Talia Mae Bettcher, "Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Carrie Figdor, Robert Talese, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry.

Today's interview is with Talia May Boettcher, professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles. Her book, Beyond Personhood, an essay in transphilosophy, is just out from the University of Minnesota Press.

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression? How are the relatively recent concepts of person, self, and subject implicated in these forms of oppression? And what theorizations are already available within trans communities for thinking through this all?

In Beyond Personhood, Boettcher develops a new theory of intimacy and distance to show us how structures of appearing, as well as liminal experiences of appearance, can help us understand trans oppression and gender dysphoria in new ways. This new theory of interpersonal spatiality also shows us how we can build worlds otherwise, thinking about connections and relations in ways foreclosed by many of the currently dominant accounts of gender and identity. Talia Boettcher, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.

Thank you, Sarah. So will you start off by telling us a bit about yourself, your background as a philosopher, and how you came to write a book on personhood or moving beyond personhood, really? Okay, I'm going to tell the story backwards in three stages. So I see this book sort of as the current culmination of stuff that I've been doing in transphilosophy now since around, I guess, 2006.

So I was writing a bunch of essays that kind of fit together. And I think when I first started to publish in Trans Philosophy, already back then I had the idea for a book because I felt that some of the ideas that I was hitting on, there seemed to be something really big there. And I just couldn't really quite get at it. And I just wanted to keep kind of trying to dig at it.

So I envisioned something. And so this book was going to be the big one, you know, and then they kept dragging on and on and on. It's like, OK, finally, I just got to put something out and it's not going to be perfect and it's not going to be done. This is the closest it's going to get right now. Yeah. Now, the second sort of going backwards in time.

You know, I originally, you know, wasn't a trans philosopher because there wasn't trans philosophy back in the day. Not really. You know, when I went on the market in 99, I went on the market as an early modern scholar. And my specialization was in George Barclay and David Hume, and in particular, early modern conceptions of the South.

And what got me really pulled into doing trans philosophy was my own involvement in trans activism in Los Angeles, and in particular, the murder of Gwena Rao.

in 2002 and the ways in which she was represented in the media and also, you know, in court, there was a lot of misgendering, a lot of misrep, dead naming and misrepresentation of her motives. And that really inspired me to write Evil Deceivers and Make Believers and really reflected a lot of the transphobia I personally experienced and also that I'd witnessed many of my friends experience.

And so for the longest time, I was kind of pursuing two agendas at once. One was still in early modern philosophy, and one was because it was not named yet as trans philosophy. I characterized it as at the intersection of trans studies and feminist philosophy. And then finally, it just sort of seemed that, you know, well, this is where I'm doing, I feel like, real good.

And, you know, I'm really, I'm just going to throw myself into it, you know, because I feel like I can make a difference. And so I did. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to one further earlier piece of history, which is this. How did I get into Barclays scholarship? Right?

Um, yeah, well, I, um, I started at UCLA in 91 and I ended up transitioning in 1995. Um, but I was, you know, I sort of came to LA to deal with like transition issues and, um, sort of like by 93, I was sort of like, you know, living one way outside and presenting another way at school. And I was just, you know, dealing with a lot of stuff and it was really, really a challenging time. And I was going through a lot of like,

working through my gender stuff, to put it that way. And I was working with Rogers All Britain at UCLA and I became really, really hypnotized by stuff by Elizabeth Anscombe on the first person and Wittgenstein in the Blue Books on the first person. All this mysterious stuff about it not being a referring expression or it not being denoting in its use as subject, right?

