American Queer

Conclusions: The People of Drama

2007-11-16T12:19:00.000-06:00

Chang Hall’s analysis of LGBT people as grounded in narration is a nicely elegant way to conclude our study together on contemporary LGBT history and experience in the United States. I think her piece brings together several strands of the conundrums of identity, the problems of organizing around a dynamic category like LGBT, and yet, acknowledges the power and force of identity for us in the contemporary world.

Outside of our classroom, the world is still viciously homophobic in myriad ways. Lesbians, gay men, and transgender people are everyday violently attacked physically, beaten and murdered, denied housing and economic opportunity, and struggle to survive on an emotional and spiritual level. At the same time, everyday, lesbians, gay men, and transfolk celebrate themselves, rejoice in their communities, experience true joy and happiness, and participate in varying degrees with dominant culture in collaboration and conflict.

This tension between quotidian joy and quotidian violence is reflective of the discursive struggle traced out by Chang Hall, between community and individual, between cliques and the larger idea of LGBT, and building coalition on diversity. True diversity, of course, is always fraught, and negotiating that diversity is also always difficult work. This is one reason as to why debates within the LGBT community over reflecting the diverse faces of the community are historically cyclical in their drama: the same questions keep coming up because the same diversity keeps presenting itself as a challenge to both the fantasy of universal community and the imaginary roles that LGBT folks play out, of outlaw and assimilationist, in our communities.

As we have discussed often, LGBT people fall into the middle of these debates, largely, live within the didactic structure, and therefore, any putative solution is also highly idiosyncratic, individual, and unique. Yet, that fact does not stop the desire and need for building effective coalitions within LGBT communities and with the dominant culture to press both a civil rights agenda as well as perhaps envision a Carpenterian role for LGBT people in the transformation of our world into someplace better.

Personally, I do feel that LGBT people, through their experience and insight, can offer dominant culture a new way of imagining love, relationships, and sexuality. This does not discount the often deep and divisive questions around those concepts within LGBT communities themselves. Especially for gay men, where we continue to be surrounded by a culture of narcissistic pleasure and profound ennui, these concepts of love and relationship have been lost in the fury of sexuality. Similarly, but differently, for lesbians, the notions of womanhood, femininity, and sisterhood often meet the trauma of patriarchy, and the challenges of building feminist consciousness and community under the aegis of misogyny can exemplify itself in strange, disconcerting, and painful personal politics. Debates among transfolk about alliances with lesbians and gay men, and whether or not trans is a medical-psychological disorder or a social identity create disagreements and antipathies within trans thinking.

All of this, of course, happens against the backdrop of dominant culture, which on one hand tolerates LGBT communities as part of the larger communitas, but simultaneously has deep suspicion and yes, loathing of LGBT people. Physical violence against LGBT persons is one indication of this loathing. Yet another aspect of this loathing, albeit a more civilized form, is the debate over extending civil rights protections to LGBT people. Dominant heteronormative culture is, however, not static, but as dynamic as LGBT identity in its shifting and changing nature, which only adds dramatic tension to the high-wire act of negotiating identities in a representative democracy such as our own, where collective identities are held in suspicion at the same time as they are deeply powerful.

Chang Hall’s perspective that identity is narration is a useful way of thinking through our various identity positions, whether they are sexual, gendered, economic, or racial. How we write our story of identity is both individual and collective, is grounded in the body and powered by our mind, and dependent on self-conception as well as social acknowledgment. The power of Chang Hall’s idea, however, and what is not to be lost, is realizing that on many levels we write ourselves into both our individual narrative and the larger dramatic project of collective identities. And if we are indeed the authors of our stories, than we can change direction, plot, narrative, and dramatis personae, if we want to badly enough or are forced to by circumstance or situation.

We are actors, not participants, in our own drama. The recognition of this narrative role has the power to change the world, and I would argue that it is exactly that recognition, that LGBT people can change their worlds, that has driven contemporary LGBT cultural politics since the 1950s, and continues to inform who we are, who we become, and where we are going today.

Trans and the Politics of Affinity

2007-11-13T11:26:00.000-06:00

The question of transgender is one that is profoundly confounding for many lesbians and gay men. How the T fits into the L and the G directly confronts the reformist acceptance that lesbians and gay men have carved for themselves within dominant society, the discrete agreements that the progression of lesbian and gay politics and social organizing have made with heterodominant society. Following Bornstein, these agreements are grounded in a refusal to confront gender terror (the violent sustenance of the gender dyad), and I think on some level this is true, but works differently for lesbians and gay men.

Lesbians, of course, have a critique of gender, flowing from their status as women as well as the effects of second-wave feminism on lesbian consciousness. How that critique meets transgender has been, in the past, controversial (the idea of a woman-born woman), but also actively engaged in difficult questions, such as what is the meaning of the transman? The phenomenon of butch lesbians transitioning into men has triggered concerns over the effects of dominant culture on women’s thinking, as well as the future of the community in the face of increasing sophistication and social acceptance of the trans as a legitimate choice for natal (born) women.

For gay men, who famously lack a coherent critique of gender, our unquestioned and relentless fetish of masculinity in our sexual subcultures does not provide the most ideal environment for questioning gender terror. While putatively the question of trans has been more engaged in lesbian communities (with the debates over woman-born women, the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, women-only space, Butches into transmen, etc.), gay men confront the challenge of trans as well, on one hand in the increasing number of gay transmen who have no penis (a sexual conundrum?), and on the other more largely in the question of what is contemporary gay sexuality in relationship to bisexuality, down low culture, and the use of the Internet to bring thousands of putatively straight men into the gay sexual milieu.

