Nonbinary Jane Austen
One has to be careful where non binary thinking doesn't get trapped in binaristic logic. And that can happen, I think, easily through identity politics.
Christopher Breu:I loved it as a model of literary criticism. I mean, it's a it's an incredibly rich, deconstructive reading of Jane Austen, and it reminded me of how powerful close reading can be.
Ali Sperling:It really was interesting to think about Austen not as a gender abolitionist, but as someone who's calling for an abolition of the social order.
Marquis Bey:There are so many other people with investments in Austin, with the whole archive that they have in Austin. What are the political stakes in writing this kind of book?
Chris Washington:Okay. My name is Chris Washington, and I am the author of this book, Nonbinary Jane Austen. I suppose the one thing I could say is it is a book that is attempting to think about, among many other things, I suppose, how one does literary criticism today. But there's also a way in which the book is not about Jane Austen, which I think I may say in the book at some point in kind of the same way that Derrida's of Grammatology is not really about Rousseau. I don't know if that's helpful or not, but it is a also very much an attempt to think about a way of reading nonbinarily.
Chris Washington:One of my people who read it before it was published said something like, you skate delightfully right on the edge of what literary criticism can do. I don't know if that's true or even maybe what that necessarily means, but it sounded nice. So anyway, I think we can just go around and and introduce ourselves and see what happens.
Christopher Breu:Okay. This is Chris Breu, Christopher Breu. I'm the author of most recently, In Defense of Sex, Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, in which I argue for the importance of thinking about sex as a category of both embodiment and desire and thinking about it as a nonbinary category in both cases as a category that's about nonbinary embodiment. I was born intersex and I am intersex. Hypospatias was what I was born with and both am intersex and identify that way.
Christopher Breu:But although one of the things I argue in the book is it's less about identification and more about embodiment. And my work's always been pro sex, so that's also something that I take on in this book as well. I argue that we're in a weird moment in which sex is both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem in discourse right now. And so, yeah, but I'm really especially interested and I'm influenced by Marquis's work and it overlaps with Chris and Allie's work in thinking about how we can think about embodiment and desire in non binary ways. Where I might differ a little bit more is I want to emphasize the material dimensions of embodiment a little bit more strongly in some ways.
Christopher Breu:And that's what I'm doing. Also work on a number of other things, but this is what's most relevant to this podcast.
Ali Sperling:So, hi, I'm Ali Sperling. I'm an assistant professor of literature, media and culture at Florida State University. And I'm also currently a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry here in Berlin. And I'm just very happy to be here and excited to be part of this conversation. So like, thanks everyone for bringing us together and for this really cool book.
Ali Sperling:Chris, this is, two Chris's, so Chris W, I don't know how to like address that. Chris Washington, thank you for this this book, which I read with so so much pleasure and interest, and learned a lot. I work on twentieth and twenty first century, American literature with a focus focus on, science fiction and especially on the what is the weird, both as a literary and cultural category and as a theoretical frame more broadly. I also, work in queer and feminist theory and in the broader, environmental humanities. My current book project looks at modernist American literature through this theory of the weird that follows from New Materialisms, Black Studies, and Queer Theories of Embodiment.
Ali Sperling:So a lot of overlap, obviously, with all of your work here, which I admire very deeply. Maybe I can also say a little bit more about how the non binary came of interest after this first round, but that's a general introduction.
Marquis Bey:Hello, hello everyone. I am Marquis Bey. I am full professor of Black Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Critical Theory at Northwestern University. Generally speaking, just to give a quick primer as to the work that I do, how I inhabit this sociopolitical and intellectual space. Generally speaking, my work concerns trans and non binary theory, black feminism, abolition, and all of that with a particular focus on how processes of racialization have impacted non normative genders.
Marquis Bey:But more specifically, and perhaps even more fastidiously, I am constantly preoccupied with how rethink what certain terms mean, and namely for me, blackness, transness, non binary, feminism, those kind of terms, along a political or philosophical or imaginative rather than an identificatory one. So I think we'll have a lot of overlaps there to to talk about. And to date, I've published a number of things, but most relevant for our conversation, sometime next year, I will be having my newest book coming out, and that is gonna be called Nonbinary Life. So I've been immersed in thinking about the very question that is nonbinary. So I'm super, super excited for this conversation, y'all.
Marquis Bey:I'm happy to be here.
Christopher Breu:Well, one thing I wanted to say just about the book is that one, I loved it as a model of literary criticism. I mean, it's an incredibly rich, deconstructive reading of Jane Austen. And it reminded me of how powerful close reading can be at various points, that there's a kind of care and precision and a complexity, a deconstructive complexity to your reading, often a very small passages or short passages. But I mean, remember when queer theory first exploded. I'm old enough actually to sort of go back that far a little bit.
Christopher Breu:You know, I remember when there was that feeling of, wow, you could do really interesting things with language on this really precise and micrological level. You could find the current of queerness in a text that might otherwise not seem that queer on the surface. And often, it was right there. I mean, it was a matter of looking at it differently. And I think you do the same thing with Jane Austen here, this writer who, we tend to associate with the marriage plot.
Christopher Breu:Right? We tend to associate with realism and, you know, ideas of, you know, finally producing a kind of closure, that marriage represents and and reproducing a kind of set of social frameworks, you know, even as it's also critical of it, and there's ambivalence around it, as you already point out. The great thing about any realist text is, you know, it's always ambivalent before it resolves. Right? Closure's always a fantasy a retrospective fantasy on a certain level.
Christopher Breu:But one of the things I love is that you actually reveal this deep nonbinary current running through Jane Austen and this kind of rethinking of it of embodiment and being and becoming. I wondered if you could say more about that about that, Chris.
