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One of the consequences (maybe not the most interesting one) of the Rooney cluster controversy is that we need more and better analytics for disaggregating “queer” and “kinky.” I remember Ellis Hanson giving a talk on “kink theory” once that i found super interesting.
We all know that “queer” does too much analytic work at present, but for reasons that were probably unpredictable by Michael Warner or Eve Sedgwick, it has positioned itself in relation to two antonyms: straight, and vanilla.
Straight: heterosexual, normative, familial/natalist, probably a bit terfy.
Vanilla: sex as tenderness rather than self-shattering, sex as foundation of familial and property relations.
“Vanilla,” obviously, is also implicitly a racial category. And it def includes some gays.
Vanilla: sex as tenderness rather than self-shattering, sex as foundation of familial and property relations.
“Vanilla,” obviously, is also implicitly a racial category. And it def includes some gays.
A disaggregation is especially necessary, then, under the state of gay liberalism where a romantic tolerance of gay identity co-exists with a morbid and violent phobia of gay sexual practices. I’m also reminded of the necessity of what @autotheoryqueen calls “faggotry studies.”
The distinction is important if we want modes of thinking about queer liberation that don’t depend on expressive models of identity: “I *am* (gay/trans/bi), why won’t you (the state/the church/heteropatriarchy) let me be who I am?”
(It’s true that “kink” is sometimes used to refer to individual disposition - “what’s your kink?” - but it sounds less expressive to my ear. Kink is a practice, a party, not what you are but what you do.)
The problem with this line of thinking is that other people “are” straight in the same way. But if we shift our definitions from being to doing, from ontology to practice, the whole liberal framework will fall apart. Which is what we should collectively embrace.
Queer theory holds that heterosexuality is unsalvageable in the same way the marriage form is unsalvageable. People can want it, and even choose it freely, but they do not feel such desires or make such choices in conditions of their own design. Is this theory true? 
I don’t know. I’m not very interested in it. I’m more interested in the aesthetic, political, affective, and economic consequences of sexual practice. Which is ultimately a question irreducible to identity, or “queerness” as the generalizable force as we understand it. It’s kink.
(Caveat: I think it’s right to say that sexual *desire* cannot be reduced to an ethics, and in fact must be retrieved from ethics—CJ and I read Bersani the same way. But to claim that sexual *practice* doesn’t entail ethics, politics, or aesthetics seems obviously wrong to me.)
(caveat ii: this is a problem with certain internet-famous understandings of transness, too. fine to say that transness derives from desire, rather than identity, but once you argue that transition primarily exists as *practice*, your idea of desire is indistinguishable from ID.)
(caveat iii: another reason for this confusion is the mystification of Freud’s account of fetishism as though it were a general account of objects. his whole point is that fetishism is non-pathological: if you need to suck a glove to get off, stock up on gloves and ur fine!)
I think we’re understandably afraid of calling ourselves kinky, or speaking as though our transitions and relations derive from kink. Because it sounds awkwardly 80s, and because it sounds awfully close to the pathologizing that trans ppl have to survive being lobbed at us.
This is also why it’s important, though. We might think, too, of the way the terfs are coming after BDSM in the UK and observe that the politicized trans subject has as much - maybe more - in common with cis perverts as/than with vanilla gays.
anyway. the important point is to try to shift from identity to practice, away from the singular moment of volition and towards the architectures that sex both reproduces and unmakes. k bye
oh i want to acknowledge, too, that a grad student I’ve been working with - Kevin Stone - has been working on a related topic! leather culture and the marriage plot in German and English novels - a fabulous project, that will change the way we all think about this topic!