And I kept trying to articulate this stuff that I failed miserably at articulating. And it sort of culminated in my really failing to articulate it

And but transitioning and and then ultimately moving more into early modern sort of conceptions of self to sort of look at how, you know, these conceptions started to get going. And it allowed me to have a little bit of a distance, I think, at the time, which was very healthy for me. But, you know, it is true that, you know, particularly in this book,

the chapters where I'm thinking about transphoria and trying to make sense of what it is like to transition and make sense of oneself. And also where I'm trying to make sense of critiquing the concept of the subject and leaning in with this notion of the centrality of the object really comes from me trying to revisit, trying to make sense of that stuff

Probably still failing again, you know, but it was probably a clearer attempt this time than it had been before. So, you know, who knows? Maybe one day I'll even get closer to it. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that the, I mean, the Wittgenstein reading comes up in the book, but it's interesting that the historical chapter is really around John Locke and not Barkley.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is some stuff. I think I do. I do my reference my book on Barclay in a footnote or something. So it may be right. But I felt that this stuff on Locke, I sort of like had put early modern philosophy aside and.

And then I'm trying to remember how it was that I became interested in it again. But I did become interested in it again. And I think it was because I became really, I had become interested in Maria Lugones' idea of, you know, the colonial modern gender system. And I had also really started to think about, for some reason, thinking about Locke's

you know, the apparent contradiction in Locke over like his, his formal views on slavery and then his apparent commitment to channel slavery in practice. Mm-hmm.

And, lo and behold, it ended up connecting very much to, in my view, his views on personhood. And if anyone is, I think, responsible for introducing what we think of now as the concept of personhood and selfhood into philosophy as philosophical concepts, it is Shirley Locke.

Yeah, and let's go to the lulus agonis because one of the first things you do is reject category-based accounts of trans oppression and move us instead to thinking in terms of the colonial modern gender system.

using like very much in conversation with Maria Lagona. So why does moving away from sort of category accounts of oppression, how does that help us get at trans oppression and what we can call so-called gender dysphoria? You open up this category of transphoria quite a bit in the book. So how does going to the colonial modern gender system help us get clearer on what's happening?

Okay. This is a really, really tricky question the way that you formulated it. Oh, okay. No, and I want to be careful about it because there are some tricky moves that I'm kind of making here. And this is chapter one that I'm not really stating. There are reasons for it. But I want to be clear that my reasons for rejecting sort of...

a categorical model of oppression, where we think about oppression in terms of vectors, like the oppression of women, the oppression of trans people, the oppression of Black people, and stuff like that, where you were thinking of folks selected and then sort of categorized and oppressed on the basis of that category. I am not drawing on a Ligonian critique of that, and that's important.

It is true that Lugones herself, when she turns to...

introduced the colonial modern gender system, that she talks about intersectionality. And she seems to have this critique of intersectionality as pointing to the limits of, she calls it a categorical logic, and yet still residing within the categorical logic. Now, there's kind of this like, so there's a kind of conversation going on between

you know, folks who are very much in the, you know, the Ligonian decolonial tradition and, you know, other Black feminists who are concerned about, say, the possibly dismissive way in which Ligonis treats women.

Franchise notion of intersectionality. Okay, so my view on this was, and this is a metaphilosophical methodological view that I have. Contrary to popular opinion, I don't think that any philosopher necessarily has the right to sail into any philosophical issue. Certainly if you think about

philosophy as like a conversation or a discussion going on between various different interlocutors. I kind of felt like it really, you really didn't need like a white trans lady swashbuckling into a conversation that was none of her business. Right. So I wanted to kind of gracefully stay out of them. Okay. Yeah.

Yet it is also nonetheless the case that, you know, from my position, I have learned a lot from women of color theorists like Kimberly Crenshaw, Horton Spillers, and of course, Maria Lugones.

And when I theorize, I also, it's important to me to give back. So like, how can the concepts I generate also be useful to others as well? That's kind of the way I think about it. Now, in this chapter, right, I'm trying to offer a critique of categorical vectors that I do not think draws on a Ligonian critique of intersectionality. Gotcha.

And one of the things that is important to note is that my critique of categorical vectors comes before my discussion of intersectionality. And because I think that intersectionality can be discussed and can be utilized and made sense of without an appeal to categorical vectors. Right.

