Nonbinary Jane Austen

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth century. Here, Washington discusses a politics built on plurality and possibility with Marquis Bey, Christopher Breu, and Alison Sperling.

Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender.

Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. 

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

REFERENCES:

Derrida’s Of Grammatology

Foucault

Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift

The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books

The Matrix film

Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton

Fred Moten

Judith Butler

We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin

Edward Said

Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson

S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ

A Mercy / Toni Morrison

Sojourner Truth

Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An

Episode Transcript

Chris Washington (00:06):
One has to be careful where non binary
thinking doesn't get trapped inbinaristic logic. And that can
happen, I think, easily throughidentity politics.

Christopher Breu (00:19):
I loved it as a model of literary criticism. I
mean, it's a it's an incrediblyrich, deconstructive reading of
Jane Austen, and it reminded meof how powerful close reading
can be.

Ali Sperling (00:30):
It really was interesting to think about
Austen not as a genderabolitionist, but as someone
who's calling for an abolitionof the social order.

Marquis Bey (00:38):
There are so many other people with investments in
Austin, with the whole archivethat they have in Austin. What
are the political stakes inwriting this kind of book?

Chris Washington (00:52):
Okay. My name is Chris Washington, and I am
the author of this book,Nonbinary Jane Austen. I suppose
the one thing I could say is itis a book that is attempting to
think about, among many otherthings, I suppose, how one does
literary criticism today. Butthere's also a way in which the

(01:13):
book is not about Jane Austen,which I think I may say in the
book at some point in kind ofthe same way that Derrida's of
Grammatology is not really aboutRousseau. I don't know if that's
helpful or not, but it is a alsovery much an attempt to think

(01:33):
about a way of readingnonbinarily.
One of my people who read itbefore it was published said
something like, you skatedelightfully right on the edge
of what literary criticism cando. I don't know if that's true
or even maybe what thatnecessarily means, but it
sounded nice. So anyway, I thinkwe can just go around and and

(01:56):
introduce ourselves and see whathappens.

Christopher Breu (01:59):
Okay. This is Chris Breu, Christopher Breu.
I'm the author of most recently,In Defense of Sex, Nonbinary
Embodiment and Desire, in whichI argue for the importance of
thinking about sex as a categoryof both embodiment and desire
and thinking about it as anonbinary category in both cases
as a category that's aboutnonbinary embodiment. I was born
intersex and I am intersex.Hypospatias was what I was born

(02:23):
with and both am intersex andidentify that way.
But although one of the things Iargue in the book is it's less
about identification and moreabout embodiment. And my work's
always been pro sex, so that'salso something that I take on in
this book as well. I argue thatwe're in a weird moment in which
sex is both ubiquitous andubiquitously a problem in
discourse right now. And so,yeah, but I'm really especially
interested and I'm influenced byMarquis's work and it overlaps

(02:45):
with Chris and Allie's work inthinking about how we can think
about embodiment and desire innon binary ways. Where I might
differ a little bit more is Iwant to emphasize the material
dimensions of embodiment alittle bit more strongly in some
ways.
And that's what I'm doing. Alsowork on a number of other
things, but this is what's mostrelevant to this podcast.

Ali Sperling (03:03):
So, hi, I'm Ali Sperling. I'm an assistant
professor of literature, mediaand culture at Florida State
University. And I'm alsocurrently a visiting fellow at
the Institute for CulturalInquiry here in Berlin. And I'm
just very happy to be here andexcited to be part of this
conversation. So like, thankseveryone for bringing us
together and for this reallycool book.
Chris, this is, two Chris's, soChris W, I don't know how to

(03:23):
like address that. ChrisWashington, thank you for this
this book, which I read with soso much pleasure and interest,
and learned a lot. I work ontwentieth and twenty first
century, American literaturewith a focus focus on, science
fiction and especially on thewhat is the weird, both as a
literary and cultural categoryand as a theoretical frame more
broadly. I also, work in queerand feminist theory and in the

(03:44):
broader, environmentalhumanities. My current book
project looks at modernistAmerican literature through this
theory of the weird that followsfrom New Materialisms, Black
Studies, and Queer Theories ofEmbodiment.
So a lot of overlap, obviously,with all of your work here,
which I admire very deeply.Maybe I can also say a little
bit more about how the nonbinary came of interest after
this first round, but that's ageneral introduction.

Marquis Bey (04:07):
Hello, hello everyone. I am Marquis Bey. I am
full professor of Black Studiesand Gender and Sexuality
Studies, as well as CriticalTheory at Northwestern
University. Generally speaking,just to give a quick primer as
to the work that I do, how Iinhabit this sociopolitical and
intellectual space. Generallyspeaking, my work concerns trans

(04:29):
and non binary theory, blackfeminism, abolition, and all of
that with a particular focus onhow processes of racialization
have impacted non normativegenders.
But more specifically, andperhaps even more fastidiously,
I am constantly preoccupied withhow rethink what certain terms

(04:49):
mean, and namely for me,blackness, transness, non
binary, feminism, those kind ofterms, along a political or
philosophical or imaginativerather than an identificatory
one. So I think we'll have a lotof overlaps there to to talk
about. And to date, I'vepublished a number of things,
but most relevant for ourconversation, sometime next
year, I will be having my newestbook coming out, and that is

(05:12):
gonna be called Nonbinary Life.So I've been immersed in
thinking about the very questionthat is nonbinary. So I'm super,
super excited for thisconversation, y'all.
I'm happy to be here.

Christopher Breu (05:24):
Well, one thing I wanted to say just about
the book is that one, I loved itas a model of literary
criticism. I mean, it's anincredibly rich, deconstructive
reading of Jane Austen. And itreminded me of how powerful
close reading can be at variouspoints, that there's a kind of
care and precision and acomplexity, a deconstructive

(05:45):
complexity to your reading,often a very small passages or
short passages. But I mean,remember when queer theory first
exploded. I'm old enoughactually to sort of go back that
far a little bit.
You know, I remember when therewas that feeling of, wow, you
could do really interestingthings with language on this
really precise and micrologicallevel. You could find the
current of queerness in a textthat might otherwise not seem

(06:07):
that queer on the surface. Andoften, it was right there. I
mean, it was a matter of lookingat it differently. And I think
you do the same thing with JaneAusten here, this writer who, we
tend to associate with themarriage plot.
Right? We tend to associate withrealism and, you know, ideas of,
you know, finally producing akind of closure, that marriage
represents and and reproducing akind of set of social
frameworks, you know, even asit's also critical of it, and

(06:29):
there's ambivalence around it,as you already point out. The
great thing about any realisttext is, you know, it's always
ambivalent before it resolves.Right? Closure's always a
fantasy a retrospective fantasyon a certain level.
But one of the things I love isthat you actually reveal this
deep nonbinary current runningthrough Jane Austen and this
kind of rethinking of it ofembodiment and being and
becoming. I wondered if youcould say more about that about

(06:50):
that, Chris.

