Human Kibble

I'm struggling to synthesize my recent reading into a coherent post. The thread of the idea has something to do with how trans desire resists the institutional drive to categorize and deny interiority. I dunno. Anyway, my brain is dead so today I brought in the TV cart so we could watch some anime together. Click for full size images, and each quote has a copy button below if you want to pull them out and chew on their connections, too.

The impact of such a list may seem to depend radically on a trust in the self-perception, self-knowledge, or self-report of individuals, in an area that is if anything notoriously resistant to the claims of common sense and introspection: where would the whole, astonishing and metamorphic Western romance tradition (I include psychoanalysis) be if people's sexual desire, of all things, were even momentarily assumed to be transparent to themselves? Yet I am even more impressed by the leap of presumptuousness necessary to dismiss such a list of differences than by the leap of faith necessary to entertain it. To alienate
conclusively, definitionally, from anyone on any theoretical ground the authority to describe and name their own sexual desire is a terribly consequential seizure. In this century, in which sexuality has been made expressive of the essence of both identity and knowledge, it may represent the most intimate violence possible. It is also an act replete with the most disempowering mundane institutional effects and potentials. It is, of course, central to the modern history of homophobic oppression.

Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, (1990)
Stop!! Hibari-kun! (1983)

One provisional answer nestles in a subordinate clause close to the beginning of Steven Marcus’s foundational study of mid-Victorian pornography, The Other Victorians, when it is is observed in passing that “in pornography no person, object, or idea is incapable of being enlisted in the cause of sexual activity.” Character, then, exists only provisionally as a pretext for a more generically primal enlistment, a seduction, a being-sucked-into the whirlpool of sex that pornography sets out, if not to depict, then at least to present. Marcus’s point is affirmed each moment in which porn promises to educate its characters: the moment, for example, when the straight boy removes his blindfold to reveal that it is a man sucking his cock and that he rather likes it; when Justine learns that she can enjoy even the chastisement she receives for her good conduct. Character exists as a mere precondition for an erasure that occurs, both chronologically and formally, at the moment of sexual pleasure. The theory of character would then be something like: there are no characters at the moment of orgasm, and it is the task of pornography to persuade its consumers of this fact. We are all the same underneath our characters—though probably Sade and BaitBus.com would entail different conceptualizations of what’s underneath.

Grace Lavery, “Picaresque and Pornography” (2023)
Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

I take the matter firmly in hand and struggle with it, vainly invoking different names to change its shape, but it resists all transformation. Materiality always resists the symbolic frame. I beg it, then, to throw all language off and become ungendered flesh, but language clenches this meat between its teeth in a death-grip. Words and things together taunt me. Though each downward stroke of my right hand tries to push them apart, they refuse to be unjoined. I know that I will find my pleasure in the pursuit of their estrangement, or I will not find it anywhere at all.

Finally, in my need, I call out for Him to help me. The bolted bathroom door slams open and He looks down upon me.

“You shouldn’t have to think so much,” He says. There is more cruelty in His voice than I have noticed before; there is a trace of threatened malice when He says “Just lie there with your legs apart and I’ll straighten out this mess.”

He scares me, but I’m ready. I’ve been waiting for Him so long now. As He falls upon me I see the knife glinting in His hand, and I know this water will soon be turning red. When I lift my hips to meet Him as He enters me, He will surely see that nothing other than my desire brings Him here.

Susan Stryker, The Surgeon Haunts My Dreams (1994)
Evangelion: 2.22 You Can (Not) Advance

(Thanks to Maddie for initially encouraging me in this deranged form of self-amusement, and to Autogyniphiles Anonymous for raising anime/theory pairings to an art form)

TV Cart Day

Show Notes: Transfemme Takeover 5

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