In Disaffected, scholar Xine Yao looks at the racial history of unfeeling. Trained as a nineteenth century Americanist, Yao, much like Lauren Berlant, shows how sentimentality was used for nation-building. Sentiment promised to unite disparate people into a single, stable country if they all “felt right.” Of course, who is allowed to feel “right,” and who is punished for not doing so, is socially determined. While this suffocating framework of universal feeling is writ large in global modernity, Yao theorizes unfeeling as modes of disaffection and dissent that emerge from different entanglements of biopolitical difference. If feeling is implicitly for white people and only taken as valid in accordance with power, can a case for racialized unfeeling be made?
In addition to these relevant theoretical interventions, I argue that Yao’s analysis of Affect Studies and its persistent “race problem” also provides a much-needed corrective to Trans Studies and its white-washed dissociation rhetoric. While this discourse helpfully seeks to unstick trans people from obligations and stereotypes of maximal, spectacular feeling—inspiration, humiliation, violence—it often ignores how emotion is racialized. If dissociation is a way to survive the routine shame of getting clocked, not everyone can just check out. As Yao reminds us, overt disaffection in response to white feelings has historically been met with punishment.
This conversation with Yao touches on boundaries and detachment; we also discussed our deeply grateful, deeply ambivalent relationships to Berlant’s scholarship. Talking with Yao made me question whether we still live in a cruelly optimistic era, or one defined by un-optimistic cruelty.
—Charlie Markbreiter
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CHARLIE MARKBREITER. Could you talk about the history of sentimentality, its role in the American nation-building project, and how both you and Berlant address this topic?
XINE YAO. Part of the founding of the US as a nation had to do with ideas of sympathy: how do you draw together disparate peoples for a national project? The right feeling is supposed to lead to the right type of politics. But trying to just cut feelings out (as if we could) is also not an answer. Think about the alt right phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” (as if white supremacy was based on fact). One thing Berlant’s work does so well is take seriously what sort of politics are enabled by feeling: what sort of effects does it produce, what also does it limit.
But I also have a hard time with how feelings are talked about––not just by Berlant, but by Affect Studies in general––which is like: isn’t it cool how sticky and porous emotions are? And my reaction is just, what about boundaries? What about the possibility of detachments? As black feminists like Audre Lorde have pointed out, boundaries are a way to refuse the constant demands for gendered and racialized emotional labor.
That’s so interesting. We know that boundaries are important, but when you talk about them as a topic of academic inquiry, people don’t take you seriously. I wonder why. Maybe because, with increasing neoliberalism and austerity, universities increasingly discourage academic workers from having any boundaries at all, as near-constant, precarious labor becomes the norm.
I’ve been thinking about the pedagogical aspects of unfeeling, and what it means in terms of our engagements with our students. Because we’re in a time when there’s so little in terms of emotional resources—or any resources for that matter. And what we’re seeing is that students need us to be resources of care, but also that we barely have enough care for ourselves. And as a result of this scarcity, you see many different types of cruelties manifest. Like there’s this impossible, cruel demand, and people are either suffering from trying to meet it, or inflicting cruelty by doubling down on their methods of discipline and control.
So what I’ve been trying to enact in my own teaching instead is: how can we teach not just give care and be a resource for care, but how do we teach care as a methodology of engagement? How do we teach students to think about building care laterally, and to think of care as necessarily reciprocal?
One way of doing this was not just by asking for feedback, but by showing students what that feedback would be used to do, and how the results would impact their learning experiences. This not only made students more engaged–-it also made them give better feedback, which of course helped us in turn. Another thing I did was separate students into pods of six and set aside time for them to share work online or just hang out. In both cases, the aim is to build laterally in a way that isn’t naive to existing power dynamics.
In Tamara K Nopper’s recent TNI piece, she describes how, for bell hooks, the personal is not an end in and of itself. I mean, it is helpful—it shows people that that they are the experts of their own experiences. But, most of the time, we see the reverse: instead of this movement out, structural forces are reduced to the personal.
In an abolitionist context, something like de-escalation is, in a way, also about feeling less. Because in a moment of heightened conflict, what both sides need is to just like take a second and be like, “Wow. I need to chill. And touch grass.” And one way to de-escalate is actually to reframe the conflict so that it’s less about individual blame, or saying that the pain anyone feels is unreal, and more about how the situation is socially reproduced by structural forces which oppress everyone involved.
I remember this tweet that Mariame Kaba had like maybe a year ago about how social media functions and exploits our experience in the activism of escalation. Which is often less helpful in an actual organizing context, which is when you have to compromise with each other to get things done.
This reminds me of my “getting in fights with people on Twitter” era lol. I’d tell my enemies, “I’m right,” and they’d just be like, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” Which was embarrassing because it was true. I’m obsessed with you in that I’m giving you so much of my energy. And, in an attention economy, what could be more of a self-own?
