Papers by Tessel Veneboer
Soapbox - Journal for Cultural analysis, 2025
Recent psychoanalytic theory contends that gender theory neu-
tralises sex by prioritising multip... more Recent psychoanalytic theory contends that gender theory neu-
tralises sex by prioritising multiplicity over sexual difference and
the problematic nature of sexuality. In this article, I draw on the
historical occurrence of separatist feminism in the forms of po-
litical lesbianism and feminist celibacy to argue that the refusal
of “compulsory sexuality” in the feminist-separatist movement
makes similar claims about sexual difference—the nature of sex
as perversion and “devoid of instinct”—as the psychoanalytic “sex”
does. If the feminist celibate can refuse sex on both a social and
a psychic level, sex must first be denaturalised and dissociated
from intuition. I consider some of the metaphysical assumptions
implicit in the politicisation of the absence of sex. The article takes
the “sex resistance” tactic proposed by the Women Against Sex
movement in the 1980s as its case to show how the theoretical
thinking that emerged as part of the separatist moment constructs
a particularly antagonistic feminist subject.
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2024
This essay situates Kathy Acker’s work in the feminist sex wars debate of the 1980s. I suggest th... more This essay situates Kathy Acker’s work in the feminist sex wars debate of the 1980s. I suggest that the critique of Acker’s work as a “nihilist version of the personal is political” is not ungrounded but might more usefully be understood as a “sex negativity” that emerges from specific feminist avant-garde lit- erary devices. I discuss Acker’s early texts, “Politics” (1972) and “Stripper Disintegration” (1973) to show how sexuality defines Acker’s esthetic and political project. I consider the (negative) feminist reception of Acker’s work, lay out how Acker was involved in the pornography debate, and I bring Acker’s work into conversation with Andrea Dworkin’s thought. The essay argues that Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical strategies and montage techniques pose a problem for the feminist politiciz- ing of self-knowledge and the genre of autobiography as a privileged site of identity formation and emancipation. In the reordering of materials, by way of replacing, exchanging, and negating, transformation is made possible by the act of rewrit- ing’s capacity to reveal substitutability. Acker’s “nihilist” feminist politics challenge the self-determination and authenticity often assumed in the politicizing of lived experience. I also suggest that “the lesbian” functions as a phantasmatic figure in Acker’s early work to circumvent the subject-object logic of the por- nographic imagination. In short, Acker’s early work illuminates the complex relation between sexuality, self-objectification, and the act of writing itself. With Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical texts we can conceive of a sex negativity that is not anti-sex but challenges what Michel Foucault calls the “monarchy of sex” through non-positive affirmation.
Reverse Cowgirl: een leven herschreven
Boundary 2, 2022
In Philosophy for Spiders McKenzie Wark reads the novels of the punk avant-garde writer Kathy Ack... more In Philosophy for Spiders McKenzie Wark reads the novels of the punk avant-garde writer Kathy Acker as philosophical texts, or as the title proposes: as "low theory." Low theory rejects the privileged terms of "high theory" and likes to remind the reader that the philosopher has a body. This theory "from below" often talks about sex and makes theoretical thinking a bodily task. Wark also finds this kind of thinking in Kathy Acker's literary experimentation. Acker's "null philosophy" comes from below-from the body and self of the author-while undoing that same self. As scholar and writer, Wark has made significant contributions to the fields of media theory and cultural studies with Hacker Manifesto (2004), Molecular Red (2015) and Capital is Dead: is this something worse? (2019). More recently, she turned to gender theory and memoir writing with Reverse Cowgirl (2019) and now she has published this personal-critical reading of Acker's experimental prose. Philosophy for Spiders comes with a content warning for "sex, violence, sexual violence and spiders" as well as a form warning: "this book has elements of memoir and criticism but is neither" (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, Wark proposes to read Acker's work as philosophy, more specifically as low theory, a term first used to describe the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and popularized by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Wark follows Acker in her view that perhaps she was not writing novels: "they're big chunks of prose, but are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren't even that" (54). Rejecting a clear-cut division between the novel and a philosophical text allows Wark to read Acker's prose as "philosophical treatises" (54). The reader might wonder what the low in low theory reacts to: is it the dominance of the "master discourse" of high theory, or does the complicated