The Sense of Wildness
-Jose Esteban Muñoz
THE BROWN COMMONS AFTER PARIS BURNED
I commence this chapter with some reflections on the conceptual and historical dimensions of the philosophical and historical story of a particular sense of brownness that emerges today: what I am calling the moment After Paris Burned. To make this case, I open with a consideration of trans in a recently translated book of feminist queer trans theory. I move from those textual speculations to two events that offer a prehistory of Paris Is Burning and its subsequent historical legacy.
“Transgender” has become a key word for many. It describes various quotidian transmigrations of being and body. Transgender speaks to both new and historically recorded biopolitical struggles. Surely, there is a need for accounts of transgender experience writ large. With that said, it seems important to state that this is not what Paul Preciado offers in the book Testo Junkie¹. This is not to say that Preciado calls a “new pornopunk philosophy… [which would allow us] to think about doing something while we are on our way out, undergoing mutation or cosmic displacement.”² Such a philosophical endeavor is necessary for what Preciado calls the pharmacopornographic regime in which we strive. The pharmocopornographic regime comes on the heels of a disciplinary order: control no longer comes from external technologies of subjectification. Instead, in this new moment, the technologies that shape life become part of the body, and dissolve into us like the testosterone gel that Testo Junkie’s narrator dissolves in his skin. But the point isn’t that the body in this regime is without resources or potential. That’s not the case insofar as in each body, there is a resource of orgasmic force. Preciado describes it as the power to produce molecular joy, and therefore a productive power. This is akin to labor power, which Marx described as potential or ability. According to Testo Junkie, today’s mode of laboring, which he locates most resonantly at the contact zone between the global porn and pharmaceutical industry, is not immaterial labor, as Operaismo’s inheritors would have it, but it is instead a kind of uber-material labor. As Preciado colorfully describes it, “Let’s stop beating about the bush and say it: in a porn economy, there is not work that isn’t destined to cause a hard on, to keep global cock erect.”³
Testo Junkie can be thought of as a diagnostic account of the history and futurity of trans in the age of savage porn punk capitalism. The book tells this story through wild oscillations between philosophical meditations, sociocultural history, and memoiristic writing. At times, it’s a breathless history of the mutually formatting categories of “sex” and the “phatmaceutical” since the 1950s. At other intervals, it is an arresting story of loss; the book’s structure address is mostly predicated on a beloved and beguiling dead friend. Testo Junkie is a story of being-with: being with testosterone, being with an at times omniscient object of desire, named VD and described as an Alpha Bitch Femme, but it’s also about being with one’s bulldog Justine. The dog’s name is an ode to the Marquis de Sade, and the book is certainly influenced by Sade. But it is, indeed, a story of being-with, and there is something of a frenzied politics and ethics to Preciado’s book.
Gilbert Simondon, the philosopher of ontology, technics, and collectivity, described ethical action as a mode of amplification. Ethical comportment is to act with the self-knowledge that one is “a singular point in an open infinity of relations.”⁴ This is to construct what Simondon commentator Thomas LaMarre described as “a field of resonance for others’ acts or to prolong one’s act in the field of resonance for others; it is to proceed on an enterprise of collective transformation, on the production of novelty in common, where each is transformed by carrying the potential for transformation for others.”⁵
The “trans” of Testo Junkie is the fact of this mode of transformation, but not exactly an invitation to transformation. It is a call to an attunement to our transformation. In the penultimate chapter, Preciado does not call for recognition as much as attunement, an understanding of one’s process of transindividuation in relation to others and objects, especially pharmaceutical objects that abound in every aspect of contemporary life: “My ambition is to convince you that you are like me. Tempted by the same chemical abuse. You have it in you: you think you’re cis-females. But you take the Pill; you think you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra; you’re normal, and you take Prozac or Paxil in the hope that something will free you from your problem of decreased vitality, and you’re shot cortisone and cocaine, taken alcohol and Ritalin and codeine… You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is awakening in me.”⁶ Here, again, I read Preciado with Simondon, to get to a very specific idea of being-with that I think is essential to both the terms “trans” and “brown,” as I am working with them. After a stage of metabolistic preindividuality (Simondon takes much of his language from the natural sciences), a moment of transindividuation comes into play. For Simondon, the transindividual is defined as the systemic unity of interior (psychic) individuation, and exterior (collective) moment. This formulation, the transindividual, like the subject and its others, its ecological fields, its lines of object relation, resonates with what Simondon calls a real collective.⁷
