Race and Neutrality in Queer Theory

https://escholarship.org/content/qt6c14j4fw/qt6c14j4fw_noSplash_1cf44456a31d06c8005a24b1a3188ce5.pdf

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

IRVINE

Neutrality in Queer Theory

DISSERTATION

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Comparative Literature

by

Michael Simmon

Antisocial queer theory and Afropessimism are inheriting standpoint-pessimism in the singularity of the interstices of standpoints. Antisocial queer theory says that queerness is queerer than thou, and 

Afropessimism says that blackness is always already depersonalized. 

Antisocial queer theorists and Afropessimists have told us repeatedly (and conflictingly), queerness or blackness (respectively) is singularly the absent center of power. 

I noted in the introduction to this dissertation that the literature on queer neutrality has the model of “being singular plural” to bring this opposition together, and I try to enact this in the following review of race and identity neutrality in queer theory

Again, the problem is an ambivalence about identity and the power of an extreme limit of

depersonalized standpoints. In The Wretched of the Earth (1963) [Les damnés de la terre, 1961],

Frantz Fanon establishes the problematic affinity between Lumpenproletariat and revolutionary

power. The Lumpenproletariat is the disorganized underclass. On one side, Fanon says the

disorder of the Lumpenproletariat gives colonizers “the legal excuse to maintain order. Even if

the Lumpenproletariat rebels against the colonizers, it is supposedly insufficiently organized for

(lasting) revolution—the Lumpenproletariat rebels against itself and anyone in proximity in the

struggle for resources. The Lumpenproletariat has insufficiently unified class consciousness

because the struggle is too real for it to have any sustained focus on revolution. For example, the

Lumpenproletariat also consists of petty criminals who are police informants against other petty

criminals (on the ideological weakness of the Lumpenproletariat see p.137).

On the other side, however, this disorder makes the Lumpenproletariat always already a

form of rebellion (115). Fanon says,

It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the

lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the

lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their clan, constitutes one

of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people

beyond its mere representation by the proletariat—is indeterminate in practice. In Wretched

(1963), Fanon notes,

The constitution of the lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon which obeys its own logic,

and neither the brimming activity of the missionaries nor the decrees of the central

government can check its growth. This lumpenproletariat is like a horde of rats; they may

kick them and throw stones at them, but despite your efforts they’ll go on gnawing at the

roots of the tree. (129-130)

What I am saying here is that this theory of the Lumpenproletariat is antisocial theory, and

despite the hope for the revolutionary potential here, this underclass might really lack the

cohesion necessary for sustained revolutionary consciousness. This is partly how we can

understand why antisocial queer theorists like Lee Edelman have theorized a queer pessimism

that does not embrace politics, coalitional or otherwise. There is certainly ambivalence in

Fanon’s account of the Lumpenproletariat as having both “spontaneity and weakness.”

We need to take Afropessimism seriously because queer of color critique, despite its

criticisms of antisocial queer theory’s white universalism, participates in white universalism

through its affinities with humanism. In Nobody’s Supposed to Know: Down Low (2014), C.

Riley Snorton invokes Frantz Fanon’s account of Europeans’ objectification and possession of

anything they write as black, “For Fanon, black people are neither afforded subjectivity nor,

within the logics of colonial racism, a body” (89). In Black Skin, White Masks (2008) [Peau

Noire, Masques Blanc, 1952], Fanon argues that the consolidation of whiteness’ neutrality or

“the closing of the postural schema of the white man” requires the neutering of the black body:

At the extreme, I should say that the Negro, because of his body, impedes the closing of

the postural schema of the white man […] with the Negro the cycle of the biological 

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begins. […] the Negro is castrated. The penis, the symbol of manhood, is annihilated,

which is to say that it is denied. […] it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked. It

is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. (124-125).