For both lesbians and gay men, the larger question of how trans meets lesbian and gay experience is the macro question, but the micro questions of individual desire, choice, and the body are perhaps the more important questions in forcing lesbian and gay people to rethink their relationships to gender and desire. Both lesbians and gay men construct their erotic regimes around differing but powerful ideas of gender and desire, and the trans body disrupts these natural and invisible processes in an obvious way. For lesbians, this is primarily through the essentialist focus on femininity and womanhood following Stonewall, and similarly for gay men, the rise of the masculine macho/clone model in seventies sexual hedonism. But lesbian-feminism in particular as the bogeyman of this debate is a misapprehension, I think. Dominant cultural streams that instruct us/"hail" us on gender normativity are much more important and central to why we would think of the trans body as "sick" (in ways in which we lesbians and gay men can also think, on occasion, of our sexual practices as sick).

Kailey makes the elegant point that because so much of what we understand as sexual orientation discrimination is actually written through gender, this forms the basis for political organizing at the very least. And I think this is true, on a personal level. Gender performance and mimesis is as important among gay men as anything else, and how successfully one mimics dominant culture guarantees one’s sexual and social success, as well as one’s punishment (as someone who was regularly called faggot from second grade onward for gender variant behavior, long before that term had any tangible meaning in relation to actual sexual practice). Lesbians exhibit more flexibility in their erotic regimes, more fluidity in their desires and their relationship to the body, but this malleability has not precluded troubling questions from sparking debate among lesbians over the body, desire, and trans. If anything, it may have exacerbated the questions, which for both lesbians and gay men seem located along community, identity, and survival: does trans threaten our particular identities and choices as gay men and lesbians, our sense of ourselves in relation to dominant society?

In the end, one’s opinion on the T within the L and G seems to come down to a politics of affinity:

“A politics of affinity... is about abandoning the fantasy that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state form should act as the arbiter of who gets what.” (p. 188)

If one is able to understand that our erotic regimes are a house of mirrors, a stage set to perform (and conform), that one’s gender is fluid and changeable, then one is more likely to welcome transfolk into the fold. Similarly, if one is attached to the outlaw model of lesbian and gay identity, then there is an identification with others who find themselves on the marginalia of social acceptance. Also, there is the evident historical fact that transfolk have been part of lesbian and gay satellite cultures since the end of the 19th century, in conflict and collaboration. Often times this has not been a happy marriage, but in many ways is no different from the tensions between gay men and lesbians in LGBT social and political organizing. Where does the trans belong other than with us, in our struggle against a society that actively loathes those of us (lesbians, gay men, transfolk, and even straight people) who deviate, on some level, from the gender norm? As Kailey points out, it is not the gender of our object of desire, but our own gender, that is the problem.

I think the T belongs with us in the L and G because I agree with Kailey and Bornstein’s assessments on gender terror and the role of gender in lesbian and gay experience. For me personally, making the tent bigger, when one can, is more important on a social and cultural level than questions of either propriety or political strategy. But then again, I believe in the politics of affinity, which on some level are related to the ability to empathize. Empathy is a little-respected concept in our socio-political universe, unfortunately, but it brings humanism and care for others, interest in the state of others, to the table in ways that I think speak to all the potentials of gay and lesbian people from Carpenter onwards. This, for better or worse, is not a universal sentiment among lesbian and gay people, or heterodominant society, for that matter. But it is a state of grace we can strive to attain.

We Heart HAART

2007-11-10T16:16:00.000-06:00

The development of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Treatment (HAART) therapies to manage HIV infection has changed our understanding of the meanings and metaphors of HIV infection. As we have studied, the sudden emergence of HIV infection in the gay community in the late 1970s and early 1980s was like a sudden disaster, the end of a social and cultural world with little precedent in contemporary American life. The fact that gay men and lesbians rose to the occasion to care for their own and force the government and the medical industry to respond to the crisis was a watershed event in the development of LGBT communities, insofar as faced with a deadly health crisis, divisive discursive debates fell before the community’s desire to save itself from self-immolation. And the effects of that period can arguably still be felt today, as a welding of communal identities around a solid if simultaneously ephemeral notion of LGBT identity, one still open to debate but that exists nonetheless.

As Sullivan notes in his piece, the louche moral position of gay men (and by extension lesbians) was enabled by disinterest on the part of heterosexual America, a sort of open secret in which heterosexual America didn’t acknowledge the gay and lesbian communities rapidly developing since the 1950s, a sort of moral stasis that refused to either assimilate or completely reject LGBT people, a position Sullivan associates as akin to the role of Jewish communities in gentile societies before the Holocaust.

One of the themes of Sullivan and many others who write about HIV infection and gayness is the notion of “the recall to nature,” the grounding of gay men to the body through disease, and its effect of maturation on the community. I feel uncomfortable with this reading for several reasons, not the least of which is some sort of implicit (or explicit, as the case may be) critique of rising above embodiment. While on the face of it, the argument of the recall to nature through disease/epidemic impact is of course true (we all exist in physical bodies that are vulnerable to infection and mortality), the tone of the observation seems trite, especially in the face of the thousands of HIV-related deaths in the LGBT community since 1980. A way of colloquially summarizing this recall to nature argument could look like this— “Before AIDS, gay men were disco-dancing, drug-taking, sex-hungry pod people who had no care for the world. Now, they’ve risen up to the challenge of humanity by demonstrating that humanity through care and tragedy.”

