Wanting Bad Things

When I sat down to read Andrea Long Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” in n+1, I didn’t expect it to reflect back to me so vividly a key aspect of my own experience of being a woman: wanting to be and to have things I shouldn’t. The essay, which explores the origins of transness in desire on the one hand and in feminist politics on the other, sparked a debate long in the offing about whether desire, and in particular sexual desire, should be seen as the new frontier for social justice. The patterns of desire certainly seemed to follow discriminatory pathways. Was there something we could do about it? Should we try? Amia Srinivasan wrote for the LRB that while no one has the right to demand to have sex with anyone else, perhaps we have a duty to engage with our desire in the hopes of rendering it less exclusionary and less unjust. In late April, I sat down with Andrea in New York to discuss this further.

—Anastasia Berg