Madhavi Menon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695904
- eISBN:
- 9781452953656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695904.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being ...
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Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.Less
Indifference to Difference organises itself around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and ethics of being “indifferent to difference.” Following up on the ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, I think about what it might mean, methodologically, to be indifferent to differences of chronology, culture, and sexuality. Rather than giving us an identifiable “queerness,” or queerness as an identity, a universalism premised on indifference would be queer in its resistance to ontology. This queer universalism would be neither additive nor predicative; instead, it would resist the regime of difference in which embodiment is considered the basis of authentic identity. Indifference to Difference resuscitates the philosophical debates around universalism by joining them to the concerns of queer theory. Asking, along with Alain Badiou, what it would mean to be indifferent to someone else’s difference from us, Indifference, or Queer Universalism suggests that being locked into a world of differences should not translate into reifying difference as the basis of identity. Rather, by being indifferent to the many differences within which we live, we acknowledge the reality in which we are always moving and ever mobile. This continual movement is the movement of desire. Desire resides in us, but with scant regard for who we are. If we take seriously the universal inability of desire to settle, then we lose the ontological specificity of difference. Queer universalism can only ever be indifferent to difference.
Joseph J. Fischel
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816694754
- eISBN:
- 9781452954363
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816694754.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against any premature pride parade for consent as our determinant of sexual freedom, permissible sex, or good sex. Consent is not ethically dispositive, ...
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Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against any premature pride parade for consent as our determinant of sexual freedom, permissible sex, or good sex. Consent is not ethically dispositive, let alone sexy. Consent is a moralized fiction, and churns out the sex offender and the child as figures for its normativity. Fischel queries these figures and the figuration of consent in U.S. law and media culture. He argues that the sex offender and the child are consent’s alibi, its negative space, enabling fictions that allow consent to do the work cut out for it under (neo)liberal sexual politics. Post-Lawrence v. Texas, the consenting adult—the corresponding character of sexual freedom—emerges in and as the homosexual. In our sociolegal imaginary, sexual harm materializes as triptych: the hero is the homosexual, the villain is the sex predator, and the damsel in distress is sometimes a woman, but more often a child. Engaging legal, queer and political theory, case law and statutory law, and media representation, Fischel proposes that we shift our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation, to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and peremption—a term the author defines as the uncontrolled disqualification of possibility. Such a shift would be less damaging for young people, less devastating for sex offenders, and better for sex. It would also spark a move away from the sex offender, the Child, and the homosexual as the constellating characters of sexual harm and freedom, and toward the gendered adolescent.Less
Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent cautions against any premature pride parade for consent as our determinant of sexual freedom, permissible sex, or good sex. Consent is not ethically dispositive, let alone sexy. Consent is a moralized fiction, and churns out the sex offender and the child as figures for its normativity. Fischel queries these figures and the figuration of consent in U.S. law and media culture. He argues that the sex offender and the child are consent’s alibi, its negative space, enabling fictions that allow consent to do the work cut out for it under (neo)liberal sexual politics. Post-Lawrence v. Texas, the consenting adult—the corresponding character of sexual freedom—emerges in and as the homosexual. In our sociolegal imaginary, sexual harm materializes as triptych: the hero is the homosexual, the villain is the sex predator, and the damsel in distress is sometimes a woman, but more often a child. Engaging legal, queer and political theory, case law and statutory law, and media representation, Fischel proposes that we shift our adjudicative terms from innocence, consent, and predation, to vulnerability, sexual autonomy, and peremption—a term the author defines as the uncontrolled disqualification of possibility. Such a shift would be less damaging for young people, less devastating for sex offenders, and better for sex. It would also spark a move away from the sex offender, the Child, and the homosexual as the constellating characters of sexual harm and freedom, and toward the gendered adolescent.
Judith Roof
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780816698578
- eISBN:
- 9781452954387
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816698578.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Genders are dynamics, persistent sets of operations that link individual desires to multiple, shifting manifestations of socio-cultural positioning and self-presentation. These include narratives of ...
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Genders are dynamics, persistent sets of operations that link individual desires to multiple, shifting manifestations of socio-cultural positioning and self-presentation. These include narratives of cultural and familial roles, sexual desires, economic and political interpellations, peer mimeticism, imaginaries of identity and the body, and occasional performances. Genders’ operations are conscious and unconscious, simultaneously conventional and idiosyncratic.Less
Genders are dynamics, persistent sets of operations that link individual desires to multiple, shifting manifestations of socio-cultural positioning and self-presentation. These include narratives of cultural and familial roles, sexual desires, economic and political interpellations, peer mimeticism, imaginaries of identity and the body, and occasional performances. Genders’ operations are conscious and unconscious, simultaneously conventional and idiosyncratic.