Again, in some ways, this reading may be true. It certainly is sentimental. But to argue that gay communities before AIDS were so facile is a misreading, I think, or at the very least ungenerous. In other words, it is a particular analysis with social and political implications, which are apparent in Sullivan but also in some of the other writers we’ve looked at, in particular Larry Kramer. As we’ve studied, in fact gay and lesbian communities before HIV were engaged in rigorous and vociferous debates around identity, parthenogenic culture, and the relationship of LGBT people to dominant heterosexual society. Gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s did represent, on some level, an absconding of some of this work, but the sexual hedonistic culture was fueled and supported by themes in mainstream culture (capitalism and consumerism being two of the most prominent). Also, that hedonistic culture did not exist in a vacuum, but was actually documented, examined, and critiqued by gay men and lesbians alike at the time and subsequently.

Another bone of contention I would have is what is so wrong with resisting embodiment? Why was it/is it wrong for gay men to want to transcend the body (here body means the literally physical as well as metaphorically social, cultural, political, what have you) into fantasy, projection, illusion, image, and potential? Some of this is obviously problematic, for instance in the ways in which some gay men can become, like Narcissus, enamored by image alone. But doesn’t the desire to transcend embodiment also represent, on some important level, the desire to achieve something beyond what the world has given you, especially a hatefully homophobic world? I think the “recall to nature” argument has, within it, some dangerous potentials, not only for LGBT people but for everyone who has dreamed of being something and someone different.

Reading the 1970s from the perspective of the HIV crisis is, in some ways, the worst sort of presentism. The trends and themes of gay male subcultural (or satellite culture, to invoke Newton) streams remain today in a critical tension with dominant culture, centered around the complicated nexus of masculinity, identity, sexuality, and self-conception. HAART therapies provide, in the maw of these irresolvable and continual debates, a pause in mortality, and perhaps a shift in perspective, although as Sullivan remarks, whether this is farce, tragedy, or something altogether different remains to be seen.

One thing is for sure, and that is the relative success of HAART therapies in managing the spiraling death rates that decimated the community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. HIV remains, I would argue, both a challenging public health problem for gay communities, as well as continuing to provide unwanted and continual messages of disease, pathology, and death associated with gayness. The thousands of gay men whose lives have been ameliorated or extended through HAART therapies are testimony enough to the positive effects of anti-retroviral drugs on the stability and “normalization” of the community after a period of intense crisis. Whether the challenges and traumas of the HIV crisis have been absorbed and resolved successfully within the community remains, for good and bad, an open question. But I would rather live in a gay world troubled by the questions and conundrums HAART (ironically) produces than one without it. We've seen that world, and it is not for the feint of heart.

Wedding Bell Blues

2007-11-09T10:18:00.001-06:00

Marriage and its connection to romantic love and individual fulfillment, as we discussed in class, remains one of our most enduring and powerful socio-cultural myths. Wherever we may fall individually on the spectrum of marriage for ourselves, we relate to the concept of marriage in a manner almost as strongly as we relate to family, nation, and law. In other words, marriage is one of the cardinal directions of adult life, whether in acquiescence or refusal. This is one of the reasons as to why the debate over gay marriage is so vociferous and can seem, at times, like a lot of energy spent over something that, to the critical eye, seems rather exhausted if we think about the crises of heterosexual marriage in the modern period (divorce, dissonance, unhappiness).

Marriage, as mentioned in class, is not an ahistorical, transcendent state, but rather a human institution that has shifted in meaning and metaphor through time. The rise of romantic love in the 19th century and the association of marriage with feeling marked a decided shift from the proprietal and patrimonial notions of marriage before the industrial age. But like most tools of ideology, we don’t see these changes in marriage, instead thinking that marriage, like other ideological states (economy, politics, nation-state, race, etc.) is unchangeable and static, that people loved each other in marriage in the ancient world as we love today, which of course is patently untrue. But such fantasies are increasingly reassuring in a changing and scary world.

Social change can often happen rapidly and unexpectedly. The case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage, is an example of how long-held and legally sanctioned limitations and discriminations can change in an instant. And to a certain extent, “gay marriage” may or may not be such a moment. The desire for the legalization of marriage for LGBT people has been driven, largely, from the grassroots of non-organizational lesbians and gay men who believe deeply in their right to legally sanctioned relationships under the aegis of marriage (as opposed to other categorizations, such as domestic partnerships). This desire speaks, obviously, to the connection many LGBT people feel to parent culture norms, which in itself is not surprising, although may cause us to question differential socialization and the effects of discrimination on consciousness. Perhaps another way to go about talking about this is the phrase “Hope Springs Eternal,” and the efforts of LGBT people to legitimize their relationships before the state are an example of this optimism.

E.’s question in class over the role of the state in sanctioning certain relationships while discounting others remains at the heart of the debate over gay marriage, to a certain extent. Social conservatives claim that gay marriage threatens the foundations of society. Yet, the astute observer would note that heterosexuals themselves have made a mess of contemporary marriage, with little or no help from LGBT people. This “mess” would include divorce, unhappiness, legal and social battles around marriage, children, and property, as well as the problematic complex infrastructure of romantic love, capitalism, and consumerism, that surrounds both marriage and the married state for people of all classes. These crises of marriage are predicated on a number of factors that begin to shift gender relationships in the late 19th and early 20th century, including the greater economic and social emancipation of women, the rise of industrial economies and the move away from family-labor economic models, and media cultures that transmit meanings of marriage that obscured and transformed the meanings of marriage within a rising culture of economic individualism.

