Being Numerous Read online

  Six years ago, I received my conditional green card without many issues. Two years later, when it was time to apply for permanent resident status, I was in the midst of a divorce, following months of the sort of violent decline that marks many real but unsustainable intimacies. “Fake” relationships for immigration purposes are unlikely to dissolve with violent fights and a partner’s hospitalization for attempted suicide (this is a story for later). Nonetheless, the legitimacy of our original union (the condition for my permanent residency, even after divorce) came under suspicion; I fought to prove it and, eventually, succeeded. My marriage, no shorter than many, was recognized.

  Marriage is a proprietary and abolition-worthy institution. I thought that before, during and after my first marriage. I think it now. And yet I will marry again. I will not let a border separate me from my current partner, the man with whom I will spend my life. I’m against marriage, but, dear reader, I’m looking forward to marrying him. I wept at my brother’s wedding and trembled at my first. In the words of magnificent writer and critic Andrea Long Chu: “Perhaps my consciousness needs raising. I muster a shrug. When the airline loses your luggage, you are not making a principled political statement about the tyranny of private property; you just want your goddamn luggage back.”

  Marriage maintains a stubborn place in the romantic imaginary, and an immovable one in the state’s terrain of recognition. This underlines the importance of the US Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling to legalize same-sex marriage. My first thought after the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling was of green cards. To deny same-sex partners access to marriage, and thus access to state recognition, is discrimination, pure and simple; Obergefell was a necessary victory and one we must fight to protect against an ever more right-wing Supreme Court bench. Queer revolutionaries have every reason to disdain their historic struggle’s contemporary focus on assimilation to the archaic institution of marriage (and the right to serve in the military). Stonewall—the 1969 uprising that inaugurated the LGBTQ movement in the United States—was a riot. But if a central problem with marriage is the state’s hegemonic control over which people and sets of relationships get recognized, and get to stay, then the problem is with such operations of power, not with individuals’ pursuit of equal rights and liberties within such a system.

  I’d heap confetti on any couple who had wanted to legally marry but could only do so after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling. For those who found resonance in then-Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words on the “transcendent purposes of marriage”: let the champagne flow, although I challenge your understanding of the meaning of “transcendental.” Kennedy’s panegyric to marriage as a form of existential identification with another human is of little interest to the immigration agents who decide what counts as “real” marriage and which partners get to live in this country.

  In the case of state-recognized marriage, we’re talking about the attainment of recognition from an institution that wields power over us. We can hate this, and work to fight against it, while nonetheless appreciating the exigencies of navigating it now. We cannot underestimate the current necessity of state recognition, and what it feels like to obtain it. It is why I can sit and write, US soil beneath me. It is bright relief, which should be denied no one—relief, of course, predicated, as ever, on fear.

  8

  Policing Desire

  I want to share a couple of personal anecdotes. I don’t mean them to be confessions in the sense that Foucault used the term “confessional”—as the alleged revelations of some Truth from the depths of myself or my experience. But these are sex stories (kinda), and Foucault noted that sex—what we talk about when we talk about sex—takes the privileged form of confession in our society.

  So perhaps I can’t, we can’t, talk about sex non-confessionally; it’s a discourse constructed on the idea of revelation. That’s how truths about sex, or anything, are built—in the false belief that they are “found.” And that’s what these sex stories are about: the myth of revelatory sex, and the truths it produces.

  One is about a threesome I didn’t have; another is about certain porn that I don’t watch. They both involve an ex-partner I dated from my early to mid twenties who believed in revolutionary sex to the point of ideology. These are cautionary tales in how easily invocations toward radical sexual practices —especially in the context of political movements—can be recuperated into patriarchal power structures, technocapital, and the creation of more bourgeois desiring machines. And through them, I want to question what it means to talk about radical sex being recuperable at all.

  What, if anything, was radical in the first place?

  At a time when technology presents itself as playing the liberatory function of pluralizing sexual possibilities, it’s important to question the underlying idea that abundance—of partners and perversities—equals liberation. On the other hand, I don’t want to fall into a trap that denies the possibility of radical modes of sexually relating to each other, just because seemingly “radical” sexual preferences and identities are easily accessible on the App Store or on a porn tube site. These are open questions, but they give lie to claims about the inherent radicality of certain sexual practices—a lie too often peddled by the bombastic men-children and self-satisfied sex-posi “adventurers” spanning from the far left to the Burning Man playa.

  This ex and I were together during Occupy and involved in New York’s fractured anarchist scene, which briefly held itself together with school-glue solidarity for a few heady months. We were nonmonogamous but had hardly acted on it, aside from a couple of threesomes with other women, the sort of which I’ve had in numerous relationships with men without this ex’s radical posturing.

