Queering Freedom

1. Liberalism's Neutral Individual: Delimiting Racial and Sexual Difference

23 1 Liberalism’s Neutral Individual Delimiting Racial and Sexual Difference Freedom ought to have some limits. —attributed to GEORGE W. BUSH; a bumper sticker seen in Tucson, Arizona, March 2003 The Logic of the Limit in Two Registers: Enclosure and Prohibition As the fences in my gentrifying, whitening neighborhood grow higher and higher, the political, economic, and personal functions of limits in cultures of phallicized whiteness become more and more clear. Limits constitute property and propriety. Demarcating a ‘body’ or ‘subject’ from the vagueness of backgrounds , conditions, cultures, or histories, they serve as the site of individuation. They circumvent an entity, orienting us toward the criterion of ‘wholeness,’ a primary demand of legibility in cultures of phallicized whiteness. Not unlike the rituals of urination contests among male dogs, limits mark out our territories. They ground our deep senses of ourselves as individuals, our narratives of ahistorical autonomous self-determination, and the many cultural forms of that selfdetermination . In a slightly different mode, limits also function as internal and external 24 Demarcating the Space of Domination constraints of possibility that frame personal, social, or even economic fields. We understand ourselves, for example, as limited internally by our social and cultural backgrounds or as constrained by our financial resources. Or, externally , limits also function as thresholds that stand at the outer limit of experiences and cannot be trespassed, exercising an external authoritative restraint that expresses itself as a prohibition. For example, nations (most nations, at least) are restrained and limited by international law; or, more locally, I may simply realize that, with age encroaching, my limit is three drinks. In all of these, limits function as that which one (a social attitude, a political entity, a person) cannot or must not go beyond. They indicate thresholds of experience, forming the contours of our desire and subjectivity, whether internally or externally imposed. When framed as prohibitions, they incite our desire: death and drugs, along with sex and love, are the most commonly explored ‘limit experiences.’ Across all of these functions, a common operation is at work. From the function of limits as internal conditions of possibility or external boundaries of restraint to the demarcations of wholeness and individuation, limits constitute legibility. One belongs to one’s cultural background, gaining identity and direction from its historical particularity; nations that disobey international law are “imperialist” or “rogue states,” depending on their economic might; I am a hung-over sop, not an interesting person, the morning after an evening of more than three drinks; and, fundamentally to all of these, a true individual is he or she who can clearly stake his or her own identity—psychologically, politically , economically—in the chaotic world. It is this last phenomenon, the demarcating of the individual and all its permutations, that I want to explore and develop, rooting it particularly in the modern political projects of classical liberalism and their attendant concepts of freedom. The logic of the limit thus expresses itself in two fundamental registers: as enclosure and as prohibition. These two registers are dialectically related. The demarcating of entities (persons, experiences, ideas, institutions) clearly and distinctly from other entities and from historico-cultural backgrounds enacts a mode of separation that leads us to frame desire as the careful negotiation—and prohibition—of boundaries. For example, we introduce ownership on the model of private property into the social field when we conceive of an entity as individuated on the basis of its enclosure and containment by clear boundaries. This model of ownership, grounded in a fundamental preference for labor that enacts a futural temporality, in turn initiates an economics of scarcity into the field of social relations. We demand that we must demarcate that which is properly “ours.” Private property comes 25 Liberalism’s Neutral Individual to dominate our senses of the world—of our selves, others, objects, and all possible relations therein. Each becomes a quantifiable unit. As the social field is reduced to modes of ownership, scarcity comes to dominate the kinds of relations that obtain therein. The fear of encroachment begins to override any desire to cross these clear and distinct boundaries. And the crossing of boundaries, whether between persons, classes, sexes, races, nations, or religions , becomes prohibited. Boundaries differentiate us; individuation becomes our most precious value; and the crossing of boundaries is forbidden, creating that tantalizing social realm of fetish and taboo. The two registers of the logic of the...