Introduction: The Between | Olivia Michiko Gagnon and James McMaster (29.3)
In recent years, feminist and queer theory has taken a renewed interest in the couple form.1 For many, including S. Pearl Brilmyer, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang, the editors of a recent special issue of GLQ called The Ontology of the Couple (2019), that interest derives from the increased acceptance of gays, lesbians, and other assimilable sexual others in mainstream culture and under the law, a trend often shorthanded in the synecdoche of marriage equality. This special issue of Women & Performance, focused as it is on coupling, shares this interest, just as it shares the question that animates our colleagues’ issue: “can one be queer and coupled?” (238). For this reason and many others The Between: Couple Forms, Performing Together glances over at The Ontology of the Couple in admiration, hoping that our readers will start rumors that there’s something going on between us. But still, to be honest, what fascinates us most about couple forms is not just how they so often function to constrain the lives and politics of queers and feminists, but also how they might operate as what poet Catriona Strang (2017) calls “structures of possibility.” Here’s what we want to know: what modes of intellectual practice, erotic exchange, political work, and aesthetic experimentation happen uniquely within couple forms, in their most capacious and non-self-same iterations? What queer and feminist work can they do? What, in other words, is possible in the infinity, if indeed it is an infinity, between one and two?
Rather than questions of ontology (what is a couple form?), our focus here is on methodology (what are different ways of doing the couple form?) and performativity (what can a couple form do?). This is why we open this special issue of Women & Performance with “Couplets” by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant. As its title suggests, it’s a piece that describes the world in a series of paired sentences. And true to couple forms, sometimes other voices complicate things, sometimes the two spills into three, and sometimes the coupling gets lost in the long list of things we recruit to the project of surviving what’s killing us. What’s important, we think, is that we follow Berlant and Stewart’s example and think together about togetherness. Here’s how they both narrate and enact that thinking: “As collaborators, we try not to let each other jump the gun. We throw weight against short-cuts and fake foundations. / We go with our gut about what it takes to get into a thing, really inside its machine and spread. There’s a certain amount of hanging around with the matter that keeps putting pressure on sense.” As we read this, we wonder whose voice is whose, who wrote what, and this very well could be the point—a consequential one for co-authorship and collaboration, which are two of this issue’s major foci. Perhaps, to start, it is best just to say that “Couplets” emerges from the collaboration between Stewart and Berlant, and it’s the between that we are after, after all.
While this pivot away from ontology and toward method and performativity firmly situates our project within the field of performance studies, it also performs its own kind of multiplication, moving us from “the couple form” to couple forms. Thus, though typically regarded in its normative instantiation as that sexual, romantic, and social unit of relation that sits as a colonial imposition at the core of the bourgeois nuclear family, and tied as it is to well-worn fantasies of the good life as well as to the violent suppression of other forms of kinship, the couple form–we insist–is neither a known quantity nor an exhausted entity. Rather, it is a field ripe for analysis and an object with as of yet unmapped performativities. Some of us may think we know what the couple is, but this issue takes for granted both that we don’t and that we do ourselves a political and theoretical disservice when we assume that a coupling can only ever do what we expect it to, as if our shared critiques could ever fully account for every duet that’s ever been.
The articles in this special issue do the “nonce-taxonomic work,” to invoke a phrase forged by Eve Sedgwick (1990), of cataloguing various couple forms, none of which quite fit the (hetero/homo)normative mold of the couple form. In the lead-off essay of this issue, for example, Broderick Chow and Eero Laine offer a theorization of the feud as a kind of couple form. This account, which spans centuries but which points its focus most directly at Netflix’s GLOW, a show about women’s wrestling, outlines a pairing that is antagonistic at its core but nevertheless erotic in a way that potentiates at least some anti-capitalist possibility and pleasure. Shannan L. Hayes and Max Symuleski theorize another alternative couple form in their essay, which spends time between Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz. Theorizing a “counterprivate couple” that is “critical of the normative couple form that privatizes affect” even as its rhythm of “dyadic withdrawal and return [...] rejuvenates the affective energies that are needed to sustain the ongoing political work of counterpublic world-building,” the authors engage Leonard and Wojnarowicz’s intimate relationship in order to open out onto larger questions about the couple’s relation within and to the collective. By describing neglected genres of coupledom–the feud and the counterprivate coupling of artistic and activist comrades–these articles, taken together, ask us to attend to what we are calling the between, a zone that gestures toward undertheorized categories like “relationship” and “rapport,” categories that imply duration and memory made manifest in the affective expectations and performatic repetitions that come to characterize this or that couple form.
