I get a little suspicious of some theory-heavy political manifestos, in part because I think it's always a temptation to get completely lost in the pleasures of theorizing while eschewing concrete plans of action. Erin Manning's Politics of Touch seems to surrender to those pleasures, at least to judge from the chapter "Engenderings." Manning seems preoccupied with a continuous state of transformation of which touch is representative, a reaching toward a solidified state that never seems to materialize. Frustratingly, the structure of her text kind of takes that metaphor and runs with it. It's hard to tell from one moment to another whether she's discussing "touch" in a literal, scientific sense, or in a metaphorical sense, or in a political sense.
This approach bugs me because it seems to dwell in a space of unbridled academic optimism (which might just be on my mind because of reading Judy Wajcman's "From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience," which is very critical of the tendency among cyberfeminists* to assume that the mindbending possibilities of cybertechnology would, in and of itself, act as Liberator, despite the lack of a concrete methodology for how we could carry that liberation out). It's hard to jump from her politics of reaching out toward individuations (which, if I'm understanding correctly**, is an entity in the process of transformation, as we all are, rather than a discrete individual with an assumed definite boundary and form) to politics that can be used deliberately to effect change.
*While "Feminists with Mirrorshades" is nowhere near an accurate definition of this word, it's definitely the most rad definition. Feminists with anachronistic katanas? Motoko Kusanagi? MAYBE.
**A big if indeed.
That said, she has this great metaphor (which anyone in the class knows but which I'll go over for anyone who hasn't read the text): dance. For Manning, dance (particularly tango) involves the exact kind of perpetual reaching out that she uses metaphorically elsewhere, because the forms of movement that seem extremely definite actually emerge out of the tug and pull of two people. There's a constant negotiation taking place from movement to movement, and you can't really stay still and renegotiate, you've got to constantly be reaching out and adjusting. What's more, the dominant-seeming member of a pair can, in fact, become subordinate***. This hit home for me, because I'm really into the idea of dance as something that has ascribed gender roles but, through the actual experience of dancing, can actually manage to break down and queer those roles.
***Sorta like in BDSM. Don't look at me like that, it's Foucault's idea!
It hit me particularly strongly partly because of my own experience contra dancing and seeing how complex the gender interactions can get (especially when you start switching roles, or dancing in same-sex pairs). The balance between changing masses is a huge deal in contra, at least according to the folks who taught me, just as in Manning it's the contentious, developing interaction between individuations that can potentially revolutionize society.
But this metaphor also stuck with me because of my late obsession with Janelle Monae. Wait, here, have some context:
Someday I hope to be able to rock a suit and hairstyle half as cool as Janelle Monae.
The thing I'm hitting on here, which I got tipped off to via a David Brothers article (he also does a good job of introducing the cyberpunk themes of Monae's work, so the article is worth checking out), is the notion of dance as a revolutionary act of disobedience. Which, alright, normally that would've made me raise my eyebrows a bit, since Dance isn't exactly a taboo art form... except that now, between Brothers and Manning****, I'm picking out the fact that for Monae dancing is an act of defiance against roles, even when the roles are inherent in the dance style itself. The suit, in particular, helps underscore the queer nature of this defiance, actually.
****"Brothers" and "Manning." Huh. Weird male-oriented names I'm calling on here. What an odd coincidence.
So, sorting through Manning's odd prose by way of Janelle Monae songs about dancing androids, I'm starting to see how really she's working with a pretty tried and true theme of Theory, which is that upsetting and disrupting gendered categories can help to upset rigid and inflexible political institutions as well. That's clicking for me a little bit more even now as I type it, even though I don't dare claim that's her actual point. The essay is still very dense, and very disorienting, probably by design. But regardless, I think I'm starting to see a potential way forward from the abstract bliss of Theory. Part of reaching out might involve consciously entering a dance of gender with people, where we can pull even those that think they're acting out definite roles into a mutual bargaining of power in which identities are replaced by amorphous becomings and fluid performances. We're the solvent to the chemical borders here.
And it only took watching a bunch of music videos to get me to suss that out.
Hello and welcome to Cyborg Maria.
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