Here’s an equation, which is mine:
psychoanalysis + queer theory = lunacy.
And it’s a true equation, at least as demonstrated by the paper below (and others) in a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, brought to my attention by Luana (I don’t know how she finds these things).
I had to read this paper three times to even understand its thesis, but I think I do now. And its thesis is something like this (I may of course be wrong since the paper is not only opaque but dreadful).
- All babies are queer. But “queer” doesn’t mean the definition below produced by Grok:
In activist and academic circles tied to the LGBTQ movement, it now functions mainly as a broad umbrella label for people who identify as non-heterosexual in orientation or who reject alignment between their self-perception and biological sex. Its meaning remains imprecise by design in many cases.
- Rather, by “queer”, the author and, I guess, the contributors, apparently mean “a departure from norms”, so that every baby is “non-standard”. This leads to the question, “How can a baby be non-standard” when all babies are nonstandard?” This is the conundrum that apparently motivates this issue.
- The author apparently means, and I quote:
In our approach, queer babies are neither having gay sex nor are they the babies destined, by the backward logic of cause-effect development, to become gay adults. We are not, in other words, using ‘queer’ as a descriptor of either sex acts or people. Rather, claiming the essential queerness of babies posits that babies are queer on their own terms – which is to say, because we were all babies once, that there is something constitutive about this queerness.
So how were we all queer as babies? To answer this, the author turns to Freud.
Freud provided more than a hint of how to think about the queerness of babies. In his first foray into a theory of sexuality, overtly entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905/1955), Freud introduced the notion of polymorphous perversity, beginning in the first essay with an insistence that what is deemed ‘perverse’ – namely, a deviation from either the normal (reproductive) sexual aim or normal (hetero)sexual object – is so common in sexual life that he is forced to conclude ‘there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions’ (1905/1955, p. 171). That which is deemed non-normal, or perverse, thus sits at ‘the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct’, a claim that Freud further insists is ‘only … demonstrable in children’, specifically in infants. What for Freud is crucial about the early stages of infantile sexuality is that the sexual instinct, which in adults appears to be singular and teleological, is revealed to consist of ‘component instincts’ and partial objects
Okay, so all babies are queer because they all have infant sexuality as construed by Freud, a sexuality instantiated at adulthood when the psychoanalysts get their claws into patients. But this still doesn’t tell us how babies are “departures from the norms”.
At any rate, this exercise in academic logorrhea combined with discredited Freudian theory can be read by clicking the title below (it’s the introduction to a whole issue on queer babies), or by reading the pdf here. The author is Misha Kavka at the University of Amsterdam, whose c.v., laden with papers about queerness, is here.
Here is a screenshot of some but not all of the contents so you can see what academics are getting paid to produce:
I will give one extended quote from the paper so you can see how dire it is: full of opaque and just awful writing, wordplay (common in this kind of postmodern piffle), and a questionable thesis that cannot be tested.
For an introduction to the issue of ‘the queerness of babies’, it may be no bad thing to attempt a definition of both terms. First, the easier one: ‘baby’ both is and is not a metaphor, which is why we present it here in the plural. There is no getting away from the fact that the baby, always an overdetermined signifier, slides into a metaphorics of potential on the one hand and helplessness on the other, precisely because the baby in reality is the infans, defined in the psychoanalytic tradition as ‘the one who does not speak, and is therefore not fully inscribed, only partially represented by language as a symbolic system’ (Poulios & Papadaki). This infans who does not yet speak – and who may never speak, as the psychoanalyst Nadine Cordova reminds us – is nonetheless ‘spoken of long before its arrival … and is even inscribed somewhere long before it appears’ (2024, p. 97, my translation). Marked by the trauma of birth, not (yet) in language but already inscribed into and symptomatic of the family, as Bice Benvenuto argues in ‘Oedipus in Pieces’ here, the baby is a psychic enfleshment that arrives both too soon (born prematurely, according to Lacan) and too late (as Diego Semerene posits in this issue, ‘A baby is a commissioned portrait. After someone’). Moreover, as Poulios and Papadaki argue, the infans represents not just an early developmental period but a field of psychic life that remains ‘active during the whole life of the subject, in parallel to and quite independent from the primary and secondary processes of mental function’. In that sense, the baby marks a (prelinguistic) developmental phase as well as a psychic formation which we never leave behind – that is to say, from which we must always depart. Thus, our very attempts to figure, to re-member and/or to analyse the baby make of it a quandary and a question. In that sense, this perfectly standard baby – the infans whom we cannot (yet) make sense of – is also perfectly queer.
