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Juliane please add a title here that includes ‘review’ and the full details of Critique and Post-Critique

Critique and Post-Critique, edited by Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker, continues Rita Felski’s exploration of new critical approaches beyond the suspicious reading practices that usually travel under the heading of critique. After her earlier volume The Uses of Literature (2008), in which she outlined four different reading modes based on a neo-phenomenological examination of the experience of reading, and Beyond Critique (2015), in which she explained her dissatisfaction with the status of critique as the master-discourse in literary studies in more detail, Critique and Post-Critique now gathers a range of essays from such prominent critics as Toril Moi, Heather Love, Jennifer Fleissner and Ellen Rooney. The collection offers a range of views on the tensions and potential connections between the practices of critique and the new dawn of post-critique. The title of the book is programmatic: the majority of contributors to this volume are not interested in doing away with either post-structuralist critical practices or symptomatic reading entirely—perhaps an impossible undertaking anyway as Felski and Anker point out: “the ‘post-’ of post-critique denotes a complex temporality. An attempt to explore fresh ways of interpreting literary and cultural texts that acknowledges, nonetheless, its inevitable dependency on the very practices it is questioning” (1). Instead, the overall direction of this volume is to curb the excesses and complacencies of a critical framework that once started as the cutting-edge of left-wing criticism and has become academic mainstream in the humanities. Accordingly, several essays call for a rejuvenation rather than the abandonment of critique.

The book opens with an excellent overview by Felski and Anker of the philosophical and political underpinnings and the development of critique as a heterogeneous body of theory. It offers a possible definition of the term itself and looks at the disposition of the critic before situating critique as a political project in the field of cultural and social history. It then includes a useful summary of the current status of nascent post-critical approaches and concerns.

The first section of the book includes essays on the “Countertradition of Critique”, invoking thinkers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Donna Haraway and Nietzsche to outline alternative histories of critique and/or criticism. Opening with a deceptively straightforward account of critical practice based on the question “Why this?”, Toril Moi draws upon Wittgenstein to explore a form of criticism that rejects the psychoanalytical depth model of literary criticism and the critic as detective, revealing the “hidden” truths of the text. Instead, driven by the question “Why this?”, the literary critic seeks to clarify their own sense of confusion or irritation with a text. This does not do away with the chain of cause and effect as the argumentative model of criticism, but it reconceptualises the political drive of critique as a thematic rather than a methodological concern—not all answers the critic may find are necessarily politically charged. According to Moi, this opens up a wider and richer field of potential answers available to the critic. Moi’s main critical activity is based on the much-maligned practice of re-telling, or paraphrasing, the text as involving an inevitable (and potentially difficult) act of interpretation in the process. The next essay by Heather Love enters the fray of academic and intellectual politics more directly by using the work of Donna Haraway for a critical reading of Bruno Latour’s contributions to the field of post-critique. According to Love, Haraway’s often undervalued cross-disciplinary expertise offers a potential bridge between the critical practices of the humanities and the more fact-based approach of the sciences, resulting in a comprehensive ethos of care and a sustained awareness of “how knowledge is made”. Simon During offers an alternative history of the origins of critique. He traces several aspects of critique in Nietzsche’s writing before showing central features of critique, such as irony and polemic, in 18^th century writing—long before the ascent of the post-war philosophy and cultural criticism usually associated with critique.

The next section of the book focusses more closely on “Styles of Reading” with essays offering close readings of particular texts or styles of interpretation. Jennifer L. Fleissner offers an astute exploration of suspicion in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love with reference to Latour, reading the novel as a meta-critical response to the issues of symptomatic readings in the humanities/science divide. Fleissner is followed by an inspiring contribution by Ellen Rooney, who, drawing on Althusser and Marx, offers a spirited defence of symptomatic reading that recuperates precisely the elements critique seems to have lost: the willingness or ability of the critic to be surprised, and with it a sense of humbleness and revived analytic prowess. C. Namwali Serpell writes on literary cliché, much maligned by critique—a rich source of meaning if approached as “a material form of language” and a “mode of affective exchange” (165) rather than a stale collection of truisms hiding their own emptiness of meaning. Elizabeth S. Anker closes this section with an astute analysis of Coetze’s theoretically charged writing, which invites and eludes critique in equal measure and for that reason enjoys great popularity among scholars. It therefore lends itself to Anker’s meta-critique of our own scholarly preferences, the strengths and weaknesses of critique.

The last section of the book takes a closer look at “Affects, Politics, Institutions”. Several articles in the first two sections could also be read under this heading. It opens with an excellent analysis by Christopher Castiglia of our misgivings of critique. Castiglia locates our dissatisfaction not in the method of critique but in a critical disposition he calls “critiquiness”: “a combination of mistrust, indignation, ungenerosity, and self-congratulation” (214). Castiglia traces the suspicious Us-against-Them stance of critique back to its roots during the Cold War era when, in contrast to the melancholic resignation many critics feel today, political engagement was driven by strong sense of hope and political agency, which he wishes to recuperate for our present. Hope is coupled with imagination for Castiglia, the speculative mode of fiction and a firm belief in “the potential lying in wait” (226). This turn towards the future is also at the heart of Russ Castronovo’s essay on the politics of critique. Taking the famous picture of Edward Said throwing a stone as his starting point, he addresses the wide-spread frustration and disappointment with the apparent ineffectiveness of critique as a radical mode of thought that, despite its dominance across the humanities, has not even managed to protect its own domain from neo-liberal assault. Tracing the political mission of the critic back to Matthew Arnold, he locates the potential of critique not in the pursuit of any specific political agendas. Instead, he looks towards critique as a form of Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianic power” (246). Critique works best when missing the political mark (just like Said’s stone) by training our sense of imagination, of openness and possibility. John Michael takes his criticism of critique one step further: together with our belief in art, our belief in critique as the harbinger of a better world and the provider of truth has fallen prey to the same logic of secularisation and pluralisation that has continued to erode religious faith in many corners of the globe. Accordingly, looking to Whitman as the poet of democratic plurality (“I contain multitudes”), Michael suggests a different role for the modern critic, who should act as translator. Translation rather than revelation “is the activity of reconstituting, redescribing, and recontextualizing meanings” (271) based on close attention to the text and with an acute awareness of its own performance of meaning. In the last contribution, Eric Hayot looks more closely at the different temporalities of critical fashions, human ageing and political and institutional change. It cannot be accidental that the prevalent spirit of disillusionment originated with a generation of critics who were just passing into middle-age. Hayot sees the problem with the different speeds of human, political and institutional change, all of which contribute to our current sense of crisis. Rather than take this crisis for granted, he encourages us to question our own comfortable beliefs in a world going to the dogs and remember Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, which always holds the potential to disrupt the status quo.