Chris Washington:So I will say there's a way in which I wanted to think about how wherever there is gender, there are many genders. So when you look at, as you say, a canonical author like Jane Austen, who we think of as this very heteronormative author in the marriage plot and all of these things. That all turns on gender and social dynamics and power. You know, if that's the case, there must be many genders at work here and many genders in fiction. The name is escaping me off top of my head.
Chris Washington:I quoted in the book somewhere where somebody said in their essay, why do we always read these works of fiction and think these people are just cisgender or straight or any of these things, you know. And I liked what Marquis said a while ago, you know, thinking about things imaginatively and not identificatorily. Right? To think about this kind of imaginative reading of Austen that doesn't force things that aren't there, but rather, you know, shows how they must be there. For a long time, I guess technically, still am.
Chris Washington:I was just a romantic British romantic literary scholar and wrote these other books on that stuff. I don't know how much they're worth anything. But so I wanted to start thinking about ways to not think about how to rethink British romanticism necessarily, which I don't know that we need to be doing. I'm not sure how far that gets anything. And so one thing I was careful to do is not to talk about British romanticism.
Chris Washington:I don't think those words appear at all. But rather to to begin to use authors like Austen to begin discovering that kind of non binary life that must have been there, that kind of trans life that must have been there, and other types of things we might think. But again, to do it without necessarily engaging in identificatory politics, I think there's a way in which one of the things I'm saying in the book, drawing on a lot of authors, Mark Yest among them, is is to resist identity politics. The difficult thing I watched this documentary called Turn the Page last night, which is about Robert Caro who wrote the giant book, The Power Broker on Bob Moses in New York. It's like it's like 700,000 words long.
Chris Washington:And in the documentary it's about him and his editor. He said, Oh, you know, it used to be longer and I had to cut 350,000 words. And he said it took a year. And so one of the things I did try to do speed about the micrological, these kind of intense readings, is that in writing the book, although it's a short book, it did take me probably four years to write it with an intense rereading and revision process that at the very end, I was told I had to cut 3,500 words, which felt like it was gonna blow my head off. So when I watched that documentary last night and he had to cut 350,000, I thought, wow.
Chris Washington:But it is that process that I think helped hone the readings down to a very directed, and again, that's a good word, micrological kind of approach to this. And I think deconstructive is a good word too. I am a very Adderada type thinker. So there is that as well going on here.
Christopher Breu:It's also very much a a book that draws on Foucault. His account of biopolitics and and and disciplinary politics and and and sexuality, which I I actually have some questions about how you use biopolitics, but we can get into that later. But, yeah, I I think you draw from a number of different theoretical black studies, queer studies, or black theory, queer theory, you know, from a number of different traditions. So and I also love your vocabulary. I've never had a book send me to the dictionary more than your book sent me.
Christopher Breu:And I I think I have a good vocabulary, but clearly, I you know, I mine needs some work.
Chris Washington:Well, you know, when you grow up being a here's a word for you, a librocubicualist, which means someone who reads in bed all day and you, you know, you're you grow up reading Joyce and Beckett in bed all day, kind of you begin thinking of these, odd words a lot of the times. You know? And in fact, I'm wearing my Bloomsday shirt I got last year on Bloomsday. I hope the vocabulary works and it's not weirding people out.
Christopher Breu:No, it's great. I loved it.
Marquis Bey:Yeah. I never have any qualms or quibbles with big words and dense vocabulary. For me, there's a lusciousness in the work that that takes and entails. It's kind of, I don't know, there is something exciting about that, I appreciate that. I want to ask a quick question, and other folks can chime in on this as well, but I'm I'm curious in particular about more broadly the political stakes of and I guess more specifically, what I mean by that is the political stakes in doing a reading of a particular author in a lot of ways who is so overdetermined by an archive that arrives before you even arrive to that author.
Marquis Bey:So in writing a book, Nonbinary Jane Austen, and yet there are so many other people with investments in Austen, with the whole archive that they have in Austen that to them have nothing to do with nonbinary, what are the political stakes, the political implication for you in particular in writing this kind of book or in approaching any author who is approached or encountered by others on other kinds of ground? What did that mean for you? How did that impact you? I guess more generally, how does that impact all of us who write about other people for whom many others have certain kinds of investments, which I hope makes some kind of sense.
Chris Washington:No, it's a great question. And thank you. I really because I do want to talk about the politics of the book because I do think it is a very political book. And yes, Austin and the archive around it, the criticism around Austin, which is could probably make a small library, and in fact has in Chatham and England, is very overdetermined. You don't necessarily see that represented in the book fully because I had to make a lot of decisions about the politics of citation.
Chris Washington:So the first thing I had to do was cut all references to my other work and just get rid of my my own bladder, you know, because you say in footnotes, I'll see my other bits. And then, you know, I got rid of all my friends because sometimes I would say, oh, see this person who's just my friend. And then I really had some tough choices because I was not going to cut black scholars, queer scholars, trans scholars, non binary scholars. Right? So that ended up amounting to cutting quite a lot of references to Jane Austen's scholarship.
Chris Washington:So I had to try to be very carefully nuanced in picking one one or two examples that was kind of representative of the way that Austin archive works. And I can also say, you know, I'm looking at sometimes minor looking passages in Pride and Prejudice or even sometimes major ones. I also go to less read Austen Marks because most people just think of these five or six novels. But her early juvenalia is really just wild and crazy. To me, it's sometimes more interesting than the other stuff.