The desire to deny LGBT people the right to marry is, on some level, representative of the fantastical return to the past for many heterosexual critics. But like Pandora’s Box, there is no going back to some halcyon day of perfect marriage and love, which never existed anyway. The other question, for many LGBT critics of the desire to marry for LGBT people, is why would we want to invest in such a problematic institution anyhow? But feeling is rarely accountable to rational or political drive, and the desire to marry on the part of many LGBT people is just that, a feeling that in many ways is driving a movement.

The positive aspect of this "feeling movement" is that LGBT people may shift and change the meanings of marriage and partnership away from economic and socially-sanctioned procreative roles and property towards a more holistic meaning of love in the contemporary age, towards a more inclusive sanctioning, in other words, of diverse coupling and relationship dyads. The risk of course is that LGBT people will fall into the same problematic patterns of many heterosexual marriages, based in consumerism, fantasy, and ennui, and therefore become a more reactionary force.

We won’t be able to tell for awhile what the outcome of these debates will be, but in conclusion I would direct you to the eloquent and beautiful statement by Mildred Loving, one of the plaintiffs (along with her late husband Richard) in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia, issued this past spring on the 20th anniversary of the case. Change is possible, and change will occur. How that change happens is, to a large extent, within our own hands.

Will You Marry Me?

2007-11-07T18:44:00.000-06:00

Now, for a wedding interlude...

Abbalicious: 'nuff said

The 5th Dimension: Git 'er done, Bill!

The Carpenters: If you're feeling suicidal yet groovy

The Power of an Image

2007-11-06T12:28:00.000-06:00

Debates over positive and negative representation are probably relatively familiar to most of you, in particular over positive and negative representations of marginal and/or disempowered social groups, such as racial-ethnic minorities and representations of the LGBT community, especially in film and on television. Visual Studies work over the past 40 years has attempted, however, to take apart this simplistic dyad between positive (good) and negative (bad) images. We, of course, are versed in bad representation, from Stepin Fetchit to the five paragons of black negative stereotype examined in Marlon Rigg’s Ethnic Notions (The Mammy, Zip Coon, Uncle Toms, Pickaninnies, and the Sambo). In our current age of sensitivity, however, the power of good and bad representations remains, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder.

Controversies in the LGBT community over the relative value of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Will and Grace, and the L Word pit a rigid dyad (positive v. negative images) against the complex interplay that images have for us (and speak to older controversies, over the film Cruising, the novel Faggots, and the play/film Boys in the Band). All of which is to say that there is very rarely a purely negative or positive image. Rather, all images enter into a relationship, a dialogue, with who we are, what we see and at what moment, and the circulation of those images within and outside of any given community.

The trio of shorts we viewed this week, Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied, Etang Inyang’s Bad Ass SuperMama, and Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, all attempt to, as we mentioned in class, add flesh to the body of Black LGBT culture, history, and identity. Partially, this is a matter of addressing the very fact of Black LGBT culture in an open manner. What often gets left out of discussions of positive and negative representation is the element of the fantastical or illusory in those representations, the understanding that a representation is just that: a presentation of reality, a version of the multiple layers of reality that in itself is not real, but always already a fantasy projection (all film, even Cinéma vérité, is constructed, and therefore a representation).

Another way of understanding this is the act of witnessing. It is a known fact that witnesses to a crime or event will often remember the facts, progression of events, and what happened differently. If you think about some shared event in your life, say in your family, often different people will have different memories that are grounded in their interpretive position, values, emotions, and perspectives above and beyond any one incident itself. Representation tends to work this was as well: what is good for the goose is seldom good for the gander.

Simplistic methodologies towards representation tend to obscure this complicated nexus of feeling, memory, and interpretation. Instead, these questions are reduced to the dyad: is it good or bad? This is why, in Film Studies, often the initial student response to representation (“I liked it,” or alternatively, “I didn’t like it”) is superfluous. How one feels about something does not get down to the intellectual work: what makes it work? What is the film’s project? How does that project communicate itself? What tools does it use?

Feminist film scholar Linda Williams detailed some of this work many years ago in a famous essay titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she argued it was important for viewers to divorce themselves from simple questions over like or dislike, in other words over enjoyment, because such questions obscured ideology, and the sense in which ideology washes over us when we watch cinema and television in invisible ways. In some senses, disempowered or marginal communities such as the LGBT community have a more complicated relationship to visual culture because of the identity and representational issues connected to the circulation of images in popular culture. For the most part, discussions over representation are predicated on the circulation and political value of the image, although this is not always true. And because feeling does, obviously, play a part in interpretation, sometimes these discussions are slippery.

In the case of our trio of filmmakers, their projects to give body to Black LGBT experience is explicitly political, particular filmic moments that are meant to address the larger invisibility of Black LGBT experience both in mainstream culture and Black cultures. A famous anthology of Black feminist writings was called, “All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.” And in some senses, this sums up some of the feelings of Inyang, Riggs, and Julien, in terms of staking out a territory that is explicitly and proudly Black and Gay.

As we have mentioned in class, we don’t live within dyads, although we use them to categorize the world. Are the works by Riggs, Inyang, and Julien positive or negative representations? Of course, for the purposes of the class, they are positive in the manner in which they address their subjects, although this does not mean they are perfect. For Black traditionalists, however, sensitive to the stain of homosexuality on identity in a heterodominant society, these would not be positive representations, but rather negative ones, in the sense in which they present the community in “a bad light.” And as we have discussed vis-à-vis Trujillo, the representation of racialized sexuality is always in conversation with race and sexuality simultaneously.

