Panel Proposal: *Choice Materialities*

Lucas Cassidy Crawford, University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta)
-‘Say my Name, Butch!’ A Literary Ethics of Transgender Name Change

Anthony Easton, independent scholar and artist (Toronto, Ontario)
-On the Lacunae of Choice

Jennifer E. Crawford, York University (Toronto, Ontario)
-Getting it on/off: Desire and the Fact of Orgasm

*Panel Motivation*
While eugenics discourse has all too many (industry- and normativity-inspired) reasons to prove that sexuality and gender are not a matter of choice, the question of choosing one’s styles of fucking, one’s gender, one’s politics and one’s family has been central to the various developments and de(con)structions of queer communities. On the other hand, many queers are eager to prove that nothing about their lifestyle is a choice, while many religious conservatives base their prejudice on the belief that ‘homosexuality’ is indeed a choice. In all cases, choice is taken for granted as the pivotal point. While different political aims underlie the many orientations to choice we see played out in popular, scientific, and academic discourse today, there is something else at stake in any argument about choice: the fraught role of matter. In many popular accounts of gender and sexuality, materiality – one’s body, in particular – either generates or reflects, motivates or inhibits, and ultimately, chooses or deals with a choice. To the end of moving beyond these binaries, the three papers on this panel struggle to problematize both the ostensible liberation of choice and also the ostensible captivity of being unable to choose. The indeterminate, stubborn, and inchoate matter of embodiment mars both of those easy projects and demands a much more nuanced account of how our queerness takes shape and how we shape it.

While Anthony Easton’s paper analyzes popular discourses of choice and asks what is at stake in perpetuating this trope, Lucas Cassidy Crawford’s paper analyzes a particular transgender choice – that of choosing a new name – and argues that this seemingly linguistic technology of gender is actually thoroughly material. Easton’s paper provides an overview of what seem to be ‘the’ choices facing queer and trans communities in this very particular age from his very particular perspective as an artist and activist, which provides a valuable frame to the incisive and detailed close readings of the other papers. Jennifer E. Crawford’s paper takes as its subject something that seems like a ‘no-brainer’ kind of choice: that everyone would surely choose the orgasm as the material culmination of sex. By imbuing the act of not coming with agency, this paper sets out a new ethics of sexual practice that questions the valorization of sex that has a decisive ending or obvious trajectory. Together, the papers point the way towards strategies and ethics for navigating not only the very difficult choices we make as queer people but also the dangerous and ubiquitous public discourses of ‘choice’ that seem impossible to avoid in our era.