On 5 September 2020 a wildfire erupted in the El Dorado Ranch Park in San Bernardino County, California—the traditional homeland of Serrano and Cahuilla peoples. As of the morning of September 9, the fire has razed over 11 thousand acres of land, burning to a cinder all wildlife in its path. The El Dorado wildfire is one of 7452 fires in California this year that have collectively burned over 2.6 million acres of land—the most destructive wildfire season that California has seen in recorded history. The wildfires have been unusually difficult to contain because the state’s notorious reliance on prisoners as cheap sources of firefighters has been incapacitated due to the spread of COVID-19 in prisons. The California skies have become a menacing orange as daytime has been plunged into darkness. Satellite images reveal thick plumes of smoke covering California, neighboring states, and the Pacific Ocean as far as Hawaiʻi, nearly 2500 miles away.
The El Dorado wildfire was sparked by a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party. Popularized in the 21st century, the gender reveal party is a gathering of friends and family to formally announce the supposed gender of a baby on the way. This is not the first time a gender reveal party has sparked a massive wildfire. On 23 April 2017, a wildfire was sparked in Green Valley, Arizona when a target packed with an explosive substance was shot at by a high-powered rifle. The detonation shot blue smoke into the air (it’s a boy!) and set the surrounding grass ablaze. The fire spread into the nearby Coronado National Forest in the traditional homelands of the Apache and O’odham peoples. The fire consumed nearly 47 thousand acres of land. Notably, the person who started the fire was an off-duty US Border Patrol agent.
The gender reveal party is predicated upon a conflation of sex and gender, which feminists have long argued are distinct. One simple version of the argument is this: sex does not determine gender because the latter is a social construct. This formulation, however, gives the impression that while gender is flexible, sex is not. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler has argued that sex, too, is constructed in her book Bodies that Matter, published in 1993. Rather than presume sex to be a fixed material and hence natural substance, Butler argues that materiality is itself an effect of power. This is visible in the sexing of an unborn child: “Consider the medical interpellation which… shifts an infant from an ‘it’ into a ‘she’ or a ‘he,’ and in that naming, the girl is ‘girled,’ brought into the domain of language and kinship through the interpellation of gender” (7). The gender reveal party participates in this interpellation as well by gendering the fetus for a circle beyond the parents. Butler continues: “That ‘girling’ of the girl does not end there; on the contrary, that founding interpellation is reiterated by various authorities and throughout various intervals of time to reenforce or contest this naturalized effect. The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm” (7-8). The gender reveal party is meant to align family and friends into a particular gender track for the unborn child. Butler concludes that the subject does not “have” a sex. Rather, it is through sex that one becomes a subject at all.
Butler’s aim is not to throw out the subject with the bathwater but to scrutinize its conditions of emergence. Gender is not an identity marker per se but a field of power through which subjects emerge, or fail to emerge. To complicate and revise Butler’s account, while also drawing out the often-neglected racial dimensions of the gender reveal party, we might turn to Hortense Spillers’s highly influential essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” which was published in 1987 and hence predates Bodies that Matter by half a decade.
In this rich and complex essay, Spillers argues that the transatlantic slave trade was not only the violent removal of Black bodies. It constituted a fundamental rupture that continues to define the African diaspora. The conversion of persons into property was not only a legal maneuver with immense social, political, and economic consequences. It was a “theft of the body—a willful and violent severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire” (67). This interruption of will and desire reduced Black people to mere flesh, which is most visible in scars of violation: “eyes beaten out, arms, backs, skulls branded, a left jaw, a right ankle, punctured; teeth missing, as the calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, the bullet” (67). Spillers points out that the conflation of Blackness, flesh, and violation removes Black people from the pale of ethical concern. “The procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory” (68). This reduction of Black people to flesh was not remedied by emancipation and the civil rights era and it continues to this day.
