Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance

195 Pages·2022·2.073 MB·English

by  Irmgard Emmelhainz

Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures
Critical Mexican Studies
Series editor: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Critical Mexican Studies is the first English-language, humanities-based,
theoretically focused academic series devoted to the study of Mexico.
The series is a space for innovative works in the humanities that focus on
theoretical analysis, transdisciplinary interventions, and original concep-
tual framing.
Toxic Loves,
Impossible Futures
Feminist Living as Resistance
Irmgard Emmelhainz
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee
Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved
First printing 2022
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Emmelhainz, Irmgard, author.
Title: Toxic loves, impossible futures : feminist living as resistance /
Irmgard Emmelhainz.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2021] |
Series: Critical Mexican studies | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021035784 (print) | LCCN 2021035785 (ebook) | ISBN
9780826502445 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826502452 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780826502469 (epub) | ISBN 9780826502476 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC HQ1111 .E46 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1111 (ebook) | DDC
305.42—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035784
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035785
Some passages of this book have been taken and expanded from the following:
“Dragging (My) Shadows on a Circle: On Anger, Vulnerability and Intimacy,” e-flux journal #92, June
2018, available online: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/92/204505/dragging-my-shadows-on-a-circle-on-
anger-vulnerability-and-intimacy.
“Shattering and Healing,” e-flux journal #96, January 2019, available online: https://www.e-flux.com/
journal/96/244461/shattering-and-healing.
“Decolonial Love,” e-flux journal #99, April 2019, available online: https://www.e-flux.com/jour-
nal/99/262398/decolonial-love.
To Lizzy and Layla. Roberta too.

Contents
Introduction 1

J’ai une voix de ce qu’on appelle “femme” 5
Reasonable Murder 14
A Sensorium of Violence 16
Expressionist Postcard 20
Love Revolution Fear Strike 21
From Las niñas bien to the Primates of Park Avenue 35
Mangomitas Postcard 43
One on One: LakeVerea vs. Bellas Artes 45
The Preprogrammed State of Being Happy 49
Crisis of Relationality and Being/Having 51
Abusive Love 55
Water Running under the Bridge 59
And Water Not Running 64
Vulnerability 69
viii Contents
More about Empathy 74
Decolonization 81
Maternity Slavery Rebellion Creativity Jouissance 91
Voice Desire Body Difference Love 100
Existential Eroticism and Modernism in
Jeff Koons and Marcel Duchamp 103
Postcard for Historias Propias (Stories of Our Own)
by Lorena Wolffer 113
The Pencil of Nature and Other Appropriations 116
Cosmopolite Postcard 122
Narcissism, Human Rights, and Postimperialist Utopias 123
Palestine Today 131
Chimalistac Postcard 140
Uprooting, Rights, and State Violence 142
COVID-19 147
To Dismantle the Engine 150
The New Normality 158
Coda 163
Notes 167
Index 179
Introduction
My hands itch to write
imposed idleness
now heal!
For it all must flood out
ten fingers dancing
sprinkling
in full speed
on the keyboard
or I might drown
soon
on unarticulated thoughts . . .
Irmgard Emmelhainz
I was born resisting, I bloomed from the cracks, I held onto life with the roots I managed to
weave through the pavement opening up paths to find my own nourishment.
“The Coyote Woman” from Historias propias desde casa by Lorena Wolffer
The fact that the glaciers are melting is seemingly abstract to us as is the
news that the Amazon Forest is burning up at the speed of an entire foot-
ball stadium per minute. Yet, breathing in Mexico City feels indeed like the
Apocalypse; the interdependent fabric that sustains life on earth, including
human life, is tirelessly being torn up by market forces; the barriers between
humans and machines seem to blur, making humans obsolete, especially
our faculty of reason; culture has become entertainment and algorithms;
constantly, we are invited to achieve a state of bliss by cultivating our feel-
ings, to save ourselves with self-love, to seek sexual gratification, and to lib-
erate ourselves from the obligations of social and family life. Yet we have
completely lost our sense of belonging. We foresee a future in which most
of humanity will be redundant, and an answer to the double challenge of
1