Sunday, March 29, 2015

Transvestite Metaphysics in the Big Bang Theory (Pt 1)


"Good night, real Penny.
Good night, transvestite Penny"

The Big Bang Theory

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The following is a transcript of a paper,
"Transvestite Metaphysics: Quantum Entanglement and Natural Philosophy in 13th century Literature," delivered at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts 
in Orlando, Florida. March 18-22, 2015.
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Science vs Scientism

“Prepare to be terrified,” says Amy Ferrah Fowler when her quantum physicist boyfriend Sheldon Cooper resists attending a fund-raising dinner and glad-handing philanthropists (The Benefactor Factor, S04E15). “If you are unconvincing, this year’s donations might go to, say, the geology department.” “Oh no,” replies Cooper, “Not the dirt people!” “Or, worse still,” teases Fowler, pressing on the scientist’s fears, “it could go to the liberal arts” “No!” he exclaims. “Millions of dollars,” finishes Fowler, driving the phobia home, “being showered on poets, literary theorists and students of gender studies!” “Oh, the humanities,” Cooper shouts jumping up to defend the sciences' financial supremacy over those working on things like transgender in medieval literature.

This exchange from the CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, humorously represents a real position, consciously or unconsciously held, by many in and about the sciences, which is that because of theoretical quantum physicists like Sheldon Cooper, working on so-called "Theories of Everything," Science is becoming able to not merely trump but replace liberal arts areas of studies including literature, philosophy, and theology. “I believe in Science,” is a thing many people un-ironically state when asked questions about meaning, creation, and existence in the universe. This is to say, science has shifted from being considered one mode of attaining knowledge among many, concerned with its own kinds of questions and methodology based on empirical observation, repeatable experiments, and collaborated theories into the chief authority on everything from gravity to gender. This fetishization of Science as a universal hermeneutic constitutes what CS Lewis calls "Scientism." Science comes to mean more than just a set of experiments but a supreme governing school of thought, authority and politics.


The distinction between Science and Scientism is critical because the latter too often holds itself up as the former. When he defined his own critics of Scientism, Lewis was careful to stress distinctions between scientists doing Science and any person transferring uncritical fetishism often associated with religion to Science. "It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real," writes Lewis in the Abolition of Man, "Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost" (Abolition of Man Ch.3). The movement from physics to metaphysics, done without care to understand the implications of statements about what is real, shifts scientific thinkers into the realm of questions and consequences they may not have the disciplinary training to understand. Approaching discovery and doubt with the sharpness to particularities that the scientific method demands, leaves open the library of knowledge to new ways of being in the universe. It is emphatically collaborative, looking to other studies, experts, and ways of knowing to add to its archive. It is the those who practice Scientism who are too quick to state what departments in a university and what genders are real enough to warrant inclusion in donor grants or theories of everything.

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Theories of Everything But...

While Cooper’s tyrannical Scientism is an extreme case not representative of diverse thinkers in the sciences, it rings true a truth that often goes unnoticed or uncommented on among those in the sciences: that scientific fact functions based on and replicates non-scientific political ideologies based on assumptions about race, disability, gender, and sexuality. Indeed, while science itself is too massive to be regarded as essentially sexist, certain scientific communities and ways of thinking, as represented on the Big Bang Theory, affirm many patriarchal assumptions about the body. Even after the introduction of more women into his group of friends, Cooper and company continually make condescending remarks about women, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. With science being used to justify nearly every one of Cooper’s opinions and actions, one cannot assume that his views on gender exist without affecting his views in quantum physics as to what constitutes embodiment and reality.

A key example of how quantum physics becomes political is in Cooper & Company’s treatment of Transvestites - a form of gender the scientists use as a stand in for all gender queerness or diversity. The term is used by Bernadette, a microbiologist, to describe a portrait of the female lead, Penny, where she appears particularly butch. Mocking the Penny in the painting, Bernadette wishes it and her friend goodbye, “Good night, real Penny. Good night, transvestite Penny” (The Rothman Disintegration S05E17). It’s significant that the term transvestite has not been in regularly use since the 1980s due to its largely derisive connotations as since then feminism began to speak against such prejudice, pioneering of terms such as transgender. This shows the shared disregard for these progressive arguments in the humanities by the larger scientific community that reflects Cooper’s distastes for gender studies as a whole. The trans-ness of transvestism becomes opposed to realness. 

