David Valentine

‘I went to bed with my own kind once’: the erasure of desire in the name of identity

Abstract This paper explores how some individuals’ talk about sexual desire is rendered as incomprehensible when those desires are not easily talked about through categories of sexual identity. Using data from an ‘alternative lifestyles’ support group in New York City, I argue that paying attention to expressions of desire is vital for understanding what ‘sexuality’ has come to mean in contemporary theoretical accounts. Moreover, such an approach enables a critical view of both the political systems which underpin sexual identity as well as the relationships among language, gender, sexuality, and desire.

The Categories Themselves

the global marketplace—that is, as an intellectual framework that is less inclined to export Western notions of sexual selves, less inclined to expropriate indigenous non-Western configurations of personhood. Transgender studies, too, is marked by its First World point of origin. But the critique it has offered to queer theory is becoming a point of departure for a lively conversation, involving many speakers from many locations, about the mutability and specificity of human lives and loves. There remains in that emerging dialogue a radical queer potential to realize.

Exit Strategy: Profit, Cosmology, and the Future of Humans in Space

Commercial NewSpace industries are increasingly significant players in outer space. The temptation is to see NewSpace as merely the next step in neoliberal capitalism’s search for new profits and markets. However, finance capitalism’s emphasis on short-term investor “exit strategies” is actually hostile to both the cosmological vision and entrepreneurial practice of NewSpacers, who seek a different “exit strategy”: to escape Earth’s gravity and establish space settlements which they see as essential to long-term human survival and evolution. At the same time, critical theorists are hostile to, or ignore, the idea of space as a site for human sociality. I argue that the context of outer space—and what it promises—challenges a progressive perspective on human futures to take seriously the cosmological visions of powerful social actors whose goals naturalize capitalist relations, even as these goals are re-imagined in reference to powerful cultural and economic historical tropes.

Estratégia de Saida

Commercial NewSpace industries are increasingly significant players in outer space. The temptation is to see NewSpace as merely the next step in neoliberal capitalism’s search for new profits and markets. However, finance capitalism’s emphasis on short-term investor “exit strategies” is actually hostile to both the cosmological vision and entrepreneurial practice of NewSpacers, who seek a different “exit strategy”: to escape Earth’s gravity and establish space settlements which they see as essential to long-term human survival and evolution. At the same time, critical theorists are hostile to, or ignore, the idea of space as a site for human sociality. I argue that the context of outer space—and what it promises—challenges a progressive perspective on human futures to take seriously the cosmological visions of powerful social actors whose goals naturalize capitalist relations, even as these goals are re-imagined in reference to powerful cultural and economic historical tropes.

Extreme: Limits and Horizons in the Once and Future Cosmos

This paper introduces a special collection of Anthropological Quarterly for examining “the extreme” in contemporary modernity. Drawing upon sites of political, scientific, and economic engagement that source specifically to the extraterrestrial, we argue that the figure of the extreme shapes an analytic of limits and ever-opening horizons—epistemological and physical—provoking new understandings of humanness, environment, temporality, and of inter-species life as we think we understand it, here on Earth. It follows that this framework is not restricted to the environment of outer space: the analytic of the extreme, which is broadly salient in contemporary imagination and social practice, opens to examination of how all modern subjects are capable of upending modernity’s everyday spaces and timelines. The assembled papers cohere around this commitment. Coming in from very different angles, each seriously considers the possibility of outcomes not anticipated by analytic or vernacular explanatory frameworks, while refusing to commit anthropologists to the dangers of prognostication.

