ACTS AGAINST NATURE

Abstract

This paper makes an argument for greater consideration of negativity in queer engagements with biological or natural systems. Focusing on one particular paper by Karen Barad – “Nature’s Queer Performativity (The Authorized Version)” – I argue that this work tends to under-read the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be. What interests me is that Barad’s argument about nature’s queer performativity begins and ends with sodomy (“acts against nature”). While it has been a highly cathected site of analysis for some early and influential work in queer theory, sodomy has been little discussed in feminist and queer science studies where Barad’s work has been so influential. I argue that sodomy (a menace that cannot be erased from the political or conceptual landscape) spoils any identitarian queer politics that attempt to depathologize or reaffirm the natural world.

Keywords:

• queer; performativity
• Barad
• negativity
• sodomy
• homographesis

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Elsewhere Luciano (“The Inhuman Anthropocene”) calls “inhuman humanism” a contradiction suggesting a usage of inhuman to mean cruelty; whereas Chen (Animacies) pairs human and inhuman, taking them to be roughly equivalent to live and dead, animate and inanimate. Interestingly, a Google Scholar search for the terms “queer” and “inhuman” ranks first a paper from the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry that reports on a case of severe domestic deprivation and abuse of twin boys: “the people next door [to where the boys lived] testified that they often heard queer, inhuman shrieks which resembled howling” (Koluchová 107). Furthering the semantic proliferation of “inhuman” (animalistic/howling) and intensifying the depravity of “queer,” this conventional psychological report and its proximity to the Chen and Luciano introduction (ranked second by Google Scholar) suggest that queer/inhuman, already in circulation, will breach the confines of Luciano and Chen’s introduction. My goal here is not to delineate the correct uses of these terms but rather to pay some attention to this polysemy and its effects.

2 While she much more clearly distinguishes the inhuman from the non-human, Karen Barad nonetheless seems to make a similar kind of move. For Barad, the inhuman (usually understood as a lack of compassion) becomes, ironically, the means by which we may be more compassionate. That is, the inhuman “may be the very condition of possibility of feeling the suffering of the other, of literally being in touch with the other, of feeling the exchange of e-motion in the binding obligations of entanglements” (“On Touching” 219). As I will argue below, Barad tends to under-read for the constitutive violence of such touchings, exchanges and obligations:

living compassionately requires recognizing and facing our responsibility to the infinitude of the other, welcoming the stranger whose very existence is the possibility of touching and being touched, who gifts us with both the ability to respond and the longing for justice-to-come. (Ibid.)

3 Hollin et al. graph the exponential increase in citations of Barad’s work since the publication of Meeting the Universe Halfway in 2007.

4 Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (Unnatural Offences) states “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine” (<lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/1-50/report42.pdf>; see also Arondekar; Puri). Even though the Supreme Court in the United States has deemed sodomy a constitutionally protected practice (Lawrence v. Texas), sodomy returned as a criminal act in the 2016 US election cycle in the state of Georgia when 83.3 per cent of voters approved an amendment to the constitution of Georgia to create the “Safe Harbor for Sexually Exploited Children Fund.” The ballot question read:

Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow additional penalties for criminal cases in which a person is adjudged guilty of keeping a place of prostitution, pimping, pandering, pandering by compulsion, solicitation of sodomy, masturbation for hire, trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, or sexual exploitation of children and to allow assessments on adult entertainment establishments to fund the Safe Harbor for Sexually Exploited Children Fund to pay for care and rehabilitative and social services for individuals in this state who have been or may be sexually exploited? (<https://ballotpedia.org/Georgia_Additional_Penalties_for_Sex_Crimes_to_Fund_Services_for_Sexually_Exploited_Children,_Amendment_2_(2016)>)

5 There is an extensive historical literature on sodomy, especially in the early modern period in Europe and the New World (e.g., Betteridge; Bray; Jordan; Traub). In addition, there are excellent readings of sodomy as a legal, racialized or cultural category (e.g., Huffer; Rodríguez; Puar; Puri; Ruskola; Thompson) and a number of critical readings of anality and its value for queer theory (Nash; Sedgwick; Stockton). The idea that sodomy might circulate as a conceptual rubric (rather than as a historical, behavioural or legal event) has been much less common since the early work by Edelman (Homographesis; “Ever After”), Goldberg and Bersani cited here. For recent queer work about nature, see Chen; Giffney and Hird; Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson; Morton. I don’t claim here to offer a survey of this emergent work, but I do wager that the difficulties in Barad’s work in relation to negativity will be found in these texts as well. This is not because all these texts are in error, but because the operations of negativity are enduring in, and constitutive of, scenes of queerness.

6 See, for example, Wilson for a detailed examination of how Gayle Rubin claims a conceptual and political space for sexuality by detaching it from biology.

7 “The imploded phrase ‘spacetimemattering’ (without the usual hyphens to separate out the nouns) refers to the entangled nature of what are generally taken to be separate features” (Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity (The Authorized Version)” 49).

8 Nachträglichkeit is translated in the Standard Edition of Freud’s work as “deferred action.” Jean Laplanche has suggested that the term “afterwardsness” might be a better rendering of the idea that a “second” psychic event may become the cause for a “first” psychic event that has happened earlier. Laplanche and Pontalis note that “human sexuality, with the peculiar unevenness of its temporal development, provides an eminently suitable field for the phenomenon of deferred action” (112).

9 It is worth noting that grammatology, in the conventional sense of the term that Derrida re-deploys in Of Grammatology, includes within its purview the science of orthography (which studies, amongst other things, the norms of spelling). Spelling is, of course, a central concern for his deployment of the neologism différance:

I will speak, therefore, of the letter a, this initial letter which it apparently has been necessary to insinuate, here and there, into the writing of the word difference; and to do so in the course of a writing on writing, and also of a writing within writing whose different trajectories thereby find themselves, at certain very determined points, intersecting with a kind of gross spelling mistake. (Derrida, “Différance” 3)

10 Arguing for the “possibility of empirical support for deconstructive ideas like différance” (“Nature’s Queer Performativity (The Authorized Version)” 45), Barad sees a broad similarity between différance and her ideas of diffraction (“identity is diffraction/différance/differing/deferring/differentiating” 32) and agential realism (“There is no pure external position, only agential separability, differences within, différance” 47) that she has formulated through close engagement with the specifics of quantum physics. Breaching (and the differences between breaches) has been an important part of Derrida’s formulation of différance:

The two apparently different values of différance [differing and deferring] are tied together in Freudian theory [ … ] The concepts of trace (Spur), of breaching (Bahnung), and of the forces of breaching, from the Project on, are inseparable from the concept of difference. The origin of memory, and of the psyche as (conscious or unconscious) memory in general, can be described only by taking into account the difference between breaches. Freud says so overtly. There is no breach without difference and no difference without trace. (Derrida, “Différance” 18)