Deviance

(upbeat music) Welcome to Feminist Keywords, the podcast companion to our 2021 book, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, published with New York University Press. You don't need to have the book to listen to the podcast. But if you wanna buy it, or if it was assigned for your class, it's available at all major online booksellers, or locally at a local bookseller. But online, you could also get it at [email protected], which is also listed in the show notes. We created Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies as a readable resource to bring important concepts and debates in feminist, queer, and trans-theorian politics, to your kitchen table, to your classroom, to your discussion group, to your book club, or anywhere you wanna engage with these conversations. We asked 77 leading thinkers to write on 70 terms, ranging from hashtag to intersectionality, reproduction to woman. In Feminist Keywords, the podcast, we expand on the book by interviewing our authors, so you can hear them in their own voices to talk about the significance of their keyword. We hope that these interviews generate conversations, debates, and additional questions about the urgent issues that face you and your community. (upbeat music) - I'm your host today, Keela Tompkins, and I'm chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. I'm author of the forthcoming book in 2024, called Deviant Matter from nyupress. And finally, I'm a member of the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, which also includes my friends and colleagues, Aaron Azura, Amy Bong, Carmichavez, Moshana Goman, and Amber Jamil Muster. (upbeat music) For this episode, my guest is Kami Adiyemi, Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Women in Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington and Seattle. Dr. Adiyemi is the author of the Deviant's Entry. Dr. Adiyemi also published the book, "Feels Right, Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago with Duke University Press in 2022." Check it out. Kami, Dr. Adiyemi, welcome to Feminist Keywords. - Thank you for having me. - It's great to talk to you, also great to see you 'cause I haven't seen you in ages and catch up with you. So just as a way to slide in and introduce you to our listeners, tell us a little bit about you. Tell us what do you work on, tell us what are your pronouns and maybe just a little bit about what you care about when it comes to something like Feminist Keywords. - I use she/her pronouns. I guess a little bit about myself. I teach in a gender studies department, but I think it's important to know that I was trained in performance studies at Northwestern. And I don't say that to set up a distinction between performance studies and gender studies, but to say that's how I come to thinking about the concerns of a field like gender women's and sexuality studies, it's really by thinking about the body and thinking about performance as our kind of primary units of analysis. And because of that interest in the body, or maybe not because of, but that interest is expressed in my work, which focuses primarily on black queer life, and specifically black queer women. And the book that you mentioned feels right is about the kind of conditions and situations in which black queer women dance in the city, like dance at parties. And what that dance, what those practices of dancing, what their feelings and their relationships around dancing can tell us, not only about black queer women's lives, but about how those lives are shaped by the city, by the sort of political economic governance of the city. So using dance to think about the ways that cities, not only govern things like zoning law, or like where we go, or what our buildings look like, but how we feel when we move through that city. And the dance floor is just a really, I think, rich site for tracking that relationship between moving and feeling and being disciplined by the city, which is itself disciplined by and governed by capitalist rule. - You brought up the dance floor. And one of the things that your Deviant Century does so beautifully is talk about, especially in the context of your relationship to performance studies, is how people embody the political, or not necessarily the political in some sort of like capital P way, but just like how people embody. What's an example of like a scene that you describe in your book as an example of something that you would study? And what would be an example of embodying politics or being embodied in relation to politics of dance floor? - Yeah, I think people, when they think about politics, I'm thinking about my students. There is a kind of refusal for lack of a better word to honor their own relationships to politics. A lot of times people say things like I'm not political or I'm not into politics, that's not for me. And I think when people say that or feel that, they're thinking about capital P politics, like that is symbolized, represented in things like voting or Congress, these sort of formal political institutions. And I'm very interested in what you talked about is that sort of lower case P politics. And when we think about politics in that regard, my sort of favorite easiest, uncomplicated definition of politics is the processes through which we determine us versus them. And that's a very sort of antagonistic definition, but I think it's an easy starting point for people to think about what does politics mean to me. And so if we think about it as a definitional process of whereby I understand myself versus or in relationship to another, we can access political thinking at a lot of different registers and at smaller scale registers. And so for me, thinking about the politics of the dance floor, it helps me think about how people move on the dance floor is an expression of how they're relating to themselves. And it's an expression of how they're relating to other people. It's like a very accessible way of thinking about one subject in relation to and sometimes against another subject, which for me is like a very political process. A process whereby politics is articulated. An example that I start with in the book is a woman who gets up on the DJ, or the DJ is on the sort of stage. And she destroys the music, like the actual device that the music is being played from. And she says that she's doing that