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A Transmasc queer academic saying that trans lesbians aren't real women and are all actually just fetishistic white transvestite men is some shit. And then referring to straight trans women as "street queens" as to make sure to misgender the rest of us for good measure.
Transmisogyny has so thoroughly spread through the queer community, that these fucks are willing to openly spout it as doctrine.
Kadji Amin joins Jules to talk the category nonbinary, the asymmetry of trans masculinity and trans femininity, and a shared love of f*gottr
I just found this and it's really bad
Wtf is this seriously.
Not only is this just an absolute circle jerk, but they view enben (in 2021 mind you) As a political statement, as something like oooh we're just shaking things up, we're so silly goofy. Hey how about ask us? This is the lady who goes to further her reactionary hatred of non binary people with her "transgender liberalism" article. At least in 2021 they both treated us like some strange tropical bird they were studying. Now it's pure blame and hatred.
If, for [Gayle] Rubin, both intergenerational sex and BDSM are crucial sites of struggle against the persecution of sexual minorities and, for Foucault, both pederasty and BDSM are critical practices through which to think the ethics of power in asymmetrical and “diagonal” social relations, it is instructive that only BDSM has been taken up, within queer theory, for the potentially radical ways in which it negotiates power, gender, and history in and through sex. There is, nonetheless, an inscription of pederasty within BDSM that we might bring into focus in order to disaggregate what we think we know about queer sex radicalism in the present; namely, Daddy/Boy play. If it seems counterintuitive to connect Daddy/Boy play to pederasty, it is because since the 1980s, Daddy/Boy has been embraced as part of a sex radical queer culture and rendered synonymous with the “now.” By contrast, pederasty is more likely to be associated with homosexual self-loathing than with contemporary sex radicalism and is assimilated to the “then” of a vaguely defined pre-Stonewall history and the “there” of an equally vaguely defined Arab-Islamic culture. With their presumably antagonistic politics and alleged locations in distant time periods and geographical spaces, it seems certain that pederasty and Daddy/Boy will never meet. One might protest, however, that there are significant formal differences between pederasty and Daddy/Boy. As elaborated within BDSM cultures, Daddy/Boy is a contractual means of playing with both intergenerational power differentials and the incest taboo to create erotic scenarios with a particularly intense sexual and affective charge. These power differentials, however, need not be based on real world differences in social power. In other words, the “boy” need not be literally younger than the “Daddy,” neither need be male, and the “Daddy” need not have greater social, economic, or racial capital than the “boy.” Pederasty, on the other hand, would appear unseemly in its exuberant attachment to the scene of social power, uncritically adopting its patriarchal homoerotics of hierarchy between men and youths or older and younger men, and even intensifying it with inequalities of race, class, and geopolitical power. As a form that is not associated with kinship, pederasty, moreover, appears to be distant from both the incest taboo’s erotic charge and Daddy/Boy’s self-conscious manipulation of that charge. In short, if BDSM play, including Daddy/Boy, has been understood within queer theory as a distinctively queer method of responsibly, consensually, and self-consciously playing with social power, assuming pleasurable agency over sexual trauma, exploring new female, genderqueer, and transgender masculinities, and challenging “the racial and gendered hierarchies that undergird the disciplinary paternalism of the state,” pederasty would appear, uninterestingly, to do none of the above. What does it mean, then, that a “modernized” and recognizably queer pederasty might take the shape of a contractual Daddy/Boy BDSM relation, in which the Daddy really is old enough to be the Boy’s father and really does provide material support and pedagogical instruction, and the Boy really is dependent, in various psychic, emotional, and material ways, upon the Daddy? If Daddy/Boy play can come so vertiginously close to reality, then the time has come to interrogate the valorizing and modernizing separation between retrograde pederasty and queer radical Daddy/Boy by theorizing both as inegalitarian erotic dependencies that cannot be adequately held within the liberal form of contractual consent.
Kadji Amin, from Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
Queer methods of critique ... reach promiscuously and willfully across texts and time. We view these as performances of structural dissent -- the refusal to be deterministically structured -- that offer a rethinking of historical and formal method.
