I'm teaching in a women's studies department this semester across the
Bay at a state university. My class is a departmental regular called
"lesbian and queer perspectives on literature and media," formerly given
to reading small press lesbian novels and other staples of the
seventies. In sore need of an update, the revamped reader I've put
together is nice and fat, heavy on the yummy queer theory and
contemporary culture with an emphasis on race, class, and nation.
The hectic process of building a syllabus from scratch meant pulling
all my related books off the shelves and onto the floor. I sat in the
middle of my new fort and tried to think in weekly thematics, things
like "lesbian looks and dykes on film" and "queer goods in commodity
culture." Meanwhile I'd just turned in my second column about race and
sexual politics, something about a celebrated dildo and historical
amnesia. Obviously, it's the intellectual stuff that occupies most of my
time these days.
By some stellar coincidence I came across an article by Heather
Findlay, Girlfriends editor, examining the "lesbian dildo
debates." I was sorry I hadn't discovered her essay earlier, before my
last deadline; between Freud and the fetish she brilliantly theorizes
the meaning of vinyl black dick.
Then I picked up the new Punk Planet and stumbled over a seemingly
flip remark in an essay about "sexual mutants," miscegenation and
multiculture: "When I think about race, fucking --even just the word 'fuck' --
just seems to come to mind."
Oh dear. It seems I get to use the Findlay article after all.
Wanting to fuck the "other" isn't in and of
itself transgressive -- unless you want to consider antebellum
slave owners ahead of their time. Which I don't. And as Findlay
pointedly observes, "Race permeates American culture. Sex easily becomes
the location for racial terror and desire; It seems that the black dildo
[or any other racial] fetish can make acceptable
a specifically racial lack -- the lack, that is, under
white hegemony of a relation between the races."
I certainly didn't feel any better after reading the rest of the
"sexual mutant" essay. I mean, its basic premise was so amazingly
problematic. Reproductive heterosexual activity is the solution to
volatile race relations in the United States, what-?!
But the author, Annalee Newitz, was dead serious. "'You know,' I
told my students one day in the midst of a discussion on race, 'we could
eliminate a lot of racial problems in the United States right now if
everyone would just agree to breed with people of a different race.
Then, the very next generation would have a totally different racial
makeup.' Everyone laughed. But I was only half-joking." And I'm still
bothered, not because I believe in any sort of racial "purity," but
because the coupling of reproductive heterosexuality and utopian
national futures is so obviously reactionary. Do we really need to
sanctify heterosexual activity any more than it is already in our
national political culture?
Newitz might think her notion is wildly radical, but TIME
magazine suggested the same thing in 1993 with a special issue on
interracial (heterosexual) marriage, using computer-generated
"morphing" to imagine "The New Face of America." The accompanying
TIME essay argued that "those who intermarry have perhaps the
strongest sense of what it will take to return America to an
unhyphenated whole," and that this consensual crossbreeding, in the
reproductive sense, will do the assimilative work of the "melting pot."
Of course, as queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Evelynn Hammonds
noted, the resulting computer-generated offspring looked oddly
homogenized, tending toward light-ness, or white-ish .
(Assuming that Newitz hopes to eliminate "race" in much the same manner-- i.e.,
breeding whites and nonwhites. her vision of future generations will no
doubt follow suit.) In the TIME essay the political rhetoric of
abstract citizenship takes advantage of this physiological equivocating
(a nose is a nose is a nose) to suggest we are all the same beneath the
skin; raceless and genderless citizens equal under the objective eye of
the Law. Of course, such abstractions hardly apply to the social
realities of class war, institutionalized racisms and national
heterosexuality. Or as the punks used to say (if never about
themselves), some of us are more equal than others.
The question is, then, what purpose does it serve to eliminate "race,"
and especially as an analytic framework, before we. ve actually
dealt with its material and ideological effects?
Not unlike TIME. s special issue, Newitz fashions a potentially
dangerous vision. Never mind the implicit patriarchal notion that women
are the literal reproducers of the nation, disguised here as glorious
sexual deviancy. (As if we weren't already forced to deal with shocked
exclamations of "What? You're not going to have children?!" Now we'll
have to contend with accusations of being counter-revolutionaries.)
