There are many things lost in the naming of a death as a "gay youth suicide."
I want to focus on two aspects of this naming: one, what is contained in the category of sexuality and two, what kinds of normative temporal assumptions are produced through the "event" of suicide. As a faculty member of Rutgers University, where the most spectacular of the suicides to date occurred, that of Tyler Clementi, I cannot help but want to provide better context for the local circumstances of his death. All three students (Clementi, Ravi, and Wei) involved in the sex surveillance leading up to the suicide were living on Busch campus in Piscataway, New Jersey, already codified as the science/engineer/pre-med "geek" campus (some might say sissies, in fact). Busch is also racially demarcated as the "Asian" campus, an identity rarely disaggregated from geek on college US campuses. Clementi's suicide has thus occasioned a vicious anti-Asian backlash replete with overdetermined notions of "Asian homophobia" and predictable calls to "go back to where you came from." Commenting on the biases of the criminal justice system against those of non-normative race, ethnicity, and citizenship, a press release from a Rutgers University organization called "Queering the Air" notes that Garden State Equality (a statewide New Jersey LGBT advocacy group) and Campus Pride (a national group for LGBT students) have demanded the most severe consequences for Ravi and Wei, prosecution for hate crimes, maximum jail time, expulsion without disciplinary hearing, noting that "18,000 people endorse an online group seeking even more serious charges - manslaughter. ("Justice Not Vengeance in Clementi Suicide," Queering the Air, 10/19/10)
It seems imperative, then, that the racial implications of two "model minority" students from a wealthy New Jersey suburb targeting an effete young queer white man be considered beyond convenient cultural narratives of the so-called inherent or intensified homophobia within (often racialized) immigrant communities as compared to more accepting white populations. Is it possible to see all three students involved as more alike -- all geeks, in fact -- than different? Instead of rehashing that old "gaybashers are secretly closet cases" canard, perhaps there is a reason to destabilize the alignments of "alikeness" and "difference" away from a singular, predictable axis through "sexuality." A letter recently circulated by Queering the Air claims that Clementi's death is the second suicide by an LGBTQ student since March and that four of the last seven suicides at Rutgers were related to sexuality. What then, is meant here by "related to sexuality?" I am prompted by new media scholar Amit Rai's reformulation of sexuality as an "ecology of sensations"
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- as affect instead of identity -- that transcends the designations of straight and gay and can further help to disaggregate them from their racialized histories.
Missing from the debate about Clementi's suicide is a discussion about the proclivities of young people to see the "choice" of internet surveillance as a mandatory regulatory part not only of their subject formations, but of their daily bodily habits and affective tendencies. For these youth "cyberstalking" is an integral part of what it means to become a neoliberal (sexual) subject. Think of the ubiquity of sexting, and applications like Grinder, Manhunt, and of productions like DIY porn, and cellphone mass circulation of images, technologies that create simultaneous sensations of exposure (the whole world is watching) and alienation (no one understands). These bodily technological practices constitute new relations between public and private that we have yet to really acknowledge, much less comprehend. Legal discourse itself is clear that "invasion of privacy" remains uncharted territory for jurisprudence in relation to the internet. But more significantly, to reiterate Rai's "ecologies of sensation," the use of these technologies impel new affective tendencies of bodies, new forms of attention, intention, distraction, practice and repetition. What might easily be overdetermined as the difference between "gay" and "straight" could otherwise be thought of more generously through the quotidian and banal activities of self sexual elaboration through internet technologies--emergent habituations, corporeal comportment, and an array of diverse switchpoints of bodily capacity.
If signification and representation -- what things mean -- are no longer the only primary realm of the political, then bodily processes -- how things feel -- must be irreducibly central to any notion of the political. Clementi's own participation in the testimonial spaces of the chat room to detail his roommate's invasion into his "privacy" and his use of FaceBook for the explanatory "suicide note" are not minor details: they reflect precisely the shared continuities with his perpetrators through ecologies of sensation. Accusations of "homophobia" and "gay bullying" and even the references to "cyberbullying" do not do justice to the complex uptake of digital technologies in this story.
