Christopher Breu, Dialogical Cultures Senior Fellow
Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in contemporary literature and culture, critical and cultural theory, and gender and sexuality. He is the author of Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of Noir Affect (Fordham University Press, 2020) and a special issue of symplokē on "Materialisms" (2016). He is currently working on a monograph entitled In Defense of Sex (see description below) and co-editing two special issues, "Is Sex Passé?" for Cultural Critique and "Infrastructuralism" for symplokē..
Project at KU CAS: In Defense of Sex (A Theoretical Monograph)
In Defense of Sex argues for returning the concept of sex to prominence in gender and queer theory, defending it as a conception of both embodiment and desire. While sex has long been central to feminist, gender, and queer theory, more recent discourses both in popular culture and in theory have privileged gender over sex, affirming the former as a more mobile and multiple conception of embodiment and identification. Similarly, recent theoretical and popular accounts of sexuality have tended to focus on a proliferating set of identities while backgrounding questions of sex as desire and act. The turn to theorizing gender as multiple and fluid has been salutary for affirming transgender and identifications and embodiment as well as undoing the powerful ideological force of older, binary conceptions of gender. The current conception of gender presents sex as hopelessly binary and antiquated.
In Defense of Sex argues, instead, for a nonbinarized and materialist conception of sex, which can complement the recent rethinkings of gender. Such a conception of sex is crucial for theorizing intersex embodiments. It is also crucial for resisting the ways in which the recent understandings of gender as multiple, fluid, and chosen dovetails with neoliberal ideas of flexibility and the maximization of human capital. Affirming sex as material (yet not binary) and gender as about identification and materialization (again, not necessarily binary) enables me to theorize both trans and intersex in nonreductive ways, while maintaining many of the most important insights of feminist and queer theory. I also draw upon Hortense Spillers’, C. Riley Snorton’s, and R.A. Judy’s conception of the flesh to argue that a concept of embodied sex (which overlaps with their concept of the flesh) is crucial for anti-racist theorizing. The parts of the project that focus on sex as desire make a parallel argument about the algorithmic and neoliberal production of sexual micro-identities and the way in which they resist an understanding of desire as transformational, social, and related to an encounter with otherness.
While recognizing the important advances around issues of consent and alternative relationships to eroticism articulated by asexual theory and feminist theory, In Defense of Sex is built around the affirmation of sex as desire as a fundamental orientation toward otherness and the social. In Defense of Sex affirms sexual desire (understood in the broadest sense) as a principal component of human flourishing and sociality. In rethinking the relationship between sex and gender, trans and intersex, embodiment and identification, desire and subjectivity, In Defense of Sex pushes contemporary queer discourse around gender beyond neoliberal notions of flexibility, microidentity, self-fashioning, and choice. It instead articulates a materialist framework where the specificity of intersex, trans, queer, anti-racist, and feminist struggles can be understood without giving in to the internecine and unproductive battles that sometimes play out between these different perspectives.