In Defense of Paranoia, part 2
weak theories and helicopters
In the last installment of this series, I talked about trigger warnings. I talked about how easy and popular it is to critique purity teens using Eve Sedgwick’s concept of paranoid reading, and how this is a mistake. (By “purity teen,” I mean the kind of person, usually understood to be young, who is thoroughly and uncritically sold on the concept of safety and moral correctness as a queer and feminist political goal.) In fact, our purity teens are all too often accomplished practitioners of reparative reading, and in order to parse out the actual manifest content of the their claims and anxieties, we often need what Sedgwick calls “paranoiacally structured” thought. Is it even fair, actually, to say that we are dealing with a generational problem?
But I’m getting ahead of myself—last week, I mentioned the controversy surrounding Isabel Fall’s Hugo-nominated short piece of science fiction, “Helicopter Story,” and this week I want to describe some acts of reparative reading performed by the mob that chased Fall out of literature. If you’re not familiar with this tangled, thoroughly picked over story, there’s a good rundown by Emily VanDerWerff here—and if what I’m saying about Sedgwick sounds like Greek to you, you’ll probably want to read my first essay about this. Central to what I’m untangling here is the question of language’s productive power—as Sedgwick points out, it’s central to the claims of anti-essentialist thought that language is productive of reality. How, then, is anti-essentialist thought adequately to answer the demand of the securitization-obsessed queer who therefore wants to make language a safe place? Clearly, we can’t simply tell this person that language can’t hurt them—we know it can.
Initially, this mob attributed huge destructive power to language, and particularly to art, such that Fall’s story is a dangerous and opaque part-object against which women and trans people must be defended. Then, as it came out that Fall was herself a trans person, and trans Twitter began to name the transphobic mob as a transphobic mob, the mob responded by declaring their own speech acts ones of ordinary criticism, ones any author should expect and metabolize. (This would also imply that readers should be able to metabolize fiction without crying harm, but never mind.) Quickly, the transphobic mob members began to lament the mob harassment they were receiving as a result of their decision to join a mob, and language surged back into a position of power. At this point, as usually happens in situations of collective transphobic behavior, it became very popular to speak solemnly about how it is so, so sad that so many people had been hurt—on all sides.
This entire thing is a dead horse. Everyone involved, particularly the author whose review of the story I’m about to close read, has said that they are very sorry and will never do it again. I appreciate this. The mob’s various now-penitent leaders are all the unambiguous tragic protagonists of their own apologies, of course, but, as Noël Coward wrote—“Don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.” Because of this apology, I won’t mention my specific author’s name here—not least because she does come across as sincere in her political confusion and ignorance. I wish her well. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call her “Jones,” both because I think the overly personalized nature of this conversation has been unhelpful from the start, and because I want to emphasize the fact that most of the writing I’m quoting here is work she’s disavowed. I cannot forget an apology full of incredible phrases like, “As it turned out, my act of misgendering Isabel Fall was even more catastrophically harmful because it wasn't directed at a man,” and “I had forgotten, or never properly internalized, the fact that some trans people are extremely vulnerable.” Nonetheless, a quick biographical sketch, for context: Jones is a writer of genre fiction, but is perhaps better known as a critic, particularly of PC games. She has quite a few novella and short story credits to her name, and is a graduate of Clarion West, a kind of Breadloaf for the SFF set. Jones spoke loudly about the helicopter story, and a lot, and as soon as it came out. Then, as Fall’s identity was revealed, she became her own reparative reader, going back over her review of the story to explain her own feminist heroism to herself. Hence, my feeling that this disavowed writing provides a helpful opportunity for discussion.