Chris Washington (06:51):
So I will say there's a way in which I wanted
to think about how whereverthere is gender, there are many
genders. So when you look at, asyou say, a canonical author like
Jane Austen, who we think of asthis very heteronormative author
in the marriage plot and all ofthese things. That all turns on

(07:14):
gender and social dynamics andpower. You know, if that's the
case, there must be many gendersat work here and many genders in
fiction. The name is escaping meoff top of my head.
I quoted in the book somewherewhere somebody said in their
essay, why do we always readthese works of fiction and think
these people are just cisgenderor straight or any of these

(07:39):
things, you know. And I likedwhat Marquis said a while ago,
you know, thinking about thingsimaginatively and not
identificatorily. Right? Tothink about this kind of
imaginative reading of Austenthat doesn't force things that
aren't there, but rather, youknow, shows how they must be

(08:01):
there. For a long time, I guesstechnically, still am.
I was just a romantic Britishromantic literary scholar and
wrote these other books on thatstuff. I don't know how much
they're worth anything. But so Iwanted to start thinking about
ways to not think about how torethink British romanticism

(08:23):
necessarily, which I don't knowthat we need to be doing. I'm
not sure how far that getsanything. And so one thing I was
careful to do is not to talkabout British romanticism.
I don't think those words appearat all. But rather to to begin
to use authors like Austen tobegin discovering that kind of
non binary life that must havebeen there, that kind of trans

(08:45):
life that must have been there,and other types of things we
might think. But again, to do itwithout necessarily engaging in
identificatory politics, I thinkthere's a way in which one of
the things I'm saying in thebook, drawing on a lot of
authors, Mark Yest among them,is is to resist identity

(09:09):
politics. The difficult thing Iwatched this documentary called
Turn the Page last night, whichis about Robert Caro who wrote
the giant book, The Power Brokeron Bob Moses in New York. It's
like it's like 700,000 wordslong.

(09:29):
And in the documentary it'sabout him and his editor. He
said, Oh, you know, it used tobe longer and I had to cut
350,000 words. And he said ittook a year. And so one of the
things I did try to do speedabout the micrological, these
kind of intense readings, isthat in writing the book,

(09:52):
although it's a short book, itdid take me probably four years
to write it with an intenserereading and revision process
that at the very end, I was toldI had to cut 3,500 words, which
felt like it was gonna blow myhead off. So when I watched that
documentary last night and hehad to cut 350,000, I thought,

(10:16):
wow.
But it is that process that Ithink helped hone the readings
down to a very directed, andagain, that's a good word,
micrological kind of approach tothis. And I think deconstructive
is a good word too. I am a veryAdderada type thinker. So there

(10:37):
is that as well going on here.

Christopher Breu (10:40):
It's also very much a a book that draws on
Foucault. His account ofbiopolitics and and and
disciplinary politics and andand sexuality, which I I
actually have some questionsabout how you use biopolitics,
but we can get into that later.But, yeah, I I think you draw
from a number of differenttheoretical black studies, queer
studies, or black theory, queertheory, you know, from a number
of different traditions. So andI also love your vocabulary.
I've never had a book send me tothe dictionary more than your

(11:03):
book sent me.
And I I think I have a goodvocabulary, but clearly, I you
know, I mine needs some work.

Chris Washington (11:08):
Well, you know, when you grow up being a
here's a word for you, alibrocubicualist, which means
someone who reads in bed all dayand you, you know, you're you
grow up reading Joyce andBeckett in bed all day, kind of
you begin thinking of these, oddwords a lot of the times. You

(11:31):
know? And in fact, I'm wearingmy Bloomsday shirt I got last
year on Bloomsday. I hope thevocabulary works and it's not
weirding people out.

Christopher Breu (11:42):
No, it's great. I loved it.

Marquis Bey (11:44):
Yeah. I never have any qualms or quibbles with big
words and dense vocabulary. Forme, there's a lusciousness in
the work that that takes andentails. It's kind of, I don't
know, there is somethingexciting about that, I
appreciate that. I want to ask aquick question, and other folks
can chime in on this as well,but I'm I'm curious in

(12:05):
particular about more broadlythe political stakes of and I
guess more specifically, what Imean by that is the political
stakes in doing a reading of aparticular author in a lot of
ways who is so overdetermined byan archive that arrives before
you even arrive to that author.
So in writing a book, NonbinaryJane Austen, and yet there are

(12:28):
so many other people withinvestments in Austen, with the
whole archive that they have inAusten that to them have nothing
to do with nonbinary, what arethe political stakes, the
political implication for you inparticular in writing this kind
of book or in approaching anyauthor who is approached or
encountered by others on otherkinds of ground? What did that

(12:53):
mean for you? How did thatimpact you? I guess more
generally, how does that impactall of us who write about other
people for whom many others havecertain kinds of investments,
which I hope makes some kind ofsense.

Chris Washington (13:08):
No, it's a great question. And thank you. I
really because I do want to talkabout the politics of the book
because I do think it is a verypolitical book. And yes, Austin
and the archive around it, thecriticism around Austin, which
is could probably make a smalllibrary, and in fact has in

(13:30):
Chatham and England, is veryoverdetermined. You don't
necessarily see that representedin the book fully because I had
to make a lot of decisions aboutthe politics of citation.
So the first thing I had to dowas cut all references to my

(13:54):
other work and just get rid ofmy my own bladder, you know,
because you say in footnotes,I'll see my other bits. And
then, you know, I got rid of allmy friends because sometimes I
would say, oh, see this personwho's just my friend. And then I
really had some tough choicesbecause I was not going to cut

(14:16):
black scholars, queer scholars,trans scholars, non binary
scholars. Right? So that endedup amounting to cutting quite a
lot of references to JaneAusten's scholarship.
So I had to try to be verycarefully nuanced in picking one
one or two examples that waskind of representative of the
way that Austin archive works.And I can also say, you know,

(14:39):
I'm looking at sometimes minorlooking passages in Pride and
Prejudice or even sometimesmajor ones. I also go to less
read Austen Marks because mostpeople just think of these five
or six novels. But her earlyjuvenalia is really just wild
and crazy. To me, it's sometimesmore interesting than the other

(15:02):
stuff.
That's kind of a pragmaticwriting answer. But the the
larger stakes of the politics ofthe book, I think, are very much
invested in what I would call aleftist politics of liberation.
I was recently been reading thisbook, Transfem Futures by Nat

(15:23):
Rauchat and Michike Vandendreb,called Abolitionist Ethics for
Transfeminist Worlds. Andthere's a passage, I can't find
it off the top of my head, wherethey say the difference between
trans liberalism andTransliberation is that
Transliberalism wants to workwithin existing institutions.

