Introduction: Queer Metarelationality

Queerness describes a distinct relation to relationality; in this respect, queerness is metarelational.¹ It attaches to a particular object and to the relational forms that nurture that attachment.² We bond with these queer kin and to a particular structure of queer kinship; we connect to that mentor and to a specific form of mentorship. At the same time, relationality is queer in the sense that it outstrips every grammar, diagram, and narrative we have for attachment; indeed, it stretches far beyond the ties that bind subjects and objects. Relationality encompasses our interpersonal histories of dependency, which precede our existence and live at the edges of consciousness, and it includes the material infrastructures and political forces that arrange our relations into particular shapes. Perhaps most importantly, relationality includes the very capacity to relate and to be related—to ourselves, to others, and to the social.

Queerness is metarelational precisely because relational estrangement is a primary experience of queer life (see Cohen; Weston). It can take dramatic forms, such as bullying, eviction, or incarceration. Or it can be more subtle, such as exclusion from social invitations, institutional roles, or historical narratives. Such violence does not only attack queer people; it also attacks queer relationality as an affective, ethical, and political capacity. As a consequence, queerness is filled with self-consciousness about the contingency of relation: queers know our bonds can be sundered, invalidated, or withdrawn without a moment’s notice; and we know that relationality suffocates just as much as it sustains. Yet despite this knowledge, queerness has an irrepressible relational drive; it pulls us into intimate social relations with others—for sex, eroticism, and romance, certainly, but also for the expansive pleasures of conversation, friendship, partnership, mentorship, pedagogy, activism, community, and care. As much as queerness is world shattering, then, it is also world soldering. Ejected or estranged from inherited relational forms, queers craft other relations to survive, usually without a map to follow. While queerness can make us lonely, no one does queerness alone.

Queerness is thus a metarelational practice, a thing we do together, for and with each other, to manage the anguish and joy of queer belonging. To say that queerness is metarelational does not mean that queers do relationality “better” than others. On the contrary, queerness is also a scene for relational violence, abuse, and trauma (see Holland; Machado; Pérez). Nor should we idealize queer reflexivity. At a certain extreme, self-consciousness can tip into debilitating anxiety, depressive rumination, and even self-hatred. Such extremes may destroy our relational capacity altogether. Instead, we might think of metarelationality as an unending ethical and political quandary that queers and other minoritized subjects must face. In Judith Butler’s words, this quandary hinges on “the difficulty of being formed as a reflexive subject within a given social world […] ‘formed’ within a set of social conventions that raise the question [of] whether a good life can be conducted within a bad one, and whether we might, in recrafting ourselves with and for another, participate in the remaking of social conditions” (Giving 134–35). In other words, queerness affords a chance, however vexed, however slight, to change the very shape that relationality takes.

It is no coincidence, then, that queer theory’s most energizing debate for nearly two decades has been metarelational to the core. Often described as the “antisocial thesis,” the debate hinges on how queerness relates to relationality.³ Does queerness unravel the social fabric, or does it weave new ties to bind us otherwise (see Bersani; Freeman, Beside and Time)? Is queerness best defined by our untamable drives and psychic compulsions, or is it a relation of power that cannot be extricated from the social forces of race, gender, and class (see Amin; Edelman; Ferguson; Muñoz)? Is relationality ecstatic or traumatic, mundane or exceptional, indentured or negotiable, corrosive or adhesive, queer or not (see Berlant and Edelman; Herring and Wallace)?

