In her new essay collection, ” reframes gender – specifically gender transition – as something that “expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire… a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants.” Similarly, you argue in “The Mixed Metaphor” that “people want race,” that Asian Americanness can exist because people want to be Asian American, not just because they’ve been racialized as such. What originally got you thinking about how the things we think of as identities are really desires?
Andrea Long Chu: You’re right to put those pieces next to each other – I knew that that argument was getting repeated when I was writing “The Mixed Metaphor,” so it’s a very appropriate question.
Part of the answer is that I was an asshole in a comparative literature graduate program, where that’s the kind of thing one says all the time, usually without great substance to the claim. But I’d been interested in psychoanalysis, and I’d been doing lots of feminist theory, queer theory, all of that, and so it did seem like a natural claim to make, because it just made more sense.
Identity doesn’t work the way that we often say that it does. And obviously, when we’re talking about it just as a market category or whatever, then it is fully abstracted. But I don’t think that means that you have to do away with it, either. Talking about identity in terms of desire, outside of just rhetorical backflips, is saying that it’s actually an object. It’s a thing I interact with in a way that’s ultimately material. You just have to think about it as something that you’re in an active relation to, and therefore have some amount of agency and choice, and chances to exercise freedom or not. It opens up the question instead of just trying to crush it because you think it’s meaningless.
This doesn’t sort out the actual business of negotiating belonging. It’s just saying that belonging is an activity and not a state. We still do have to argue about it, but the arguing about it – that actually is the thing, the work of constituting it. It’s not like writing that piece allays my own personal anxieties, either. These are all still things that I think about, but I do think that the piece is, if not politically optimistic, at least maybe intellectually optimistic.
AH: In “On Liking Women,” you also write that “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle,” and you’ve argued against Amia Srinivasan’s idea that people can and should change their desires. Do you feel that the same is true of critical judgments?
ALC: I actually think about that line a lot because it is so strident, if I can use that in a neutral way. I’m stating the case as strongly as I feel that I can, as I often did in those days of writing. Do I really believe that nothing good comes of trying to change your desires? Well, no, because I do like to believe that people should change how they think and change how they behave.
I can still endorse that line in a couple of ways. There is not a lot of value in disguising what’s actually going on when we desire things. It’s not a process that lends itself well to being synchronized with one’s political beliefs; it sort of happens to you, and then you have to deal with it, and dealing with it probably can involve trying to change it in different ways.
Some days I think maybe we should try the whole political lesbianism thing again. Before, I was like, well, you can’t make someone want to eat pussy, and I still probably believe that. But I now think that the greater obstacle to mass exodus of women from heterosexuality is not actually sexual preference. It’s that most women don’t respect women enough to actually be in a relationship with women. I don’t even really mean that in a snarky way. I just mean the loss of status, and then the reflection of that loss of status in the partner – there’s a certain mortification of the spirit that has to happen in order to stop attaching your social value to that of a man. The issue isn’t that all these women aren’t having sex with women, it’s that the reason they’re not having sex with them is that we all still experience ourselves as having so little social value. That part of it seems like the thing that actually needs to be fixed – the respect part, not the cunnilingus part. Maybe people should change their desires in that sense.
In terms of what’s happening in the bedroom, obviously I think there needs to be some sort of sexual ethic there. But politically, I tend to think it doesn’t really matter very much. It’s what’s happening on a larger social or political level that’s more important. And I think those things are more than a matter of desire; they are a matter of principle and belief and judgment.
To answer your question, then, if I’m reading a novel or looking at a painting, I could have a particular reaction, and then read a bunch, and then change my beliefs about it, and sometimes change the sensation. But the sensation is also just there. It’s not like it doesn’t have a context; it has sort of nothing but context. But I don’t think there’s any point in beating myself up because I have that experience of aversion or attraction or whatever. That’s not worth anything, and it’s not going to be productive in terms of changing how I feel about it anyway, if I think that I ought to change how I feel about it.
AH: Your NYU PhD dissertation, Bad Politics, was going to be “about what happens when subjects living under oppression don’t feel like resisting and do something else instead.” You’ve stated that this was a response to the academic “fantasy of critique as a political act.” Have any of the ideas from your dissertation made it into Authority?
ALC: Yes, sort of necessarily, in that they continued with me for a long time in various forms. The idea of being oppressed and choosing to do something other than resisting it came very much out of this experience of being in fields like gender studies and queer studies, where you’d get so used to people saying, “Okay, here is the beginning of my talk. And here are some theorists I need you to believe I have read. And here is this film that is important and interesting, or is really popular and so it’s interesting that I am subjecting it to academic attention. And I’ll show you a couple things about it, and then I’ll say, here’s how it’s advancing the politics of this.”
And I thought, well, that’s not true! Maybe, but it often ended up being the least interesting thing you could say about those works. Obviously, it’s not that I want to depoliticize art. But it all seemed like a misunderstanding about the relation of people living in unjust conditions to those unjust conditions. People living under oppression are doing all kinds of things all the time, and they’re not all connected to some sort of resistance.
Ultimately, the stupid thing about that kind of paper – well, the stupid thing about that kind of paper is that the academic milieu required that you write that kind of paper, right? But the stupid thing about that paper is that it had such a myopic view of the lives that people are actually living. It tended to reduce the oppressed to their oppression.