Critique and Post-Critique does not offer a comprehensive or even particularly clear vision for our post-critical future. Instead of new critical approaches, we find meditations on the role and identity of the critic in our current time, speaking specifically to the state of academia in the US. However, several connecting threads between individual contributions emerge: it seems that the self-righteous complacency of “critiquiness” rather than critique is at issue. For several contributors, post-critique seems to mean a return to the vibrant, radical roots of critique. Rather than a turn to “surface reading” as suggested by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid and Reparative Reading” and Bruno Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” are the cornerstones of post-critical thinking. Most contributors still locate at the heart of their practice the progressive political mission to change the world and therefore remain loyal to some of the founding principles of critique. Symptomatic reading remains a much-valued practice, although the suspicious detection of the truth somewhere hidden in the depths of the text is dismissed as a gesture of “critiquiness” rather than critique. Toril Moi’s question “Why this?” broadly resonates with the logic of symptomatic reading; her suggestion of paraphrase as a valid critical method has commonalities with Michael’s figure of the critic as translator and the repeated call for close, attentive reading throughout this volume. The self-reflexive stance of critique remains key to any sense of critical integrity and is crucial to the deepening conversation between humanities and sciences about how knowledge is created across the disciplines.

Over the course of the book, a figure emerges that I would call the “good critic”. The “good critic” can be found across all critical territories within and beyond critique: open-minded, self-reflexive, and driven by a genuine interest in and close attention to the text. The good critic remains willing to be surprised by the text and accepting of the inevitably provisional character of any reading. To other readers and students, the good critic is an advocate of hope, of poetic imagination and intellectual curiosity, of self-awareness, and political agency. Critique and Post-Critique is essential reading for all practitioners of literary criticism. It offers a good overview of the history of critique and the current debates surrounding it, as well as food for thought for our professional identities as critics and scholars.

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Through storytelling, this essay explores hunger and desire as it weaves fairy tale with theories of orality. Jagoe links an infant’s need for nourishment with the confusion of love that can morph into a devouring possessiveness. The motifs of eating, of taking in, and of containment are discussed in relation to Little Red Riding Hood, Maurice Sendak, Slavoj Zizek, and family memoir. From the ghoulish imagination of children and fairytale, to the sexual complexity of adolescence, and on to the limits and capacities of maternal love, Jagoe interrogates an intimacy that nourishes instead of devours, that contains instead of consumes.

My family ate my twin. Shortly after he and I were born, my parents fell on hard times. Faced with so many hungry children, they checked to see which one of their round babies was fattest. He was, just by a bit. So they roasted him at 400°.

“Even me, did I eat him?” I asked my siblings, who told me the story.

“Yes, we all sat around the dinner table and you licked your fingers. That’s why you’re fat now.” And then they would pinch my waist and pretend to bite my arms as I squealed with pleasure and fear.

I tried to erase the image of his pudgy legs, his soft baby belly, crisping in a hot blaze of fire as he became our suckling roast. I escaped that death but, as the extra mouth to feed, I also caused it.

For the rest of my overfed childhood, I missed my other half and wished I hadn’t been such an insatiable baby. To love people seemed like a delicate balance of getting what I needed from them without eating them up. Because if I devoured them, I’d be left with even more of a gaping void than the one the hunger had originally sought to fill.

The tall tale that my siblings told me seems particularly macabre, but it’s not so different from the many fantasies and fairy tales that permeate our culture. Parents, lovers, children, wolves, witches, and monsters titillate and threaten with the charged phrase, “I’ll eat you up!” It’s both a happy ticklish delight and an ominous menace. The realm of love and intimacy tastes of the flesh and blood and drool and tears and milk of each other. But where does it stop? How much can we give and take so that we are each nourished but not eaten up? The trick is to maintain happy intimacies in which we are contained but not consumed, delighted but not devoured.

It’s hard to get that ratio right, though. Because devouring is seductive, and seduction is devouring. Yes, of course “Little Red Riding Hood” ends with the wolf’s comeuppance, but most of the story is about his wily lure. When he meets Little Red, he professes admiration for her flashing red cloak and encourages her to enjoy herself in the wild wood. How different from her authoritarian mother, who admonishes her to be polite, constrained, and careful! The wolf makes her feel not like an undisciplined child, but rather a delicious creature whose desire for attention should be indulged. So when she exclaims about those big eyes, ears, hands, and mouth, the charming beast gives the response that she most hopes for but fears: “the better, my dear, to see you… to listen to you… to touch you… and… to eat you up!” His rapacious attention is dangerous but oh-so-thrilling. And irresistible too, because they confirm to the girl that, despite her mother’s admonishments, she is indeed palatable exactly as she is.

As Little Red grows, she’ll probably learn that there are plenty of hungry fellows out there, all of them willing and eager to eat her up.

My first big bad wolf ate me up when I was 16. He was an airplane pilot, but I got to control the direction of his motorboat across the blue waters of the Mallorcan sea. My kid cousins were heaped in the back as I stood at the helm, acutely aware of the blonde and silver hairs on his chest, his Rolex and wedding band glinting in the sun, his gaze taking in my tanned belly.

Back in Barcelona, my body was looked at with less admiring eyes from the women of my mother’s family. I was foreign—my height from my American father, or maybe a product of my upbringing in a land of nutritional excess. My shape was unfamiliar to these Spanish relatives, who spoke in judgmental and incomprehensibly antagonistic tones about my long legs, rounded hips, loose limbs. I heard rebuke and rejection in my mother’s “I don’t know what you do to men!” Did she really not know? Did she not see in me what they saw? Did she just see fat and gangliness where they saw voluptuous willowiness?

I now get that my mother was also issuing a warning, one that spoke of her lived knowledge of how men can treat girls. But like Little Red, I was in no mood to accept maternal injunctions. Men found me sexy! They paid attention to me, they looked at me, and I felt powerful as we flirted. Like Miranda gazing from the shore at all the men who shipwrecked their way into her world, I was excited by their existence. “O, brave new world that has such people in’t!”

So when my aunt’s husband said he would take me back to the hotel on his motorcycle, I wasn’t going to be held back by the apparent uneasiness of the other adults. When I snuck back into my room a couple of hours later, my 14-year old cousin was awake and asked me where I had been. We stood in the moonlight whispering. I told her he had taken me to the beach, and angled myself so that she couldn’t see the scratches and dirt on my back.

Maybe I didn’t tell her because she was still a girl, and I didn’t want her to know that her dashing uncle was a predator. Or maybe because I didn’t have the words for it, my Spanish hardly up to the task. When I think about it now, I say it in English, “he ate me out.” But it was not just that I didn’t have the linguistic ability to say it; it was also that I couldn’t map it on the spectrum of my sexual knowledge at the time. My mother had made it clear to me that men always want one thing, and that their need for it is so uncontrollable that it is up to us women to protect ourselves. So did it count as a sexual act if there was no penetration or ejaculation? He hadn’t taken off any clothes. How to define his laying me down on a rock and putting his head between my legs? Was it something that he wanted, or something that I had unknowingly elicited? Who was taking, and who was giving? Is the power in the eating, or in the being eaten?