The apparently sudden spate of queer suicides is also obviously at odds with the claims of purported progress by the gay and lesbian rights movement. As noted by Tavia Nyong'o, Dan Savage's sanctimonious statement "it gets better" is a mandate to fold oneself into urban, neoliberal gay enclaves, a form of liberal handholding and upward-mobility that discordantly echoes the now discredited "pull yourself up from the bootstraps" immigrant motto. (The aspirational symbolism of Clementi's transit from Central New Jersey to the George Washington Bridge that connects Northern New Jersey to upper Manhattan is painfully apparent.) Part of the outrage and upset generated by these deaths is precisely afforded through a fundamental belief that things are indeed supposed to be better, especially for a particular class of white gay men. As I argue in my op-ed in the Guardian, this amounts to a reinstatement of white racial privilege that was lost with being gay. Savage has also mastered, if we follow Sarah Lochlain Jain on the "politics of sympathy,"
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the technique of converting his injury into cultural capital, not only through affective productions of blame, guilt, and suffering, but also, I will add, through affective productions of triumph, transgression, and success
The subject of redress and grievance functions here as a recapacitation of a debilitated body. To make my second and related point, then, I want to shift the registers of this conversation about "queer suicide" from one about the pathologization (abjection, expulsion) versus normativization (acceptance, tolerance, legalization) of sexual identity, to questions of bodily capacity, debility, disability, precarity and populations. This is not at all to dismiss these queer suicides as simply privileged forms of death, but to ask what kinds of "slow deaths" -- to cite Lauren Berlant's term -- have been on-going that a suicide might represent an exit or escape from. It is also to "slow" the act of suicide down -- to offer a concomitant yet different temporality of relating to living and dying. Berlant moves us away from an event or the event of trauma or catastrophe, proposing that "slow death occupies the temporalities of the endemic."
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Slow death occurs not within the timescale of the epidemic nor the crisis, not of the event of the suicide or the death, rather "...a zone of temporality...of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent, often in phenomena not prone to capture by a consciousness organized by archives of memorable impact."
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In this non-linear temporality, for it starts and stops, returns, redoubles and leaps ahead, Berlant is not "defining a group of individuals merely afflicted with the same ailment, [rather] slow death describes populations marked out for wearing out."
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Understanding slow death as a force across multiple temporalities is precisely the kind of reorientation of concepts like sexuality called for in Rai's ecology of sensation.
If as Berlant argues, "Health itself can then be seen as a side effect of successful normativity"
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(emphasis mine), it seems to me that in order to honor the complexity of these suicides we must place them within the broader context of neoliberal demands upon the body as well as what are constituted as neoliberal "opportunities" for the body. In my current book project, Debility/Capacity, I examine these heightened demands for bodily capacity and exceptionalized debility. Capacity and debility are on the one hand, seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formulations of health, agency, and choice -- what I call a "liberal eugenics" of lifestyle programming -- that produces population aggregates as well as the technologies of bioinformatics and biopolitics. Those "folded" into life are seen as more capacious or on the side of capacity, while those "targeted for death," or living out "slow death," are figured as debility, whether that is racialized, sexualized, or in terms of disease or disability. Such an analysis reposes the questions of which bodies are made to pay for "progress"? Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated by a neoliberal discourse, and which cannot be? In this regard, Savage's project refigures queers, along with other "bodies" heretofore construed as excessive/erroneous, as capacity, ensuring that queerness operates as a machine of capacity. Even though poststructuralist queer theory most apparently works through registers of negativity and increasingly negative affect, through critical reading practices primarily deconstructive in their effects, such a figuration of queer theory has emerged from a homeostatic framework: queer theory is already then also a machine of capacity in and after the cybernetic turn.
Our current politics are continually reproducing the exceptionalism of human bodies and the aggrieved agential subject, politics typically enacted through wounded attachments.
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Without minimizing the tragedy of these recent deaths, dialogue about ecologies of sensation and slow death might open us up to a range of connections. For instance, how do queer girls commit suicide? What of the slow deaths of teenage girls through anorexia, bulimia, and numerous sexual assaults they endure as punishment for the transgressing of proper femininity and alas, even for conforming to it? What is the political and cultural fallout of re-centering the white gay male as ur-queer subject? How would our political landscape transform if it actively de-centered the sustained reproduction and proliferation of the grieving subject, opening instead towards an affective politics, attentive to ecologies of sensation and switchpoints of bodily capacities, to habituations and un-habituations, to tendencies, multiple temporalities, and becomings?