It reminds me of the bullying we experience as children. And how it heightens your self-surveillance and our attempts to become as non-responsive as possible so that the bullies don’t get any pleasure out of picking on you. When people portray the trauma response of dissociative shut-down, they usually vilify it. But just because you need to switch off doesn’t mean you’re dissembling. You’re making a decision about the allocation of care. Maybe you failed to “rise to the occasion,” but would it actually have mattered if you did? Maybe you’re just saving your energy for those who actually need it.
Lauren Berlant famously also examined “not feeling it” as both a trauma response and a survival strategy.
Lauren Berlant came to Cornell while I was doing my PhD there. They also did their PhD at Cornell, and at one point jokingly referred to the “Cornell school of sentimentality.” Berlant’s writing has been so informative for me. But it’s also not the sole determinant of how I approach the world. For example, their diagnosis of citizenship and the good life as exclusionary mechanisms is both extremely helpful and an over-reification of the US and citizenship as the ultimate model. And while they know that citizenship is built upon exclusions, what they don’t really explore is: what if you don’t want citizenship? What does it mean to read their work in the US, as someone who’s not a US citizen and it’s not really interested in being a US citizen and then to feel and stay with that dissonance? In the nineteenth century, Chinese sojourners didn’t always want to stay. Many of them wanted to go home. Which, again, isn’t even about Berlant, but the problem of sympathy, and how the solution is always just, “Okay. We’ll do better next time.”
I hate the obsession with finding, denouncing and then reclaiming each of racial capitalism’s niche effects. It’s supposed to reveal the contradictions of life, but more often performs a siloing function in addition to justifying harms caused via a mode of cost-benefit analysis thinking—which is more neoliberal than anything else. As if to say, “It’s all worth it, so long as...” some queer theorist can reclaim your pain. Which is actually quite different than saying, “Decades of dissociating causes lasting trauma, both individually and collectively. How do we heal from that?”
And this actually also resonates with the question of identity politics that I tried to analyze towards the end of my book. The point of identity politics was never about this hyper focus on individual; instead, it is the starting point for methodology. Now there are so many jokes about people naming their privileges and then they go off and do whatever they are going to do anyway. But actually you’re supposed to look at the nexus of differences and privileges and then realize therefore, “This is what I’m responsible for.” Which doesn’t just mean that feelings are valid, but about looking at the attachments to those feelings, and what they may but also may not actually index. Which is part of why the work coming from Trans Studies by scholars such as Maxi Wallenhorst is so exciting, and why I’m also grateful for Queer of Color critique, which looks at how white gay/trans feelings are overly universalized.
Along those lines, I’m curious if you could talk more about how dissociation is racialized, both discursively and in life. Trans Studies has done a great job of showing how dissociation is gendered and sexualized by analyzing it via dysphoria; “Fucking Like a Housewife” by Jamie Hood is a great example of this kind of analysis. But one reason I really appreciated your book is the way it shows who is allowed to access unfeeling, who is forced into it to survive. Which helpfully undercuts the liberal sentimental practice of associating maximum feeling with maximum truth, as if those who felt most and best were automatically the most valuable. Trans Studies dissociation discourse has a race problem, is maybe what I’m trying to say.
When you’re talking about affect, there’s always the temptation to make a universalizing move. Because you want something that speaks to the individual, but is also more generally useful. But this is when it becomes useful to bear in mind Sylvia Wynter, or Denise Ferreira da Silva, whose work analyzes the way universal affect leads to the Enlightenment’s universal “Man.” We don’t want to do that. What we’re trying to do instead is make frameworks that speak deeply as a theory in the flesh, both to us and to those we care about in our communities. So how can we push back against universalism’s portability, which is of course based on racial violence.
That makes a lot of sense. Because most of the time, when white trans people universalize, they’re not like, “I looooove whiteness,” more like, “This thing helped me, so it will help you, also.” Without understanding that it might actually not. It’s perhaps another example of what historian Jules Gill-Peterson called “white gender.” That term is from her piece on Christine Jorgensen, who was the first mainstream American trans celeb, and also about her own experiences with white trans women.
Feelings are valid, but sometimes there has to be a type of distancing to really understand the attachments that are involved.
As dissociation has become a more prominent topic in both Trans Studies and mainstream culture, how do you feel the concept of dissociation has been racialized?
Following Wynter, we might say that “universal feeling” over-represents whiteness and the Human, and that, in this case specifically, it leads to an over-representation of the white trans person. So, dissociation is gendered, especially via its contact with dysphoria, but that experience coheres differently for different kinds of subjects in a way that can’t be extricated from the sort of wider colonial biopolitics of difference.
It’s less about proving that dissociation isn’t actually a theoretical panacea, because of course it isn’t, but asking: how was dissociation produced as the catch-all answer in the first place? And if dissociation is the catch-all answer, then what was the question?