On Clowncore, Sex Neutrality, and Literary Failures: Rethinking Cohesive and Consistent Self-Narration

by leah toledano

How might clowncore, sex neutrality, and literary failures work together to produce a coherent narrative?

Yes, that’s it! They don’t.

But perhaps it is in these moments of difficult thinking, squinting with one eye while the other is shut, allowing yourself to settle into the uncomfortable and the unfamiliar, where bouts of clarity might occur. As an undergrad Senior in 2020’s Zoom land, cohesion and consistency of any kind seems like some sick joke. Though, as I write this listening to circus music, literary cohesion and consistency feel the most tangible in all of my years, where I turn from erotica, to queer theory, to critiques on tourism, to a guide on BDSM humiliation, to ethnography, and can still trace ongoing narratives no matter how unrelated one subject may be to another. And it is because I have redefined what cohesion and consistency mean to me. Finding the nuances, the precarities, the hard to see — nearly invisible — intersections and overlaps can serve as a way to dismantle that which is logical and easily understood in the guise of capitalism, intellectualism, heteronormativity, and hegemony.

According to J. Halberstam, in his book The Queer Art of Failure, he notes that “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world,” (Halberstam 2-3). Maybe cohesion and consistency isn’t even necessary when capitalistic and binary-ridden notions of success and failure, career-making, and financial climbing are relinquished from the grasp. Ruminate in the unknown for just one second.

Here, I would like to address the importance of sex neutrality and the ways that clowncore resonates with me and my genderqueerness. The nature of the clown is inherently a genderless one. Even when cis-men are garbed in the costumes, clowns are stripped of their “manhood” and of their socialized gendered traits, becoming naked, pathetic, failing, lonely creatures. It is in this 1 space of being sacked of the ability to successfully perform one's gender where clowns comfortably exist. Like clowns, I too fail at performing cisgender “womanhood,” and happily so. I have the gift of waking up and using my outward presentation to designate the location of my gender for the day, and also the ability to wake up the next and express my gender merely through the music I listen to; today specifically, as previously noted, that is circus music. This is what cohesion and consistency look like to me, and maybe, what that actually means is anti-cohesion and anti-consistency.

Sex neutrality, as opposed to sex-positivity, resonates with me similarly in that cohesion and consistency isn’t a requirement in how I express my sexuality. Sex neutrality doesn’t require one to vibrantly display their sexuality, nor flaunt how transgressivesely they exist from the cis-heteronormative hierarchy; this is particularly important to me on days where I experience gender confusion and uncertainty. It simply recognizes the existence of everyone on the spectrum and doesn’t include some sort of caveat. There is no one way to achieve sexual liberation, and in fact, sex neutrality offers the possibility of rejecting the sex hierarchy overall.

Sex neutrality understands that flipping the hierarchy still maintains exclusions; what I mean by this is that the farthest you can transgress from the hegemonic model of intimacy is not a one-way ticket to freedom and liberation. Since all this does is flip the hierarchy that is in place, disqualifications and exclusions of certain folks still occur (think: asexual community for example). Instead, what are the possibilities of doing away with the sex hierarchy altogether?

Megan Milks notes in their book Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives that sex neutrality “evokes the same respect for diversity originally implied by sex-positivity without assuming sexual desire or suggesting sex is inherently positive,” (Milks 114). There’s also the most evident factor that sex-positivity has certainly been co-opted by big cooporations and capitalism, and also by TERFs. It also often misses the mark on BIPOC, queer, nonbinary, genderqueer, and/or gnc folks’ experiences as well due to white-washing and the fact that straight cis-women are centered in the discussion.

Now with all of that being said, my take on literary failure follows. Literary failure, for the writer, is when a narrative is inconsistent, impossible to unpack, fails to deliver an intellectual take on something. Literary failure is when most of your midterm and finals papers are returned with a B+ marking. It's when your sexist professor from Italy pulls you aside after class sophomore year and asks if your essay was plagiarized because the intelligence conveyed in your work is simply unmatched with how he believes you present yourself in class. It’s when you turned your back on law school in order to pursue something more creative and more representative of your person. It’s also when imposter syndrome prevents you from generating any creative literature for months. Like clowns and sex neutrality, literary failures don’t hold up when compared to dominant narratives of success.

Clowns, those who don’t align with cis-heteronormativity, those without clear-cut career paths, and those without cohesion and consistency and clarity are considered failures according to dominant ideologies. Thus, for the writer, literary failure might bring about the best narrative because of the nature of it being unsuccessful.