- from "Queer Form: Aesthetics, Race, and the Violences of the Social," Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, Roy Pérez (x)
I am interested in how much work in contemporary queer studies responds to queer’s present failure in light of the past aspirations that continue to inhabit it with a renewed utopianism that relocates the affective energies of queer onto objects and analytics--from transnationalism to affect to assemblages--deemed more politically and theoretically promising than mere same-sex sexuality. Despite queer’s disappointments, we cannot seem to allow it to fail, for that would not only threaten the future of the field of inquiry that bears its name but also the possibility of using queer studies as a resource for the renewal of contemporary queer political imaginaries. As a result, queer scholars deploy queer’s lush connotations, bifurcating from the denotative use of queer as an umbrella for LGBT to exploit instead some connotative sense of queer that appears better suited to forward the transgression and political potency with which queer became laden around the early 1990s. My hypothesis, then, is that what queer studies has institutionalized, above an object of study or method, is a set of historical emotions generated within U.S. queer culture and politics around the early 1990s, and indeed, that these historical affects propel the inchoate method that animates what objects may be claimed as queer.
This may be unwelcome news for scholars whose entry points to queer are elsewhere than the U.S. 1990s and who seek to make queer scholarship relevant outside of this narrow context of institutional emergence--I am thinking particularly of queer scholarship on non-U.S. areas, prior historical periods, and racialized populations. My argument, to be clear, is not that queer studies needs to confine itself either to the historical time and place of queer or to the "object" of same-sex sexuality. To the contrary, I am arguing that any redeployment of queer outside of its narrow context of emergence that seeks to keep queer’s affective histories intact by preserving the 1990s convergence of same-sex sexuality political urgency and radical transgression, might go further still. For, one reason why queer scholarship on Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as on earlier historical periods tends to be marginalized within the field as a whole is because it examines sites in which queer operates in markedly different ways from what has been canonized within queer studies. In their introduction to a 2016 special issue of GLQ on queer studies and area studies, Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel incisively critique the tendency of queer scholarship to mine the global South for examples rather than epistemologies, failing to attend to how key "concepts [such] as loss, margin, normative, and nonnormative" emerge from a U.S. political context (Arondekar and Patel 2016, 152). [11] Recent U.S. politics and histories inform not only the conceptual apparatus of queer studies but also the very affective method by which new subjects, politics, practices, and concepts are claimed as queer in the first place. place. Finding a "match" between a historical or area studies example and one of queers affective connotations--such as shame, camp irony, or radical opposition--can offer a gateway from sexuality studies to queer studies scholarship, a wider audience, and a certain theoretical cache, but at the cost of reinscribing queer’s U.S. affective histories at the center of work on new contexts. In order to make good on the expansion of the terrain of queer scholarship since the "What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?" special issue, we might instead rework queer’s affective historicity to allow queer to do new kinds of work with different objects and archives in a range of historical, cultural, and geographic contexts. This may mean allowing queer to come not only to mean but also to feel differently than it does now.
I propose attachment genealogy as a method that focuses on analytically queer forms of nonnormativity that clash with queer’s current affective and political connotations in order to excavate the historical attachments that inform queers aversion to these particular objects. The ambition of such a method is to at once bring into view and multiply the historical and social conditions that shape what is possible, imaginable, and sensible under the sign of queer. Attachment genealogy begins with the experience of scholarly unease. For the field of queer studies, an object that produces unease is one that exposes, fragments, and reworks queer’s own affective histories. When a scholarly object or archive rubs against the grain of, rather than satisfyingly echoing, one of queer’s affective dispositions, our discomfort is the sign that we might profitably perform an attachment genealogy. The first step is to locate the source of the rub--what affective field disposition does the object fail to satisfy? Attachment genealogy then traces backward to locate and fill out the specific context (usually the United States and historically recent) from which that field disposition emerged. The scholar is then freed to perform the final step of attachment genealogy, that of elaborating the alternative scholarly priorities and feeling states that the object generates in order to both conceptually and affectively reorient queer scholarship. In this way, rather than being mined for case studies that are legitimated as queer by virtue of their coherence with the conceptual apparatus and feeling states of queer scholarship, history, geography, and race might be valued for the divergent queer epistemologies and affective histories they generate.
