As respect edges desire. Trans and Queer Histories, and the Politics of Protagonism. [Unfinished.]

The premise, or crucial promise? To engage in a sustained inquiry into the conditions of possibility which have historically enabled certain individuals (and certain public figures, more specifically) to attain an important degree of recognition as trans and/or queer subjects in the public sphere, and how such subjects have accordingly been endowed with variable degrees of representational agency (and responsibility) in relation to their respective communities.

Trans and queer histories, even ones primarily concerned with the wider remit of politics and activism, often seem to reassert the centrality of key individuals to the historical process, in effect re-individuating collective histories of struggle, dissent and survival.1 Indeed, it has often proved important — for more and less equivocal reasons — to recuperate and reemphasize the individual agency of imagined protagonists, whose course of action presumably concentrates shared needs and desires, while catalyzing incipient styles of the radical will.

From an intradisciplinary — or intrainstitutional — standpoint, we can point to the highly mediated and modified mythologies surrounding writers, theorists or critics that are commonly recognized as crucial contributors to their respective fields.2 The iconographic narratives surrounding such authorial personae is a strong example of dominant representational economies, and of the tendencies towards individuation and individualization inscribed within them. Barthes, Sedgwick, Butler, Foucalut… In the case of queer studies, in particular, the mononymic stature of each attests to the enduring efficacy of their signature, and its hold over the readerly imagination. But it also expresses something of the politics of personhood at stake in their ongoing reception, and speaks to various forms of readerly desire and (dis)identification. Thus, we might do well to remark the processes of personalization — including the identificatory ambitions, or the projective insinuations of intimacy — that readers perform in relation to the authors they most esteem. In such circumstances, the recognition of an author’s work comes to articulation in tandem with a range of ideas, impressions, and emotions regarding their authorial persona: an erotics of authorship, even, despodently resistant to the analytic injunction to dispose of “the author” as a meaningful category of inquiry.

Such forms of readerly captivation are sometimes embodied through critical practice, itself. David M. Halperin’s Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Replica Books, 2000) vividly attests to an important entanglement between the personal and the theoretical, as Halperin mobilizes aspects of Foucault’s personal life to ground his celebration of Foucault as a radically commited, anti-assimilationist, queer thinker. Biographical and theoretical discourse are made to interface as an integrated system of meaning, passible to the same methods of critical reading and construed as complementary expressions of a unified ethical and political intent. Nearly a decade later, Lynne Huffer’s Mad For Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (Columbia University Press, 2009) suggests something of this enduring fascination with Foucault, in particular, while dramatizing and fleshing out the scene of readerly attachment: Huffer’s critical retrieval of less recognizable text’s from Foucault’s archive is interspersed with stylized diaristic entries, punctuating the text with personal incursions, impressions, and speculations.

“Judy!” (Anonymous, 1993), an indepent fanzine on the work of Judith Butler with a more self-consciously fantasist bend than Halperin’s academic monograph and with less academic ambitions than either project, attests to the degrees of creative kink and imaginative erotic attachment involved in such forms of readerly/writerlycelebration. No less importantly, it demonstrates just how quickly these come to articulation. The zine itself — which includes multiple references to lesbian and/or feminist counter-culture, citing figures such as Kathy Acker or Monique Wittig with gossipy candor — was published just three years after the publication of Butler’s own Gender Trouble (Routledge, 1990), suggesting a rapid cycle of reception, admiration, and readerly engagement.

One might ask just how disparate the impulses underlying these different projects might be. Andmore importantly still, whether they attest to the crafting of authorial standpoints already entangled in the fantasy of authorship itself, and thus caught up in a provocative, projective relay with their imagined (and desirted) subjects. Is Judy! not a creative case-study in the affective relations that surround academic discourse, inspite of rather than thanks to its adamant rationality? Are Saint Foucault or Mad For Foucault not the endeavours of a couple of flirtatious fans, each project title ringing out infatuation like a sappy pop song? And finally, is desire not an powerful agent in the constitution of such authorial personae as objects of critical reverence and admiration? Could we even hope seperate the politics of reading Foucault or Butler from the relational erotics enlivened by their multiple publics?