Simondon helps us give an account of a being-with that is intrinsic to both trans and brown, consisting of objects, human and otherwise, that are browned by the world, or taken up by the discourse of trans, in what Preciado calls the cold pharmacopornographic era. This is to imagine a brown commons, transrelationality, and what Simondon would call the real collective. The brown commons is predicated on a certain mode of methexis, a word derived from ancient philosophy, that accounts for modes of doing and participating and group sharing that follows mimesis. Methexis is not the opposite of mimesis. Mimesis being the representing or imitation of life, methexis calls attention to a different procedure, a different component. It is a moment in which partition between the performance and the audience lifts or frays and a kind of commons comes into view that is not made by the performance. Methexis is often roughly translated as participation, of which a common example in Plato is the way that the beautiful object participates in the larger category of beauty. Certain objects, be they human actants or nonhuman and inorganic ones, including objects that are considered immaterial, like sounds, for example, be they musical or distinct accent, participate in what i call brownness or the sense of brownness. The brownness of a commons, its very nature, is the response to salient forces that have rendered circuits of belonging and striving within the world brown.
The work of Wu Tsang has become a touchstone for me in thinking about contemporary art practices that follow a queer methexis, which is one important path to what i am calling a brown commons. In this chapter, I will arrive at Tsang’s work after considering some thoughts and performances that orbit around the brown commons that I see Tsang so elegantly illustrating. To do so, I first want to travel back to an event, a performance, which resonates as queer, transgender, brown, and so many other things.
It’s 1973, four years after Stonewall Rebellion. Sylvia Rivera takes the stage at a rally in New York City’s Washington Square Park called Gay is Good. River was famously there the night of the riots when she, along with other transgender bar patrons, mostly black and Latino, resisted arrest during routine raid on gays in the West Village bar. This story, the tale of gay power’s revolutionary impulse, in its desire to see and be something else, is a poignant one that is canonical in LGBT studies- so much so that Stonewall was mentioned in the same breath as Seneca Falls and Selma during President Barack Obama’s 2013 inaugural address.⁸ Despite its status as a now-iconic site of uprising, the fault lines at the base of the gay movement were always in place, and Rivera always made a point of bringing them into a view. An early video camera captured moments from the Gay is Good rally and displayed the fractiousness of gay politics and gay life at the time. Approximately four years after Stonewall, Rivera holds the stage during the rally and lashes out at those in attendance who choose to neglect the plight of queer and transgender people in prison, people who routinely experienced rape and other forms of violence. Rivera wears a snug body suit and clutches a hand held microphone that she pulled off a stand in an awkward gesture. She paces the stage in a restless fashion. The primitive black-and-white video footage decomposes during several moments of the activist’s speech, as though the early technology could not capture Rivera’s rage, her righteousness. The camera momentarily shifts to the audience of assembled queers, who at first attempt to shout her down. Some demand that she shut up. Rivera makes demands not for her own sake but for the sake of others. Her words are a clarion call, not in that they bring a commons into existence, but in that they call on an already existing commons to do something, to take action, and to also expand their ability to attune themselves to the world.⁹
Rivera speaks of the weekly letters she and her group, STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, founded in 1970 by Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson), receive from incarcerated queers who suffer and experiencea heightened level of systemic harm while incarcerated. She demands that the assembled gay masses acknowledge those who belong to a queer commons that is coming into view but is not fully visible. Certainly, scenes of dissent and contestation are critical to the task of knowing our commons. Rivera’s speech can easily be understood as a statement that emerges from this moment within a burgeoning gay power movement. But it is also a moment when a brown commons comes to know itself. Fanon famously wrote about how one is blackened by the world.¹⁰ Both adjacently and often coterminously, people are browned by life. The logic of Fanon’s argument is resonant with John Dewey’s assertion that groups are called into existence by a shared sense of harm. A commons is not an assemblage: it includes various things or pieces of things gathered into context and bringing about multiple effects. What I am describing as a brown commons exists, but we are not always attuned. Or sometimes we only encounter it within the register of the singular. This singularity, as Jean-Luc Nancy crucially argues, cannot be properly apprehended independently of its plurality.