Right. For example, by making sense of it in terms of structures of violence. Right. So anyway, there's a lot of really sort of like subtle issues there.

So let me just then talk about my own reasons for rejecting, thinking about oppression in terms of categorical vectors. Why not just sort of outline just how I'm thinking about it? You know, I prefer to...

I guess this is kind of in some ways maybe like quasi-Wittgensteinian. I don't know. But I mean, I like to think about like practices, social practices, extra discursive social practices and discursive practices kind of woven together. Right. So for me, that means that like, you know, it's not as if you're going to have some sort of like, you know,

entity that is named and then out in the wild and then named and then somehow oppressed. There's already social work being done to it. And the function of the discourse is going to be part of that. And the discourse can involve naming, but it can involve different stuff too. Right?

And so we don't want to, like, fetishize the discourse or the name as if that's sort of, like, driving all of the work. Rather, what's interesting is to analyze those structures, right? And so what I prefer to do is sort of, like, talk about these structures of violence. So you take, like, say, date rape. There's, like, repeatable, like, things that happen in the cases of date rape that you can cite, like, you know, the blaming the victim, ways in which certain visual cues are taken as issuing, like,

morally binding promises when nothing was stated, et cetera, et cetera. And you can start analyzing that as a kind of repeatable structure. So I prefer, that's what I prefer. Now, why do I prefer that? Okay.

So one reason is I don't think that it makes sense to talk about trans people as being oppressed because we're trans. Right. And I know this may seem counterintuitive, but I came of age in the 90s and there was not as much trans visibility back then. Right. And what you and people didn't. Right. What you often got was like, oh, there's like, you know, a man in a dress and then people would call you gay or whatever. And it didn't matter. And.

So there was this mechanism by which you were experiencing a kind of invalidation. And the invalidation I experienced was being invalidated as a woman, right? The trans didn't figure anywhere in there in a certain sense, yeah? And I would say even now, if you look at what the Trump administration is doing, right, it's not so much about oppressing trans people, it's denying that trans people exist, right? And they're not...

I mean, it's about saying that really you just have like men who want to be in sports, right? Men who are like claiming that they're women.

And so I don't know that it makes sense to talk about trans people being oppressed as trans people when the very existence of trans people as trans people is under contestation. And then the other reason is more general, and that is simply, I think, that categories like woman, you know, function to oppress in different ways, right? They don't just oppress individuals named, right, by, you know, like...

oppressed like you know sexistly but like if you have like you know let's say white fragility or delicacy built into it then they become tools of racist marginalization if you have heterosexuality built into it then they become forms of like queer and lesbian marginalization

So this thought, for example, that the concept of woman is like the sole property of feminism is not true, right? So what we need to do then is look at the concept of woman and see how it's resisted in various different ways, right? Because how you use the term in a resisting deployment is going to be in sort of direct response to this sort of oppression you experience. And

And so you're going to have multiple forms of resistant responses. And now you have this multiplicity. And now the question becomes, well, what concept are you going to use when you formulate your vector? Right. So I'd rather just talk about sort of like,

the discursive practices and different ways in which the word woman is used and then identify these different structures of violence. Work management platforms, endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different.

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And you give us a really powerful theory, theoretical, I think, apparatus. I don't know what the right word is, but a very powerful theory with which to do this, which you call interpersonal spatiality theory. So will you sketch the outline of what that is and how that helps us understand practices and structures rather than looking at...

things is already fixed and constituted and then being taken up by forces. Yeah, okay. I mean, I sort of, I mean, I turned to this idea. So first, let me just say what I mean by interpersonal spatiality. You know, it's a big, cool philosophical expression.

designed to evoke fear and puzzlement. But really, it just refers to intimacy and distance. And often we talk about intimacy in terms of the metaphor of closeness and distance. And it is metaphoric. But also, of course, it can be also like space and how far we actually literally stand from each other is also, right,

understood in the sense of intimacy and distance. And so the basic premise of interpersonal spatiality theory is that all of our sensory and discursive encounters admit of closeness and distance in the sense and everything in between.