The more recent reappraisal of the legacy of trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, their tentative reinscription as protagonists of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and their according relocation within a wider constellation of historical figures that solicit variable forms of historical desire and admiration is, in a sense, a counter-formation. Their emphatic rememoration is profoundly motivated by (and works as challenge against) exclusionary histories and economies of representation. These histories have consistently worked to reinscribe cisgender, white, gay men as the central protagonists of any significant historical transformation pertaining to sexual dissidence and/or gender disobedience, in an ongoing project of erasure that disregards the concrete agency of racialized subjects, trans folk, and women. A project that ultimately dissipates their mark in the ongoing making and remaking of collective histories of trans and queer liberation. Vitally important, this archival recuperation produces its own mythologizing forms of reification, pivoted as it is to the narrative intelligibility of an individual that represents a significant group formation (a community, more simply — an identity or a shared situation) and who enacts transformative forms of oppositional resilience that are nonetheless explained and rememorated as intrinsic to the minutiae of their individual, personal histories… Or to the projected image of their character as a form of historical fantasy.

In this case in particular, both activists have become especially remarkable for their capacity to exceed the boundaries of the acceptable and trespass against seemingly indisputable institutions in conditions of profound impoverishment and insecurity: the state-sponsored N.Y.C. police forces that performed regular raids across gay-friendly establishments in the 1960s; the heteronormative and cisnormative status quo itself, as a self-regulating sert of social relations; the prison industrial complex which has systemically led to the disproportionate incarceration of trans, queer, and racialized people in U.S. society across the 20th and 21st century…

But they are also mobilized, rhetorically and imagetically, to typify a group or demographic, and the wide range of historical forms of exclusion enacted by the state and by society at large against it. An important is whether this process of taxonomic reduction of larger collective histories and social formations to individual histories (and mythologies) of political, intellectual, or creative action, is a question of necessity: the nearly inescapble correlate of normalized processes of historic remembrance, which conditionally delimit the ways we go about producing accounts of social change or mediating critically sensitive modes of historical mediation. This leads ut to confront the ongoing effects of such templates of historical remembrance on our continued efforts to make sense of ourselves, both individually and collectively, ultimately evincing the harsh continuity of the cultural imperative to identify a protagonist where there may have been none, while exposing the criteria embedded into the celebration of a presumably exceptional indiviudal over another. Over innumerable and unnamable others, even. And is this not precisely the kind of hierarchical reasoning solicited by liberal capitalism, which can only recognize merit as a question of exception, or equate importance as the measure of a subject’s concrete achievements?

The recent production and distribution of the film Stonewall (2015) exemplifies both the racist and transphonbic assumptions embedded into popular perceptions of the historical past, and the entertainment industry’s willingness and capacity to amplify and instrumentalise those assumptions. The film’s decision to figure as its protagonist — and thus, as the riots’ protagonist — a white cisgender gay man complies with uninterrogated forms of collective remembrance that have worked to whitewash Stonewall across time, as well as the gay liberation movement at large… Not to speak of contemporary LGBTQIA+ movements, in their context-specific articulations. More to the point, this decision — initiated at the level of production, mediated through concrete choices in storytelling, and actualized through the casting process — works to pacify public perceptions of the events, attributing radically disruptive political gesture to a white, male protagonist and thereby rendering them as recognizable from within an entirely different narrative framework: that of the reclamation of rights, within assimilationist discourse. This is not an outlaw outcast: a sex worker, a cross dresser, a queer, or a freak. This is, self-evidently, an American citizen.

