Psychotic Little Worlds
Tamar Shirinian
In Psychoanalysis Under Occupation,1 Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi provide a deep analysis of the psychic effects of Israeli tactics of “reality-bending.” They show the ways in which Zionism is insubordinate toward reality – that it refuses to abide by the rationality and material reality of Palestine as a country populated by Arabs to which European Jews hold no legal, hereditary, or historical title.2 Zionism, a settler colonial and imperialist project, compels Palestinians to live in a world in which reality is consistently disavowed. This reality-bending is a psychotic mechanism, at least clinically defined: “a cognitive slippage that seeks an omnipotence that can, at its heart, snuff out the psyche of another, rendering the ‘abnormal,’ ‘normal.’”3 Sheehi and Sheehi refuse normalized forms of psychotherapy, including psychoanalytic practice in the state known as Israel, in which Palestinians must choke on their own dispossession and dehumanization as these realities are left outside the doors of the clinic. Rather than any form of actual healing, they argue, normalized apolitical psychotherapies in Palestine train minds and bodies to learn to cope with ongoing militarized occupation as normal. Reality-bending contributes to life as asphyxiation. Under Zionist settler imperialism, the regime dominates through the taking of breath and life, both individual and collective, psychologically rendering Palestinians as dis-membered – as individuals out of political, collective, and historical context. And, of course, it is in Gaza where this asphyxiation has been not just metaphorical, but a literal reality, regularly choking breath out of life.4
I start with Palestine because these days it is the beginning of everything – from my gut to all over. But this conceptualization of reality-bending is instructive. It allows us to understand other worlds that have lived in bent realities, that have constructed their own psychotic social mechanisms, that have produced revisionist histories and narratives and then naturalized them as if...as if.
A friend said to me recently – pained – “It’s like you know what happened but they are now telling you something else happened. You lived it, you remember, you were there, but they are telling you something else.” During the 2020 “44 Day War,” Armenian soldiers, who were obligated to go and fight and die, went scared, went unwillingly. Now, history tells us, they were heroes, who voluntarily sacrificed themselves for their country. For nearly twenty-five years, the country’s post-Soviet oligarchy robbed the people blind – of what commons had been produced by the Soviet system, of their daily bread, of any sense that they were living under social organization. Today, according to some people, it is those who came after – to “clean up” – who committed those robberies. How does one so quickly forget what really happened? Bending reality has the potential to drive one mad and especially when it happens on the scale of an entire society.
Reality-bending, however, also has its micro-formations, creating psychotic little worlds. Almost twenty years ago, a group of queer feminists founded something – a space, a blog, a concept, a world, a possibility? – called Queering Yerevan. Queering Yerevan was a collective of artists and writers. It was never a closed space: some came and went, producing one piece of writing or participating in one happening, and some saw themselves as shaped by this formation. I was not a founding member of the collective, but I was brought into the fold a few years in and had the privilege of witnessing the making of queer feminist work in Yerevan and in Armenia. This is not to put Queering Yerevan in a grave, as if the project is dead and gone. What Queering Yerevan was over the years has consistently transformed and not too many happenings are claimed in its name anymore. While somewhat faded, it promises to awaken and to act again at any moment. Today’s historical revisionism has all-but completely destroyed memory of what Queering Yerevan meant for feminism in Armenia while also resignifying toward destruction its political potential.
Permit me to feel historical. 2010-2014 were tumultuous years in gendered and sexual reformulations in Armenia. From national sex panics to the sharpening of divisions within political struggles between nationalists and non-nationalists on the basis of gendered and sexual reformulation, to the grounding of gender and sex as critical political concerns in the country, these were formative years on which today’s various queer and feminist formations have established themselves.
Queering Yerevan had a massive role to play in this historical moment. It produced an uncompromised space to work out critical questions: the possibility of creating a queer and feminist literature, art, and discourse; women’s creativity and the potentials of collaboration without men’s interference; the relationship between patriarchy and the state; the issue of borders and its intimacy with boundaries between persons, nation and diaspora, concepts, and bodies; gender as something that can be made and remade; gender as a critical feminist issue, inseparable from feminism and inseparable from woman; and sexuality as a public issue. Perhaps most critically, and something that seems to have been forgotten within the micropolitics of queer and feminist psychotically little worlds of revisionism today, Queering Yerevan conceived of queer feminist possibility independent of, and in many ways counter to, any queer feminist project dictated by capital. In the work displayed on its blog, through its “happenings” in Yerevan and elsewhere, by way of the narrative and the discursive possibility that it produced, and in the personal encounters between its members (and especially its founding members) and others and amongst members – Queering Yerevan acted as an obstacle for any emergent project that would speak in a compromised language. Here, by obstacle, I mean as a hostile entity that refused to give in to the disciplinary forces that came with the neoliberal agenda to produce a kind of feminism (perhaps we can call this a liberal feminism) that could exist, nicely and neatly, side- by-side, with capital. It provided a critical space.