where this is to be understood in terms of interpersonal boundaries, okay? And I think that this is already really an insight. We don't think about this a lot, but like, you know, you don't stare at strangers, right? And we don't think about that because it's taken for granted. But even when you're talking to someone, right, you don't stare at them.

you don't like stare them down. Like, you know what I mean? Like you don't like mad dog them or heaven forbid, like, you know, you don't stare at your friend's genitals when you're talking. I mean, like, and there are all these like boundaries that we just sort of assume and we don't, we don't think about. So,

I started to think about these boundaries and these boundaries, I think, are different from like museum boundaries where it's like, just don't touch the thing. We want to protect it. These things are meant to be crossed because they're what makes intimacy possible. And it's like when you cross it, when you traverse it, right, that's intimacy. Like when you go up and you hold someone's hand, you put your hand on their shoulder and it's nice or whatever. Hold hands. It's nice. Just intimate.

But it's a boundary you traverse. And if there hadn't been that boundary, if everyone were just doing it all the time, it wouldn't be intimacy. What enables it to be intimacy is that there was a sort of a normative regulation that we don't typically do it. And so I started to sort of like spin this out into more and more of a theory. And it really has two sides to it. And one is, I guess, kind of bold, right?

I mean, I would characterize it as basically transcendental in the sense of like, if you take intimacy and distance, interpersonal spatiality, and you say that it is central to us, to us, to how, to what makes us us, to how we see ourselves in relationship to each other and in the world, without which we wouldn't be recognizable, right? Because that's central.

If it's necessary.

then what is necessary for it? What makes interpersonal spatiality possible? And then you have this general sketch about what you need for interpersonal spatiality, right? Well, you need boundaries. Well, you need intimate gestures. You need attention and self-display and so on and so forth. I'm not going to sketch the whole theory, right? But you're going to need all these ingredients. And that's the transcendental part, right? But one of the things about the theory is like you,

You need boundaries. I didn't say which boundaries. You're going to need a boundary system. I didn't say which boundary system. And so which boundary system you have is going to be contingent, right? And there's a kind of like quasi-empirical investigation into what that actual system looks like, right?

And so that's where I think sort of like this, like looking into the practices comes in. So like, what are the mundane ways by which we negotiate interpersonal space on a daily basis? How is it instituted in a particular system that we take for granted? And what kind of damage does that do? Because you can take a particular practice.

There's a danger if you recognize that you can have multiple boundary systems that you end up with a kind of relativity, right? What's a violation in one system is a violation in another system. But if you've centralized...

intimacy and distance as your supreme values, you then use those values to then look at that system and go, wait a minute, this system sets it up so that it systematically undermines the capacity for interpersonal spatiality or half the interpersonal objects that are supposed to be constituted

as capable of interpersonal spatiality is a failed system. It allows you to make that kind of intervention. So with that, you can then analyze certain systems and say, like, look, this is a bad system. It's abusive. And here's why. Right. And so, yeah, and that's basically what I've used the system to do. And so I analyze mainly what I call the folk system of interpersonal spatiality.

which is sort of a vague notion, but it kind of designates what I would call our system. Probably more like sort of like a set of systems, maybe with some like a lot of overlapping similarities so that we can talk about various different ways in which different structures of violence are set up within that system.

Yeah, I mean, we could see things like the bathroom bills that people are introducing as fighting over what the folk system is going to be. Right. Like the Trump administration's trying to reassert a certain folk system that it feels like we've somehow problematically wandered away from. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Exactly. It's very much is very much that. I mean, I would say that in this case, it's about democracy.

constituting the physical person in a particular way, because I think that in the folk system, we have what I would call physical persons that involve two types of appearances, proper and intimate. Proper being low, intimate being naked. The idea, of course, is that nakedness is just as cultural as is clothedness. And then the further idea, of course, is that

Well, that's sex differentiated because, as you'll notice, that female nakedness has a tiered system, whereas male nakedness just has bottomlessness. So with female nakedness, you have toplessness, bottomlessness. Male nakedness is bottomless.