These theoretical comments are also methodological insights of relevance to co-authors, artistic collaborators, and other co-conspirators. The stuff that lives in the between of a couple form–stuff like antagonism or friendship, a politic or a child, bad habits or good intentions, a shared history of oppression or a long history of infidelity–makes a difference to what those two subjects can do together and what that doing can mean. For a concrete example of all of this, we need look no further than the feet featured on the cover of this issue. Those feet belong to two friends, Ts̱ēmā Igharas and Jeneen Frei Njootli, and that friendship informs their simultaneous artistic collaboration, which informs their friendship–you get the point. The image renders a moment in the pair’s durational collaborative performance Sinuosity, which is also featured in this issue’s Ampersand section. The piece unfolds over several hours, during which Igharas and Frei Njootli sing and braid each other’s hair together using colorful flagging tape. What results is a transnational–Indigenous nation to Indigenous nation–coupling whose enactment of feminist kinship is a powerful protest against resource extraction in the artists’ respective territories. In the latter half of the performance, the artists’ braids form a skipping rope, which audience members are invited to engage with. The between, in this case made manifest in and by the braids that bind two friends, would seem to hold more space for sociality than couple forms are often assumed capable.
To be sure, for us, couple forms have always been embedded within larger constellations of relation. Indeed, like a wedding, the eponymous symposium out of which this special issue was born was organized around the two even as it revealed a more expansive social arithmetic. Save for a few panels, presenters were pairs that presented in pairs, and each pair of pairs–or foursome–was joined by a fifth tasked with opening the conversation out to everyone else in the room. Stewart and Berlant served as one of the symposium’s coupled keynotes, reading from their recent book The Hundreds (2019), which is reviewed here by Ethan Philbrick who also participated in the symposium, an artist and scholar deeply invested in collaboration himself. Others who appear in this special issue also took part in that weekend: Barbara Browning (with Imre Lodbrog), Chow and Laine, and Liz Kinnamon and Aaron Madison, who provide a thoroughgoing, and dialogic, account of the symposium, included here as its own kind of performance review. To the side of that, though, we should say that the symposium was itself born out of our friendship–over drinks, over time, and out of a desire to expose some of what is occluded when we insist, always, on (the production of) the Author or the Artist. Anyone who’s ever written or read an “Acknowledgments” section knows what we’re talking about and knows, too, why it might make sense for this special issue to call for a citational practice that brings offstage intellectual work to the page, laying bare the informal processes by which we all learn to think, read, write, make, and perform.
Our work, whether we are artists, academics, or activists, happens in particular places, in proximity to particular people, and this irrevocably shapes what that work can become. Much of this issue’s Ampersand section foregrounds this fact. Blanca Ulloa and Annie Sansonetti are friends and colleagues whose online contribution “Lovey-Dovey Mixtape” is also the gift of a soundtrack to an anonymous audience of lovers. And Ulloa and Bianca Felix Biberaj’s “List: This Movement Takes Three Hours” is simultaneously a record of time spent together as friends and as part of a broader community–their MA cohort in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Ulloa’s double presence–her multiple couplings–also calls attention to the beautiful promiscuity of friendship and the many twos that always cohere amongst the many. A similar call is sounded in Leticia Alvarado’s “Ghostly Givings: Nao Bustamante’s Melancholic Conjuring of Brownness,” which opens with an artist, on stage and among friends, mourning the loss of a loved one. The artist is Bustamante and the loved one is José Esteban Muñoz. Theirs was a “symbiotic relationship” that traversed academia and the art world, a dynamic echoed in this issue by Mathias Danbolt (an art historian) and Ester Fleckner (an artist), whose cross-medium coupling materializes through the intimate juxtaposition of Danbolt’s language with Fleckner’s woodcuts. Alvarado’s point is that Bustamante and Muñoz continue their relationship even after the latter’s untimely passing, with Bustamante using performance, thankfully, to return Muñoz and what he meant to the world to us, if only for a moment. Alvarado is doing something similar with her essay, writing with her teacher even as she is without him. We’ve included her piece among more obviously co-authored pieces for this reason, wondering whether it’s right to call her the single author of her essay, which is not to discount Alvarado’s unique insights but rather to recognize that any of us who recounts our losses in writing does so in relationship with those lost.