I do not invoke Sylvia Rivera and her public performance of 1973 as a example of how Latinas and other people of color have been at the center of the gay liberation movement. That is an argument that was powerfully made by Gloria Anzaldúa more than twenty years ago.¹¹ It is evident that queers, or joteria, are at the center of liberationaist movements. It is also important to know that Rivera’s performance is more than a mass dressing down, more than the public shaming or calling out of the privileged white middle-class mainstream. Instead, I am positing Rivera as a thinker and activist who labored tirelessly to unconceal the profundity of our being-with. When you listen to Rivera’s words, you can hear her demand that her audience think and that they open themselves to the understanding that there is something expansive to the commons, that they, those in attendance, are only a segment of something vaster. Yes, harm organizes their compresence with each other in the park, but they are part of something more capacious. The audience seems to be with Sylvia as she growls the letters that spell out gay power. Certainly those who are with her have drowned out the voices asking her to shut up. But they are only allowed this moment of methexis, this moment of group sharing and belonging, after they have thought of the commons that includes those beyond a proximate presence. Rivera was often known to chant, “Power for all the people.” Rivera must amend the slogan “Power to the people” because “the people” as a construct often allows for the forgetting of many who belong in and to commons, people obscured or jettisoned because their being in common is less palatable. This commonness is knowable in advance. To think of a brown commons is to imagine a commonness that does not always avail itself in advance, a commons that has been concealed by its browning in the world. This methetic brown commons represent a joining, but not the joining that is most easily apparent — let’s say the being-in-common of that predominantly white audience facing that stage under Washington Square Park’s large white arches that afternoon in 1975. It is about imagining one’s singularity in relations to a plurality that includes bodies being incarcerated and brutalized on Rikers Island, two miles from the island of Manhattan.
To think of the bronwnness of the commons is not to think in terms of the equivalent. Within the commons that is organized by a shared sense of harm, people do not experience the same degree of harm. Indeed, if harm is that thing that collates our experience of being-in-common, then not all people are equally browned within the world. This book had given an account of brownness from the perspective of Latinos in North America who have been browned by the law, browned by migration, browned by diminished life chances within capitalism. (It should go without saying that all racialized and poor populations face diminished life chances.) The sense of brownness is larger than something like latinidad. Indeed, it is planetary in its vicissitudes, and a full account of it is hard to imagine. Within brownness there is something that is shared, incommensurable, yet commons. Brownness is not queer, as the example of Sylvia Rivera shows us. Brownness and queerness, like other vector of particuliarity, such as blackness, indigeneity, Asianness that also structure my theorization, all comingle, are adjacent, sometimes provisionally interlocking in situational commonness. Attuning ourselves to the brownness of things that have been occluded is worth considering because it allows us to see the fullness of our commons, both singular and plural. Much had been written about the queerness of Sylvia Rivera, but so much less time has been spent attending to her brownness in the world and what it meant and did.
Rivera’s work has been taken up with zeal by a younger generation of thinkers and activist like Dean Spade, who helped found the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a group that provides invaluable assistance to many transgender people who often fall out of more popular narratives of queer belonging, often because of the ways in which the world has blackened them or browned them. I am drawing on the work and activism of Tourmaline, a black queer trangender activist intellectual who liberated the tape of the 1973 rally from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. (The tape was originally posted on her Tumblr.)
