The storm and rage around the Avital Ronell case in the US and beyond confuses many of us while it has also produced a forum for a deeply reactive emotional response – and this has been a huge surprise to me – among critical queer/feminist scholars. These are the intellectuals whose outspoken task has been to go against the grain; to keep theorizing, analysing and ”scientifying” matters that patriarchal society, conservative (male-run) academy, and the populist right-wing political front have wanted to label as troublingly non-matter(ing), incorrectly ideological, or just unintelligible and therefore wrong, problematic, shameful and condemned.
Why, then, do so many coming from this brave intellectual queer/feminist community now seem to forget the complicated character and history of their own becoming as an academic community, as risk-takers in the contingent sphere of academic intelligibility, and focus their righteous or at least morally upper-handy attention on one (however possibly ethically wayward) person, a queer/lesbian feminist woman?
The ‘we” who present the judging queer/feminist community are used to getting /being attacked by patriarchal powers exactly via this same strategy and rhetoric; of singling out and targeting of one person (or one course, or one discipline). Against this background I wonder why there exists an apparent need to use the same tactics here; when one of “our own” gets trashed, and others who are also “us” (actually, among the very best of us) along with her?
What are we afraid of? The “safe object” for the queer/lesbian never was safe.
Why do we race to defend ourselves against this one queer woman – who we label as horridly erring, no, more than that, horribly and monstruously abusive in her “neediness” – by willingly sacrificing her (and others) by reclaiming our own solid understanding of correctly moral behaviour, ”proper borders”, and superior knowledge of what constitutes abuse, power, and (bad) sexuality?
In my eyes, it is not a co-incidence that Ronell herself, in her earlier work, has argued for the necessity of the unintelligible, writing: “if we could communicate, we wouldn’t need to communicate.” This rage around her is communication, even if it takes the form of regression and defence.
What are the skeletons that we are trying to hide under our – apparently – morally purified academic beds by blowing our horns so loud around Avital Ronell?
Defence always tries to parade with so many trumpets that no one notices what it tries to hide. Read Anna Freud, for example. (Well, she herself definitely had one or two proper skeletons in her closet, but her personal life is not the matter here – although she is a pivotal part of that contingent history that we all participate in).
Anna Freud tells a story about a girl whose envy and jealousy towards her siblings combines in a fierce hostility towards her mother. But her love-fixation to the mother was not lesser than her hatred, and in this situation, a violent defensive conflict occurred. Finally, her ego solved this ambivalence by displacing one side of her ambivalent feeling outwards. Although the mother did not disappear as the love-object, a second important female person was needed, one that she hated violently. As time went on, and a few more dramatic stages took place, the procedure finally left upon the girl’s character a permanent paranoid imprint.
Are we not acting out this paranoid naughty girl who is longing so much for the feminine, maternal love but – to an equally forceful measure – hates it, hates the others who are of the same academic kin, but divergent, and cannot solve this ambiguity when someone tries to mess up our fragile scene? Are “we” queer/feminist scholars, as this girl, dancing around the expected academic grave of Avital Ronell who we see both as the ambiguous mother and the replacement object, channelling our inner conflict outwards? The shameful death we are eager to witness but at a safe distance, ensuring we have no part in it?
But, enough about Ronell now. I have never met her, and I don’t have enough knowledge of the US academic system or the Title IX to be able to add anything significant to that exact debate.
But what I do have, is a decades long experience of lesbian lives and lesbian academics. My lesbian career started by living through the so-called Sex Wars and anti-capitalist proto-queer dyke culture in the early 1980s Amsterdam, London and Helsinki. It continued by witnessing and participating in the institutionalism of Gender Studies in the early 1990s, and the simultaneous rise and struggle of Queer Studies, often in a close proximity to the newly established Gender Studies Departments and academic feminism(s).
And here is what I want to say, based on my proto/queer lesbian experience: in the hope of being able to add to the evolvement of the larger debate on “proper queer/feminist academics”, originating from the debate produced around the AR case.
Queers are, of necessity, really weird. This is the first and perhaps only queer rule: they take the weirdness of the human psyche extremely seriously. There are so many reasons for that; and this is at the core of the power of queer, in good and bad.
Although we now see millions marching in the metropolitan Prides, it is just one or two seconds away that we had to risk – under the regime of criminal law, condemnative religious order and crazy mental health discourse – the figuring out, exploring and expressing our desires, imaginations and identifications, and our romantic feelings and the nature of our pleasures. This risk-taking exploration and experimenting often took place on individual terms, without any pre/existing knowledge or feeling of a community. (Look at contemporary Russia, and you could see that all that we take as guaranteed today as our “rights” and “identities” and “communities” could be lost just in days by an autocratic order.)