It is important to be clear about this as there are today so many misunderstandings about critique. Critique is not in itself a problem for capital. To write volumes on neoliberalism, on capitalism, on inequality does near nothing against those realities. And, indeed, if the critique is commodifiable in some form – creates a space in which the critique can be commodified or in which the critique provides cover for a space of commodification otherwise – then it is always welcome. At times, what looks like critique is actually the production of particular kinds of subjectivities that can cope with capital’s interests: who can see themselves as objects of development who progress toward the better when they invent (or, more accurately, appropriate) new concepts and ideas that they incorporate into their selves. At times, activism or humanitarianism – both of which might offer critique – are created not as actualizing gestures toward the making of new worlds, but as one’s products in capitalist non-profit circulation, which ultimately leaves capital unscathed while appropriating political discourse and narrative. Feminism becomes a resume, listing various skills (including agility with certain terms), and past experiences in order to sell oneself within non-profit capitalist circuits, which include grants as well as social capital that can be exchanged for grants.
Self-care, collective care, toxicity, safety. Whatever justice-oriented or struggle-oriented meaning or weight these terms and concepts may have had at some point are being entirely reconfigured. They arise today instead to police, to compel, to divide, and to compete. To shut down struggle.
Queering Yerevan, for me, was a space where we borrowed, appropriated, invented, and discarded concepts with the ultimate purpose of consistently challenging compromise with capital and its encroachment. Queering Yerevan was a space of constant debate, discussion, argument, anger, love, and laughter. It was not an easy space. And by that I mean the best of things – an obstacle to any formation within ourselves that might drive us to adapt. Queering Yerevan provided shelter and protection from a world that wanted to be okay with liberal reality as a political economic worlding. This protection was often created through hostility. We were hostile toward the status quo as well as reconfigurations of that status quo that threatened to create a new, adaptive, liberalism.
This queer feminist legacy has been lost in time and what it means to be queer and feminist in Yerevan has been bent out of shape and almost unrecognizable. “Feminism” now seems to belong to those who can garner the largest social networks. Queerness is an image sculpted out of signifiers that are no longer allowed to be challenged: marginalized and oppressed identities in whose name struggle comes to mean wild affirmation. Any relation that stands in the way of capital’s investment in future projects can only exist with a target on its back; it must be demolished lest its negative (and negating) energy spread. Queer feminist struggle: a diversified investment portfolio. “Safety” is no longer a possibility for which there is collective struggle – so that we all might one day have it – but has become shelter from struggle. Lest we forget that struggles for actual collective safety have always been termed terrorism while genocide occurs in the name of “safety.” Securitization. Counter-insurgency feminism. Acts, actions, projects, ideology, narrative, and history become the product – a kind of prototype – to be marketed for future investment. Venture feminism.
It is hard to notice the time-space at which reality bends. One must very carefully attune herself to the feeling that something is just not as it should be. Reality’s bending happens smoothly – never at a sharp angle, but a gentle arc. A contradiction occurs, nonetheless. It can be felt in the feeling of having a lump in her throat – unable to speak because the words that one might have used have been taken and reshaped and delivered back to her, robbing her of what she thought she once knew. It can be felt in in the phenomenon of coming up against a wall – having a thought that one has thought because it is actually what is going on, but learning (often very quickly) that that thought is not allowed to be thought. What happens in these moments of contradiction are quite violent. It resubjectivizes under a new psychotic reality, creating psychosis within the self and then disavowing the very history of how that psychosis appeared. These contradictions become quickly adapted to already-existing narratives, assumptions, and concepts that allow psychic reality to disavow that moment as a particular moment, bending with a perverse reality. Psychotic situations: an international feminist camp, at which there also appeared an Israeli couple who produced themselves as the victims of political repression when a Lebanese woman announced that she could not be politically free in their presence; a screening of a queer pornographic film at which the ways that bodies react to that film are policed and then shamed; a mass email that labels two women – both of whom are lesbians – as “bullies” and accuses them of causing traumatic injury (defined as asking a question at a public forum); the perversion of “the personal is political” so that any political discussion becomes one about personal experiences and one’s own feelings of exhaustion and alienation; the disciplining of feminisms into suzerainties, with demands to remain loyal to one’s own clan.
Here, we might learn through the experience of Israeli settler colonial reality-bending, which works at the level of genocidal dismemberment. Psychic healing for Palestinians, thus – as Sheehi and Sheehi argue – is necessarily a collective struggle. Re-memberment, re-joining back to the community that has been cut up and separated toward unrecognizability. Back to life and breath rather than empty signifiers. Back to social relation, which – in case we have forgotten – includes conflict and difficult emotions like anger. Back to reality.
