An Open-Letter to Kathryn Bond Stockton
On Friday April 22, you closed the 9th Annual DC Queer Studies symposium with a keynote titled, “Impure Thoughts and All They Birth: What Does the Dildo of the Future Look Like?”. After a long day, the four of us (one black queer woman, two mixed-race queer women, and one white queer woman) were excited to listen to your talk. As we sat down and your talk progressed, a flood of emotions overtook our bodies: confusion, anxiety, disgust, anger. We began shifting in our seats, looking around, fidgeting. These corporeal movements transformed into visceral responses: a churning stomach, nausea, an accelerated heartbeat. Our bodies were under attack.
While most of your talk was unsettling, we would like to focus on our larger concerns:
Penetration: Throughout the talk, you used “penetration” as a central metaphor - equating teaching as penetrating and learning as receiving. What violence occurs when you fail to contextualize and historicize sex (penetration, barebacking, dildo-ed/ing, receiving, kissing, orgasm) as a metaphor? We live in a rape culture in which sexual violence goes unseen and unacknowledged. You asked, “Did you feel that? I just penetrated you,” which conveys that this penetration was an unexpected violence. Your use of penetration without communicating consent perpetuates rape culture. How does a queer white body that can be read as masculine continue to perpetuate white heteronormative masculinity? Or, how does a queer white female body make invisible sexual violence within queer communities?
Race: The teaching and circulating of stereotypical characterizations of Eldridge Cleaver privileges white students and renders students of color, and the trauma their bodies carry, as invalid. While you claim “historicizing doesn’t fit the way we read,” what violence occurs when you don’t contextualize and historicize a complicated figure such as Cleaver? As problematic as Cleaver is, exhibiting him and his “codpiece” pants serves as more than just a punchline in your keynote address but continues to perpetuate the fetishization of the Black body.
You justified usage of, and risk the reification of, these over-simplified archetypes through pedagogical commitments, arguing that Cleaver’s work is demonstrative of the ways that “we are all infected with racial cartoon,” which students need to recognize, and by declaring this exercise as an “equal opportunity offense.” However, the operating assumption at work here is that your students are equally unaware of “racial cartoon,” thereby presuming a white student as subject -- presuming your students are sheltered by whiteness, allowing them the privilege to not see themselves in racialized terms. Further, in suggesting that these generalizations function as “equal opportunity offense,” you refuse and obfuscate a historicization of the explicitly racialized, sexualized nature of these representational tropes, which disproportionately influence depictions and popular understandings of Black women and men. Given the way these images and characterizations have populated our collective national imaginary throughout history, and still haunt depictions of blackness today, these tropes are anything but “equal opportunity offense.” It is epistemically violent to presume that “stereotypes” about white people are weighted, circulated, and concretized in the same ways as are stereotypes about Black people. How might our theories be compromised when we don’t acknowledge our positions of power? How does a queer white body simultaneously silence and speak for racialized bodies?
Trickle-out theory: We understood your notion of trickle-out theory as an attempt to disrupt the hierarchical dispersion of knowledge: “trickle-out theory vs. trickle-down economics” as you distinguish. By positioning academics as “repair queers,” you center the academy and decenter those “at the dinner table.” Your notion of “succinct complexity”, the ability to translate theory at the dinner table, mirrors code-switching, the practice marginalized students employ in order to communicate their academic endeavors to those who have been historically disenfranchised. You proffered the concept of “swiss-cheese” minds; not everything we learn will remain and this is okay. You claim students no longer need to articulate rigorous theoretical language. What is disconcerting is the lack of recognition that this rigorous theoretical aerobics has historically been and continues to be a key mechanism used to deny marginalized persons access to the academy. How is the queer white academic body exempt from the standards placed upon academics of color?
We composed this letter in order to ask questions, and while this letter is addressed to you, we are fully cognizant that your theorizations emblematize the structuring logics of the neoliberal academy. It is not that your keynote “kisses” racist and colonialist discourses, but is made possible through these logics. We cannot begin to express what it feels like to sit in a majority-white audience as they laugh at rape jokes and racialized bodies. We hesitated to bring these points up during the Q&A - were we understanding correctly? Being too sensitive? Too emotional? We questioned what our bodies were telling us, our embodied ways of knowing that you so easily dismissed. This is the power of Academia. We have similar fears about this open letter - will there be consequences for speaking our voices?
Ultimately, we are writing this letter because we cannot let this violation of our bodies, knowledges, and experiences remain invisible. Your keynote was a visceral reminder of not only (white) queer theory’s limits but also that the Academy is in need of desperate repair. You asked us if we felt you “penetrate” us and we can guarantee that we did and continue to feel this violation. In fact, your non-consensual “penetration” birthed this letter.
