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Harrington and 'normophobia'

Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-June-25 02:05:47, Tuesday
In reply to 'Normophobia' and the way forward. posted by Sick Rose on 2024-June-23 14:39:06, Sunday

The good thing about Harrington is that she recognizes the corrupting power of the market. The bad thing is she comes nowhere near to recognizing it as being behind the CSA industry (Jessy's point). She expresses, in her book, solidarity with the anti-market, anti-individualistic tendency of anti-trans activism. But as Sophie Lewis (against whom Harrington argues extensively in the book) points out:

[T]he fact that currently certain developments in neoliberalism happen to benefit trans people and sex workers is no reason to conflate trans and sex-worker self-organisation with neoliberalism (or individualism, identitarianism, postmodernism, and all the rest of it). The economic contexts of these developments is the same as for the neoliberal selling back of ‘freedom’ as zero-hours or flexi-time, and the selling back of the right to choose as the obligation to be entirely self-responsible. One need only skim the mainstream media to see niche pockets of boutique sex-work becoming gentrified (viz the Verge app for ‘paid dating’), while A-list representatives of a particularly bioconservative notion of trans as consumerism are becoming mainstream (viz Caitlyn Jenner).


(I don't suggest that the linked Sophie Lewis essay is particularly strong, but she does make some correct points, this one among them.)

"Normophobia" seems to me an attempt at humor -- Harrington is poking back at those who have (with good reason) labeled her transphobic. It has some substantive content, with respect to the incongruity of the fake-liberationist stance adopted by the privileged woke. But it's an obvious oxymoron. Social norms cease to be social norms if they lack hegemony. While her book was, in my opinion, a serious effort at analyzing how feminism has failed, this essay suggests she may morph (or has morphed) into a gadfly who seeks only to provoke. (Paglia made a similar transition.)

Thinkers more firmly rooted in the conservative tradition (like Deneen, a professor at Notre Dame whom she cites with approval) must view with alarm her tendency to use epigraphs that undermine the points she is trying to make. The book chapter in which she introduces the concept of "Progress Theology" begins by quoting King's aphorism about the moral universe bending toward justice. Her concept is advanced as a challenge to King, but it really isn't. Black civil rights is the clearest example that supports King's generalization. (I have suggested that what Harrington is really challenging is elite presentism -- not at all the same thing.)

Here she begins with Reich's indictment of the family as fascist, which she calls an invocation of an "authoritarian bogeyman." But the elites she criticizes in her book, and condemns here, can hardly be bracketed with Reich, an iconoclast who built the "orgone accumulators" Woody Allen satirized as the "orgasmatron" in the 1973 film Sleeper. Besides, Harrington, like Reich, sees the failure of the family as central to our current social ills. She cannot plausibly contend that criticism of the family, like hers, Reich's, and Lewis', is the cause of its failure. Her book suggests the opposite: that industrialization disrupted a family model in which women were able to combine child care with economically productive labor (because the home was the primary site of such labor), replacing it with wage labor that took them out of the home and kept them away from their children.

Still, Harrington is right to demand that society meet the needs of mothers, and to argue that current feminist orthodoxy, fixated as it is on equal participation in a wage labor marketplace, fails them -- and fails children.

Lewis would counter that this only demonstrates the need for alternatives to the family. Is she open to boylovers as participants in building such alternatives? Probably not, anymore than Harrington would be likely to welcome us as among the normophilic. True, we did once have an accepted or tolerated role to play in socializing boys. Men had an even more broadly accepted role in socializing girls through the institution of early marriage.

But I do not believe either early marriage or pederasty is capable of being revived. Neither is compatible with a wage labor economy, and the wage labor economy is not going away. The nuclear family, the family form that replaced the extended family of the preindustrial age as a consequence of the industrial revolution, has failed. We must, as Lewis contends, seek alternatives. As boylovers and girl lovers, our hope for the future depends on finding a role for us in such alternatives.

hugzu ;-p


Pharmakon
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