And then also you have this weird interactive stuff where like, you know, if a male sees a female naked, she'll cover herself. If a female sees a male naked, she'll cover her eyes. So it's constituted so that in both cases she's violated. Here's the case where you could do a feminist analysis of the folk system and say that it's set up to enact these like sexist structures of violence, right, that are being reinstituted by Trump and his people, right? Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, under the name of defense, right? Yeah. So how does ontological pluralism help us understand trans oppression and other modes of oppression better? And this here, you're really drawing again on Lugones, I think, and the idea that there are different worlds and that we that moving between different worlds, we can lose core part of ourselves.

Because of the systems, the folk system in place. Yeah, I mean, I follow the Ghanians in thinking that appealing to different worlds or social realities gets the phenomenology right, first of all. That's just kind of what it feels like, you know? You know, when you're in certain places

surrounded by people in a certain context, you know, I feel like, oh, I just, I guess I just am a man in this situation. You know, there's nothing I can do about it. And so that's one thing. It just describes it, right?

And but I also think that it helps us understand oppression better because, you know, for Lugones, I mean, within a dominant world, she says, like, if we want to represent if oppression is inescapable, let's represent it as inescapable. And sometimes she wants to say that oppression is inescapable in a dominant world. Right. And sometimes that is what it feels like.

And that's very demoralizing. But the thought is, well, no, there are also multiple realities. And it is precisely these multiple realities that allow for resistance. But I think that's really important because I think that there's sometimes like ways in which

And I fear and I'm sad, but I think that this is going to be changing now. People are going to like really begin to grasp. But no, no, oppression is not something where like you just sort of like push back in a second and it was like over. Like that's not how it works. Like oppression is you're erased. Your voice is not heard. You know, you're steamrolled and nothing you can do can change it. I mean, like oppression.

And oppression is just not like showing up all of a sudden and, you know, say we're here, we're queer and it's better. I mean, and sometimes, right, it may be the case that you are never going to be able to change things in that world. So it also suggests strategies, like maybe the best strategy is not trying to change that world. Maybe the best strategy is trying to make that world irrelevant.

to encircle that world by other worlds, right? Why are you, I mean, this is always this interesting question. I mean, is the right solution always going to be to like yell back at your oppressor or is it going to be to make new friends? I mean, so yeah. And that's so central to Lugones' project. I mean, and the piece there is about love, right? She's talking about, and she's particularly calling out feminists for not

caring about the erasure of people in the world. And she's saying, if this is a project of love, let's build a better world within feminism. Her entire book is about that, you know, building coalitions across multiple oppressions. Yep, totally, totally.

So let's focus on, I want to move to the way your theory moves us beyond the binary account of transness. And this one is really predominant, right? And it's a friendly account. It's meant to be supportive of trans life. And so how does interpersonal spatiality theory help us move beyond the binary account of gender?

Yeah. So first, let me just say why I was never really happy with beyond the box. Actually, let me start by saying what I take beyond the binary theory to be. Right. So the idea is that, you know, man, woman, male, female, masculine, feminine are construed as being mutually exclusive, exhaustive and invariant and aligned with each other. Right. And that that view is,

right, forces the rest of us out of existence or like, right, but marginalizes the rest of us.

And, you know, so one call ever since sort of like the 90s, when this type of view was coming out, there were those trans people who, you know, were like, well, no, I'm a man or I'm a woman. What are you talking about? I'm just like trying to live my life. Get away from me with this radical theory. What are you talking about? OK, so one of the problems with this theory is it might appear to misgender that type of trans person.