My inability to understand and answer these questions did not just stem from the fact that I was an inexperienced girl. I think he, in his philandering pilot life, had drawn strict and arbitrary lines around what was acceptable. Maybe if I had answered his phone calls afterwards I would have found out the parameters: fuck only certain orifices, or eat but don’t get eaten. These kinds of caveats seem like so many bets hedged, but they are also constitutive of how each of us defines intimate acts.

Take, for instance, the strange sexual parameters of philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. You would think he, so psychoanalytic and world-wise, would be comfortable with oral and anal practices. His body, after all, is so unmistakably a body as he gives his lectures, gesticulating and twitching, sweating and spitting. But he is remarkably reticent to share his body, as evidenced in an interview with Decca Aitkenhead that was published in The Guardian on June 10, 2012. There he answers questions about Hegel by talking about his own sexual limits:

I am very—OK, another detail, fuck it. I was never able to do—even if a woman wanted it—anal sex. You know why not? Because I couldn’t convince myself that she really likes it. I always had this suspicion, what if she only pretends, to make herself more attractive to me? It’s the same thing for fellatio; I was never able to finish into the woman’s mouth, because again, my idea is, this is not exactly the most tasteful fluid. What if she’s only pretending?

Zizek, one of our contemporary society’s most voluble talkers, has no problem ejaculating words into his listeners’ ears. Yet from his penis comes another substance, “not the most tasteful” one, which he will not release into a woman’s mouth or anus. Of what is he so wary? One of the definitions of “attraction” is “the action of drawing or sucking in”. So it could be that he distrusts being sucked in by a woman pretending that she likes to suck him in. Or, on the other hand, it could be that he doesn’t fear that his cum isn’t a “tasteful fluid”, but that it’s too tasty, and that once she gets a taste of him, she’ll eat him up.

Zizek and the pilot are the same generation. I know in my gut that my predator wouldn’t have asked me to perform oral sex on him. In her latest book, Girls and Sex, Peggy Orenstein talks to teenage girls who consider blow jobs to be the thing they do when they don’t want to have sex, when they feel they owe the guy something, or just as part of making out. They don’t expect reciprocity, and in fact, feel that it requires a high level of trust and commitment to let a man perform oral sex on them. When I was young, my friends and I thought of blow jobs as an extreme act that came after a sexual penetrative relationship had steadied. To take a guy into my mouth was a lot more intimate than into my vagina, and his mouth was much more personal than his penis.

I didn’t continue seeing the pilot because he scared me. I didn’t understand if he had raped me, or if I had been given something I wanted. Did his wife allow him to eat her? If she didn’t (and she obviously didn’t—not her, my sweet and infirm Catholic aunt!) then did I hold a knowledge and a power over her, and over him? He did, after all, risk his marriage and his reputation, to get a taste of me, and I gave it to him. With his big mouth, he showed me that I was delicious. And that was something that my mother had never been able to give me: the feeling that I was irresistible and delectable.

It wasn’t just me that my mother found inedible. She didn’t eat much of anything. When I was 11, she developed a spasm in her throat. Her oesophagus would constrict around any food she tried to swallow. She would choke on steak, spitting chewed pieces into her napkin. Potatoes, even mashed, stuck in her throat. It wasn’t about soft or chewy, hard or stringy; it was something less predictable about density, consistency, and taste. She would sit at the dinner table, silently crying, as my father attempted to keep the family conversation afloat.

She went down to 92 pounds that first year, as she went through various traumatic experiments of oesophagus stretching, drug treatments, and psychoanalysis (which she rejected after about a month: “it’s so stupid, they just want to blame everything on the mother”). She only started to recover under a regimen of Valium and occasional sips of holy water from Lourdes. She regained her weight once she decided to allow herself whatever she could swallow. Mostly delicate sweet pastries and thickly buttered thin toast, slices of cheese and finely mashed tuna salad. Nowadays, she no longer feels hunger, but is often weak or shaky because of blood sugar drops and spikes.

This debilitating psychosomatic illness had its benefits. It got her out of going to endless dinners and social events with my philanthropist father. She was free from the scrutiny of the American women who towered over her at cocktail parties, tossing back their martinis and canapes while she sipped at a tonic water. She could stay at home and watch PBS, or tidy her clothes. I would say that it gave her more time to be with her last child still at home, but that’s not how I remember it.

Instead: I would burst into her room, diving onto her bed with my belly full of the Doritos or chocolate chip cookies that I had wolfed down when I got home from high school. She would be reclining on her chaise longue next to the window, her head propped by her hand, eyes closed, a cup of tea and a few shortbread biscuits on the little table at her side. She would smile at my stories of Regina and Anne fighting over a KitKat, or of the saying that the nuns told us about why we should avoid premarital sex: “it’s like potato chips, you can’t have just one.” Sometimes she would interject a comment (“How do they know? They’re nuns!”), but after a few minutes she would say that I was tiring her with my talking. I would quietly close the door behind me, feeling like my mouth was too big and too American, but the next day I would crash in again, unable to stop trying to enliven her.

A couple of decades later, when she would see me kissing my babies voraciously, my mother would say the Spanish refrain, “cuando son pequeños, te los comerías a besos. Y cuando son mayores, te arrepientes de no haberlo hecho” (when they’re little, you could eat them up with kisses. And then when they get older, you wish you had). I think she was genuinely curious about my consuming love for my children, and that, in quoting that old wives’ saying, she was trying out the words of women who can’t control their maternal hunger for their children. I didn’t totally recognize myself in the refrain. I did find their fat little cheeks and toes delicious, and would eat them up with my kisses and take in their scent with big gulps of breath. But they were also eating me up. My sons got fatter and heavier as I got thinner, the blubber sucked out of me as I lay like a nursing seal, giving them the nutrients they needed to thrive.

There’s a sketch by Maurice Sendak that is the opposite of my mother’s refrain (Sendak 1992, 75). In it, a screaming baby is soothed by suckling at his mother’s breast. He gets bigger and bigger as he opens his mouth wider and takes in more of the breast, then her head, then her whole body, until he is a happy fat child standing alone on the stool that she had sat on.

Sendak, Maurice. Illustrator to I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book, 1992

This image circulates on breastfeeding blogs, striking a chord with the new mothers who feel that they are being consumed by their insatiable little babies. Sendak portrays both the necessary selfishness of the child and the unconditional love of the mother, and the danger of giving free rein to either.