The reason this debate endures is not because convincing solutions have yet to be proposed. On the contrary, many groundbreaking contributions to queer theory have arisen within and in proximity to this debate. The debate continues because metarelationality nourishes queer thought. “How might we relate to one another?” is a queer question because our relations cannot be taken for granted. On some level, relationality failed us. We suffer at the hands of white, patriarchal, capitalist, and cisheteronormative structures of belonging and nonbelonging whose violent grip on the social remains tight. Thus, many queers wish to limit, if not prevent, that violence, or, at the very least, to hold ourselves accountable for that violence in a meaningful way. Certainly, such ethical deliberations may be twinged by a repetition compulsion, or a desire to master the unmasterable. But it may also be a way for queers to continually renew the promise of metarelationality—namely, its capacity to compose queerer arrangements for intimate and social relation.⁴

From this perspective, the antisocial thesis is not an esoteric debate consigned to the rarified pages of academic journals; nor is it a debate that can, technically speaking, “end.” It is a profound extension—and thrilling development—of a vernacular queer ethics of metarelationality. We can see this ethical concern in even the most committed antisocial queer theories. Lee Edelman, for example, defines queerness (or the sinthomosexual) as a corrosive force of negativity that undoes all symbolic and social bonds. In his words, “To embrace the impossibility, the inhumanity of the sinthomo-sexual: that, I suggest, is the ethical task for which queers are singled out” (No Future 109). Note that Edelman figures queer relations to negativity as an ethical “embrace.” He champions “the embrace of queer negativity” (6) and beckons for queers to courageously “embrace their figural association with [reproductive futurity’s] end” (17).⁵ Edelman’s impossible “embrace” crystallizes a queer metarelation to nonrelation; it contorts an existing figure of belonging (the embrace) into a strange and surreal form—namely, the image of queers welcoming the chilly death drive with a warm hug. My point is not that Edelman is secretly a relational theorist. Rather, it is that queerness compels him and queer theory at large toward metarelational figuration, even if only to spotlight the void at the heart of relationality.

No one has gone farther in theorizing the queerness of metarelationality than Judith Butler, particularly in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) whose twentieth anniversary occasions this special issue of differences. It has always struck me as odd that Giving an Account of Oneself has not played a more central role in queer theory’s antisocial debates. It arguably constitutes Butler’s fullest articulation of their theory of relationality. The book also explicitly revises key Butlerian concepts that undergird queer theory—the discursive theory of power, the performative scene of address, and the means by which subjects become critical—to account for their relational affordances. To be sure, Butler announces Giving an Account of Oneself as a contribution to moral philosophy, which may explain its uneven reception in studies of gender, sexuality, and race.⁶ But I suspect another factor may be that the book capaciously straddles—and powerfully deconstructs—the division between social/antisocial or relational/nonrelational positions. Indeed, it’s hard to place the book’s argument in a single queer camp, not least of all because of Butler’s insistence that relationality composes and decomposes us, often in the very same breath.

Giving an Account of Oneself also stands out for its sustained inquiry into the queer relationality of narrative. Butler’s commitment to narrative contrasts the iconoclasm of antisocial theories, which champion the shattering of representational forms. Butler’s narrative theory also departs from the nondiscursive affect of relational theories, which affirm the sensations that precede cognition, perception, and linguistic representation. While critics understandably associate Butler’s work with subversive resignification, far less attention has been paid to the significant role that narration plays in their theory of performative address. For Butler, we are driven to give an account of ourselves by virtue of the need to endure as relational subjects: “[N]o one can live in a radically non-narratable world or survive a radically non-narratable life” (59). Self-narration already has a reflexive thrust because I “enact the self I am trying to describe” (66). But our self-descriptions founder on the limits of what eludes narrative articulation as such. These limits are not only contoured by the unconscious and the vastness of the social field; they also derive from “our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency” (20). This expansive relationality outstrips narrative on all sides because it is the force that gives rise to our capacity to narrate. Queerly twisted around, self-narration is like trying to glimpse the back of your head in a mirror. These narrative contortions bring our attempt to figure relationality to a crisis. In Butler’s words, “[E]ven the word dependency cannot do the job here” (82). The word “dependency” cannot capture the dependencies of dependency, or the metarelationality that makes being dependent possible.

