My SPEP 2023 Paper: Orientation and Sexuality Beyond the “Soft Biopolitics of Control”: Sara Ahmed, Linda Alcoff, and Melinda Cooper on horizons of legitimate heritability
Aka the short version of chapter 2 of the vibes book
Here’s the text of my SPEP paper for this year, which is Friday morning. It’s the short version of chapter 2 of the vibes book.
Orientation and Sexuality Beyond the “Soft Biopolitics of Control”: Sara Ahmed, Linda Alcoff, and Melinda Cooper on horizons of legitimate heritability
ABSTRACT
Justin Joque and John Cheney-Lippold argue that the algorithms behind contemporary tech platforms model probability as situated likeliness and create flexible norms about identity categories. Using Sara Ahmed and Linda Alcoff’s work on identity as orientation or horizon, I argue that the situated likelihood these algorithms model is not a norm, but a phenomenological orientation. Then, tracking Ahmed’s use of debt to describe how orientations govern the reproduction of the patriarchal racial capitalist nuclear family, I argue that orientations are heritable as wealth, and thus governed not by norms but by what Melinda Cooper calls the laws of “legitimate relationships.”
Keywords: phenomenology, queer theory, technology, politics
The user landing page for social video platform TikTok is populated by an algorithm that is one of the most notorious black boxes in the tech sphere. Called the “For You Page” or FYP, the TikTok feed is closely tailored to individual user preferences and habits. As the company explains on a 2020 blog post, “This feed is powered by a recommendation system that delivers content to each user that is likely to be of interest to that particular user. Part of the magic of TikTok is that there's no one For You feed…each person's feed is unique and tailored to that specific individual.” Calculated according to a weighted mix of things users “actively express as preferences” such as likes, follows, hashtags, and sounds, and passive preferences such as location and device type, the FYP algorithm caters to the idiosyncratic tendencies of a situated subject.
As critical data studies scholar Justin Joque argues in his book Revolutionary Mathematics, algorithms like TikTok’s “understand probability as a measure of subjective belief.” Whereas mathematical probability was traditionally understood as an objective measure of the rate or frequency of a variable’s occurrence, such as the rate at which a flipped coin lands heads or tails, today Baeysian approaches which treat “probability as a subjective method of belief” are more fashionable, especially in the tech sector. As philosopher Robin James puts it, “like a bizarro version of feminist standpoint epistemology,” Baeysian approaches calculate probability relative to the individual user’s specific context, such as how long they watched past videos in their feed or what brand smartphone they use. In this model, past behavior creates a trajectory toward or away from particular sets of possibilities, like what video you want to watch next. Recommendation algorithms like TikTok’s cater to personal tendencies because that’s what the math that drives them models.
In an article on “the soft biopolitics of control,” media studies scholar John Cheney-Lippold argues that these evolutions in math have been accompanied by corresponding shifts at the “discursive” or cultural level: “cybernetic categorization provides an elastic relationship to power, one that uses the capacity of suggestion to softly persuade users towards models of normalized behavior and identity through the constant redefinition of categories of identity.” Whereas norms have traditionally been rigid disciplinary standards to which everyone must conform, algorithms are, Cheney-Lippold contends, capable of modeling flexible norms that shift in response to new data. If I start watching a lot of TikToks by queer creators, the algorithm is more likely to classify me as queer too. Cheney-Lippold thinks this is a shift in the character of norms, from rigid ones to flexible ones. This paper argues that Cheney-Lippold’s account does not go far enough: the changes in math he notes don’t mark a change in the character of norms, but the shift from norms to another object of knowledge and governance. If Bayesian probability models orientations towards or away from various possibilities, then their discursive complement isn’t a norm, but a phenomenological orientation.