(This neutering/neutralization is not limited to black men: see Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black

Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1997.) Speaking of Antilleans’ dreams

prior to exposure to whiteness in the context of Jacques Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage,

Fanon says in Black Skin, White Masks (2008) [Peau Noire, Masques Blanc, 1952],

I contend that for the Antillean the mirror hallucination is always neutral. When

Antilleans tell me that they have experienced it, I always ask the same question: “What

color were you?” Invariably they reply: “I had no color.” […] There is no reason now to

be surprised that Mayotte Capécia [a black woman in love with a white man] dreamed of

herself as pink and white: I should say that that was quite normal. (125n)

After contamination with the white mythology of blackness, the neutral, color-blind self-image

Antillean becomes the neutered, invisible self-image, “The father [a black teacher] was given to

walking up and down his balcony every evening at sunset; after a certain time of night, it was

always said, he became invisible” (126n). One of Fanon’s key contributions to Afropessimism is

the realization that “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society […]

Ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to

understand the being of the black man” (82). However, adding to the confusion, Fanon also

equivocates his position on humanism, opening Black Skin, White Masks with, “Toward a new

humanism… Understanding among men… Our colored brothers… Mankind, I believe in you…”

and then, “I will say that the black is not a man” (ellipses in original; 1).

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In the shimmering textile (for lack of a better term) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the

Black Radical Tradition (2003), Fred Moten coalesces an Afro-optimism out of Afropessimist

accounts of ontology, standpoint-pessimism, anti-identitarian critique, and utopian queer theory.

Invoking Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “queer performative,” Moten invites us to think beyond

the “onto-theology of national humanism” such that,

What one begins to consider, as a function of the nonlocalizable nature or status of

discontinuity, is a special universalization of discontinuity, where discontinuity could be

figured as ubiquitous minority, omnipresent queerness. (69)

This becomes explicitly informative of standpoint-pessimism and its relation to Afropessimism

when Moten argues in “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)” (2013),

What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the

desire for a standpoint? What emerges in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to

that thought is not (just) that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative

power that is supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to

ontology; or, in a slight variation of what [Nahum] Chandler would say, blackness is the

anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation,

ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space. (738-

739)

The dialectic of identity standpoint, intersectional identity, and singular non-identity moves

through a negation of identity continuity and then a negation of the intersection of identity

discontinuity, providing only a singular non-identity (as opposed to multiple non-identities,

which have been negated by antisocial queer theorists and Afropessimists differently). These 

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collective anti-identitarian racial critiques form the background against which antisocial queer

theorists like Lee Edelman addresses Afropessimist challenges to queer theory.

In “Lee Edelman in conversation with Ralph Poole: ‘Queerness,’ Afro-Pessimism, and

the Aesthetic” (2018), Edelman contrasts identity with “queer nothing,” and he establishes his

affinity with Bersani’s “ontological obscenity,” saying, “I don’t think that queerness is an

ontological position” (i.e. queerness is excluded from ontology) and “queer is not something that

someone can claim to be.” Explaining to Poole why he finds Afropessimism attractive rather

than a threat to his own position, Edelman analogizes between the two positions with respect to

anti-identitarianism,

The blackness of Afro-pessimism is not the articulation of yet another identity position

that could be incorporated into a multicultural society. So, the reason it appears here is

precisely because my prior work—work that I think has, in its own way—had perhaps

some influence on the development of Afro-pessimism. The possibility of thinking about

the correlation between the ways I’m looking at queerness and the ways that Afropessimists are understanding the relation between blackness and the subject position of

black beings in the world. That seemed to me correlations that were productive.

In “Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction

without Futurity” (2015), James Bliss also makes an argument about the influence between

antisocial queer theory and Afropessimism (three years prior to Edelman’s argument) but in the

opposite direction of Edelman’s argument. Bliss tries “to find in the interventions called queer

negativity—the critique of reproductive futurity, of the family, of the politics of hope—their

prefigurations and alter-articulations within Black feminist theory” (83). Hortense Spillers is one

example. Spiller’s highly influential work in this area, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An 

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American Grammar Book,” was published in the same year—1987—as Bersani’s “Is the Rectum

a Grave?” Spillers makes an argument about the politics of representation of blackness, saying,

First of all, their [African and indigenous people’s] New World, diasporic plight marked

a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing

of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose

at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become

a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.

[…] demarcates a sexuality that is neuter-bound, inasmuch as it represents an open

vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as

male/female. (67, 77)

Edelman ignores the ways in which Frantz Fanon and Hortense Spillers develop a queer

theory—an anti-identitarian, antiassimilationist account of the power of sex and gender

neutrality—based in an evaluation of race’s constitutive role in the production of sex.

