this double refusal

"Power itself must be abolished–and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles–but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal." –Jean Baudrillard

[thisdoublerefusal]

It was and remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often with homophobic consequences. It seemed to me, and continues to seem, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion. In particular, I opposed those regimes of truth that stipulated that certain kinds of gendered expressions were found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original. The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text. Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized. One might wonder what use 'opening up possibilities' finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is 'impossible,' illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

[thisdoublerefusal]

What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal—for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew—only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as 'natural' as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide—it was beneath them.

Toni Morrison, Sula

[thisdoublerefusal]

It was and remains my view that any feminist theory that restricts the meaning of gender in the presuppositions of its own practice sets up exclusionary gender norms within feminism, often with homophobic consequences. It seemed to me, and continues to seem, that feminism ought to be careful not to idealize certain expressions of gender that, in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion. In particular, I opposed those regimes of truth that stipulated that certain kinds of gendered expressions were found to be false or derivative, and others, true and original. The point was not to prescribe a new gendered way of life that might then serve as a model for readers of the text. Rather, the aim of the text was to open up the field of possibility for gender without dictating which kinds of possibilities ought to be realized.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

[thisdoublerefusal]

Gottlieb is all excited because he has just received from England a new book about Francis Quarles, written by an Oxford don. Gottlieb probably knows every bit as much about Quarles as the don does. But Oxford, towering up in all its majesty behind this don, its child, utterly overawes poor little Gottlieb, who was born in one of the wrong parts of Chicago. 'It makes you realize,' he says, 'the background you need, to do a job like this.' And George feels saddened and depressed, because Gottlieb obviously wishes, above all else in life, that he could turn himself into that miserable don and learn to write his spiteful-playful, tight-assed vinegar prose.

Christopher Isherwood A Single Man

[thisdoublerefusal]

You can't live on the promise of a casual smile which passes while you sit on the stoop waiting for the breeze from the river—demented queen! You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks—no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

[thisdoublerefusal]

'You know, I hate being gay,' said the boy, leaning over toward Sutherland, 'I just feel it's ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it's like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I'd get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I'll never be any of the things they expect of me,' he said, 'because it's like having cancer but you can't tell them, that's what a secret vice is like.'

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

[thisdoublerefusal]

They're happy because they're masters of destruction. Rebellion kills other people, but it gives life to the rebels themselves. Because they go all out, they live life to the full. They're on cloud nine. They're high on enthusiasm, heroism and patriotism.

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love Translated by Barbara Bray

[thisdoublerefusal]

If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen up on such a happy ending.

Joan Didion, On the Morning After the Sixties

[thisdoublerefusal]

My conclusion was more or less this. It's natural that soldiers' eyes should light up with desire for possession when they break into some luxurious place, and even more natural that some of their leaders should be corrupted through handling kilos of unused greenbacks. When a revolutionary movement meets with success, such things become proof that one was in on it from the start. It's difficult to distinguish total devotion to a cause from a quest for position, ambition for money or power.

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love

Translated by Barbara Bray

[thisdoublerefusal]

We didn't have any illusions that the Internet was secure, or that governments, criminals, hackers, and others couldn't break into systems and networks if they were sufficiently skilled and motivated. We didn't trust that the programmers were perfect, that the code was bug-free, or even that our crypto math was unbreakable. We knew that Internet security was an arms race, and the attackers had most of the advantages. What we trusted was that the technologies would stand or fall on their own merits. We now know that trust was misplaced. Through cooperation, bribery, threats, and compulsion, the NSA—and the United Kingdom's GCHQ—forced companies to weaken the security of their products and services, then lie about it to their customers.

Bruce Schneier, Saving Privacy Forum, Boston Review

[thisdoublerefusal]

Characteristics of male power include the power of men 1. to deny women [their own] sexuality—[by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against masturbation; denial of maternal and postmenopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in the media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence] 2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them—[by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that male sexual 'drive' amounts to a right; idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, the media, advertising, etc.; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm; pornographic depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence and humiliation (a subliminal message being that sadistic heterosexuality is more 'normal' than sensuality between women)] 3. to command or exploit their labor to control their produce—[by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, sterilization, and childbirth; pimping; female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of women] 4. to control or rob them of their children—[by means of father right and 'legal kidnapping'; enforced sterilization; systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts; the malpractice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as the 'token torturer' in genital mutilation or in binding the daughter's feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage] 5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement—[by means of rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah; foot binding; atrophying of women's athletic capabilities; high heels and 'feminine' dress codes in fashion; the veil; sexual harassment on the streets; horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for 'full-time' mothering at home; enforced economic dependence of wives] 6. to use them as objects in male transactions—[use of women as 'gifts'; bride price; pimping; arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals—e.g., wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation, call girls, 'bunnies,' geisha, kisaeng prostitutes, secretaries] 7. to cramp their creativeness—[witch persecutions as campaigns against midwives and female healers, and as pogrom against independent, 'unassimilated' women; definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural values become the embodiment of male subjectivity; restriction of female self-fulfillment to marriage and motherhood; sexual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of women's creative aspirations; erasure of female tradition] 8. to withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments—[by means of non education of females; the 'Great Silence' regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture; sex-role tracking which deflects women from science, technology, and other 'masculine' pursuits; male social/professional bonding which excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions]

Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader

[thisdoublerefusal]

What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comes into existence of its own accord when what is rightly called mediocrity is in the ascendant.

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love Translated by Barbara Bray

[thisdoublerefusal]

If I'd stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

[thisdoublerefusal]

"Then she said, 'Do you believe in hell, Mr. Birkin?' Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell. Bodies split, heads blown off, groveling fear, shrieking fear, unspeakable fear! The world made mud! But I knew it was Bible hell she had in mind, hell that went on and on, an aching timeless hell. So I answered, 'Well, it depends. Hell's different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times.' She didn't question this: I swear she read my mind. She knew. 'Then what about hell on earth?' she said.

J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country

[thisdoublerefusal]

Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled 'black' by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

[thisdoublerefusal]

You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing—beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code—what is 'right' and what is 'wrong,' what is 'good' and what 'evil.' I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of 'morality' seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversations. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to 'believe' in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with 'morality.' Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

Joan Didion, On Morality, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

[thisdoublerefusal]

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Slouching Towards Bethlehem