Celebrating Academic Writing #2: Imperial Leather

Okay! So, way back in June I started what I quite optimistically referred to as a "weekly-or-so" feature sharing some of my favorite excerpts of academic writing. Ha ha! I guess I should have said "very occasional" feature! But regardless, I've been getting back in the swing of this weblogging thing and so I decided to share another excerpt, this time from another one of my favorite academitrices, Anne McClintock.

What makes Anne McClintock so special to me is the sly and seemingly effortless way that she braids together theories of gender, domination, race and the post-colonial in her work. Many people use this type of theoretical cross-pollination in their methodology, of course, but McClintock stands out because she uses her raw material to push back at theory, transforming it and making it able to speak to a wider range of phemonena by the time she's done. Her writing on a theoretical level mimics the cultural processes she's describing - her book, Imperial Leather, describes how contact with the colonies profoundly changed the culture of the colonizer, rewriting the history of British domination as a dynamic interplay of hierarchies jarred loose and thrown into uncomfortable relief both at home and in the colonial scene. Her astute attention to the inextricability of sexual performance and racial performance allows her to see the interconnections between the most macropolitical movements of empire and industry and the most micropolitical contestations within the domestic and "feminine" spheres of home, hygiene and heterosexual, yet perverse, desire.

In the below excerpt, she uses the multivocality of the material she treats to question and expand upon one of the most overworked theoretical structures in academia: the fetish. Speaking to both Freud and Marx (and reaching past them to the anthropological work they both borrow from), she sets up what will become a fascinating excursion into the marketing of soap in the early 1800s in the following chapter, decentering the phallus from its customary place as the explanatory anchor of meaning within a fetishistic structure of disavowal and desire in order to allow an account of white female commodity (as well as just plain-ole sexual) fetishism to emerge from this colonial moment. So doing, she accomplishes what I think is the most important thing an academic endeavor can do: it makes everything seem theorizable, seem relevant and worthy of consideration. Her work provides an opening that renders more possible than previously, expands the territory of the thinkable and therefore, in a way remarkably rare within academia, actually earns the overused appellation "theorist."

Fetishes may not always be disruptive or transgressive and can be mobilized for a variety of political ends—some progressive, some subversive, some deeply reactionary. No one understood the seductive power of fetish spectacle better than Hitler. The male Victorian middle class was not prevented by its fondness for flagellatory rituals from violently foreclosing the fetish rituals of other cultures. Fetishes such as the pink triangle can be deployed for divergent political ends, some less undecidable than others. Rather than marshalling these differences under the reductive sign of the phallus, we might do better to open them to different genealogies.

Although the fetish is a compromise object, it does not necessarily embody only two options. Fetishes can involve triangulated contradictions, or more than three. Different patterns of consumption or forms of violent political closure may effectively contain the disruptive or undecidable power of the fetish. White male fetishes can resonate differently from illicit black or female fetishes. Considerable theoretical rigor and subtlety are lost if all fetishes are reduced to the magisterial phallus: oral fetishes such as the pacifiers used by men in "babyist" fetishism; breast fetishes such as nipple-clips or fetish bras; imperial fetishes such as slave-bands and whips; leather and rubber fetishes; national fetishes such as flags, team colors and sport mascots; political fetishes such as crowns and coats of arms; religious fetishes such as crucifixes and holy water; authority fetishes such as uniforms and handcuffs.

Instead of gathering these multifarious fetishes into a single primal scene, we might do better to open the genealogies of fetishism to more theoretically subtle and historically fruitful accounts. The fetishes of other cultures might then no longer have to genuflect to the master narrative of the western family romance. Since fetishes involve the displacement of a host of social contradictions onto impassioned objects, they defy reduction to a single originary trauma or the psychopathology fo the individual subject. Indeed, fetishism might become the theoretical scene of a renewed investigation into the vexed relations between imperialism and domesticity, desire and commodity fetishism, psychoanalysis and social history—if only because the fetish itself embodies the failure of a single narrative of origins.