The interesting thing, for me, about Julien, Riggs, and Inyang is the task of creating a visual language for Black LGBT identity. Again, these projects I would argue are far from perfect, but I suppose the point, the larger point, is that there really is no perfect representation, although that does not stop us from wanting one, which is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

The Sexuality of Betrayal

2007-10-30T10:46:00.000-05:00

Carla Trujillo’s piece on Chicana lesbian identity explicitly recovers, from the work of Cherríe Moraga, the notion of Chicana lesbian sexuality as racial and cultural betrayal. More largely construed, the meeting of LGBT sexuality and racial identity is one fraught with tension. On one hand, the purported refusal of compulsory procreativity (what Adrienne Rich once famously called Compulsory Heterosexuality) on the part of lesbians and gay men of color is an important part of the puzzle. In a white supremacist society, sustaining the community of color through reproduction is an important, if underthought, part of resistance to racial domination. But perhaps more crucial to the tensions around race and sexuality is the notion of cultural otherness, the association of LGBT sexuality with whiteness and assimilation. The struggle for gay men and lesbians of color has been to determine their own answers to this preconception, their own solutions to the conundrum of the powerful pull of sexuality with the equally powerful fact of racial identity in a white supremacist society.

A personal recollection— When I came out to my family, there was, to a limited extent, the revulsion most heterosexual parents express at the revelation of gayness or lesbian identity. But more importantly for my family was the double betrayal of gender and racial identity. They associated my gayness with Anglo (white American) identity, with being corrupted by Anglo culture and decadent mores far from home (in college). Simultaneously, my gayness was read by my family as a rejection of appropriate masculinity, patriarchy, and maleness: I would not have a family, a wife, and could not, by definition, meet the ideal of a Mexican American man. In the end, I remained unsure of which was more crucial in the dramatic events that followed. Suffice it to say, the gayness, the very fact of a sexual interest in men, seemed the least of it. This, curiously, was an experience echoed by other Chicanos/as at Yale, the awkward return home and the notion we had become "Anglo."

This narrative is one shared by many gay men and lesbians of color, in terms of negotiating the complicated spaces of race, gender, and sexuality. As C. pointed out in class, this nexus is what marks sexual identity difference for people of color, the confrontation with certain questions of allegiance and solidarity, with strong emotional and sentimental ties to the struggles of family and community, set against a backdrop of reactionary thinking about the appropriate solutions to living in a white supremacist society.

And some of these reactionary thinking models are relatively limited, as Trujillo points out. The challenge of gays and lesbians to heterodominant models of resistance for communities of color is just one aspect of the power of the reactionary model, which in some ways totters between revolutionary and reformist solutions (just as in the larger LGBT community). For the bourgeois assimilationists (Booker T. Washington comes, unsurprisingly, to mind), family and work form the bedrock of the solution for combating white supremacy. Through propriety, appropriate behavior, and hard work, communities of color can rise above the limitations of white supremacy. Within this model, lesbians and gay men of color can only be parasites (due to their non-procreative and individualist stance).

Yet, curiously, the revolutionary forces in racial-ethnic communities, those with an admittedly anti-assimilationist stance, also reject LGBT sexuality, associating it with bourgeois decadence. How much of this is borrowed from leftist thinking is unclear, although the association is there. The revolutionary social movements of the sixties in racial-ethnic communities of color, Black Power and El Movimiento Chicano et al., foregrounded a radical vision of family centered around a strong masculinity. To ironically echo the lesbian-feminists of the 1970s, you can’t fight the revolution in high heels, and the gender dimensions of LGBT sexuality made lesbians and gay men beyond the pale in terms of the righteous struggle against white supremacy (and relegated heterosexual women of color to the status of sexual tool and secretary).

In our current moment, which reflects this heritage of both assimilative and revolutionary struggles and idea(l)s around racial-ethnic identity for the historic “minority” groups in the United States (Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-American communities of historic standing, generally pre-1900), there is still a strong association of LGBT sexuality with whiteness, with "wrong" cultural assimilation, with decadence and corruption. In so far as LGBT sexuality is associated, correctly in mind, with challenging cultural norms and preconceptions around gender in communities of color, this association is a transference, a projection, an easy dismissal that sounds good and feels good for heterosexuals of color, that allows them to avoid confronting deeper questions. Given the embattled state many communities of color feel they are under, in particular Black and Latino communities, the defense posture reflects in some ways the tribulations of white supremacy.

But less generously, these attitudes also demonstrate a fundamental laziness, an analytic posture that seeks to preserve or maintain problematic gender and cultural norms that arguably result in a lot of unhappiness in communities of color, and not just for LGBT folks of color, but for families and women of color in particular, not to mention the corrosive effects of rigid masculinities on men of color of all sexualities. The persistence of both ideas of white sexuality and the efforts of LGBT people of color to integrate their experiences into the larger diorama of racial identity and community reflects, at the very least, the remarkable differences between sexuality across the racial spectrum.

“Sweetie, every day is Halloween in the Castro”

2007-10-30T10:09:00.000-05:00

Whither, the Gay Ghetto?

