Explaining Chemical Reactions
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Transmolecular Revolution: Trans*versality and the Mattering of Political Life Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Weil, Abraham Brookes Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 28/09/2021 00:08:02 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/628400 TRANSMOLECULAR REVOLUTION: TRANS*VERSALITY AND THE MATTERING OF POLITICAL LIFE by Abraham Brookes Weil ____________________________ Copyright © Abraham Weil 2018 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF GENDER AND WOMEN’S STUDIES In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2018 • I THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE Transmolecular Revolution: Trans*versality and the MatteringAs members of Political of the Dissertation Life Committee, we ce1tify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Abraham Brookes Weil, titled e e oso and recommend that it be accepted as fulfillingthe dissertation requir ment th phy. �:r �: :::� Date: April 9• ZOIS Date: April 9, 2018 Date: April 9, 2018 Date: April 9, 2018 1 didate's submission I hereby certify that I Have read this dissertation preQared under m that it be accepted as fulfillingthe dissertation requirement. 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. Abraham Weil 3 Acknowledgements I want to extend a special thank you to my mentor, Susan Stryker, who has far exceeded the role of dissertation director. Thank you for your enthusiasm, rich feedback, for generously sharing ideas, and for your tireless support. Many thanks to my committee, Eva Hayward, Adam Geary and Vincent Del Casino for their unwavering support throughout the entirety of this project. Thank you to the department of gender and women’s studies and the school of geography and development for ongoing support of my research. Thank you to my colleagues Dylan McCarthy Blackston, Michael Brasher, and Francisco Galarte for reading, commenting, and thinking about my project. And finally, I would like to thank Kelly Sharron for the endless and unwavering support of all of my ideas. 4 Table of Contents List of Figures…7 Abstract…8 Introduction: The Mattering of Political Life…9 Chapter One: Trans*versality…30 • Capitalism and the Coefficient of Transversality…37 • Les Mirabelles…44 • Majoritarian/Minoritarian…52 • Trees and Transcoding…55 • Lines of Flight: Interdisciplinarity and Transversality…60 • Proposing Trans*versality…65 • Trans*versality…68 Chapter Two: Transmolecular Revolution…71 • Multiplicities in the City…75 • Coding and Decoding May 1968…80 • Mommy/Daddy/Me…84 • Molecular Revolution: A Case Study…87 • Working for the Unpredictable…94 • Territories of Desire…96 • Transmolecular Revolution…101 Chapter Three: Urban Jungles…109 • Darwin’s Trees…115 • Genealogies and Geographies of Blackness…129 • The Human and the Posthuman…136 • Black and Trans* Materialities…150 5 Chapter Four: Trans*versal Animacies…156 • #…158 • Alivedead…164 • Intersectional Assemblages: All Colors are Found in Black…170 • Year Zero: Molecularization…174 Conclusion: Trans-Becoming/Becoming-Trans, or, Trees and Rhizomes…182 References…189 6 List of Figures Figure One: Loulou Bonheur in Guérilléroses Figure Two: The Mirabelles in the final scene of Guérilléroses Figure Three: The Mirabelles, Les Berceuses D'orage (From left to right) Loulou Bonheur, Marie Bonheur, Nini Crepon, La Limande Germaine, and Ginette Plumetis. Figure Four: The Mirabelles, Les Berceuses D'orage Figure Five: Félix Guattari’s schizoanalytic unconscious (1986) Figure Six: Charles Darwin’s Tree of Life Figure Seven: "Prof. Darwin" by Faustin Betbeder, 1874 Figure Eight: New York Post Cartoon by Sean Delonas, 2011 Figure Nine: Blackface on Halloween Figure Ten: Blackface costume depicting Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman Figure Eleven: Cardboard image of Trayvon Martin at Union Square Rally, New York City, July 14, 2013 Figure Twelve: Protests in Paris during May 1968 7 Abstract My dissertation “Transmolecular Revolution: Trans*versality and the Mattering of Political Life,” develops the concepts of “transmolecular revolution” and “trans*versality,” drawn from the conceptual vocabulary of cultural theorist Félix Guattari as well as recent black and trans* theorizing to intervene in debates about the complexity of embodied subjectivity and scales of political mattering. Guattari crafts transversality as an ethical, political, social, and aesthetic tool, capable of maximizing communication between different topographies in a field and creating micropolitical linkages across scales, while still retaining the specificity of minoritarian life (defined by Guattari as any subjectivity that is not traditionally masculine, white, and straight, but for the purposes of this dissertation, black and trans*). Individual chapters explore Guattari’s ecosophy through his use of transversality and molecular revolution; an examination of student-worker protests of May 1968 and the uptake of Deleuzoguattarian frameworks in genealogies of trans* and black studies; and an analysis of the #blacklivesmatter and #blacktranslivematter movements that draws on critical animal studies to reveal ways that species hierarchies are always present in processes of racialization that allow some lives to matter more, or less, than others. While the dissertation certainly attends to questions of oppression and resistance that motivate deep political change, it also highlights possibilities for creativity and invention necessary for any successful revolutionary project. 8 Introduction: The Mattering of Political Life This project began as an attempt to think about revolution. I was interested in how to read texts, art, music, and political philosophies that emerged in the context of revolution to think about how revolutionary politics are deployed, remixed, and remembered. I wanted to understand: what is revolution now? This is not an autoethnography, though it would be disingenuous to say that I do not place myself within the folds of this project. Many of the theoretical choices I make in this project emerge directly from my own experiences as a queer black trans man. There would be no way to generalize the experiences of subjects that embody these identities, but for my purposes, I argue that there is a relationship between my own corporeality and lived experience that generates a particular interest in modes of becoming. There are many moments that I return to that mark the physical, emotional, and affective violence that has been leveraged against my body, but one in particular haunts the pages of this project. This suspension in time brought me to a standstill with my own materiality and mattering, inspiring a sense of urgency that previously existed through the passive accumulation of living as a monster. In 2012, I was dancing with a group of friends at a bar that I had been many times before. In fact, I had danced there almost every week, with the same group of friends, so much that the bartenders knew what we wanted before we asked, and the DJ knew what songs we liked to hear. It was a Thursday night and we were celebrating my successfully defended master’s thesis when we were violently assaulted by a group of men. They hit us with beer bottles and barstools as they called us faggots and niggers, leaving us bloody on the floor. As I floated in and out of consciousness, seeing frantic friends lean over me, I experienced a paranoid confusion 9 tapping against the familiarity of what it meant to occupy my body. As the ambulance arrived I slipped in and out of the room, trying to interpret my feelings of wanting to run away from them, but feeling helpless to do so. They explained that they would wrap my head “like Aunt Jemima” and take me to the hospital. I closed my eyes and tried to leave myself. Waking up in the hospital brought little relief. From the police investigation that never left the station to the consistent misgendering or use of a name that was no longer mine, I found myself floating through these moments as they had appeared to me before; my earliest memories of gendered and racialized violence, my teenage angst as I came to know the bounds of acceptable sexuality, and the more recent violence of transitioning. These moments flashed, painfully, as the staples in my head horrified me and my inability to speak in complete sentences stunned my family and friends. The long weeks of recovery that followed were generative, if not embedded with an agonizing self-hatred, as I attempted to comprehend what had