There’s a different ratio that needs to be maintained. A mother’s role is to give, but also to take away; to provide sustenance, and to teach limits. Not too much, not too little, but just right: that’s what a mother and child negotiate as they feed their inexhaustible love. Sendak represents this beautifully in his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are, which I read to my son hundreds of times. It was always at dinner time. I would put a peeled and cored pear half on his high chair tray. His face, covered in peas and cereal, would light up as he stuck his thumb in the little hole I had cut out of the middle so that it wouldn’t slip out of his too tight clutch. I would open Where the Wild Things Are, and read him the story of a mother and child who work through the pleasures and perils of eating and of being eaten. Max is sent to bed without dinner because, at the end of a day of mischief in his wolf suit, he threatens his mother with “I’ll eat you up!” In his bedroom, he is unrepentant, and his anger dissolves the walls so that he sails away to “where the wild things are”. There, he proves that he is even scarier and more full of romp than they are, and is crowned king. When he tires of their wildness, he sends them to bed without their supper.

But it’s tiring to be so wild, and Max is “lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all”. The wild things cry “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”. Ah, the tables have been turned! The wild things use the same threat that Max made to his mother, but this time it is attached to expressions of need and love. They are panicking, scared of being unloved and abandoned. Like the voracious breastfeeding child, they would consume their ruler in their hunger to have all of him. To keep him close and not risk separation.

Max, however, has learned the lesson taught to him by his mother, and knows that sometimes love is about limits. She makes it clear: he can’t eat her. But that doesn’t negate the fact that she is the one who “loves him best of all”. So he knows how to respond to the wild things’ hunger, and does so in one word that takes up the whole page: “No!”. They gnash their teeth and bare their claws, but he leaves them and returns to his room, where he finds his supper waiting for him. “And it was still hot.”.

And with that, I would close the book and my son would wag his head happily and hold his arms up for me to pick him up. I’d scoop him into my arms and growl “I’ll eat you up” as he sucked my chin and smeared pear chunks into my kissing mouth.

Oh, but it’s sad! Those wild things are so deliciously enticing, and game for rumpus. They let Max be their ruler, and do whatever he commands. So what have they done wrong, that he would leave them like that? Their wild love is not, unfortunately for them, what he needs, much as it tempts him. It’s delectable but dangerous to be amongst creatures that could, at any moment, gobble him up. So he returns to his mother and the walls of his room, where he is not a hero or a leader, but a contained individual. He is diminished but held, hungry but not devouring. He has learned that saying “I’ll eat you up” also means “I love and need you”, but that he is not allowed to actually devour his loved one. And he is comforted by less than he thought he needed, the soup an adequate substitute for the flesh of his mother.

It’s not so awful that my older siblings made up that story about eating my “twin”. I was their baby sister, after all. They sucked on my pudgy baby feet and fingers as I crammed them into their mouths. They let me gnaw toothlessly on their chins and noses, and wiped off the drool and vomit that I smeared on them. In the face of a mother who had little hunger for us—who found our hunger off-putting—we nibbled at each other, learning what was edible and what was not, learning the limits of each other.

References

Opie, Iona and Peter. Orenstein, Peggy. Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. New York: Harper Collins, 2016.

Sendak, Maurice. Illustrator to I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild’s Pocket Book. Edited by Iona and Peter Opie. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press, 1992.

—–. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper Collins, 1963.

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This essay argues that not every practice toward achieving the good life can fit neatly into categories of the healthy and the normative—happiness. It argues for an aesthetic reconsideration of everyday life via the trans ordinary: scenes of everyday life-making for trans people. These scenes can problematize normative conceptions of the good life, or of happy living. In this sense, this essay explores how variously embodied practices can make a less-bad life possible. Employing phenomenology and recent trends in affect theory, this essay explores how trans narratives establish scenes of carrying on that, while not immediately heralded as happy, complicate the notion of healthy well-being altogether.

This essay explores the lived aspects of feeling “happy” within the rhythms of day-to-day gender non-normative life, which I will be calling the “trans ordinary”.^[1] I use shudder quotes around “happy” to point toward the normative perils of assuming that happiness extends from accepted healthy attachments to things, life-activities, and people. My aim is not to argue that happiness is impossible to achieve or that the things we enjoy will always disappoint us, but to question happiness’ solidity across different ways of life. What is it to be happy when attachments to unhealthy habits (whether to fast foods or so-called unsafe sexual practices) may produce feelings of emotional contentment but reproduce conditions for social ostracism or poor health, or both? Is this sense of happiness most crucial to a person when life is patterned around a constant state of exhausting vigilance—whether about one’s own sense of belonging in the world, a sense of local safety or ordinary mutual recognition and reciprocation? Might happiness be understood as phenomenological, as irreducible experiences of the bodily type? Or as affective attachments that do not fit neatly within liberal commitments to self-sovereignty or radical left critiques of power and of revolutionary empowerment? These are some of the questions we need to ask in order to re-frame happiness as it is lived in the fragile grooves of the trans ordinary.

For me, happiness is an assemblage of feelings, or attachments obtaining amongst people, things, institutions, social forms, or the world. Happiness can be constructed around anything that might provide a sense of longevity and stability in the face of what scholars are more and more identifying as lived insecurity (Stewart, 2007, pp.1-7). It is not an emotion, per se. Happiness often reflects an adjustment within and around everyday practices to the sometimes fantasmatic genres of living a good life, being a member of a good society, and so on. Happiness is thus more an assemblage of feelings that can be described as attempts at “getting there” rather than some existential mood of “being there,” where the “there” is the projected space of happiness beyond the finish line of anticipated experience.

By “getting there”—including all the affective structures attending practices associated with that phrase—I mean that non-normative life adjusts itself to fit as best it can to the fantasy of a normative “good life” because this so-called good life is perceived as the only real road to happiness. Of course, non-normative life faces all sorts of impasses along that road. Although I will explore how trans communities are disproportionately affected by structural violence, I am more concerned with the various practices that best approximate happy livability (see Gossett, 2013; Valentine, 2007). In the ordinary, such “affective attachments” to everyday objects are part of efforts to manage feelings of wellbeing in justifiably unhappy circumstances. Tracking the affects and effects of happiness in everyday non-normative expressions of life means adjusting our own theoretical conception of the normal, the impersonal, and the political. This means shaking loose some already settled questions in queer and trans theory that include, but are not limited to, the trans body as philosophical sites of becoming (Baldino, 2015), the trans body as revolutionary (Spade, 2011), and the trans body as an effect of the disciplinary power of sex/gender (Butler, 2006).

The first section of this essay sketches the phenomenological and affective terrain onto which rest of the essay will map experiences of the trans ordinary. Here I rely most heavily on Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003), and Andrea Long Chu’s (2017) brilliant critique of trans phenomenology—including nods to her recent commentary on transness and desire (2018a; 2018b).The second section explores the meaning of happiness as attached to potentially unhealthy or “ugly” affective states. My archive consists of various stories from transwomen across the 20th century. “On Rage” and “On Privation” illustrate how happiness is affectively structured by the need to find continuity in unstable ordinaries by engaging with the improvisation and suspension of feeling.