The way this idea has survived in the book and in a lot of things that I write is that I am trying to be interested in what people are actually doing. You could say that reviewing a couple of books a year for a magazine is not the best way to do that – fine. But I want to know if there is a way, as a critic, to think about what people are actually doing, or what a book or film is actually doing. And that’s coming out of an aesthetic belief that it’s more interesting to do that, and a political belief that it’s more just to do that.
AH: You said earlier that you used to state your arguments perhaps more strongly than you felt them, and your review of Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom concerns the freedom not to mean what you say. So I’m curious – how often do you mean what you say?
ALC: In some of my earlier work, I’m not sure that I could have told you how serious I was being. That is, I think, a general affliction. But I was self-consciously being like, I am going to state this sort of indefensibly. Females has a lot of that going on, and when I read it now I see the vulnerability or the insecurity behind that. Also it still is kind of thrilling, which is to say I don’t necessarily think it was a mistake.
These days I absolutely mean what I write. I’m actually trying to tell you something rather than perform a particular idea, which is a legitimate form of writing, just part of a different literary tradition than what I’m doing now. I’m trying to tell you something quite earnestly about the thing that I’m writing about, and in that sense I really do mean it.
In the case of that Maggie Nelson piece, I think the point is not that I have the freedom to say whatever I want without accountability. That’s not interesting to me. It’s more that it is built into language that no one could be literal if they wanted to. When you refer to something, it’s always going to be pitched at an uncertain register. So the idea of policing who is allowed to have access to what seems to be a fundamental part of language – it feels incorrect to me.
AH: In that same Maggie Nelson piece, you write that “The higher critical act… is not to position the subtlety of one’s own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them but to draw out like water from rock the nuances that exist within the ideas one finds the most noxious, the most strident, the most difficult to dignify.” Since you’ve written op-eds as well as criticism, I’m wondering if you also apply that philosophy to other kinds of argumentative writing.
ALC: Yeah, even just from the point of view of what’s interesting. There’s only so much utility in going on about how something that’s bad is bad. I know I say that as someone who has gone on at length about things that I thought are bad, and there are versions of that that I think are more or less successful, but what I mean is that my personal distaste is only so interesting to other people. It can be entertaining, but to make it worthwhile, it has to move onto something other than just distaste or revulsion.
So, yes, I do try to abide by what I wrote in that piece. I want to hack past what a less clever version of myself would content herself with and try and find something serious. Is there a serious idea in here somewhere, or is there a real conviction? Or is there a real kind of underlying assumption? Can I find someone on the other line? I want to find the other person, and the best work, I think, is the work where I feel like I really have found them.
AH: In “Criticism in a Crisis,” you write that “if it is a choice between left-wing art and left-wing criticism, I will choose the latter every time… The problem of much (though not all) ‘political’ art is that the artist is trying too hard to be her own critic, premasticating the work so that all we have to do is swallow.” I think a lot about the question of how to make good art that is also political. Do you have an example of political art that you feel is not premasticated?
ALC: An example of work that is very explicitly, intentionally trying to do something – it can be very hard to do that effectively. For instance, I remember seeing Prima Facie with Jodie Comer. It’s a one-woman show about a barrister who has been defending accused rapists, and then she is one day raped, and she goes through the process that she has forced other women to go through. I loathed it because it was trying so hard to tell me something not just that I already know, but that I would have to already know in order to care about the show. There’s just a very simple loop there, and it’s not accomplishing anything.
AH: Devil’s advocate, though, how is that different from “writing for the person who already agrees with me,” as you’ve said you do?
ALC: Well, I don’t actually think that people think what I already think – I have a high opinion of my ability to produce thoughts that other people generally would not produce. But I want to give the reader the chance to feel that I am just telling them what they already know. What I mean is that I want to impart those ideas with so much force and gentleness that they feel like things that you already believe, or already think, or already wonder.
And I don’t think that an artist should have the same relationship to their audience as a critic does, because many artists are very poor critics – and, you know, probably the other way around, too. It’s just not what I’m looking for from an aesthetic experience, whether it’s a heady or intellectually stimulating one or just a piece of entertainment. So when an artist does decide to do that, I feel condescended to in a way that I don’t feel if I’m reading a good essay. Time and a place, as with all things.
ALC: You often read works biographically because, as you’ve said, “persons are where books come from.” How do you feel about your own work being read biographically? You mentioned that you don’t write about yourself that much anymore – does that have anything to do with how you want your work to be read?
ALC: I am much less interesting to myself than I used to be, thankfully. If I become interesting to myself again, I am sure that I will write about it. And it’s not lost on me that, in this political environment, it’s going to be necessary to respond to current events more – it’s not like I haven’t done that already.
I have been quite public about a number of things, partly out of my own desire to do so, and partly because it is the price of admission for writers with marginalized identities of some kind. There is a pressure on a trans person in public, of which we have very few, to end up in memoir, basically. So there’s work in the book that is very directly autobiographical, and it would not be hard to try to read the rest of the book through those parts of the book. If I were reviewing it, that’s one way I might do it. But I have no control over how the book will be read, and that’s fine.
The reason I’m interested in biographical readings is – I mean, I can’t deny that there’s an aspect of gossip, right? It’s fun to notice a little biographical detail from someone’s life end up in a story ten years later. But to me the point of it is not just because I’m interested in biography. Again, it’s more that I am trying to figure out what’s actually happening. Books do come from somewhere, and I’m looking for someone to talk to. I am trying to get them to come out and play. That may feel a little disingenuous because of how cruel I may have been to some of the people I’ve written about, but it is coming from a place of really wanting to know them. And really knowing someone is a difficult and painful thing for all of us, most of the time.
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