History is written by victors. Yes, this is still true. The end of World War II, however, saw the rise of a new moral economy in which victory was no longer celebrated as military triumph (the triumph of force), but as moral perseverance through suffering.5 It was the sufferer who became victory’s figure par excellence – the one who they had tried to destroy, but survived against all odds. The one who they had no regard for, but lived to tell the story of overcoming. This moral economy has done some strange things in the bending of our reality. Victory has meant that one gets the right to name themselves as the victim. And naming oneself as a victim provides immense moral cover for very large crimes (genocide). But also small crimes.
There was once a time in Yerevan during which feminism was not a struggle between who had endured more trauma and who had inflicted this trauma. This is the tale of today. And, it turns out, that it was queer women who were the biggest patriarchs against whom the struggle had to turn. Psychotic reality-bending.
Yes, of course it is true that patriarchy is internalized in all of us. But, when did these concepts – feminism, patriarchy, the political – become signs completely detached from any signified? History – both what happened and what is said about it – bends when the words with which we want to describe it mean different things. Criticism and conflict become bullying. Spaces of actual debate and dialogue become unsafe spaces. To take apart already established meanings of concepts and assemble together other meanings is not just something anyone is allowed to do. Resignification is for the powerful – those already interpellated as victorious sufferers. Those who have recapitulated to the making of a kind of struggle that is okay with no longer struggling.
Making struggle palatable, maybe even delectable. But ensuring its painlessness. Fun, comfortable, safe. But for whom?
Resignification in itself is not necessarily destructive – it has the potential to be a creative process. Eros, not Thanatos. But resignification that empties potential toward making a new (and more just) world, toward destroying structures that incapacitate, turns concepts into empty caskets that circulate and circulate, in melancholic grief, until they are long, long forgotten and cast aside. Patriarchal violence, once the cause of the historical enslavement of women, is now what lesbians who have chosen to not participate in the processes of inclusion into structures of violence do to straight women in charge of large grants and networks of non-governmental organizations. A horror show of historical revisionism as simulacra. Our own little psychotic world where the postmodern nightmare is awakened.
For, if not psychotic and not living in a false reality that goes against any reality principle, wouldn’t one have to ask if it would ever even be possible for capital to invest in projects actually geared toward its own destruction – projects that are really invested in struggle?
I am not of the mind that we need to demarcate what counts and what does not count as something. What is and what is not feminism. What is and what is not care, love, toxic, dangerous, violent, and so on. Today, globally, we see that feminism has been the agent of militarization, securitization, imperialism, commodification and many other mechanisms that lead to the destruction of life (of women and non-women). Instead, it seems to me, what matters is an analysis geared toward the actualization of making a world that can hold down the barricades against these mechanisms and, more, create possibilities of their overturn. Can these new emergent feminisms – that create concepts that shut down discussion and real relation (which, of course, we all know includes conflict), that commodify particular styles of life and brand particular forms of activism and that reify worlding into commodifiable images, and that ultimately call out women geared toward analysis and struggle as the ultimate patriarchal violators – make a world that can hold down the barricades against the encroachment and destruction of capital? It is not that these are not “feminist” but that perhaps it is time to move away from feminism as a project when this is what it comes to mean. Or, it is time to produce new forms of feminism. Naming but putting aside righteously suffering victors, investment portfolios, resumes of past projects, securitization, and counter-insurgency dispositions toward feminism – signifieds no longer for us – and creating new pathways.
Jean Laplanche demands that “[i]t is time to abandon slogans and think on our own.”6 What Queering Yerevan offered was precisely this space of abandoning slogans and thinking on our own. We talked incessantly of desire, of pleasure, of violence, of exploitation, of the various contradictions that informed our own beings as well as our relation to one another. We asked uncomfortable questions; we admitted uncomfortable desires; we understood uncomfortable realities. We refused to allow concepts to become reification. We refused to allow any discourse to become our internalized narrative – asking, asking, asking, incessantly. Those encounters were deeply troubling – at times excruciating (if I were to be honest). But they were immensely inventive, challenging me to imagine how I create, what I create and how I am also myself in constant creation. By the standards of today’s “safe space” diktat Queering Yerevan would have been intolerable. Today, any form of struggle, questioning, and indeed reality seem to have become intolerable. All while maintaining themselves queer and feminist in name. A perverse historical revisionism that has produced psychotic little worlds.
1 Sheehi, Lara, Stephen Sheehi. 2021. Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine. New York: Routledge.
2 ibid., page 14
3 ibid., page 82
4 Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press.
5 Fassin, Didier, Richard Rechtman 2009. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
6 Cited in Saketopoulou, Avgi, Ann Pellegrini. 2023. Gender Without Identity New York: The Unconcious in Translation, page 30.