I argue that within this improvisational zone ordinary practices often approximate the feelings associated with normativity (sovereignty, a handle on things) that the good life fantasy propagates. In that way, I argue that forms of self-care in maintaining the continuity of day-to-day life may also include injurious practices. As Adler and Adler (2011) have argued, self-harming by cutting is “at its essence, about feelings [and] the pain that drive people and the feelings of relief they get from it” (p.66). As a cutter and a non-binary person, I find that most discussions about self-injury either deliver a pathos-laden narrative or essentialize us as pathological depressives. That must change. The cultural attitude, not the subject, needs to change. I argue that the project of making a life that feels good means dealing with, carrying on, and making do in the complex management of worlds. In the trans ordinary, normative fantasies come to face with the realities of violence, dissipation, and impasses that force readjustments. Happiness is no less real when the practices enacted to achieve it have come to be associated with anything but happiness.

Resisting Paranoid Theories of Trans Experiences

I like to think that phenomenology and affect theory can be utilized along the lines of what Sedgwick (2003) called reparative—as opposed to paranoid—forms of criticism. Focusing on the day-to-day practices of life within structural oppressions, reparative theorists think in terms of “what is naive, sincere, uncomplicated, unironic, uncritical, unstrategic, or just plain ordinary about everyday being in the world’” (Chu 2017, 150; emphasis added). Such readings aim to sidestep the claim that humans are simply duped by power and tricked into an identity (and desires). This is why Chu’s choice of “naive” is telling and important. Naive can be defined here as the condition whereby no prior theorization, no method of inquiry, has been imposed upon something. For my analysis this “something” is the body. Improvisation is critical for a phenomenology of something like bodily experience. In a manner of speaking, experience is experienced as pure experience, or phenomenality—a very literal sense of being here. The body may be ordinary, average, sexy, or sometimes unappealing, but it is already here for us to experience. Experience and activity are phenomena that invite creativity and, again, improvisation in what closely approximates Martin Heidegger’s notion of the nexus of life’s available possibilities in the everyday (see also Harney and Moten, 2013, pp.48-49).

Despite recent inroads made in developing trans phenomenology within this vein—from Jay Prosser’s Second Skins (1998) to Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body (2010)—there is still a failure to take seriously this everyday improvisation. Often following Judith Butler’s (2006) take on strong (social) constructionism, these studies misapprehend the day-to-day expressions of bodily experience, of actually experiencing being-in-a-body. Constructionist theories situate the body as reflecting norms (or being “inscribed” by them) through bodily iterations and performances. Repetitions instantiate the norm, making the norm real. Such trans phenomenologies elide what it is to experience the singular presence of one’s own body—in other words, one’s body untouched by theory. They erase the possibility of the presence of a trans body in spite of their intended goal of enabling the description of precisely this experience. For example, Chu’s (2017) review of these phenomenologies argues that Prosser, while discussing the “wrong body” narrative of transsexual experience, suspends the body in a “literal-to-come, linked to an imagined, idealized, or phantasmatic future where the ‘imaginary or phantomized signifieds’ of the transsexual body image will be—one day, some day—reunited with their ‘corporeal referents’” (149; see also Chu, 2018b). In other words, trans bodies are not-here-yet.

In response, Chu goes on to argue that in order “to defend a theory of social construction, Salamon must insist that this ‘simple givenness,’ this unproblematic availability of the phenomenological body, ‘is a fiction, albeit a necessary one’ – even though […] she assures readers that ‘to claim that our experiences of sexed and gendered bodies are socially constructed is not to claim that our experiences are fictive’” (p.146). Can the trans body ever simply exist? Chu thinks so. There is a taken for granted appeal that leaves “[life’s] unremarkableness” in peril. Focusing on what the future trans body ought to look and feel like, theorists retroactively assemble emotions that haphazardly privilege sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) and other forms of transition. As Chu would have it, trans phenomenologies should “[succeed] in making transition boring” (142). Being trans just is. Delving into that “is” constitutes the phenomenological intent of my essay even when that “is” consists of behaviors considered normatively questionable.

If phenomenology seeks to understand things as they are in the everyday, then affect theory is a complementary method of prying open the not-quite-definable sensations that are a part of ordinary bodily existence (Berlant, 2011, pp.6-7). Unlike emotions, affects are not immediately intelligible. But they are experienced and thus “known” to exist in scenes of life. I will explore this while reviewing Susan Stryker’s poetic account of feeling unsettled by the trip to the hospital during the birth of her partner’s child. Affect theory is concerned with how a person’s sensations are brought to the surface of perception, e.g., comfort or discomfort, calmness or anxiety, belonging or standing out like a sore thumb. It is all about intensity (Massumi, 2003, pp.34-35). As something felt, “affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy” (Sedgwick, 2003, p.19). If happiness is understood as affect, then it is easier to see how its production can be attached to things not intuitively “good.” My affective argument centers on practices of making do that dominant (social and intellectual) norms would define as problematic and thus chalk up to pathology or power.

Throughout my meditations on affect, I depend heavily on Lauren Berlant’s (2011, pp.52-54) vision of how affective structures in crisis deepen a subject’s commitments to feeling something, anything, akin to happiness. She argues that within widespread contemporary precariousness “happiness exists [for some] in their commitment to bring life in line with the affect they want to continue experiencing” (pp.166). When the pursuit of happiness becomes a strategy for feeling something at the expense of getting something, the fragmentary and elusive characteristics of being happy begin associating in unanticipated ways with unanticipated lived consequences. Affective structures that emerge during crisis, or crisis time, also organize the sensation of trauma and anxiety by clustering such feelings around objects that promise a way out of worry. Such structures can induce suspensions of feeling burdened by worry whereby subjects look for and reenact a sense of solidity. Such structures of affect constitute my theoretical scaffolding of the trans ordinary and how it is transformed into zones of livability. These zones hold happiness and dissipation in proximal location to one another across scenes of living.

Trans Narratives of (Precarious) Happiness

Throughout this section I will be adopting the view that norms and normativity need to be recast in the modes of what living is doing with the norm rather than the other way around. Normative accounts of the good life (manifested through heteronormativity [marriage], cisnormativity [passing], and bionormativity [transition-related surgeries]) do not interpellate trans subjects as such because, ideologically charged as they are, they tend to “read normativity too narrowly as an authoritarian desire” (Berlant, 2011, p.186). For the purpose of this section, I treat norms more like genres within which subjects work and make life happen. Each of the following testimonies will indicate that affects of belonging and self-sovereignty (all relationally “happy”) might have to be put on hold, suspended as it were, in response to perceived norms. Yet in each story, these suspensions illustrate a kind of “readying” for (rather than a hollowing out of) agency and agential intensity that living in crisis conditions induce.