This history of risking everything does not mean that our weirdness should be forgiven if it somehow harms others who depend on us. No. But it should be accounted for by those of “us” who think they need/could judge any of us. However, in particular, it should be accounted for, by those who never had to take this risk, or, by those who had to risk, but who deny it. An argument about sticking in a former victim position while abusing power is only so far interesting if it is not followed by a proper – queer – analysis of this specific position.
Do we want a world where people do not take risks? Risk-taking leads to adventures, surprises, new perspectives, odd encounters, dangers – well, to everything which, at the end creates pleasure because we bloom in the sphere of unexpected. Norms are there to be transgressed (yes, transgression still exists), to be played with. Exploring risky borders is bound to lead to many confusing, complex, contradictory, weird and odd situations. At the individual level, in the context of queer/lesbian, a life-time of risk-taking easily leads also to bizarre, eccentric, monomaniac, needy, masochist or other (seemingly) crazy combinations of character-building. No one is sound on this stage. Because no one is sound on any stage, to be more precise.
We lesbians, as women, are not socialized or expected to express any antisocial or active sexual desire or romantic feelings towards improper objects (remember, this is what Judith Butler, one of those we now want to get down along with Ronell, has taught us). In this situation, we act weirdly or do very strange things: as teenagers, we stalk the neighbour girl; as PhD students, we send letters with clips from the Donald Duck comics to our straight feminist supervisor because we cannot tell her that we manage to go through the difficulties of our dissertational pressures by imagining her as our favourite Donald Duck character, in some adventures with us; or, we cannot tell our lesbian supervisor that we do not want to help her to fold her laundry or to use her as our relationship shrink but we cannot tell about this inconvenient situation to anyone else, either, because, as feminists, we do not want to make her to look as a “needy” elderly woman, and to trash her dignity and respectable reputation in the eyes of those who never had to take the queer/lesbian risk. At the same time, our straight male supervisors ask from us whatever and no one ever thinks they are “needy”. They might be called other names, but never needy.
And this is important: “needy” seems to be something that we are accustomed to attach to such women who take risks, and explore the utter limits of their genius and psychical structure and pleasure and desire, and therefore they need, by necessity, to live an antisocial life, because no one could do these experiments and do the theoretical and/or intellectual work on this if living a “normal” social life. At the same time, these queer/lesbian risk-takers still need to get through the everyday life demands (the laundry!), and also to be entertained to not get out of the human.
We know many men professors who have a constant group of (heterosexual) women and male PhD students to cook for them, to clean for them, to join them for travel, to walk their dogs, to write their cv’s, and to listen to their worries in phone at late hours and on holidays. But, as said, no one thinks (or says) that they are “needy”. The women and men around them, serving them, might never fantasize about sex with them – but they are allowed to fulfil and satisfy their romantic imaginations about being the ones who could serve or touch (Zizek, anyone?) this male “genius”. Who is needy here, and who is normal in this rather normal academic picture?
Lesbian genius is a very powerful matter because it lives from and in an enormous risk. Its forum for exploring the question of “communication” is always under an attack. It constantly needs to question its own existence, space, form – and everyday psychical-level acts. Solving one’s laundry matters could pose a huge risk! It always errs, often in gross ways.
In Finnish, we have the saying that one is “banging one’s head on the Carelian pine”. The Carelian pines are known to be very thick, growing in a place with no real civilization, and therefore, they are safe to experiment with all kinds of hurts. At the same time, Carelia is the lost, imaginary, longed-for space in the contemporary Finnish “folk imagination”, partly relating to the megalomaniac nationalist (mostly male war-mongers’) ideas, and partly to the lost kinship, home and nature; lost to Soviets due to the lost 2nd world war. But the saying also refers to a kind of wilfulness, “sisu”, where the person is not giving up when imagining something that could (or has) existed, drawing both on the victim history and the wrongful ideas of greatness, getting more empowered with each head-bang.
The lesbian genius, to me, remains of this generic Finnish person who bangs her head alone on that huge Carelian pine. Finland, as an independent country, somehow survived, against all the odds, through the turmoil of the dangerous and messy 20th century where many solid-looking borders were destroyed, transgressed or moved. It only barely did that, and certainly not without erring, faulting and gaining deep scars (think about “Finlandizierung”). The lesbian, as a person, as a social group, as an identity, has also survived through the same period, being about the same age as the nation state of Finland. It barely did that, but not without erring, faulting and gaining deep scars (think about Avital Ronell – or Anna Freud’s story of the paranoid girl).
Queer Pain 