Attitudes, Affects & Alliances in Scholarship (Part 1): Bra-Strap

BRA{::}STRAP

by M.W. Bychowski

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Orienting / the Round-table

The following was presented at the George Washington University on February 15th, as part of a round-table on "Attitudes, Affects & Alliances in Scholarship" sponsored by M.A.T.C.H. (Mobilizing an Active Theory Community in the Humanities) a Theory Working Group. (Listen to talk on Podcast!)

This round-table on attitudes, affects and alliances is doomed to feel wrong; because this isn’t the space where we are accustomed to have these conversations. It’s also doomed to feel too short, because once we move from talking about our professions to talking about our lives, things are bound to explode across life-times and life-lines.

Perhaps we are not infinite, as the Perks of a Wallflower tell us, but life is hardly finite, life seems to defy limits at every turn. And so since we can’t do justice to the bigness of life, we in MATCH (and today everyone present is a part of MATCH) are trying to do justice to the smallness, the intimacy, the particularity of life by sharing stories told by objects that orient us. So: radical, small, doomed, personal. Here we go!

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I. Phantoms in the Chest 

“If orientation is about making the strange familiar 
through the extension of bodies into space, 
then disorientation occurs when that extension fails. 
Or we could say some spaces allow for certain bodies 
and simply does not leave room for others.” 
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 11

I am a partial body. The broken fragments in my brain and in my chest tell me that I have breasts of substantial weight and size. When I close my eyes I see them. When I move around, I know they are there. I am a large-breasted woman; that much is fixed in my nervous system. 

I am a partial body. The broken fragments of my eyes and in my finger tips retreat when they run across my naked chest. This is not my body they say, I am not flat-chested. Closing my eyes and moving my hands in front of me, at a certain point I feel warmness and pressure in my chest (6 inches or so in front of me). 

Some trans people say that they hate their body, they look at it and feel violated by their naked-form. I rarely feel disgust at myself when the clothes come off, but I do feel an ethereal detachment. It's like looking at yourself in a Halloween mask or done up in stage-make-up, you don’t mind if you are ugly or silly or whatever, because what you see is not you. 

There is a kind of invulnerability in that state, a sense that anything could be endured in that naked state, humiliation, exposure, abuse, because it would be happening to someone else. Not me. Not me. 

I sometimes wonder if that is why so many trans people commit suicide after puberty, when the transformations of different parts of their bodies (genitals, chests, hips, brains) move in such drastically different directions, that the threat of self-violence is not a threat as such. The attack is not on the self, but on another, on a body that has your phantom body imprisoned.  

I don’t mean disembodied spirits in the slightest, I mean: phantoms-in-the-brain, phantoms-in-the-body's-self-mapping, phantoms-in-the-flesh; for me, phantoms-in-the-chest.

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II. Un-Claspings 

“Some boys take a beautiful girl & 
they hide her away from the rest of the world; 
well not me, I want to be the one in the sun.”
Robert Hazard, Girls Just Want to Have Fun

One of the earliest moments I ever felt some of the suffocating pressure of this dysphoria partiality release was when I first had my chest bound. Around the age of fourteen, some of my girl friends and I were at one of their houses. In one of those little double-deceits I practiced, I was letting them do something that no other “boy” had them do before: make them into a “girl.” 

The deceit came not in becoming a girl, but in letting them believe that what they were seeing the result was the lie; that what they were doing was obscuring more than it was revealing. It was a lie about a lie. As they put on my make-up, shadowing my eyes and lining my lips, I tried not to rejoice to much at the un-masking that they were participating in. 

Don’t get me wrong, the feigned displeasure, was not wholly to shield my identity as a boy, but to shield myself as a woman from the immense vulnerability that I was experiencing. Slowly I was becoming visible to them in a way that no one, hardly ever I, got to see myself. Then suddenly I couldn’t hide anymore, because they did something I did not expect. Putting a blind-fold on me, trying not to ruin my eye-make-up, I felt my arms guided up, a snap on my shoulders and a sudden tightness on my chest.

They removed the blindfold, and I looked down and saw the bra and my body. In a moment of panic I bolted up from the chair and ran to the bathroom. The two of them giggled from the other room, misunderstanding my reaction. They thought I ran away because I was embarrassed by the incongruity of the bra on my boyish chest.