explicitly because the DJ is playing black music in the room full of white people. And that moment kicks off the book and I think kicks off my thinking about the relationships between capital P politics and lowercase P politics and how important the individual body is to negotiating politics at both of those scales. And I do think it models how what's the word intense the body's movement in a space, how intensely that can resonate and shape other people's experience of the space and thus shape other people's experiences of the bodies in that space and then what happens when that spills out from the club into the streets. There's like other examples I think that I work through in the book that are really technically about how people are dancing, like literally with one another and thinking about how do people learn how to dance? When do they learn how to dance? Who teaches them to dance? Who corrected their dancing? They're so called bad dancing and then how did that influence how they would go on to dance? All of that bodily awareness that is disciplined through social dance is a very political process as well that not only that lowercase P, but that sort of uppercase P. And so I think the whole book is really thinking about the dancing body as a unit of analysis for understanding how we engage in political thought and political practice. You're in a Department of Gender Women in Sexuality studies. What is feminist about either your method or your interests? What is not feminist about either your method or your interests? What a twist, what is not feminist about it? I think of feminism in the sort of Bell Hook's genealogy where feminism is a movement to end oppression based on the basis of gender and sex and sexuality and that is always entangled with other matrices of identities. So feminism for me is always also about race and class and citizenship status and ability. But I think that specificity of feminism as a movement to end oppression based on dot, dot, dot with a particular emphasis on gender and sex and sexuality is core. I think not only to how I think about feminism but how my department thinks about feminism and teaches feminist theory and practice. I will say though, I think I was not necessarily thinking about my academic or intellectual project through a lens or with a brand 'cause what we're doing in the Academy is often branding ideas. I was not necessarily tagging my work in order to make it legible to other people. I was not necessarily tagging it with that capital F. Feminism sort of, yeah, tagging. like a better word. But I think the emphasis in my work have always been feminist in nature and specifically thinking about the intersections of a kind of, I don't even wanna say a radical, but a kind of queer feminist framework. Is I think drawing out some of the problems that capital F feminism expresses, especially in institutionalized settings like the Academy, where there is a way that feminism is narrated very narrowly. And I think lots of folks will be familiar with this, the ways that feminism sometimes is overrepresented by cis white women of a certain class status and a certain educational status. And the conflation of feminism with those people and those bodies can be quite off-putting for people. And so I think the ways that my work is not feminist is more specifically in the sense that my work is not representing that kind of institutionalized feminism. I was just teaching yesterday actually about radical feminist movements in Italy in the '70s, which are not my specialty, but when you're teaching survey courses, you suddenly are like entering into sort of new territory. And so I was giving a definition of feminism and trying to really hit at home that feminism is not about singular specific subject. It is not about women, it is not about hating men, it is about movements to end oppression on the basis of gender and sex and sexuality. And trying to reframe the emphasis away from the body's feminism is presumed to represent and toward the systems of oppression that feminism attempts to intervene into. With that definition, that is very much, I think, where I am coming from intellectually and what my work represents as a kind of example or model of feminist theory in practice. - I want to turn to deviance. Now it's interesting to think about the intellectual genealogy of thinking politically with deviance and how that actually in different ways of telling the story of feminist concerns over the last half of the 20th century, that deviance is and is not a concern of certain waves of feminism. In fact, deviance is actually a threat to certain strains of feminism. One of the ways we often narrate it in our classes is by bringing in gale rubens, which says there's gender and then there's sexuality and maybe these aren't the same thing. We have to start thinking about gradations of deviance. So let me just turn to deviance and say in terms of its relevance to feminist studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, what do you think of as the history of the term deviance and why might it be an important word for gender and sexuality studies? - What I think of when I think of the history of the term deviance are the ways that the term, how the word is used, how the word has been defined, who the word is supposed to be connected to, changes, and has changed so many times across history and in different disciplines or according to different institutions, like for example, hospitals versus police stations versus the classroom. And I as a sort of object to think with what I think is useful about that history of deviance is paying really close attention to just how many ways that word has been used and applied and defined and redefined. Because when we think about the many shifting definitions and applications of deviance, we can think about the fact that it is not a sort of quote unquote natural or quote unquote biological or divinely bestowed way of being in the world. It is a word that people have used in many different kinds of ways to punish people and to punish people in order to continue to secure certain kinds of resources for certain kinds of other people. On the one hand, we can use deviance to, like I do in the keyword essay to talk about the relationship between norms and everything that we sort of position against norms and we call it deviance. But