The protagonist’s body is immediately typified as both righftul and innocent through the very fact of its whiteness, while accommodating the erotic expectations placed in action within a dominant libidinal economy and nomative conceptions of white masculinity. This outstanding white masculinity is the convergence point of a number of standardized physical ideals that the entertainment industry continuously work to promulgate, to reproduce, and to propagate. At this precise point — the actor’s corporeal, filmic presence — the politics of respectability and the politics of desirability powerfully intersect with disconcertingly uncreative and conservative effects. The majoritarian standpoint must be reiterated and reified at all costs, regardless of the fiercely exclusionary effects of its consagration as the only standpoint imaginable, as certainly as the central standpoint from which truth or meaning might be gathered. The erotic operation at stake is almost an exact reversal of those theoretical captivations that Butler or Foucault seem to engender. The fantasy of the white body, the fantasy of the male body, and the fantasy of the cis body work to the effect of producing a protagonist where there was none, and where there were certainly other subjects (and bodies) to cast in that narrative, erotic, and epistemic position.

A useful exercise in response to Stonewall — regardless of its relative merits as an aesthetic and technical document, and concretely directed towards challenging the representational economies it partakes of and — might be to speculatively wonder how it could have been otherwise. How could it have been construed, produced, and presented differently? Who should have been its protagonists, if it were to exact a stronger claim to historical truth, or a greater proximity to the vivid realities of racial capitalism, of white supremacy, of the systemic erasure of trans and racialized subjects? And does this ultimately need to be a question about who? Why couldn’t, in fact, this historical event — irrevocably important for the contemporary Gay Liberation Movement, in large part thinks to its intergenerational and intercultural rememoration as such — be narrated with no subject at its center? No fundamental, unquestioned, authoritarian standpoint? With no recognizable, individual core, both narratively and emotionally speaking? With no equivocal claim to the psychological or causative realism seemingly achieved through the construction — in fact, through the invention — of this protagonist of collective unrest and political action? To raise these questions, and to trace their unlikely connections to the problems of authorship presented by the mythologic edification of Foucault or Butler, it to begin to confront the problem of individualism as such, and to tease at the ramifications of what could be other ways of thinking about trans and queer life in contemporary western society. It is also an approximation to the tense and troubling interaction between the politics of respectability and the politics of desirability, when the making (and unmaking) of trans and queer lives is concerned.

Fundamentally, I am concerned with crafting an experimental, interdisciplinary framework (drawn primarily from literary and cultural studies) which might help confront — and thus, better understand — how the politics of respectability, under which trans and queer lives are rendered as legitimate, intelligible and legal, interact with the politics of desirability in the constitution of regulatory ideals of personhood. These ideals, in turn, seem to find their paradigmatic expression in particular individuals, who seemingly embody the efficacy of these political projects in different ways, and who exemplify compulsive fictions of personhood which coercively delimit the conditions of possibility of trans and queer life under capitalism, colonialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity and neoliberalism. This is a tautological economy of meaning, reasoning, and remembrance: it is a self-approbating, self-perpetuating system. What kinds of narratives might we retrieve or ourselves reconfigure, if we recognize it as such and contest the binding limits of that circular logic?

1To provide an example situated within the notionally universal domain of philosophy (i.e., a humanist discourse predicated on eurocentric, phallocentric and cisheterossexist precepts and presumptions concerning the organization of identity and world alike), as opposed to the regional or topical concerns of minoritarian subjects articulating minoritarian standpoints, Jean Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet, Saint and Martyr ( is a powerfully evocative document… thematization. Especially insofar as Genet’s literary skills, and the conceptual and political intentionality articulated through them, provide Sartre with the rationale for approaching transgressive topoi then disavowed by continental philosophy — including homosexuality — without ultimately destabilizing his writerly standpoint, his core political commitments and social belongings, or his own reputation as a critical thinker. Genet, whose own body of work bears witness to a range of historical projects of exclusion and oppression, thus becomes the imagetic pivot through which Sartre can breach the prohibited and discursively mediate the unsayable.

2Here, I use “mythologies” in partial accordance with Roland Barthe’s selective usage of the term in his own Mythologies (

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