(15:49):
Whereas Transliberation wantswants to abolish those
institutions.
Right? So there is a way inwhich Jane Austen is an
institution and I'm working inthat kind of institutional

(16:11):
framework, but I'm hoping itcomes out on the other side of
what they are here calling transliberation and things like what
Marcus calls black transfeminism and these more
abolitionist politics, which isone reason why the book is

(16:35):
resisting these identificatoryprocesses and ultimately becomes
not so much about Austin, butabout my imaginative fantasy
about this Austin who will bekind of to come. This non
institutional process that can'texist yet in the institution of
Austin. So there's a kind ofpalimpsest to Austin's work

(16:58):
where I am uncovering thatpowerful non binary current. But
at the same time, it's a kind ofpara plomina, which is a
extraneous thing added to book.
But at any rate, so I hope thebook lands in that liberatory
abolitionist politics, thatimaginative space of this Austin

(17:23):
to come, and so manages to getaway from those old readings of
Austin to think in a whollydifferent way. But I don't know
if it's successful or not. Ifthat answers your question.

Marquis Bey (17:33):
It absolutely answers my question. Thank you
for that.

Ali Sperling (17:38):
Yeah, it really was interesting to think about
Austen not as a genderabolitionist, but as someone
who's calling for an abolitionof the social order, right?
Which is the kind of beginningof the book, the way it sets up.
I had not thought about JaneAusten in this way before, I
admit. And it seems also to mein response to what Marquise is
asking about the politicalstakes that non binary in this
in particular, and I think thiscomes a lot from your work

(17:59):
Marquise, if I remember thecitations in the book correctly,
that the non binary is a spaceof fugitivity and
misrecognition, right? That youkind of talk about throughout
the book.
And actually what I reallyenjoyed, or at least noted
oftentimes you perform themisrecognitions in the book,
right? You give us a kind ofreading and then you ask, or
does it, right? And so that thebook kind of also enacts in a
way that the forms that we mighthave always misrecognized, but

(18:21):
that actually that's kind of acornerstone of how you're
reading non binary ness inAustin, right? That it actually
depends on being understood asadhering to the social order in
some way or being recognized assuch. And so I thought that was
a really provocative insightinto Austin and leads me to
something that I might ask,which something I'd written down
but Chris and I had a momentbefore, so I don't wanna steal

(18:43):
Chris's question.
So maybe I'll ask it in one wayand you can tack on what we had
already spoken about. But sinceyou just brought it up again,
which is like, this is not abook about Jane Austen. One of
the things I was thinking aboutis this recent piece just
because I work in theenvironmental humanities by Mark
Bold, which is on, I can'tremember, it's called Ride or
Die, something about theAnthropocene, right? Which is
like, okay, we can read for theAnthropocene anywhere. And I

(19:05):
think he even finds it in theJane Austen, like he might even
talk about Pride and Prejudicein this piece or something like
that, right?
And so Chris and I were talking,if it's not about Jane Austen,
is this a method or amethodology? Because you also
say this is not a non binaryreading, right? It's not like a
practice of reading for the nonbinary, but it's something else.
So is that something that can bepracticed? Does it have to be
Jane Austen?
Like how might we think aboutthis outside of genre or

(19:27):
periodization or other thingslike that?

Chris Washington (19:30):
Sometimes when I teach the film, The Matrix,
you know, the directors, theRachowskis say, Oh yes, it is a
trans allegory film. And, youknow, we don't have to follow,
you know, what they think,obviously. But when I'm teaching
it to the to my sophomorestudents who are not English

(19:51):
majors or literature mediamajors, cultural studies, it's
just general audience class. Thelast couple days will spend
exploring the film as this transallegory. One of the things I
try to get them to see is thatthe people in the film are
hackers.
And what they are hacking, ofcourse, is at base level binary

(20:15):
code. Right? And you can seethat when you see the matrix.
There is a way to think aboutthe reading methodology
developed here as a way ofhacking nineteenth century
gender in the nineteenth centuryrealist novel or even beyond
that. I did really want to thinkabout what it means to read non

(20:40):
binarily even at the same timeis not making that some type of
codification.
There's kind of a double playgoing on, to speak a little
deconstructively throughout,where it is the resistance and
the erasures that also aremaking these things appear. But

(21:03):
at the same time, things areappearing and they're not
erasures. And in that way, it isa a way of reading nonbinarily.
But at the same time, it'ssaying, but these things aren't
just there. That's a complicatedquestion.
I I think that's maybe somethingpeople have to think about from
reading the book. You know, Ican say of the people who have

(21:28):
also read it elsewhere andtalked to me about it, everyone
has said, oh, this is what I gotout of it. And it's totally
different each time. And, youknow, it's just a short little
book. But, I mean, I think thereis a lot going on.
But I also am happy in someregards to let people develop
those lines of flight from it intheir own reading. You know,
there's I mean, as I said acouple of things here, there are

(21:50):
things I hope people are gettingfrom it, but I'm also happy that
people are having these reallywild readings of it. Other
things are coming forth.

Ali Sperling (22:00):
I was thinking about just some of your opening
comments about how the book isalso thinking about how to do
literary criticism today. Andthis thing that keeps coming
back up in the book that the wayin which you're reading Austin
is attempting to move beyond anadditive logic, right? So to me
there's something that's veryspecific about what the non
binary or non binary ness mightoffer that is And not a kind of,

(22:22):
so I was thinking about that,but I think you also gave us
more stuff to think about.