--Kadji Amin, “Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory's Affective Histories.” Women's Studies Quarterly 44 (3/4), Fall/Winter 2016, pp. 173-189.
Speculations on the dynamics of transfeminine lives by panels solely consisting of TMEs are by their very nature worthless.
It doesn't matter if the panel has transmascs or cis women. It is foundationally no different then the panels of government conservatives legislating away our rights based on their own wild speculations of who we are.
Maybe if that panel actually had a trans women of color on it someone would have told those guys what bunk their speculations on trans lesbians were. But instead we got "heterosexual transvestites got to keep their male privilege while male attracted street queens lived actual transfeminine lives."
How do we discern between the desired goal of political solidarity and a suspect identification with and appropriation of the identities and experiences of subordinate groups, between the holy grail of a coalition between the differently oppressed and a form of analogization that levels significant historical and experiential differences, between a praiseworthy attraction to difference and a vilified racial fetishism? How do we do so specifically for the white person attracted to racialized others? Robert Reid-Pharr observes approvingly that “nearly two decades of writing and film making by people of color, and in particular the work of black gay men, has spoken to the experience of sex with whites, painting it at once as liberatory and repressive,” only to puzzle over the fact, striking, given such a tradition, that “so few white artists, critics, intellectuals of all stripes, male or female, lesbian or gay, have found it necessary to cover themselves in the mantle of dinge queen, rice queen, or what have you. The desire for black, brown, and yellow flesh remains largely unspoken within either academia, or even within popular publishing,” despite the extensive mass marketing of such desires in pornography. While recent scholarship by Darieck Scott, Jennifer Nash, Juana María Rodríguez, and Nguyen Tan Hoang has reclaimed the practice of self-racialization within highly stereotyped racial scenarios as a survival strategy, a vocabulary of desire, and means of accessing ecstasy for people of color intimately shaped by a racially stratified social order, white desires for racialized others tend to be addressed only in order to be critiqued. Critics respond to the ongoing realities of racism and settler colonialism by celebrating the queer potentials of identificatory mobility and perversely racialized desire in one direction only. What is needed is a more nuanced method for parsing desires, identifications, and attachments that go the “wrong” way, from white to racialized subjects. This is, to be clear, not because white desire is more valuable or important, but because scrutinizing it forces us to ask different and uncomfortable questions.
Kadji Amin, from Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
[…] progressive changes won by activists and culture producers do not erase collective historical memory, particularly that which impels affective and erotic response. For there is no unidirectional “progress” within affective and erotic life; reclaimed figures draw on the entire affective force of the history of investments and transformations that led up to them and run the risk of a wholesale reversal into precisely the degrading histories they were intended to redeem. If, as [Tim] Dean argues, all sexuality is fetishistic, then it is also true that all sexuality is profoundly and complexly historical. The part-objects, scenarios, and narrative fragments that we find arousing move us to the rhythm of multiple invisible yet felt histories. If our sexuality sometimes responds to “archaic” beliefs and histories we wish were forgotten, it is because sexuality itself is a complex and multitemporal form of collective memory—one which informs us of our own constitution, as erotic subjects, within social orders that produce terror, pleasure, and power out of various forms of inequality and oppression. Conscious thought may undergo political development, abandoning earlier positions for newer ones understood as more enlightened and just, but the temporalities of the erotic are incoherent—at once archaic and capable of stunning metamorphoses, but never orderly or developmental. Racialized erotic life foils the queer theoretical desire to equate queer sexuality with liberation, political resistance, or a movement beyond the social order altogether by confronting us with the irreducibly historical but never simply progressive temporalities of the erotic.
Kadji Amin, from Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History
