Learning in public

Abstract

This essay offers an extended consideration of Cherríe Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh’s dialogue “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” to investigate questions about collectivity and consensus, duration, disappointment and reinvestment, vulnerability, and the suffocating effects of idealization in political practice. The essay meditates on co-writing, coupledom, collectivity, dialogue, consciousness raising, and pedagogy, which, each in their turn, offer methods for staging “staying with the trouble.” The essay advocates for reinvigorating Moraga and Hollibaugh’s commitment to “using feelings as theory,” a way of drawing upon lesbian experience for feminist politics that occupies the dialogic, descriptive, cobbled together particularities of the hyphen between theory-practice.

Keywords:

• couple
• collectivity
• consciousness raising
• lesbian feminism
• queer theory
• affect
• Moraga
• Hollibaugh
• theory
• practice

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Damon R. Young for his generous reading and incisive comments on an early draft of this essay, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Notes on contributors

Joan Lubin is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in Science and Literature in the English Department and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is working on two book projects: Pulp Sexology, a literary history of the quantitative human sciences; and Social Science Fictions, a study of the convergence between the genres of science fiction and campus novel over the course of the long 1970s.

Jeanne Vaccaro is a postdoctoral fellow at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and in the Department of Gender Studies at USC. Her book in process, Handmade: Feelings and Textures of Transgender, was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital | The Andy Warhol Foundation.

Notes

1 As Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang (2019a) helpfully describe, the enabling form of queer theory’s insights into what they describe as “sex difference feminism” has often been the triangle, from the Oedipal triangle in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) to the homoerotic triangulation of heterosexual coupledom in Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men. See also Wiegman (2015).

2 See Rooney (2002) for a theorization of the classroom and the public intellectual in terms of what she calls the “semiprivate room.”

3 See Haraway (2016).

4 See Muñoz (2005) and Love (2007).

5 On “the couple’s anthropophagic one” see Brilmyer, Trentin, and Xiang (2019b, 226). They note, by way of opening:

The couple is; the couple rarely are: this grammatical technicality would suggest that when we ask “what is a couple?” we are talking about two ones that have become a new one and thus should be addressed as an ontological unity. (223)

6 In its heteronormative form, the couple is premised on the gender binary. The unity of that form of the couple is premised on the subsumption of woman to man, whose integrity stands in for them both, vouchsafing the couple’s oneness. A dominant strain of feminism insisted that butch/femme was a problematic reiteration of this logic, parroting the hetero couple form and its gender binary to subsume the feminine subject to the subjective primacy of her butch partner. Queer mobilizations of butch/femme as a performative deconstruction of this normative couple form insisted by contrast that, rather than a reiteration of this relational dynamic, butch/femme constituted a parodic revelation of the unnaturalness of sexual difference in the first instance, pulling the rug out from under the presumed naturalness of the couple form that relies on the subordination of women for its unity. We see Moraga and Hollibaugh articulating a crucial interstitial space in which the subjective naturalness of their respective genders has alienated them from feminism even as it has granted them access to a politicized experience of their own eroticism, constituting the grounds for a theory rather than a camp critique of gender per se.

7 While this formulation acquired a certain prominence and durability in its consolidation as slogan, lesbianism is far from unique in its nomination as the lowly practical counterpart to high theory. For example, see McDowell (1995).

8 See King (1994), esp. p. 125.

9 On “transitivity” as a feature of queer object relations, see Wiegman (2012), esp. p. 319.

10 See Chuh (2014).

11 This 1975 text by the Women’s Action Alliance was expanded in 2017, and includes a new foreword by Mariame Kaba and an afterword by Jacqui Shine.

12 See Halberstam (2016). See also the discussion of this blog post in Young (2019).

13 On learning what we don’t already know, see Tompkins (2016).

14 “Queer commentary” is the descriptor proposed by Berlant and Warner (1995) in their early anti-state of the field essay “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” For one articulation of the distinction between “queer theory” and “queer studies,” see Wiegman (2012), esp. note 7, p. 305.

15 In their recent co-edited special issue of differences: a journal of feminist theory, Wiegman and Wilson (2015) contend this is the sign of its disciplinarity.

16 There is a large and growing body of scholarship devoted to the contentious relationships between queer, LGBT, and feminist/women’s/gender studies. For an influential early example, consider “Against Proper Objects,” in which Butler (1994) close reads the rhetorical contortions perpetrated by LGBT studies as it strenuously labors to produce itself as the supersession of a now outmoded feminism by distinguishing its proper object, “sex,” from feminisms’ supposedly exclusive commitment to analysis of “gender.” Butler finds this distinction ultimately unsupportable, operating instead as a tool to suppress the questions animating feminist theory in favor of new ones, rather than resolving or engaging them further.

17 Soto makes this observation with respect to the Combahee River Collective statement in particular.

18 Her most widely known work with the politics of language is probably as co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, first published by Persephone Press in 1981.

19 This interest in X and the grammars of sex has been taken up broadly in Latinx studies. For example, see de Onís (2017) and Velasco (1996). Consider also the operations of X in two foundational works of queer literary studies: Johnson (1979) and Sedgwick (1990b). Berlant and Warner's “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” (1995) has anchored its own discourse in the auto-critical tradition of queer institutional critique and field genealogy. For more, see Love (2012); Wiegman (2016); and Jagose (2013).

20 See Lyons (2010).

21 “Queer feminist studies” is what Wiegman (2014) has recently proposed calling the hybridized and parallel tracking thought-formation of which we would offer “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With” as an exemplary instance if not a crucial genealogical antecedent.

22 De Lauretis’s (1994) early reflection on the development of queer theory, “Habit Changes” also proposes evacuation as the outcome of the habitual in theory, in which theory becomes a publishing genre, obeying its own immanent conventions rather than attempting to deduce knowledge about the world:

As for “queer theory,” my insistent specification lesbian may well be taken as a taking of distance from what, since I proposed it as a working hypothesis for lesbian and gay studies in this very journal (differences 3.2), has quickly become a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.

23 There has been a fulsome body of queer scholarship substantiating this point. See for example Berlant and Warner (1995), Ferguson (2005), Duggan (2003), and Eng (2010).

24 Cf. After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory, a contentious special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) and, later, essay collection (Duke UP, 2011), edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker. Critiques of the volume’s logic largely consolidated around its periodization (or eulogization, as the case may be) of the field – the “after” of its title. One could just as easily find in its title an elision of the difference between queer critique and its nominal object (“sex”) and thus, implicitly, a denial of the idea that queer theory might have a mediating method that would survive the demise of its object.