This piece is excerpted from a keynote lecture delivered by Jasbir Puar at the Affective Tendencies conference, October 8, 2010, at Rutgers University. The longer version of this lecture is part of Puar's book project titled Affective Politics: States of Debility and Capacity. See also her op-ed "In the Wake of It Gets Better" in the Guardian (11/16/10).
Photo illustration by jeff safi.
I agree that the "It gets better" campaign is wrapped up in neoliberalism. Like evangelicals whose mega-church pastors are millionaires, as long there is a perception of doing "God's work" (literally or metaphorically), no one looks at the money. No one except the opposing side who points and points at the money. For example, conservatives in the 1990s attempted to paint homosexuality as a "white, privileged" issue in order to win over communities of color.
I bring this up because while I can see an overdetermined "Asian homophobia" in the Clementi case, I am also wondering about those rural and suburban spaces that are very white and heterosexist. Whites who fled from these worlds (or were never part of them) and now live comfortably and "productively" in a "new" world are taking their anger out on or "imposing justice" on "homophobes of color" -- but what about the young people of all races still embedded in spaces where the idea of, say, gay marriage remains an impossibility? As a point of comparison, are there affective differences in the rhetoric directed toward "homophobes of color" over [white] heterosexist homophobes (e.g., evangelicals, Mormons, etc)? For example, are you implying that had Ravi and Wei been white, people would have been less likely to call for manslaughter charges?
thanks to puar for this 'timely interruption' into the thoroughly understandable yet almost physically re-interring politics of sympathetic (out)rage, identification, and projections back and forward in time and across bodily states of modern mortality. reading such a deeply felt and intellectually uncompromising analysis actually makes me feel better.....
This is a great article to follow up a great talk that's still ringing in my hollow head. As usual, Jasbir Puar brings out the seemingly obvious (important) issues and questions that are left out in a lot of knee jerk reactions to Clementi's suicide and others that came after it--from the middling, middlebrow media to Savage and his kind to anti-Savage and their kind.
The central question that seems to be left out of all the speechifying and grandstanding going on in "response" to queer suicides seems to be: "How does it feel?"
I think Puar has done a very nice job laying out and insisting upon that question not getting answered and folded into whatever political project for the queer future, but asked, felt, lived and asked again.
Thank you Jasbir for this "untimely" intervention. Untimely because you pose so well, so movingly, the question of (habituated) temporality and (normative) sexuality that takes us beyond the binaries between life and death, capacity and debility, queer and queerest, norm and excess. To dispense with these binaries means returning to the virtual-actual circuits (processes) of sensation in which the timescale of habituation, its body as a non-coinciding resonant unity, both preindividual and populational at once--open sexual politics to something quite old and yet always becoming--tactical but unpredictable experimentations in and with ecologies of sensation and sense. I believe your intervention calls for nothing less!
Alan, thank you for your comment. I think you raise interesting questions that I attempted to address in the long version of this piece. Certainly Queering the Air has noted the force with which the Asian backlash has overtaken any anger directed at the Rutgers administration for their failure to intervene on Clementi's behalf (he registered a complaint about his roommate after the first surveillance) and the complete absence of a conversation about Clementi's own suburban background, his family situation, etc. Also the charge of "Asian homophobia" automatically presumes Ravi and Wei are straight. If you check out the website for Queering the Air you wills ee that their press releases do indeed suggest that gay liberals in New Jersey have been calling for prosecution under hate crime legislation rather than violation of privacy is problematic in part due to the furor around race in this case. Also, I refer you to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project's stance against the passage of the hate crime protection act last fall for similar reasons (the Audre Lorde Project--I am a board member--also endorsed this statement.) http://srlp.org/fedhatecrimelaw. At least in the case of New Jersey, suburban and white, or even rural and white, are not automatically co-constituted anymore (See Karen Tongson's new book Relocations on the racial and sexual diversity of suburbs.)