This excerpt taken from pages 202-203 of Imperial Leather (Routledge, 1995)

Celebrating Academic Writing #1: "White Glasses"

Academic writing gets a bad rap. Convoluted, gangly, jargon-larded, empty, pretentious -- there are myriad examples of how the weird world of academia has produced a culture of writing that shows all too clearly the costs of driving generation after generation of scholars to publish or perish without giving even cursory mention of how to go about making the things they publish enjoyable, or even readable in the most basic sense. It is seen as at best indecorous to criticize a paper for inelegance -- as long as it is technically grammatically correct, the criticism should focus on whether it is "correct," whether it is "cohesive," "organized." There is no room for a consideration of beauty, even in literary and cultural studies; sometimes the articles and books I read come off as even jealous or spiteful in relation to the beauty of their objects, ripping them apart and paraphrasing them in the dullest fashion as if actively trying to drain the language of any power beyond that by which the academics themselves are routinely judged — is it cohesive? Organized? Correct?

What is saddening about this situation isn't just that the writing produced by many of the people who care about writing the most is becoming less and less pleasurable to read, but also that there is precious little opportunity to acknowledge when an essay or article or book produced within academia is, indeed, beautiful. The fact is, despite all the factors working against it and despite the generally bad reputation academic writing has even amongst academics, academic writing can achieve a kind of bracing, stirring beauty all its own. So, I feel that the least I can do is share some of my favorite moments in academic writing in a little weekly-or-so feature on this little blog, pieces that have stuck with me both for their insight and their sheer beauty, and which humble and inspire me as I attempt to do right by them in my own attempts at academic authorship.

To kick off this celebration, I have chosen an excerpt from one of my favorite articles by one of my favorite academic authors of all time, "White Glasses," by Eve Sedgwick, which she wrote about her colleague, Michael Lynch, who was dying of AIDS at the time she was writing and who was also something of a fashion icon to Eve with his snazzy white glasses. It is proof to me of the importance of allowing emotion and intellectual precision to inform one another, as opposed to working constantly to keep them apart; I miss the anger of this period of queer theory, and the unapologetic passion that vivified its rigor and prevented it from curdling into mortis.

One thing I learned…is that the white of the glasses means differently for a woman, for a man. The white of the glasses is two things, after all. White is a color—it is a pastel. White the pastel sinks banally and invisibly into the camouflage of femininity, on a woman, a white woman. In a place where it doesn’t belong, on Michael, that same pastel remains a flaming signifier.

White is also, however, at the same time no color, the color of color’s own subtraction and absence. At once the white-flaring acid of dissolution, the acid’s crystalline residue and its voided trail, in many cultures white is the color of mourning. On women of all colors white refers, again banally, to virginity (to virginity as absence or to the absence of virginity) and the flirtations of the veil—to ways in which our gender tries to construct us heterosexually as absence and as the dissimulating denial of it, and tries also to inscribe in us, as a standard of our own and other people’s value, the zero-degree no-color of (not the skin of Europeans themselves but) the abstractive ideology of European domination. A white woman wearing white: the ruly orderliness of this sight makes invisible the corrosive aggression that white also is: as the blaze of mourning, the opacity of loss, the opacity loss installs within ourselves and our vision, the unreconciled and irreconcilably incendiary energies streaming through that subtractive gap, that ragged scar of meaning, regard, address.

The entirety of this essay can be found, along with many other gems, in her collection Tendencies (1993)

ALL BODIES ARE MUTILATED / It's enough that I am collecting what I love

Inspired by the Fiction Prompt over at Koreanish, I have conducted my own water-witching expedition amongst my books and found seven passages that, as will likely inevitably happen, ended up flowing together into a strange yet cohesive meditation. In this case, one pondering violence and artistry, blood and bloodlessness, girls in trouble and men choking on self-loathing. None of this is really all that surprising. A lot of it is more beautiful than I remembered.