When Edelman draws correlations between queer theory and Afro-pessimism, these

correlations are analogies, “queerness and blackness, I’m arguing, are in the position of what

Lacan calls the Thing, which is not articulable as such within the course of being” (Edelman and

Poole). The analogies do not stop: “‘Woman’ is also a term that can figure into this, ‘Trans’ is a

term that can also figure into this, so there is no master term that occupies the exclusive name for

the excluded remainder of either aesthetics or civil society” (Edelman and Poole). This

negotiation with Afro-pessimism falls short because Afro-pessimism holds there to be a “master

term” for the abject of humanity, the term that the slave master’s terms make non-analogizable

with any other form of oppression. In Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S.

Antagonisms (2010), Frank B. Wilderson III calls the kind of thinking exhibited by Edelman, 

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“the ruse of analogy.” Wilderson says that the ontology of sexual difference we see in many

Lacanian feminist and queer theories is a thoroughly white construct, “There is no such narrative

as political genealogy and there is no such entity as a ‘gender ontology’ unless the subject under

discussion is not Black” (311).

In “Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Queer Theory, and Ethics” (2015), Calvin Warren extends

Wilderson’s argument more directly to any queer theory that would see itself as an ally to Afropessimism,

Whenever we equate an ontological position [or para-ontological position] with an

identity formation, we perform the very violence that sustains the antagonism. Put

another way, ontological violence sustains itself through strategies of displacement,

equivalence, and neutralization. In relating blackness to queerness, we can only speak in

distorting similes—the rhetorical practice of likening one thing to another. (19)

In a revised version of “Onticide” for the journal GLQ (2017), Calvin Warren challenges

intersectional analysis for its presumption of the commensurability of sexual difference with the

“grammatical paucity […] of antiblack suffering” (408), claiming that

scholars have attempted to reconcile blackness with sexual difference and sexual identity

through logics of equivalence. This scholarship operates under what I call “the

intersectional approach.” Although this approach provides intellectual space for

contemplating and representing sexual difference and sexual identity, it often does so

precisely by way of a structural adjustment. Thus it enacts a performative contradiction

(between blackness and humanism) that it either ignores or neglects. (401)

Warren’s argument against queer theory’s impersonalism is that sex is a function of property

relations that haunt the boundaries of the human. 

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A person understood as “queer” could purchase a black-object from the auction block

like his/her hetero-normative counterpart. In those rare instances where the black-asobject was able to participate in this economy and purchase a black-object as well, the

black purchaser could, at any moment, become another commodity—if found without

freedom papers or validation from a white guardian—the system of fungible blackness

made any black interchangeable and substitutional. This movement between object and

subject is not a problem for queerness, but is an unresolvable problem for blackness.

(2015: 19-20)

For Warren, the fungibility of blackness separates it from queerness even in antisocial queer

theory’s attempt to appropriate Afro-pessimism,

This, then, is the ultimate scandal or ontological violation of the New World: black flesh

is reduced to devastating sameness, and becomes interchangeable, or fungible, within an

economy of exchange. The violence of captivity expelled the African from Difference, or

the Symbolic—the order of differentiating subjects—and relegated it to the vacuous

space of undifferentiation. (2015: 9)

Because fungibility distinguishes sex and race in standpoint-pessimist theories, race remains a

stumbling block for the reception of neutrality in queer theory. I might say fungibility is

something tragic for blackness and comic for queerness. There is a difference between cruising

for people and people cruising all over you, although they might potentially both be nomadic

affirmations of an identity-disrupting Other (where one is an elective affirmation, the other

coerced affirmations).

Despite the chain of fungible Things, there is a punchline to Edelman’s defense of queer

superiority over Afro-pessimism in antisocial queer theory, 

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For me, the use-value of queerness lies particularly in the fact that for the most part it is

less strictly attached to an identitarian position or to a specific type of body or specific

type of act than Woman or Blackness. (Edelman and Poole)

One way we might understand this claim is by recognizing that Afropessimism, unlike antisocial

queer theory, also participates in queer of color critique’s ambivalence about humanism. In