On Rage

Susan Stryker has written some of the most influential texts in trans studies. Her style is often disarming, revealing and resonant with an everyday awareness of lived pain often lost in critical (queer) theory. Her influential “My Words to Victor Frankenstein”—a hybrid of monologue, theoretical analysis and poetry—captures the powerful affective stakes in the trans ordinary: from happiness, transition, reactions to heterosexism in medical science, all the way down to the normative family (Stryker, 1994). The joyous scene of her partner’s giving birth is fraught with all kinds of affective tensions. Stryker’s story does not begin at the hospital. It begins at home where the decision was made that the birth would have to take at the hospital for medical reasons. Exhausted from participation in the birth of her partner and disappointed that they couldn’t have the envisaged home birth, away from the normative “script” of the hospital as a site of ambiguous consent to gendered norms, the declaration “it’s a girl,” finally triggered Stryker. It unlocked a series of affects that already circulating before and during the event. “Why, just then, did a jumble of dark, unsolicited feelings….” Stryker confesses that “my body left me hanging” (p.245). Between her lover’s body and her own there grew a space, an emergent gap that seemed unbridgeable. Stryker had to suspend her feelings in order to avoid being completely undone by the moment. However, she would catch up would herself and those feelings later.

The sensation of “catching up” is an example of what Berlant (2011) attributes to the peculiar temporal effects of life in cultural crisis, or what Massumi (2003) has called a “pastness opening directly onto a future” (p.30). The traumatic or violent potential of an experience does not necessarily manifest directly. For example, homophobic or racist norms that possess the essential effect of dehumanizing non-normative ways of life can be felt as tremors in the fields of perception. They become actualized in form and content by a joke, or by gendering a newborn child, or by being mistaken for somebody else when you are Black in a culture of whiteness. Anthropologist Veena Das calls the effects of these happenings “the soft knife of everyday oppressions” (2007, p.218). In this way, crisis is lived as a nonevent, an affective maw spanning across lived time, connecting feelings of presence and precarity in ways that are phantasmatic but materially abrupt. I would describe the sensation as anticipation, as worrying affects that ready the subject for the actualization of something “in the air.” This physical and mental state is anxiety inducing, for sure, because it suspends feelings of being control in order to be ready for the moment when something might happen. It is a kind of knowledge, an epistemology all too familiar for those living a non-normative life.

I call this a non-normative epistemology because it runs the full gamut of intersectional precarity. The poet Claudia Rankine argues that the affects of racialized anger form “[another] kind of anger [that] can prevent, rather than sponsor, the production of anything except loneliness” (2014, p.24). Rankine invites readers to consider what could possibly be known, or be as considered knowledge, in such affective states. Is affect a type of knowledge unto itself? Perhaps a knowledge of one’s limits and one’s body? “You begin to think, maybe erroneously,” Rankine writes, “that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment” (p,24). The known becomes the realization of having lived in the very impasse being presently faced. Experiences over the long course of making a life accumulate and, so to speak, readies the body through a kind of visceral memory. Minorities of all kinds carry a life’s worth of experiences in the everyday that may never register at conscious levels. This is especially true of bias and of the expense of energy. The soft knife of everyday oppressions is “soft” precisely because it cuts slowly and delicately into the ordinary over the course of time. Unaware of its temporal effects, minoritized subjects feel a continuous sagging by the nonevent of (racial, economic, gendered) crisis, a sensation that anticipates a happening before it actually takes place. It’s the difference in what happens in the moment that counts.

This seems to be the case in Stryker’s hospital scene. She must make new attachments in order to make sense of the impossible (her own body’s inability to bear children), to recuperate from her own feelings of shame at being emotionally distant, and her exhaustion of feeling so overwhelmed by norms that she already knew were there. She writes “I floated home from the hospital, filled with a vital energy that wouldn’t discharge. I puttered about until I was alone. […] Finally, in the solitude of my home, I burst apart like a wet paper bag” (Stryker, 1994, p.245). Whereas Sianne Ngai (2005, p.1) describes anxiety as so many “ugly feelings [that act as] affective gaps and illegibilities, dysphoric feelings, and other sites of emotional negativity [producing] suspended agency”. I argue that, on the contrary, such suspensions are sites where affective attachments turn into new experimental practices that question the limits of ordinary knowledge and test boundaries. Stryker’s impasse leads her to an attachment of rage, the epistemic continuity she needs to fix what she can fix in the everyday. Her tears of anger at the limitations of her own body are akin to her feelings of pride at having been witness to the birth of a child. This transgender rage, of a particular kind of relation between the trans subject and normativity, de-privileges the linguistic and advances the affective for Stryker: “No sound/ exists/in this place without language/my rage is a silent raving” (p.248). Her rage is a means through which hegemonic gender practices and the limitations of biology get mapped back into her ordinary. She is free to associate with other feelings, cathartic yet tentative, but given over to potential energy. Her rage might sustain but can also suspend a sense of self to begin again someplace else and at another time. In that sense rage can be its own form of affective knowledge, a way of relating to dissipation and keeping oneself together in the face of potential undoing.

On Privation

The following stories are taken from the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Archives are often products of privileged donors, situated in private universities or libraries, exemplifying how certain voices are recorded and remembered and others discarded to history. But here the materials themselves felt lost. They were keepsakes, fragments of forgotten lives, arranged in sometimes non-intuitive ways: sorted into folders and held together by paperclips. Looking back on my experience there, I felt that the archive in British Columbia buried physical and affective registers together in one location. At this burial site, I was left with the task of “finding” stories, narratives, or “critical objects” to signify trans life. These stories illustrate that the “I am” is often a linguistic mask for an attachment to “I want to be.” This attachment, often routed through the future-temporality of transition, leads to a number of affective impasses each person deals with in different ways.

Among the number of people whose testimonies I read, Dorothy D. (1971) stood out to me. She, along with many other trans people in the mid-20th century, used op-ed pieces and letters to the editor as means for sharing lived experience. Dorothy, living most of her life by another name, writes of the kinds of exhaustions identified earlier in Stryker’s letter. Her identity, she argues, “would be classified by shrinks as an unoperated transsexual”. She hasn’t “gone to the girl factory to get a sex change a la Christine Jorgenson” (p.9). Dorothy would, however, “prefer to live as a woman full time. I feel more together that way. I am more comfortable, relaxed, more me. I’ve spent better than 50 years trying to be Phil, and all I’ve got to show for that is a lot of pain and agony, so I think I’ve given my male self a good try” (p.9, my emphasis). Fifty years of waiting, practicing, and being another to what effect? By the time Dorothy (as Phil) reached middle age, she had joined the advertising business, had served in the military, and experienced economic success. All this under the pretense of a name she felt alienated from. In one important passage, she asks “where am I, Dorothy, at?” (9, emphasis in text). Dorothy discloses herself as herself, her I, as less a part of a constructed “trans-script” and more of an ongoing encounter with the nakedness of her experiences with the world. Her ordinary was trying to make Phil work; and it didn’t work in the emotional long haul.