Chris Washington (22:27):
Yeah, I see that great quote from the C.
Riley Snorton book, Black onBoth Sides. This is a book of
history, but not a book ofhistory that people understand
as a book of history. It wantsto get beyond the additive logic
of abledisabled, blackwhite,gaystraight, cis, trans. Which

(22:48):
is a model, I think, of thinkingtowards non binary.
But at the same time, one has tobe careful in doing that where
non binary thinking doesn't gettrapped in binaristic logic. And
that can happen, I think, easilythrough identity politics and

(23:12):
through identificatorysomething. There's a big word
for you all who like is onepoint of going to Foucault and
thinking about Foucault thisway, but also drawing on the
work of Black Studies and FredMoten, but also Marquise, his

(23:34):
work, which I hope I've followedcorrectly and done justice to. I
think that Snorton quote reallyhelps exemplify my answer to
that, which is that on oneobvious hand, non binary
thinking has to resistbinaristic thinking in politics.
On the other hand, it has to beaware that it is caught up in

(23:59):
that binaristic thinking.
It's the double bind. Unravelingthat is the difficulty. And I
guess that is one other thingthis book is trying to do, is to
unravel that thinking. Toimagine a kind of non binary
life that does not find itselfalways caught in those pitfalls
of binary. But again, I don'tknow that the book accomplishes

(24:23):
the the point of the forerunnersbooks is to offer a thought that
isn't completed, which I ratherliked because that thought can't
be completed.
You know, the completion of thatthought would be a kind of just
allowing things to exist inbinaristic thinking. It has to
be continually open ended. AsMarquis says in Blythe

(24:44):
Transformalism, if we wantradical, we can't know what it
is that is coming. Or else itwill already be the
anticipatable, that we'llalready be trapped in this old
logic and life and ways ofthinking and being. And that's
another way of of answering thequestion about the book's
politics.
And another way to answer thequestion about the Austin
archive. I don't imagine theAustin people are are liking

(25:08):
this book, which is not thepoint. Those are not the people
I'm I hear from.

Christopher Breu (25:13):
I wanted to this maybe picks up both on
Marquise's question and in a bita bit on Ali's question as well.
And it comes back to thequestion of of Foucault in part,
but also maybe a distinctionbetween different kinds of
radical politics. You know, myown affiliations tend to be more
Marxist. You know, know,Marquise, you've written
brilliantly on anarchistimaginaries and and thinking
about that. I wonder about thethe politics, not only of

(25:33):
abolition, but one of the thingsI really love about your book is
the critique of identitarianlogics.
I mean, it's something I shareand try in in a similar way in
in defense of sex and in otherbooks I've written, but
especially in in defense of sex.The first book actually was
probably more about identitythan a critique of it, but, Hard
Boiled Masculinities. Part ofwhat I'm interested in, and
maybe one way to link thismoment, is the way in which you

(25:54):
use, Kajia means, we're allnonbinary now, which I take as a
kind of critique of, the ways inwhich nonbinary is
operationalized as an identityby all kinds of people and all
the time that that it doesn'tseem to mean anything anymore if
everybody uses it, is how I readthat piece, you know, which I
think is a kind of sharpcritique. But it also is a
reading of Judith Butler that,in fact, we are all nonbinary on
a certain level. Right?

(26:15):
But that's there's also a kindof utopian dimension of it. And
you really kind of go at thatutopian core. You know, one of
the questions I have, and thisis maybe a different way of
coming at this, is there adanger of effacing all kinds of
material difference in the nameof effacing all kinds of
identities on a certain level?One of the questions I have
about abolition obviously, I'mfor the abolition of capitalism.
I'm for the abolition of policeand and prisons.

(26:37):
But I wonder, do we wannaabolish gender fully? Or is
gender a space of of play? Do wewanna abolish it as an
institution or a a space ofmultiple identifications? And
one of the questions I I wind uphaving here too is that we're
now in something different, youknow, neofascism, whatever you
wanna call it. Techno feudalismseems to be something people
floating.
I'm not sure I'm fully on boardwith that. We're moving past
neoliberalism, but for fiftyyears, we've had a politics that

(26:59):
has assaulted institutions inthis country. And so I worry
sometimes about the rhetoric ofgetting rid of institutions,
whether that plays into theright rather than the left. And,
you know, maybe another way toask this is representation in
institutions, are they alwayspolice functions? Are they
always carceral?
Is language always carceral?Because I'm not convinced of of
all of any of those things, butit feels like it's really
central to your argument.

Chris Washington (27:21):
So, I guess I would say abolitionist politics
is not about destroyingembodiment or materiality or
identity in the sense of leavingnothing. I understand
abolitionist politics to bedestroying, carceral

(27:43):
institutions such as, in thiscase, harmful ideas about gender
that hurt people verymaterialistically. And I think
that's part of Amin's point too,is that it's not just hurting
trans and non binary people, butcisgender. Although there's also
the the funny part in thatarticle where he says, where the

(28:05):
hell did this come from all of asudden? Right?
You know, and you're right. Whathe's saying what I've been
saying about the non binary isthat it is it goes in both
directions. There's somethingwhere it's become so amorphous.
All identities fall under it.But at the same time, there's
something utopian about it.
So there's kind of this doublecut there. But I think for Amin,

(28:29):
I think for others, the point ofabolitionist politics is to
abolish ideas of identitypolitics that are carceral, but
that is in order to let manyidentities and embodiments
flourish. Whereas now theycannot. And I think that's also
what Amin is getting at. It'slike abolition is exploding

(28:54):
notions of gender in order toexponentialize them.
Right? As to the question of,you know, say political
institutions of state andabolishing them? And does that
play into the right's hands?

Christopher Breu (29:09):
No, maybe even less political, but things like
education, right? Publiceducation would be one example.

Chris Washington (29:14):
Well, I mean, I think, that does become the
question of, yeah, reforming theinstitution versus abolishing it
and doing something different.But again, if one thinks of
abolitionist movements, of eventhen destroying the public
school system, it is in order tobuild something different that
is carceral and perhaps that isnot carceral, but that perhaps

(29:37):
that can only happen with thatwith that gone. I mean, I think
those questions of liberationare very often answered by, we
don't necessarily wanna knowwhat's happening next. And of
course, the right does want tois in the process of getting rid
of all of these institutions.And this is horrifying from some

(30:03):
perspectives, but it may alsoend up being the space that one
can work in.
But that would be the need tohave the power to do so. I think
the the thing where Zu RanbamDonnie is one's primary in New
York City with the unabashedlyleftist agenda is the

(30:24):
possibility that that leftismcan win and can win within an
institution that I thought wascompletely dead and corrupt like
the Democratic Party. But soanyway, the point overall is I
don't think of abolition asbeing this destructive process.
It is about building things. Itis about clearing out systems

(30:44):
and systemic thinking likebinary thinking and binary
notions of gender that areharmful in real material ways to
people and letting allowing formaterial flourishing.