The central thrust of Jones’s initial review of the story is simply this: that it was written by a man. (At the time, a lot of readers thought the writer must be a transphobic male 4chan type person; a special prize for paranoid reading goes to the people who thought that Fall’s minimalist bio—“Isabel Fall was a born in 1988”—was a 14/88-related Nazi dogwhistle.) Jones can tell by the prose, which does not “feel like it was written by a cis or trans woman.” Now, an awful lot of red-blooded paranoid queer reading these days centers on ferreting out trans-exclusionary radical feminist thought, often at the expense of more useful projects—you might expect a paranoid, securitization-obsessed bad millennial queer subject to fixate on it. Indeed, I’m sure Jones runs across multiple full-throated denunciations of the mythical “TERF” every day online. If Jones were, as such a paranoid reader would be, compulsively fixated upon transphobia, if she were really thus precluded from any other thought, it would not be possible for her to opine that “[i]t feels like “Isabel Fall” is a straight cis person who is a current or former helicopter pilot. Probably a white dude.” Can’t she hear what she’s saying? Surely, a paranoid reader would cringe at this remark: “The writing [...] about life and sex as a woman, and about PTSD-like reactions in women, feels flat and fake.” Most surprising, though, in its glaringness, is the moment when Jones accuses Fall of the paradigmatic sin of fetishizing womanhood. Fall reduces sacred womanhood to “surface details,” Jones declares, such as “high heels & make-up. Femmes have a word for that shit. We don’t call it ‘womanhood.’ We call it ‘glam.’” It feels like a New York Times op-ed by Camille Paglia about how Caitlyn Jenner wears too much makeup. If Jones’s problem here is that she obsessively reads only to rehearse the same foregone political conclusion, how is it that here she violates her community’s stated values so blatantly?
Sedgwick says that paranoia places its faith in exposure, but Jones’s desire to expose here is a very different one from the kind for which Sedgwick chastises her post-structuralist colleagues. Here, Jones intends to expose, through a reading of Fall’s prose, Fall’s true gender: that of a misogynist man. But we fall into the danger here of thinking that paranoia and homophobia might be simply the same forces wearing different hats, which they are not. Sedgwick does write of the homophobe’s paranoia, and of how the relationship between paranoia and homophobia in Western thought has been “peculiarly intimate”—but when she describes the practice of paranoid reading, she connects it most urgently not to the trans-exclusionary radical feminist or the religious right, but to theorists like Judith Butler, DA Miller, and Guy Hocquenghem. She points to this last theorist’s rereading of Freud’s homophobic claim that all paranoia is repressed desire: “If paranoia reflects the repression of same-sex desire, then paranoia is a uniquely privileged site for illuminating not homosexuality itself, but rather precisely the mechanisms of homophobia and heterosexism.” Considered from this vantage, the paranoid way of reading that Sedgwick describes is something Jones suffers from a shortage of, rather than an excess, and to imply that her transphobia and her paranoia are one is to foreclose the possibility of thinking through their peculiar intimacy. Especially because, once Fall’s trans status was revealed, Jones had to reconcile her own beliefs about her pro-trans politics with her paranoid acts of exposure—and chose to do so through a dazzlingly reparative rewriting of her review.
This was two weeks later. The story had been pulled down; Fall’s life in literature as a trans woman had been blown to shreds. An Atlantic journalist reached out to Jones for comment. Sensing bad optics, and wanting to get ahead of the matter, Jones published a new essay on her Patreon. In this new essay, Jones finds herself in a perfect example of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s “depressive position,” the concept in which Sedgwick’s reparative reading has its roots. Klein posits that as a baby, you don’t initially know your mother is one person. You think she is one person when she pleases you, whom you love, and a different person when she does not please you, whom you hate. Once you realize she’s one woman, and that for the rest of your life love is going to involve reconciling such confusing experiences, you freak out. Thus, you enter the depressive position for the first time, and it is from this position that you will carve out strategies for dealing with the world’s imperfect part-objects and making a life with them. After discovering that Fall is a trans woman, Jones has to process the revelation that these two characters from her personal psychodrama—the sexist/transphobic male writer and the tragic trans victim—are actually one person: Isabel Fall. From this depressive position, Jones attempts to salvage her world.
“There is a difference between letting a doctor or a sympathetic friend probe your wounds, and getting randomly jabbed by a faceless stranger,” she writes. “It takes enormous trust for readers from a marginalized community to let a writer play literary games with their oppression, and most of us can't give that trust to someone whose intentions are too opaque.” In other words, we should take a reparative view of Jones’s actions in drumming up this mob: she was confronted with a faceless stranger, and she was scared. Indeed, her theory of the case keeps plenty of space open for the story’s wrongness, its misogyny: “[n]othing that's been said actually makes me like the story better--I find casual stereotyping of women obnoxious and shallow, and misogyny in science fiction will always grate on me.” Now, in an essay that initially reads as an attempt to go back and apologize for transphobic choices made in the heat of the moment, Jones talks herself right back into her initial view of the story as harmful and dangerous, a faceless stranger, jabbing away.