In many respects this comes not from a lack of physical knowledge about matter, but a lack of metaphysical understanding about the meaning of that matter. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad argues for theories of everything that remain open to everything that may exist outside out the disciplinary borders of physics. "Matter and meaning are not separate elements," argues Barad. "Matter is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evident perhaps when it is the question of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities" (Barad 3). Only grasping the explosive power of cutting an atom will leave you with only half of the Atomic Bomb's power. You must, as Barad writes, grasp "fact and value" together. To ignore the social implications of nuclear science is not to be a good scientist but to justify a narrow-minded Scientism by claiming that science itself compels ignorance of politics. Indeed, when Pope Francis may his infamous comparison of transgender as being like an atomic bomb, he understood not only the matter that was being rearranged by trans science, practice, and medicine but the substantial effects on transforming the meaning of gender. To quickly determine what is real and not-real is not good science, but an anti-intellectualism propelled by a Scientism that does not want to meet the universe half way. This Scientism not only fears what it may discover in the universe full of transvestites and literary critics, but may be uncomfortable with the dangerous, violent, explosive effects of its own work beyond the scope of whiteboard.


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The Real and the Transvestite

In the scientist’s theories of everything, assumptions about what metaphysically exists, including gender, transgender women are simply not as real as other bodies, real women. This is an attitude reinforced throughout the show, especially through references to Cooper’s former neighbor, Louie/Louise, “the 200 pound transvestite with a skin condition” (Pilot S01E01). Note: when we encounter Louie/Louise, in episode 22 of season 3, the only “skin condition” we discern in him/her is that he/she is black (The Staircase Implementation S03E22). In any case, this emphasis of the pathological nature of Louie/Louise’s body reaffirms the unrealness or less reality of her trans embodiment. Without pausing to affirm, nuance or debate Louie/Louise’s gender, all the members of the group unanimously refer to their former neighbor as he. “He” kept his apartment “immaculate” we later find out, repeating and conflating yet another punch-line stereotype, this time about gay men (The Big Bran Hypothesis S01E02). Cooper knows this because he helped her install a webcam in her bedroom, contrasting the contained and disciplined sexuality of Cooper with the out of control sexuality and gender of Louie/Louise. The joke here depends on a public association with webcams in the bedroom with online sex work, where trans woman sell access to video of them revealing their bodies or sexual behavior to online viewers. Now of course she is a webcam sex worker (beside being a police officer)! Aren’t all trans people disease ridden prostitutes?

What does this lead us to believe about the Scientism of Cooper and company’s theory of everything is that just as the university funding can do without literary and gender studies, so too transvestite bodies do not exist (at least on the same metaphysical plane of realness) as properly governed female and male bodies. Indeed, transvestism is repeatedly compared against Penny's preferable cis-reality. In the pilot episode, when Leonard first sees Penny, the first thing he does is compare her to Louie/Louise. "Significant improvement to our old neighbor," says Leonard. "Yes, she is" affirms Sheldon (Pilot S01E01). From the start, there is a contrast between "real Penny" as defined by her cis-female body and "transvestite Penny," whether she comes in the form of a painting, Louie/Louise, or undesirably tomboy behavior. The prior is signified as real fact and the latter the work of cultural artifice. This demonstrates a queer uncanniness between the real and the transvestite Penny. Trans culture is used to police Penny's cis body. The power also works in the other direction. According to the logic of the show, the work of culture and clothing, the focus of Louie/Louise’s gender transitioning as a trans-vestite, does not change the ontological status of the body which wears it. In this quantum theory of everything, realness is on the side of Nature and the body, keeping the work of the humanities, clothing, and Nurture as an unnecessary, even pathological fantasy. Louie’s body is male and real, Louise’s clothes are trans and unreal.

The divide between Nature and Nurture, Matter and Meaning, is held up by Scientism against the Humanities and trans bodies as emblematic of the work of such extra-scientific social engines. It posits the scientist in the subject looking out the objects of study as he draws circles around the universe and determines what bodies and lives fit into his theory of everything. The Big Bang Theory acknowledges this own problem in its Pilot episode as a personal and professional exclusivity when Leonard tries to convince Sheldon to invite their new neighbor to dinner. "I think we should be good neighbors. Invite her over. Make her feel welcome" (Pilot S01E01). "We never invited Louie/Louise over" points out Sheldon. "And that was wrong of us," confesses Leonard, "We need to widen our circle." In this framework, Cooper and his scientist friends are in the center of the universe of what is determined to be real and transvestites exist on the margins or outside the circle of realness.  The problem then is twofold. First, how do we bridge this unscientific divide to reflect the quantum entanglement of matter and meaning, so as to "meet the universe halfway?" Second, how to we reconstruct a more just system of politics based on these world views where trans bodies are no longer on the outside of theories of everything but integral to understanding them? How do we bring a transvestite metaphysics into our scientific imagination? How does science become good neighbors with other bodies and disciplines? I propose that alternative models exist in the places that Cooper is so quick to defund: poetry, literary criticism, and gender studies.