Marquis Bey (30:56):
Interestingly and very paradoxically enough, I
love distinctions. So thedistinction that you make that I
find, like, incredibly rich interms of, like, a reading or
thinking nonbinarily, I lovethat so very much. And I wanna I
just wanna invite more to besaid about that. Like, what
precisely do you mean orimprecisely perhaps do you mean

(31:20):
by that? Because I I feel fullyon board with that.
And I just wanna hear you saymore, like, what exactly do you
mean by a reading practice or athinking practice, nonbinary
rather rather than looking fornonbinary people, identifiably
nonbinary people, but thinkingand reading nonbinary. What does

(31:40):
that mean for you? And perhapseven what purchase does that
have? Where might that travel?How might that move?
Who can do that? Who can't dothat? Etcetera, etcetera.

Chris Washington (31:51):
Wow. No. This is really a great question too.
Let me see if I have some witsto gather. I suppose there's an
assumption.
There's a premised assumptionI'm making that we live in a
world that is, I don't wanna saynecessarily ontologically or
material, but maybe those areright too, that is defined by a

(32:12):
binaristic logic and a way ofbeing. And I think a lot of
problems stem from that. Andthey're material problems. But
they're also problems of thoughtthat are preventing any type of
progress. This is a kind offoundational logic.
And so thinking nonbinarily isto try to defy that grounding

(32:32):
logic. As to who can do it, Ithink that becomes everybody. As
a manner of reading, I think thescene that perhaps exemplifies
it the best in this book is thisfamous scene in Pride and
Prejudice where ElizabethBennett and Mr. Darcy are
dancing, that I read as thisproduction of nonbinarystic

(32:57):
thought and nonbinarystic beingof kind of each and the other,
but also beyond the other. So asa way of reading, that scene
kind of captures what I'mgetting at there.
But then that in turn developsas a way to to read the world,
the social world around us.Right? And I think that is the

(33:20):
type of thinking that provesliberatory and abolitionists, to
go back to those words, becauseit's getting at that basic
foundational problem that wehave in our thinking. Another
way to put this in more perhapseveryday political terms is to

(33:40):
say that I think, and this wouldagain be the difference between
liberalism and leftism, I think,part of that binaristic thinking
leads to a certain orthodoxy andcertain talking points and
certain conventional wisdomsabout what politics is and what
can happen. And so I think thatis all part of this binaristic
logic.

(34:01):
I don't just mean like liberalsversus conservatives or
something. I I'm not I don'twanna make that Marghisov's
distinctions. Don't know ifthat's really good. But So it is
an attempt to radicalize ourthought politically at a basic
level, to get outside ofconventional wisdom and
political orthodoxy. Which Ithink, quite frankly, are are

(34:25):
not just inhibiting people'sthoughts but is actually killing
people.
And again, there's a way inwhich, right, yes, this non
binary thinking that I'm tryingto develop here is incomplete.
And it must be. Right? Becauseif it's not, it is gonna fall
into a kind of reifiedorthodoxy, that additive logic.

(34:47):
Right?
So in some ways, this is a bookof logic. It's like
Wittgenstein's Tractatus withoutthe without the math. Or, yeah,
as I said, there's a thepolitics of anti mathematics.
Right? I've never been good atmath, and so I I always thought
if I would run for office, thatwould be my slogan.
You know, vote Washington, hewon't count you out, you know,

(35:09):
about abolishing mathematics. SoI use that joke in here about
Austin, you know, vote Austin,she won't count you out because
she's moving beyond that binarylogic. I guess another way to
approach it would be, you know,we're now seeing all these
studies about AI and how it'sdestroying people's cognitive
capacity. Of course, we came outof COVID that destroyed a lot of

(35:33):
people's cognitive capacity. Ihad a horrible COVID that just
totally fucked me up and for,like, two years, which is
another reason why this booktook I I pitched this book in,
like, 2020 or something.
I just couldn't do it. And thosethings are true, you know? Those
things are harming uscognitively, whatever that

(35:53):
means. But so is this type ofthinking that the book is
critiquing. I think it's beenharming us cognitively,
psychologically, socially,materialistically, however we
wanna put that for a long time.
Even being able to kind ofostensibly point to that can be
helpful. Because I don't thinkpeople see that. I think they're

(36:16):
caught in this binaristicthinking. It's a great question.
No, it was funny before this, Iwas saying, man, I don't know
what to say about the book, buthopefully, hopefully my answers
are coherent, even ifunsatisfactory.

Marquis Bey (36:31):
Yeah, I think that was lovely and marvelous. And I
do find, I don't know, just toperhaps maybe assuage some of
the anxiety perhaps that youmight be feeling that I also
often feel anytime I talk aboutanything. I think part of, like,
the feeling of, I don't knowwhat I'm going to say about this
book that I spent so much timewriting that is multiple

(36:52):
thousands of words is I thinkthere's a perhaps there's a
fullness to the things that youthink. So there's a kind of
saturation perhaps that thatyou're that you're immersed in
such that you don't know whatyou're gonna say because there's
so much to say. There's so muchthat you could say.
So I I think that's more atestament to the fullness of

(37:15):
your thought rather than anykind of dearth of thought, if if
I may.

Chris Washington (37:19):
Oh, thanks. I do have a lot of anxiety about
stuff. I had a lot of anxiety. Idebated that we're publishing
this book. And I guess that'sthe other thing, one becomes
anxious, but also scared ofthese thoughts because they're
not gonna fit.
They don't fit what the currentnarratives are really at all.

Ali Sperling (37:35):
You know, there's multiple points in the book
where you talk about, we're notgonna find Jane Austen here, or,
you know, there's some kind of,we're both looking for some
version of the author herself,right? But of course, we're
never gonna find her orsomething like that, right? That
this figure might come closestto actually being the way that

(37:55):
we, that Jane Austen might haveactually felt or thought. I
guess I would just kind of ask ageneral question about your
relation to the author and thefigure of the author. I think it
might also kind of tie back intoMarquise's question at this, at
the start a little bit.
In what ways did you feel likethis was related to Jane Austen
the person, or did that informthe thinking of the book in some
way?