Her frustration and exhaustion while living as Phil only tracks into the life of Dorothy. She must consider how “passing” works, how to overcome the former duality of Dorothy/Phil and merge into a unified self. She has to make do with the body she has and explains the difficulties of passing (its practices, its constitutive features) like this: “[a]ppearance can also overcome a low-pitched voice if you know how to act the woman’s role – carriage, sitting, gestures. This takes practice” (p.9). Dorothy’s practice is one that revels in the adjustments to the norms of femininity. But she isn’t inscribed by them so much as adjusting to these norms. In other words, she is not performing them but living in day-to-day improvisations of having mastered them. These practices get bound up with an economy of pain and joy, economic success and emotional failure, for sure. But she sutures these events together to make a life, however unexceptional she defines it. In one sense, it is the banality of trans life that stands out in Dorothy’s story.

For Dorothy, learning and practicing gender cues does not exhaust her as such. Rather, it’s the wait of “getting people to believe how I feel—that when I’m Dorothy, I feel together, secure, at peace with myself and full of self-confidence” (1971, p.10; my emphasis) that is tiring. The feeling of her own togetherness seems to be in a constant state of risk. Dorothy’s ordinary consists of the sagging sensation of never getting it quite right. One wonders why she should try at all, keeping at it in spite of the fact that friends and family continue to let her down. She keeps those connections in spite of her efforts to master self-making. In Dorothy’s view, you take what you can get and make it work, so that one day you might rest in a space of affective balance.

Dorothy deserves to be understood as she is, and deserves access to the medical care her body and identity require. However, I want to complicate the reading of her story by detaching the scenes of trans bodily experience from their automatic emplotment in a genre of transition (thus avoiding what amounts to an identity-based teleology). Dorothy’s desire for sex reassignment surgery (SRS) is situated in a field of conflicting promises. It speaks of her desire to feel at home in her body and have access to the affects of social belonging. SRS, at best, offers the promise that this form of transition (and there are many forms) will allow her to thrive, but specifically where her family and friends are concerned. But SRS does not guarantee that forms of social reciprocity will be there. The need to make a life will continue in spite of gender-confirming surgeries. If SRS is not a defining event, but one among many, then happiness is a cluster of connections to all those non-events and interstitial spaces in the trans ordinary.

Nancy Ledins (n.d.), like Dorothy, uses writing as a vehicle to clarify those vexed identity issues surrounding her sense of womanhood. The archive contained a letter written for a future self and reader. It was meant to be cathartic, expressing a tentative connection to a feeling of belonging in a suspended space where the yet-to-come was still, as it was being written, very much here. It is transition as optimism or, as Veena Das puts it, “writing the self points to a promise” (2007, p.214). In a letter addressed only to “Dear,” Nancy tells her reader that “Bill Griglak is Nancy Ledins – the name I have chosen to be known by in this preoperative stage and, within due time, postoperatively. [But] surgery is not the final answer—not the end-all—not the magical answer” (pp.1-3, emphasis added). What then is the promise of the future for her? In saying, “I am me”, that Bill Griglak is Nancy Ledins, she places her identity in the tenuous bracket of “becoming”. This “I” comes at a personal cost (no doubt expressed in her grief of capping, repressing, and suppressing her feelings in the ordinary). Rankine (2014) maintains that this pronoun provides a false sense of present and future security. “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it./This makes the first person a symbol for something./The pronoun barely holding the person together” (p.71, emphasis in text). There is no guarantee that the “I” will ever come through on its promise of togetherness, completeness, or happiness even after SRS.

I agree with Berlant (2011), who argues that our historical present is felt as though we faced with an imminent sense of crisis. In such temporalities, affects (even happiness) are registered in suspense, as if as subjects we are only catching up to them. As such, affects, including happiness, are realized in otherwise counter-intuitive scenes of making do, out of ongoing relations to a past as much as to a projected self in the future. For instance, Dorothy speculated that SRS would provide the means of dissociating from her old life by making her new life livable. And yet before, during, and after SRS, Dorothy would still persist in an unjust ordinary of misrecognition by strangers, family, and friends. Nancy knows how that sagging feeling of incompleteness in life might in fact carry over into bodily life after SRS. It didn’t guarantee happiness (see Chu 2018a). Dorothy felt the ongoing pressure to convince others that her “I” existed at all. Nancy had to confess to herself that her “I” was an ongoing construction, a tentative “I” always in the process of becoming – as if she needed to prove to herself that it was possible to exist. And yet both Dorothy and Nancy approximated happiness, made do, existed.

I don’t wish to argue that SRS or transition does not contribute to one’s sense of self-making and wholeness. It very much does. What I am saying is that attachment to the promissory narrative of transition can reify a kind of self-extension into a future self-to-be. Such a narrative may occlude the disappointment that attends making life happen in our historical present (see Chu, 2018). What Dorothy and Nancy’s narratives invite readers to consider is that self-extension and SRS occur in different temporalities. They fact is they deal with their bodies and persist in the present, however wrong or unjust their circumstances may be. Their narratives engage in what remains undefeated in their problematic relations with normative power. Their stories speak of a knowledge that self-preservation can take many forms in the ordinary. As I will argue in the next section, this kind of knowledge can also result in attachments where the normative fantasy of the good-life invites what many see and isolate as injurious (and thus bad) acts of self-management.

Injurious Care in an Injurious World

Theorizing the genre of “life in crisis” means dealing with how everyday violence is woven into the scene of the ordinary. Self-harm (various forms of purposefully injuring the body) is one example of this. When someone’s ordinary is impinged on by an injurious world, they might discover that injurious acts reproduce the normative feelings that “healthy” forms self-care are supposed to produce. These include belonging, grounding, control, and relief. This discussion opens a place for self-injury in the conversation because it “provides an alternative way of talking about phrases like ‘self-medication’, which we use to imagine what someone is doing when they are becoming dissipated, and not acting in life-building ways—the way that liberal subjects and happy people are supposed to” (Berlant, 2011, p.100). This alternative thinking attempts to separate the phenomenological act of cutting from the so-called medicalized subjectivity and its implicit need for institutional forms of help.

In spite of itself, my discussion remains adjacent to (if not captured by) psychiatric and psychological discourse. It also must contend with a popular imaginary that reads self-injury as indicative of a poorly managed emotional life. These practices are linked to suicidal ideation (which is often not the case). These perspectives narrate the cutter within diagnosis and melodrama the present analysis is distancing itself from. In such narratives, cutters figure either as psychiatric subjects, out of control and unable to make healthy decisions; or they are liberal self-sovereign agents and in total control, freely choosing to irresponsibly injure themselves as a call for help. Undoubtedly, injurious behaviors can pose serious health risks (Adler and Adler, 2011; Carmel, et al., 2014, p.314; Girshick, 2008, p.166). However, psychological (normative) narratives of self-injury are problematic in that they regularly intervene in ways that can trigger a popular response to shame people who self-injure or deny their ability to think for themselves. In other words, cutters need to view their practice as their “problem” that they need to change. Neither of these narratives incriminate the cultural context of crisis, precarity, and inadequate attention to mental health as possible culprits. Trans self-injurers, already emplotted in a medical narrative, live in multiple, intersecting impasses.

