Confluence

[jouis_sens]

Yesterday, two things happened:

California's Proposition 8 was ruled unconstitutional, and on the country's opposite coast, a Long Island man was arraigned on manslaughter charges for the August 1st murder of a 17 month old, whom he punched and choked to death in order to "make him act like a boy instead of a little girl."

This is what a toddler's

Comments

[wicked_sassy]

Poignant and precise, as you always are. This is powerful.

[jouis_sens]

But where are the words precise enough to end this? They have eluded us for so long.

[signsof]

Oh god. What could possibly constitute 'gendered behavior' in a baby?

[jouis_sens]

Well, it's unclear if in this case the violence was a response to perceived femininity or instead simply preemptive: while I wasn't able to confirm it personally (hence I did not include it), one person indicated that they thought that Roy had been born with minor sexual ambiguity, and assigned male at birth - in which case Jones' brutality might be more accurately read not as a response to visible (however wildly misperceived) behavior per se, but instead a 'precautionary' step he was taking to make sure that that maleness 'took.' The other two reported cases this year involved slightly older boys (but both under 10), and those were instances of violence as responsive to overt behaviours which the fathers considered too feminine (e.g. playing with dolls). It was a hair I chose not to split here, since at a certain point on the line it comes down to the same thing, whether the victim is cis or trans: gender essentialism is so pathological that people feel compelled to enforce it with violence up to and including death if need be.

[signsof]

I don't know how you manage to deal with those people. When I read all the stuff that's going on with that I just flip out./

[escarpe]

It sounds trite and prosaic to say that the father of this poor child had issues. But if I try to put myself in his shoes I can't fathom the pressure and depth of feeling I would have to be under to harm a child

[jouis_sens]

While it is absolutely true and more than amply documented that, as you note, child abusers were very frequently themselves abused children, fueling a gruesome cycle, in the Jones case there's no reason to necessarily think that is the cause, or even a significant contributing factor. Cause and effect in these kinds of homicides is often less related to the personal background and more to the social-interpellative one. The numerical majority of perpetrators who have maimed or killed a child (or adult) in trying to get them to conform to gender expectations, or simply punishing them for not so conforming, were raised in homes free of both physical and emotional abuse: that's how deeply, how obsessively internalized, gender essentialism is in the collective psyche - anything that deviates even slightly from it is capable of provoking violence, even from people of more or less "normal" upbringings

[escarpe]

I agree with what your saying, I suppose that my question of whether the man was abused springs from my desire to make sense of the crime. I find it hard to fathom why anyone would want to harm their own child for any reason. Of course social drives are stronger than we often give them credit for but as Malcolm Gladwell points out societal drives and pressures are often stronger and more defined than genetic drives.

As for the "Australian Sex party" apart from having the best name in politics they seem to be the party that I am most inclined to vote for this election.

[signsof]

You guys have an amazing number of parties. The two party system is so boring.

[paracelsus]

Are you familiar with Agamben's book, Homo Sacer? It's a critique of the concept you end up with here, the right to be alive (although he calls it 'bare life'), and how it's become a central concern of the State. I know he's considered a bit of a topic du jour, but I find it persuasive.

[jouis_sens]

I've taught it several times, usually together with State of Exception. While I too agree with some of his post-foucauldian biopolitics (despite the unseemly trendiness), and an engagement with HS in this post would certainly have been apropos, those kinds of layers are typically omitted by my tendency to aggressively redact my background when jotting in this space. (Which frankly is just as well, since, wherever we severally align ourselves in re exilic/extimic Otherness and the current political moment, on mornings like August 5th what I primarily want to say requires nothing more than the vernacular: Stop murdering queers. And toddlers because you think they might eventually turn into one.) Thinking categorical exclusion is very interesting if we put Agambian bare life (and Butler's critique thereof) in conversation with Badiou.

[dulcemia]

I was sitting here thinking about how painful this was to read and then I realized it was probably even harder to write. Thank you for writing it.