Wu Tsang’s work can be considered alongside the work of Spade and Tourmaline, all queer artists, intellectuals, and activists challenging queer thought to follow the lines pioneered by Rivera and Johnson when they founded STAR. These thinkers in the tradition of STAR (later Rivera would reconstitute STAR changing the name from Street Transvestite Activist Revolutionaries to Street Transgender Activist Revolutionaries) are committed to a new methetic turn in queer and transgender work that strives to offer a more expansive consideration of mainstream sexuality politics. This generational cohort’s work always strives to transmit the brownness of queerness’s commons.
Wu Tsang, along with her friends Ashland Mines, Asma Maroof, and Daniel Pineda, started a performance party at the Silver Platter in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park section in 2008–10. Later, that event, the founding and running of the party and the director’s aspiration to make it a safe space for transgenerational transgender contact, was documented in Tsang’s film Wildness (2012). It tells the story of an art project that attempted to catalyze what I would call a brown commons within the metropolis. I use the word “catalyze” in that last sense quite intentionally. I mean catalyze as in start, commence, bring something into action. Wildness the film resists many of the protocols of realist documentary. It narrates the story of Los Angeles’s Silver Platter, a long-standing Latino gay bar that catered to the local gay community and featured old-school trans and drag performers. Tsang and her three initial collaborators, all young queer of color, punks, and artisit, took over the bar’s less populated Tueday night slot anf hosted a party featuring edgy queer performances by the likes of Nao Bustamante, Dynasty Handbag, Zachary Drucker, and countless other performers. These performers would otherwise most likely never perform in that space, which has been dedicated to a different type of transgender performance. The documentary tells the story of the Silver Platter through interviews with the bar’s proprietors, regular patrons, and those who would become Tuesday night’s denizens. The film includes talking heads and performance documentation, but it also attends to the larger urban ecology that surrounds the space by including adjacent histories of anti-immigrant and queer violence. Wildness also features the bar itself as a speaking persona who narrates the ebbs and flows of brown life that traverses its walls.
The film opens with a shot of LA streets and traffic, not the glamorous Los Angeles of television and movies but the Los Angeles of workday life. The opening visual is shot from the car; streets are lined with minor plots of commercial spaces; small businesses fill out these strip malls, lined with the seemingly ubiquitous Los Angeles doughnut shop; a blue neon sign announces “carnitas” over one restaurant. A mysterious voice-over has been narrating the first opening images to a heavy and ominous-sounding drum-driven score. In Spanish, the voice says, “Time is borrowed and it changes everything. Faces, relationships, and neighborhoods. There are not many like me left. And I wonder what will become of me?” Viewers eventually realize that the throaty feminine voice is not that of a person but of a place which holds and shelters brown life within its walls: the Silver Platter. The camera slows down long enough to focus on the back of the head of a figure walking away from the camera. Another cut, and we encounter the filmmaker/artist Wu Tsang’s face, looking up at some source of illumination. Long before humans begin to take primary roles in the documentary’s unfolding narratives, we witness a commons of lights, shadows, places, commerce, buildings, trees, and more. It is not until a brown commons is visualized as street, ambience, light, and movement that the documentary’s protagonist can come into view. Viewers encounter the bar’s glimmering sign, its luminous old-school beauty suggesting another time and place. The first three shots are scored to throbbing cumbia as the space erupts with dancers. Nicol is at the door charging covers, stamping arms while drinks are poured, and people circulate within the spaces. The film cuts to the world outside the bar. Gone are the glittering lights of an alternative everynight life, and instead people are shown standing around on a corner outside the establishment. Then a cut to a gorgeous shot of the emptied bar, where smoke and light twirl, giving the space a beautiful otherworldly effect. Then the viewer encounters the woman of the Silver Platter, who introduce themselves, tell us where they are from, describe life at the Silver Platter, and generally revel in the spotlight.
