The philosopher Charles Mills once famously said that: 

When you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off. Either philosophy is not about real issues in the first place but about pseudoproblems; or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places…

Is he right? Maybe – but the right kind of theory can, actually, change your life by solving real problems. In Year 10, I stumbled across the work of Judith Butler during a boring English class, discovering and resolving several identity ‘problems’ or troubles of mine. 

To spread the joy of having your sense of self shattered by feminist philosophy and queer theory, I’ve collated a series of ten quotes that indelibly altered my perception of myself, the guys I date, and why I date them — alternating between long and short quotes for those of you with the attention span of a TikTok.

1) On subjection

Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.

– Catherine Mackinnon, “Method and Politics”, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 124. Emphasis added.

2) On sexuality as language

Sexualities are like languages: they are complex systems of communication and reproduction of life. As languages, sexualities are historical constructs with common genealogies and biocultural inscriptions. Like languages, sexualities can be learned. Multiple languages can be spoken. As is often the case within monolingualism, one sexuality is imposed on us in childhood, and it takes on the character of a naturalized desire. We are trained into sexual monolingualism. It is the language that we are unable to perceive as a social artifact, the one that we understand without being able to fully hear its accent and melody. We entered that sexuality through the medical and legal acts of gender assignment; through education and punishment; through reading and writing; through image consumption, mimicry, and repetition; through pain and pleasure. 

– Paul Preciado, “Introduction”, Countersexual Manifesto (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000, 2018), tr. Kevin Gerry Dunn, 8.

3) On being gay in a straight world

The homosexual identity, …is a systematic accident produced by the heterosexual machinery; in the interest of the stability of nature-producing practices, it is stigmatized as unnatural, abnormal, and abject. 

– Paul Preciado, “Countersexual Society”, Countersexual Manifesto (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000, 2018), tr. Kevin Gerry Dunn, 28.

4) Being gay in a gay world

Again and again, I was astonished to learn from gay friends of hot spots in notorious toilets at the diner, the bus terminal, or, Minerva help us, the Yale library. What gives? Women, straight or gay, do not make a lifestyle of offering themselves without cost to random strangers in sleazy public settings. At last, I saw it. Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in prehistory, is anywhere you kneel. Similarly, straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family — in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature. 

— Camille Paglia, “Homosexuality at the Fin de Siecle”, Sex, Art, and American Culture (London: Viking, 1992)

5) On inequality as gender

Stopped as an attribute of a person, sex inequality takes the form of gender; moving as a relation between people, it takes the form of sexuality. Gender emerges as the congealed form of the sexualization of inequality between men and women. 

– Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 6–7.

6) On homophobia

…violence enacted against sexed subjects—women, lesbians, gay men, to name a few—[can be taken] as the violent enforcement of a category violently constructed. In other words, sexual crimes against these bodies effectively reduce them to their “sex,” thereby reaffirming and enforcing the reduction of the category itself. Because discourse is not restricted to writing or speaking, but is also social action, even violent social action, we ought also to understand rape, sexual violence, “queer-bashing” as the category of sex in action. 

– Judith Butler, Footnote 26, Notes to Chapter 3, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990, 1999), 212.

7) On sexuality as aesthetics

Sexuality is defined here as a political and yet sometimes unconscious aesthetics of the body and its pleasure.

– Paul Preciado, “Introduction”, Countersexual Manifesto (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000, 2018), tr. Kevin Gerry Dunn, 8.

8) On sexualisation

Feminism has no theory of the state. It has a theory of power: sexuality is gendered as gender is sexualized. Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex and the distinctively feminist account of gender inequality. 

– Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence”, Signs, vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1983), 635.

9) On love 

The urge toward love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death.

– George Bataille, “The Link Between Taboos And Death”, L’Erotisme, or, Death and Sensuality: a Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957; New York: Walker and Company, 1962), 42.

10) On cruising

Cruising carves out intimacies in public space in the same way poetry carves out intimacies in public discourse; and cruising is also itself a kind of discourse, with codes that have to be secret in plain sight, legible to those in the know but able to pass beneath general notice, like one of Wyatt’s sonnets. Both poetry and cruising have a structure that is essentially epiphanic, offering the sudden, often ecstatic revelation of a meaning that emerges from the inchoate stuff of quotidian life.

— Garth Greenwell, “How I Fell In Love With The Beautiful Art Of Cruising”, Buzzfeed (April 5, 2016).

And… who said novels can’t be philosophical, too? Here’s one of my favourite quotes from my favourite character from my favourite novel, Gone Girl…

Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times. Unconditional love is an undisciplined love, and as we all have seen, undisciplined love is disastrous. 

– Amy Dunne, in Gillian Flynn, “Ten Months, Two Weeks, Six Days After the Return”, Gone Girl, (New York, Crown, 2012), 454.