A Brooklyn Culture Mafia

[linebaugh]

never heard the term. Does Henry Miller fit the bill?

 

[borzoi]

imo books about a man in an mfa or a sexually frustrated academic should have a little label on the front like the explicit lyrics warning

 

[sus]

What's incredible about Long Chu is she's an iconoclast, and very few actual iconoclasts get let into golden institutions; she got there through a combination of her identity, being an incredible writer, and going mildly viral for understanding chan culture. She's written pieces that have seriously swayed conversations, and made semi-reactionary stances on these issues way more acceptable in liberal crowds.

She came out against Avita Ronnell, wrote a somewhat wildly honest piece "My New Vagina Didn't Make Me Happy," and has been frank about much of her transition being motivated by sexual fetish/desire.

 

[sus]

autofiction/autotheory is the lineage almost all these people, and almost all the arty/literary young female writers these days, put themselves into. living (journal/memoir-type stuff) side-by-side with theorizing the everyday. often it'll go between intimate and large scale—feelings and the natural world, or the personal and the political.

the trajectory is usually cast as starting with Barthes; it's got bits of german romanticism in it, it loves the fragment form. Annie Dillard, Maggie Nelson are probably some of the best entries imo.

 

[shiels]

has been frank about much of her transition being motivated by sexual fetish/desire.

theres a framing of the argument around dysphoria and mental health for obvious reasons and i imagine a reticence to discuss these kinds of motivations (which obv arent extractable from mental health etc) because of the pervert accusations from the right / terfs etc. this kind of simplification takes place a lot when complex phenomenon are becoming culturally salient, issues have to be condensed into a form that can be easily broadcast and repeated everywhere

 

[version]

Like you mention with PUA etc I think the alt right drew a huge amount of power from tapping into this well of resentful sexual energy, it wasn’t exactly planned as such but that festering underworld nexus ended up framing loserdom in simple terms and set up an enemy, a programme of subjugation from some feminist culturalist marxist jewist cabal which was neatly packaged in a gateway drug, the red pill into right wing politics

You seen The Believer? Was watching clips a while back and at one point the protagonist goes on this antisemitic rant to a reporter and it sounds exactly like something you'd read on 4chan. All the weird sexual hang ups etc. The comments are predictably horrendous.

 

[IdleRich]

imo books about a man in an mfa or a sexually frustrated academic should have a little label on the front like the explicit lyrics warning

That would be the end of Saul Bellow.
What's an mfa though?

 

[version]

Master of Fine Arts..

 

[beiser]

a notable trans journal recently put out an entire issue dedicated to andrea long chu studies, mostly negative. Good enough of an endorsement for me, frankly.

 

[beiser]

Have been fascinated lately by the "Detrans" subreddit, for people who transitioned back to their birth identity. Niche of course, but the question that's interesting though is whether the category grows as trans visibility does also.

A widely aired set of stats say that dissatisfaction with hormones, surgery, etc, are extremely low, and that detransition is also very unusual. The thing that's concerning here is that these don't stand up to the Lucas Critique, which is to say that—all we know is that dissatisfaction is low in the absence of statistics suggesting that dissatisfaction is low.

IE, if the fact that dissatisfaction is low encourages a large number of marginal participants (who would have previously backed out) to try these things, dissatisfaction rates are very likely to climb rapidly…

Nothing really that can be done about the matter but I do worry about whether it runs into major blowback later.

 

[boxedjoy]

a notable trans journal recently put out an entire issue dedicated to andrea long chu studies, mostly negative. Good enough of an endorsement for me, frankly.

Sorry, what?

 

[beiser]

Sorry, what?