Cultural Notebook: Recovered Gayness

2007-10-26T09:35:00.001-05:00

A recent controversy in the Obama national campaign has shed a little light on the phenomenon of recovered gays and lesbians (aka "Ex-Gays" or "Sexual Conversion"), that is, lesbians and gay men who have been "cured" (or recovered from) their homosexuality:

Some reading:

Ex-Gay— Wikipedia (a good place to start)
Obama: Don't Pander to Homophobes
Ex-Gay Watch
Narrative of treatment for Ex-Gays
Commentary on an Ex-Gay Activist

Pro Ex-Gay sites:
Baptists Are Saving Homosexuals
"National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality"
(lots of pro Ex-Gay narratives here, as well as political advocacy for "curing" homosexuality, and not in the Martha Stewart way of curing, say, a salmon)

Culturally speaking, the "recovered gay" movement is a peculiarly American phenomenon, sharing a number of aspects with other spiritual enlightenment movements that have proven to be instrumental in our history (for example, the Great Awakening), through the Protestant promise of recovering perfection before God in this lifetime, a larger socio-cultural theme flowing from Calvinist Protestantism and the Puritans. Conveniently, such discourses also seek, as many contemporary American cultural themes do, not only to recover gays and lesbians for heterosexuality (which, as an aside, hardly seems to need them), but return to a pre-sixties social order of family, work, and nation.

Such fantasies of cultural return (across the political spectrum, I might add) are always, almost without exception, dangerous, mostly because they don't take society from where it is, but where it should be (i.e., utopian). And 'should' here is not only subjective , but highly selective. This would not be, however, the first time, nor certainly the last, when delusion, fantasy, fear, and idealistic Protestant Rigor are the watchwords of an American socio-cultural phenomenon. Of all the nation-states in the developed world, Americans, for myriad reasons, seem particularly prone to such states of anxiety.

Manifesto Destiny

2007-10-24T21:35:00.000-05:00

Our discussion in class today, arguably one of our liveliest, was in some ways a very function of the manifesto we read: Queers Read This/I Hate Straights. By nature and design, a manifesto is meant to trigger strong feelings, and the “anonymous queers” who composed this particular piece of agitprop (agitation propaganda) clearly meant to evoke strong passions on two fronts, or as we said in class, polyvocally. The first audience would be gays and lesbians, both the radical elements of the community and those less so. The invocation of shared memories of alienation, anger, hurt, and fear are meant to draw the circle of queer identity broadly. The secondary audience, but no less important for dramatic impact, would be heterosexuals, and not, as J. noted in class, those who couldn’t care less for LGBT politics, but those heterosexuals engaged on some level with the community, broadly construed.

As M. also noted, the broadside is not meant to function as a workable or even convincing program of action. Rather, it is meant to shift consciousness, enable the “clicks” that lead to something else. The desire of Queer Nation, and the anonymous queer authors of the manifesto, hoped these clicks would lead to greater radicality in the community. In fact, whether or not that was actually the case is hard to measure, not the least of which is the brevity of organizational life span of Queer Nation itself (1990-1992/1993), but also because the larger effects of these types of social discourses are very difficult to trace, although it is the perspective of the course that the queer moment, or queer nationalism, or whatever you want to call it, was the opening for a period of questioning and debate that at once recast old debates in new garb (Mattachine radicals v. reformists, DOB v. Butches and Femmes, GLF v. GAA, etc), as well as signaled a new period of maturity in the LGBT community, in terms of both interior and exterior critique and a vociferous politics of debate that persisted through the 1990s. Some of this work we shall be reading in the next couple of weeks, and by way of example, Carla Trujillo’s piece assigned for Friday, is reflective somewhat of the growth in what counts as LGBTQ, in Trujillo’s case race, ethnicity, and cultural parameters of gender specific to the Mexican American community.

In some ways, the anonymous queer authors of Queers Read This/I Hate Straights break some conventional rules of the manifesto genre. But a clear understanding of the function of polemic might be useful here. The polemic is meant to be profane, to challenge conventional knowledge, and uncover, if we wanted to read it post-structurally, ideological tendencies and themes which, as we have noted before, prefer to be invisible. Again, the work of Louis Althusser might also prove to be valuable here: how does the ideology of heteronormativity “hail” us, call and command us? (This concept is also known as interpellation) Heteronormativity interpellates ("calls to us") us invisibly, through concepts such as the natural, the organic, the biological, the normal.

Interpellation is one reason why public displays of affection (PDAs) between lesbians and gay men are so shocking: it ruptures our understanding of the normal and natural order in which we participate, mostly unknowingly. A good way to measure this is to ask yourself a question, dependent on your subject position: If you are straight/heterosexual, what did you think or feel the first time you saw LGBT intimacy? Not just the body or bodies of LGBT people, but kissing, handholding, or whatever. Alternatively, if you are LGBT, what did you feel the first time you performed or revealed that intimacy in public (if ever)? The frisson, the thrill, risk, danger, disgust, or shock, is the effect of ideology revealing itself. But we have no language for such moments.

The anonymous queers are, to a certain extent, trying to give us language for that ideological process of both invisibility and “hailing.” This recognition necessarily involves violence, as it also involves ripping people out of their ideological cocoons. This is not to say that such efforts cannot go too far: ideological zeal can lead to some bad decisions. Outing as a practice of queer nationalists was deeply controversial for many LGBT people, for instance, as coming out is typically regarded by many people as a private, personal choice. (Whether this is true or not is open to debate) Similarly, polemic and manifesto have been used to ill effect in most revolutionary struggle, where a politics of “the ends justify the means,” borrowed from the French Revolution, has resulted in much human misery, in particular over the course of the social and political revolutions of the 20th century (Soviet, Stalinism, Nazism, the Khmer Rouge, decolonial nationalist revolutions in the developing world) and those of the 21st that borrow from it (Hugo Chavez and Chavismo come immediately to mind).