Because that person goes, but I'm a woman. And it seems like the other, the binary theory is going to go, no, you're not. Minimally, it's going to make that kind of trans person seem like they're being reactionary, not part of the program, a dupe, right? And I think like almost worst of all,

It's obscuring the resistance. And I say it's obscuring the resistance because if you're a trans person, it's really hard to live in this world.

And you're facing like this denial of, you know, you're not you're not really a woman. You're really a man all the time. Right. So let's let's see the resistance. Let's like illuminate the resistance. You're you're not not only are you annihilating and you're not showing us the resistance, you're representing this person as person as whole to be actionary.

Well, one of the reasons why you can't show this person as resistance is because I would argue you haven't revealed all of the forms of oppression. And so I like to say, and I think that I've never really successfully been clear enough about this.

But I think that reality enforcement is not well explained in the Beyond the Binary account. And on just a quick review, and I'll do the sort of the easy version of this. So in my view, like, it's not just the chance people have their identities invalidated, but like a trans woman is viewed as really a man disguised as a woman, right? And then, so appearance reality contrast, and

This connects to a deceiver, pretender, bind. So either you're trying to trick somebody or you're playing at make-believe, right? And then I've argued that this has to do with the fact that public gender presentation communicates genital status. Okay.

Now, you might say, Talia, but the Beyond the Binary explains that, right? Because there's an alignment between male gender presentation and genitalia, right? Isn't that already explained? And I want to say, well, it doesn't posit a representational relationship. Okay, but that's kind of disappointing. So let me say more. Also, what it doesn't do is it doesn't talk about...

What makes genitals private in the first place? It doesn't illuminate ways in which trans people are subject to genital verification, which constitute forms of abuse. And we need a kind of theorization of this. My theory, interpersonal spatiality theory, illuminates this. Let me try a completely different route, though. So I think that beyond the binary theory is often underwritten by Butler's early queer theory. Mm-hmm.

And so in this view, you know, gender is performative or imitative. Right. And this is really cool move that Butler makes. Right. And Butler is responding to this idea that, say, butches are merely, you know, just imitating, you know, masculinity, you know, imitating the real McCoy and Butler.

So Butler's solution is to say, look, it's all imitation, right? And it's just that in heterosexuality, what's going on is it's an imitation that passes itself off as not imitative and naturalizes itself. And then what you have with, you know, some forms of sort of like queer subversive imitation is that it exposes and parodies this fact. Okay. Yeah.

But I do want to point to the fact that imitation is not necessarily the same thing as deception, and it's not the same thing as make-believe. Imitation could be used for deception and make-believe, but it's not the same thing. It's different. And

What I believe is needed is a theory that explains how it is that trans people are constituted as pretending, as deceiving in a way that nobody else is. What are the what is the theory that elucidates that? So then we can explain, right, how trans people resist that. And that's precisely what my theory does. Yeah. Yeah.

You also then help us think differently about the wrong body accounts, which is another friendly account meant to help us understand trans oppression and make claims on behalf of trans people. So how does interpersonal spatiality theory help us see that wrong body accounts aren't giving us enough theoretically? Well, I mean, I sort of, I would reverse it and sort of say like,

Let's start why I'm already concerned with the wrong body account. Because I came in concerned with it from the get-go. And then sort of like, well, I was trying to make up something that's better, you know? Yeah. I mean, so the first thing is, like, wrong body account suggests that

it's got to concern the body. And this is necessary if you're going to go ahead and make the additional move that your internal sense of your body is innate. Because what else is it going to track? Like, it can't track a cultural phenomenon because then that's going to make it really hard for it to be innate. Because the cultural phenomenon can vary across cultures. It's not going to be innate that way. Okay, so...

The problem is that like, and this is just like, so all these theories are popping around, but like when I got exposed to like, you know, trans communities, when I first transitioned, I just met like so many trans women, right? Who, you know, some, you know, said, well, they had no interest in,

in getting bottom surgery and some were on hormones and some weren't. And it was just all over the place, right? And it's like, I never doubted for a minute that these women were women. And to think that there's, I mean, to have the theory that requires you to draw a sharp difference between like, oh, here's like transsexual and here's transgender, it just seemed absurd to me. It didn't make sense to my experience.