One key vector for the reduction of Black people to flesh is through gender—or, more precisely, through what Spillers calls “ungendering.” Spillers points out that Black people have had a tenuous relationship with gender in the United States, beginning within the hold of the slave ship. Slavers addressed the problem of how to maximize the amount of people within the tight space of the hold. “Under these conditions,” Spillers writes, “one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities” (72). Archival material examined by Spillers shows that male and female bodies were reduced to mere measurements of the amount of space that they would take up. The captain of one slave ship called the Brookes recommended, in the words of Elizabeth Donnan that might summon Marx’s notion of “exchange-value”, that “five females be reckoned as four males, and three boys or girls as equal to two grown persons” (72). In other words, quantitative measurement obliterated sexual difference as an anchor of Black identity. Spillers also points to the American legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, whereby the slave status of the mother would be passed down to any children born from her. (Note: I say “any children born from her” rather than “her children.”) Motherhood and kinship, which Spillers argues are central to female gender in the United States, were made into impossibilities for Black people. Spillers concludes that gender itself has been a constitutive means by which Black peoples have been reduced to mere flesh.
Through Spillers, we can understand the gender reveal party as an instrument of antiblackness in the United States. The announcement is not only a means by which a fetus is recognized not as mere biomatter but as a child—which is to say a human in the making. It is the reinforcement of binary gender identity as a significant marker of the human, when Black peoples have been abjected from both categories—gender and the human. Simply put, the gender reveal party is a celebration of the human from which Black peoples have been thoroughly excluded. Here’s a hypothesis: The gender reveal party is actually a border patrol party, a party of the modern slave patrol that, whether intentionally or not, maintains the unbridgeable gap between Blackness and humanity.
At the end of “Mama’s Baby,” Spillers calls for resistance to entry into the notion of gender, which is in any case an impossible task. “We are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness,” writes Spillers, “than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject” (80). I want to take up Spillers’s call by putting the subject in brackets to open up sociality and insurgency to a broader ontological range. Here, I am heeding the cry of the opening line from Fred Moten’s In the Break: “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (1). The gender reveal party is problematic not only for its enforcement of particular kinds of subjects but also for its conscription into subjectivity itself. I want to speculate on the political potentiality of what has been indexed as “objects” and “objecthood,” which has become acutely visible in recent uprisings across the US.
The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 inflamed protests, riots, and uprisings that quickly spread across the country. People took to the streets, took the streets, made noise, disrupted traffic, broke curfew, smashed windows, fought cops, liberated neighborhoods, and partied hard. It must be underscored that these actions, if not movements, have not only been against police brutality. They have been against the institution of police itself and the police logics that have shaped ordinary life beyond the institution, as seen in every Mark and Patricia McCloskey, every Amy Cooper, every Kyle Rittenhouse, every Karen and, yes, every Chad. Calls to defund and abolish the police have rejected reform as a viable political avenue. What we have seen is not a call by Black and Brown people to become subjects in response to centuries of objectification—that is, to be recognized, to be included, to have equal rights, to have a place within America. Instead, we have seen a refusal of subjectivity and its sociopolitical conditions grounded in policing. To many, the very world built by policing must be burned to the ground. Indeed, fire has been a tool of choice for some protestors, who have razed police precincts and set cop cars on fire.
I want to suggest that the fires on the streets of protest are connected with the fires of gender reveal parties. Clearly, there are many differences between them and they are certainly not causally related. My proposal is that they are different manifestations of the same sociopolitical matrix of subjecthood, whose ontological conditions are predicated upon antiblackness. My second proposal is that both sets of fires reveal, on the one hand, the exclusions, harms, and consequences of commitments to the subject and, on the other hand, efforts to seek out worlds that are not designed by, around, or for the subject. In other words, might these vastly different yet entangled fires attune us to the failures of the subject and a propensity toward a life otherwise?
This propensity surges forth from objects themselves. It was a 3.1 magnitude earthquake that hit New Jersey. It was a 60 degree plunge in temperature in Colorado. It was Hurricane Laura barreling through the Caribbean and into Louisiana and Texas. It is the coronavirus throwing into upheaval every aspect of life. It is massive wildfires all along the West Coast of the US. It is the persistence of protestors on the streets for months and Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas for centuries. This ensemble of objects has and has always stubbornly resisted the efforts of subjects to know them, use them, exploit them, master them. Their noise has not issued in a clear message. Instead, it has been an invitation: to bend our senses, to grasp their rhythm, to join an otherworldly party. The question, at once political and ontological, is not what “we can do”—not that we are, in the refrain of Obama’s 2012 campaign, “fired up and ready to go.” It is whether we might heed the call of objects and to see that some minor part of us has been burning for that call all along.
SOURCES
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
Hortense J Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” diacritics 17.2 (1987), 64-81.