In 21st century feminist of color phenomenology, “orientation” or horizon is the term for socio-materially situated perspectives from which some things are more easily and likely to be performed, perceived, received, accomplished, and others more easily and likely to be avoided or elided. As a discursive model for situated likelihood, phenomenological orientations are a productive method for theorizing the discursive complement to Baeysian quantitative governance. In what follows, I use Sara Ahmed and Linda Alcoff’s concepts of phenomenological orientation and horizon to develop an account of how this form of situated likelihood is modeled as an object of knowledge and how it functions as a form of governance. Tracking how Ahmed uses debt to theorize the politics of sexual orientation, I show how she pushes beyond Judith Butler’s account of performative norms and offers a theory of sexuality as orientation. Then, tracking Ahmed’s use of the language of debt and inheritance to describe how subjects get orientated, I argue that orientations are heritable as wealth. As Melinda Cooper points out, the inheritance of private wealth is governed by laws that legitimate some forms of relation and criminalize others. Thus, I argue orientations are evaluated for their il/legitimacy rather than their ab/normality.
What is an orientation?
For both Ahmed and Alcoff, orientation refers to one’s sociomaterial situatedness. Ahmed argues that “if consciousness is about how we perceive the world ‘around’ us, then consciousness is…situated.”, and Alcoff describes consciousness as “a reflective awareness about the horizon of our situation.” Both philosophers use situation and situatedness to describe all the affordances and limitations that location offers to facilitate and/or inhibit what one can do, think, or be. Patriarchy, as a concrete material and social situation, makes some things easier to reach for women, and others harder; women who exhibit traditionally cis-feminine orientations will have an easier time following through on their orientations, whereas women whose orientations are aligned differently will have a much more difficult time following through on their aims.
Ahmed refers to this alignment between an individual subject’s orientation and the hegemonic orientation for that subject-position as “being in line.” “We are ‘in line,’” she writes, “when we face the direction already faced by others. Being ‘in line’ allows bodies to extend into spaces that, as it were, have already taken their shape.” For example, it is much easier for cis women to get gender-affirming surgery such as breast augmentation than it is for trans people to get gender-affirming care because our medical system is oriented more toward cis than trans embodiment. Orientations are the mutual situatedness of subjects and their sociomaterial context; they shape the greater or lesser likelihood of future possibilities.
As situations in social and physical space, orientations are similar to the device artists use to plot visual perspective in two-dimensional artworks.
Known as “perspective,” this representational technique organizes pictorial space to reflect the first-person point of view that sighted people adopt when they look out upon the world. Ahmed repeatedly likens orientations to “one’s point of view” or “a certain take on things…depending on where we are located.” The example of the perspective diagram in the image above shows that orientations are composed of points in space relative to a particular situated perceiver, which are connected together by horizon lines. Orientations are tabulated by mapping the subject’s relative position vis-a-vis a selection of reference points in their material/social situation, and then outlining the frame of what is more available, less available, and unavailable to them in that position. As Ahmed explains, “the bodily horizon shows what bodies can reach toward by establishing a line beyond which they cannot reach.” The horizon lines thematize and make palpable the range and limits of the perceiver’s point of view, while also making explicit the perceiver’s relative position and capacities. Horizons outline both elements of a subject’s situation: their location and the possibilities afforded--or not afforded--them there.
Although my example of pictorial perspective might suggest that horizons are primarily spatial, they are also temporal. As Ahmed explains, horizons are “performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition.” Subjects become oriented by iterative experiences. For example, when you move house it takes a while to align yourself to your new space, to gain the muscle memory to navigate your way from your bed to the washroom in the dark without running into anything. We align ourselves with our living spaces through our repeated interactions with them.
Whereas feminist philosophy has traditionally understood this iterativity or performativity as an opening to subvert gender norms (this is Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble), Cheney-Lippold shows that algorithms treat normative categories as themselves iterative. Contemporary algorithmic governance co-opts performativity’s once subversive potentiality and turns it into a mode of more fine-grained surveillance and control. Though horizons are performative, such performativity does not offer the subversive potential it once had.
How are orientations used to govern people?