Narrative, however, can begin to glimpse these braided knots because it is a form for unfolding contiguous relations over time (see Bradway, “Queer”). Put simply, narrative affords forms for queer metarelationality. Indeed, Giving an Account of Oneself challenges the tendency to understand narrative as exclusively teleological, driven toward closure and coherence; in doing so, it pries self-narration away from the disciplinary logic of confession. As Foucault argues, confession hunts for secrets (sexual and otherwise) hidden at the heart of the self. We confess these secrets to an interpretative authority (judge, doctor, administrator, professor), who assesses the price to be paid for our account. As a narrative form and social practice, then, confession seduces us into compliance with biopower and its policing of subjects. Self-narration, by contrast, produces a critical dialogue with the intimate and social relations that shape us. Building on Foucault’s fascination with parrhesia, or the courage to speak truth at great cost, Butler rewrites self-narration as an ethical practice that takes place within an intersubjective and hypersocial scene of address.⁷ We give an account of ourselves to another, or many others, and in the process, we run up against the limits of our knowledge (Is that how it happened? Who said that? Why were we there?); we get caught up in the felt intensities of transference (What are you thinking? Are you listening? Do you care?); and we may even start to see how our unique story is shaped by conventions (plots, tropes, grammars) we did not author or authorize, which can be amusing, maddening, or just a fact of life. The absence of a stable ground does not undo our narration so much as compel it. We renarrate ourselves “again and again, in several ways” (37). This is why Butler argues that an origin story “cannot establish my accountability. At least, let’s hope not, since, over wine usually, I tell it in various ways, and the accounts are not always consistent with one another. Indeed, it may be that to have an origin means precisely to have several possible versions of the origin.” To say that we “have” these possible versions of our story does not mean we possess them, like property we carry around; it would be more accurate to say that they possess us, like phantoms that speak with our tongues, usually when we least expect.

In such moments, we circle back, start again, try another angle, look with different eyes. And as it unspools, our storyline keeps getting snagged on the knots of our immeasurable dependencies—affective, intersubjective, material, social, discursive—and their intrinsic opacity. For Butler, such “opacity seems built into our formation” as relational beings (20). As a visual metaphor, “opacity” may evoke a smudged window, a dense fog, or a static fuzz that never resolves into a legible pattern. But these images do not quite capture how opacity arises out of the dizzyingly kaleidoscopic network of dependence that reaches beyond our field of vision. So when narrative stumbles into opacity, it does not shut down so much as open out. In Butler’s words:

Placed in scare quotes, “incoherence” (a keyword for queer theory) transforms from an absence of logical consistency to a baroque overabundance of relationality. In this context, incoherence does not shatter the self so much as spotlight the unaccountably queer relationality that “precede[s] and enable[s]” our self-formation (82). Butler admits that “this particular kind of transitivity is difficult, if not impossible, to narrate.” We can see this difficulty in Butler’s prose as it accretes a litany of relational verbs (implicated, beholden, derived, sustained). Butler’s sentence isn’t grasping for the “right” word; it is giving queer metarelationality a form. The verbs are not exchangeable or equivalent; they are irreducibly entwined, just like the intimate social relations they index.

By weaving recursively from narrative to its limits and back again, Giving an Account of Oneself presents a timely challenge to the pressure for people, especially minoritized people, to “speak their truth,” “live their truth,” or “live their best life.” Butler strongly critiques the demand to “manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same” (42). Such an insistence on narrative consistency can itself be a form of “ethical violence.”⁸ It may lead us to erase the smudges from our stories, so audiences will consume, accept, and applaud them. But seamless stories tend to cut the seams of relationality; they tidy up the messy stitches that bind our narratives to others. Thus, Giving an Account of Oneself counters consistency with the relational force of “interruption” (64). Certainly, interruption can be annoying, aggressive, or manipulative—think, for example, of patriarchal mansplaining, the tears of white fragility, and transphobic whataboutism. All of these interruptions aim to shut down dialogue. Yet interruption need not only come from outside; it can also arise from within, as in the moments when we discover “another story is already at work in me” (74). Indeed, Butler hears a cacophony of discourse—social, interpersonal, and otherwise—in self-narration. To the extent that we “permit, sustain, and accommodate the interruption” of this discordant chorus, a “certain practice of nonviolence may follow” (64). Interruption may loosen individualism, especially the ego’s fantasies of autonomy, mastery, and unity. In this sense, interruption need not silence narration; it can stretch our story into new territory we could not have reached alone. In such moments, we might even discover how the story of “you” makes the story of a “me” possible in the first place.

