Theory-Shaped Resentments and Materialist Methodology

an unedited blog post on the day's discourse

Don’t use gender theory to litigate gay bar beef. The airing of resentments between friends will give rise to questions that almost seem theory-shaped: do straight tgirls or gay tgirls have it worse? or: what is to be done about misogynist men who play with their gender expression? or: are late transitioners privileged compared to early transitioners, or is it the other way around? These questions, and many others like them, must be scrupulously ignored. Their terms are, at best, local and imprecise, and at worst are so loaded and unfalsifiable that they open up discursive space for campaigns of abuse and ostracization. Much like the gay bar beef they imitate, the theory-shaped resentment is only resolvable through a popularity contest, or else a consensus by inertia. The end result is praise for the praised and abuse for the abused, almost always along the usual lines of power and authority. Let us instead focus on propositions that are falsifiable, arguable, and explicitly grounded in a negotiable methodology.

This started as a rebuttal to the panel on Transfemininity and Class Mobility, in which Kadji Amin, Joan Lubin, Gareth Gavin, and Heather Love spoke. As I kept going, I realized that I wanted a blog post more than a proper essay. I will leave it to others to systematically approach the halfassed bullshit a bunch of academics said. For my piece, I’d like to contribute some thoughts on feminist materialisms. Having been one of the architects of the recent-ish idea of “materialist feminism”, and having made many mistakes within that framework, I hope that my thoughts have some benefit. That panel’s subject - class mobility and the structuring conditions of transfeminine participation in the labor market - is of vital importance, and deserves to be better thought. I feel that what is useful in materialist feminism must be rigorously salvaged, and not allowed to be overshadowed by its abuses and imprecisions.

What does materialism, in the feminist context, propose? The best definition I have come up with is this: the ideas, categories, and practices through which social actors attempt to understand the world must be articulated in their relationship to how humans survive. An account of, say, a legal struggle for formal equality, is incomplete if it cannot account for that struggle’s relationship to property, production, labor, reproduction, etc, as well as accounting for the ways in which its own account has been mediated by these factors of survival.

Contained within my definition here is a metaphysics that needs to be explicitly articulated, because it is the stumbling block for most attempts at a materialist feminism. Materialism is strongly realist about labor, property, and survival: it proposes that there are knowable dynamics that structure how we live and work. These dynamics precede social-scientific observation, and supersede our attempts to name them. The dynamics of capitalist accumulation, dispossession, valorization, etc. are real. These dynamics also structure what thoughts and speech acts are available to us. One can, then, take up the naive realist stance, and decide to speak only of the “real” beneath the epiphenomenal - beneath the name “trans women” are a few classes of workers, perhaps a few exceptional forms of labor market discrimination which bring them into discursive contact. Alternatively, one can take a more skeptical orientation toward theoretical speech - the “real” of labor and survival is something akin to the Freudian unconscious. “Material reality” can’t be directly represented into political speech, but the theorist must maintain a contingent assemblage of concepts that negotiates with, returns to, and is undone by the dynamics of survival. As Frederic Jameson put it, such a theoretical practice is dialectical, “acquired only by a concrete working through of detail, by a sympathetic internal experience of the gradual construction of a system according to its inner necessity.” (Marxism and Form, 1971)

From a philosophical perspective, all of this is very sketchy. Why should labor be more real than speech? How is it that dynamics of human behavior - which are famously made by humans, but not as they please - could possess a unique form of substantiality or necessity? Why is this any less stupid than appeals to “biological reality,” a similar form of skeptical realism?

For my own purposes, I can only argue for a materialist outlook from a strategic vantage. I find it impossible to believe in the reality of any figure of human speech, cognition, or perception. Concepts are empty, impermanent, and co-arising. If there is an essence or truth beneath these empty phenomena, it is the property of God and not ours to represent. It is my sincere hope that there is an “inner necessity” to which dialectical method aligns my will, but this is a matter of faith, not argument. I am, however, convinced by the argument for skillful means with which to reduce suffering. Arguing for the reality of survival enables us to argue for a renegotiation of knowledge production, specifically its reorientation toward the poor and excluded. The skeptical realist move allows us to argue from outside existing confines of debate - your argument is invalid not because it is incoherent or improper, but because it is missing necessary information and context. (Perhaps going further, it also licenses internal critique: the outside is already present within academia, and by pressing at its contradictions we can reveal the conditions under which our knowledge is produced.) By making labor, dispossession, and property relations necessary, materialist methodologies can make the knowledge held by poor people similarly necessary. Materialism enables academics and para-academics to argue for looking outside of academia, and aligning their professional knowledge production with a wider field of emancipatory struggle. Sketchy propositions enable us to, for a time, do something for human freedom.

But of course, most of the proponents of a materialist methodology do a rotten job of returning to the knowledge of poor people. Rather, they substitute their preferred layer of academically empowered producers of knowledge to represent poverty, which supersedes whatever poor people have to say about it. This could be gender or racially marginalized academics, labor statisticians, or whatever Marxist, transfeminist, etc. dogmatist is lying around. Substitution is bolstered by the naive realist proposition, “I know the material reality beneath your silly words, and I’m going to tell you all about it.” Substitutionism and naive realism enable the theory-shaped resentment to take flight. Able to position themselves as representatives of subjugated knowledge, the failed materialist is enabled to say pretty much any bullshit they want.

Substitutionism and naive realism are also annoying and difficult to fight. Rigorous inclusion of academically marginalized people is not easy. It’s always easier to find a nearby academic, and the building of intellectually fruitful relationships with marginalized people takes a tremendous amount of time and trust. Naive realism is also a powerful tool with which to agitate, educate, and organize. It is thrilling and motivating to find oneself the bearer of a hard-won truth. Adopting a dialectical method, by contrast, requires that one become needling, negative, open-minded, and patient. Though in theory we ought to have the mental resources to stand firm in our temporary, contingent commitments, most of us don’t. It is exhausting to continually undermine one’s own intellectual foundations, and a great way to make desperate people feel that their time is being wasted. You can’t just say “we’re doing dialectics now” and handwave away the difficulties of doing so.

Materialist transfeminism ought to strive toward a methodology, something firmer than vibes and propositions to ground us through messy, protracted struggle. It is beyond me, for now, to articulate in depth what that methodology might be. What I can say, however, is that I believe a materialist transfeminism will be at its best as a theoretical architecture which proposes, conducts, analyzes, and critiques interventions into the conditions of trans people’s survival. These interventions must be conducted for and with the people whose lives stand to be transformed, from their very beginning. Even the smallest, most individual efforts at exploration will do, for a start.

Some proposals for the enterprising materialist:

Embed yourself within an effort to “hire the dolls.” What mechanisms to do so are available? What are their limits? Who was reached? What new possibilities emerged as a result of effort?

Look within union struggles to secure trans healthcare for union members. (Presumably a lot of you are UAW or AFT, and can get involved pretty swiftly.) What faultlines are emerging within the union? What can the U.S.’s largest unions achieve in this regard? What solidarities are necessary to take on the expansion of Catholic healthcare monopolies?

Dig deep into the struggle against homelessness. What kind of interplay exists between emergent socialist municipal governments, networks of trans mutual aid, and NGO and para-NGO housing providers? What concrete positions are being advanced from within the organized, transgender homeless? How can the socialist left reorient around these positions?

All this is to say, please fucking do something. The downward mobility, and fragile upward mobility, of trans women is a present day refugee crisis. We do not understand it, and we are doing a terrible job of addressing it. Spending time asking “are bricks bourgeois?” ought to humiliate us all.