3: What Is Human Desire?

The dominant story of desire in our society is a tale of the pursuit of those things that we lack: sex, power, recognition, status, money, hedonism, consumables, property, vacations, fame, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook likes, Botox, Apple's latest, BMWs, lip fillers, gym bunny bodies, perfect partners, gifted and talented kids, good lives and equally good deaths. Our desires seem to be increasingly individualistic, where people are more interested in improving themselves than they are engaging with wider society. As the Chinese queer writer Hongwei Bao (2013, p. 133) observes ‘desire is not simply personal; it is also political, social and cultural’. ‘What types of desire one experiences’, Bao continues, ‘and what one desires are subject to different social discourses. Desire certainly has its social impact. It can include as much as exclude people. It can disrupt rigid social hierarchies as well as reinforce them’. This chapter sits with desire – and considers how desire is typically understood, felt and enacted – with a running parallel project of searching for new ways of desiring. These new desires are trained on what Angela McRobbie (2011, p. 143) calls ‘joyful affirmation’, the pleasure we get in our sense of belonging with others. This is desire pulled away from a nagging sense of what we lack to a desire for connection with others. I consider whether or not it is possible to hold on to those kinds of desire that are not muddled up with the vulgar materialism of everyday life. And, as with other chapters, I address the question of desire with reference to stories in which disability appears.