“Onticide” (2017), Calvin Warren’s continues to wrestle with an ambivalence about humanism

despite his criticism of queer of color critique,

Because we lack a grammar outside humanism that would allow us to articulate

“particularity,” “difference,” and “surplus violence” without getting trapped in a double

bind, I propose a procedure of writing with and against humanism to address this

problem. I call this procedure “onticide.” It uses the technique of erasure (sous rature) in

relation to features of human difference that exclude blackness but are necessary to

articulate the fracturing of fungible commodities. This approach departs from

intersectional analyses that attempt to either reconcile blackness with humanity and its

difference or conceive of blackness as ontologically equivalent with features of human

difference. I suggest that the intersectional approach is inadequate to the task of

articulating the particularity of violence Steen experienced, and that an onticidal approach

(writing with and against humanist terms of difference) enables us to contend with the

humanist double bind more productively. (394)

Nevertheless, we can still ask Edelman to pay attention to reception: Queerness as opposed to

blackness is less strictly attached to an identitarian position by who? As I noted in the

introduction to this dissertation, the passive voice in queer theory can mask the politics of

representation in the reception of contentious issues. In “Variations on the Standard Treatment”

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[1955] (2006), Lacan argues that the phenomenon of transference should make us pay attention

not only the way that the contextual relativity of interpretation determines what is said but also—

due to the potential projection of the big Other—who said it. I think Edelman is projecting a

white Other through which he understands Afropessimism. This chapter might then be concluded

by thinking about the function of negation in queer theories of identity.

In an essay critiquing Lee Edelman, Tim Dean, Leo Bersani, and Adam Phillips, “No

Second Chances” (2011), David Marriott reevaluates the status of antisocial queer theory’s antiidentitarianism against the background of recent minoritarian visions of futurity, including

Muñoz’s criticism of antisocial queer theory’s normative white reproductive futurity. Unlike

Muñoz, however, who is invested in impersonality and—Marriott insists—teleology, and

strangely similar to antisocial queer theorists, Marriott approaches queer anti-identitarianism

with careful attention to psychoanalytic accounts of the ego.

Marriott begins to untie antisocial queer theory by claiming that, on one side, it disavows

the proximity of narcissism and identity, which it does through exclusively foregrounding all that

is antinormative in intimacy. On the other side, it ignores the psychoanalytic understanding of

the ego or identity as already in flux, destabilized. (Edelman actually does acknowledge this at

the beginning of No Future, however, and yet Edelman still rails against identity.) The result is

antisocial queer theory’s reliance upon a dialectic of identity that is more Hegelian than

Freudian. Marriott suggests that antisocial queer theorists like to reveal the strangeness of

intimacy more so than they like to accept the strangeness of intimacy, and this is what I would

characterize as antisocial queer theory’s exhibitionism. These queer theorists like to point at

instances of the ego’s supposed subversion (like masochism), but as Jack Halberstam points out

in “Queer Betrayals” (2014), antisocial queer theory has performed very badly at abandoning its 

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identity (especially racially, as I have also shown in this chapter), and we may need to allow

antisocial queer theory to die in order to fulfill its implicit request that we betray it. In a real dig

at Bersani et al., Marriott argues that antisocial queer theorists “want to shatter the category of

identity without being threatened by the act of actual shattering” (110). Marriott’s argument

pivots on an appreciation of Freud’s account of negation, wherein judgement splits the ego from

itself in the process of defense. The antisocial queer polemic against the ego, then, may very well

be an ego-negation that indirectly functions to reinforce the ego, and this seems to be the case

with racial identity in antisocial theories of queer neutrality. Although Marriott’s essay ends with

hardly a mention of the relationship of race to this critique (partly because his essay addressed

this earlier through Muñoz), the ending of Marriott’s essay makes one clear reference to race

when accusing antisocial queer theorists of unintentionally reinforcing “the so-called old

relational modes,” which are identitarian and normatively white (113).

What can we learn from this and where might we go from here? In the chapter, “How to

Fix Bathroom Signs,” I explored Lacan’s account of fixation and identity in the clinic in terms of

the reproduction of racial identity, and I can round that gesture off with a further reflection on the

relationship between the mechanisms of negation and the dialectics of racial identity. Although

antisocial queer theory might seem to be at its strangest when desperately trying to explain how

narcissism—that organization of self/same-love or homo-sexuality—is vital to anti-identitarian

theory, I think that a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework suggests that what is most strange

about antisocial queer theory is its superficial understanding of negation, which is precisely what

Marriott is trying to point out with his reference to Freud’s account of the dialectics of the ego.