If we stick, however, to consciousness, the role and function of agitation propaganda, and “clicks,” Queers Read This/I Hate Straights does trigger a certain nausea through polemic, which is precisely the point. What LGBT people (and, for that matter, heterosexual readers) do with that nausea (I am thinking specifically of the Spanish word asco here) is, in the end, up to them.

The Politics of Disavowal/The Politics of Style

2007-10-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

Today’s discussion of Adam and Queer nationalism and activism at the dawn of the nineties to a certain extent hinges on how much you believe Adam as an interlocutor. What I think is compelling about his dismissal of Queer Nation as style politics is, one hand, the traditional leftist suspicion (inherited from late 19th century and early 20th century Marxism) of aesthetics as bourgeois preoccupation, and on the other a clear need to undermine Queer nationalist activism as not engaging with the mechanisms of the state in a beneficial way. But as one student remarked today, the true question is were LGBT mainstream organizations doing that critical engagement, and if so, why Queer Nation? The implication here being that Queer Nation does not happen in a vacuum, but is in response to some crisis.

The unfortunate polemic in Adam mars what is, in some ways, an interesting argument of the progression of movements and thought streams in LGBT America during the eighties that leads us to Queer nationalism. Adam wants you, the reader, to follow his point and agree with him, that Queer Nation and the politics that flowed from it were all surface. But the simple fact of the matter is that Queer Nation and the activism it engaged with represented something more tangible than a bunch of lesbians and gay men who wanted to wear ugly leather jackets and scream outside of government offices.

As a student remarked in class today, the rage of the HIV crisis was the fount of the larger critical perspective of needed action to combat homophobia and political inertia. By emerging out of the leading HIV activist organizations (ACT-UP) and working in that vein, Queer nationalists were attempting a course correction that, as noted in the last post and in class, implicated both LGBT organizing and mainstream heterodominant culture.

The question of whether appeals to state benevolence on LGBT civil rights questions have, of course, a long history, dating back to the original discussions in Mattachine over self-consciousness and legal confrontation, or the regime of experts. To a certain extent, Queer Nation deploys Harry Hay’s arguments on identity and pride based in difference from heterosexuals to form its politics. Adam’s rather ham-fisted disavowal of Queer Nation and queer activism of the early 1990s says more about his particular political perspectives and proclivities than anything, per se, about Queer Nation.

And to return to the question of style, it may be important for us to interrogate our suspicion of style politics. The Left has maintained a bias against “style” that in many ways one could argue was as much a product of political and social homophobia as any tangible political argument on bourgeois habits. Historically, LGBT people have used style to differentiate themselves from heterosexuals. We have discussed some of the politics of style in Butch/Femme/Kiki debates, and of course the widespread social stereotype of gay men as being concerned with fashion, looks, and home decoration (the hideous Queer Eye television series being just one co-opted example). Yet, we have also talked about how Butch/Femme/Kiki discussions, or the rise of the gay clone, were as political as they were sartorial, and reflected active and often contentious debates between lesbians and gay men on representation, self-presentation, and our relationship to the heterosexual world. Adam curiously reproduces what is arguably a deeply homophobic loathing in his simplistic dismissal of Queer Nation on the basis, almost exclusively, of style.

Regardless of the spinning tops of academics, the tangible effects both of LGBT rage and the questioning it produces proved to be more long lasting and influential, in the end, than just style politics. Where Adam may be getting it right, however, is in the increasing diversification of LGBT politics, in the face of the nagging desire for unity, that would spawn a series of discursive crises in the 1990s, such as outing, gays in the military, and gay marriage, which would split the LGBT community as much as provoked the ire and ungenerous attention of heterosexual America.

Queering Queer

2007-10-21T22:39:00.000-05:00

At the end of the eighties, with AIDS activism at its apex and the lesbian sex wars having fractured the superstructure of lesbianism, Queer politics rushed into the vacuum created by these social, political, and discursive crises. The avatar of this Queer moment was the short-lived but influential organization Queer Nation, which emerged out of ACT-UP New York as a sub-group dedicated to questioning and challenging the perceived homonormativity of mainstream LGBT organizations and bringing the activist techniques of ACT-UP to social change for lesbians and gay men.

A younger, politicized generation of lesbians and gay men took up a queer banner that in many reflected the values of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance of the immediate post-Stonewall period of the early 1970s. Arguing that LGBT organizations had become too oriented towards reform rather than revolution, Queer Nation in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and the organization OutRage! in the United Kingdom wanted to “queer” once again lesbian and gay identity, place it in opposition to heterodomination as well as homonormativity, and undermine gender, race, and class categories by “queering” them: that is, recast socio-cultural and political relations in a critical and revolutionary framework. We should understand homonormativity in this context to mean a reformist, commercially focused LGBT identity that mimicked heterosexual bourgeois attitudes of consumption, ennui, moral propriety, and material comfort.

The twin engines for this movement were AIDS activism and the political crisis of HIV, and the rise of 1980s identity politics that recapitulated sixties social movement ideas of marginal identities and subjective perspectives. Queer Nationalists argued for a dedicated and specific lesbian and gay identity (“Queer”) that was grounded in deep alienation from the heterodominant parent culture, an identity that was located in a sense of visceral difference and oppression, and that could form the basis for collective organizing.