  He spoke a big game about “queering.” About challenging a social order organized by heteronormative and coupled forms. He saw a political imperative in pursuing polyamorous and queer constellations. In (what seemed to be) queer porn (more on this later), and in kink, he saw revolutionary interventions. Sometimes he used “queer” to mean a political subjectivity that works to undo both hetero-and homo-normativities—queer-as-disruption, as opposed to gay-as-assimilation: “Not gay as in happy, queer as in ‘fuck you.’” Sometimes he used “queer” to describe any sexual interaction between non-straight, non–conventional-bodied, or non-cisgendered folks—“queer” as in a label you can use to identify yourself on an app designed for threesomes. Both meanings exist, and they intersect—his problem was that he collapsed them together entirely. (His problem was also alcohol.)

  I, too, believe that a heteronormative social order that punishes desires, identities, and sexual practices outside of its narrow remit must be burned to the ground. Individuals and communities have fought and died, and still do, to be able to love and fuck without persecution. The work of queer pornographers to give these desires representation and recognition is crucial.

  And, of course, to join a movement to fight persecution is the very meaning of becoming a political subject. Times of political revolt have long been attended by claims about the revolutionary force of challenging traditional sexual prescriptions. And little wonder: sex is a discourse that plays a major role in shaping what kinds of selves get to exist and how they get to exist together. This is the stuff of politics.

  The problem with my ex’s position was modal. He viewed certain sex—certainly not all sex—as a necessary rite of passage, without which appropriate radicalization was impossible. His belief touched on the religious—a faith that certain sex acts between certain bodies carried a radically transformative quality, a priori. For a man who claimed to be a Foucault scholar, it was a baffling assertion of normative moral facts. But we met when I was very young. He was twelve years my senior, and it took me some time to weed out the hypocrisy and dogmatism from what, if anything, was righteous, or even sexy.

  People say “the personal is political” a lot, and almost always in a reductive way. It doesn’t just mean that our individual “personal” issues—like our sexuality, our
families, our fucking —are political negotiations. Is it even useful to call these “personal” issues? Aren’t impersonal issues also political? And if that’s the case, then everything is political, so why use the word to delineate anything at all?

  Perhaps like this: the personal is political because person-hood is political. Who gets to be a person, and how? How are persons formed, categorized, and organized in and through relations with each other? The personal is not political because personal choices are necessarily political choices, but because the very terrain of what gets to be a choice and what types of persons get to be choosers—what types of persons get to be— are shaped by political power. The sort of political power that whispers through human histories of convention formation and maintenance, of hierarchy and adherence to it, of regimes of expertise, of oppression, of struggles and paradigm shifts.

  Remember how Meryl Streep’s character (editor in chief of an influential fashion magazine) in The Devil Wears Prada chastises Anne Hathaway’s character (the naive assistant) for thinking she had agency when she’d chosen to buy a blue sweater? A Foucauldian point well made: capital didn’t make her choose and buy that color sweater, but it did overdetermine the conditions of possibility for any such purchase.

  And so it is with our sexual desires: we think we just have them, as if there are not centuries of power operations determining our desiring tendencies—as well as the very terrain of what gets to be a choice, and who gets to be a chooser. The risk of a personal-is-political discourse that focuses on individual choice, rather than on terrains of choice making, is the development of a politics that finds its primary expression through, say, buying organic or downloading an app for nonmonogamous fucking that allows you to define yourself as “pansexual.” Who you are is held stable, while your personal choices are deemed political. This is what I call “neoliberal identity politics”—another phrase used a lot these days, and almost always incorrectly.

  So back to this ex.

  After one of the many days of vigorous street protest during Occupy’s heyday, a large group of anarchists were reviewing, recuperating, and relaxing in a Brooklyn loft space often used for such purposes. I had to leave reasonably early to wake up for a radio interview of some sort. My ex stayed late and ended up going home with another person (who then identified as female, but no longer does). And, as far as he explained it the following day, the assumption had been that I would join them in bed the next day.

  The particulars of our nonmonogamy at that time (not all nonmonogamies are the same) required that he inform me in advance of going home with another person. Since I had been asleep, this was not possible, and his unopened texts could hardly be said to count. So that was a fuckup on his part. And it’s a fuckup particular to our technological moment: instant communication has never been so easy, producing at times a misleading presumption that we have communicated—or should have been able to communicate—information to an intended party simply by sending it. The speech acts fail, and digital enmeshment is curbed by the timeless human predicament of being asleep.

  This isn’t just an issue when communicating polyamorous plans—it’s a problem of an expectation being produced. Expectations of reception and response didn’t emerge with the invention of instant messaging; centuries of waiting on tenterhooks for letters preceded this. But I think the assumption of instantaneousness produces an often-incorrect feeling that the sender has successfully communicated. In this case, he had not.