Beyond its complicated linguistic history, ‘queer’ in contemporary use tends to circulate between two meanings. As an abstraction, whether philosophical or socio-cultural, it gestures towards that which is non-standard, anti-normative or what Sara Ahmed calls ‘oblique or “off line”’ (2006, p. 161); in Lee Edelman’s psychoanalytically inflected understanding, queerness sits on the edge of the Symbolic, rather like the infans, since it is ‘a matter of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order’ (2004, p. 25). In its more specific uses, on the other hand, the term ‘queer’ is aligned with sexuality, referring to practices, desires and identities that deviate from heterosexual norms, as denoted by the ‘Q’ in LGBTQIA+. As queer theorists of the last three decades have shown, there are many points of crossover between these two meanings, to the degree that the sexual lurks in many a mention of ‘queer’, however abstracted, in often enticingly scandalous ways.
“Infans” in Latin translates to “one who cannot speak”. Yet Kavka also repeatedly talks about “interrogating the baby,” although babies can’t answer questions. That, too, must be postmodern lingo.
Had enough? I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish. At the end of the paper, Kavka tells us “what we are calling on ourselves, and others who feel beckoned, to do. A quote:
- to turn our attention to the baby, the infans, as the post-foetal but pre-Symbolic agent provocateur who arrives both too soon and too late;
- to acknowledge the baby as a primary site of queerness, which describes the as-yet-undetermined formation of the becoming-subject;
- to separate the sexual from the genital and, by extension, to understand sexuality (infantile and beyond) on the spectrum of polymorphous perversity rather than as a binary;
- to position the queer baby before identification and hence before the adoption of sexual identity, while acknowledging its necessary connection to the sexual nature of the drive; and
- to turn our attention to the clinic, where the invitation to question the baby in a different way can, we hope, open up ‘the path to sovereignty amidst inhospitable conditions’ (Poulios & Papadaki).
After reading this paper several times, between swigs of Pepto Bismol, I left both amused and angry. Amused because the author could have given her thesis in one paragraph, but tricks it out with all kinds of allusions to Freud, postmodernist thought, and wordplay like this (bolding is mine):
. . . let us begin by sitting with the notion that the baby is ‘essentially queer’ – which is, no bones about it, both the core contention and the field of play for the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.
. . . Taking an autotheoretical approach to disinterring the personal, political and familial histories that swaddle the baby within the (in)vestments of those who came before, Semerene adopts the word travesti – reclaiming the Latin American term for a not-quite-passing transwoman – to figure the travesti baby as a stand-in for parental lost objects whose hand-me-downs fit only ‘as an act of passing’.
. . . If this polymorphous yet indeterminate baby, swaddled but never quite separate, is a symptom of the family, as Benvenuto reminds us, then the queerness of the baby is also bound, precipitously, to a queerness of relations stretching from the first car(ri)er to the transference between analyst and analysand.
This is just one symptom of bad writing: not only opaque prose (perhaps it’s comprehensible to other contributors, but certainly not to well-read academics like me), but also showing off by making puns.
And why was I angry? Because as a scientist all I see is a bunch of obscurantist theorizing with no way to test it, and the authors are getting both money and professional credit to write this stuff. And either a library or subscribers have to pay to read the stuff. Most of all, because although psychoanalysists and sociologists purport to be engaged in truth-seeking, there is no truth, and no way to find it, within this paper. It is empty theorizing. How appropriate that it draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, founded by perhaps the most famous fraud in academic history. Although throughout his life Freud claimed to be doing science, Fred Crews shows definitively that he was a grifter and a charlatan, making up many of his results and simply lying about many things. And yet Freud is still regarded by many academics as a great thinker, and analysts still use his methods—which will cost you a lot of time and money—to “address” people’s problems.
If you want an example of why the humanities are in trouble, simply read this paper or (God help you) the rest of the issue. I’ve written before about why the art—and by extension much of the humanities—can’t help us find propositional truth, but rather aim at helping us see how other people think and thereby prompting us to reflect on ourselves. But the only light this paper sheds is on the convoluted thinking of a coterie of postmodern academics.