Forget, for now, the racial fetishism she masks as radical desire. Hers
is a vision in which private, reproductive heterosexual activity becomes
the ultimate expression of both conscientious citizenship and
revolutionary commitment. She suggests these acts would be the best
thing for the "common good" of the nation.
This hardly departs from the usual ideological line handed us about
the necessary heterosexuality of country and community. "Straight sex"
is again naturalized as the proper expression of desire, duty and
love. Queers are too-obviously unsuited for a eugenic program of
future-forward fucking, and subsequently ineligible for the re-imagining
of a utopian nation. It seems we are neither the future of America nor
its most radical "sexual mutants;" both those destinies are recuperated
for properly reproducing heterosexuals. That a national reproductive
heterosexuality, already a patriotic fetish, is further enshrined as
revolutionary by a "sexual mutant" is bad enough. Her racial politics
only make it that much worse.
For Newitz race seems to be simply exotic, a sexy difference with no
apparent (or meaningful) history or social consequence. Any other
meaning is mere cliché, or even boring "melodrama." What is not
allowed then is the much rowdier difference that acts up, refuses to be
assimilated, and makes a fuss about white hegemony or relations of
power. As such, Newitz does not interrogate institutionalized racisms,
or their volatile histories. Moreover, while reproductive miscegenation
is hardly a "new" or unusual practice, "race" as a disciplining social
logic still persists, itself a mutable construct. And that she makes no
mention of white hegemony in an essay addressing race relations is both
startling and profoundly telling.
In fact, Newitz unwittingly acts in at least some of the interests of
white hegemony. She implicitly suggests that people of color threaten
not only their own welfare but also the common good of the nation if
they refuse to comply, even if only in principle, with the imperative of
assimilative eugenics. She disregards the structural and ideological
components of "race," the multiple effects of racisms, and the necessary
creation of communities of survival, as well as resistance, under white
hegemony by derisively defining "separatists" as those who refuse to
cross-fuck. (Though as a friend of mine said, "Yo, it's not about not
wanting to fuck other 'races.' Maybe we're just not interested in
dealing with white girls with bad attitudes!") What she offers as social
transformation can be understood instead as a wishful escape from
confrontation and complicity with contemporary political struggles and
the structural violence of racisms. Meanwhile white hegemony ducks out
the back, unaccounted for.
Sneaking in behind her professed desire for an abstract post-racial "mutant" future
is a volatile political history and unruly racial body it seems
she wishes didn. t exist. An undeniably racial body that counts, that
doesn. t want her love or a fuck but something else, something more
like social justice, maybe.
So that her projection of race-mixing into the utopian future demonstrates
a profound and problematic wish to forego the hatred, guilt and
violence of our country. s history of racial domination. Paraphrasing
Findlay, her miscegenation fetish can "make acceptable" a specifically
racial lack . the lack, that is, under white hegemony of a relation
between the races. And if sex itself is the location of racial terror
and desire, we could say that this desire for "mutancy" and
miscegenation is another powerful cultural fetish which allows her (or
us) to circumvent the Real of racial disintegration.
Using her parents' "mixed" Christian/Jewish marriage as a model for
social transformation, Newitz stakes the utopian future in a family
institution and reproductive heterosexual activity, both
federally-protected within a zone of privacy. This national
heterosexuality is mobilized to act as a "melting pot" in a
frighteningly toxic metaphor of assimilation and historical amnesia. As
Berlant wrote of the TIME issue, it is just as relevant here to
suggest that this argument "sacrifices the centrality of African
American history to American culture by predicting its demise," as well
as the erasure of Asian American, Native American, and Chicana/o and
Latina/o histories. So that if white hegemony can't kill the black or
alien body, it seems it can certainly imagine a "happier" time in which
that body no longer exists.
Newitz promises relief and disengagement from contemporary struggles
by projecting a "mutant" image of the future that offers a stable and
dominant collective identity. One that is, in any case, still
white-ish, heterosexual, literally domesticated and completely
forgetful. Hers is a "solution" that not only evades the messy question
of unhappy histories and continues to eject queers from full
citizenship, but also sacrifices attention to the complex race and class
relations of exploitation and violence in the present tense. In the
end it. s a still-liberal and relentlessly heterosexist version of
the usual "love sees no color," with fucking and babies.
Trangressive? Hardly.