Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution, Material Trans Theory, and Natural Law

ABSTRACT

Natural law perspectives take existing formations of life-matter and translate them into normative templates. From an evolutionary perspective, the normative aspect of natural law is always under suspicion. Because life-forms have histories and futures that are shaped by a dynamic of accidents, they are not susceptible to normative assertions about what they “should” be or do. This is particularly the case with sex. Sexual reproduction is a minoritarian strategy within the full spectrum of life. Like all aspects of life, sex is a product of a fluctuating backdrop of phylogenetic (species-forming) and ontogenetic (individual-forming) accidents. And like all aspects of life, it continues to vary within this field of material processes. My argument in this essay is that, rather than a fully integrated feature of a lawlike apparatus, sex is a mess. From the evolutionary perspective—and especially, I show, in the light of the new “extended evolutionary synthesis”—sex always has been and always will be barnacled with accidents. This dovetails with what we might call material trans theory, a species of New Materialism that sees sex as a concrescence of material forces and processes introjected into bodies. Both views leave sex fundamentally incompatible with metaphysical explanations or metaphysical norms—including and especially natural law.

Notes

¹ Other versions of natural law philosophy are out there, but I’m focusing on a particular strand that attaches philosophical claims to normative legal assertions.

² See also the recent special issue of Angelaki on “Tranimacies,” which the editors define as “a set of relations that shifts the binary mode of sex/gender from unitary bodies to a material network of desires” (Steinbock, Szczygielska, and Wagner, 2017, p. 1).

³ By contrast, trans theorists such as Gayle Salamon take a decidedly antimaterial approach to understanding trans and sex, in part by turning up the volume on the psychoanalytic aspect of Butler’s work. Salamon is expressly critical of Prosser, writing that his “emphatic insistence that the transsexual body is ‘unimpeachably real’ ends up landing him squarely in the Real, that domain of plenitude and fullness that not only exists outside of language, but, indeed, is fundamentally incompossible with subjectivity itself” (Salamon, 2010, p. 41). This entrapment of Prosser’s word “real” in the arch Lacanian metaphysical category “Real” seems unfair: Prosser is simply making the case that sex emerges out of a material-semiotic complex. Discourse impinges on body and body impinges on discourse. There is a strong argument to be made that Salamon’s analysis of materiality is faulty inasmuch as she seems to understand it entirely in terms of the material image of a body. This flows from the Idealist (in the philosophical sense) prism of Salamon’s work. For her, “flesh is that which, by virtue of psychic investment and worldly engagement, we form our bodies into, rather than the stuff that forms them” (Salamon, 2010, p. 64). Matter, in this view, is always organized by Mind. This position would seem to be incompatible with the New Materialist approach advocated here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donovan Schaefer

Donovan Schaefer, Ph.D., joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor in 2017 after spending 3 years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. He earned his B.A. in the interdisciplinary Religion, Literature, and the Arts program at the University of British Columbia. His master’s and doctoral degrees are from the Religion program at Syracuse University. After completing his Ph.D., he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Haverford College, where he participated in the 2012–2013 Mellon faculty research seminar on affect and politics. His research focuses on the role of embodiment and emotion in religion and secularisms. His first book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke University Press, 2015) challenges the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. His current project explores the intersection between New Materialisms, science, and secularisms.