The Silver Platter’s voice and Tsang’s self narration tell the story of the bar. It is interesting to note that their narrative are rarely aligned. Tsang makes observations about her experience of the space and their stories. She talks about desires for opening up the bar as a place that could potentially link generations of queer and especially transgender people. Tsang’s narration, as we will see, also worries over the potential pitfalls of a project of actualizing the expansive potential of the Silver Platter. But with that desire to expand comes a possibility for danger, the chance that the bar’s status as a safe space that accommodates many could perish. Tsang worries a great deal about the potential traps in this venture, and the bar counters her concerns by debunking the idea of a safe space, insisting instead that no one person can decide who and what is included in a vibrant historical common space like the Silver Platter.
The logic of the safe space does not easily hold to a place and a situation like that of the Silver Platter. The Silver Platter is a space of encounter and swerve, and it has always been so. The Silver Platter is a meeting place for many kinds of people. Its materiality is a turbulent thing. One figure in the film, Betty, discusses the ways in which the onset of the Wildness party was met with great disapproval by many of the regular patrons, who felt neglected and ignored by the new attendees. She and many of the regulars refuse to call the night Wildness and call it el martes, Tuesday. Betty thinks that the crowd looks like kids from the university, boys and girls whom she describes as American and white. Nicol, the doorwoman, has a very different response. The new crowd excites her. She explains that mingling with people outside her immediate community gives her a vaster sense of belonging to the city and the nation. She remarks that despite their differences, they share something, perhaps sexuality.
There is no consensus. The commons is not a space for that. To be of the brown commons is not to be in sync, or to be lined up; conflict and disagreement are central to the commons. The film attempts to document a larger art project: the staging of a party by Tsang and three other young queer artist of color, at least one of whom identifies as transgender, attempting to forge coalition with predominantly working-class or poor Latina trans-women. Certainly, the artists are not wealthy, but they do manage to do- they live a life beyond their actual financial capital because of the other forms of capital (chiefly cultural capital) at their disposal.
The rich urban ecology of this brown city is highlighted by shots of the faded neighborhood. The Silver Platter herself explains that MacArthur PArk has many layers. She discusses how the economy collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s and how the influx of Latin American migrants and political refugees influenced the environment. Despite urban revitalization projects, the rents are still cheap, and that is what brings Tsang and her friends to the area in the mid-2000s. Once arriving in their new neighborhood, the young artists meet Gonzalo, Koky, and Javier, the men who work at the bar daily. Gonzalo inherited the bar from his brother Rogelio, who had owned it for decades. The three men are supportive of the Tuesday night party, and the influx of new visitors is financially beneficial.
Tsang explains that at the Silver Platter she finds the sisterhood she was searching for in the bar. She seems to form an especially meaningful bond with Erika, with whom she does not share a language. Erika is a small person with a dreamy look in her eye. Tsang explains, “I can’t explain what I felt with Erika. My dad never taught me to speak Chinese.” She describes how this lack of language was always a missing piece and how it is now the way she feels closer to people. It is this thing that is missing for Tsang, knowable as inability to communicate one’s situation and history, a certain muteness in the face of one’s history that draws her to Erika and the Silver Platter in general. It is for this reason that the force of a kind of brownness beckons. Tsang and Erika do not fuse. They feel each other’s allure. Their relationality is not predicated on a complete and uncomplicated being in common but instead on a mysterious being-with. During the voice-over about their bond and inability to communicate through conventional means, Tsang and Erika are shown hanging out, rolling around in bed together, much like the title of Cherrie Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh’s famous dialogue of 1981, “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism,” wherein the author discussed their differences along line of butch/femme, race, and class.¹² Moraga and Hollibaugh discussed the silences that saturate butch/femme, cross-race, and cross-class dyke sex and relationality, a language of commonality through sex that is displaced by a second wave feminist discourse that eschews the language of power differentials among women. In the case of Erika and Tsang, language cannot capture their communication, their allure, as two transgender people communing and being in common without the linguistic fusion of a full-blown dialogue. An iteration of the film was shown as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial and titled The Green Room, an installation that attempted to re-create the Silver Platter in the art space. The two-channel video, Que pasa con los martes?, offers deeper insight into Tsang and Erika’s weird relationality. Tsang sits in bed with Erika and some other women, bodies wrap around each other, and looks are exchanged. On one channel, Erika recounts her treacherous migration to Los Angeles and describes the life she encountered at the Silver Platter. Glamorous Erika wistfully reflects on her life in LA, but the installation juxtaposes the treacherous trail she has traversed and the dangers she has encountered. Tsang’s installation keeps these stories in dynamic tension. Her own mysterious being-with Erika is not permitted to elide the real material experience of dangerous and fraught border crossing.
