Gender, Embodiment, Desire: A Discussion with Meg Fernandes and Jack Halberstam

“Gender is something that happens between me and other people”, moderator Irene Kacandes quoted writer and activist Masha Gessen in her introduction to “Gender, Embodiment, Desire” – the latest in-person event in the discussion series “Humanities for Humans”. With eight virtual and in-person events over two years, the series – a joint venture between the Walter de Gruyter foundation and the non-profit organization 1014 – space for ideas – aims to address the big questions facing society in an era of increasing polarization.

Learn more about the lecture series “Humanities for Humans” in this interview with Irene Kacandes.

At 1014’s Fifth Avenue headquarters, poet Meg Fernandes and gender theorist Jack Halberstam engaged in a vivid discussion about issues such as: Why are lawmakers blocking young people’s access to trans-affirming care? What does “non-binary” mean? Should we abolish the concept of gender, or is it a basis for desire?

Asked about the associations which spring to mind upon hearing the words “Gender, Embodiment, Desire”, Meg Fernandes opened the discussion by reading one of her poems, entitled “I’m Smarter than This Feeling, but Am I?” from her collection “I Do Everything I’m Told”.

The ensuing discussion is available in full on Youtube and as a text excerpt (see below).

Meg Fernandes

I think when we are talking a lot about queer bodies, we’re obsessed with this sort of phenotypic, fetishistic aspect of a body, like, is the body intelligible as trans, as queer, as cis. That kind of focus, always on the outside of the body, really misses a commitment to ambiguity and to things that one could not know – things are subperceptual to us. My first degree is actually molecular biology, and I spent a lot of time in a lab looking at mRNA transcripts and thinking about how easy it is when you’re in those spaces to think of the body as something that is denaturalized. So, thinking about the body not as something that is biologically deterministic, thinking about interiority as a space of imaginative potential is a really important undertheorized way of looking at queer and trans discourse right now, especially in the public eye, which is obsessed with what people can see, with the body as evidence, what bodies are there to refute or prove.

“Desire is a triangulating structure …  It’s always you, what you want, and that sort of obstacle in between.”

So that poem to me [meant] we’re looking inside all the time, we’re looking literally in a telescope. Obviously, it opens with fisting. The New Yorker didn’t take this poem, I don’t know why, it was great. But also, it opens with this idea of the orifice which brings me to my second point, [to] quote Donna Haraway who says that sex, infection and eating are old relatives because according to Haraway, these are moments in which you become in relation to somebody. You eat the apple, you are the apple. You get the virus, you surrender to the virus. You have sex with someone and you’re in relation with them, you are at risk to surrender to them. All of a sudden there are these moments in which you become a distributed subject. You’re no longer a sovereign subject. You’re not just on your own, you’re part of something that’s more relational, which is what desire is. And I think that quote that [Irene] brought up of Masha [Gessen] was great, which is, like, my gender is really produced by who I’m in the room with. [“Gender is something that happens between me and other people.”]

Desire is a triangulating structure. You can’t want what you already have. It’s always you, what you want, and that sort of obstacle in between. Hence why boundlessness, orifices, and interiority, these openings and borderless, somewhat unknowable phenomena are interesting to me. As you can tell, Jack and I are really committed to having a conversation of poetics about trans and queer identities because good poets know that language is a failure. So, any way that we can sort of destabilize those ideas are where we would like to begin, I think.

Jack Halberstam

Let me just put out some topics that are under the spotlight and under discussion in this very fraught moment, at a time when people are very polarized about all kinds of things, and then play it out in their relationship to issues like transgender bodies, where they can go, where they should not go, how we should think about the bathroom, what kind of space should it be, who should be in there and so on. I want to get into questions about why conservatives are so focused on trans-affirming care for trans youth at this moment, and why they are doing their very best to try to make sure that young people who want to transition will be prevented from doing so.

Let’s see if we can figure out the answer, and I have a few answers to those questions. Let me say also, as somebody who is a slightly different generation than Meg, that it’s been really interesting to watch how these conversations about gender and desire have evolved over the past two decades. We’re in a moment when there are young people, for example, who really believe in something called gender abolition, the idea that gender is an oppressive construct and that we should maybe stop using it. That’s hard for me because I grew up in a time when gender styles were a way of signaling your queerness to other people who might not openly be able to talk about that. And so, in a lot of queer, what were then called lesbian, communities people used butch femme styles to indicate their desire, not just their gender.

“I want to hold on to the possibility that gender, which seems to be a way of limiting our options, also gives us access to desire.”

That was seen as sort of anachronistic and an old way of doing things – until Judith Butler came out with these two amazing books: “Gender Trouble” and “Bodies that Matter”. The reason that those books were world-shifting is because Butler moved the emphasis away from queer and trans people and directed their critical attention to straight people. Butler said, gender isn’t simply a pathology when we see how it’s acted out through queer bodies, gender is a problem for all bodies. All bodies, they said, are performing their gender. This was received very poorly by all kinds of people, but it’s proven to be a very powerful formulation and one that we continue to use today.

So, I want to hold on to the possibility that gender, which seems to be a way of limiting our options, also gives us access to desire, which might not be something that we want to dull with androgyny and the abolition of gender. That’s something that we can maybe talk about, because Meg’s poems bristle with all kinds of desire that come from gendered locations. I’m going to hold on to gender not simply because I think it’s important to differentiate between male and female bodies, but because it gives us access to desire.

CHECK OUT THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW HERE!

[Title image by Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash]