What I'm trying to suggest though is that there's also something that we might call interpretive
luminology.
Things are like mutually exclusive.
And I think that both can be going on, but when I say to you, for example, that the word
woman can be used in a rather, what seems to me a radically different way in particular
the trans subcultures, that's not about whether or not you fit into terms of the category
or not, because it's precisely about what the category means.
Because in one interpretation, you may be liminal, on another interpretation, you may
be right in the center, depending upon how the word is being used.
Does that make sense to you?
So what I want to suggest is that sometimes, and I think that this is a bit too unfair
to know, but I think that sometimes there's the assumption of a singular interpretation
of the categories, one interpretation, whereby on that interpretation, one becomes categorically
liminal.
That is, the categories aren't themselves open to multiple interpretations.
Multiple ways to see.
And I think that there's other possibilities of liminality that are categorical liminality.
By that, I mean being caught in a space in which you're being interpreted in two different
ways, and you're kind of in between the two interpretations.
So for example, when I'm with friends who are like part of, and I feel like I'm speaking
so crudely, but I'm just going to go ahead with it, who are like part of the subcultures
within which I travel, and I'm using words, and they understand those words more or less,
and we're using them in particular ways, we also understand that if we're in the presence
of other people who aren't familiar with those words, or how we're using those practices,
and they're part of just sort of dominant culture, unfamiliar with resistant culture,
that they're interpreting us in different ways.
Right?
Remember I talked to you before, like sometimes, you know, if you come out and you go, oh yeah,
I'm a transgender woman, on one interpretation of that expression, oh, so you're really
a man.
And you say, no, I'm a transgender woman, you don't understand what I'm talking about.
Oh, no, no, so you're really a man.
Transgender woman, that expression means different things, right?
So maybe in dominant culture, or in some context with the dominant culture, it may mean really
as so-and-so discusses as so-and-so, in subcult, it may mean something else altogether.
Sometimes it may mean both at once, and you may be as it were caught in between the interpretations.
And that in-betweenness of sort of interpretation of multiple meanings is what I mean by interpretive
liminality.
And I would argue that this is not a point that I can make now.
I suspect that this is more what Lugano's and Zemento do have in mind.
But I think that they're also blended in their work as well.
And I think that it's useful pulling them apart just to see this.
And I think that inhale, the categorical liminality is emphasized more, and that it leads to these
assumptions about sort of fixed interpretations, although sometimes not, sometimes not.
So certainly in the leather type voice piece, I think you do see this kind of interpretive
liminality really brought out in sort of stark relief.
Does this make sense to you guys?
For me, it's sort of important.
I mean, I want to draw attention to this, because I think that this is really especially important.
If we don't have this dimension, we lost a lot, right?
If we just assume, because this has to do with sort of assuming, we'll talk more about this today,
assuming the common assumption is that trans people are punished because they fall outside
the binary, right?
Or they're in between the categories.
And this categorical liminality is a far more sophisticated account than that.
But it's similar in the sense that it assumes an interpretation.
It assumes that the individual, right, self-interprets as being categorically liminal or in between
the binary.
Are you with me on this?
And that's part of the issue.
The issue is how this person is being called and what those words mean, right?
So if a person says, yeah, I'm a trans guy.
Oh, so like, you don't fall quite into the binary.
You are neither, you know, really man or really woman.
Well, no, that's actually not what I mean.
I mean, then I'm really a guy, but I haven't been trans.
Well, the person says that, right?
Well, then an assumption has been made.
We've actually positioned that person, as it were, beyond the binary or problematically
with regard to the binary, regardless of their own interpretation.
And importantly for my purposes, regardless of the resistant practices already in place,
the resistant cultures whereby individuals have the social practice of self-naming
and giving those words meanings.
Does that make sense to you?
So we're leaving it in an important dimension here.
Or at least I want to separate these things and give this a kind of prominence.
Something along the lines of the genesis of a resistant culture.
I mean, you mentioned the idea of family teapot, if I know you're not.
I mean, say, for example, there was a group of people that said they weren't teapots,
by skin, by sportsmen, for all I care.
You know what I'm saying?
I mean, what would constitute an actual culture that could then be resistant
and have its own practices?
You know what I mean?
I guess the question is along the lines of how does the genesis of such a resistant culture take place?
And I don't know.
So also part of your question is like, you know, what makes a culture genuinely a resistant culture?
And this gets to the issue of how do we identify sort of a dynamic of oppression and resistance
and push and push back, which is important to me.
And I see that in the Hill article, the other day, boy, if you have the dominant culture
of tension with a resistant culture, there's this kind of conflict.
So how do you sort of identify that?
This is why I go back to transphobia, for example, or other things.
We're talking about trans issues and trans subcultures.
So I talk transphobia, but we could talk homophobia, we could talk misogyny.