In line with the spectral lingering and affective connectivities that Alvarado charts, a couple of the issue’s other entries use the couple form as a frame that attunes us to multiplicity where singularity has so long been assumed. One of these is a conversation between Julietta Singh and Barbara Browning, friends and colleagues, which stands in as a review of Singh’s new book, No Archive Will Restore You (2019). In that book, Singh argues against the singular bounded subject in favor of “feminist formulations of the body [that] insist on our vital entanglements with the outside world, complicating any easy binary demarcations of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’” (30). It’s an insistence that rhymes, albeit in a slantwise way, with the contribution made to this issue by Maureen Catbagan and Amber Jamilla Musser. Inspired by the work of the late Barbara Hammer, these authors write: “The couple form is usually depicted as a relation between two separate entities. However, this premise often presumes a concept of selfhood that is explicitly contained. When thinking more broadly about the self as plurality, being-together and coupling become more tangled.” It’s a passage that reminds us that multiplicity is not only given in how the two might open out onto the many, or how twos exist within the many, but also in how the one might be internally differentiated in two or more–indeed, many more–ways.
In the issue’s final essay, Joan Lubin and Jeanne Vaccaro meditate on the complex relationships between the couple and the collective, sex and learning, lesbianism and feminism, theory and practice. Working with and through Cherríe Moraga and Amber Holli-baugh’s dialogic exchange “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism: A Conversation toward Ending Them,” Vaccaro and Lubin teach us a thing or two about what it feels like to read, learn, and write together. One of those things is something we keep coming back to: the moment in their essay when they describe their varying relations to their object of study. There’s something methodologically interesting, if theoretically ironic, to this moment, we think. The couple reveals itself as a couple precisely by speaking about its internal differentiation. Another is one of the central suppositions of this special issue: that couple “is ideally the name for a durational dialogic form, rather than a unit of romantic attachment.” And those durational dialogic forms can be (almost) infinitely varied: there is the extensive feud and the one-night stand, the lifelong friendship and the chance encounter. There are lovers, artistic collaborators, students and their mentors, co-authors and co-editors, the list goes on.
In the end, what we’ve assembled with this special issue is a cohort of feminist thinkers, some artists and others scholars spanning academic ranks and institutions, whose work makes clear the need for a more collaborative humanities. And these thinkers join, and diversify, a number of other admired figures who have done much of their very best writing in pairs, people like–oh, we don’t know–Marx and Engels, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri, Moten and Harney, the list goes on and on. Co-authorship is not a new phenomenon for critical theory. And yet, the whispers persist. We’re referring to the questions intimated under the breath of graduate students, contingent faculty, and other untenured faculty, often to advisors or mentors but more often to one another. Will co-authoring an article make me less marketable? Will it count? And the answers to these questions according to the conventional wisdom? Yes. And kind of. There seems to be a paranoid fantasy circulating, or at least the perception of one, that co-authorship and collaboration might conceal individual insufficiency. “I bet one of them is doing all the work!” an imagined critic admonishes, pulling us backwards in time to the days of school projects and their anticipation of unfair distributions of labor. “How do we know whether this person can really write if we’ve never seen them do it alone?” asks an imaginary gatekeeper, as if writing well with others doesn’t imply its own set of valuable (and teachable!) skills and knowledges.2 Surely, all collaborations risk unjust–which is to say, gendered and racialized–labor imbalances. We should guard against this risk, of course, but it would be foolhardy to believe that the between could ever be without vulnerabilities like this one. Instead, The Between embraces an old Butlerian point: our vulnerability is the price we pay for sociality, but, for this reason, it is also what reminds us that, for better or worse, we owe everything to one another. In taking this point seriously, the between stays with the trouble, to use Donna Haraway’s (2016) formulation, and risks those labor imbalances, which it must keep at the forefront of its practice and concerns, in order to guard against a slew of other ways in which we are held apart: through academic siloing, mandates of individual authorship and originality, and calcified conceptions of mastery that lead to masculinist and colonialist fantasies of invulnerability (Singh 2018). Let’s be honest: there are few things that we can do on our own, perhaps almost nothing, and there are many things that we can do uniquely together.