Chris Washington:That's kind of a pragmatic writing answer. But the the larger stakes of the politics of the book, I think, are very much invested in what I would call a leftist politics of liberation. I was recently been reading this book, Transfem Futures by Nat Rauchat and Michike Vandendreb, called Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. And there's a passage, I can't find it off the top of my head, where they say the difference between trans liberalism and Transliberation is that Transliberalism wants to work within existing institutions. Whereas Transliberation wants wants to abolish those institutions.
Chris Washington:Right? So there is a way in which Jane Austen is an institution and I'm working in that kind of institutional framework, but I'm hoping it comes out on the other side of what they are here calling trans liberation and things like what Marcus calls black trans feminism and these more abolitionist politics, which is one reason why the book is resisting these identificatory processes and ultimately becomes not so much about Austin, but about my imaginative fantasy about this Austin who will be kind of to come. This non institutional process that can't exist yet in the institution of Austin. So there's a kind of palimpsest to Austin's work where I am uncovering that powerful non binary current. But at the same time, it's a kind of para plomina, which is a extraneous thing added to book.
Chris Washington:But at any rate, so I hope the book lands in that liberatory abolitionist politics, that imaginative space of this Austin to come, and so manages to get away from those old readings of Austin to think in a wholly different way. But I don't know if it's successful or not. If that answers your question.
Marquis Bey:It absolutely answers my question. Thank you for that.
Ali Sperling:Yeah, it really was interesting to think about Austen not as a gender abolitionist, but as someone who's calling for an abolition of the social order, right? Which is the kind of beginning of the book, the way it sets up. I had not thought about Jane Austen in this way before, I admit. And it seems also to me in response to what Marquise is asking about the political stakes that non binary in this in particular, and I think this comes a lot from your work Marquise, if I remember the citations in the book correctly, that the non binary is a space of fugitivity and misrecognition, right? That you kind of talk about throughout the book.
Ali Sperling:And actually what I really enjoyed, or at least noted oftentimes you perform the misrecognitions in the book, right? You give us a kind of reading and then you ask, or does it, right? And so that the book kind of also enacts in a way that the forms that we might have always misrecognized, but that actually that's kind of a cornerstone of how you're reading non binary ness in Austin, right? That it actually depends on being understood as adhering to the social order in some way or being recognized as such. And so I thought that was a really provocative insight into Austin and leads me to something that I might ask, which something I'd written down but Chris and I had a moment before, so I don't wanna steal Chris's question.
Ali Sperling:So maybe I'll ask it in one way and you can tack on what we had already spoken about. But since you just brought it up again, which is like, this is not a book about Jane Austen. One of the things I was thinking about is this recent piece just because I work in the environmental humanities by Mark Bold, which is on, I can't remember, it's called Ride or Die, something about the Anthropocene, right? Which is like, okay, we can read for the Anthropocene anywhere. And I think he even finds it in the Jane Austen, like he might even talk about Pride and Prejudice in this piece or something like that, right?
Ali Sperling:And so Chris and I were talking, if it's not about Jane Austen, is this a method or a methodology? Because you also say this is not a non binary reading, right? It's not like a practice of reading for the non binary, but it's something else. So is that something that can be practiced? Does it have to be Jane Austen?
Ali Sperling:Like how might we think about this outside of genre or periodization or other things like that?
Chris Washington:Sometimes when I teach the film, The Matrix, you know, the directors, the Rachowskis say, Oh yes, it is a trans allegory film. And, you know, we don't have to follow, you know, what they think, obviously. But when I'm teaching it to the to my sophomore students who are not English majors or literature media majors, cultural studies, it's just general audience class. The last couple days will spend exploring the film as this trans allegory. One of the things I try to get them to see is that the people in the film are hackers.
Chris Washington:And what they are hacking, of course, is at base level binary code. Right? And you can see that when you see the matrix. There is a way to think about the reading methodology developed here as a way of hacking nineteenth century gender in the nineteenth century realist novel or even beyond that. I did really want to think about what it means to read non binarily even at the same time is not making that some type of codification.
Chris Washington:There's kind of a double play going on, to speak a little deconstructively throughout, where it is the resistance and the erasures that also are making these things appear. But at the same time, things are appearing and they're not erasures. And in that way, it is a a way of reading nonbinarily. But at the same time, it's saying, but these things aren't just there. That's a complicated question.
Chris Washington:I I think that's maybe something people have to think about from reading the book. You know, I can say of the people who have also read it elsewhere and talked to me about it, everyone has said, oh, this is what I got out of it. And it's totally different each time. And, you know, it's just a short little book. But, I mean, I think there is a lot going on.
Chris Washington:But I also am happy in some regards to let people develop those lines of flight from it in their own reading. You know, there's I mean, as I said a couple of things here, there are things I hope people are getting from it, but I'm also happy that people are having these really wild readings of it. Other things are coming forth.
Ali Sperling:I was thinking about just some of your opening comments about how the book is also thinking about how to do literary criticism today. And this thing that keeps coming back up in the book that the way in which you're reading Austin is attempting to move beyond an additive logic, right? So to me there's something that's very specific about what the non binary or non binary ness might offer that is And not a kind of, so I was thinking about that, but I think you also gave us more stuff to think about.
Chris Washington:Yeah, I see that great quote from the C. Riley Snorton book, Black on Both Sides. This is a book of history, but not a book of history that people understand as a book of history. It wants to get beyond the additive logic of abledisabled, blackwhite, gaystraight, cis, trans. Which is a model, I think, of thinking towards non binary.