And for a purgative, read the book below, which is not only immensely revealing (it’s based on a ton of research) but superbly written. We live in a culture that, sadly, is still saturated with Freud’s ideas, and everyone who calls themselves educated needs to read Freud: The Making of an Illusion.
Pretty bloody Kavkaesque, no?
Or maybe this has already been expressed in the down to earth philosophy of Yorkshire:
There’s nowt so queer as folk!
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
I wonder how many of these authors have spent considerable amounts of time with actual human babies, not metaphors of babies? Babies are not entirely non-verbal, are quite capable of making their needs known by crying, gestures, etc. if one is attuned to them (“feed me” “hold me”) and some, like my own, start verbalizing with actual speech by 7-9 months. Babies are fascinating tiny persons at the beginnings of development, containing much of who they will be, including their sexuality to some degree. This would be an interesting topic to explore but all these authors seem to do is pontificate on their own beliefs — I don’t even know if I would call these ‘theories’ which implies some attempt to explore evidence and find truths. What a lot of nonsense! A baby could do better!
When confronted with terms like “Queer”, I find it useful to look at James Lindsay’s New Discourses website. He has both an entry on “Queer” and “Queer Theory”. I recommend the whoe article, but:
I was about to jump in this article’s comments to ask if people knew about that anti-woke dictionnary I simply couldn’t recall anything about apart it was on black background (!) – and wham, there’s your comment ! Thanks a ton.
Except that’s not how Kavka construes “queer”; she apparently means “not standard”, though all of us were queer babies. Mixed with that is a bit of Freudian polymorphous perversity.
Yes, but I think that’s the same thing: The assertion that there is no standard or norm for babies. It’s the old, old claim that about the tabula rasa with the implication that we could have different adults because babies aren’t, yet, subject to Capitalist value formation.
Here’s an equation, which is mine: psychoanalysis + queer theory = lunacy.
You’re too kind, good Sir, you’re too kind! /Tiny-Tim-voice
But seriously, is this even Sokal-able?
Since babies can’t be placed in categories suitable for adults, this apparently makes them similar to the way “queer” folx can’t be placed in categories suitable for normal, average, unimaginative, restricted, and boring people who aren’t “queer.”
At least, that’s the best translation I can come up with, once the opaque jargon is eliminated. I suspect the basic idea may be that both the infant and the queer arrive upon a stunned world trailing clouds of glory — and neither one is appreciated enough.
“Questioning the baby” reminds me of the Steven Wright quote:
Maybe that’s it.
Queer babies, queer sheep, at least according to my local democratic chair, if everything is queer is nothing queer?
A point I have made many times: if everyone’s queer, no one is.
Well…urk. I’ve read quite a bit of Frederick Crews’ commentary and, once again, I recommend Postmodern Pooh, written a generation ago and still very funny & relevant. I hope I can find Freud — The Making of an Illusion in the library for a deeper dive. A couple of years ago I got into big trouble with a friend when I disparaged Freud on a public forum. I knew his wife was a psychiatrist, but I hadn’t realized she was Freudian, so he took it as grave insult and returned the favor.
The table of contents is creepy — I clicked through. As for “queering babies” and surrogacy, Julie Bindel (UK) has some searing commentary on this sort of thing — not just queering babies (ugh!) but the practice of surrogacy.
Thanks for this post.
Yes, Fred, who was a friend, sent me both of his Pooh books, and they’re hilarious. I think the transmogrification of English studies into English “Studies” is what made him retire early from Berkeley, and he mocks those “studies” in the two Pooh books.
To me his Freud book is a masterpiece, and really well written. Everyone who even knows who Freud is should read it.
Living in my own bubble, I was not aware of these books.
On the “order immediately” list.
Tom: thanks for the book tips!
The Pooh Perplex (which preceded Postmodern Pooh) is, in my opinion, even funnier.
Freud is still popular in the 24th Century: https://youtu.be/mRq95IKBUtU
As is the equally unscientific Jung.
(That’s my comment limit reached.)
The inmates have taken over the asylum. Such “polymorphous perversity” as I have never witnessed before.
