#without hope

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But trans satire, I think, has the potential to become a real, substantive methodology—not rejecting narration as such (which is impossible), but trying to learn how to write without optimism, or maybe how to be optimistic without being hopeful. Then again, I do suspect that writing without optimism is also impossible, insofar as I am persuaded by Lauren Berlant (2011: 1–2) that ‘all attachment is optimistic, if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene.’ Perhaps what I mean, then, is writing without political optimism, that is, writing without the subsumption of all optimistic attachment under the sign of the political. Call this a bitter optimism, maybe. Bitterness feels right to me as one of the primary critical affects of trans satire as we’re imagining it here—not cynicism, which is away of titrating bitterness until you can’t taste it anymore, but real bitterness, the bitter disappointment of finding out the world is too small for all our desires, and especially the political ones. I know I’m bitter. I get the sense you are, too.

Breaking Point