Chris Washington:But at the same time, one has to be careful in doing that where non binary thinking doesn't get trapped in binaristic logic. And that can happen, I think, easily through identity politics and through identificatory something. There's a big word for you all who like is one point of going to Foucault and thinking about Foucault this way, but also drawing on the work of Black Studies and Fred Moten, but also Marquise, his work, which I hope I've followed correctly and done justice to. I think that Snorton quote really helps exemplify my answer to that, which is that on one obvious hand, non binary thinking has to resist binaristic thinking in politics. On the other hand, it has to be aware that it is caught up in that binaristic thinking.
Chris Washington:It's the double bind. Unraveling that is the difficulty. And I guess that is one other thing this book is trying to do, is to unravel that thinking. To imagine a kind of non binary life that does not find itself always caught in those pitfalls of binary. But again, I don't know that the book accomplishes the the point of the forerunners books is to offer a thought that isn't completed, which I rather liked because that thought can't be completed.
Chris Washington:You know, the completion of that thought would be a kind of just allowing things to exist in binaristic thinking. It has to be continually open ended. As Marquis says in Blythe Transformalism, if we want radical, we can't know what it is that is coming. Or else it will already be the anticipatable, that we'll already be trapped in this old logic and life and ways of thinking and being. And that's another way of of answering the question about the book's politics.
Chris Washington:And another way to answer the question about the Austin archive. I don't imagine the Austin people are are liking this book, which is not the point. Those are not the people I'm I hear from.
Christopher Breu:I wanted to this maybe picks up both on Marquise's question and in a bit a bit on Ali's question as well. And it comes back to the question of of Foucault in part, but also maybe a distinction between different kinds of radical politics. You know, my own affiliations tend to be more Marxist. You know, know, Marquise, you've written brilliantly on anarchist imaginaries and and thinking about that. I wonder about the the politics, not only of abolition, but one of the things I really love about your book is the critique of identitarian logics.
Christopher Breu:I mean, it's something I share and try in in a similar way in in defense of sex and in other books I've written, but especially in in defense of sex. The first book actually was probably more about identity than a critique of it, but, Hard Boiled Masculinities. Part of what I'm interested in, and maybe one way to link this moment, is the way in which you use, Kajia means, we're all nonbinary now, which I take as a kind of critique of, the ways in which nonbinary is operationalized as an identity by all kinds of people and all the time that that it doesn't seem to mean anything anymore if everybody uses it, is how I read that piece, you know, which I think is a kind of sharp critique. But it also is a reading of Judith Butler that, in fact, we are all nonbinary on a certain level. Right?
Christopher Breu:But that's there's also a kind of utopian dimension of it. And you really kind of go at that utopian core. You know, one of the questions I have, and this is maybe a different way of coming at this, is there a danger of effacing all kinds of material difference in the name of effacing all kinds of identities on a certain level? One of the questions I have about abolition obviously, I'm for the abolition of capitalism. I'm for the abolition of police and and prisons.
Christopher Breu:But I wonder, do we wanna abolish gender fully? Or is gender a space of of play? Do we wanna abolish it as an institution or a a space of multiple identifications? And one of the questions I I wind up having here too is that we're now in something different, you know, neofascism, whatever you wanna call it. Techno feudalism seems to be something people floating.
Christopher Breu:I'm not sure I'm fully on board with that. We're moving past neoliberalism, but for fifty years, we've had a politics that has assaulted institutions in this country. And so I worry sometimes about the rhetoric of getting rid of institutions, whether that plays into the right rather than the left. And, you know, maybe another way to ask this is representation in institutions, are they always police functions? Are they always carceral?
Christopher Breu:Is language always carceral? Because I'm not convinced of of all of any of those things, but it feels like it's really central to your argument.
Chris Washington:So, I guess I would say abolitionist politics is not about destroying embodiment or materiality or identity in the sense of leaving nothing. I understand abolitionist politics to be destroying, carceral institutions such as, in this case, harmful ideas about gender that hurt people very materialistically. And I think that's part of Amin's point too, is that it's not just hurting trans and non binary people, but cisgender. Although there's also the the funny part in that article where he says, where the hell did this come from all of a sudden? Right?
Chris Washington:You know, and you're right. What he's saying what I've been saying about the non binary is that it is it goes in both directions. There's something where it's become so amorphous. All identities fall under it. But at the same time, there's something utopian about it.
Chris Washington:So there's kind of this double cut there. But I think for Amin, I think for others, the point of abolitionist politics is to abolish ideas of identity politics that are carceral, but that is in order to let many identities and embodiments flourish. Whereas now they cannot. And I think that's also what Amin is getting at. It's like abolition is exploding notions of gender in order to exponentialize them.
Chris Washington:Right? As to the question of, you know, say political institutions of state and abolishing them? And does that play into the right's hands?
Christopher Breu:No, maybe even less political, but things like education, right? Public education would be one example.
Chris Washington:Well, I mean, I think, that does become the question of, yeah, reforming the institution versus abolishing it and doing something different. But again, if one thinks of abolitionist movements, of even then destroying the public school system, it is in order to build something different that is carceral and perhaps that is not carceral, but that perhaps that can only happen with that with that gone. I mean, I think those questions of liberation are very often answered by, we don't necessarily wanna know what's happening next. And of course, the right does want to is in the process of getting rid of all of these institutions. And this is horrifying from some perspectives, but it may also end up being the space that one can work in.
Chris Washington:But that would be the need to have the power to do so. I think the the thing where Zu Ranbam Donnie is one's primary in New York City with the unabashedly leftist agenda is the possibility that that leftism can win and can win within an institution that I thought was completely dead and corrupt like the Democratic Party. But so anyway, the point overall is I don't think of abolition as being this destructive process. It is about building things. It is about clearing out systems and systemic thinking like binary thinking and binary notions of gender that are harmful in real material ways to people and letting allowing for material flourishing.