Ahmed’s account of sexual orientation draws on Judith Butler’s discussion of performativity, which is rooted in Foucault’s account of norms. Butler’s well-known argument is that norms are performative, i.e., iterative: each iteration of the norm is an opportunity to either follow it exactly or modify it. Claims like “the normalization of heterosexuality as an orientation toward ‘the other sex’ can be redescribed in terms of the requirement to follow a straight line” reflect Ahmed’s Butlerian orientation by framing sexuality as governed by a norm--the ‘straight line’--one is compelled to iteratively follow.
Although Ahmed begins from Butler’s account of performativity, her theory of orientation pushes beyond Butler’s normative framing toward an account of power that uses logics of legitimation to govern speculative probabilities. In describing the body’s iterative performance of its orientation, Ahmed argues that “the normative can be considered an effect of the repetition of bodily actions over time, which produces what we can call the bodily horizon, a space for action, which puts some objects and not others in reach.” By performing a specific orientation, I create a milieu or landscape of possibilities for action, opportunities that are more or less realizable or probable. Ahmedian orientations model probability in the same way Bayesian algorithms do: as subjective possibility.
Although this is not her intention,, Ahmed implicitly develops an account of how horizon and orientation govern sexuality with tools and processes that aren’t norms. First, if the body's orientation determines its possibilities for movement and action, then orientation governs subjects’ probable capacities, i.e., what it is easier and more difficult for that specific body in that specific situation to do. For example, understanding sexuality as an orientation rather than as a norm means “the differences between how we are orientated sexually are not only a matter of ‘which’ objects we are orientated toward, but also how we extend through our bodies into the world.” Traditionally, “queer” and “straight” track the difference between abnormal and normal object choice; as Ahmed argues here, they can also track the difference between a debilitated and a capacitated body. As an orientation, sexuality shapes our future possibilities and capacities, such as our susceptibility to harassment or our ability to discuss our families in public.
Although she does not state this point, the difference between normal and abnormal object choice does not always coincide with the differences between a capacitated or debilitated orientation. In the 2020s the impact of one’s sexuality on one’s capacities is not strictly governed by heteronormativity (or even homonormativity), but by one’s situation, i.e., where one lives, one’s access to other privileges related to class and race, and so on. With “Don’t Say Gay” and “Stop Woke” bills in the works in their home state, queer teens enrolled in public schools in Florida currently face significantly more sexual oppression than teens enrolled in private boarding schools in, say, New England, where such legislation is much less likely to pass into law and wouldn’t effect private schools anyway. The relevant difference here is not between normal and abnormal object choice or orientation—the teens in both examples are queer—but between a subject’s capacities with respect to private family responsibility: the teen with greater access to family wealth is less likely to be targeted by state-mandated sexual oppression because their family privately pays for their education. In this example, the teens’ respective orientation toward capacity supported by private family wealth rather than public funding—determines the degree to which they are able to extend themselves, as queer people, into the worlds they inhabit. Here, sexuality isn’t policed through conformity with a universal norm, but through the possibilities afforded by one’s orientation toward private family wealth/responsibility.
Orientation, legitimation, and sexuality
Ahmed’s discussion of debt and inheritance further clarify that orientations govern by distributing possibilities and capacities in line with the distribution of private wealth. Orientations are heritable because children’s situations are effectively identical to their parents’ or guardians.’ Ahmed explains, children
inherit the proximity of certain objects, as that which is available to us, as given within the family home. These objects are not only material: they may be values, capital, aspirations, projects, and styles. Insofar as we inherit that which is near enough to be available at home, we also inherit orientations, that is, we inherit the nearness of certain objects more than others, which means we inherit ways of inhabiting and extending into space.
To inherit one’s parents’ orientation means to inherit their degree of debility or capacity within their situation. For example, in the U.S., postal code is currently a more accurate prediction of future health than one’s DNA; even though DNA is biologically heritable, it has less of an impact on one’s future health than the socioeconomic and racial orientation of the household one grows up in. This is what Ahmed means when she says we inherit our parents’ orientation as determinants of our ability to extend into space, i.e., that our parents’ situation shapes our future possibilities. Regardless of one’s connection to their biological parents, the situation(s) one finds oneself thrown into as a child orient one’s present and future possibilities.