“Yes, I stand by my review,” she writes. “No information on the author or her intentions was provided, [...] and I gave my first impressions and opinion.” She is “happy to know that the story was written in good faith and with positive intent,” but by this time, the general theoretical line on this communal tarring and feathering had already coalesced among the SFF writers involved in it, cobbled together of reparatively intricate claims: this was not a transphobic mob. There were trans people in it, and besides, their anger was not at Fall herself, but at her editor, Neil Clarke, whose editorial practices had been so inadequate. Clarke should have understood that trans language is uniquely dangerous. He should have provided a trigger warning. He should have had trans sensitivity readers read the story (it came out shortly that he had, whereupon the mob suggested that he had had too few trans people read it, or perhaps the wrong kind of trans people). Most of all, he should have made it clear exactly what and who the author was. Transsexual artists must not be allowed to deceive their public. It is the depressive position that allows this fear of deception to double and mutate so that it can avoid detection as transphobia: perhaps the danger is that a trans woman writer might appear to be a feminist woman when she is really a misogynist man, or perhaps the danger is that a trans woman writer might appear to be a misogynist man when she is really a feminist woman. Either way, she’s deceptive, and it’s a problem. In her reparative reading, Jones can feel both fears, substituting them for one another as necessary.
For Sedgwick, reparative reading produces what affect theorists call “weak theory.” Here, a theory is something you use to organize your emotional life. Strong theories, like paranoia, can take over a lot of territory fast and hard, brutally determining the thrust of your emotional life. By contrast, weak theories are highly contingent upon their context, and incapable of taking over too much territory. Their extreme contingency can allow for a great deal of subtlety and contradiction—and my point here is, a reflexive habit of holding unresolved contradictions in your head is not always a blessing. Here, Jones commits several perfect acts of weak theory: for a moment, she can have it every way. The story can and even should be published, and the situation of its removal and Fall’s harassment is sad—and also, the story is sexist, her review was quite right, people are being harassed by dangerous transsexuals, and Fall’s misogyny has a morally significant negative impact. The spaces these successive weak theories take up may be individually small, but like any good space where the depressive position can emerge, each one is a foothold for a self’s flawed and insistent emergence. Jones’s use of reparative reading here chills me with the reminder that contingency, smallness, and intellectual vulnerability do not always signal the absence of power, or of loyalty to power, or of the desire to wield one’s power over others.
At her essay’s end, Jones oscillates between reparative and paranoid reading at a dizzying speed, with a finale that enacts the intimate relation between paranoia and transmisogyny in dazzling CinemaScope, as she offers what she hilariously terms a “ general comment”: it is “VERY HARD to judge the merits of any narrative by a marginalized author, if you don't share their marginalization.” Thus, “[a]s a cis person, I seldom stray out of my lane when it comes to trans authors writing trans narratives. I read them. Sometimes I even recommend them, if I find them entertaining or enlightening. But I am not equipped to judge them, particularly where ‘authenticity’ is concerned.” You would think that this precluded the essay ending on a strong claim about Fall’s story, but no—weak theories trailing behind her, Jones goes for the big finish. “I'll admit,” she admits, “that I have many trans and nonbinary folks in my social and professional sphere.” (I’d like to take this opportunity to admit that this is also true of me.) “I would like to think that these people are not all carrying around a lot of really gross baggage and stereotypes about the bodies and sexuality of cis women,” she writes plaintively. But she has “realized that when I say that Isabel Fall's story felt ‘inauthentic’ to me, ultimately what I'm saying is that MY trans friends do not say this kind of stuff around me, or behave as if they believe it. Because if they did, we wouldn't be friends, would we?”
