In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire

by Christopher Breu

Examines the need to recenter the category of sex – theorizing sex itself as nonbinary – in contemporary studies of gender and sexuality

Gender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomitant theory of sex, gender’s contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism’s emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem.

In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 5, 2024

Reviews

[Colin]

Love the concept of the physical body as not purely discursive but rather materially both generative and limiting even as it is always socially mediated. The first chapter on the rise of gender and decline of sex was fascinating, though I wish the remainder of the book tackled more of the experiential & affective nuances of sex as embodiment & desire.

[Dee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breu writes a self-consciously utopian “defense of sex,” both in the term’s meaning of sexuality and the sexed body. It’s part of the ongoing turn to (convergence of?) feminist materialism, eco-criticism, and queer studies, and overall a very readable and informative work. Leaning on his friend and interlocutor Anna Kornbluh’s recent insight that imaginative immediacy (so, the highly engaging and identity-making videos in your TikTok feed) has replaced the social symbolic as well as people’s trust in long-term planning and institutionality, Breu correctly observes a waning in the importance society accords to sexuality as a vehicle for community formation and intimacy. He suggests that ongoing academic liberationist projects ally to create a better world for all bodies and sexualities. To get there, Breu’s argumentative sequence walks the reader through psychoanalytic, feminist materialist, trans and intersex, as well as Marxist approaches, each chapter defining and later refining necessary terms. The argument is really well designed, in my opinion, and Breu’s own positionality as intersex and survivor of experimental medical mutilations support his argument where expedient (despite his stated suspicion of autotheory in the final chapter).

Breu, deeply indebted in his intellectual formation to Judith Butler (aren’t we all?), doesn’t want to jettison construction wholesale but sides with the soft constructionists who accord agency and culture-shaping powers to the body. I enjoyed his use of Barad and Frost here but was missing reference to Angela Willey’s concept “biopossibility” (from her 2016 Undoing Monogamy). His attentiveness, and repeated conceptual return, to Black theorists’ writing on “flesh” is also much appreciated; Spillers, Bey, and Snorton pop up repeatedly. (I would have been even more careful not to analogize Black enslaved experience and white intersex experience, though.) Overall, I think Breu might have experimented with drawing from science writing like Willey and many of the materialist and eco-feminists do.

My own reservations about the ahistoricity of psychoanalysis cloud my judgment about Breu’s PA chapter, but I thought that it was overall the least compelling part of the book. A lot of the work the chapter does in articulating desire as something both intimate and external (Breu employs Lacan’s neologism “extimate” here) felt familiar. It’s hard working getting the body into PA, and Breu did what he could. I was reminded, though, that contemporary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and sexology have come to similar, and less language-contorting, conclusions, but these are areas of inquiry that Breu does not touch here.

The book’s conclusion, a multi-point utopian wishlist for a future sexual commons, was as ambitious as it was historically and socially blind (Breu admits as much, to be fair.) Building on queer theorizations of cruising, Breu imagines the future sexual commons as state-funded, communally run Berghains where responsible (and variously laborious) fucking happens. Breu dutifully mentions possible caveats to this necessary institutional incitement to sex (rape as a socially endemic problem is like #7 on his list) but, and this damages the overall persuasiveness of Breu’s finale in my opinion, he forgets to mention problems like the lack of widely visible models for alternative family formation (and people’s very likely ongoing and very firm commitments to the family as the basic unit of childrearing—pregnancy and taking care of children are costly, as he notes), religious scruples to (and powerful cultural sanctions against) public and non-marital sex, and the banal (and to Breu, most likely cringe) observation that tons of people refuse to engage in sex without the promise of long-term commitment and love. Finally, why, why, does he not mention, towards the top of his list, that sexualization is the oldest and most effective way to hierarchize people by gender? Julia Serano just wrote a whole book about what it felt like to realize as an adult that non-optional sexualization freaking sucks. We already live in a world in which women are pressured to be continuously sexual; we have tons of evidence that it’s cis men who have gained most of the pleasure “unleashed” by the sexual revolution. The last thing we need is to further institutionalize “fucking” through a Ministry of Sex. If the history of post-WWII socialism has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t trust the boys who want to make all labor, including sex, communal. The women will end up doing everything, remain politically, socially, and sexually marginalized, and be told they’re now free. (NB: I get why queer theorists still prioritize “fucking” as a category, but at this point the use of the term is kind of a stale provocation. I want one contemporary scholar, just one, to theorize love—or, maybe, feminine-coded pleasure—as constitutive of a utopian sociality without them wanting to die of shame and/or boredom.)

Lastly, and this is weird for a Fordham UP publication, the book feels hastily put together and edited. Strange typos, misspellings, and punctuation errors on every third or fourth page. Maybe a few more people should have eyes on the text for future editions.

[K✨]

i am very stupid ❤️