Community, Love, Conversation: A Response to Diana Tourjée
By: B Lee Aultman
Tags: Politics, Transgender, Trans Women, Conversations

Community, Love, Conversation: A Response to Diana Tourjée

In her recent thought-piece published on Vice, Diana Tourjée suggested something a bit radical: Cisgender heterosexual (or cis-het) men are “part” of the trans community. She makes clear that cis men are not themselves trans. She instead points out that these men have played crucial and dialectical roles for her and other trans women’s identities. To generalize a bit, these men’s heteronormative desires reaffirm that trans women are women at an experiential level of womanhood. Trans women who are sexually and romantically attracted to cis men establish their own affective investments with intimacy. In other words, trans women find recognition. In universal terms, every person desires recognition but achieves in a variety of ways. The author goes on to argue that the fact these men feel or are induced to feel shame about their desires. This is, in part or in whole, a product of certain toxic conventions of phobic masculinity. In that sense they lack a “cultural narrative” through which they can express their desires. In that I think she means that men like Jack or Mike lack a shared vernacular that can speak across normative and nonnormative forms of attraction. Along these lines Tourjée is making a needed intervention into the concept and actuality of community talk. I want to expand on that notion and enable a conversation about the reparative effects of fantasy, normativity, and transness.

It is striking that “trans twitter” has reacted to Tourjée by either polemically standing against her or shrugging it off with the coolness of theory. Given the vexed relationship trans women have had (and still have) with cissexual men, it seems the polemical stance is expected. And for others the fact that a piece about sexuality and transness was published by yet another white trans woman didn’t warrant the time for a close read. What ends up being missed in either case is the attention that might be paid to conventions of conversation animating the author’s reparative optimism. Community here is not conceived monolithically. On the one hand, community refers to the affective and epistemic bonds connecting human beings along shared histories and present ordinaries. Communities are constituted as a collection of similarly-situated individuals who then bear the mark of “identity.” And yet, community refers to these and more. She includes within her definition the scenes of negativity (trauma, self-negation, dissipation) as well as affirmation that produce a coherent story out of the incoherence of desires of “trans amorous” men. These stories exceed the borders of identity. What, precisely, is the difference between trans amorous men and straight men? The absence of any cultural narrative (Tourjée’s phrase) that make sense of the differences that might go beyond the call out of fetishism (trans chasers) reaffirms the toxicity of heterosexual norms.

If cis-het men are part of trans women’s lives — if they have a “community” to call their own — it is because they meet at the borders where normative identity, affect, and desire meet the optics of recognition. And they meet in unpredictable ways. In this sense, such trans amorous men constitute part of the conversation among trans women, not excluding the complexities we all have about the meaning of sexuality, personhood, and dehumanizing objectification. What is it to be a man in cases where the coherent image of sexuality obscure? The shift in his object/scene of desire (the realization of the specific form of womanhood invested in) does not have to end with shame. But more importantly, it doesn’t have to end with violence against the woman. When any of us find that our object/scene of affective investment has changed or disappeared we revert to a language that makes sense of the encounter. But no language cogently pieces together what is now most urgently needed for the taxonomies of sexuality across heternormative affectspheres. This is where conversation is important.

Tourjée is opening up a conversation. Conversations are encounters in which each of us must give up our fantasy that we are in sovereign control of what we say and how we feel. Sustaining sovereign fantasies destroys the conversation. In conversation, we open the possibilities of having no orthodoxy, no declared end, no consensus to enjoin. We communicate while suspending those agreements for the sake of something that exceeds the situational context. We might return to that scene so as to learn from it. Conversations are in that way pedagogical. My recent scholarly anxieties reflect what I feel to be a general dismissal of conversation among critical activists. I have elsewhere written on what I have called the “trans complaint” in this regard. I argued, among other things, that this complaint literal. Trans communities aren’t whiny, or prone to existential negativity. I pointed out how trans people are subject to the pressures of sexual normativity in a number of lived ways (appearance, comportment, speech) that alter the possibilities of world-making. Trans people find ourselves attached to scenes in life that might satisfy basic needs of recognition (friendships, intimacy, work) but are continually disappointed at the same moment they are experienced. Reproducing those scenes is exhausting as the promise of recognition is never guaranteed. “Recognition is the gift that keeps on taking,” I suggested. The trans complaint is, rather, a style of responding to these pressures within the liberal optics of recognition. More often than not, however, it is a style that amplifies white bourgeois attitudes of transfemininity. Tourjée’s article is no stranger to amplification (to which I will return briefly). But the complaint might go something like this: We should know better than to rely on cis-het men to confirm our desires. We should know better than to think we can emancipate ourselves from cisnormative optics by unknowingly reaffirming them and accepting straight men into our lives. Besides, there is no “we” given our fragmented histories, stories, and lived experiences. The author turns to cis-het men — who by dint of their own identity categories get figured as discursive oppressors — as a means of conversation-starting. Not only for them but for trans women in their relations with them. Now, the extent to which it can be criticized for its racial naivete is fair game. For example, Tourjée skirts her own racial optics by asking how many cisgender women would think it perfectly okay to date a man who refuses to be seen with them in public. Black women (and women of color in general) continue to experience precisely this level of amorous misrecognition in public life.

My response would be that narratives like Tourjée open our thoughts to new modes of relating in spite of the power to disappoint. This is reparative as I conceive of it, a mode of relating to the world and others that converges on taking in. The reparative rejects dogmatic disavowal. To repair enables a conversation that suspends the negativities inspired by politics, desires to be right, to silence and correct. Repair is political in that it is an affective blend of love that rejects sentimentality. It doesn’t inflate love in disingenuous ways for the sake of spectacle. Love of the conversation more often reflects love as a reparative agent.

I want to conclude on this point. There is a paucity (but not an absence) of popular work on transness that speaks to the reparative. On a personal note, I thought Andrea Long Chu’s Females would be more than what it was. My math was wrong. Its glibness and flattened irony in the face of political urgency for trans women was partially devastating. I have and will continue to admire her work. But my reaction to Females is similar to that of Lauren Berlant’s questions to queer nihilist Lee Edelman in Sex, or the Unbearable: “If not repair, what? If not world-building, what? If the inevitable nonencounter, then what?” The “what” should be the intimate encounter, the routine of life-making, the episodic intervals that produce (and reproduce) sociality. So where does this leave transness and the conversations that need to be had in and out of the zones that terms like community demarcate? Reparative conversations about love emphasizes the nonsovereign relation we have to each other. Importantly, it does so without irony. Females is one example of how acrimony over who has the “hotter take” on representations of culture forecloses dialogue (and is absolutely antithetical such dialogic calls in “On Liking Women”). The worlds of those who promote hot takes over ordinary encounter are, I surmise, unaware of the inconvenience of others. That’s the real irony: the hot take denounces what is different in the name of a poetics of difference. Hypocrisy disguised by the satisfaction of wit. It deflates the positive virtues of being in conversation by summing up the world in a few characters. So much for ethics.

So I end on a somber note. Perhaps this distance is a space of abeyance from a normative world that does us harm. In that drawn-out space of experiencing harm it is easy to find the savage takedown appealing. But there is potentiality in another encounter, another story that leads us through more fragmented worlds, another conversation that enables an ethical relation of repair.