Affective trans relationships: Towards a Deleuzian approach to friendship theory

Over many years, friendship theory has been produced in quite particular ways in various disciplinary traditions. Deeper knowledge about the parameters of what constitutes friendship-bonding has been taken up time and again to demonstrate this abstract notion. From friendship theory’s early philosophical understandings to today’s psychosocial hypotheses and studies that deductively measure then find evidence to support or them, seem to suggest that at school friendship is based on hierarchized types of relationship. For instance, “high-quality friendship” is often characterized by high levels of “prosocial behaviour” and “low levels of conflict” (Berndt, 2002, p. 7), without explaining what constitutes prosocial or the types of conflict and for whom. As such, to view friendship as a teleological thing—intentional, by design, or purposefulness—misses the complexity of relationships that people have with other bodies. I challenge these assumptions about friendship by looking at some empirical data that focuses on friendships derived from parents of trans and gender-exploring children. I attempt an affective/ing understanding of friendship through a Deleuzian framework, which emphasizes the multidimensionality of desire in the search for truth. I argue that for trans and gender-diverse people and their families, friends and friendship bonding is a fleeing, eluding, flowing, leaking, and disappearing conjugation of interrythmic intensities that has a lot of potential for disrupting limit-situations through their problem-posing, generation of new ideas-desires in the classroom, leading to new possibilities, based on a relational ethics rather than a moralizing hierarchy.