In this paper, I attempt to rethink race and ethnicity through Deleuzo^Guattarian conceptions of affect and machinism. Considered in the context of a theorisation of machinism, affect might be thought of as not only underwriting difference and contingency, but as simultaneously affording the potential for bodies to be organised into proper relations. I suggest an understanding of the virtual as impure, full of bundles of potential functions, an understanding that allows us to envisage race and ethnicity in terms of virtual memory and the incipient organisation of affect. I also argue that thinking of race and ethnicity in terms of affect requires a theorisation of machinism. Race and ethnicity thus have to be considered in terms of historically specific sociomaterial assemblages that are at once practised and productive. Building upon these insights, and taking inspiration from the writings of Elizabeth Grosz, I propose a vision of an antiracist politics that pursues justice by other means than a politics of recognition or resistance. Instead, I suggest that antiracist struggles need to harness the subliminal and superliminal forces that produce the conditions for affect, subjectivity, and action. This is a politics that seeks to free desire from its historically specific organisation, but which attends to its own reinvestment in racialising and ethnicising tendencies.
In common with the experiences of many other groups -and despite changing legal landscapes and increasing recognition within social policy of different groups' needs -LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans) people continue to face discrimination and abuse, and improving safety continues to be a key touchstone for policy makers and practitioners engaging with LGBT lives. Based on evidence from Count Me In Too, an LGBT participatory research project in Brighton & Hove, UK, the paper challenges approaches to dealing with LGBT safety that narrowly focus on reporting within a hate crime paradigm, and recognises the shift towards multi-agency approaches to LGBT safety. Our evidence shows that many LGBT people differentially recognise or do not recognise abuse, instead 'normalising' much of the abuse they experience in order to carry on with day-to-day life. By focusing on the effects of abuse and how it is dealt with by individuals and communities, rather than focusing on what constitutes abuse, we show the importance of addressing LGBT safety in ways that move beyond questions of criminal justice and the reporting of hate crime. We argue for a broader social policy framework that uses multi-agency approaches to community safety for those who experience abuse on the basis of their sexual and/or gender identities, which should attend to how safety services may provide more appropriate contexts of care and support, and which should build upon relevant knowledges within LGBT communities. Fostering solidarities among LGBT people may also empower them to work towards broader social transformation.
Recent geographical interventions have begun to question the power relations among lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people, challenging assumptions that LGBT communities have homogeneous needs or are not characterised by hierarchies of power. Such interventions have included examinations of LGBT scenes as sites of exclusion for trans people. This article augments academic explorations of trans lives by focusing on 'the gay capital' of the UK, Brighton & Hove, a city that is notably absent from academic discussions of gay urbanities in the UK, despite its wider acclaim. The article draws upon Count Me In Too (CMIT), a participatory action research project that seeks to progress social change for LGBT people in Brighton & Hove. Rather than focusing on LGBT scenes, the article addresses broader experiences of the city, including those relating to the city as a political entity that seeks to be 'LGBT inclusive' and those relating to the geographies of medical 'treatment' that relocate trans people outside the boundaries of the city, specifically to the gender identity clinic at Charing Cross Hospital in London. It argues that trans lives are both excluded from and inextricably linked to geographical imaginings of the 'gay capital', including LGBT spaces, scenes and activism, such that complex sexual and gender solidarities are simultaneously created and contested. In this way, the article recognises the paradoxes of the hopes and solidarities that co-exist -and should be held in tension -with experiences of marginalisation.
This paper explores the testimony of trans respondents to Count Me In Too (a participatory action research project that examined LGBT lives in Brighton and Hove), and this analysis occasions the development of innovative concepts for thinking about understandings and experiences of trans phenomena and gender. The analysis starts by exploring the diversity of trans identities before considering evidence of how health services pathologise trans experiences. These analyses not only call into question mind/body dualisms within contemporary gender schema, but also challenge the continued reliance on a sex/gender dichotomy – both in public institutions and in academic theorising – making a definitive distinction between transsexualism and transgenderism difficult to sustain. To do justice to the complexity of the respondents’ testimony, we advance the concept of a ‘sense of gender’ – a sense that belongs to the body, but that is not the same as its fleshy materiality – as one register in which gender is lived, experienced and felt. This sense of gender becomes expressed in relation to a sense of dissonance (sometimes articulated through the ‘wrong body discourse’) among the various elements that compose the body, its sex and its gender, such that the ‘body’ experiences an inability to be ‘consistent’ in ways that are usually taken for granted. The paper suggests that further work needs to be undertaken to explore how the concept of ‘senses of gender’ can be applied to a broader rethinking of the relationship between gender and the body.
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