Worth asking how this came about in Academia. One contributing factor, I think, is the ease with which new journals are created. Here’s journals that this author has published in. Vol 31 is the oldest, probably (?) meaning formed in the mid 1990s, which I would call “recent” for science. Others are even more recent … two a little over a decade ago. Of course, journals have monetary value for publishers who are happy to cooperate as long as they are profitable.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society V31
New Review of Film and Television Studies V23
Porn Studies V12
Sexualities V28
International Journal of Fashion Studies V11
I was going to show the difference with Transactions, first published in 1872, but they messed it up for me by restarting at V1 every now and then. I think it is fairly safe (but perhaps slightly risky) to assume that is not what is happening with the above journals. I turned to my own discipline, psychology. Psychological Review was first published in 1894, now at V133.
Speaking of psychology, Freud actually wrote a manuscript in 1895 called “Project for a Scientific Psychology” but not published until 1950, long after his turn to psychoanalysis. In Project, he articulated an approach to normal and abnormal behaviour as a natural science. And it reads fairly modern today, and certainly more so than his psychoanalysis work. For example, he conceptualized some disorders in terms of mental representations that become associated with one another. Not sure why it was never published at the time or what changed his direction so dramatically. He’s taught now in psychology only for historical reasons, although some contemporary work can be related to his at a superficial level, such as the role of the unconscious, which must be important to understanding human behaviour and experience given our minds do not consciously represent all our experiences, attitudes, and so on at each moment in time. When Jerry is enjoying his time with ducks, his conscious mind is freed of the tripe he discusses here, but it’s still internalized down there somewhere, waiting to be activated. Which happens all too often in some corners of academia, although the corners have taken over much more floor space in some disciplines.
Here’s one image from Freud’s Project. It represents possible mental structures underlying a woman’s anxiety.
https://ageologyofborders.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/document-php-5.jpeg
As Fred Crews has noted in his book and other writings, Freud did not originate the idea of the unconscious or of it driving our thoughts and actions.
Just checked with my wife. She had F. Crews the book on Freud you recommended out from our library & reviewed it on Goodreads. So I had seen & read a part of it and also the exchanges in the New York Review of Books. I’ll be at the library this week to get that book out for a closer reading.
I quickly thought of an old article from The Onion, which claims that the majority of babies are manic depressive, and they arguably show symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
https://theonion.com/98-of-babies-manic-depressive-1819570630/
These jests are actually more believable and comprehensible than the above truth claims!
There is enough manure in these papers to fertilize the north forty.
This is Judith Butler-like gobbledegook. In the postmodern world, writing is deliberately obscured with incomprehensible jargon. The authors’ points could have been made with direct language; the choice not to do so is revealing. And that there are academic journals publishing this sort of thing reveals a great deal about the entire fields of study.
Starwolf there was a moment in my life, maybe 20 years ago, when I realized that not everything is for profit. This was surprising to me because my own life was aligned thusly, for profit and later, for getting dirtbags out of jail as a defense attorney. There ya go: cards on the table!
I decided: Wealthy societies and rich institutions are able to subsidize an entire class of Nonsense, whose closed loop of support, whose circular justifications creates a whole mass of bs.
I’m unsure whether this is a net negative or positive, big picture wise. I mean – if they weren’t ensconced in gender departments at unis or the – huge- NGO industry, would they resort to robbing me on the subway? They’re very extreme…
Hard to say.
best,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Definitely can recommend “Freud: The Making of an Illusion”. There are letters that only became public recently, and they are a big part what Frederick Crews uses as evidence. So the book is not a rehash of old arguments.
The title seems to deliberately mock Freud’s anti-religion book The Future of an Illusion. It is the only book I’ve read by Freud and I’d imagine many readers here might enjoy it. Freud interpreted adults’ belief in a patriarchal God as a regression to childhood, when they had enjoyed the protection and guidance of a real father. As adults now on their own, to alleviate insecurity they project the image of the protective and supportive father as the idea of God the Father, and ask him for protection and guidance in times of need. Seems a pretty reasonable interpretation to me.
A bit more, hit my limit: The article and the contents of the journal beyond abstracts– as I click through — paywalled. But you’ve quoted enough to provide the gist of it.
This is good:
“I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish. “
We could purge academia of every remaining Freudian term and frame. We could shutter the practice of every remaining psychoanalyst. It wouldn’t matter. Ours is now a largely therapeutic culture—and the insidious damage from that turn, while different in kind from the damage wrought by Marxism, may prove deeper and harder to unwind.
I’ve been rereading Christopher Lasch. Can you tell?!
Doug my friend – you really should drop by NYC one day and look me up. I can take you to the “Karen Horney” clinic of …..psychoanalysis… on 63rd, on the Upper East Side where I used to live.