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Part 2: Transvestite Metaphysics
in Roman de Silence
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Monday, March 23, 2015

Sexual Alchemy: Sloth & Productivity in Fragment VIII


“We faille of that which that we wolden have, And in oure madnesse everemoore we rave” 

The Canon's Yeoman's Tale
Geoffrey Chaucer

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Introduction to English Literature 1 
A Genealogy of Gender and Genre 

In this course, we explore gender and genre through literature produced in and around the early British Isles, from the elegiac poetry of the Anglo Saxons to the Epic poetry of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this survey of medieval and early modern texts, we trace how forms of narrative were informed by and acted on the construction of concepts of sex and sexuality. We study how debates around nature and nurture, essential and artificial, eternal and mutable came to produce later notions of transgender, queerness, disability, race, and religious difference.

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Like Attracts Like:
Confessions of a 14th C Scientist

What is the ultimate goal of Science? What is the ultimate goal of same-sex attraction? In class we listed many of the products of science, including knowledge, power, technology, and conflict. Likewise, we listed many of the products of same-sex relationships, including knowledge of one another, sexual power, techniques for pleasure, and conflict. Then we asked how might investors (of financial or social capital) see this output? What if science or same-sex relationships, despite many contributions, don't produce the specific things they want? What if investors demand scientists turn lead into gold? What if authorities demand that sexual activity produce children? Despite constant work, discourses that resist or fail to live up to the demands of society continue to be marked as unproductive, mad, or sinful. 

Continuing our discussion of the genre of confession as a medieval form of "speaking-together" about corporate sins, our class examined Geoffrey Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman takes a personal story and transforms it into a reflection on the social discourses of alchemy and sexuality. According to medieval science, all bodies are subject to the grand unifying principle that "like attracts like." In this way, alchemy is about taking diverse materials, mixing them together to get like and like to recombine, purifying all substances back into undifferentiated forms. This prime matter, which some supposed mercury to be, is the perfect product of "like attracting like" and from which all matter might be re-created. Likewise, the intimate, secret, all male society of alchemical mentor and apprentice represented in the relationship between the Canon and his Yeoman, reflects "like attracting like," suggesting that same-sex attraction is the more pure sexuality from which all love derives. Yet alchemy and same-sex relationships, while more natural, are considered more sinful because they do not (re)produce the socially demanded products of gold and children. Ironically, the sin of alchemy and same-sex pairings is that they aren't considered heterogenous enough, they do not "divide" in ways to be properly creative.


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Sloth: the Wrong Kind 
of (Re-)Production

“Sloth” or the “unspeakable” sin shows a lack of proper (re)production that marks alchemists making them into embodiments of waste and sloth because it does not produce the proper kind of goods, claims that mark the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and the Second Nun’s Tale in Fragment VIII of the Canterbury Tales. The Second Nun opens her tale about chastity with a sermon on the sin of “ydelnesse.” One must always keep busy, says the Nun, “Whan he may man in ydelnesse espye, / He kan so lightly cache hym in his trappe, / Til that a man be hent right by the lappe, / He nys nat war the feend hath hym in honde. / Wel oghte us werche, and ydelnesse withstonde” (Geoffrey Chaucer, the Second Nun’s Prologue 8-14). Man is seized by the lap, presenting idleness as failed production or reproduction from the working class. This is critical for her as she is about to tell a tale (a form of leisure) where a secular woman abstains sex to pursue the invisible promised rewards of God. The opposition of Sloth then is not simply (re)production but production of a certain kind.

The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale then is a critical response, an exemplum supposedly showing the dangers of not reproducing according to the norms of gender. The work of excessive masculine heat labor produces a kind of poverty of ideal materials (gold money) but produces an excess of other material and social products. Evident by the switch from identification as an alchemist to the confession that alchemy is impossible, after every attempt to mix everything together, “The pot tobreketh, and farewel, al is go,” the container of breaks by excessive embodiment. If we accept this failure, like an alchemist, we find an over-productive reflection of the compulsion to work in society (Canon Tale 907). This goes beyond the scope of sublimation of the diverse into the singular, instead it does what it promises to do, multiply, only it is multiplying diversity.