Orientations are not biologically heritable like genes; rather, they are heritable as wealth. The language of debt pervades Ahmed’s discussion of the heritability of orientation. As she explains, “the concept of ‘orientations’ allows us to expose how life gets directed in some ways rather than others through the very requirement that we follow what is already given to us.” Parents and communities “give” individuals orientated situations as a kind of inheritance, and those gifts or what Ahmed calls “social investment[s]” direct one toward specific things and away from others in order to reproduce the capacities and situations they have been gifted. As an investment, orientations are expected to bring returns, and when they do not, they create a debt. For example, she claims “heterosexuality becomes a social as well as familial inheritance through the endless requirement that the child repay the debt of life with its life. The child who refuses the gift thus becomes seen as a bad debt, as being ungrateful, as the origin of bad feelings.”In the context of contemporary patriarchal racial capitalism, orientations are quite literally a form of human capital, and they are doled out with the expectation that this investment of human capital will produce more and more of it. Following a different orientation than the one you inherit from your family puts you out of line with what is held to be the proper transfer of wealth and property. As the intergenerational transfer of human capital, the inheritance of orientation is, the inheritance of orientation is literally a transfer of wealth and property.
If orientations are inherited as a form of property, then their transfer is governed the same way the inheritance of property is governed, i.e., along social, political, and juridical lines of il/legitimacy. I use “legitimate” in the sense that Melinda Cooper does in Family Values, where it refers to phenomena that occur within the explicit boundaries of a legally sanctioned relationship. As Cooper argues, in the 21st century US,
non-normative sexuality is now much more likely to be accepted, as long as the attendant transmission of biological and economic assets —that is, children and wealth —is appropriately legitimated within the form of marriage. The socially meaningful dividing line, in other words, appears to have shifted from the normative and non-normative expression of sexuality to the legitimate or illegitimate relationship…At the same time, the most virulent new forms of homophobia are increasingly turning to the language of moral, divine law (rather than social scientific normativity) to contest the public expression of non-heterosexual desire.
Echoing Ahmed’s move from sexuality as object choice or “expression” to sexuality as orientation or “relationship,” Cooper argues that both neoliberals and neoconservatives frame sexual inclusion and exclusion as a matter of legality, be it civil law in the former case, or religious law in the latter. For example, the legalization of gay marriage allowed wealthy white queer people to access the property rights traditionally reserved for white heterosexuals while maintaining and even exacerbating non-white and/or non-bourgeois queers people’s vulnerability (e.g., unequal access to housing, medical care, etc.). Here, the line traditionally policed by the normality of one’s object choice is now policed in terms of the legal recognition of one’s relationship. Conversely, reactionaries like US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito advocate for the “religious freedom” to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people: the state, they argue, should not interfere in their ability to follow what they believe to be the laws of their religious tradition. More recently, right wing extremists have framed LGBTQ+ people as child sexual predators or “groomers”—i.e., as people whose sexual orientation toward minors is illegal. In each of these cases, the difference between those granted or excluded from full personhood on the basis of their sexuality is framed as a difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate or criminal relationship. Marriage, wills, probate law, and the like, are all legal tools governing the legitimate transfer of wealth. If orientations are heritible as wealth, then their heritability is likewise governed by secular and/or sacred discourses of legitimacy.
Even though Ahmed frames her analysis of orientations in terms of norms and hetero/homonormativty, her treatment of orientations’ heritability as investment of capacity (or human capital) aligns with Cooper’s theory of the shift from sexual norms to sexual legitimacy. Legitimate orientations are ones that are in line with laws governing the distribution of property. And if, as I have argued here, orientations are discursive analogs for the Baeysian probabilities that run algorithms like TikTok’s, then these algorithms govern not with malleable norms, but with orientations evaluated for their relative legitimacy.