Such pronominal disorientation and reorientation is one of the pleasures of reading Giving an Account of Oneself. Throughout, Butler’s “I” finds itself impinged on, held by, entwined with “you.” In this way, the prose lyrically unfolds the queer metarelationality of the second-person. While scholars have long appreciated the role of “the other” in Butler’s thought, less attention has been paid to the ways they encounter “the other” through “you.” They stress, for example, that it “matters that we feel more properly recognized by some people than we do by others. And this difference cannot be explained solely through recourse to the notion that the norm operates variably” (33). Thus, Giving an Account of Oneself gives fresh theoretical weight to the “proximate exchanges” in which we address ourselves to, and find ourselves addressed by, others (24). Within these scenes of address, we confront social norms and discover relationality as a capacity, a skill, even a practice of agency. These intimate yet social dimensions of address are the reason that Giving an Account of Oneself critiques the “inadequacy of the dyad as a frame of reference for understanding social life” (28–29). From this vantage, Butler’s “you” encompasses far more than the scene of address between a handful of subjects. It is the grammatical imprint of our metarelational exposure to the social as such.

It is time to follow Butler’s lead and pay more attention to the queer affordances of the second-person address.⁹ Despite the ongoing discourse around the politics of pronouns, “you” has yet to garner much interest. Adriana Cavarero’s claim remains true: “[T]he ‘you’ is a term that is not at home in modern and contemporary developments of ethics and politics. […] The we is always positive, the plural you is a possible ally, the they has the face of an antagonist, the I is unseemly, and the you is, of course, superfluous” (qtd. in Butler 32).¹⁰ Among its many benefits, Butler’s metarelationality recovers what Cavarero describes as the “contiguity of the you.” But it does so, at least in part, to rethink the queer dependencies of you and we. In a fascinating parenthetical, Butler makes a metarelational address to the reader on this very point: “(You can see that I resort here to the plural we, even though Cavarero advises against it, precisely because I am not convinced that we must abandon it.)” (33).

As if harkening back to this aside, the arresting final sentence of Giving an Account of Oneself invokes “we” no less than four times: “If we speak and try to give an account from this place [of “unknowingness”], we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven” (136; my emphasis). Clearly, Butler has not abandoned the we, but they have altered its trajectory, from a collective subject to an agonistic relation. We might even say that Giving an Account of Oneself rescues relationality from collectivity, or perhaps returns collectivity to its metarelational conditions of possibility. After all, this sentence recalls and reorients the final sentence of Bodies That Matter, which describes speaking as “always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself” and thus “the unstable and continuing condition of the ‘one’ and the ‘we,’ the ambivalent condition of the power that binds” (242). Across all of these sentences, we can see Butler’s long-standing fascination with the power of “grammatical fiction[s]” to arrange the social (Bodies 99). But we can also see the growing significance of the “you” that lies before and beneath every “we.” To be clear, the second-person does not mediate between the me and the we; on the contrary, before the me and the we, or the individual and the collective, comes the you, which each inherits as the metarelational capacity of address.

It is important to think of queer metarelationality as an ethical capacity. Because it can be exhausted and even extinguished, it must be approached with care. In Butler’s words, “[N]one of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy” (Giving 101). Here, again, we find the embrace— skin on skin, in this case—as a figure for queer metarelationality. For Butler, the potential for violation, for shattering, for being undone is the price of relationality; we did not choose this condition nor can we dispel it nor is it clear we would want to, given that it is the price of belonging as such. But we must learn to deal with it with ethical skill. In telling the story of the subject in this way, Giving an Account of Oneself fiercely challenges the dismissal of poststructuralism as amoral. Yet it also departs from poststructuralism’s conventional narrative arc, which typically arrives at ungroundedness as a denouement. Instead, Butler stresses that we are divided “from the start,” a refrain throughout Giving an Account of Oneself. If we begin with incoherence, Butler asks, then what? This is a narrative problem, an ethical invitation, and a political question. The question demands a response; and we answer it, one way or another, with the life we live. But it is important to remember that no single answer, and no single story, can have the last word.