Chris Washington (38:16):
I mean, and no. You know, is, you know, it's
about Austen, the author andperson, and it isn't. One of the
main ways of reading Austen inAusten scholarship has always
been biographically, you know,which is obviously not what I'm
trying to do here. Yeah. I amtrying to talk about Austen on

(38:38):
one hand, but also to imaginethis other Austen that doesn't
exist because I think, you know,that's what she's trying to do.
But there are complicated thingsI was unable to discuss here,
like the very real, issues ofslavery that Austen was enmeshed
with at the time and that herwork's enmeshed with, you know,

(39:01):
the one novel, Mansfield Park,the dad, whatever his name is,
is, I should probably know Ishould probably know things
about her novels. Is, investedin the slave trade, know, Edward

(39:23):
Said's famous reading in Cultureand Imperialism is Austen's very
much. But of course at the sametime, there's a there's a kind
of turn of the screw to Saeedreading, which is there are
these ways of resisting it. Andso, you know, some people will
say, you know, you can't thinkof Austen as this kind of
abolitionist in any sense. She'ssimply deeply enmeshed in

(39:46):
slavery.
Which those are complicatedthings to think and work
through. But one of the things Isuggest in the book that I don't
get to fully explore is to Thisgreat lie from Fred Moten's
work, which I'm currentlywriting a lot about Moten. I've

(40:06):
written this great long thingabout him. What I think comes
out of his work politically too,which is a lot about style and
the way he thinks about style,but also how he thinks about
blackness. Blackness as style ina way.
And, you know, this book is alsoabout literary style. I suggest

(40:30):
what would it mean to readAusten from a black studies
perspective that I kind of leavethat thread dangling. But just
to think about that as, like,one acknowledges the historical
material realities of the timeof the slave trade. But if we
take a Black Studies perspectiveon Austin seriously, it would
mean, Moten says, you know, Iread Samuel Richardson as part

(40:54):
of or I read Marx and I want toread Richardson as part of this
Black radical tradition. Like,how would you do that, right?
Because we're all ultimatelyimplicated in the culture and
imperialism of our time, right?And so I think, you know,
thinking non binarily, thinkingabolitionists is also a way to

(41:20):
critique that very system we'reenmeshed in. Right? And so that
is why this is a reading ofAusten and not a reading of
Austen. It's trying to to comefrom an angle that allows for
this new method of thought toemerge from this reading, this

(41:40):
imaginative reading.
So when I say things like Austinin the book, you know, it is
just this kind of prosopopoeiawhere I'm, you know, giving
voice to an author who isn'tthere and who isn't the author
in any event. Yeah. There's athere's an old line from Richard

(42:02):
Rorty. I don't know if anybodyremembers Richard Rorty. The
things I say about Hegel in thisbook skate on pretty thin ice,
but I don't care.
I I I use authors to do what Iwant. I use authors to make the
point I want and not to sitaround just endlessly defending
and critiquing. And so I think,you know, in some ways, I hope

(42:25):
you know, I tried to, like,never really defend or critique
Austen in one way or the otherin them.

Christopher Breu (42:33):
I want to pick up one, I agree that your your
work is very influenced byMoten, who's, you know, a really
important thinker and importantMarxist thinker too, so that
there is that Marxist lineagethere, or genealogy. And I also
want to say one of the things Ireally value about your book,
there are a number of things Ivalue about it. I mean, one of
the things I was trying to thinkof is as somebody who was
embodied and forcibly, you know,I've had I've now had seven

(42:56):
seventeen surgeries, I have theeighteenth, unfortunately,
scheduled in about three weeks,you know, 17 surgeries,
originally not necessary, butnecessary because of the
complications created by thefirst surgeries on my body to
try and properly sex my body,you know, as somebody born, you
know, with hypospadias, which isreally just that the urethra
comes out somewhere reallydifferent than where it normally

(43:17):
would come out, and especiallyborn with a severe version of
it. One of the things I reallyvalue about what you say, and I
think this also echoes in JulesGil Peterson's work, and also C.
Riley Snorton's work, is theways in which that binary idea
of gender produced so muchviolence, right?
That it inscribes so muchviolence. And I'm interested in
how the material world getsaltered to try and somehow

(43:39):
adhere, including bodies, right?Including whole systems of
gendered institutions andstructuration and stuff like
that, right? Systems, as youtalk about it, how those all get
put into place to try andmaintain this fiction that's
incoherent, that's collapsing.Marquise's work is very
influential for me here too.
But yeah, I think your bookreally goes about it, you know,

(43:59):
really powerfully into undoingthat binary logic. I do wonder,
and this is also something thatcame up with Butler, who was so
important to me early on, theirwork was really about undoing
that binary too in all kinds ofways. I was always one of those
people who wanted more about thebody a little bit as it resisted
language in various ways. Butthat's another question. One of
the questions becomes, how do wethink about conventional

(44:21):
feminism?
And I know, Marquise, you'vetaken this up too, where people
actually find gender assomething that also is a system
that they have to respond to andname. But I find your approach
so powerful here. I mean, itreally resonated with me. I also
love your reading of the analsex joke in the one section
because it reminds me of one ofthe things I've been trying to
think about for this intersexjoy piece that's coming up that

(44:43):
I'm writing soon, that's abouthow do we think about pleasure
in bodies and in ways that arebeyond the binary or outside of
the binary or multiplicities?How do we think about part
objects in the most affirmativesense?
Like, yeah, this is where I getpleasure. This is where I have
pleasure. It doesn't actuallynecessarily add up to a I mean,
is more psychoanalytic, itdoesn't necessarily add up to a

(45:03):
full body ego that's fixed incertain gender paradigm, among
other things.

Chris Washington (45:07):
One of the things that was funny was
someone sent me a picture fromThe Strand in New York City as a
shelf of books there, and it wasJudith Butler's new book, Who's
Afraid of Gender, on a shelf andthen this one beside it, and
that was the shelf. I havereally thought a lot about

(45:28):
Peterson's histories of thetransgender child, which you
brought up, the way in whichthese things, you know, as you
say, try to make coherent aworld coherent to fit these
normative orthodox ideas. And assuch, you know, I think the line
in that book, sex was created tomake gender coherent. Right?