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Mercurial Goals & Methods

In his prologue and tales, the Canon’s Yeoman affirms how their labor attempts to control diversity and change through the ability to reproduce (to “multiplie”) of ideal matter. Their work, he says works through “oure materes encorporyng, / Oure cementyng and fermentacioun, (816-817). They bring together diverse bodies and transform them into gold and silver through the technologies of change. In this case, the alchemist uses fire (“fir) as part of “sublymyng” mecury, “quyksilver, yclept mercurie crude” into silver. Mercury is a signature substance in alchemy, considered masculine (metal) and feminine (liquid), as well as spiritual and ideal (easily turned into a gas) as well as material and base (liquid at room-temperature). Mercury was named after the god of border crossing, whose name in Greek means “boundary stone” and the creator of alchemy. Alchemists also believed mercury to be the first undifferentiated original water from Genesis 1.

The problem is Alchemists reproduce the matter of their work rather than their supposed goal. The Canon is always on the move, like mercury, existing without a proper state or place in society. When the pilgrims ask where they come from, the Yeoman responds that he and his master live in the liberties of a city, “In the suburbes of a toun… Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde, / Wheras this robbours and thise theves by kynde / Holden hir pryvee fereful residence, / As they that dar nat shewen hir presence” (Canon Prologue 657-652). Here they are at their liberty to move about freely, keeping company with outlaws (potentially including sodomites) who fall outside the order of law and gender. “Ge is heere and there” the Yeoman says of his master, “He is so variaunt, be abit nowhere.” This shiftiness at once marks the power of queer anonymity and its lack of social access or interaction with proper boundaries that govern bodies in the city. 

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The Madness of (Re)Making

As soon as he erupts on the scene, the alchemists present themselves as bodies that are hard at work, undergoing material change and re-signification. The Canon and his Yeoman have “riden fully fyve mile” so that they and their horses are covered in sweat. This emphasis on the heated labor of the body is mirrored the blackened face of the Yeoman. “Reednesse have I noon, right wel I knowe / In my visage,” confesses the Yeoman, “for fumes diverse / Of metals, whiche ye han herd me reherce, /Consumed and wasted han my reednesse” so that while his “colour was bothe fressh and reed / Now is it wan and of a leden hewe” (Prologue 1097-1098/ Tale 724-728). This darkening of the body as excessively full of masculine heat, in line with humoral theory that stated that darker skin was a result of excess black bile. This bile at once marks a body as containing a tendency towards sloth, depression, and laziness. In other words, too much work and too much of the proper gender (masculine heat) can produce Sloth.

Working with chemicals produces alternative states of mind, madness derived from heighted states of productivity. The Second Nun argues that the Slothful “Thurgh his madnesse and folye / Hath lost his owene good thurgh jupartye, / Thanne he exciteth oother folk therto, / To lesen hir good, as he hymself hath do. / For unto shrewes joye it is and ese / To have hir felawes in peyne and disese.” The Yeoman confesses that “We faille of that which that we wolden have, / And in oure madnesse everemoore we rave” (Canon Tale 958-959). They fail to do the impossible but succeed in producing madness. Madness suggests mental illness but also anger, another result of excessive heat. From the heat of labor, their work makes them depressed, “For sorwe of which almoost we wexen wood.” They become consumed by the act of making and remaking.

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Same Sex Attraction and Sodomitical (Re)Production

In the second tale, where the Canon's Yeoman presents alchemists as liars and con artists, the Yeoman continually affirms the duplicity (multiplication via mimicry) of his work. In this tale, an alchemist promises a priest to secrets of his alchemy, so that he might be able to transform lesser metals into gold. According to the Yeoman, the alchemist tricks a priest, whom is “made his ape,” or copy (Canon Tale 1313). The alchemist will make substantial money off of the priest through his con. He does so by having him work as his assistant, copying his motions as he makes copies of silver objects in a “chalk stoon” that serves as a mold, to take silver shavings and “make it of the same shap” of the object to be multiplied, “an ingot” (Canon Tale 1207-9). If the priest is paying attention, he will learn the con and that by chemistry and a glib ability to exploit others. The alchemist leaves the priest as a version of himself, before he began, penniless but steeped practice.

The Canon and his Yeoman exist in a non-reproductive all male environment that takes the dream of “like attracting like,” a principle from Aristotle. The Yeoman is consistently try to emphasize secrecy and failure in order to distract from potentially speaking about “the sin that should not be named” (sodomy), wherein the student (the lesser) is drawn into the corpus of the master (the Canon). Metaphorically, if not literally, the Canon gives his body as he “blowe the fir” (fire being a sign of the masculine matter), his seed (money), and his companionship (abstaining the company of women) out of a desire for his master’s secret essence (what Plato in the Symposium calls the “algama,” or the hidden thing inside the beloved). As a result of the committed relationship to the Canon, the Yeoman becomes a kind of reproduction of his master, a fantasy of a non-heterosexual (asexual or homosexual) spawning of a male without the need for women.

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