Marquis Bey:Interestingly and very paradoxically enough, I love distinctions. So the distinction that you make that I find, like, incredibly rich in terms of, like, a reading or thinking nonbinarily, I love that so very much. And I wanna I just wanna invite more to be said about that. Like, what precisely do you mean or imprecisely perhaps do you mean by that? Because I I feel fully on board with that.
Marquis Bey:And I just wanna hear you say more, like, what exactly do you mean by a reading practice or a thinking practice, nonbinary rather rather than looking for nonbinary people, identifiably nonbinary people, but thinking and reading nonbinary. What does that mean for you? And perhaps even what purchase does that have? Where might that travel? How might that move?
Marquis Bey:Who can do that? Who can't do that? Etcetera, etcetera.
Chris Washington:Wow. No. This is really a great question too. Let me see if I have some wits to gather. I suppose there's an assumption.
Chris Washington:There's a premised assumption I'm making that we live in a world that is, I don't wanna say necessarily ontologically or material, but maybe those are right too, that is defined by a binaristic logic and a way of being. And I think a lot of problems stem from that. And they're material problems. But they're also problems of thought that are preventing any type of progress. This is a kind of foundational logic.
Chris Washington:And so thinking nonbinarily is to try to defy that grounding logic. As to who can do it, I think that becomes everybody. As a manner of reading, I think the scene that perhaps exemplifies it the best in this book is this famous scene in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are dancing, that I read as this production of nonbinarystic thought and nonbinarystic being of kind of each and the other, but also beyond the other. So as a way of reading, that scene kind of captures what I'm getting at there.
Chris Washington:But then that in turn develops as a way to to read the world, the social world around us. Right? And I think that is the type of thinking that proves liberatory and abolitionists, to go back to those words, because it's getting at that basic foundational problem that we have in our thinking. Another way to put this in more perhaps everyday political terms is to say that I think, and this would again be the difference between liberalism and leftism, I think, part of that binaristic thinking leads to a certain orthodoxy and certain talking points and certain conventional wisdoms about what politics is and what can happen. And so I think that is all part of this binaristic logic.
Chris Washington:I don't just mean like liberals versus conservatives or something. I I'm not I don't wanna make that Marghisov's distinctions. Don't know if that's really good. But So it is an attempt to radicalize our thought politically at a basic level, to get outside of conventional wisdom and political orthodoxy. Which I think, quite frankly, are are not just inhibiting people's thoughts but is actually killing people.
Chris Washington:And again, there's a way in which, right, yes, this non binary thinking that I'm trying to develop here is incomplete. And it must be. Right? Because if it's not, it is gonna fall into a kind of reified orthodoxy, that additive logic. Right?
Chris Washington:So in some ways, this is a book of logic. It's like Wittgenstein's Tractatus without the without the math. Or, yeah, as I said, there's a the politics of anti mathematics. Right? I've never been good at math, and so I I always thought if I would run for office, that would be my slogan.
Chris Washington:You know, vote Washington, he won't count you out, you know, about abolishing mathematics. So I use that joke in here about Austin, you know, vote Austin, she won't count you out because she's moving beyond that binary logic. I guess another way to approach it would be, you know, we're now seeing all these studies about AI and how it's destroying people's cognitive capacity. Of course, we came out of COVID that destroyed a lot of people's cognitive capacity. I had a horrible COVID that just totally fucked me up and for, like, two years, which is another reason why this book took I I pitched this book in, like, 2020 or something.
Chris Washington:I just couldn't do it. And those things are true, you know? Those things are harming us cognitively, whatever that means. But so is this type of thinking that the book is critiquing. I think it's been harming us cognitively, psychologically, socially, materialistically, however we wanna put that for a long time.
Chris Washington:Even being able to kind of ostensibly point to that can be helpful. Because I don't think people see that. I think they're caught in this binaristic thinking. It's a great question. No, it was funny before this, I was saying, man, I don't know what to say about the book, but hopefully, hopefully my answers are coherent, even if unsatisfactory.
Marquis Bey:Yeah, I think that was lovely and marvelous. And I do find, I don't know, just to perhaps maybe assuage some of the anxiety perhaps that you might be feeling that I also often feel anytime I talk about anything. I think part of, like, the feeling of, I don't know what I'm going to say about this book that I spent so much time writing that is multiple thousands of words is I think there's a perhaps there's a fullness to the things that you think. So there's a kind of saturation perhaps that that you're that you're immersed in such that you don't know what you're gonna say because there's so much to say. There's so much that you could say.
Marquis Bey:So I I think that's more a testament to the fullness of your thought rather than any kind of dearth of thought, if if I may.
Chris Washington:Oh, thanks. I do have a lot of anxiety about stuff. I had a lot of anxiety. I debated that we're publishing this book. And I guess that's the other thing, one becomes anxious, but also scared of these thoughts because they're not gonna fit.
Chris Washington:They don't fit what the current narratives are really at all.
Ali Sperling:You know, there's multiple points in the book where you talk about, we're not gonna find Jane Austen here, or, you know, there's some kind of, we're both looking for some version of the author herself, right? But of course, we're never gonna find her or something like that, right? That this figure might come closest to actually being the way that we, that Jane Austen might have actually felt or thought. I guess I would just kind of ask a general question about your relation to the author and the figure of the author. I think it might also kind of tie back into Marquise's question at this, at the start a little bit.