Standing alone in the bathroom mirror, my reaction was rather the other way around. I felt too good at this moment. I felt to exposed. I felt too naked. They had seen me. This, this was what my brain had been waiting for and expected. This weight, this lift, these contours. It was like the deadness, the phantoms in my chest had suddenly and wildly come alive. 

I had to be alone in this moment because you couldn't kill a phantom, but this — this you could hurt; this has blood.

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III. Straps that Bind 

“The idea of wholeness in partition caught on…matter’s partibility became key to its efficacy…Although the pieces are gathered by various framing devices into a whole, the visual presentation also stresses parts as parts” 

Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality 193-196

Anyone that has gone from blurry vision to glasses, from limited motion to flying down the street in a car or chair, from straining under labored breathing to being able to take in full fresh breaths... and then suddenly having you new vision, mobility, and breath taken away from you again, knows how much darker the darkness is once you look into the sun (not necessarily worse, but deeper & darker). 

For someone that is often so much in her own head, or maybe everyone feels this way, real action comes as a result of desperation. It's not that the dangers and difficulties are not there, but at a certain point, they become besides the point, to stay put or to go back is too intolerable. It's do or die, to stay in a certain place will surely mean a death of some-kind, an unlife, a haunting. 

It's better to hit the ground running, then to simply and stiffly plunge into the ground. It matters how a person falls, we are told by the Lion in Winter, especially when the fall is all that is left. 

For me, being thrown into the world comes along very particular trajectories, as I am pulled towards particular objects along particular lines; what Sara Ahmed calls "life-lines" or Butler calls "livable-lives." These objects are my bra-straps, my tan-lines, my Victoria-Secret shopping bags, my sisters, my lovers, my friends; they make me feel at home in this world, in this body. 

 My bra-straps, my breasts that go on the outside of the flesh, my object-oriented, crip-focused, queer-infused, ecologically-minded, medievaly-scripted pursuit of transformation gives me attitudes, affects, and alliances that help me hold on to something and to think through experiences -- so I can find the words to tell to myself when I lose my grip and the dissonance between brain and world get too much; so I can find the words to tell to others, because I used to think 50% of trans people commit suicide by the time they get to my age but as studies get better at surveying, we are now finding its closer to 60%. 

Frankly, more times than not, I don't know what to say to them to help them make sense of things; to give them a life-line or to help them share in mine. These kids, these people, they are smart and often their reason against things and reasons not to try are better than what I can offer. But I am still going to try. The questions are hard, but I'm not done thinking yet. This is my life, this is why I study and do what I do, the way that I do it; this is personal.

Upcoming: MATCH Round-Table

January Meeting (Affect Theory)

Queer Phenomenology

by Sara Ahmed

The fourth meeting of MATCH was held at the end of January to launch the Working Group into a series of discussions on "Making It Personal," culminating in a Round-Table on "Attitudes, Affects and Alliances in Scholarship" to be held as part of the Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings Symposium in Washington DC on February 15th.

In reading Ahmed's Introduction "Getting Into It," we followed up on her invitation to consider how we come to occupy certain spaces and take on certain forms of occupation in response to different "things" which orient us. Those present developed a working list of "things" that seem to have us in their gravitational pull, simultaneously informing our scholarship but with a life and a livelihood outside it.

At times, Ahmed notes, we become formed and directed by dis-orientation and an expulsion from spaces which seem to allow certain bodies to extend and not others. We discussed how such "queerness" launches us on certain trajectories which in turn orient and re-orient us. The idea of objects which move with us became particularly important at this time, occupations which demand that we remain constantly on the move.

In turn, we thought about identity as the inscription of these lines of movement, push and pull, on our bodies and how different things "stick" to us like glue or else slide off us as a result of taking on these identity positions. Without a doubt, scholarship becomes a large gravity well which pull in a lot of our life, but these too can and often does exist either in competition with or in orbit around other "things" which hold a stronger sway on us at this time.

Upcoming January Meeting on Affect

Join M.A.T.C.H., a Theory Reading Group, for our discussion of Affect Theory, with selected readings (aprox. 20 pgs) from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others.

The trajectory of this month's meeting will be to prepare for next month's MATCH round-table on "Attitudes, Affects, & Alliances in Scholarship" by holding our own informal discussion of the personal side of our work & careers.

For first timers: meetings are once a month. Contact M Bychowski (mbychows@gwmail.gwu) for the reading; aprox. 20 pages from a selected theorist. You will be e-mailed a pdf file.

