My thoughts on this book are somewhat confused but I think itās just because there is such richness to the book, it articulates things and logics in a way that I didnāt know could exist and that it feels like Iāve been waiting for someone else to come and put the words in my mouth.
The most salient points about it
- The fact that the legal or the penal or the carceral system cannot be trusted with feminist or progressive aims because it is worse than indiscriminate, it still worsens the conditions of the worse off while empowering those who are best off.
- The address of desire, which I think was also talked about in n+1 Andrea Long Chu. I remember that I read this essay a while ago because Joe told me to read it, and it has more sinister overtones in that context. How could someone who put his desires above all, and suffocated my own in the process, be trusted with a long and sophisticated document that says, you desire what you desire, thereās no one who should be able to say anything to you about it, because that is moral authoritarianism. All I asked was that you treat me like a human being. And your desire was to treat me inhumanely. Who is right in this context?
- Even the fact that they acknowledged my nonbinary identity, that they decided to minimize it in some way. I donāt really speak about the fact that I prefer certain pronouns over others, it is a symbol of my ambivalence, not in engaging with gender or sexuality per se, but of defining myself or allowing others to easily engage with defining me.
- That was something that I now believe deeply that he felt uncomfortable with. If a straight man is confronted with a nonbinary individual, it might be deconstructive or demeaning or confusing to acknowledge that the person in front of them is not really female but possibly even a little bit male, or that they could be (mis)recognized as male in public. Maybe I was really a status symbol and that was destabilizing in that context. Because I know that this person could not have really loved me.
- āI bet I would be nonbinary in a US contextā I interpreted that as first as a kind of glee in the possibility of it, the remaking of oneself in a different context, but it feels now like it was just dismissing my own thoughts and decisions on the matter, which are not not to be engaged with but I donāt think that this really constituted careful or caring engagement with me. I guess much of this relationship did not have the elements of careful or caring engagement with myself, so Iām not sure what else I expected.
- And the fact that though desire is so personal, we should ask the question of where it comes from, we should still investigate what is going on, we should still think about how it comes into play, even if the end result is confusing, and we should think about how we can be open to other possibilities, and to really experience freedom, which is not avoiding the scrutiny of our desires but to explore what it would look like if we donāt let everyone else tell us what to desire in the first place. And the implications of multiple axes of oppression in understanding desire, and how desire is not an excuse for what is going on, but another doorway to investigate what is going on and how the greater system is affecting our own lives and the possibilities contained within.