In a conversation after the screening, Tsang talked to me about how she once used the term “brown” to describe what was happening at the space on an internet forum, which led to criticism in the comments section for using that word. She was sarcastically asked if “Asians are brown now.” I hope I have made it clear that my deployment of the term, Asian can potentially be just that. Not in a way that inhibits our thinking of a critical Asianness or even a yellowness; but a brownness that is copresence with other modes of difference, a choreography of singularities that touch and contact but do not meld. Brownness is coexistent, affiliates, and intermeshes with blackness, Asianness, indigenousness, and other terms that manifest descriptive force to render the particularities of various modes of striving in the world. Brownness is larger that the U.S Latino-centric rendering I am offering. Latino lives are one portal into this attunement to the brownness of world I am calling for. Brownness is certainly larger than the sets of experiences that some groups of Latin American immigrants and their children experience in the U.S as racialized minorities. Thinking brownness is not an easy path; it is most certainly a contested, debated, and productive route. We cannot foreclose the brown commons’ reach or its potential.
The Wildness project has one gleaming intertext: Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning. Tsang completed a performance for camera that was commissioned as part of the Performa biennale in 2012. In preparation for For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3) Tsang researched Livingstone’s 1990 film at the UCLA archives where interview transcripts, negatives, and outtakes are stored. The artist considered the camera one of the performance’s characters. The performance is not the documentation of a live event but a performance for camera. Tsang imagined the performer troupe as doing a kind of séance that was summoning the ghosts of the film’s past. For How We Perceived a Life (Take 3) was shot on 16mm, the same format as Paris is Burning. The duration of the piece is exactly the length of a 400-ft roll of film. Tsang attempted to create the effect of continuous reality emerging out of a fractured one; thus the piece was shot as a single take with no editing. She used take 3.
The film plays continuously on a 16mm loop (the head is spliced to the tail). There are very specific installation instructions for the piece: the projector is behind a visible wall, and it projects through a hole that is cut out of the wall. At one point in the film, one hears the reperformed voices Octavia St. Laurent, Venus Xtravaganza, and a very angry Crystal LaBeija.¹³ The dancers converge in a huddle on the floor, displaying a touching and being in common that at first may look like an indeterminate mass. However, it soon becomes clear that they do not fuse; instead, they switch roles, swap positions, fall in line, disassemble, confront each other, and practice soliloquies that so many queer and transgender people must have memorized at home somewhere once they stumbled on the film online, at a video store, or maybe even in a classroom. It is important to remember that Paris is Burning is a canonical film for queer studies. Everyone from bell hooks to Judith Butler has something to say about it. It is curricular. It is taught regularly.
Coming of age, Tsang and the generational cohort I mentioned above were familiar with the film, as many queer people today are. Numerous queers watched Paris is Burning because it promised a world, glimmering and glamorous, tinged with criminality and discord, haunted with the specter of tragedy. So many learned the word “shade,” as in “throwing shade,” from that film, and while the phrase is not new, its descriptive force not waned when discussing contemporary queer color of life. It is also true that it is another tragedy of the commons. But in the case of the commons of black and brown bodies that the film represents, it was not a vague civilizing enclosure that threatened the queer ecology of the commons. It was, instead, something else, a story of pandemic and poverty that enclosed and nearly snuffed out this queer world.
