In a shocking turn of events, there’s another discussion of Transgender Marxism . I’ll give you all a moment to contain your gasps.
For anyone new to this: Transgender Marxism is a collection of essays by, you guessed it, transgender Marxists, a PDF of which can be found here - https://transreads.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-07-15_60f0b3d5edcb7_jules-joanne-gleeson-transgender-marxism-1.pdf
I’m hosting a discussion group on these essays, and so I’m sharing my initial read-through and note-taking with the online class (you).
I hope that we can spark a discussion, or at the very least that we can all learn a little something.
The discussion on the very lengthy intro (and links to all other essay discussions) can be found here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/395378
Today’s essay is Encounters in Lancaster by JN Hoad.
JN Hoad is a femme de lettres, carer and communist in the North West of England. They are concerned with trans and queer care practices, and how these come to make change in the world. Their work has appeared in Salvage magazine, Blind Field and New Socialist.
Edit: the discussion continues with Zoe Belinsky’s essay here - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/437038
“Social discipline treats othered, unremitting bodies as raw material, mere substance to be moulded, and so denies our agency and social life. Whatever your appetites, they can only be fed to you through the recognition of the state, managers, and forces of sexual control. From this view, the bodies which inhabit and make the world are featureless, except in as much as they must be disciplined, arranged, and put to useful work.”
“A ‘materialist’ analysis which sees only particles falling through the void regards individuals exactly as modern capital regards precarious workers.”
This is what I mentioned earlier: even those who seek to dismantle capitalism’s extreme exploitation and expropriation of labour as a value commodity fall victim to the mindset that sees bodies as resources devoid of the myriad physical and metaphysical needs and desires they experience.
There was an entire, really well-written, analogy to Pac-Man. Didn’t expect this essay to take that turn, but I enjoyed it. Pac-Man goes through the maze, doing his work of cleaning away the dots, consuming them but not digesting them: he is not a living body, merely a tool of labour. Hoad compares this to their time as a server, navigating the labyrinthine convention centre rooms, clearing away after the bourgeois, seen as nothing but a tool of labour, despite the human needs of their flesh.
In describing a queer community club event run by anarchists:
“A single photo captures this ecstatic matrix of encounters. From the stage, we look down upon the dancing crowd, packing the room front to back, the shadows and awkward angle making the venue seem cavernous and labyrinthine compared to its stumpy reality under the houselights. Limbs and faces form a warm, collective blur. The long digital exposure fills the air with coils and scratches of green, red, and white laser light, bouncing and spiralling among the performers. Charged particles of glitter falling in a void, orchestrated and expressive.”
“The same freedom fighter eventually takes me along to Antifa queer self-defence classes in Manchester. I learn to punch their gloved hands in full force hundreds of times. Those repeated exertions transform my body, its capacities and habits. As much as sex, dancing, or even hormones have. Over weeks of playfighting, I come to assume my body with confidence. Time was when leering straight men on an enclosed train, or handsy strangers on the dancefloor, would reliably cause a panic attack. Now I move confidently in the dark.”
Self-defence is so important, sometimes I wish that I was able to be more athletic. The confidence of knowing that you aren’t easy to over-power: transfeminine people are often criticised for strength or aggression, deemed as unladylike, but if it’s an option for you, please take it. Safety is more important than delicacy.
“We need a fuller account of how an encounter can constitute – or disrupt and shatter – bodies: how whole scenes, movements, cadres, riots, can have their origin and substance in the sudden, transformative appearance of strangers. In short, we need to be able to account for encounters like Mary Burns and Friedrich Engels, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.”
“state sanctions and casual brutality are always operating to make straight subjects seem coherent, assumed”
“Those individuals that conform to the straight path are, then, not falling in a void, but living in a world whose substance has already been historically and violently moulded to give way to their drives, swimming with the tide”
The “natural” state of cisheteronormativity was murderously imposed on society, enforced through violent corrective measures to arrive at a place where people can look you in the face and tell you that being queer is a “new trend,” and that the “default” is straight.
“To intervene in these scenes of encounters, violent and liberatory, is to work as an aleatrix – one who rolls the dice. Becoming an aleatrix means to have an ethical concern with encounters. And to practice the ethics of expecting, and savouring. To feel the heat of other bodies, the chill of rejection, to allow ourselves to be enticed towards hostile prospects. To guide bodies towards a moment of transformation. This care in rolling the dice is what empowers us to swerve away from straightforward, to merge with ‘the aleatory constitution of a world’.”
This was a really fun read, I am a big fan of their writing style. Definitely a poet here (and I’m a sucker for poetry).
Thanks for joining me and reading along! <3
Thanks for sharing!
Well said.