It is fair to ask whether ethics is the discourse through which queer and social theory should take place in this dire moment of political, social, and environmental crisis. Yet, building on Theodor Adorno, Giving an Account of Oneself insists that ethical quandaries surface in historical moments when the “collective ethos” has crumbled (4). For Butler, ethics are thus always imprinted by and situated within their political contexts. It is for this reason they urge an ongoing dialogue between ethics and social theory:

Ethics desperately needs social theory to avoid becoming an idealized (white, male, straight, cis, colonialist) abstraction; and social theory needs ethical thought precisely because it is a venue through which subjects may become critical about social formation and learn to live otherwise. But perhaps most importantly, ethical and social theory share a commitment to sustaining life—to crafting practices, forms, and models through which relational beings can endure collectively.¹¹ From this perspective, we can see ethical concerns abounding in critical, social, and political theory, even when not named as such. Indeed, the question of how to sustain collective life inspires some of our most important debates about how to challenge genocidal fascism, rapacious capitalism, and environmental devastation; and it lies at the heart of theoretical, artistic, and political efforts to nourish Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, feminist, trans, anticolonial, and nonableist lifeworlds in the face of this violence.

To further the metarelational dialogue between ethical and political thought, then, this special issue draws Giving an Account of Oneself into conversations with queer theory, trans studies, Black studies, disability studies, postcolonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, life writing, and narratology. Rather than assess the book’s legacy or measure its influence, contributors extend an aspect of Butler’s argument into a new scene of address, from the trans body in the queer classroom (Adair) to the infant’s body in the hands of a parent (Ashtor), from Black art on the gallery wall (Musser) to trans politics across the globe (Gill-Peterson), from Foucault’s interviews (Huffer) to interviews with victims of sexual assault in higher education (Ahmed), from Butler’s resonances with Emily Dickinson and White Lotus (Snediker) to the African novel’s fraught dialogue with white humanitarianism (Paustian), from an epistolary exchange between philosopher friends (Gilmore) to a rejuvenating candlelit dinner between hiv-positive lovers (Bradway).

In a wide-ranging response, Butler breaks from their usual “habits by offering a bit of a story about [their] life,” taking us from the scene of writing Giving an Account of Oneself to the agonizing parallels they witnessed between Jewish and lesbian separatist communities (235). As Butler stresses, their narrative indulgence “hardly means that you now know me.” To believe so would forget the lesson that “no narrative account can track the formation that never leaves us,” and it would also forget the inscrutability of the “you” who shares this “existential predicament” (225). Butler recognizes that some have found the “absence of autobiography in [their] work […] irritating” (224), but they insist that they have not been “hiding” (225) in abstraction all these years. Rather, they have “actually [been] trying to connect with those who also tend to fail when they seek to give an account of themselves in a language that, strictly speaking, belongs to none of us” (225). If we have failed to hear this desire to connect in Butler’s style of address, and if we have failed to appreciate it as one of their most enduring ethical commitments, then perhaps we need a queerer account of the relationality of theory itself.

The contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including literary studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, philosophy, and media studies. In this way, the issue takes a cue from Butler’s own method in Giving an Account of Oneself. Reflecting on the authors’ “eclectic use of various philosophers and critical theorists,” Butler observes: “Not all of their positions are compatible with one another, and I do not attempt to synthesize them […]. [Yet] I do want to maintain that each theory suggests something of ethical importance that follows from the limits that condition any effort one might make to give an account of oneself” (21). Similarly, this issue does not attempt to synthesize its disparate fields, archives, or commitments. But we invite you to read in a Butlerian vein and to see our limits as generative—perhaps even as a queer holding environment for your sustaining interruptions to come.

Thank you to Denise Davis for shepherding this special issue through every step of the process and for improving it in countless ways with her insight, attention, and care.

Notes

Works Cited