Saying "Yes": On Negativity

"I would prefer not to." - Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Schrivner"

I love queer nightlife.

I love the eclectic creativity on display. I love the acts of radical love and sexuality. I love the passion and talent of the performers. I love the culture of consent. They are a welcome respite from the oppressive expectations and insidious, compounding violences of the world. It is a thrill to witness the innovative ways that the freaks and outcasts shake off the roles and the shame society shackles them with. I nod my head reading Travis Alabanza describe their reverence for clubs in their book, "None of the Above":

"Through my experience of club culture, I was able to create alternative associations with parts of myself that the outside world had tampered with. I could go from the minority to the majority using just a sweaty hand stamp, passing through a half-broken basement door."

Alabanza describes her love for a phrase often used in queer entertainment: "Ladies, gentlemen, and those lucky enough to transcend gender!" She writes that people like me are lucky for deciding that we exist outside male and female roles. We choose something different, and in doing so manage to become ourselves.

But I struggle at times to understand what the different thing I'm choosing even is. So often I feel as though being queer is a long series of Nos - to certain ways to dress, to dance, to look. This feeling does not always go away in queer spaces. Queer people love to play with masculinity and femininity, neither of which hold any interest to me. In sideshow in particular there is notable gendered distinction, not in identity (many sideshow performers identify outside the binary), but in presentation. Femininity is performed especially often, to the extent that I find myself believing that to be talented in my skills is to be skillfully feminine.

My identity feels like a string of negatives. Alabanza would consider this a positive: "How lucky I felt to be illegible." They're not the only queer writer to tie queerness to negativity. In his book, "No Future," Lee Edelman suggests that if society is going to tie queerness with negative qualities like shame, deviance, selfishness, and self-destruction, we should embrace it. We should accept and celebrate our opposition to oppressive heteronormative and capitalistic values like productivity, reproduction, and consumption. We should fight against what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism," the irrational belief that enduring ways of life that hurt us will eventually pay off and make us happy. Queer negativity offers, as Mari Ruti writes in her book, "The Ethics of Opting Out":

"An antidote to the valorization of success, achievement, performance, and self-actualization."

I find this a worthy goal. However, Edelman loses me as he goes even further to proclaim that this negativity opposes every form of social viability:

"The embrace of queer negativity can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value."

In other words, there can be no social creativity in queer negativity. Ruti refers to this position as "antirelational" thinking, and criticizes it as a theory put forward by white gay men who don't comprehend that the position that we can and should exist outside of society and revel in negativity demonstrates privilege that marginalized people, who are "already leading overly precarious lives," don't have. She critiques that valorizing queer negativity results in giving up political will and power, which many cannot afford to do.

So can queer negativity be creative? Ruti thinks so:

"If Edelman reads negativity as a matter of self-annihilation, I read it as the foundation of many of the things that make our lives worthwhile: our psychic complexity; our capacity to be interested in the surrounding world; our desire to interact with others; and our tendency to form meaningful bonds with those we love."

To understand how, we need to talk about Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan.

Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist who identifies as a lesbian, is legally non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. They are known for their theory of gender performativity, which is, in a nutshell, the idea that we create the illusion of a stable gender in ourselves by repeatedly performing elaborate acts that mark us socially as a "woman" or "man." Furthermore, they state that our gender identities are formed through social action in a relationship with power, specifically, a collaborative relationship. Everything we do, even attempts we make to resist power, requires a dialogue with it. We cannot exist outside of a relationship with power, no matter how hard we try.

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who posited that we form an identity when we become unconsciously aware that there is a chasm between how we perceive ourselves and how we wish we were seen by others. Sounds familiar to me, is this not the experience of so many trans and nonbinary people? Put another way, Lacan would say we are defined by "lack." How we understand ourselves as subjects is an illusion created by internalizing "signifiers," which are given meaning by "the Symbolic," which is defined by "the Other" - parts of the world that are outside our conscious control. As far as gender is concerned, he believed that "male" and "female" are given meaning by "the Symbolic."

But Lacan also believed in something called "the Real" - a state of being beyond culture and language, beyond "the Symbolic." This is where he and Butler part ways. As Ruti puts it:

"Butler has insisted that because every part of the subject has been infiltrated by power, the real cannot be anything but a symbolic construct; for Butler the very notion that there could be a kernel of being that resists the symbolic is itself symbolically produced - one ideological fantasy among others. The Lacanian perspective is merely that such shaping has never been entirely successful."

Simply put, Lacan believes there is something deep within us that exists outside of how power shapes us, how "the Symbolic" defines us. To access that, we harness what Ruti calls, "the negativity of freedom": essentially, the power of saying No. To quote Ruti again:

"The negativity of freedom - the No! - is crystallized in the so-called Lacanian "act": a destructive act through which the subject, momentarily at least, extricates itself from the demands of the big Other by plunging into... the real. In other words, even when we feel overwhelmed by the webs of power that surround us, we possess a degree of autonomy as long as we are willing to surrender our symbolic supports, as long as we are willing - even temporarily - to genuinely not give a damn about what is (socially) expected of us. Insofar as the subject occupies a place of lack in the Other (symbolic order), we can perform separation and suspend the reign of the big Other."

Ruti posits that it is here that negativity possesses the power to create social relationships, not sever ties. The Lacanian subject separates itself from the Other to become closer to someone(s) who they value so deeply that they are willing to risk being incomprehensible in order to be truly themselves. Ruti writes that in doing so:

"We gain the ability to wield the signifier even in highly rewarding ways. We gain the capacity to be interested in the world around us, we gain the ability to desire, and sometimes even love, others."

If I accept Lacan's belief that there is a part of me that exists apart from "the Symbolic" and determines who I truly am, Lacan would consider it my ethical responsibility to remain true to this part of myself. But I return to my question of who am I, gender-wise, in society if I have separated myself from roles and expectations, from "the Other"? As Ruti asks:

"If social subjectivity is a function of being interpolated into the symbolic order, then how can we even begin to conceptualize forms of desire that have not been completely overrun by the desire of the Other?"

Lacan believes that each of us relates to this "lack" in an entirely unique way. But I sometimes struggle to transform my own feelings of "lack" into a coherent gender identity. Instead of saying No!, what do I want to say Yes! to? Ruti, again, has an answer for me:

"If the process of fashioning a singular place within the world results in a distinctive subjective "style," this style always expresses something about the manner in which the symbolic and real, however tenuously, come together and amalgamate."

Style.

I've found that's my answer. I've come to prefer style to gender. Style is mutable, individual, infinitely creative, DIY. Style crosses gender lines. I see Alexander McQueen, visual kei, emo boys, yami kawaii, goth, punk and I think Yes! Yes! Yes!

Friedrich Nietzsche says it better than I can, in "The Gay Science":

"To give style to one's character - that is a grand and rare art! He who surveys all that his nature presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye."

No Future: On Queer Theory and the Death Drive, by Lee Edelman

The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche

The Ethics of Opting Out, by Mari Ruti

None of the Above, by Travis Alabanza