on the other hand, it's a really good tool for thinking about how identities and practices are socially constructed to fit within a vision of the world that serves certain kinds of people and practices and ideologies and institutions. So at a meta level, I think it's very interesting to think with deviance in particular and to think about the ways that it has moved as telling us something not about the people we call deviant, but about our socio-cultural, political, economic realities. - What is an example of the application of deviance as a category in a way that has been socially punishing? - I think gay people, and I use that word in order to kind of flag the limitations of what that has meant over time, but gay people as that term is circulated to this day like in contemporary politics to mean a lot of different kinds of sexual deviance. I think when we think about how homosexuality, how gayness has been positioned as deviant over time is a kind of a very representative example of the shifting formations of deviance where the medical industry, the criminal punishment system, the educational system has in lots of different ways positioned the homosexual or the gay as the sort of ultimate deviant because of the ways that sexual formation is perceived to not fit into and thus not reproduce the normative logic of the family. And at the very same time as the homosexual, the gay, as these symbols sort of catch off for all different kinds of sexual deviance, at the very same time is that formation is positioned as deviant, it becomes very profitable in media, entertainment, culture industries. The symbol becomes very profitable so at the same time as performing a kind of homosexual or gay, and I'm using those words chronistically at that point, becomes profitable in a certain regard that person that actual body is continually punished. So I think the sort of vexed position of the gay is representative of how deviance is unevenly applied. In some regards, it's a punishable offense in some regards, it's an offense that can be capitalized upon. And again, it shows us I think that deviance as a term is a very slippery term. And the ways that deviance can either be punished or marketed tells us again something not about the deviant body, but tells us again about the kinds of institutions that we participate in and that we reproduce, that require that body to make sense of itself and its own goodness or its righteousness or its justness or its normativity and yet continually wants to consume that sort of deviant otherness. - Yeah, like I think like post stone wall, so like post 1969, a film I would love to teach, but I don't know if it would even be legible to undergrads today is a film like cruising as an example of what you're talking about, that classically offensive wildly 70s film where Al Pacino goes undercover as a gay man. And then in relation to it, that emergence of the gay criminal, the lesbian criminal and then forward just like science of lambs and other films, the transgender criminalization. Would that be an example of what you're talking about? - Yeah, and as you were talking, I was actually thinking about Tracey Lissette, the trans actress who has been posting these like incredible TikToks about Dave Chappelle because Dave Chappelle has I think his third Netflix special that hinges upon his hatred of trans women, that and that hatred is expressed often with that long standing fear amongst heterosexual people that they're gonna be trapped by the trans person. Like they're gonna be tricked into liking them or loving them and the big reveal is that they're trans. And that's Dave Chappelle's whole personality right now is that fear of the trans reveal. And Tracey Lissette has been making these TikToks where she was like, it's giving client. It's giving client Dave Chappelle. Like you have been talking about us for long enough that I think you just wanna fuck us. And I think you have been fucking us and somebody fucked you over and now you're pissed and you've made three specials about us. And I think, I don't know if I can completely track that back to the original question about deviance, but I think it does tell us a story about how the deviant subject, the person who has been scripted as deviant by dominant society is also the person that dominant society desires the most. And again, that does not tell us anything about that deviant subject. That tells us about our sort of story. of patterns of desire, it tells us about pleasure, it tells us about fear, it tells us about a society that demands certain ways of being and certain ways of desiring and certain ways of feeling, you know, it doesn't tell us anything about the doll. And so I think, again, it's a reminder to always be suspicious of the word deviant or the other words that we use to describe deviance to always be suspicious about whether the extent to which that word is actually talking about the person or the practice in question, or if it's telling us about the person who is uttering that word, who is saying that deviant or that's not normal or that's bad or whatever, we're learning more about that person who's doing the uttering than we are about the person or the practice or the place or whatever that's being allegedly described. I'm teaching my biopower class next semester at the grad level here and my favorite passage underlined until like the pages we're holding together anymore in history of sexuality is like Foucault just goes off, he suddenly turns into a poetic poet and he goes like the power that palpates, the power that prods, the power that touches, the power that reveals, the power that seeks, the power that peaks around through the keyhole. And then like by the end of this like amazing paragraph, you realize, oh, it's actually the power that's deeply kinky, right? It's actually like the disciplining power that can't stop talking in that way. You talk a lot about Kathy Cohen's landmark, essay deviance as resistance in your keyword entry. It's an essay I teach every year. I think it's a work of immeasurable genius. And one of the interventions I think you're making is about the difference that she also makes between deviance and resistance. But you also have a point to make about romanticizing the deviant and therefore romanticizing resistance that I wonder if you can walk us through that. I think that comes out