She seeks to explain, as we do when we read reparatively, how it is that she has made this life, this self, this social position in the imperfect world. “It makes me sad,” she writes, “to think that Isabel Fall is writing from a common point of view. That this is how many trans people feel about women and womanhood.” Oh, wow! Mask off, as those paranoid kids like to say! Here is another weak theory of the case, arriving in reparative style straight from a depressive swoon. This weak theory is ready to explain how it is that in its little domain, a good aspiring ally from queer nerd Twitter has found herself repeating claims about “many trans people” that would be equally comfortable in the mouth of either Mary Daly or Tucker Carlson—take your pick. There’s no need to worry about their apparent ideological mutual exclusivity.
What are these toxic notions about womanhood, apparently so common among trans people? The plot of Fall’s story is very simple: the narrator was once a cis woman. In her world, it’s possible to link gender to weapons technology, such that expression of one’s gender come in the form of acts of war. She has chosen such a path, and is now an attack helicopter, her true self, an identity that brings her much joy. Her gunner is also her partner, since both of their genders and sexual identities have been reassigned by the forces of empire—but her partner is having doubts. “Why do you think we just blew up a school?” asks the doubting gunner—but the protagonist is steadfast in her self-love, her desire to be safe, her entitlement to security. “Why do I text my best friend the appearance and license number of all my cabdrivers?” the protagonist thinks to herself. “These were the things that had to be done.”
The story’s critique of homonationalism is frank. You could even call it a little too obvious—although personally, I’m always charmed by science fiction’s tendency towards the bluntly allegorical. Throughout the story, our narrator invokes the traumatic nature of life as a woman as, in no small part, her motivation for and belief in the beauty and righteousness of the gender given her by the US Army. “No one stalks an attack helicopter. No slack-eyed well-dressed drunk punches you for ignoring the little rape he slurs at your neckline. No one even breaks your heart.” No wonder a writer like Jones cannot tolerate her story—the target of her satire is precisely Jones’s kind of validity-pilled, safety-pilled politic. The story exposes this strand of feminism as a function of white American women’s safety within and loyalty to empire, where the transphobic feminist will always be first to arrive at the party, since, as Jules Gill-Peterson recently wrote, she is “carrying on what she has libidinally metabolized as a civilizational mandate for white women as keepers of the order of things.”
This question of white women’s role in empire can bring us back to the question of language’s productive power. Many young feminists and queers, having arrived at the conclusion that language produces reality, thus seek to securitize language, and particularly art. It’s my hope that, by offering this close reading of Jones’s particular articulation of this civilizational demand, I’m pointing out how far it is from some worrying tendency on the part of youth to be “overly sensitive” to social systems like transphobia, or to practice a paranoid reading style that can only do one thing. On the contrary, the problem is much more severe, and although its manifestations shift from generation to generation, it is not generational in nature. Indeed, I have held back a tidbit from you: despite how emblematic she might seem of a certain type of trigger warning-fixated millennial or zoomer, Jones is actually in her fifties. She is not a confused kid—she’s the acting president of a major SFF professional association, and she is acting out a politics of safety that will be familiar to many feminists of her generation. White cis feminist demands for securitization have always been about empire, the nuclear family, and the need for the white cis woman to acquire something called “equality” through assuming her proper position and propping up them both. A real attempt to reckon with this demand when it begins to make demands upon art and literature sends us back to the imbrication of white, settler-colonialist feminisms with the anti-sex lesbian separatist politics of the Sex Wars—not at all an easy theoretical task, and all the more difficult because of the ease with which it can appear old hat.
What I feel I can offer here is an examination, from the ground, of how these tendencies are manifesting themselves in a few particular types of queer online sociality, such as the community of genre writers I’ve discussed in this essay. In my next installment, I’ll examine that Jack Halberstam’s 2014 Bully Bloggers post about trigger warnings, which came in the wake of a wave of controversy about their use in the classroom. In that post, Halberstam connects the problem of queer demands to securitization to the Sex Wars, but gets triggered himself—and I don’t blame him, since I’m sure being Jack Halberstam in the Sex Wars was just awful. Still, the post is wantonly cruel and very strange—a vividly painful memory, for me, of when I was a youth with extremely pro-trigger warning politics. This post was the moment I decided that there was no possibility of good faith in what I still believed was an intergenerational debate. Indeed, examining it again may make me turn back fondly to some of the politics of my youth—maybe I had some good points after all! What I’m sure of is this: that trigger warnings are a phantom here—a way of avoiding talking about that impossible type of person, the trans youth. Stick around.