Your point about the affective differences is mirrored in my desire to highlight affective resonances across identity formations. So whether the backlash would have been less/worse/different if Ravi and Wei were white is for me, part of the larger problematic of ecologies of sensation that might produce continuity and affiliation across many kinds of social formations. I cannot sum up the entire rest of the paper here (sorry!) but I do hope my brief comments have been helpful to clarify what I believe is at stake in thiking affectively rather than only identitarianly. Best, JKP
I'm having a tough time reading your essay. Perhaps it's me. And perhaps it's your academic writing style with references to things that a small group of your colleagues understand but remain lost to me (e.g., identitarianly). I only say this because I'm afraid that I might be misinterpreting your critique of Savage. That said, if you are poking at his "It gets better" campaign, I need to ask you if you think any young gay boys and girls are alive today because they read essays such as yours and decided that suicide was not a reasonable option. Because I'm reasonably certain that lots of them have heard his sanctimonious plea and decided that it really does get better and they're alive today because of it. If I'm off base, please pardon my confusion and chalk it up to my inability to penetrate your words.
Thanks -- that does help me piece it together.
An affective train links nondiscrimination in housing/employment, repeal of DADT, anti-bullying ordinances for schools, hate crimes legislation, marriage equality -- but if anyone dares to critique any compartment of this train, then they're constructed as someone wanting to derail the train altogether. Still, one wonders who is conducting the train, who bought tickets for first class, who is hitching a ride, and if anyone is tied to the rails up ahead.
It's a cliche that "queer theory" and queer theorists today routinely demonstrate their inability to talk meaningfully about sexuality.
This essay confirms that cliche. The author starts by wondering what "sexuality" contains, but quickly proceeds to downplay sexuality in any everyday specificity, despite the fact that the everyday specificities of expressing sex are exactly what are violated directly in both everyday bullying and "cyberbullying."
This essay distracts attention away from violences oriented at sexual expression even in its most innocuous demonstration ("private quaters," in a "neo-liberal" institution, in fact!) in order to raise concerns about "new technologies" or "ecologies of sensation." In this understanding, rather than talk about sex and violences expressed against sexual expression, it makes more sense to demote sexuality, to place it below "categories" such as race. "Queer" becomes an unquestioned minoritarianism that only speaks to the degree that race or ethnicity are presumed to be "already" visible, sensational, and in a context where all everyday life is presumed to be "cyberneticized," at least, for "kids today."
But why, again, are all Asians geeks -- even those that bully queers? There are no heteromasculinist tendencies, no violent homosociality serving as boundaries of everyday life for Asian subjects? And what exactly does Puar think unifies "Asian" subjects in the first place? The claim that all Asians are oppressed geeks makes no SENSE, in and of itself generally; and it is certainly far from descriptive even in this one instance in the Rutgers community, as far as I can tell.
But there's the rub: the author seeks to sensationalize, not to make sense. And in fact, an analysis of "affect" would necessarily interrogate BOTH sense and sensation, internal difference and external difference, and the terms by which inside/outside sense and sensation are negotiated and constructed, not simply spectacularized ecologies of sensation that allow sex to be traded off in a recoding of race as cyber-raced geekness. The author's invocation of ecologies of sensation allows unsupported generalities phrased in terms of race and technology to cover over the fact that an innocent make-out session between two gay guys was virally networked in order to shame white gay male queerity! Sure, we'd rather talk about constructed markers of racial and technological identity such as "Asian geekiness" rather than "the kiss" -- and this despite the fact that Asian geekiness, even if it is relevant, would necessarily be a factor primarily relevant to a discussion of the perpetrator's actions, not the student's suicide!
Oops, the subject is now officially switched back to sex and suicide, with race and tech secondary, intersecting factors. Sorry Dr. Puar!
I want to make clear that I am not arguing against an intersectional analysis of sexuality, race, and technology. I am arguing that sexuality, when it is the object of violence, must be addressed as the object of violence, before other intersectional factors. It is key to do this because there are so many homophobes, those who do queer theory and those who don't, who are so uncomfortable talking about violence against sexual expression that making secondary factors into primary ones simply becomes irresistible, even, almost, "sensible." Puar's essay is an example. When those secondary factors are raised to a point of primacy in the analysis, the result is that sexuality, already suicided in everyday life, is yet AGAIN silenced by the cultural critic. Unfortunately, this route is exactly the road taken by Puar.
