too muchness // desire // nobodies // solidarities // world-making
Being excessive is often made into a subject position, as in: “she is too much,” or “her attitude is excessive.” The act of being excessive signals an overflowing, a too muchness that reinforces an othering, or the un/making of those who are excessive into those who are unnecessary and, as a result, can be forgotten, disappeared, or not oriented toward. The un/making of one as too much is a move toward disposability, toward marking somebody as a nobody. Or at least this is what normative cultures may want for us to believe: that those of us who are excessive, who are too much, who desire to desire, and desire to desire more, are nobodies.
And yet, what if we embraced our too muchness, or being nobodies, or desiring of more? And what if we focused on proliferating what that more could signal? What if the “more” being desired was not solely about desiring more from gender — itself a guiding principle for trans women’s lives — but about the feeling of desiring more as shared across identities and experiences? That is to say, what if excessiveness was understood as decoupled from bodies — one is “being excessive,” with the being forming excessiveness into a bodily experience — and instead understood as an felt reality between people? And, what if that felt reality was able to animate collective solidarities, a way of coming together through our shared experiences of being crafted as “too much” to imagine new worlds as nobodies? Said differently, if trans is desire, and if circuitries of desire mediate our wanting more, and as a result being made to feel we are too much, who else may be experiencing the same felt reality, and how may we come together to revel together in our positioning as queer, subaltern, outside, and too much? How can our moving toward the feeling of being too much be a way to re/craft worlds through new solidarities?
This is not to say that being too much does not have a bodily reality. Indeed, those of us that are marked as being “too much” know that our excessiveness resides in and is often located on our bodies. Trans as excess is then both a felt and embodied reality, in that it is placed on our bodies in particular ways that require we take it up in such a manner. We may not think of ourselves as “too much,” but we must when our bodies and lives are made to feel excessive through the normative lens of society. In similar ways, others who are de/constructed as “too much” have a similar felt and bodily experience; their excessiveness is both a felt reality and something that is placed upon their bodies in multiple ways.
One of the things I am curious about is how solidarities can be created across identities and experiences. Although de/constructed according to different discourses, the how of too muchness may be felt in similar ways, and perhaps in ways that allow people who feel these realities to come together were they to recognize the possibilities. Furthermore, because the strictures of being “enough” — as opposed to too much or not enough — are so narrow, there are perhaps more people than one may at first think with whom they could be in solidarity. Take for example:
“I worry my gender may be too much for you…”
“I worry my disability may be too much for you…”
“I worry my eating disorder may be too much for you…”
“My being a Black woman marks me as always already being too angry…”
“People understand LGB, but then say that queerness is too much for them…”
The experience of excess is affixed to the body through various marginalized subject positions, and is also felt as that which occurs between people, namely as a resulting effect of the machinations of power. Here, bodies are seen as important, and also not the sole field on which the grammar of excessiveness is played out. That is to say, bodies mark a site, but not the final location for, the affective trails of excessiveness.
Moreover, the way that excessiveness “shows up” may well be connected to desire across populations, as well. Trans manifestations of gender are always imagined through a lens of desire in that transness seeks more; there is a wanting, a yearning, a deep seeking of that moreness, regardless of how it shows up. Even those trans people who want to “pass,” or who seek to “fit in” and no longer wish to even identify as trans, are desirous of a gendered experience that is beyond that which was given to them. To paraphrase Dean Spade’s writing, there is nothing that is not radical about transitioning, regardless of the “end state” (which itself is fictitious, given there being a lack of ending to trans becoming). Thus, excess is a function of desire, which is itself a key element to the lived realities for trans people.
Desire, too, may operate in various ways to frame the “too muchness” of other populations and experiences. Imagining crip futures, owning and moving into one’s Blackness, changing one’s physical embodiment (including the ways we seek to change our body morphology beyond trans contexts); these are all animated by, in, and through circuits of desire. Importantly, too, desire knows no normative judgements; indeed, what we can and often do desire may not be “good” for us, be it objectively or subjectively speaking. For example, Berlant (2011) noted that
a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. …These kinds of optimistic relation[s] are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” (p. 1)
Therefore, not all of our desires are oriented toward our liberation, nor are all of them directed in ways that provide joy…and that they could is also not the ultimate point here. Instead, I am curious about the fact that desire serves as an animating affect that motivates relational experiences in the world to the point that some are deemed excessive, too much, and, as a result, nobodies. And if we can understand how desire is grounding actions and attitudes in a way that is moving bodies such that we are being framed by normative discourses as too much, then we may then have the ability to ask: and what now?
What worlds can we make as nobodies? What ways can we craft solidarities across bodies of nobodies, and how can we create, then, a body politic that is felt through our bodies when our bodies are de/constructed as impositions to that which is the “normal order of things”? McRuer’s (2006) provocation from an able-bodied society that asks, tacitly and otherwise, “Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be like me” (p. 9)? And, what might it mean to embrace our nobodyness in a manner than defies the illogics that de/construct us as such?
It’s not to say one must recognize an experience as “just like” another; indeed, Halley (2000) discussed the dangers of this as a social process (as well as its resultant juridical implications). However, one can seek solidarities without being “just like” another; in fact, one must, as a social imperative, do just that. We who are made nobodies because our desires — cruelly optimistic as they may be — make us such through the normative lens of social life are pushed apart, balkanized into separate bands, much like colors through a prism. However, there are false borders where the colors blur into one another, and even places in those false borders where there is no difference between “different” colors. These spaces, then, are where we can come to find solidarities, where we can seek the commonalities that occur to/on/about us through disparate grammars. They are also the locus of radical potential, a place for under-worlding possibilities to germinate.
What if we were to think about solidarities that can be made through the ways normative cultures attempt to frame what they may determine to be the wasting of potential life, gendered and otherwise? How could the collective desires of multiple, potentially overlapping, populations create bodies that are framed out through excessive demand, and how could this excess be a way to think bodies together to then dream alternate, underground worlds in which we kiki over our too muchness. In short, what if being too much was a felt reality that pushed us out, but drew us in, and brought us together? What if we embraced and held fast to our wanting to want, and desiring more, regardless of the cruel optimism that motivated such desires in the first (and perhaps second and third) place? That is, if we are always already too much, and if we are always already desirous of that which will be taken as a way to un/make us as nobodies through normative prisms of cultural meaning, then what could we do if we found back alleys, basement clubs, and private phone lines through which we could find each other and be too much together?
This is not a metaphor. This is not a thought experiment, or at least it is not a thought experiment in the ways such experiments are castigated as unreal and, as a result, lacking significance and meaning and potential. If our being made into nobodies means is a grammar through which normative ideologies attempt to remind us there are no bodies with whom we can converge and convene, then such coming together in dark spaces is exactly the form of world-making practice we need to seek sustained life. It is not a process of “rehabilitating” each other through our shared status as nobody; it is not about answering this ontological claim by saying, “But look here, we are somebody!” Instead, it is about being with, feeling together, and doing differently. It is about cultivating new life in the rubble of a field in which we cannot live. It is about desiring more and being too much together.