Transsexuality, Transvestism, and Transgender

This article traces the different histories, scope and contemporary applications of the terms of ‘transexuality,’ ‘transvestism,’ and ‘transgender’. All three terms and the subjectivities they have come to designate arose during the twentieth century. They are all fundamentally intertwined with the epistemological shift that occurred in Western societies in the eighteenth and nneteenth centuries, when the dominant paradigm for understanding and regulating gender and sexuality shifted from the various Christian churches to the state and to various branches of the developing medical science. In contemporary psychiatric classification, transvestism and transexuality are separate pathologies. Transvestism, the oldest of the terms, is considered a psychosexual disorder characterizated by an erotic focus on clothing, whereas transexuals are defined as individuals who have a ‘gender identity’ that is at odds with the gender by which they are socially designated. ‘Transgender’ is a much more recent category, having arisen in the United States in the early 1990s. It was cined by gender and sexual rights activists as an alternative to the pathologizing terminologies of psychiatrists and cinicians, and it has been disseminated as an umbbrella term to describe a range of persons who had previously been seen as distinct: transexuals, transvertites, cross-dressers, drag queens, and even intersex people. Like the other labels, though, ‘transgender’ is contested, even (especially) among those whom it is supposed to designate. And like the other terms, it is a site of tension, since it complicates the clear-cut distinctions between gender identity and sexual orientation that form the basis commonsence thinking and much political and social activism in contemporary Western societies.

Gravity fixes: Habituating to the human on Mars and Island Three

What shifts might emerge in theorizations of and debates over “the human”—as a historically specific entity or as nominating a general species difference—if Earth and its variable conditions no longer form the habitual grounds for these arguments? To answer this question, I examine two sites proposed by outer space settlement advocates: the surface of Mars, and the interior of a massive, rotating cylindrical space settlement called Island Three. I argue that these places unsettle habitual critical approaches to the human in outer space by posing radically different conditions through which to make accounts of the specific and the general, including that of humanness. Using gravity as both metaphor for significance and a physical quality and quantity that potentiates worlds and experience, I examine how a variety of problematics about humans and their histories are fixed—from Earth—in the imaginations of both settlement advocates and their critics, and explore problems for both critical theory and space settlement advocacy in thinking “the human” through nonterrestrial sites. I argue that thinking humanness from elsewhere in the cosmos offers new anthropological insights about questions of difference and relation, specificity and universality, Indigeneity and settlement, ontology and epistemology, and habits of embodiment on Earth.

For the machine

What if I wrote this response from a perspective off-planet, not above Earth but from some other place, off to the side: say a camp at the base of Olympus Mons on Mars or in artificial gravity on a vast rotating space habitat between Earth and the moon? Where I and the plants with me – and our relationships with one another in our machinic habitats – may appear to be in suspension to you; and you to us? But also where the status and constitution of human, plant, andmachine – and thus the ethical but also ontological relations between us – are up for constant attention, work, and negotiation? These are places where terrestrial relationships set in place by prepositions like ‘from’, ‘with’, or ‘above’ – as much as prepositional prefixes like ‘epi’ – may require new calibrating coordinates for experience, ethics, and politics. These questions should draw our attention to the fact that the differences among these sets of relationships are multiplied by also being different from one another’s – terrestrial, Martian, cylindrical settlement – so that there is not just one universal account of what it is to be above, in suspense, or suspended. In this speculative attempt at comparison, ‘ground’, ‘roots’, and ‘air’ – materially and metaphorically – must be put under suspension, but also, therefore should the relation proposed by Battaglia and demanded by the preposition ‘for’ in the question of who or what is ‘for’ whom or what. I must ask you to suspend disbelief to imagine what anthropological and ethical insights might arise out of these speculative perspectives which are prompted both by Battaglia’s paper and from six years of ethnographic research among space settlement advocates. These are mostly (white, male) US-Americans with mostly libertarian leanings (regardless of their left/right political commitments; see Schneider-Meyerson 2015) who uncritically draw on the precedents of the white settlement and colonization of North America, Australia, and Africa as analogies for what they see as their prime directive: to move large numbers of humans from Earth to other sites in the cosmos. The reasons for such a breathtaking mission are varied, but cohere in their talk around several grounding (and ethical) claims: to fulfil an unmarked human need for exploration; to revitalize the human species through the challenges of a new frontier; or in a more utilitarian vein, to allow terrestrial life to take root elsewhere as a ‘back up’ in the event of an imminent destruction of Earth through a natural or human-induced disaster or – at a deeper time scale – the eventual death of Earth in about a billion years. I wish to further suspend (or to adopt Battaglia’s phrasing, put under arrest) the immediate critical ethical questions that readers might bring to such a simultaneously grounding and flighty enterprise: what racialized accounts of the human travel with these analogies? What violent expansionist, extractive, and exploitative ideologies