The Feeling of Gender

What feelings rise when one is confronted with gender? What about when one seeks out gender, but it is nowhere to be found? What curiosities, fears, pleasures, and confusions ripple out, and how do these feelings induce particular epistemes that then ground attitudes and behaviors about those genders one does (not) find? How do fantasy and desire project visions of gender, like film on a screen, that speak to who one could is and/or could become? How can gender be both the quotidian residue of everyday life, and also a weighty prospect through which political, social, and cultural occurrences resonate?

I have a specific memory of being in a classroom, the worn carpet that used to be crimson, but is now brown with years of dirt, mud, rain, and snow. We have been split into groups and are tasked with discussing Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and the student across from me is making desperate accusations of the main character’s gender and sexuality. The student is anxious. The student leans in and says, “Well, this is how I read the character,” defending the choices being mapped onto the character’s body, which really were a mirror image of the student’s own desires, and by proxy, the desires the student had for all other people, despite claims to the contrary. I slump further in my seat, feeling itchy, and eye the clock; how much more of this will I have to endure?, I think. The third student in our group is searching for words, so I help out by saying, “Why does the main character need a fixed identity?” The first student freezes, the previous anxiety ramping up and causing a stuttering and stammering response of “well, I am just so uncomfortable with someone shifting identities from day to day.”

Winterson (1992) wrote that “written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille” (p. 89). What occurs when we go looking for things that are not readily present on bodies, or may be ambiguous, or do not reflect our understandings of how one ought to show up in the world? What racialized and gendered understandings do we place onto others when these may not be seemingly obvious, if they ever can be? Following Berlant and Stewart’s (2019) insistence, what are the races and genders of the students in the memory recounted above? Are they dressed similarly? How are they holding their bodies, and what does that convey about their histories with class, disability, and education? How might the carpet be a metaphor for how sediments are trapped over time, obscuring vision, and muddling the efficacy of visibility as a way of arriving at a knowable subject? How are feelings circulating in that space to create an affect of disconnection, and air of undesirability for all involved, albeit for decidedly different reasons across the three students?

A girlfriend of mine once told me that we trans women and girls “want to want, and desire to desire.” She told me this after a few cocktails in our first few months of getting to know each other. She rarely ate when we went out, despite ordering food, at least not in those first months. Another time, about five months into knowing each other, we went out. I needed cheering. I was wrecked about someone who I shouldn’t have allowed to wreck me. I felt fragile, vulnerable, and ugly, so I did my best impression of confidence, posting it on Instagram for people to boost me with their double taps and kind comments. I told myself I would only have two cocktails, but she ordered me a third, and then a fourth. We got mouthy, queeny, excessively femme, which feels like both an oxymoron and an impossibility, as if excessive was not synonymous with femme or there could ever be too much of it. We bumped along the streets and made our way to my car, and as I was driving her home, she turned to me, holding my hand, which was gently on her thigh, and said, “There is a golden thread that connects us.” In that moment, I was undone, unraveled, scraping for something to hold onto rather than letting the feelings out. We had such a nice night, and again, as she did months ago, she gifted me with a particular vision of myself, a communal vision of us, that made sense. I’ve been thinking about the golden thread ever since, revisiting it in the dark moments of the evening, the lonely moments of the morning, and the quiet moments on bike rides when I wonder aloud “but what is it that I want and desire?”

I’ve developed this crush. She is so very different than those who I have given myself to previously, be it in mind, body, or both. And even as I realize this, I wish I could unyoke her from previous people who I have been with or wanted. I want those people to never be in my mind or body again, and yet, there are traces of them when I think of her. She is so different, I think…then her, or him, or her…and there they are. Always already present, as shadows and ghosts following my current crush around my mind. Perhaps this is why I do not want to pursue my crush beyond my nascent desire. Perhaps this is why I am unsettled by liking her. And also, maybe it is something else; my wanting to want, my desiring to desire, that has me staying present with the crush rather than seeking more. And also, maybe it is a fear that she — or we — will end up like the others. Past relationships have reminded me that I have not guarded my heart for those who guard my heart nearly as well as I should have. This crush is not benign, even if it doesn’t develop into something more, whatever that “more” is or does. I wonder if she will read this, and that makes me wonder what this may stir for her. I also wonder how other people who read this will un/do the genders, sexualities, and romantic affiliations of my crush and I. I wonder how people will imagine her racialization, and how their imaginings may trade on various fantasies, anxieties, and beliefs about who should be dating whom. I wonder about how others’ desires for me to be in a romantic relationship may crush this crush of mine.

