Alexander Stoffel || Anti-trans strands of feminism have been on the rise for at least a decade in Britain. They have participated in the renaturalisation of a medico-juridical notion of womanhood that is ostensibly threatened by the existence of trans people (as well as by cis, often racialised, women who do not present in an appropriately ‘womanly’ manner). The now widely accepted story of this movement’s emergence holds that its seeds were planted during the period of second-wave feminist activity and remained long dormant until suddenly and spontaneously springing up a few years ago. While at times compelling, this story has left us with anachronistic readings of second-wave feminist texts and relatively few resources to explain the development and consolidation of anti-trans feminism today.
My wager is that anti-trans feminism is best understood as a nationalist formation. That is to say that the anti-trans feminist movement is animated by nationalist relations of desire; by its attachment to the consolations, promises, and fantasies that nationalism offers. Two main propositions follow. First, anti-trans feminism shares constituting logics with other nationalist formations and must be understood as one moment within a longer history of sexual nationalism. Second, anti-trans feminism is not a mere revival of second-wave feminism. Rather, anti-trans feminism’s encounter with past feminist movements is mediated by the nationalist logics that sustain it in the present. Taken together, these propositions offer us a more radical diagnosis of anti-trans politics and clarify the stakes of its defeat.
I
The capitalist nation-state accomplishes an astonishing feat: it maintains all prevailing social distinctions of property, race, gender, sexuality, status, and ability while simultaneously concealing their continued existence. In ‘On the Jewish Question’, Karl Marx writes: ‘Far from abolishing these effective distinctions, [the nation-state] only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and it manifests universality only in opposition to these elements.’ The central concern of this text is the establishment of ‘the political’ as a distinct sphere, where the individual can appear as an abstract citizen who is interchangeable with and equivalent to all other citizens and has ‘emancipated’ themself from the concrete differentiations that characterise their life in civil society. But this political emancipation, for Marx, is devious. Instead of abolishing those hierarchised social differences, the capitalist nation-state declares them to be ‘non-political’ distinctions and hence naturalises them as its constituent foundation. While social differentiations continue to exist within civil society, in the political sphere the individual is constituted as ‘the imaginary member of an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and infused with an unreal universality.’ According to Marx, this ‘unreal universality’ is the distinguishing feature of the capitalist nation-state.
Founded on the realities of dispossession, enslavement, and exploitation, the capitalist nation-state nonetheless declares universality, homogeneity, and equivalence. As the guarantor of each abstract individual’s life, liberty, and property, the nation-state presupposes and formally abjures all the differentiations of the real lives of its members. This raises the question: How is the contradiction between form and content – that is, between the nation’s stipulation of a homogeneous citizenry and the concrete hierarchies of life under its rule – resolved? Not everyone is admitted as a full and equal member within the national imaginary, supposedly bound by common interests, values, and traditions. How does the nation maintain its ‘unreal’ universality despite all its exclusions?
Crucial to the occlusion of the nation’s exclusions is its promise of inclusion. National subjectivity is supposedly available to all. We are told that anyone, anywhere, and in any circumstance can overcome their concrete material circumstances and become the universal national subject. To think about nationalism is therefore to think about desire. It is to understand the nation-state as an object upon which we project various needs, hopes, and dreams. We invest the nation-state with the promise of transcendence and take immense comfort in its myth of inclusivity, availability, and resolution. Because we find an escape from the particularities of proletarian life in the universalised condition of national subjectivity, the nation-state is able to dissimulate the concrete histories of oppression, exploitation, and domination upon which it is built. Mass identification with the nation’s ideals therefore secures its illusory universality.
‘Healthy’ and ‘natural’ desires are considered those that create attachments to objects that promise entry into the universalised condition of national subjectivity: whiteness, sexual respectability, domesticity, productivity, consumerism, and so on. The streamlining of desires towards these ‘appropriate’ objects maintains the reproduction of the nation’s universality. Desires that do not follow this script are stigmatised, pathologised, and devalued. Often, we label them as anti-social or ‘queer’. Indeed, queerness has historically been associated with an array of perversities that are said to violate the proper relations of the national community, serving as a designation for a corrosive threat to moral order, to public health and security, to labour discipline, to privacy, and to proprietorial conceptions of the self. Queer people have always been placed in a precarious relation to the nation – either denied their existence or rendered a hypervisible threat to national values, safety, and posterity.