Ali Sperling:In what ways did you feel like this was related to Jane Austen the person, or did that inform the thinking of the book in some way?
Chris Washington:I mean, and no. You know, is, you know, it's about Austen, the author and person, and it isn't. One of the main ways of reading Austen in Austen scholarship has always been biographically, you know, which is obviously not what I'm trying to do here. Yeah. I am trying to talk about Austen on one hand, but also to imagine this other Austen that doesn't exist because I think, you know, that's what she's trying to do.
Chris Washington:But there are complicated things I was unable to discuss here, like the very real, issues of slavery that Austen was enmeshed with at the time and that her work's enmeshed with, you know, the one novel, Mansfield Park, the dad, whatever his name is, is, I should probably know I should probably know things about her novels. Is, invested in the slave trade, know, Edward Said's famous reading in Culture and Imperialism is Austen's very much. But of course at the same time, there's a there's a kind of turn of the screw to Saeed reading, which is there are these ways of resisting it. And so, you know, some people will say, you know, you can't think of Austen as this kind of abolitionist in any sense. She's simply deeply enmeshed in slavery.
Chris Washington:Which those are complicated things to think and work through. But one of the things I suggest in the book that I don't get to fully explore is to This great lie from Fred Moten's work, which I'm currently writing a lot about Moten. I've written this great long thing about him. What I think comes out of his work politically too, which is a lot about style and the way he thinks about style, but also how he thinks about blackness. Blackness as style in a way.
Chris Washington:And, you know, this book is also about literary style. I suggest what would it mean to read Austen from a black studies perspective that I kind of leave that thread dangling. But just to think about that as, like, one acknowledges the historical material realities of the time of the slave trade. But if we take a Black Studies perspective on Austin seriously, it would mean, Moten says, you know, I read Samuel Richardson as part of or I read Marx and I want to read Richardson as part of this Black radical tradition. Like, how would you do that, right?
Chris Washington:Because we're all ultimately implicated in the culture and imperialism of our time, right? And so I think, you know, thinking non binarily, thinking abolitionists is also a way to critique that very system we're enmeshed in. Right? And so that is why this is a reading of Austen and not a reading of Austen. It's trying to to come from an angle that allows for this new method of thought to emerge from this reading, this imaginative reading.
Chris Washington:So when I say things like Austin in the book, you know, it is just this kind of prosopopoeia where I'm, you know, giving voice to an author who isn't there and who isn't the author in any event. Yeah. There's a there's an old line from Richard Rorty. I don't know if anybody remembers Richard Rorty. The things I say about Hegel in this book skate on pretty thin ice, but I don't care.
Chris Washington:I I I use authors to do what I want. I use authors to make the point I want and not to sit around just endlessly defending and critiquing. And so I think, you know, in some ways, I hope you know, I tried to, like, never really defend or critique Austen in one way or the other in them.
Christopher Breu:I want to pick up one, I agree that your your work is very influenced by Moten, who's, you know, a really important thinker and important Marxist thinker too, so that there is that Marxist lineage there, or genealogy. And I also want to say one of the things I really value about your book, there are a number of things I value about it. I mean, one of the things I was trying to think of is as somebody who was embodied and forcibly, you know, I've had I've now had seven seventeen surgeries, I have the eighteenth, unfortunately, scheduled in about three weeks, you know, 17 surgeries, originally not necessary, but necessary because of the complications created by the first surgeries on my body to try and properly sex my body, you know, as somebody born, you know, with hypospadias, which is really just that the urethra comes out somewhere really different than where it normally would come out, and especially born with a severe version of it. One of the things I really value about what you say, and I think this also echoes in Jules Gil Peterson's work, and also C. Riley Snorton's work, is the ways in which that binary idea of gender produced so much violence, right?
Christopher Breu:That it inscribes so much violence. And I'm interested in how the material world gets altered to try and somehow adhere, including bodies, right? Including whole systems of gendered institutions and structuration and stuff like that, right? Systems, as you talk about it, how those all get put into place to try and maintain this fiction that's incoherent, that's collapsing. Marquise's work is very influential for me here too.
Christopher Breu:But yeah, I think your book really goes about it, you know, really powerfully into undoing that binary logic. I do wonder, and this is also something that came up with Butler, who was so important to me early on, their work was really about undoing that binary too in all kinds of ways. I was always one of those people who wanted more about the body a little bit as it resisted language in various ways. But that's another question. One of the questions becomes, how do we think about conventional feminism?
Christopher Breu:And I know, Marquise, you've taken this up too, where people actually find gender as something that also is a system that they have to respond to and name. But I find your approach so powerful here. I mean, it really resonated with me. I also love your reading of the anal sex joke in the one section because it reminds me of one of the things I've been trying to think about for this intersex joy piece that's coming up that I'm writing soon, that's about how do we think about pleasure in bodies and in ways that are beyond the binary or outside of the binary or multiplicities? How do we think about part objects in the most affirmative sense?
Christopher Breu:Like, yeah, this is where I get pleasure. This is where I have pleasure. It doesn't actually necessarily add up to a I mean, is more psychoanalytic, it doesn't necessarily add up to a full body ego that's fixed in certain gender paradigm, among other things.
Chris Washington:One of the things that was funny was someone sent me a picture from The Strand in New York City as a shelf of books there, and it was Judith Butler's new book, Who's Afraid of Gender, on a shelf and then this one beside it, and that was the shelf. I have really thought a lot about Peterson's histories of the transgender child, which you brought up, the way in which these things, you know, as you say, try to make coherent a world coherent to fit these normative orthodox ideas. And as such, you know, I think the line in that book, sex was created to make gender coherent. Right?
