Queer Theory, Queer Praxis

For many years, I have been actively involved in queer politics, queer theory, queer communities, and queer sex.

For the purposes of this blog, "queer" does not denote a "sexual orientation" but rather this term alludes to a critical and political project that emerged in a particular cultural and historical moment. When I take up the word "queer," I do so in solidarity with activist projects such as Queer Nation, ACT UP!, the Lesbian Avengers, Transsexual Menace, Gay Shame, and numerous other grassroots and scholarly efforts to make cultural space for marginalized sexualities and genders.

(Someone emailed me about this blog and basically called into question my lesbian bona fides. Just to be clear: My queer practice doesn't consist only in writing words and marching in the street; for the past 12 years I've lived as an "out lesbian"--though I prefer to problematize that identity category--and I've had queer sex with queer women.)

I see my sexual praxis as part of a critical project to engage what Michel Foucault describes as a "great surface network" of sexuality "in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances are linked to one another in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power."

My project is to break patterns, fragment wholeness, and disrupt continuity—to disrupt the normative sequences that produce the familiar and the normal. I thus have a predilection for the queer, the monstrous, the grotesque, the non-normative.

My involvement with BDSM began as a performative engagement of critical theories of gender, sexuality, the body, and subjectivity. Foucault and other theorists of sexuality have seen in various sadomasochistic practices technologies for unseating the genitals as the singular or primary site of sexual pleasure. If a technique of pleasure is completely non-genital, the gendered implications are that people of any gender or sexual "orientation" could engage in that activity with each other. Neither genital configuration nor legal sex would determine or limit sexual role/position/experience. In some of my BDSM relations, I felt that I had achieved this goal of degenitalizing sexuality through a variety of practices, at least on the part of my embodied subjectivity (and not necessarily that of other bodies/subjects involved).

Desiring/Submitting

Salaams,

I am writing this blog as a diaristic account of my thinking and experiences, particularly regarding religion, philosophy, theory, culture, and my recent engagement with Islam. Other related topics might include aesthetics and art, gender and sexuality, the body, subjectivity, and social and material relations.

I have titled this blog Desiring/Submitting. I have recently been struggling with two categories. I hope that my thinking through some issues relating to these categories may create a conversation with other readers in the blogosphere.

Both of these terms are complex and polysemous, inflected with numerous connotations.Desiring and desire are terms that have been in circulation in anglophone and francophone queer theory and history of sexuality academic circles. In common parlance, desire can signify any need or want or craving. Desire can connote a bodily hunger, a refined and educated taste, and a complex cultural field. The material and cultural production of desire and the history of desire are important areas of study that I wish to engage as part of this blog. I also describe some of my own interests, wishes, and desires in my everyday interactions.

"Submission" is the literal translation of the Arabic word "Islam". To be a Muslim is to be one who submits to the will of Allah. "Submission" is also a term in circulation in the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadomasochism) community and culture, in which submission virtually always means a consensual and negotiated submission to a particular person or people in an erotically charged context. Both Islam and BDSM are constellations of knowledge about which I have been learning and communities in which I have been participating in the past several months.

I do not present desiring and submitting as two poles of a binary opposition. Desire does not entail a libertarian-hedonistic worldview of "I do what I want". Submission does not require a denial or destruction of the self. Rather, desiring/submitting constitutes a troubled und unstable dialectic of sorts. Desiring and submitting are each techniques of affirming and closing off possibilities.

Both desiring and submitting are relational processes. Desire frequently invokes a desiring subject and a desired object. Submission requires a submittor and that to which the submitter submits. Paradoxically (and fabulously), in submission, the power to which the submitter submits--who may be God or some worldly power--is actually the grammatical "object".

I put these terms in the presenting progressive--"desiring" not "desire"; "submitting" not "submission"--because these are active and ongoing engagements in my life. Rather than seeing either desire or submission as a fixed momentary action, I see these as continuous practices and challenges. In that spirit, this blog is an unfolding conversation.

Islamic studies, queer theory, and Euro-Marxian critical theory are not theoretical approaches that have frequently found a comfortable home together in the blogosphere or other forums. inshaAllah this blog can be one small forum for such a critical project.

Thank you for reading. I welcome comments.