Queer theory has been enraptured by the uncontainable, unreliable, and mysterious side of desire. It turns out, queer scholars find, that desire is difficult to manage. It constantly fails to reproduce those stable attachments to ‘proper’ objects. It therefore threatens to disorganise, destabilise, and disturb the reproduction of society’s national ideals. No matter how much people are told that desiring the ‘right’ things will allow them to transcend their particular material conditions and achieve universal recognition, their desires just can’t be captured. Queer theory doesn’t shy away from this unsettling truth. Rather, it welcomes desire’s utopian, perhaps even abolitionist, drive towards the disorientation, disorganisation, and disruption of our world, placing it in an antagonistic relation to the protocols of nationalism.
II
The Black lesbian feminist movement of the seventies and eighties, perhaps more so than any other movement for sexual freedom, has been read as a subversion of nationalist logics. Represented by groups like the Third World Women’s Alliance and the Combahee River Collective, Black lesbian feminists articulated their subjectivity as multiply determined along various axes of social differentiation. In the writings of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Smith, and other Black feminists, the nationalist ideal of a singular, universal identity can only ever produce a false sense of unity, as it must rely on the suppression and regulation of non-normative differences. True solidarity is only achieved through an engagement with difference. According to queer-of-colour critics like Roderick Ferguson and Grace Kyungwon Hong, this Black feminist politics of difference provided an alternative to the ostensibly universal and homogeneous visions of subjectivity that are privileged by the capitalist nation-state. These scholars conceive their politics of difference as the negation of the normative confines of nationalist politics, rather than as an affirmative celebration or commodification of difference. The central categories of Black feminist thought, such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘difference’, Ferguson argues, are ‘an attempt to cease appropriating culture to demonstrate the accoutrements of national identity – homogeneity, equivalence, normativity, and essence.’
Black feminism’s radical appraisal of the relationship between nationalism and sexuality enriched and radicalised nineties queer theory. There have, however, been tensions between the two intellectual traditions. One uncomfortable legacy of Black lesbian feminism is the refusal among many of its most prominent members to recognise S/M as an erotic practice. It would be wrong to reduce the entire Black lesbian feminist movement to one ‘side’ of the feminist sex wars. Nonetheless, practices of S/M were widely denounced as an internalisation of white supremacist notions of domination and submission. Key Black feminist texts of the period represented the Black female sexual experience as an archive of trauma, injury, and harm, emphasising a wounded sexual subjectivity at the expense of the rich multiplicity of Black female (and queer) sexual pleasure. I want to propose that this refusal of S/M – the understanding of S/M as a direct replication of the historical relations of enslavement – is intimately linked to nationalism. The libidinal logics of nationalism in fact demand the reduction of S/M to an internalisation of racialised oppression, and severing the association between S/M and the US history of enslavement violates nationalist injunctions.
Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects provides some clues as to why. Sharpe argues that historical relations of subjection must be repeated in the present (in this instance, through a view of S/M as an expression of master-slave relations) for survivors of slavery to guarantee their precarious place in the national imaginary. For Sharpe, a transformation of subjection occurs through the idealisation of subjection as a means to achieve assimilation into the universalised conditions of whiteness, Americanness, and heteronormativity. Indeed, after the abolition of slavery, the repetition and recirculation of original scenes of subjection across generations became central to the process of national inclusion for formerly enslaved populations. Sharpe asks us to consider the case of a child who is conceived as a result of the rape of their enslaved mother by their slave master. This horrific scene of violence might later be reconfigured as a claim to white lineage and therefore as an escape into the universal recognition of national subjectivity. In this case, a demand is made to remember, reconstruct, and reproduce a scene of original violation so that it may act as the basis for securing the next generation’s place in a shared story of national identity. Sharpe describes this reconfiguration of ownership and rape into a romance of the family as a narrative ‘in which “pain [is] being transformed into pleasure”, in which readable progress is proximity to whiteness, and where both come to signify as a gift, as (positive) inheritance.’