We will meet in the Rome Hall vestibule (1st floor), move to a classroom where we will have introductions, then begin an hour discussion of the material. Afterwards all are invited to dinner at a local restaurant.

All are invited! Come if you are anxious about Theory and have questions to share (in a low-pressure setting), excited about Theory and have comments to share, or want to meet people that share similar interests!

Coming Soon: MATCH Round-Table

Attitudes, Affects, & Alliances in Scholarship: A Round-table

Sponsored by M.A.T.C.H., a theory working group

"I define affect without necessary restriction, that is, I include the notion that affect is something not necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages many bodies at once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected." 

Mel Y Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

What question are we trying to answer? - An unusual query for us in the Humanities, in part because many of us aren't looking for answers. Some of us aren't looking for anything, the looking itself is the thing. If those in other disciplines and professions often misunderstand what the Humanities "does," it may certainly stem from the lack of conversations in the Liberal Arts that allow us to articulate to each other and ourselves what it is we do and why. By holding a round-table on attitudes, affects, & alliances in scholarship, we intend to open up such a dialog, where participants will be invited to discuss what personal tics, dispositions, pleasures, friendships, and goals direct us to work in academia.

This round-table will be a part of Temporal Slippages and Spatial Slidings: A Symposium on Failed Fixities hosted by the George Washington University English Graduate Student Association (GW EGSA) on February 13, 2013 in Washington DC at 9:10-10:10 AM.

December Meeting (Bubbles)

Bubbles: Spheres I

by Peter Sloterdijk

The third meeting of MATCH was held at the beginning of December to accommodate the tight schedules of those presenting and attending the meeting who were busy traveling, writing, and grading papers at the end of term. Peter Sloterdijk's book Bubbles, the first in a three-part series, was chosen on the recommendation of peers and the promotion of actor-network and science studies theorist, Bruno Latour, whose blurb for the book reads:

"It's about time that the English-speaking world begin to appreciate what is, without question, the most important work in philosophy of nature to appear since the irruption of the ecological crisis at the forefront of our consciousness and political order. Many naturalists, activists, political scientists, and ecologists have been nibbling at the notion of nature. But Peter Sloterdijk, in this first volume of his giant trilogy, goes much further and deeper since he renews what it is to be thrown 'in' the world by totally renewing what it means to talk about the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities. It is only if we profit from Sloterdijk's infectious concept of 'envelopes' and 'spheres' that we might at last begin to prepare ourselves for living with and in Gaia instead of against and out of her."

With a work covering so many different veins of the group's interests, it is reasonable that one dominant vein that connected them all for us was his literary style of writing. Sloterdijk freely employs metaphor, mythology and affective anecdotes which he creates as much as deploys towards creating a sense as well as a sensibility through his work. The conceit of much German phenomenology was been though through in this work and perhaps come out the other-side, looking via but also beyond the scope of human sensations to understand a broad and mysterious ecology that folds in, out, and across us.

October Meeting (Cyborg Theory)

"Cyborg Manifesto"

by Donna Haraway

&

"The Computer Reprograms Me"

Michael Chorost

The second meeting of MATCH centered around what was dubbed "Cyborg Theory" inspired by a lecture and workshop advertised over the summer around Michael Chorost's recent books Rebuilt & World Wide Mind. Leigha McReynolds and Erin Vander Wall lead the discussion, including an excerpt from Chorost's first book and Donna Haraway's foundational essay, "the Cyborg Manifesto." 

The conversation functioned across a variety of interlocking topics. On one level, all members were interested and comfortable with the invitation to think along with "Post-Humanism" to imagining bodies (including the human body) not as a discrete subject, but as an array of changing, exchanging, and permeable systems of objects (which may possess different degrees of subjectivity). On a second level, we parsed Chorost's attempts to draw strict distinctions between things such as Cyborgs, Androids, Robots, and Humans. We developed our own working understanding of the terms (apart from Chorost) but generally agreed that such beings in life and literature often seen to cross or straddle these categories despite our attempts to pin them down. On a third level, we contemplated Chrosost's attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and disability which appeared strikingly to work hard to assert hierarchical and defined differences in bodies, despite his concentration on how his own body and identity is deconstructed by his hearing-aid; this attitude was then compared with Haraway's proposals for an inter-penetrating material feminism.