Christopher Breu:Or the other way around, I think, actually.
Chris Washington:Or the other way around. Yeah. Okay. But it does create this violence because it is all these horrible surgeries and corrective surgeries to make that system fit coherently. Right?
Chris Washington:So that'd be another way of answering Marquise's question earlier, you know, non binary thinking is a way to resist that violence. I mean, it is a very real violence that is being enacted. That's again why it's kind of a foundational problem.
Marquis Bey:Perhaps this is a question open to the class, I suppose. And it's perhaps quite simply a question about reading practices. I would love to hear all of us, Chris, you especially, to talk about reading practices. How do we read, especially when we are trying to read nonbinarily perhaps? And that will, I would imagine, necessitate that we rebuke certain kinds of conventional wisdom, we will piss some people off.
Marquis Bey:I imagine all those things come with the kind of nonbinary reading practice, but I would love to just hear any of us, all of us talk about our reading practices. How old are we to approach or counter that question?
Chris Washington:Well, maybe I'll let everybody else go ahead, and then I'll try to steal your ideas in my answer.
Christopher Breu:Well, have funny reading practices, or I have a different reading practices, and maybe it's not non binary enough. Foucault's a major influence, I use a decent amount of psychoanalysis, including Lacan, although I have my issues too, and LaFlange. But I'm actually not a huge post structuralist as it gets conceptualized. I actually think that the binary opposition is not actually my big obsession in terms of how I think about language and reading practices. In fact, I'm more interested in what Adorno and Lacan in a certain way do, which is a kind of negative dialectics in which the opposition or the tension both can't fully be articulated, but also can't be fully undone either, that they overlap, that they intersect, that they map onto each other.
Christopher Breu:But I'm interested in those tensions and not smoothing out the tensions, if that makes sense. So that, to me, is the reading practice. And I articulated in instance of the material, which I did for Minnesota a while back in 2014, but it also comes back in this new book. And so that may be where I come at things differently. I'm interested in the ways in which I'm also interested in thinking about representation is not always just a problem, but also as an important site for struggle, articulation, for articulations of collectivity, even as I also share very much the critique of the ways in which identity has become almost a version of branding, very neoliberal in a certain way.
Christopher Breu:Micro identities seem to proliferate, especially on the left when what we need is solidarity, I think, at the present and new ways of thinking about embodying queerness, embodying you know, thinking about race, thinking about all these things. Yeah, my reading is a different practice. It's actually about both maintaining contradictions, even as I also want to mark that they always are, you know, need to be recognized as undoing themselves as intention with each other and as overlapping with each other. So that embodiment, I can think about a whole range of non binary embodiments that might actually still have a relationship to poles of masculine or feminine or poles of And that's not to say that those are the only ones. Embodiments around race, a whole range of these things.
Christopher Breu:But I'm interested in thinking about the tension. Like when I was asking about the tension between feminism and the kinds of critique that we are doing of of nonbinary embodiments, of nonbinary, thinking, you know, engendering. I'm interested in maintaining those cultural tensions, not affirming one side or the other, but thinking about what that contradiction produces in a certain way. And so that's how my reading might differ a little bit, if that makes sense.
Chris Washington:I will just chime in quickly to say I'm not interested in poststructuralism either as it is technically constructed. And I don't know that I would read Derrida as saying that there is a resolution to the tensions that he is pointing out in any sense. I mean, there's a way in which he's much closer to Adorno than people think. Although, although I don't think anybody wants to hear such a comparison.
Ali Sperling:Marquise, this is hard. This is a tough question, right? Like how do we read? And then how might we also think about extending this invitation that Chris's book gives us to think about what it means to read non binary or something. I don't think that's exactly what you suggest in the book, but something like that, right?
Ali Sperling:Like, does it mean that we're looking for something or is it a particular practice or methodology? I mean, for me, I was trained as a close reader, so I appreciate those kind of pages and pages attentive. I think that's the only way that a book like this actually could work with Austin. Like those moments are so heavy, like each word really does because, you know, these, especially these women figures, like I cannot say it in any other way. So I've also been thinking more about kind of reading, especially because of the weird thinking about, you know, gaps and things that are unable to be said, which I get a lot from thinking of queer of color critique, course, you know, Munoz's reading for ephemera, of course, I'm thinking tons of stuff in Black Studies and feminist and queer theory to kind of read and look for gaps and what what what is missing from the archive, what is absent, you know, and I'm thinking of that what of course, you know, what Fanny says, think it's Mansfield Park, Which is the question of slavery when I think she asks someone in the book.
Ali Sperling:I haven't read the book in a very long time. I think she asks someone like her father maybe, or she asks someone like, well, are those people or what's happening here, right? And she's met with a kind of silence, if I remember, I think Mark Bold talks about this in that piece I referenced earlier, which is as the closest I've come to even thinking about Mansfield Park in like a decade. So sorry to reference it twice. But right, the fact that she's kind of met with this, like how do we interpret the, you know, so there's something, there's some gesture there to acknowledging something that's going on, but that it cannot be answered, it cannot be resolved in the text for a whole host of reasons, that we can critique and we can engage in different ways, and so I'm interested in that.
Ali Sperling:But I guess to read for the non binary would be to think about locating these kind of specific social or political formations that are the direct result of or response to binary logics, whatever we kind of identify those to be, right? And it seems in this text, at least, one of the main ones is the couple, right, and marriage, which are the results of a rigid gender, forms of gender imprisonment, as you say. And I'm thinking of Pearl Bromayer's work on the ontology of the couple that issue of GLQ from a few years ago. So that these different forms of social formations that are the direct result of binary logics. And so there's a way that one could search for those, but also I think that you would find them everywhere as well.