of my experience teaching as well. I'm teaching in a department and I'm teaching classes that often hail people who have felt deviant in their lives or who have been ostracized in their families or their churches or who do not feel like comfortable period in society that hates their bodies or hates their skin or hates the money that they do or do not make. And there's I think a real desire among students to have themselves modeled in the classroom or to see themselves in the materials we're reading or to see themselves on campus that can be a really violent ugly place. And then we are tasked with teaching them about models of resistance. And so it can be very compelling to be reading about or watching films or listening to podcasts about deviant subjects. It can be really compelling to over identify with that subject or always take them up as a kind of heroic formation. And I understand that impulse. That's how I learned to not only see myself in scholarship but to see myself in kind of ways of doing politics that felt really vibrant. But the risk is when we are always thinking about that deviant subject as the hero of the story, we can flatten the complexity of how that subject came to be or the context in the circumstances that make that subject possible. The romanticization of the deviant subject can shut down complexity and nuance. But I think that can be really dangerous, that can be as dangerous because when we use the word deviant, we're also flattening itself. When we use it pejoratively, there's also a flattening happening. And the risk is when we are only thinking about deviance as something heroic to recuperate a flattening happens there as well. So I think in the keyword, I'm really asking people to slow down a little bit, slow that impulse down, keep the impulse because that kind of optimism is what allows for revolutionary practice, but also slow down and like take a few extra steps, really consider why that impulse to create the idealized subject or scenario or practice. And slow down in order to continue to develop rich critical thinking, you might come to the same answer, right? That's a heroic deviant practice, but I want you to be able to show your work. One of the amazing things about the Cohen essay, and I think this resonates with your work in terms of black queer, often specifically black lesbian, but like black queer life in Chicago is not all deviance are resisting the political, not all deviant acts are resisted. But for me, when she says that, it's also a little bit ambivalent because in a way what she doesn't quite spell out, but it's something that I think your work in performance studies and performance studies as a methodology does account for the accumulation of resistant or non-resistant minor everyday act and ways of living life in a minor key below the key of large p-politics that as they accumulate over time collectively become a form of refusal to normativity, but it's that sense of scale and accumulation that really makes deviance as resistance, trenchant, you know, gives it teeth. Yeah, I think about like, I could have written that book on black queer women's nightlife, and I could have just been like, all of the beautiful black queer's dancing is resistant. Like it's beautiful, it's pure joy and period, and that is a fine argument to make, but I think what you pointed to in the incoherent formulation is that not all deviance is resistance, not every dance floor, not every black queer dance floor is doing this major political work all of the time, and in fact the people who are getting under that dance floor are like anybody else, often reproducing the very structures that have been set out to punish them, and I don't mean reproducing those structures like they are actively reproducing, I mean reproducing in the ways that as we are part of societies, we are part and parcel of reproducing that society, and I think the word you pulled out of accumulation and scale is really important to attend to the sort of smaller scale practices on that dance floor can show us how oppressive structures are being reproduced. There is a person at the door checking government IDs, and doing that for a check, and they need that check, right, to pay their bills or whatever, but there are these ways that we are participating always in capitalism, for example. And so it's not to say that that participation in the dance floor is not a beautiful joyful, powerful instantiation of black queer life, it is to say what else is happening on that dance floor that we can think about in a more nuanced way, in order to understand smaller scale ways that we can combat systematic oppression. I think the dance floor is showing us constantly, actually living a life is really messy, it's really hard to engage with other people, it's really hard to inhabit a body, it's really hard to find a beat sometimes, and that difficulty shows us that resistance is also messy. And sometimes it doesn't work, or it's small over here, it's big over here, and really as scholars or as historians, all we can plot is that accumulation of the small scale, and the failures as well, because the failures then allow people to readjust, find the beat, and find success in other ways. Thank you for being here so much today, Kemi, AdiYemi. Thank you for having me, I love the keyword book and I love the podcast, so I'm just so grateful to have been invited to participate, thank you. I would like to thank my guest, Professor Kemi AdiYemi, who is associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women in Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. I would also like to thank Professor Karen Thompson at the University of Southern California for supporting this podcast series and audio engineer, Allison Holly, for producing this podcast. This podcast is supported by the consortium for gender, sexuality, race and public culture, a male and funded intersectional studies collective at the University of Southern California, which brings together researchers working on gender, race, and sexuality in popular culture while also translating that research for the public square. It is also funded and supported by the College of Art and Sciences and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. Thanks for listening to feminist keywords, the audio companion to keywords for gender and sexuality studies. [Music]