What is the feeling of gender? What does it mean to feel trans? And no, I don’t mean feel trans in an ethereal, not-quite-real sense, although maybe I do, because if gender is relational, and affect resides in the in between of self and other, then maybe gender is both real and not, concrete and decidedly fluid, dripping down the sides of one’s hands when trying to hold tightly to something that never wanted to be contained. What I am searching for most at this moment is the way gender is (un)created through the affective suturing of peoples and happenings.

When you imagine gender, what do you feel? What is the race of gender? The dis/ability of gender? The class status? Does gender have big hair, a long beard, is it dressed in a loud print, or a short skirt in hopes of warm days ahead? When you think of gender, do you taste vegetarian dishes, do you imagine particular sorts of undergarments strewn about rooms, various sexual acts with certain partners, known or unknown? In asking these questions, I wonder how our individual and collective feelings of gender are intimate portraits of our own internal desires for self and, as a result, others. How we feel gender is a reminder of who we wish to be, and who we wish others to be. There’s a particular sort of violence in this, as our desires for self and others also mean we are also projecting what/who we do not desire at the very same time. The insidiousness of gender constriction through overlapping ideologies of racism, colonization, compulsory able-bodiedness, and classism mean that when we each desire futures, there are likely people, experiences, and subjectivities that are refashioned as not only not present, but through their non-presence, not having a future.

I have had so many conversations with students, colleagues, and friends about affect theory, Black studies, and the overall atheoretical bent in the field of higher education. We seem to be circling around the same question: is our field ready? The more I circle back to that question, I am wondering another one: who am I/are we envisioning as the field when we inquire about readiness? I can think of a lot of people — the abject, the unruly, the ugly, the always already outsiders, the extra ones, both in emotionality and ontological senses — who are ready, have been ready, have desired so much more from “our” field. What would happen, I wonder, if we, the undercommons, just decided we wouldn’t think much about what “they,” those who seem to think “the field” revolves around their needs and wants, are ready for? What if we infiltrated the institution, stole what we could, and redistributed it amongst ourselves to feed and enrich and enliven us? How might it feel, this forceful presence? And if we did turn away from the continual centering of normativities, how might our feeling gender provide a platform upon which to alter the ground under our collective feet?

I am less interested in an argument positing higher education as theoretically rich or vapid. Instead, I am curious about what feeling gender means for the cultural location of college. To feel gender requires a particular kind of space, and as a result, I am interested in turning toward that space, even if it means turning away from portions (or the whole) of the field. Fields have desires, too, which both draw in and repel various kinds of thinking, being, and feeling. Moreover, fields may suggest an openness to something, but in their suggestions, they are enacting a particular form of disavowal. Fields produce and circulate non-performatives (Ahmed, 2012), which then congeal and harden around various bodies, minds, and ways of being in the world posed as dangerous. The non-performatives build up, restrict movement, work to harden hearts and soften minds so that nothing can ever challenge the ongoing colonial project of resource extraction and hoarding of those who pose themselves as central, as knowing what, who, and how is best for the field. So what if we refused? What if we decided to turn toward the affective and feel our way to new futures that need, desire, and crave?

Everyone wants to monetize gender, but to do so means to dilute it. When did women become a synonym for nontrans, and when did men become restrictive in a similar fashion? When did understandings of gender and sexuality stop at the confines of a queer center, or a women’s center, or a gender and women’s studies department? Why did race and racialization not always already reside in these spaces? How does the cordoning off of spaces into single axis analyses of self-in-the-world violently simplify a radical tradition that has forever been complex and full of promise and contradiction? Are we too far gone, or is there possibility yet untapped? And if there is a there there, if there are ways of feeling gender anew, of recognizing how these feelings saturate attitudes and actions and, as a result, are a potential root that we can pull to unearth the gender binary discourses that cover college campuses like a pall (Nicolazzo, 2016, 2017), then why would we not turn away from the field to (re)make the field? Where is gender (not) and how can we feel gender in ways that jackhammer away those residues, cements, and sediments holding us planted in place?