Christopher Breu (45:51):
Or the other way around, I think, actually.

Chris Washington (45:53):
Or the other way around. Yeah. Okay. But it
does create this violencebecause it is all these horrible
surgeries and correctivesurgeries to make that system
fit coherently. Right?
So that'd be another way ofanswering Marquise's question
earlier, you know, non binarythinking is a way to resist that
violence. I mean, it is a veryreal violence that is being

(46:17):
enacted. That's again why it'skind of a foundational problem.

Marquis Bey (46:22):
Perhaps this is a question open to the class, I
suppose. And it's perhaps quitesimply a question about reading
practices. I would love to hearall of us, Chris, you
especially, to talk aboutreading practices. How do we
read, especially when we aretrying to read nonbinarily

(46:43):
perhaps? And that will, I wouldimagine, necessitate that we
rebuke certain kinds ofconventional wisdom, we will
piss some people off.
I imagine all those things comewith the kind of nonbinary
reading practice, but I wouldlove to just hear any of us, all
of us talk about our readingpractices. How old are we to

(47:05):
approach or counter thatquestion?

Chris Washington (47:07):
Well, maybe I'll let everybody else go
ahead, and then I'll try tosteal your ideas in my answer.

Christopher Breu (47:14):
Well, have funny reading practices, or I
have a different readingpractices, and maybe it's not
non binary enough. Foucault's amajor influence, I use a decent
amount of psychoanalysis,including Lacan, although I have
my issues too, and LaFlange. ButI'm actually not a huge post
structuralist as it getsconceptualized. I actually think

(47:36):
that the binary opposition isnot actually my big obsession in
terms of how I think aboutlanguage and reading practices.
In fact, I'm more interested inwhat Adorno and Lacan in a
certain way do, which is a kindof negative dialectics in which
the opposition or the tensionboth can't fully be articulated,
but also can't be fully undoneeither, that they overlap, that

(47:58):
they intersect, that they maponto each other.
But I'm interested in thosetensions and not smoothing out
the tensions, if that makessense. So that, to me, is the
reading practice. And Iarticulated in instance of the
material, which I did forMinnesota a while back in 2014,
but it also comes back in thisnew book. And so that may be
where I come at thingsdifferently. I'm interested in

(48:19):
the ways in which I'm alsointerested in thinking about
representation is not alwaysjust a problem, but also as an
important site for struggle,articulation, for articulations
of collectivity, even as I alsoshare very much the critique of
the ways in which identity hasbecome almost a version of
branding, very neoliberal in acertain way.

(48:41):
Micro identities seem toproliferate, especially on the
left when what we need issolidarity, I think, at the
present and new ways of thinkingabout embodying queerness,
embodying you know, thinkingabout race, thinking about all
these things. Yeah, my readingis a different practice. It's
actually about both maintainingcontradictions, even as I also
want to mark that they alwaysare, you know, need to be

(49:04):
recognized as undoing themselvesas intention with each other and
as overlapping with each other.So that embodiment, I can think
about a whole range of nonbinary embodiments that might
actually still have arelationship to poles of
masculine or feminine or polesof And that's not to say that
those are the only ones.Embodiments around race, a whole

(49:28):
range of these things.
But I'm interested in thinkingabout the tension. Like when I
was asking about the tensionbetween feminism and the kinds
of critique that we are doing ofof nonbinary embodiments, of
nonbinary, thinking, you know,engendering. I'm interested in
maintaining those culturaltensions, not affirming one side
or the other, but thinking aboutwhat that contradiction produces
in a certain way. And so that'show my reading might differ a
little bit, if that makes sense.

Chris Washington (49:49):
I will just chime in quickly to say I'm not
interested in poststructuralismeither as it is technically
constructed. And I don't knowthat I would read Derrida as
saying that there is aresolution to the tensions that
he is pointing out in any sense.I mean, there's a way in which
he's much closer to Adorno thanpeople think. Although, although

(50:14):
I don't think anybody wants tohear such a comparison.

Ali Sperling (50:20):
Marquise, this is hard. This is a tough question,
right? Like how do we read? Andthen how might we also think
about extending this invitationthat Chris's book gives us to
think about what it means toread non binary or something. I
don't think that's exactly whatyou suggest in the book, but
something like that, right?
Like, does it mean that we'relooking for something or is it a
particular practice ormethodology? I mean, for me, I

(50:41):
was trained as a close reader,so I appreciate those kind of
pages and pages attentive. Ithink that's the only way that a
book like this actually couldwork with Austin. Like those
moments are so heavy, like eachword really does because, you
know, these, especially thesewomen figures, like I cannot say
it in any other way. So I'vealso been thinking more about
kind of reading, especiallybecause of the weird thinking

(51:01):
about, you know, gaps and thingsthat are unable to be said,
which I get a lot from thinkingof queer of color critique,
course, you know, Munoz'sreading for ephemera, of course,
I'm thinking tons of stuff inBlack Studies and feminist and
queer theory to kind of read andlook for gaps and what what what
is missing from the archive,what is absent, you know, and
I'm thinking of that what ofcourse, you know, what Fanny

(51:23):
says, think it's Mansfield Park,Which is the question of slavery
when I think she asks someone inthe book.
I haven't read the book in avery long time. I think she asks
someone like her father maybe,or she asks someone like, well,
are those people or what'shappening here, right? And she's
met with a kind of silence, if Iremember, I think Mark Bold
talks about this in that piece Ireferenced earlier, which is as
the closest I've come to eventhinking about Mansfield Park in

(51:44):
like a decade. So sorry toreference it twice. But right,
the fact that she's kind of metwith this, like how do we
interpret the, you know, sothere's something, there's some
gesture there to acknowledgingsomething that's going on, but
that it cannot be answered, itcannot be resolved in the text
for a whole host of reasons,that we can critique and we can
engage in different ways, and soI'm interested in that.
But I guess to read for the nonbinary would be to think about

(52:08):
locating these kind of specificsocial or political formations
that are the direct result of orresponse to binary logics,
whatever we kind of identifythose to be, right? And it seems
in this text, at least, one ofthe main ones is the couple,
right, and marriage, which arethe results of a rigid gender,
forms of gender imprisonment, asyou say. And I'm thinking of
Pearl Bromayer's work on theontology of the couple that

(52:30):
issue of GLQ from a few yearsago. So that these different
forms of social formations thatare the direct result of binary
logics. And so there's a waythat one could search for those,
but also I think that you wouldfind them everywhere as well.
So yeah, thanks for thequestion, Marquise.

