Peer Review

“I think it’s really about this pulverizing pulsion which drives the subject into the disjointedness of desiring the Other, with ‘drive’ operating in the German sense of trieb, which…”

Bristol droned on, but no one was listening except the professor, who was herself extraordinarily high and picturing the leftover peach pie in the freezer which, when warmed and paired with a Diet Coke from the department vending machine, would be the most satisfying meal she’d had all week. 

“So yeah. I know that part about topology was probably a lot, but I think it’s relevant when we think about the concavity of the speculum.”

“Yes, yes, good.” Dr. Khusari replied slowly, letting her British accent imbue every syllable with the confidence that can only come from a thousand years of empire. “Why don’t we all just take a few minutes break? Would that be alright? We’ll reconvene at 7:30.”

There was the quiet rustle of chairs sliding back, water bottles clicking open, granola bars being unwrapped. Bristol stood up and made his body flat against the wall so he could shuffle past the three students between him and the door. Once outside, he rounded the corner into the Humanities Department’s gender-neutral bathroom. He picked the stall furthest from the door, undid his vintage leather belt, and peeled the acid-washed skinny jeans away from his legs. He sat there, on the toilet, savoring the chilled porcelain and the hair on his thighs, which sprung up erratically now that their denim oppressor had been pushed away. 

As he did every time he shit, he pulled out his phone and started scrolling. 

TikTok showed him everything he could possibly want in a mutually-exclusive multiplicity. Every swipe was a reminder of what he didn’t have, but attaining one fantasy would always mean forgoing another. He sat in a marketplace of performative desire, profitably paralyzed.

Bristol received exactly three kinds of content, all designed to incite a depressive spiral of consumption. His particular vice was comparison: if you showed him someone similar enough to him doing something (or someone) that he might want to do, you could trap him for hours (or in this case, his entire shit break). 

The first category of content came from what others would broadly call “power gays.” These were the boys who went to Duke and Penn on partial or full debate scholarships because they’d made eating other people alive a personality trait. Upon graduation, they entered one of four fields: medicine, law, consulting, or investment banking. Their LinkedIns were filled with performative “I’m pleased to announce” posts, their TikToks were day-in-the-life vignettes of aesthetic biochem notes or tableau vivants from their second internship at the Fed. 

Bristol had always been ambitious, but never aspired to the professions, so most of this content didn’t affect him terribly, most of the time. There was one couple which had branded themselves “Harvard Law Husbands.” Bristol had never wanted to be a lawyer, but seeing the play-by-play renovation of their second apartment in Beacon Hill made him just the slightest bit queasy. (His own bank account was overdrawn monthly to cover a matchbox apartment 40 minutes away from the university). His dad always said he should go to law school. Some days he thought that after all this PhD mess was over, he still might. 

The second category of content Bristol received was the cottage core gays. These were the gays who escaped the shallowness of the city to live off the land. After college they purchased idyllic farms with what Bristol assumed were hidden trust funds. A search for vegan apple pie recipes would cause his feed to be populated by young 20-something men with perfect skin making strawberry jam in unwashed mason jars (to enhance the flavor). They were the antithesis of the power gays: the cottage core gays rejected conventional status symbols to form their own culture. It didn’t require the same upfront investment that law school or medical school might, but cottage core, good cottage core, still had one hell of an entrance fee. Bristol sometimes envied their teacup pigs and pantries grown from scratch, but twenty minutes scrolling through cottage core content generally left him unphased. There simply wasn’t enough existential octane in a life devoted to the refinement of hemp coffee. 

The last group, whose content was the most taxing to consume, were the knife-wielding strangers in his own house: the real academic gays. Bristol was no joke, academically-speaking. He knew continental philosophy inside and out, he could write a solid paper, and his German was well above average. But he would never be them: the gays that read Antigone in Attic Greek for fun, that not only subscribed to but had been published in n+1 (as undergrads of course), that had solid, all-but-corporate careers in arts nonprofits but were still doing a PhD in medieval French literature just because they could. Their lives, scholarly and otherwise, were meticulously documented, touched up, and sent via algorithm to the people whose existences essentially looked like theirs, only a little less shiny. Their content served to remind Bristol that while he could study, he could aspire, he could emulate, the fact that he had to study at all meant he’d already failed. He wasn’t born with it, nor was he, in the grand scheme of things, particularly ahead of anyone else. Lots of people went to good liberal arts colleges; some, like him, even double majored in German and theory. He got into a middling PhD program at a state school; every so often, in moments like this, he was reminded that this was a program, not the program. 

Before the sting of mediocrity could metastasize into a system-wide panic attack, Bristol pulled the little red and yellow bottle from his pocket. He gently pressed it up against the smaller and more clogged of his nostrils (you’re not an addict if you can ration) and inhaled the euphoric vapor generously provided by the makers of Rush. 

Bristol proceeded to forget that he was only in a top thirty program, not a top ten. He forgot that he almost failed his French translation exam. He forgot he had a twenty-page paper for his History of German Thought class due in just over a week that he hadn’t started because he absolutely hated the 16th century. (He was, if nothing else, a modernist at heart). Bristol was suddenly no longer a scholar, no longer a petite bourgeoise thinking subject under late capitalism. He was barely a he. A phone was dropped; its user did not care if the screen was cracked or even shattered. For those few moments, the ganglia of nerves formerly known to itself as Bristol simply existed. 

And then it was over. The high was gone; there was no shit left in his bowels. Bristol replastered the skinny jeans to his legs, picked up his phone, forgot to wipe, and went to wash his hands. As he scrubbed and the water gradually became scalding, Bristol thought he heard an animal, perhaps a rat, in the vent system over his shoulder. He looked up, curious, wondering if anyone had called maintenance. This was of course not a rat, but Dr. Khusari having the best shit of her life thirty feet away, which she could do with raucous ceremony since the faculty bathroom was always empty at this time of night.   

*

With water bottles snapped closed and the muted gurgle of cheap granola bars beginning to churn in twenty stomachs, Dr. Khusari resumed the seminar. 

“Now that we’ve reconvened, I’d like to switch to the second of our two texts. Does anyone have thoughts on queer affect and/or performativity under late capitalism?”

Bristol raised his hand.  

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