aidensimon:

loneberry:

What is negative feminism and anti-social queer theory? My fragmentary answer: it is a queer critique that aims to decenter positivity, productivity, redemptive politics of affirmation, narratives of success, and politics that are founded on hope for an imagined future. It’s rude politics and has no interest in being polite. It embraces masochism, anti-production, self-destructiveness, abjection, forgetfulness, radical passivity, aggressive negation, unintelligibility, negativity, punk pugilism, and anti-social attitudes as a form of resistance to liberal feminist and gay politics of cohesion. It’s about not-becoming because the notion of becoming is perceived as following the capitalist logic of production and models of success that are often tied up with colonialism. It asks, why the fuck should queers be nice? And asserts that politeness is heteronormative and we should embrace our utter failure at functioning within a colonialist, heteronormative, capitalist, racist, sexist and transphobic framework. Jack “Judith” Halberstam is an academic who has probably articulated this theory most lately. I want to talk about his theories and raise some pressing questions and criticisms of his controversial ideas in the context of my limited conversations with him. This essay is largely based on Jack’s article, The Anti-Social Turn in Queer Studies (pdf).

Driving in a car with Jack, my roommate Matthew and his partner JD. We have excited conversation about everything from bats to drag. Jack is rushed to get to get to the airport but is incredibly calm, easy going, and undemanding even though there’s no time for the promised dinner with the college’s budget. JD is a Buddhist enthusiast, eager to discuss this inspiring interest of his. In the car he mentions how much happier his is since coming to Buddhism, how it has transformed his thinking and allowed him to think lovingly of strangers, even the little buggers with their giant carts of shit standing in front of you in line at the grocery store. Now Jack is some whose recent work revolves around the heteronormativity of politics of hope and the imperialism of happiness. Jack adds, “But why would I want to think lovingly of everyone? Maybe there are people out there that are truly undeserving of my love.” The comments JD made sparked a fascinating discussion emotional dynamicness and the value of positive feelings, giving me a glimpse of the place from which Jack’s theories of queer failure and negative feminism come from. We questioned why there is a tendency to privilege certain “positive” or “good” feelings and examined the impulse to flatten or repress the full spectrum of affective responses.

For me, the (anti)politics of negation discussed by Jack arise from a queer resistance to emotional flatness and the privileging of feeling good to feeling like shit. It’s about challenging the productive and rationalist logic of capitalism that makes you feel insane if you can’t function within its framework. It’s about thinking through how emotion informs how we approach politics and how privileging an approach that only values positive feelings erases and denies the position of people who refuse to or simple just can’t feel happy about participating in such a shitty context. People who are angry or depressed as fuck and seek self-annihilation because the world demands our unity.

So where does radical negation get us? Jack’s borrowed mantra, no future, rejects such temporal considerations. But most of us out there probably still care about the viability specific political strategies. While I was at Ida, I got into a discussion with two people who were critical of Jack’s negative feminism and anti-social queer theory. They raise some good criticisms that I am trying to think through here.

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