I hear it’s “fucked up” and “not very nice.” The August 2020 issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly: https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/issue/7/3

 

[sus]

Self-styled “writer, critic, and sad trans girl” Andrea Long Chu had a break-out year in 2019, including the publication here (with coauthor Emmett Harsin Drager) of “After Trans Studies,” which turned out to be the most-read article of the year for TSQ and among the top ten most-read journal articles of 2019 for Duke University Press overall (Duke University Press 2019). In recognition of that accomplishment, we've organized a special section of this issue, “After Andrea Long Chu,” to allow several authors to respond to various dimensions of Chu's work. Cassius Adair, Cameron Awkward-Rich, and Amy Marvin's “Before Trans Studies” offers a measured rebuttal of Chu and Harsin Drager's TSQ article, while Jack Halberstam, in “Nice Trannies,” accords Chu's self-consciously pugnacious and deliberately provocative style the sincerest form of flattery by delivering a bare-knuckled counter-punch of his own. Jules Joanne Gleeson's review essay of Chu's debut book, Females, situates that work in Chu's rapidly expanding oeuvre as a public intellectual, while longtime trans activist Riki Wilchins uses Chu's New York Times opinion piece about her impending genital surgery to reflect on what transgender studies doesn't—but might—tend to say about the phenomenological experience of being a post-op trans woman in the contemporary United States.

it took me a min to parse, so context for the rest

 

[linebaugh]

Im not sure I understand our disaffected cambridge tech divion's relationship to the trans community. It has a nefarious energy.

 

[luka]

For a normal person what is really striking and what makes you recoil in fastidious ethical horror, is the pathological narcissism and how it's not just normalised but flaunted.

 

[luka]

There's no doubt that these are the worst people to have ever lived and for that reason I can understand Gus' fascination though for my part I can't bear to look. Craner has a similar fascination with the grotesque. I've always been too squeamish,

 

[sus]

Im not sure I understand our disaffected cambridge tech divion's relationship to the trans community. It has a nefarious energy.

I think part of it is that a lot of the nuances of trans discourse have had a blanket thrown over them by interested activists who have self-tasked with protecting trans people and their political interests. Let me say first: this is understandable and probably, in the net, for the best.

But as someone said above, sexual desire (e.g.) is a part of the picture for many people who transition, the ideological conflicts between a feminist "post-gender" worldview and "I discover my true self in high heels" is a hard one. The trans question is a vector for a thousand other really charged social and political questions about the self, the state, and the pharmaceutical industry's relation to modern liberalism. Anxieties about playing into TERFs' hands, or legitimizing conservative worries, means these objections are rarely able to be acknowledged and talked-about in polite society. Which of course means we make no progress on these issues.

It's a hard question, how you balance obligations—when a teenager says he got groomed by twenty-something transwomen online, do you deny his reality, say he's inventing his victimization? I understand why the Big Liberal Public Relations image of transgenderism is airbrushed, but as Long Chu herself says, when trans individuals compare their own psychic demons and desires against this billboard-ready picture of "what it means to be trans," they're not always helped. But me? at the end of the day, I just want to be able to talk about the true nuances of things with the lads.

The "trans question" is very easy on one level—respect human beings' self-representations, be understanding and empathetic, let people figure out who they are and want to be in the world. But there's a whole nother level that is tricky and probably has to be talked about rather than avoided: questions about children's right to self-determination, or how how cultural narratives actively shift people's self-interpretations (e.g. people who would interpret themselves one way end up interpreting themselves a different way under a different cultural regime—this is related to the Lukas Critique that Beiser mentions).

I personally don't think desire just "exists," that it's something there from the moment we're born, and life is a process of authentically getting in touch with it. I think it's also or largely socially constructed; we interpret vague longings within ourselves according to our cultural schemas. And I could type out the same sentences for processes like "identity" and "self"—there isn't a "neutral you" out there to be discovered, there's a way you're lit up and actualized by the society you live in. Interestingly, actual queer theory spaces are often pretty woke on this—it's the liberalized, politicized, vanilla vision of transgenderism which is built on otherwise-suspicious pictures of being human.