So let this special issue be a strong argument for co-authorship, for collaboration, for the strengths that couple forms and other constellations might have over single authorship in certain cases. Let it be an incitement, an inducement, and an invitation. Not everyone is apprehensive about co-authorship, and we may learn best by doing, in public, together. Can’t all of these examples, finally, be precedent enough to allow the most precarious among us to think, write, and publish together without fear? Because, at this moment in the humanities, it feels like one has to earn the right to write with others. This is not only unfair; it is to our collective disadvantage.
The work included in this special issue, as we’ve begun to show and as you’ll soon see for yourself, makes this claim, our claim, undeniable: some things are only possible in the between, in the space opened up by and within couple forms. This is what makes coupling a methodology for thinking, writing, and performing. To name only one of that methodology’s affordances: co-authorship enables its component persons to think and say things that they might, politically speaking, have a hard time saying on their own. Our own claims, for example, sit more stably on the underpinning of experience when we write together than they would if we were not able to speak from and across our differentiated gendered, raced, and sexual subject positions. For this reason, among the others we’ve already articulated and still others we have yet to discover, we want to insist that co-authorship is a methodology that should be available to all of us in the humanities at all times, lest we risk banishing some thoughts, the ones we could only have while working together, into the abyss of impossibility. After all, what if those thoughts are the ones we need to save our lives?
What we are proposing here is not an additive model but an alchemical one. For the between that we are after can never simply be the result of 1 + 1, nor of me + you. Rather, it is some ineffable third thing that materializes between me and you, and because of me and you. In this, it is neither me, nor you, nor us; but it is also not not me, and not not you, and not not us–to adapt a famous performance studies formulation. But in this blurred space of the between, we have found occasion to avail ourselves to ethical forms of nonsovereignty, to indeterminacy, to encounter and relation as productive and pleasurable variations on method. And it is our hope that this sustained attention to what Moten (2015) has described as the “intense interaction that comes with playing with others”–to writing and other forms of aesthetic production “in which [...] one composes in real time with other people [...] where one is discomposed in real time”–will open out onto other ways of writing, living, and working, animated by what Sara Ahmed (2004) calls “feminist wonder” (182): an openness to what might be, to our capacity to be affected, and to the dawning of new feminist futures.
Notes
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Here, like many of our contributors, we have in mind Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s germinal comment on heteronormativity, “Sex in Public” (1998), but we’re also thinking of the many works that have attempted to adapt the critique of heteronormativity for queer subjects: Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality (2004), Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages (2017), and David Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship (2010), to name only a few. Of course, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) also has a place in this conversation, but in this special issue, as we will soon show, it is conversation itself, the coupled quality of it, that interests us as well. And for this reason, we would also include in this list of influences Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds (2019), Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable (2014), and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). ↩
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And it is worth noting here, in passing, that co-editorship does not seem to garner the same suspicions as co-authorship in the humanities, and is in many ways a more valorized and common form of scholarly activity across academic rank. ↩
Notes on contributors
Olivia Michiko Gagnon is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. She holds a PhD and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University, and a BA in English and Drama from the University of Toronto. Her current book manuscript explores the emergence of closeness as a feminist and decolonial method in contemporary art and performance. Her writing appears or will appear in ASAP/Journal, Women & Performance, Canadian Theatre Review, and emisférica.
James McMaster is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently working on a book project that puts the discourse of care theory into conversation with queer, feminist, and Asian Americanist critique and cultural production. His writing has appeared, or will soon, in the Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, TDR/The Drama Review, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Women & Performance.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren, and Kathleen Stewart. 2019. The Hundreds. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 547–566. doi: 10.1086/448884
Brilmyer, S. Pearl, Filippo Trentin, and Zairong Xiang. 2019. “The Ontology of the Couple.” GLQ 25 (2).
Duggan, Lisa. 2004. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Eng, David. 2010. The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University.
Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions.
Moten, Fred. 2015. “An Interview with Fred Moten.” Interview by Adam Fitzgerald. Literary Hub. August 5. https://lithub.com/an-interview-with-fred-moten-pt-i/.
Nelson, Maggie. 2015. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Singh, Julietta. 2018. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Singh, Julietta. 2019. No Archive Will Restore You. Brooklyn: Punctum Books.
Strang, Catriona. 2017. “‘Constellations and Contingent Networks’: Nancy Shaw’s Structures of Possibility.” Introduction to Nancy Shaw, The Gorge: Selected Writing, edited by Catriona Strang. Vancouver: Talon books.