And then even in the case of like, you know, you know, if you do have like fork experiences about your body, it's not like those are the only fork experiences you have. Like I had fork experiences about my body, but if I look in the mirror and my hair is funny and I feel like, oh my God, I look like a man. Right. Or like, God forbid, someone should mention my dead name and I want to like fall into the closet and never come out for the next two weeks. Right. So like,

And even when it comes to the body, there's ways in which at least some, they won't say all, but some can mitigate their euphoria through tactics of recoding practices, like renaming them, involving them in sexual practices in different ways, suggests that there's something cultural with it. I was never really quite happy with

the emphasis on the body in quite that way. I wanted something that could capture both. And so I mentioned before this idea of the physical person, which is...

My analysis sort of is a big feature of what's going on in the folk system of interpersonal spatiality. And this is the idea that we have both a proper appearance and an intimate appearance. So the intimate appearance concerns sort of like the structure of like, you know, intimate body. One of the things about this is that it allows for intimacy.

an account that integrates people who tend to have like more, you know, euphoric experiences that concern proper appearance and some that just concern intimate and some that concern both. And it doesn't differentiate. So I thought it was just a nice way of integrating that. Yeah. So, and this is a huge question, but will you talk a bit about how the sort of hegemonic folk system of interpersonal spatiality is colonial? So,

you know, where like beyond the binary and wrong body accounts are arising to try to open up space, I think, within the hegemonic folk systems. Yeah.

You're giving us an account that allows us to see more of what's happening. And part of what's really important within your account is it's historical coloniality. And then it's sort of continuing enforcement of that colonial project into the contemporary moment. So how...

What's that claim? Tell us a bit about the coloniality of the hegemonic folks. I mean, this is really tricky and it would require a lot. But yeah, I mean, it was really important for me to say, like, look, you cannot abstract concerns about trans politics from its historical context. And it makes no sense to take...

Chan's oppression and separated out from the long history of racism and the long history of settler colonialism. And, um,

So my account here, though, is very much, of course, in dialogue with Lugones' views about the colonial modern gender system. But I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to go back to this idea of the physical person and this idea of the intimate appearance and the socio-moral constitution of nakedness. Okay.

The first thing of substance that Christopher Columbus writes about the Indigenous in his notebooks, right, he comments upon the nakedness of the Indigenous. And that's the thing that he seems most fascinated with at the beginning.

And, you know, of course, the association of nakedness with, and this is in air quotes, the savage and savagery and primitivity. Right. I mean, it's so obvious it's like scarcely worth mentioning. Right. But it's just it's there. Right. Yeah. So what's what's going on with that? So that's sort of the short the short answer is this. I would argue that what happens is twofold, right?

that during colonial expansion, the previously existing folk system in Europe is transformed.

One, it is imposed on the colonized and enslaved, destroying or at least appearing to destroy, making invisible their own systems of interpersonal spatiality. But when it does so, it doesn't just bring them into the system as equal contributors, but constitutes them in an unfair way, right?

And so now you don't just have male and female nakedness. Now you have racialized forms of nakedness and you have culturized forms of nakedness, modern nakedness, and you have primitive nakedness. And so in this way, specifically black bodies end up being constituted as primitive nakedness.

And I would argue that this is associated with denials of modesty and that this is connected to denials of cognitive depth and that this plays out in ways in which individuals are afforded access to certain forms of interpersonal spatiality. That's far more complicated than that. But I mean, this is certainly something, this is a current cultural moment that we continue to live in.