Lacan is more helpful than Freud here, I think, because Lacan departs from the traditional

reception of Freud’s account of fetishism. 

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Let us go all the way back to Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987). In that text,

Bersani inspires decades of queer theorists’ love of pornographic sadism and especially

masochism as anti-normative, anti-identitarian forces. What Lacan helps us understand, in

addition, is that masochism and sadism are normative. The key to understanding this is, as

Marriott pointed out, the dialectics of negation and identity, which Marriott helpfully identifies

in antisocial queer theorists’ rejection of identity categories rather than identity itself. I

characterized this as an exhibitionism, which is a fetishism that illustrates the problematic

normativity of masochism.

Basically, the organization of fetishism, for Lacan, is a condition of desire for a love or

object that is unavailable and, therefore, unusable in the reflective formation of the ego, resulting

in the subject’s demand for a real encounter with another (an other reduced to this desired object)

to make up for this defect in the formation of the ego. In Introduction to Lacanian

Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (1997), Bruce Fink provides a nicely condensed review

of Lacan’s position on masochism in Lacan’s Seminar X (1963). Fink explains,

One of the paradoxical claims Lacan makes about perversion is that while it may

sometimes present itself as a no-holds barred, jouissance-seeking activity, its less

apparent aim is to bring the law into being: to make the Other as law (or law-giving

Other) exist. The masochist’s goal, for example, is to bring the partner or witness to the

point of enunciating a law and perhaps pronouncing a sentence (often by generating

anxiety in the partner). (180)

This is the conformity of perversion. As an even more basic example, we say that neglected

children act out to receive punishment because this punishment amounts to attention, which

makes up for neglect. The punishing “No” or negation that the child receives is a boundary that 

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the child uses to form its identity, much like the exhibitionist flashes their genitals to receive

disapproving attention. In the case of masochism, punishment fosters love. It is not “anti-loving”

like Bersani says. Freud’s dictum that there is no negation in the unconscious (“On Negation”

1925) has an analog in the neglected child’s realization that all publicity, even bad publicity, is

good publicity.

So, when queer theorists perform their masochistic exhibitionism (displaying the

subversion of identity) it is possible—within an Afropessimist and Lacanian-informed position—

that what queer theorists are really asking for is a surprise reaction or even a spanking from

queer of color critique and Afropessimism, which constantly reaffirm the identity of antisocial

queer theory for it, namely reaffirming that antisocial queer theory is white queer theory. Lacan

clarifies the structures of interaction here when he notes that a sadist is not satisfied by a victim

who stoically refuses to reveal their pain—a victim who refuses to say, “No.” A masochist,

similarly, only gets satisfaction at the moment when their partner says, “I cannot hurt you

anymore, we have gone too far, this is enough.” Have not queer theorists in fact gone too far in

their anti-identitarianism multiple times? A sadist and a masochist are not the perfect couple that

we imagine them to be (one likes giving pain, the other likes receiving it) but are a match made

in hell, wherein each one is endlessly frustrated in their wait for the other to give in, to say “No”

and establish the boundaries of identity. It is possible that antisocial queer theory owes its

identity to the boundaries that queer of color critics establish when they say that they are not

antisocial queer theorists but utopian queer theorists, i.e. not white queer theorists. If race is

evidently a thorough stumbling block for theories of queer neutrality, is it not possible that race

is also a formative boundary for theories of queer neutrality? 

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My concluding resignation here is that, even though I find the Afropessimist critique of

queer neutrality entirely compelling, I still cannot figure out how to translate Afropessimism into

a critique of queer neutrality in the specific case of gender-neutral public bathrooms, and this is

part of why my first three chapters take queer neutrality so seriously despite its many problems

(129).

How pointed can this spearhead be, though, if the stand it takes is so indeterminately pointed?

There are surely ways in which in which the Lumpenproletariat may be represented cohesively.

For example, in the U.S., the Black Panthers also looked to the Lumpenproletariat for

revolutionary potential, and there was a Black Panther organization called “The Lumpen,” a funk

band that regularly performed protest songs. However, the pointedness of the spearhead—