Black feminist cultural representations of the brutalities of slavery, Sharpe suggests, might be animated by a similar fantasy: that the witnessing and repetition of slavery’s ‘monstrous intimacies’ can function as the basis for seeking redress, justice, and freedom in the present. Horrific scenes of enslavement gain immense currency in the present as they promise to transform a mark of subjection into a vehicle for deliverance. Within this context, the association of S/M with slavery’s scenes of subjection becomes an imperative of nationalist relations of desire. The capitalist nation-state does not abolish the Black subject’s attachment to its history of enslavement, violence, and subjection. Rather, it naturalises this attachment as the constituent foundation for admission within the national imaginary. What would it mean, then, for S/M practices to become untethered from the US history of chattel slavery? Could S/M (or other experiences of pain as a form of sexual pleasure) be more than just a mimicry of this history? And what would such a view threaten? I am suggesting, following Sharpe, that it might threaten the fragile foundation of national recognition for Black Americans. It is not the practice of S/M itself, but rather the conflation of S/M with the master-slave relation, that reinforces racialised subjectification in the present.
III
Judith Butler explains nationalist logics of desire in relation to the state-sanctioned family norm as follows:
The state becomes the means by which a fantasy becomes literalized: desire and sexuality are ratified, justified, known, publicly instated, imagined as permanent, durable. Marriage compels, at least logically, universal recognition: everyone must let you into the door of the hospital; everyone must honor your claim to grief; everyone will assume your natural rights to a child; everyone will regard your relationship as elevated into eternity. And in this way, the desire for universal recognition is a desire to become universal, to become interchangeable in one’s universality, to vacate the lonely particularity of the nonratified relation and, perhaps above all, to gain both place and sanctification in that imagined relation to the state.
This desire for universal recognition by the capitalist nation-state provides a useful analytic for understanding what is commonly referred to as ‘homonormativity’ – an assimilationist politics that seeks to secure representational and legal victories for LGBTI+ people. In Family Values, Melinda Cooper historicises the emergence of homonormative campaigns for same-sex marriage (and for other legal avenues for the transmission of private property and citizenship) within the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She explains that, as the acute period of the epidemic came to an end, gay men began ‘loudly demanding the recognition of their relationships as legitimate units of reproduction and inheritance.’
The homonormative quest to be folded into the universalised condition of national subjectivity marked a radical departure from the radical politics of the AIDS movement. Militant, sex-positive members of the movement, such as Douglas Crimp and Jim Eigo, saw the communal fabric of queer life as the most effective means for the promotion of safer sex. For them, the AIDS epidemic was an opportunity to expansively reimagine sex and experiment with non-normative forms of intimacy, eroticism, and pleasure that were not centred around penetration and incorporated contraceptive methods. This was not, however, the route pursued by high-profile AIDS campaigners like Larry Kramer, Randy Shilts, Duncan Osborne, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile who rejected sexual promiscuity and extolled the virtues of privacy, respectability, and domesticity.
In the wake of the AIDS crisis, the epidemic became remembered, in Cooper’s words, as ‘a traumatic but necessary rite of passage into the world of family responsibility.’ The epidemic was rewritten as a hard-earned moral lesson about the civilising virtues of monogamy, marriage, personal responsibility, and legitimate forms of (biological, national, economic) reproduction. The AIDS epidemic continues to serve as an ongoing reminder of ‘the lonely particularity of the nonratified relation’ and places pressure on previously pathologised queers to narrate themselves as healthy, responsible, and deserving parents, consumers, and national citizens. We might say, borrowing Sharpe’s language, that the AIDS epidemic has been transformed from a source of pain into a source of pleasure as the reproduction of this original scene of trauma, dispossession, and death has become the vehicle for the ascent of LGBTI+ people into the nation’s imagined universality.
When the Monkeypox virus was declared a national health emergency in the summer of 2022, many gay men in Britain protested against the fact that key public health initiatives, like vaccine distribution, were targeted at men who have sex with men. What was so threatening about the open acknowledgment that the virus was mainly spread through gay sex? What wasn’t lost on many was that the Monkeypox outbreak risked shattering the basis of national recognition for privileged sections of the LGBTI+ community. It suggested that there were still reckless, anti-social, promiscuous queers out there who hadn’t learned the proper lesson from the AIDS epidemic, or perhaps that the memory of the AIDS epidemic had not been properly reproduced, and that an association with those queers would endanger their sanctified placement in the national imaginary.
