Episode 16 Blank boys and blank girls

I’ve been talking a lot about recognisability in social structures. Closed social structures divide up the world into particular categories such that it becomes impossible to think outside those categories. What doesn’t ‘fit’ within those categories, or identities, or ways of being, or ways of feeling are rejected, ignored or simply not allowed to exist.

How might it become possible to think beyond the structures that structure thought? We’d have to think more than we can think. ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks,’ writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, ‘is a desire’. To imagine new possibilities within a structure requires moving beyond thought, into a different realm of experience.

But is it appropriate to call that realm of experience desire? Desire is a loaded term – just ask Banarama and U2. In fact, it is sexual desire that is at the heart of that compelling social structure in which human beings are divided into two – and only two – distinct groups: males and females. As part of this dividing practice comes the requirement that sexual desire only occur between the two groups, and not within them. This requirement starts early. Indeed, I remember participating in heterosexual matchup games – which boy do you like? which boy are you going to marry? which boy are you gonna chase on the playground? – from about the age of 5.

How do social requirements about desire shape social structures? I share some discoveries from my ethnographic study of a women’s field hockey team (detailed in my book, Language, Sex and Social Structure).  Anxious about the fact that there were lesbians on their team, the heterosexual women I spoke to made a point of distinguishing the hockey team from other university women’s teams, like rugby. There really aren’t that many lesbians in women’s hockey, I was told. Women’s rugby is where the real ‘problem’ is. One of the ways they depicted women’s rugby as a problem is by portraying rugby players as having desire for women. Hockey players might have sexual encounters with other women… but they don’t desire them (which by implication would mean they’re not really gay).

Clearly a desire that is entirely shaped by a closed social structure isn’t really a desire at all – or is it? It’s certainly not the type of desire that Emmanuel Levinas was writing about. What would it be like to experience the Levinas form of desire: to think beyond the thinkable, to imagine new possibilities for being?