Revolting Prostitutes/"Onticide"

(Originally discussed on 5/5/20)

I hope everyone is making it the best way they can. Next week, we will discuss the Introduction and the chapter "Sex" from Juno Mac and Molly Smith's Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight For Sex Workers' Rights and Calvin Warren's essay "Onticide." Together, these pieces address questions we raised during our last discussion: how do we expand our critiques of sex and sexuality beyond a cis- and heteronormative framework? How does the institutional structure of academic second wave feminism contribute to the gulfs that exist between sex workers and academic feminists, as well as between cis and trans women? How do we confront the pervasiveness of humanist discourse, not only in philosophy, but also within what we typically consider to be radical feminist thought? The Mac, Smith and Warren readings do an excellent job of laying out the historical and intellectual cartography of contemporary conversations around sex work and anti-gay, anti-black, and anti-trans violence. By digging into and arguing with the existing archives of feminist and philosophical thought, Mac, Smith, and Warren demonstrate that our inability to imagine grammars that adequately describe ourselves and our political needs emerges from the particular phallocentrism of the archive, meaning the assumption that there can only be One ("the human") and that all others ("the marginalized") must be judged by their ability to approximate, reflect, or reproduce the desires of the One. To act otherwise would mean to be interpellated as hysterical. Or dead. 

In "Onticide," Warren is performing what I consider to be a mimetic critique of a specific genealogy of philosophical thought called ontology. Very broadly and pretentiously put, ontology is the study of Being. But what is Being, and why is it capitalized? Martin Heidegger, Warren's main interlocutor in "Onticide," is one of the most famous philosophers of ontology and Being. He defines Being as true existence, reality, and the capacity to exist as an individual human. He differentiates this from the concept of "beings" (note the lower case), which is an undifferentiated mass or substance which is not capable of consciousness, individual identity, participation in reality, nor, I would argue, recognizable speech. It's also important here to note that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party, and his ideas about ontology were/are often used to justify the multi-identity genocide of the Holocaust. 

However, this does not mean that we must not engage with Heidegger's work; in fact, Warren's concept of onticide is defined by his commitment to "writing with and against humanist terms of difference." This is where mimesis becomes a delicate and powerful tool for Warren. Just as Irigaray identified how Lacan's interpretation of the mirror stage depends upon the silent reproduction of woman-as-mirror, Warren identifies how the discourse of humanism--funneled through the sub-discipline of ontology--depends on the silent reproduction of difference-as-foundation. Reading Warren and Irigaray together, we could say that “woman” is merely one constructed category of difference among many others. This is not to say that “woman” and “gay,” for example, are interchangeable. In fact, it is the reduction of these categories to mirrors, foundations, or screens for the figure of the human that inhibits our ability to map and express the differences and affinities that lie dormant between them.

In that sense, when Warren analyzes the simultaneity of homophobic and racist violence, it could benefit us to think of violence not as a confirmation of the “truth” of a marginalized identity, but as evidence or trace of the maneuvers necessary to maintain the fixed--though exorbitantly contingent and pathetically insecure--boundary/authority of the human and of Being. Violence, then, against women, Black people, sex workers, trans folks (and especially those who fall into all of those categories) would be seen as confirmation of the ontological insecurity of those individuals who are interpellated as humans. Why do cishet men neg, murder, rape, and gaslight beautiful, confident, and intelligent women? Why do straight(?) men bully, murder, and ostracize gay men? Why do cis men and women humiliate, deny, and murder trans people, particularly trans women, and even more particularly trans women of color, especially when they are sex workers? 

Sex and sexuality are frequently the subjects of psychoanalytic discourse because they are taboo or unspeakable within the social and historical context in which the analyst writes. If undifferentiated difference was not the mirror or foundation of the figure of the human/Being, sex and sexuality would not exist as taboos to be repressed, but rather as necessary and complex components of the grammar of ourselves and our everyday lives. Furthermore, the association of queerness and transness with the realms of the fetish and deviance (such as BDSM, pedophilia, pederasty, etc) should not be taken as “proof” of their pathological difference, but rather as a sign that difference must be pathologized so that it can be repressed. Repression relegates difference to the zone of the unconscious and, I posit, the interstices. The gaps we stumble upon in language are signs of what we have been conditioned to repress. If someone or something cannot be spoken of or named, did they ever really exist? 


As we exist now, those entities which are forbidden from naming themselves and being interpellated by their chosen names are forced to live a compressed, hypoxic existence beneath the weight of a projection fashioned for and by the figure of the human. This “projection” often takes the form of what we would otherwise call a “stereotype.” But this issue goes deeper than how we might ordinarily describe a stereotype—stereotypes exist either to be proven or disproven, a move which leaves the transformation of self-into-screen or self-into-mirror intact. As Terrion Williamson asks in her investigation of the Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire tropes in Scandalize My Name, “what is the underside of the stereotype?” If the mirror could talk, what would it say? How would it say? How would it define the terms of its existence outside of its function as a reflection of the human’s greatest insecurity and self-loathing?



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