The author does this, moreover, by performing a severe reduction of the meanings of affect as both sense and sensation. I'd say that given this highly unrigorous discussion, the primary reason Dr. Puar does this is a lack of training in the areas invoked compounded by fear and discomfort with sex and suicide.
Can we just suggest that we leave commentary to the masses and to the specialists?
Well, no, we can't, we have to continue. Because queers of all colors are being bullied and suicided by bullies of all colors, all over the place (to be sensational).
So, Puar's reduction of affect to sensations of race and technology isn't "innocent" or "accidental" at all. Rather, it is contradictory and symptomatic: reducing affect to being external, visible "sensation" apparently affords, rather than interrogating, a certain kind of violent identity politics: this identity politics is one that silences when it claims to make visible or to clarify or to demythify. Puar's is a queer politics of identity that cannot discuss sexuality clearly, and instead, to compensate, insists on prioritizing, say, what race or technology might "feel" like instead!
But NOW Puar's analysis starts to make an incoherent kind of sense, in a symptomatic way: if sexuality is made "internal" to other concerns, say race or media technology, well, these latter perform nicely as "external" sensations! This ecology of sensations leaves sexuality out, for all intents and purposes; it is a sexual numbing as an incompetent mode of making sense. I gather the author, apparently, is in pain around sexuality that must be numbed by invocations of raced technology. The "Asian geek" invoked by Puar becomes somehow strangely powerful, but more a "last samurai" fantasy more than any description of everyday sexed structures of sexual feeling.
In Puar's essay, sexuality cannot be avowed clearly in its own sense, then, and so sex cannot take precedence over race or technology -- in spite of the fact that it was an overproduction of affective meaning, of both sense and sensation, in terms of sexuality which produced the violent conditions in which only suicide made sense for the now dead queer subject!
To begin summarizing, here's the first major problem.
1. Puar thus repeats, in a merely symbolic mode, the conditions of violence that led to a gay student jumping off a bridge as a way of "living down" a virally broadcasted kiss. Since Puar doesn't want us to adequate sex this sexed topic, we might then ask: what kinds of surveillance, in Puar's symbolic mode, is Puar assuming to be gained by shifting the terms of analysis of sexed suicide to those of race and technology, rather than, say, sex/tech/race? Well, now, look at the responses: oh now I understand, yes, we should be talking about race, about technology, those are VISIBLE. The author thus constrains sympathetic readers to a different gaze than that which was effectively ENDED by the queer's taking of his own life. Let's be frank: the suicided student ended for all time the violent gaze of surveillance used to shame him. Puar, on the other hand, presents an altogether different gaze to construct "our view" on that suicide. And this gaze, violent as it is, continues, as writing. (But not here, in this post!)
The result is that Puar does precisely what the essay says it tries to avoid: minimizing a meaningful discussion of the terms and conditions which gained agency at the expense of the agency of the sexed and suicided queer. Changing the subject, and insisting on a different gaze on the dead queer, whereby now we can see that it is Asian geekiness that is more compelling, Puar compounds the symbolic violences which condition the death of queers of any color.
2. That's not all. Puar's view also presents negative implications for queers of color, too. Puar's argument makes no bones about insisting that sex must be subjected to race, say, or technology. But the tragic implications in such demands are that queers of color cannot analytically differentiate exclusions they may feel within communities of color, if sexuality is only to be "networked" while "networking" around "race." You are first raced, ethnicized, then you are sexed -- so you cannot ever say that racially or ethnically determined sexual violence -- the homophobia of the Asian straight male, for instance -- has any power or purchase. The suicided student "merely" suicides so that we can talk about race, not sex! But one result for queers of color is that sexuality becomes the subaltern subject of a raced dominant. That's a nice fantasy, for some, I guess, but it is hardly a critical analysis, and it is largely not descriptive in this particular case. I find it horrifying that Puar gave this address on this occasion, in fact, although the argument has some interesting points for other purposes.
Let me sum up this long, complicated post simply: Rather than having anything to do with the everyday lives and deaths of queer subjects, what Puar's essay demonstrates better than anything else is how sophisticatedly complicit queer theory has become in its own homophobia.
I guess it doesn't "get better" -- at least not for contemporary queer theory, whose glory days of relevance seem far behind a discipline that now finds it hard to speak of its own object of analysis.
End rant.