  The far-greater violation, by my lights, was his assumption that I would want to have sex with this person, and his acting on that assumption; he said this was the condition under which they went home together. Moreover, that I should want to have sex with this person because they were, as he put it, “queer and cool.”

  The arguments that followed didn’t focus on the problematics of his assuming my desires for me. They turned on the fulcrum of why my desires weren’t somehow better. I wasn’t attracted to this person, so my ex called me a body fascist. My ex might be right. My libidinal tastes fit firmly within conventional determinations of beauty. I could, and often do, look back on this story as an ur-example of a manarchist (as they are known) weaponizing the idea of radical sexual politics in order to police the desires of others to serve his own.

  And that’s all true. No one should be expected to fuck anyone. But this is complicated by the fact that sometimes our desires are worth questioning and challenging. Sometimes experimentation, while it should be conditional on consent, does require trying things we might not immediately desire in and of themselves, but as potential introductions to desiring differently. Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.

  But by treating sex as a political project of rupturing preconditioned desires, might we end up reducing each other to experimental objects for our own self-development? And more to the point, such an approach treats sex acts as techniques of self-construction, as if the simple meeting of certain bodies serves to subvert and reorganize desires. Maybe it can. Maybe I think there are more urgent political projects than having sex with people I don’t currently find attractive, but who share my political diagnoses. And what demarcates political sex from the sort of privileged play of Burning Man orgies? Post festum, does the world look that different? I knew this would get confessional.

  In a skewering 2015 essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege,” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent policing … there are also spaces … where a generalized ideology of anti-normativity holds sway, queerness is a badge of honor, a marker of specialness, and a source of critical and moral authority: in short, a form of privilege.” FuckTheory’s contention with what he calls queer privilege is that such attitudes, and the deep irony of their basis in a misunderstanding of Foucault, are “grounded in the idea of a link between the nor-mativity of an act and its ethical valence.”

  He puts it better than I ever could: “It’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing?” The counterargument to queer privilege is not to retreat to the reactionary normativities that queerness, even privileged queerness, attempts to disrupt. No, the radical thing is not actually to be a straight couple and get married and make babies and reproduce oneself as the world produced you. It’s not actually more radical to be monogamous just because everyone and their panamorous triad is meeting in an expensive bar in Williamsburg and reveling in their radical performance. Such a counterreaction would merely repeat the problem of inherently linking the nor-mativity or abundance of a given act with its ethical weight.

  It’s a problem well put in anonymously authored text The Screwball Asses, published by queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem. “Will any desire, apart from obedience, ever be able to structure itself otherwise than as transgression or counter-transgression?” notes the 1973 text. “Limiting oneself to a sexual path, under the pretext that it is one’s desire and that it corresponds to a political opportunity for deviance, strengthens the bi-polarization of the ideology of desire that has been forged by the bourgeoisie.” The Screwball Asses author didn’t need to live in the time of Grindr, Tinder, Bumble, or Feeld to know that “there is no escaping economics … Roles are not broken but granted.” The irony: the ex gave me that book.

  Which brings me to my second anecdote—more of a string of instances.

  This same ex used to watch a decent amount of porn. We’d watch together, but more often to discuss it than to get off with each other. His perversions were not mine. And yes, his tastes were more queer. And he would find his tastes represented—this is a good thing. B
ut his means of viewing were, as with the majority of porn viewers, through a set of reductive search categories on behemoth tube sites like YouPorn, Pornhub, and RedTube, all of which are owned by one monopolizing content delivery giant, MindGeek.

  It was not his fault, per se, that tube sites rely on a grim taxonomy of racist, sexist, transphobic, ageist, and ableist tropes: “big black,” “Asian teen,” “thug,” “schoolgirl,” “MILF,” “shemale,” and so on. But it was a telling dissonance: he would praise the radical content, while using the very tube sites that have decimated the porn industry, reinforced its archaic categories, and undermined workers’ rights.

  Some years later, I became friendly with some of the actors and directors whose content would sometimes pop up (stolen) as a tube site click in the ex’s searches. I have written about their efforts to challenge porn’s problematic search tags, as well as their Homeric and often-thwarted attempts to improve working conditions. And while porn workers in the straight and queer sides of the industry challenge the means of their industry’s production and its conservative business model, it is all too often that the mere abundance of transgressive content is misread as revolutionary.

  Writing about porn in 2004, film theorist Linda Williams rightly noted that “as the proliferating discourses of sexuality take hold … there can no longer be any such thing as a fixed sexuality—male, female, or otherwise.” She wrote that “now there are proliferating sexualities,” and that “the very multiplicity of these pleasures and perversions inevitably works against the older idea of a single norm—the economy of the one—against which all else is measured.” And insofar as there is no longer one “single norm,” she had a point.