IV
My proposition is that the otherwise perplexingly diverse coalition of burgeoning anti-trans forces, often grouped together under the label ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism’, can be made sense of as yet another iteration of sexual nationalism. Many commentators have usefully described anti-trans feminism’s investment in an essentialist definition of womanhood as a ‘wounded attachment’. This concept, first articulated by Wendy Brown, names a political attachment to an identity category that promises emancipation at the same time that it forecloses the horizon of emancipation. By grounding their claims for redress in historical injury and suffering, subjects in liberal democracies must naturalise the injury from which they seek to free themselves – rather than seek to abolish the forces which produce that very injury. In the case of anti-trans feminism, this naturalisation occurs via the ascription of a supposedly transhistorical biological or cultural truth to the category ‘woman’.
Anti-trans feminists seek the devious emancipation that Marx described in ‘On the Jewish Question’: the capitalist nation-state promises to resolve the historical predicament of women through the naturalisation of a normative classification of gender as its constituent foundation. Womanhood must therefore appear as a non-political category, a mere presupposition of the nation-state. Insofar as the existence of trans people threatens to politicise this supposedly immutable, ‘biological’ category and jeopardise the success of its naturalisation, anti-trans feminists come to see transness as nothing less than a project of total female (or, in some cases, lesbian) erasure. Here we find the attempted eradication of an entire population (i.e., trans people) legitimised as a form of self-defence against that same powerless population’s imagined desire to eradicate them (i.e., cis women or lesbians). This inverted genocidal fantasy is of course not unique to the project of anti-trans feminism. Nationalist ideologies across the globe traffic in its logics, from white nationalism to Zionism through to Hindutva.
Far more mundane versions exist as well. Consider the recurrent controversies about ‘queerbaiting’, a term used to describe a person (often a celebrity) who acts as though they were queer without publicly identifying as such. The story goes something like this: the member of an outsider group (i.e., a straight person) is said to be deceiving the public by deliberately misleading them about their sexual orientation. This is a ploy to achieve some form of personal gain, usually attention or clout. The alleged queerbaiters are accused of strategically appropriating styles or mannerisms that ‘belong’ to a different group (i.e., queer people). It follows that if queer people do not identify these fraudsters and publicly shame them, queerness itself is at risk of being diluted, stolen, or erased entirely. A culture of vigilance and surveillance is therefore necessary.
It is hard to miss the parallels to anti-trans feminism’s representation of trans women as tricksters seeking to infiltrate cis women’s spaces and to steal their identity. What is telling in the case of anti-trans feminism is that their accusation is levelled not against the nation-state, but rather against another oppressed group: trans women. The primary antagonist of women is not the state, but other women. When the nation-state is invested with the sole capacity to confer justice, others seeking redress for historical injury appear as competitors in the fight for state recognition rather than potential comrades in the struggle against state violence.
We might therefore argue that the wounded attachment to ‘biological womanhood’ idealises womanhood as the basis for ascent into the universalised condition of national subjectivity. It indexes a nationalist relation of desire, animated by the promise of redemption, resolution, and recognition that only the nation-state can provide. In other words, the wounded attachment to a normative gender classification is configured through the protocols of nationalist desire. A condition of pain, injury, and injustice is transformed into pleasure through its promise of escape into the national illusions of equivalence, homogeneity, and universality. This seductive power of the capitalist nation-state – its pledge to sublimate concrete realities of the slave economy, mass death from disease, and patriarchal violence into abstract membership within an illusory sovereignty – lies at the heart of nationalist ideologies. Nationalism’s powerful seductions are a challenge we must take seriously. They remind us that the internationalist struggle for freedom will require the abolition of categories we hold dear, and enjoin us to generalise alternative possibilities of desire, pleasure, and sociality
Alexander Stoffel is a Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University. He is on the editorial board of Historical Materialism, where he co-convenes the Sexuality and Political Economy Network. Alex’s first book, Erotic Worldmaking, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.
This piece appears in print in Salvage 14: Shrouded in Darkness. Issue 14 is available to buy individually here. Our poetry, fiction and art remains exclusive to the print edition, and our subscribers have exclusive access to some online content, including all audio content. New subscriptions can be taken out here, and start with the next issue. Or you can support our work with a digital subscription, and get instant access to all published issues, including the latest issue.
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