The voices and words in Tsang’s film are familiar for those who have lived with Paris is Burning. The ball circuit now exist as an international phenomenon in many cities throughout the world, in no small part due to the distribution of Livingstone’s canonical queer text. Tsang’s film is the story of a brown commons (which is also a black commons and a queer commons) that persist beyond the meager life chances that its participant negotiate. It is an account of a persistent brownness. In a later clip, Tsang uses transcripts from the UCLA archives to re-create an interview. The difference in these reperformances is that Livingstone’s exchange during the interview is not cut out. The fan of Paris is Burning hears the familiar citations from Livingstone’s film but also hears something else: Livingstone’s questions, which solicit these fantastic speeches. It feels revelatory to hear Livingstone’s words, cut from her documentary and now conjured from the trash bin of history. Indeed, much of the criticism of Livingstone’s film amounted to a critique of the director for not including her own white queer lesbian voice in the film. Livingstone has gone to the balls, won the confidence of her interview subjects, and is encouraging them to make the extravagant statement they make.
The point of inserting Livingstone back into the narrative is not to out her as nonobjective. The reenactments of the interviews show the kind of touch that I think is at the center of this mode of organization, which I describe as a commons. It is useful to see how Livingstone too lived and thrived in the commons of the ball culture, found a kind of touching that let her know her singularity as always plural. This clip also explains Tsang’s rationale for inserting herself in all the Wildness project’s various iterations. Tsang is at the center of the party, the documentary, and every other iteration of Wildness. Indeed, Tsang helped organize La Prensa, a free legal clinic for the women of Silver Platter and the local community to help with their immigration and other legal issues. Spade was also involved with this effort. For Tsang, the women of the Silver Platter, and the performers in A Life Perceived, this desire to be with, and to be alongside in the face of the various enclosures that consume us, is all part of why the language of commonness takes shape. This move to practice our commons otherwise, to know the brownness of the world despite the impediment that manifest to themselves as enclosure, is a necessary project of dis-enclosure. Our commonness is here and it is now, and we know it when we look at and feel the logic of enclosure and harm. But rather than bucking to the force of this an unboundedness that is not knowable in advance. Instead, it functions, stridently and beautifully, as the queer dis-enclosure of a brown commons. This mode of dis-enclosure is the attunement that Slyvia Rivera demanded throughout her difficult life of struggle. It is also a return or resurrection of the voices of Venus, Octavia, Crystal, and all those who insisted on wanting more despite the ways in which their chances at achieving this full life were radically diminished, and in part constituted, through this diminishment. Young queer bodies, moving for another 16mm camera, over twenty years later, recoccupy these lost voices. Tsang’s artistic practice responds to these lines of radical thought and expression within the gay movement that persists in the ways in which brownness of the world persists. This is to say that the capacity for striving in the face of potential and actualized harm is manifest as the salient call for “Power for all the people.”
Notes
Chapter 12. The Sense of Wildness.
This previously unpublished chapter was given as a lecture in various locations in 2013, including Northeastern University, Duke University, Eastern Michigan University, Brown University, and the University of North Carolina, Asheville.
1. Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press.)
2.Preciado, Testo Junkie, 347.
3.Preciado, Testo Junkie, 347. Editors’ note: Operaismo (“workerism” in English) is an Italian Marxist movement that emphasizes the autonomous power of social movements.
4. Cited in Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 65. Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective: A la lumiere des notions de forme, information, potential, et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1992).
5. Cited in Combes, Gilbert Simondon, 65.
6. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 398.
7. Editors’ note: For more on Simondon’s “real collective,” see David Gilbert Scott, “The Collective as Condition of Signification,” in Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 150–76.
8. Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address by President Barack Obama,” White House, Office of the Press Secretary, January 23, 2013, http://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/21/inaugural-address-president-barack-obama.
9. This footage can be accessed on Youtube. Editors’ note: “L020A Sylvia Rivera, ‘Y’all Better Quiet Down’ Original Authorized Video, 1973 Gay Pride Rally NYC,” Youtube, posted May 23, 2019, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb-JIOWUw10.
10. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
11. See Gloria Andalzúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987; reprint, San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2012).
12. Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Sansell, and Sharon Thomspon (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), 224–29.
13. Editor’s note: Here, Tsang includes additional dialogue from a separate film, 1967’s The Queen.