Ali Sperling:So yeah, thanks for the question, Marquise.
Marquis Bey:I guess I should also answer my own question as well. And surprisingly, I don't have a good answer to this. I think perhaps that's those are the questions that I ask, questions that I'm also searching for an answer to. So I appreciate very much how you all have answered the question. And so I think my answer will be undoubtedly insufficient, but I think there are a couple of things that I do that I think with when it comes to reading practices.
Marquis Bey:I think one is kind of facilitated by two quotes. One is from Toni Morrison, her novel actually, honestly one of my least favorite novels by Toni Morrison, A Mercy. But in there, there's a question that is asking very simply, can you read? And it's not this literacy question, but one that is much broader than that. And I, in my mind, am linking that to something that allegedly, because there's such a mythos surrounding this person, but allegedly something that Sojourner Truth has said, that she doesn't read things as trifling as books, but she reads Nations and Men.
Marquis Bey:And I think along those two lines when it comes to reading practices, not so much a and I was trained as a literary scholar, but I have, I suppose, defected from that a little bit. For no reasons of malice, simply I'm moving another direction now. But I find myself less, I don't read perhaps as my training would have wanted me to, but I do think I find myself thinking much more differently, much differently in terms of how I come to the assessment or the evaluation or the encountering, I think is the word that I wanna use more, how I encounter things that might then impact how I and others move through or think about the world. So it's not that I simply read, Here are these novels, or what have you that I'm reading, but I find myself reading, I guess, something like Sedona Truth allegedly said, Nations and Men. I might be on the subway and I'm reading those kinds of atmospheric resonances or I might be reading the tensions between interaction at the grocery store or something like that.
Marquis Bey:And those things, I think perhaps it's for me an opening up toward those other kinds of things, trying to find other spaces in which reading might be able to happen, which is not to say that other people who might have also been trained as literary scholars are not doing that. I think what I'm simply trying to do is expand and rearticulate how perhaps we might understand reading. So I think that's very much my reading practice. And I think something else, much more granularly, I remember when I was an undergrad, and I don't know how true this is or if I'm even remembering this correctly, but one of my professors said that Slavoj Zizek has a lot of anxiety, which I would believe. I would absolutely believe.
Marquis Bey:But apparently, in part to assuage that anxiety, what he does is when he goes to write something or to engage with something, he just puts a whole bunch of quotes from other people onto a page and responds to those quotes. So it's not him writing something, but simply him responding to what other people have said. I've taken up that practice in terms of my own writing and that, because of that, that has forced me to read in a different kind of way. It forces me to think much more interpersonally than I perhaps would have before, that these are not simply words on a page of some sort, but that these are that these have come from livelihoods and imaginations and desires and experiences and all those kind of things. So it allows me to attend and tend to reading more than I would have if I were to be reading in some other kinds of way.
Marquis Bey:So I think that's where I go when I think about reading practice.
Chris Washington:I guess I'll try to approach this from a different angle than from everyone else. I very much trained as a close reader as well, like I suppose most people in literary studies in one way or the other. I used to write a very traditional type of scholarship about British romanticism that was theoretically and historically informed, but primarily based in in close reading. What I'm interested now, and perhaps people can see it in this book, is thinking about reading as also and there's this term laid in the book, read, read, write. To think about reading as this practice of writing.
Chris Washington:And in that sense, it's really kind of close, I think, to what Marquise is saying about reading, you know, nations and people in the subway cars. But also in order, which I hope tracks maybe this will track with other things I've said today. You know, reading has this process of thinking new thoughts, wherein there would be very kind of obvious ways to read some of the passages in this book from Austen. And I have tried very difficultly to think with those passages, but in order to think differently. But also to think differently about writing, you know.
Chris Washington:I mean, somebody mentioned the vocabularies earlier. But I'm also using reading to think about the way a sentence works. The way reading informs how I write a sentence. Not just in some straightforward one to one way, but maybe in this more deeper metaphysical sense about what writing is. And that doesn't just play out syntactically, although it does do that.
Chris Washington:Right? So I guess one of the things that the readings in this book What I tried to do through the readings in this book was perform a style in the writing that also models the reading.
Christopher Breu:I think we're all actually interestingly both trained in literary studies and also kind of semi fugitive from it in terms of our embrace of theory, our attempt to think political question. I mean, those have been central to literary studies, of course, too. Producing these kinds of hybrid texts, among other things. So yeah, I think it's interesting. Writing is reading and producing theoretical texts that also have a relationship to culture and literature and stuff like that, that sort of shift.
Chris Washington:Well, I think we should perhaps bring things to a close. But I just wanted to say thanks everyone for your generous conversation and questions and readings of this book. I'm glad people have gotten something out of it. Know, it's a very kind of throw yourself off a cliff book you know when you when you write it and publish it. Know you don't know if you're just gonna sink like Wile E.
Chris Washington:Coyote or or manage to or managed to somehow save oneself or be saved as it were by others. So, and I think in a way that's what this discussion did is it helped save me as an author and save the book in some ways from that cliff. So thank you, everybody, for that. It's very generous and kind.
Ali Sperling:Thank you.
Christopher Breu:Yeah, thank you for having for doing this, for writing the book, which is both to use Marquise's description lush in the best I mean, I mean that in the absolute best of senses. It's actually one of my favorite adjectives and not just because of the products, right? You know, but also it's also just a really risk taking book and I admire the risks it takes. Think they're really important risks to take.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Nonbinary Jane Austen by Chris Washington is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.