Sara Jane Stoner and Daisy Atterbury in Conversation at Makhzin

"The Grief Work of Writing and Thinking" at Makhzin features Sara Jane Stoner talking with Daisy Atterbury "on the relationship between shame and desire in language, touching on topics ranging from topping, bottoming, the queer erotics of speech, poetry, and the pulverization of 'settler subjectivity,' self-abolition, and teaching." An excerpt:

DA: I have observed what feels like this almost chemical process in myself. Finding a new grammar of address can reorganize a predisposition to repression or again shame, which often structures our desire in contemporary life. Oddly we can reorganize our relationship to desire. I think that's how you put it?

SJ: Or even, no—is it the reorganizing of desire itself? I think so. Is that fair? Or maybe that's too grand. I know that this connects with something I’ve heard Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak say live on a panel at the Graduate Center in NYC, which is echoed in an interview she gave in Pakistan at Habib University: that getting to know students personally is so important because teaching isn’t about changing a person’s mind, but "rearranging desires." I think if you're talking about something, the word relationship is in the sentence, but I think if you are entangled in it, something maybe more immediate, more rare is happening. Kandice Chuh always said to me, SJ, could you just get out of the language, could you just like, get out of it? Could you just take a few steps back, rather than being in it? And I was like, No. I don't want to. Or I can't. More probably I don't want to. So I think if you're in it then the linguistic activity is more revealing, or has more of the desiring self in it, so that you're interacting with something closer to your own desire. I spend 80 percent of my teaching time trying to figure out how to get people to just admit that things are making multiple meanings, and then trying to support them in forms of writing that don’t need to deny this. Sexy Rexy… this Summer Romance rose still isn’t doing that well, I was hoping it would be doing well; that it would be a good omen. I work hard to make this argument that we’re instruments the world is playing on, less-than-or-more-than-sovereign subjects vibrating all of the time with phenomena. Kew Gardens. White Pet. I don't know why, I find all the rose names so problematically erotic.

Please find the full conversation at Makhzin.