Even among those recognized as masters there are perceptible differences of accomplishment, though at a level so high that comparisons tend to take the form of arguments concerning the nature of beauty. Yet it may happen that one master stands out from the others by virtue of some scarcely to be defined yet immediately apparent quality, as our history demonstrates again and again; and as is the case at present, in the disquieting instance of Heinrich Graum.

For it is indeed of him I wish to speak, this troubled spirit who has risen up in our midst with his perilous and disturbing gift; and if I have seemed to hesitate, to linger over other matters, it is because the very nature of his art throws all into question and requires one to approach him obliquely, almost warily.

Steven Millhauser, “The New Automaton Theatre,” in
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories

I can’t feel anything she said. You could see the ghost of bone beneath all the dripping red. What if I ruined her finger? What if she couldn’t ever use it again? She’d break up with me, she icily informed me. I Didn’t Do It On Purpose! I was crying and she was telling me to shut up. She had no patience. She wasn’t crying. Two coyotes crossed the road and we almost ran them over. They were tan like the dry ground, they looked just like dogs, with soft bits of tongue slipping out of their mouths.

Michelle Tea, The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption
of One Girl in America

To employ once again Nenami’s favorite metaphor, the ticket gate is like the gate of the enormous prison of society. The men, convicts serving a life sentence of penal servitude, come through the gate and, together with the invalids who have come to meet them, return home to their isolation wards. These, however, were two wives who dreaded their husbands’ release from prison. Each time the train pulled in, they felt a cold shiver of fear in their hearts. Whose husband would arrive first?

Kawabata Yasunari, “The Rainy Station,” in
Palm-of-the-Hand Stories,
Lane Dunlop, trans.

“You know, what’s so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on your own”; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate—dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions; for I often noticed that living as we did, she and I, in a world of total evil, we would become strangely embarrassed whenever I tried to discuss something she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a real healthy sweetheart, I and Annabel, Lolita and a sublime, purified, deified Harold Haze, might have discussed—an abstract idea, a painting, stippled Hopkins or shorn Baudelaire, God or Shakespeare, anything of a genuine kind. Good will! She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

前田があたしに二重顎を寄せてきた。顔の産毛が逆立った。

—今晩、五万でどうだ。

一瞬、考えた。五万円。別れた男に買ってやったヴィトンの手帳の値段。あたし、こうやって腐ってくんだろうか。

（プリン食べた。三個も食べた。食—べた、食べた）

室井佑月、『ピス』にある短編、「ぎんの雨」

Bush’s mind: The Cardinal’s exit should have scared Bush but only served to reify this man’s conviction that enemies were living all around him. Now, these enemies included both his own family, as he had known before, and the Pope. Bush had always recognized that his sons wanted, through inheritance, to take away the money he was earning in his presidency. I, said Bush, must preserve the economy.

As he was thinking, a young novice entered the black-hung chamber.

“Tell my daughter that I want to see her at midnight, when all the light has failed.”

REPORT TONIGHT OF ANOTHER MURDER OF A YOUNG GIRL. ALL YOUNG GIRLS, PLEASE STAY AT HOME. IF YOU MUST GO OUT, KNOW THAT YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK.

(Pictures of a man, not recognizable, extracting a dead girl’s eye, then cutting off her left leg.)

THE POLICE ARE CONFOUNDED…SEVEN KILLINGS IN TWO WEEKS…NO CLUES…ONE YOUNG GIRL AFTER ANOTHER…THERE’S MORE TO THIS THAN JUST A MANIAC…

ALL BODIES ARE MUTILATED

Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology, A Novel

With ordinary treasures, what counts is the power to get them; with relics of the past, what counts is the collector's taste and his wholehearted love of them. But even compiling a catalogue does not quite set to rest Ouyang Xiu's anxieties about the future of his collection. He consoles himself in a fabricated dialogue:

Someone mocked me saying: “If a collection is large, then it will be hard to keep intact. After being assembled for a long time, it is bound to be scattered. Why are you bothering to be so painstaking?”

I replied: “It's enough that I am collecting what I love and that I will enjoy growing old among them.”

Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the
Chinese Classical Tale