Our goal is to use the concept of negativity to problematize what Annamarie Jagose calls the ‘rigor mortis of opposition’ between feminist and queer theory (“Undisciplined” 172). Whether negativity produces politics or wrecks its condition of possibility, negativity is a central concern for feminist theorists. From incels—involuntarily celibate men—to dildos to pregnancy, this panel traces feminist imaginations of the negative to invite new ways of conceiving coalitional thought between feminist and queer politics.
The panel begins with Sam Wrisley’s consideration of erotophobia as a central constituent for both feminist and incel politics. A recent report published in the Washington Post suggests that Americans—particularly those under 30—are having significantly less sex than previous generations. This uptick in celibacy (voluntary or not) is most profound in young men, as the share of men younger than 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled in the last decade, to 28 percent. Social scientists suggest the increase can be attributed to a number of factors: lower labor force participation, delayed marriage, the internet, etc. However, it seems likely that these purported “causes” are merely the visible manifestations of the same, larger, ill-defined phenomenon: generalized erotophobia. This paper examines erotophobia from two perspectives: popular feminism and incel. In these particular discursive fields, negative affects stick to heterosexual sex as conceptual schema, rendering it a fraught object that produces anxiety, fear, disgust, and anger. Sam argues that feminist and incel erotophobia, while seemingly originating out of contradictory affective spaces, actually share their origins in ruptures of the heretofore clearly male-dominated sexual structure. These ruptures render power differentials unclear or even reversed, inciting negative affects and further compounding erotophobia.
The second paper in this panel pivots from the affective to the literary. Chase Gregory considers timeworn feminist debates about gendered/racialized sex toys alongside Kathryn Bond-Stockton’s repeated use of “dildoing” as a metaphor for both what she calls “lesbian reading” and surface reading. Chase focuses on two trajectories that run parallel in Stockton’s work. The first trajectory is a shift in focus, from “black gay men” to “the lesbian”; the second trajectory is a shift in metaphor, from “the bottom” to “the dildo.” Pluming the connections between these shifts in object and terminology, Chase hopes to better understand Stockton’s invocation of the “lesbian reading position,” arrived at via the recurring metaphor of the dildo. Chase begins with Stockton’s early theorizations of the turnip-as-dildo scene in Toni Morrison’s Sula, and with her own self-conscious and reflective introduction to Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame. Chase then turns to several of Stockton’s recent works that use “the dildo” as the privileged metaphor for queer reading. These works include “Reading as Kissing, Sex with Ideas: ‘Lesbian’ Barebacking?” (2015), “Surfacing (In the Heat of Reading): Is It Like Kissing or Some Other Sex Act?” (2015), “Sex on a Hook: Reading, Kissing, Fishing” (2016), and the “Queer Theory” entry in Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (2016). Chase reads these works alongside theorizations of the dildo as discussed in Kai M. Greene’s piece “Troubling the Waters: Mobilizing a Trans* Aesthetic,” which examines debates about dildos in black lesbian feminist magazines at UCLA in the 1970s through a trans* theoretical lens. Attending to the use of the dildo metaphor in Stockton and its relation to both queer and trans* theories and histories of the prosthetic, the pornographic, and the embodied, Chase traces how Stockton’s early engagement with the negative as it relates to blackness and bottom-ness informs her later work on reading.
The third speaker on this panel expands upon significance of reading to feminist theories of sexuality. In this paper, Ryan Kendall borrows Lee Edelman’s Lacanian synonym for queer anti-futurity and anti-meaning—sinthomosexuality—in order to think about feminism’s history of antifoundationalism. Edelman opposes sinthomosexuality to what he calls reproductive futurism, or “the fantasy subtending the image of the Child [which] invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought” (No Future 2). Ryan challenges the link between ‘reproductive’ and ‘futurism,’ questioning what binds ‘reproductive’ to ‘futurism’ and therefore to political conservatism and restraint. Ryan uses Luce Irigaray’s work to think about how sinthomosexuality can be thought through tropes of pregnancy and childbirth. In her 1974 essay “Plato’s Hystera,” Irigaray theorizes Plato’s account of representation through an account of sexual difference, where representation and reproduction are coterminous. Irigaray invokes the womb and pregnancy as dead and deadly tropes, where reproduction/representation “is abortive” (Speculum of the Other Woman 255). Through literary analysis, Ryan argues that Irigaray’s account figures a relation between sexual reproduction and sinthomosexuality where sinthomosexuality need not operate in opposition to reproduction. Broadly, Ryan refigures queer stakes in anti-futurity and anti-meaning through a feminist anti-foundational theory of the reproductive body.
Together, these papers make a strong and impassioned case for the need of a feminist account of negativity. For MLA conferences attendees, this session will provide a sense of feminist and queer discussions of sexuality in the critical humanities and offer some ways of entering that dialogue through different ways of reading. The session will feature a presider and three panelists. Each panelist will speak for 18 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for questions and audience participation.