content of high theory make the genre inaccessible? , Developing low theory as an aspirational genre, Wark longs for a kind of philosophy that emerges outside of a (patriarchal; and even matriarchal) tradition: It is a philosophy without fathers (or even mothers), and so no more of their Proper Names will be mentioned. This philosophy for spiders is not a philosophy in which gentlemen discourse on the nature of the beautiful, the good, and the true. It is philosophy for those who were nameless as they had to spend their time working for the money. A philosophy not by those who could arise from their place to announce it, because their place was to be on their knees, their mouths full of cock. A theory in which otherwise quite tractable bad girls and punk boys go off campus and conduct base experiments in making sense and nonsense out of situations. "Recruited due to our good intentions, V and I've instead learned a brutal philosophy: ignorance of all rational facts and concepts; raging for personal physical pleasure; may the whole Western intellectual world go to hell." (81) Where Wark aims for a philosophy without "Proper Names" Acker turns to the literary and philosophical canon to think with and write through. Acker's work refers to (but never cites) a wide range of canonical thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud who inspire her to question the primacy of rationality and the Cartesian subject. In one of her first novellas Kathy Acker writes: "I'm trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life. I hate creativity" (Acker 1998, 86) and in her short story New York City in 1979 the character Janey "believes it is necessary to blast open her mind of bodies. There's no essential diagram of gendered bodies. In that sense all Acker bodies are potentially trans. (90) Bodies are trans here to the extent that they are assumed as not-cis. Still, assuming that desire always destabilizes sexual difference doesn't necessarily illuminate our understanding of what gender is, because as Wark writes in Reverse Cowgirl "there is never any symmetry to what wants" (26). To desire is to not know or understand that desire. Both in Reverse Cowgirl and in Philosophy for Spiders, Wark is interested in the way penetration potentiates a different experience of the body and self-consciousness: "being-penetrated creates a node around which every other differencesensations, selves, genders-can disperse" (Wark 2021, 91). In Acker's logic, penetration centers the self and makes thinking possible. In Wark's words, to be penetrable and penetrated is "to have an axis for sensation in the world" as opposed to those who do the penetrating. They "act as subjects in the world but they don't react, they don't
Weg met het authentieke zelf: over autofictie
Book Reviews by Tessel Veneboer
New Formations, 2025
Review of Hatred of Sex, Oliver Davis & Tim Dean
DE WITTE RAAF, 2019
(1950-2015) heeft zich nooit ergens thuis gevoeld. Ze woonde afwisselend in Parijs en New York, m... more (1950-2015) heeft zich nooit ergens thuis gevoeld. Ze woonde afwisselend in Parijs en New York, maar Brussel was de thuisstad waarnaar de geroemde filmmaker soms noodgedwongen moest terugkeren voor familiezaken. Haar Poolse ouders trokken na de Tweede Wereldoorlog naar België en baatten in Brussel een meubelwinkel uit. Naast uitstapjes naar de Belgische kust was Brussel de voornaamste plek waar de familie Akerman tijd doorbracht. Natalia Akerman-door dochter Chantal liefkozend Nelly genoemd-was getraumatiseerd door de jaren die ze als tiener in Auschwitz had doorgebracht, en voelde zich in Brussel veilig. Chantals rusteloosheid was voor Natalia dan ook onbegrijpelijk: waarom zou ze iets anders willen dan een rustig appartement met degelijke meubels? Ondertussen probeerde Chantal voortdurend te ontsnappen aan de huiselijkheid van het gezinsleven, en de relatie met haar moeder verliep steeds moeizamer. Niet toevallig zouden zowel de huiselijke sfeer als moeder-dochterrelaties cruciale thema's worden in de dertigtal films van Akerman.
Occupational Medicine, 1959
The Dutch Review by Tessel Veneboer
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Papers by Tessel Veneboer
tralises sex by prioritising multiplicity over sexual difference and
the problematic nature of sexuality. In this article, I draw on the
historical occurrence of separatist feminism in the forms of po-
litical lesbianism and feminist celibacy to argue that the refusal
of “compulsory sexuality” in the feminist-separatist movement
makes similar claims about sexual difference—the nature of sex
as perversion and “devoid of instinct”—as the psychoanalytic “sex”
does. If the feminist celibate can refuse sex on both a social and
a psychic level, sex must first be denaturalised and dissociated
from intuition. I consider some of the metaphysical assumptions
implicit in the politicisation of the absence of sex. The article takes
the “sex resistance” tactic proposed by the Women Against Sex
movement in the 1980s as its case to show how the theoretical
thinking that emerged as part of the separatist moment constructs
a particularly antagonistic feminist subject.
Book Reviews by Tessel Veneboer
The Dutch Review by Tessel Veneboer