Yeah. And I mean, bring up Angela Davis's analysis early on. And I think that connecting that lineage there, the way that she's looking at much of the 19th and 20th century, um,

And so one of your concerns in the book also, and this has already come up, are these sort of metaphilosophical concerns, these methodological concerns about what philosophy is doing. And your essay labels much of current philosophy as table-gazing. That's how it's proceeding methodologically is through table-gazing.

And so will you explain what table gazing is and how it actually upholds modes of oppression that your your mode of theorizing helps actually eliminate and resist? So so how is table gazing going wrong?

Okay, so I only picked table gazing because it seemed to kind of rhyme with navel gazing, and so that entertained me. Yeah. But I want to be careful because the gaze...

it gives it makes it seem like it's all about like a deep stare when it need not be. And really what I'm thinking though, here is a particular kind of like phenomenological model, more or less actually, you know, a phenomenological model where we start off with subject and object and

And the object is invariably like a tree or a wall or a table or Husserl's desk. Right. Then, I mean, I understand that there's more sophisticated forms of phenomenology. So I'm just going to this is really a rudimentary critique. Yeah.

And then we worry about other minds, right? We're going to worry about other minds in terms of other subjects, right? Other subjects who are aware of themselves in this kind of weird internal sense where you don't actually see yourself like you see the tree, right?

So in the book, I argue that this is basically a fabricated artificial view of experience that abstracts from what actually goes on. So what actually goes on is a whole lot of awareness of ourselves as objects for others all the time. I would say even when we're alone, we can be aware of ourselves as objects. Okay.

And so this is an artificial mode that I think, you know, leads phenomenology to kind of go wrong in a particular way. And I think that one of the, I think that there, so I argue that what is at the root of this, however, is a fundamental error. And the fundamental error that leads to this table-gazing model is the object fungibility assumption. And this is the view that,

objects of sensory access are fungible. They aren't in my view. They're not within interpersonal spatiality theory because there's a difference between interpersonal objects and non-personal objects. And what is the difference? Interpersonal objects are subject to boundaries. Non-personal objects are not. You can stare at a tree all you want to and no one's going to, they might think that you're a little bit odd,

But you're not violating any boundary. If you stare at a stranger, that's a problem. They have boundaries, right? And it's precisely the fact that they have boundaries that enables them to display themselves as an object to others and thereby become a social agent.

What happens when you start to treat other objects as if they had no boundaries, as if they were interchangeable with tables, is you undermine their ability. Not only do you violate them, but you undermine their ability to display themselves, to comport themselves to others and thereby become recognized as social agents. So there's something fundamentally important

It's not objectification because I think objectification is good so long as it's interpersonal objectification. I think that being vulnerable as an object when you share yourself intimately to your friend or your lover is just great when appropriate. But I think that being treated as a table is just terrible. And I do think that philosophy does this.

And I think this is where you're going with this, Sarah. Now I do see your point. And this is more of a methodological issue. And I appreciate your taking me here, you know, because I do think that in general, philosophy does commit to object fungibility insofar as we think it's the same thing to philosophize about tables as it is to philosophize

about trans people, right? And it is precisely for this reason that I wrote the piece, When Tables Speak, and also for the same reason that I wrote the recent piece, While Tables Burn, both published in Daily News. Yeah, yeah, and thank you for those.

Well, you've gestured what you've been working on lately, but what are you working on now? I'm working on a plan of escape from the United States. Yeah. Aside from that, I'm working on trying to be as public as possible. Yeah. You know, so that's why I sort of quickly turned to writing that piece for DM. Yeah.

And I think that I would like to, you know, start writing maybe something on, on Substaric or something like that. You know, I mean, I've been, I have some like little writing projects and, you know, of course I want to, I want to,

promote the book. I want to do everything I can to try to make the book as accessible as possible because I actually really do think the stuff that I'm doing around the physical person and nakedness and boundaries is very, very pertinent to all of this stuff around bathroom issues and locker rooms. It's just so applicable. Agreed. Agreed. Well, we'll keep looking for that work. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sarah. Yeah, thanks for this conversation.