I want to buck this trend and frame these injurious acts as a means of getting by during scenes of perceived irregularities in the mundane and traumatic events in life. The trans ordinary is a space in which a temporality is set, and the fantasy of normativity becomes momentarily attainable. “Moments like this, the fantasy of an unconflicted, normative lifeworld can provide the affective pre-experience of a potential site of rest, even if one has known it only as at best a mirage of solidity and stability” (Berlant, 2011, p.185). From both testimony and personal experience, I understand that cutting serves as a form of catching up as well as slowing down. Each person attempts to construct a self that feels more in line with that the fantasy of what normativity is telling them. If somewhat controversially put, self-injury is a means of feeling at ease with a body that is both present and projected into a future.

Lori Girshick’s (2008) study Transgender Voices is a rare but useful archive in this respect. There is not a lot of research about trans communities and their relation to self-injury. I read some of the testimonies in Girshick’s study as demonstrative of how self-injury becomes attached to life’s maintenance, how affects of rest and stability are tracked through the experience of cutting, and how self-hatred is still read as moments of dealing through violence. Trans youths also discuss their bodies in terms of temporal and episodic achievement. For instance, A.J., self-identified as female-to-male transsexual, said “I did have a self-mutilation problem which was like a drug to me. I hurt myself any way I could just as long as I was in pain because I hated my body” (p.166). For A.J., this “drug,” created an affective rush with addictive potential. For Tim, another female-to-male transsexual, cutting was a means of re-grounding everyday experience. Tim explained that he “used to dissociate and [cutting] was a way of bringing me back” (p.166). Participants in Girshick’s study as well as other related studies argued that cutting engendered a sensorium of belonging in an otherwise alienating world. In their classic study of self-harm Adler and Adler’s (2011) also note that the growing discourse on self-injury means that, alongside rising access to online communities, cutting is now lived as a new form reciprocal recognition—a virtual form of being-with. In this sense, cutters have adjusted their affective attachments in order to make sense of belonging, not only in order to vitiate the internalized stigma of cutting. In effect, cutters produce an alternative sensorium to bring about the sensation of normative well-being.

Gender, race, and class are all significant factors in Adler and Adler’s narrative account of self-injury. Roughly 85 per cent of the respondents in their study were (presumably cis) women (p.35). They found that the socialized gender identity of the person also had corresponding impacts on type of injury, location on the body, timing, and location of the act itself. Instances of cutting were overrepresented in white (middle and upper-middle class) communities; however, reports of self-injury have increased in non-white communities as well. These cases included black cisgender men, whose injuries ranged from scratching with fingernails to the use of shards of plastic. It has become “rampant among the incarcerated, in jails and prisons as well as in juvenile detention centers, where people of lower socioeconomic status and minority ethnicity are disproportionately prevalent, as well as in the military, where stress is high, personal control is low, and racial/ethnic mixing is common” (37). Self-injury happens within contingent sites. We have to think of how the fragility of being-in-crisis gets temporalized through acts that feel like self-sovereign control. Sometimes proximity to feeling in control is as good as it gets.

Since the testimonies regarding self-injury in trans communities remain limited to psychological studies, many questions as to its place in self-making remain speculative. For instance, if self-injury becomes associated with masculine and feminine performances of embodiment, couldn’t knowledge of such social “facts” impact how trans cutters relate to the phenomenon? Ian Hacking (1999) has dubbed this kind of reenactment a “looping effect” whereby sociological discourse gets taken up in ordinary life by virtue of information dissemination. For example, if cutting is closely associated with cis-feminine embodiments, could the act enable a transwoman, aware of this social “fact,” to feel feminine? If so, then questions of healthy and normative gender practices are inflected in her self-injury. The same could be said about iterations of cis-masculinity, where trans men might reproduce more severe forms of self-mutilation as a performative part of transition. Alternatively, they might avoid cutting altogether as a feminine practice that does not define their bodily experience as men. Thus, self-injury implies a worrying kind of agency because it enables certain modes of gendered continuity in life. In this sense, problematizing self-injury outside of pathology implies new questions of gendered agency over one’s body—especially in an historical present where sovereignty is associated predominantly with the normatively embodied. Accordingly, when Chu (2017) argues that so-called wrong attachments are necessary, “even if it is the wrong kind of wrong to hold onto”. Her argument turns on this notion because non-normative communities within conditions of contemporary crisis feel the affective pressures to be normal more intensely. Trans communities are in spaces of improvisation. It is precisely this improvisational nature of transness that invites theorists to reconsider the enduring normative connections between the concepts of health and happiness. When viewed as an affect, the complex ways in which happiness is embroiled in making a life become visible.

Conclusion

This essay’s central purpose was to challenge presuppositions concerning how happiness is lived in gender non-normative communities. Cultural theories have an obligation to look at how contemporary living is often one of getting by as best as one can. If a culture expects its subjects to simply bear with whatever it is they encounter in the world by maintaining a self within the solitude of their ordinaries, then non-normative life bears the brunt of attrition more intensely. Under such intensities, it might seem to be more evident that trans ordinaries contain affects of wellbeing that stem from the simple elation of an unspectacular public encounter, the boring continuity of having a stable feeling of home (whatever that home is and wherever it is experienced), or even the production of a bodily scar that temporalizes pain and makes getting on with life better because it is less bad.

There is also a cause for concern about how trans narratives are getting spun (Steinmetz, 2017; Davis, 2017). Caught between the belated promises of liberal political recognition and the undertow of fitting into the political world of mainstream LGBTQIA rights, trans communities are still expected to fill in the normative gaps these discourses create. In a word, they are expected to be happy. And yet their lives are sensationalized through accounts of surgical transformation (Chu 2018b). Trans people of color find many of their own community appropriated for the amplification of a more emancipatory “we” in the growing LGBTQIA struggle for liberation and rights (Snorton and Haritaworn, 2013). Whose experiences get to fill the gaps that these discourses create? In such a climate, I wonder whose ordinaries and which kinds of happiness will, in Audre Lorde’s words, “survive all these liberations” (1982, p.50).

References

Adler, Patricia A. and Peter Adler. 2011. The Tender Cut: Inside the Hidden World of Self-Injury. New York: NYU Press.

Baldino, N. F. 2015. “Trans Phenomenology: A Merleau-Pontian Reclamation of the Trans Narrative.” Res Cogitans 6, no. 1: 162-170.

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^[1] The conventional usage of trans (short for transgender) has been an umbrella-like term representing the plurality of gender identities that do not neatly correspond to a person’s birth-assigned sex. These include transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, nonbinary, and others (see Currah 2006). Cisgender (or cis) is a term describing gender identities that have an enduring correspondence to a person’s birth-assigned sex.

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