Bad ideas have incredible resilience, as the boss’ article above notes.
THEN… for hyucks, we’ll visit a—- homeopathic pharmacy— near me I don’t have the courage to burn down quite yet.
look forward to seeing you soon, Doug.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Horney – what a name for one of the leading proponents of an ideology obsessed with sexuality!
As my wife and I are now spending two days a week helping babysit our 6-month grandson, I will be sharing these useful insights with our daughter (who herself is a therapist). I’m sure she and her husband will appreciate learning that their son is a “primary site of queerness.”
It is deeply disturbing the need or perhaps perverse want to label babies as queer. It very much is removing a concept of what a baby really is
The word innocent must have been erased from their vocabulary.
Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development
Hannah Dyer
Global Studies of Childhood
2017, Vol. 7(3) 290–302
I come to WEIT each morning, my favorite website, for the science, the culture war and the yucks. But it is the turn of phrase, as a writer myself, that keeps me here.
Witnesseth:
“I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish.”
Brilliant.
I steal!
D.A.
NYC
“UNLIKE GAY identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality.
As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”
David M. Halperin
Saint Foucault – Towards a Gay Hagiography
Oxford U. Press
1995
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. […] Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.”
José Esteban Muñoz
Cruising Utopia — The Then and There of Queer Futurity
NYU Press, 2009, 2019 (10th Anniversary Edition)
(N.B: Gnostic “prison”)
‘at’lindzamer “Queer Kid Stuff”
“When I talk about queer, trans, & nonbinary kids, I’m not just talking about kids who currently identify as such. I’m talking about ALL KIDS. Bc all kids are queer. Queer as in different, non-normative, & pre-structural. That’s why kids are vital to liberation movements”
2:29 PM • Jun 14, 2022
[end Twitter excerpt, now deleted]
Linda Zamer : “Queer Kid Stuff”
queer as in “not grown up yet!”
Random thoughts from Purplexedville:
1. Was this the result of another slow day at the office?
2. Was this published on April 1st and do the authors still have their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks?
3. If anyone is looking for reasons that apparently a majority of the American public has lost faith in higher ed, offer this paper as exhibit #101.
I find a tiny grain of truth in the idea that babies are “queer” insofar as polyamory is considered queer (or at least that these concepts travel in similar circles). I propose that it’s possible modern (i.e. historical-agricultural) society has forced upon humans the belief system / social construct of monogamous pair-bonding. In other words, that we come into this world with a sexual nature that is quite different from what is now considered normal; that we are naturally promiscuous – in that sense “queer” – that humans are not a naturally monogamous pair-bonding species (like e.g. ducks, albeit ducks are merely sequentially monogamous). So… not exactly babies, but certainly for most young people initially entering their sex lives, novelty and variety – even promiscuity – are attractive, and for many of us, only once we get much older (arguably: past our prime) does monogamy feel “natural,” (and maybe not even then). For a persuasive argument, read this book: Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá.
Promiscuity with members of the opposite sex is not queer. Nor is polyamory with members of the opposite sex. I am not sure what you are trying to say.
The Queer terminology you are searching for is “kinship” :
“Rather than building empathy from a set of presumed straight or cisgender children, then, drag pedagogy might enact a mode of queer kinship that acknowledges that there is already queerness within the classroom.
[…]
It may be that Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is “family friendly,” in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship. Here, DQSH is “family friendly” in the sense of “family” as an old-school queer code to identify and connect with other queers on the street.”
-Harper Keenan, Lil Miss Hot Mess
Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood
Curriculum Inquiry
vol. 50 no. 5, pp. 440-461 (2020)
“Marked by the trauma of birth, not (yet) in language but already inscribed into and symptomatic of the family, as Bice Benvenuto argues in ‘Oedipus in Pieces’ here, the baby is a psychic enfleshment that arrives both too soon (born prematurely, according to Lacan) and too late (as Diego Semerene posits in this issue, ‘A baby is a commissioned portrait. After someone’).” Unquestionably a classic! Writing like this brings two things to mind. (1) Contrived to sound as if translated from French, once a point-scoring device in postmodernism, but by now a little out of date. (2) Could the whole paper be a hoax, in the Sokal and Pluckrose/Lindsay/Boghossian tradition?
All babies are queer and racist–to follow the most cutting-edge research.