Marquis Bey (52:44):
I guess I should also answer my own question as
well. And surprisingly, I don'thave a good answer to this. I
think perhaps that's those arethe questions that I ask,
questions that I'm alsosearching for an answer to. So I
appreciate very much how you allhave answered the question. And
so I think my answer will beundoubtedly insufficient, but I

(53:05):
think there are a couple ofthings that I do that I think
with when it comes to readingpractices.
I think one is kind offacilitated by two quotes. One
is from Toni Morrison, her novelactually, honestly one of my
least favorite novels by ToniMorrison, A Mercy. But in there,

(53:27):
there's a question that isasking very simply, can you
read? And it's not this literacyquestion, but one that is much
broader than that. And I, in mymind, am linking that to
something that allegedly,because there's such a mythos
surrounding this person, butallegedly something that
Sojourner Truth has said, thatshe doesn't read things as
trifling as books, but she readsNations and Men.

(53:50):
And I think along those twolines when it comes to reading
practices, not so much a and Iwas trained as a literary
scholar, but I have, I suppose,defected from that a little bit.
For no reasons of malice, simplyI'm moving another direction
now. But I find myself less, Idon't read perhaps as my

(54:14):
training would have wanted meto, but I do think I find myself
thinking much more differently,much differently in terms of how
I come to the assessment or theevaluation or the encountering,
I think is the word that I wannause more, how I encounter things

(54:34):
that might then impact how I andothers move through or think
about the world. So it's notthat I simply read, Here are
these novels, or what have youthat I'm reading, but I find
myself reading, I guess,something like Sedona Truth
allegedly said, Nations and Men.I might be on the subway and I'm
reading those kinds ofatmospheric resonances or I

(54:57):
might be reading the tensionsbetween interaction at the
grocery store or something likethat.
And those things, I thinkperhaps it's for me an opening
up toward those other kinds ofthings, trying to find other
spaces in which reading might beable to happen, which is not to
say that other people who mighthave also been trained as
literary scholars are not doingthat. I think what I'm simply

(55:20):
trying to do is expand andrearticulate how perhaps we
might understand reading. So Ithink that's very much my
reading practice. And I thinksomething else, much more
granularly, I remember when Iwas an undergrad, and I don't
know how true this is or if I'meven remembering this correctly,
but one of my professors saidthat Slavoj Zizek has a lot of

(55:43):
anxiety, which I would believe.I would absolutely believe.
But apparently, in part toassuage that anxiety, what he
does is when he goes to writesomething or to engage with
something, he just puts a wholebunch of quotes from other
people onto a page and respondsto those quotes. So it's not him

(56:03):
writing something, but simplyhim responding to what other
people have said. I've taken upthat practice in terms of my own
writing and that, because ofthat, that has forced me to read
in a different kind of way. Itforces me to think much more
interpersonally than I perhapswould have before, that these

(56:24):
are not simply words on a pageof some sort, but that these are
that these have come fromlivelihoods and imaginations and
desires and experiences and allthose kind of things. So it
allows me to attend and tend toreading more than I would have
if I were to be reading in someother kinds of way.
So I think that's where I gowhen I think about reading

(56:47):
practice.

Chris Washington (56:48):
I guess I'll try to approach this from a
different angle than fromeveryone else. I very much
trained as a close reader aswell, like I suppose most people
in literary studies in one wayor the other. I used to write a
very traditional type ofscholarship about British
romanticism that wastheoretically and historically

(57:09):
informed, but primarily based inin close reading. What I'm
interested now, and perhapspeople can see it in this book,
is thinking about reading asalso and there's this term laid
in the book, read, read, write.To think about reading as this
practice of writing.

(57:29):
And in that sense, it's reallykind of close, I think, to what
Marquise is saying aboutreading, you know, nations and
people in the subway cars. Butalso in order, which I hope
tracks maybe this will trackwith other things I've said
today. You know, reading hasthis process of thinking new

(57:49):
thoughts, wherein there would bevery kind of obvious ways to
read some of the passages inthis book from Austen. And I
have tried very difficultly tothink with those passages, but
in order to think differently.But also to think differently
about writing, you know.
I mean, somebody mentioned thevocabularies earlier. But I'm

(58:12):
also using reading to thinkabout the way a sentence works.
The way reading informs how Iwrite a sentence. Not just in
some straightforward one to oneway, but maybe in this more
deeper metaphysical sense aboutwhat writing is. And that

(58:37):
doesn't just play outsyntactically, although it does
do that.
Right? So I guess one of thethings that the readings in this
book What I tried to do throughthe readings in this book was
perform a style in the writingthat also models the reading.

Christopher Breu (59:00):
I think we're all actually interestingly both
trained in literary studies andalso kind of semi fugitive from
it in terms of our embrace oftheory, our attempt to think
political question. I mean,those have been central to
literary studies, of course,too. Producing these kinds of
hybrid texts, among otherthings. So yeah, I think it's

(59:21):
interesting. Writing is readingand producing theoretical texts
that also have a relationship toculture and literature and stuff
like that, that sort of shift.

Chris Washington (59:31):
Well, I think we should perhaps bring things
to a close. But I just wanted tosay thanks everyone for your
generous conversation andquestions and readings of this
book. I'm glad people havegotten something out of it.
Know, it's a very kind of throwyourself off a cliff book you

(59:54):
know when you when you write itand publish it. Know you don't
know if you're just gonna sinklike Wile E.
Coyote or or manage to ormanaged to somehow save oneself
or be saved as it were byothers. So, and I think in a way
that's what this discussion didis it helped save me as an

(01:00:18):
author and save the book in someways from that cliff. So thank
you, everybody, for that. It'svery generous and kind.

Ali Sperling (01:00:27):
Thank you.

Christopher Breu (01:00:28):
Yeah, thank you for having for doing this,
for writing the book, which isboth to use Marquise's
description lush in the best Imean, I mean that in the
absolute best of senses. It'sactually one of my favorite
adjectives and not just becauseof the products, right? You
know, but also it's also just areally risk taking book and I
admire the risks it takes. Thinkthey're really important risks

(01:00:49):
to take.

Narrator (01:00:50):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book NonbinaryJane Austen by Chris Washington
is available in the Forerunnersseries from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.