There's no doubt that these are the worst people to have ever lived and for that reason I can understand Gus' fascination though for my part I can't bear to look. Craner has a similar fascination with the grotesque. I've always been too squeamish,

Yes I actually thought of Craner's early oughts blogposts, the fashion/high culture stuff. I've always felt fascinated by e.g. the material cultures that know and care about the difference in treated calfskins, even if I'm not on any kind of trajectory to care myself.

 

[woops]

candidacy candidness.

Candour

 

[version]

Craner has a similar fascination with the grotesque. I've always been too squeamish,

Craner's perhaps the only person ever to have a tattoo of Pat Buchanan.

 

[linebaugh]

I think part of it is that a lot of the nuances of trans discourse have had a blanket thrown over them by interested activists who have self-tasked with protecting trans people and their political interests. Let me say first: this is understandable and probably, in the net, for the best.

But as someone said above, sexual desire (e.g.) is a part of the picture for many people who transition, the ideological conflicts between a feminist "post-gender" worldview and "I discover my true self in high heels" is a hard one. The trans question is a vector for a thousand other really charged social and political questions about the self, the state, and the pharmaceutical industry's relation to modern liberalism. Anxieties about playing into TERFs' hands, or legitimizing conservative worries, means these objections are rarely able to be acknowledged and talked-about in polite society. Which of course means we make no progress on these issues.

It's a hard question, how you balance obligations—when a teenager says he got groomed by twenty-something transwomen online, do you deny his reality, say he's inventing his victimization? I understand why the Big Liberal Public Relations image of transgenderism is airbrushed, but as Long Chu herself says, when trans individuals compare their own psychic demons and desires against this billboard-ready picture of "what it means to be trans," they're not always helped. But me? at the end of the day, I just want to be able to talk about the true nuances of things with the lads.

The "trans question" is very easy on one level—respect human beings' self-representations, be understanding and empathetic, let people figure out who they are and want to be in the world. But there's a whole nother level that is tricky and probably has to be talked about rather than avoided: questions about children's right to self-determination, or how how cultural narratives actively shift people's self-interpretations (e.g. people who would interpret themselves one way end up interpreting themselves a different way under a different cultural regime—this is related to the Lukas Critique that Beiser mentions).

I personally don't think desire just "exists," that it's something there from the moment we're born, and life is a process of authentically getting in touch with it. I think it's also or largely socially constructed; we interpret vague longings within ourselves according to our cultural schemas. And I could type out the same sentences for processes like "identity" and "self"—there isn't a "neutral you" out there to be discovered, there's a way you're lit up and actualized by the society you live in. Interestingly, actual queer theory spaces are often pretty woke on this—it's the liberalized, politicized, vanilla vision of transgenderism which is built on otherwise-suspicious pictures of being human.



Yes I actually thought of Craner's early oughts blogposts, the fashion/high culture stuff. I've always felt fascinated by e.g. the material cultures that know and care about the difference in treated calfskins, even if I'm not on any kind of trajectory to care myself.

is there a big liberal public image complex on trans people? or is the belief that there is only perpetuated in niche social/intellectual communities like the titular one here to keep the wheels spinning? Not that these conversations aren't happening or legitimate, but from my estimation, the conversations on trans people that reach the common person, i.e. through the big liberal public, are pretty facile and shallow: either don't talk about them, toothless 'awareness' pieces, or, inversely, do they even exist? I don't think its worries about playing into TERF/conservative hands is why nuanced trans issues aren't discussed in polite society, and the trans people I know arent looking to the NYT nor the NYC autofiction circle to assess the pulse.

Not that I don't get where you and beiser are coming from, Im sure youre bang on about whatever circles your critiquing, but a potential misestimation of the threat of some big liberal public in the trans community seems to suggest a reactionary need for unnecessary intellectual policing. Not accusing, just explaining the 'nefarious energy' sense I get. really I have only the dimmest image of the circles youre coming from (apparently the social construct of gender isn't some foundational thought for the whole of good-faith discourse?)