Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch (Sacred Bones Records: 2016)
A core concept in Freudian psychoanalysis is that of Eros, or “love”. Despite the translation, Eros is not love as you or I would think of it; rather, it is heterosexual love, which is to say, the drive to reproduction. Reproduction can be social in addition to sexual: People care for themselves and each other, form families, build societies, plan for and enact their futures, raise children, and, of course, fuck, all because they have an innate psychosexual drive to reproduce themselves—according to Freud.
But people are not purely social, and nor are they entirely heterosexual. Some find the confines of straight, structured, suburban life to be chafing. Some find the futures that they have built for themselves do not match who “they” “really” are. Some get tired of being nice and just want to go ape shitt. And some (queerly) view sex as something other than just reproduction, and choose their partners accordingly.
To explain why people are more complex than ants in an anthill, Freud came up with a second innate drive which must power us: Thanatos, the death drive. Because humans form identities, there is ever the chance that our inner lives, our identities, and the social expectations upon us don¦t “line up”. This is, to Freud, an uncomfortable situation to be in. When this happens, we are compelled to destroy our lives, our identities, or society. We would rather live in a state of disorder than live in a state of order that is wrong.
Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:
a surname a sexual dyad a legal unit based on state‐regulated marriage a circuit of blood relationships a system of companionship and succor a building a proscenium between “private” and “public” an economic unit of earning and taxation the prime site of economic consumption the prime site of cultural consumption a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations a daily routine a unit in a community of worship a site of patriotic formation
and of course the list could go on. Looking at my own life, I see that—probably like most people—I have valued and pursued these various elements of family identity to quite differing degrees (e.g., no use at all for worship, much need for companionship). But what’s been consistent in this particular life is an interest in not letting very many of these dimensions line up directly with each other at one time. I see it’s been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate them from one another, to disengage them—the bonds of blood, of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succor—from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called “family”.
— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer And Now” (1993).
In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argued that homosexuals should lean into their role as vanguards of Thanatos and try to bring about the end of reproductive society. Edelman argued that futurity itself is a heterosexual concept that gays needn¦t be burdened with; after all, if you aren¦t going to have kids, why worry about survival of the human race? He was subsequently roasted by lesbian moms everywhere, who have had no problem being simultaneously reproductive and gay, and by all people of culture, who unlike sub·urbanites actually saw some advantages to keeping this whole social thing going. Probably, they wrote, Lee Edelman just didn¦t want to pay property taxes funding his local school district.
But it is important to recognize that, no matter how much of an edgy fuckboy Edelman might have been, he was really only accepting a role that Freudian psychoanalysis had already laid out for him. Why be gay, Freud might ask, when straights are happier, healthier, and more accepted? Why love the same sex, when sexual reproduction is predicated on heterosexuality? What does it mean to stand for these things, if not an embrace of death?
For people who aren¦t Lee Edelman and think these questions have a genuine, positive answer… what is it?
Blood Bitch is an album about lesbian vampires, and it is an exploration of queerness and the death drive as something other than just the end of society as we know it. Jenny Hval begins the album lost, struggling to make sense of the world, struggling for her own identity, and struggling in the name of Eros—love. « I need to keep writing, » she sings in “The Great Undressing”, « because everything else is death. I’m selfsufficient, mad, and endlessly producing; I don’t need money, I just need your love, or your approval, anything. » But Eros is “like capitalism”, forever exploitative, unable to satisfy her desire because it cares only for sustaining itself.
Over the course of the album, the classic formula becomes inverted, and the endless production of Eros becomes itself a source of death. Instead, it is Thanatos, emblematized by vampiric desire, which becomes life‐affirming: « It¦s exchanging one drive for another drive. There comes a certain point in our lives when we more·or·less desperately want to be bad. And we gladly exchange the good things just, for a short moment, to feel alive » (“Secret Touch”). Thru·out the album, the image of period blood—of failed reproduction—recurs, as a font of identity, and an asocial symbol of individuation which springs unbidden and cannot be ignored. Far from the romanticized Freudian notion of reproduction as life, the risks and dangers associated with pregnancy cannot go unstated; menstruation, birth “kept under control”, the drawing of blood and the pursuit of selfdestruction: these things, these symbols of Thanatos, become absolutely necessary for survival.
When you say I love you—staying right here, close to you, close to me—you’re saying I love myself. You don’t need to wait for it to be given back; neither do I. We don’t owe each other anything. That “I love you” is neither gift nor debt. You “give” me nothing when you touch yourself, touch me, when you touch yourself again through me. You don’t give yourself. What would I do with you, with myself, wrapped up like a gift?
— Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together” (1977; translated by Catherine Porter 1985).
This is not all Blood Bitch is about, but it is hopefully enough context to begin to appreciate what it is going for. Sonically, it is the perfect Halloween album, relying heavily on noise, spoken word recordings, and a vocal style which seems calculated to make the kind of guy who complains about womens voices immediately tune out. I encourage you not to be this kind of guy.
Favourite track: The pair of “Secret Touch” and “Lorna” (and, in particular, the transition between them) cannot be beat. But “Untamed Region” deserves an honourable mention for its spoken word prowess.