And I prefer the emotion-laden words to the more technical, refined notions
like hypersexism and so forth, you know, for a lot of different reasons.
But when you notice that, I think that, I mean, so for example, in terms of like, to me,
you could just, you know, do the math in terms of or try to do the math in terms of like, you know,
violence against trans people, how are trans people treated?
Are they subject to disproportionate acts of violence?
How are they treated institutionally?
Are they verbally harassed?
Are they subject to various forms of indiscrimination?
Yes.
And so, right, then you have sort of evidence that there's this kind of like,
there is something going on, right, worth noting where there's a cruisism.
Genuine violence occurring, genuine violence occurring.
The trick, which makes this more complicated, is how that gets noticed and by whom.
Because it often gets obscured, as we saw in some of the articles we read today,
from mainstream culture, like it may not show up that a lot of this violence is occurring.
It may only show up more so among the resistant culture,
if they may notice it far more, because they're dealing with it on a daily basis.
But I think that to be kind of like a market difference from, you know,
10 people getting together and going, let's call ourselves T-pods.
Oh, yeah, no, no, definitely.
And then that's all right.
I think one of those more, I mean, I guess that's the genesis,
and then you identified some characteristics of what a resistant culture is like.
I guess that leads me to the question of there's the push there, right?
I mean, there's the divide in the push.
What is the push for?
I know the dominant culture is kind of pushing down.
The resistant culture is pushing to 1M.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, is it?
We're trying to survive, I guess.
What?
But I mean, is it beyond survival?
Like, is it to actually adapt the dominant culture to the resistant culture?
I mean, maybe it depends culture to culture, but in the typical,
because I think it's a good description.
You know, here's the nature of things.
So what should be the case?
What is that?
I don't understand this more deeply in terms of the resistance.
And I have to confess that at some level, I don't know what to say,
because I'm still thinking it through.
I follow Maria Lagona's sort of positing that whatever the suppression is of resistance
has a kind of starting axiom.
So you're going to start off with this, as if there's one, there's the other,
and it's not even clear which came first.
And the trick is to look for the resistance.
And her reasons for, I think, adopting this here are complex.
The fun is that if you don't adopt this, if you don't posit resistance,
then you have this shitty theory of resistance.
You have a depressing theory that's not going to help you at all,
because it just tells you the story about a lot of violence being done.
Does that make sense?
What is the push towards that?
The TV logically, where is the push going?
Oh, I don't know.
I'm not sure that there's a definite answer to that.
I think that sometimes it's just a pushback and maybe a groping towards something.
So what you're going to get in the end, though, is maybe not clear.
Sometimes intentions are not clear.
There's a difference between pushing against and pushing towards.
I think pushing towards something can include pushing against something,
but pushing against doesn't necessarily entail your pushing towards something.
You're pushing against something on you.
That's how my question is.
It definitely seems against, but is it towards?
Right.
And I think that I would probably want to say something profoundly interpersonal
has to do with ways of relating to each other.
But that's what I can say.
When we talk about recognition, I don't like reduction in violence.
Discrimination is a workplace.
So these are like friends that run through the right.
So that's a lot.
So yeah, it seems to be something.
Sure.
I mean, it's all sorts of interesting issues about when you're offering a theory of professional resistance,
whether or not you're going to offer some kind of vision or end toward what you're actually seeking
and how utopian that's going to look.
And I guess I do resist that, in a sense, that I would be more inclined to focus on what we're confronting with.
We can confront it with right away, as with the primary department.
Yeah, Susan?
Well, I think in different trans cultures, you see people who would love to see the gender system overthrown,
and that's their mission, to move the culture beyond gender.
And in different trans communities, that certainly wouldn't even be, that would be going the wrong direction.
So I think it totally depends on who you're speaking to.
But if everybody is up against the wall, and you say, well, everybody push so we can get here,
a lot of people are going to be fuck it.
That's the exact same as being up against the wall.
And that pushes you to leave sort of the end place for their own people to decide that everybody pushed to get away from the wall, maybe.
That's probably more like where it looks like now, at least politically.
And it's not even clear you can conceptualize what the end would look like.
I mean, Amirad, as you are now, sort of in the current situation, you may not have the wherewithal to imagine an end that would be thoroughly untainted.
I mean, this seems like, I like the comparison with the struggles with civil rights with blacks.
I mean, the question would be, are we saying we're color blind?
Right? So you're sort of obliterating this kind of, you know, what we're trying to say, we're like a racial, you know.
So there's like a lot of parallels, but I want to say, man, I want to say blacks, we're trying to go for some real grand.
And it's couch, I mean, in the civil rights thing, but that's a whole lot.
But I don't know, beyond the kind of sort of recognition and rights thing, I don't know.
What else?
Yeah.
I'm going to have some idiosyncratic cubes, but maybe I'll talk about those later.