Therefore, in some ways, Queer Nation and queer nationalism proved the truism “What’s old is new again,” through a resumption of the politics of alterity (alienated difference) that marked early contemporary LGBT organizing following Stonewall, grounded in LGBT difference from heterosexual culture. And while Adam is not a fan of Queer nationalism, the moment proved to be more important than style politics.

A personal recollection— I was in New York City when Queer Nation made its debut in early 1990, and the energy was palpable. The change, the shift, almost felt like emerging from a dark tunnel into the sunlight after the 1980s and AIDS and the sense of death that imbued gay male culture in particular: The Fear. By the end of 1990, I had moved to the other Gay mecca, San Francisco, where I was able to witness the development of an important center of Queer nationalism outside of New York. Again, the energy and critique were remarkable in the sense in which they tapped into the rage and frustration of many urban, intellectual lesbians and gay men in the shadow and grief of AIDS, and brought voice to our deep-seated feelings of anger. However, very quickly, the proclamations became self-righteous and the markers somewhat disabused: the ubiquitous “rage,” the leather jackets plastered with the trademark neon stickers of Queer Nation, the same stickers covering advertisements and telephone poles in the Castro and station maps in the subway: a uniform and stance as unrelenting and suffocating as any other. It is not that Queer Nation and queer nationalism, with its contempt for the bourgeoisification of LGBT organizing and homonormativity, did not strike a chord. It’s that, on some level, it was not polyvocal. It could not figure out as an organization and a movement to speak in many cadences. Like the movements it sought to criticize, it too formed inside and outside boundaries very quickly, and anyone that appeared "normal" in any way, even the most banal, could not enter its precincts. In particular, its project to recover the word “Queer,” a word I had never been called personally (Faggot was much more common, from the lips of loved ones as well as the passing mouths of strangers), struck me, again perhaps personally, as idiosyncratic and archaic. Then again, after many years in the trenches of racial and sexual identity politics at Yale, maybe I myself was tired of the posturing and zeal, the self-aggrandizement of identity politics, and wanted to figure out a way to understand my own rage as well as live my life.

The demise of Queer nationalism speaks on one hand to my personal recollection, which perhaps could be construed as exhaustion plus skepticism, but also, as Adam notes, to the diversification of LGBT thought following the 1980s, a diversification rooted in the lesbian sex wars and the decimation and trauma of AIDS on gay men. As we shall see, the critical impulse of Queer nationalism contained both important critiques of heterodominant parent cultural norms, in particular the legitimization of violence against lesbians and gay men, as well as a much-needed focus on where and how dominant lesbian and gay cultures had fallen down, had not risen to the challenge of developing holistic strategies for lesbians and gay men in heterodominant culture.

Almost twenty years after the emergence of Queer nationalism, the term lives on in a somewhat weak version of its earlier self, normalized and consumed as the terms lesbian and gay before it. Yet, Queer nationalism reenergized the LGBT community at a moment when debates on marriage, HIV disease, childrearing and family, local and national politics, and civil rights, and the role of transgender people would become paramount. The tenets of Queer nationalism, therefore, represent in some critical way the didactic tensions between normalcy and outlaw culture that typify LGBT socio-political expressions since the end of World War Two.

As we have noted, however, we do not live in dyads, we live within them. The twin impulses of many LGBT people to be both outlaw and normal therefore determine both the particular fate of Queer nationalism as well as the important questions it raised for LGBT people following 1990 and continuing to today.

Acronymic: Response

2007-10-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

Susan Stryker's response to "How Did the T Get Into LGBT?"

Stryker is a well known and influential trans activist and scholar.

Favorite line: "That's why every single GLBT organization of any size at the national and state levels -- with the sole exception of the spineless Human Rights Campaign -- has unequivocally come out in support of gender protections within ENDA, and has opposed the effort to pass legislation protecting only sexual orientation."

Venus & Mars & Uranians

2007-10-17T21:03:00.000-05:00

In thinking through the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, some of the most compelling questions emerge out of the question of the difference between women and men’s sexuality. A variation of nature versus nurture, do women and men really have such different sexualities? On some level, obviously, that could be answered affirmatively just by looking at the remarkable and deeply coercive differences between the socializations of the sexes in our society. And, as Faderman notes, lesbians are not distinct from the parent culture: they too are molded and formed by dominant femininity, as gay men are by dominant masculinity.

Yet, there is something in this argument that weakens when we do begin to think of how lesbians and gay men work to escape this deterministic outlook. After all, if things were so neatly tied up, then lesbian and gay sexuality really wouldn’t be a problem, right? In fact, it is the manner and ways in which lesbians and gay men work to determine their own sexual agendas post-Stonewall that reveals that, while socialized under dominant paradigms of gender, lesbians and gay men remain different, and marked by difference, through their project(s) of same-sex love/sex/attraction/identity.

We talked in class about the influence that cultural lesbian-feminism of the 1970s and 1980s had on the lesbian sex radicals, and the cross-pollination of sex radicalism on mainstream lesbian cultures, including cultural lesbian feminisms that follow the 1970s. For better or worse, things like the L-Word would not exist without the sex radicals, who in tandem with other forces (such as lesbian of color feminisms) broke the essentialist model of womanhood so important to the cultural lesbian feminists of the 1970s: the idea that there is one and true version of womanhood, and that it is superior in nature and quality to masculinity/patriarchy (including, of course, gay male cultures).

The recognition of lesbian diversity is, in some ways, akin to the expulsion from Eden, an end to a dream that had a powerful attraction for many lesbians. This dream of the cultural lesbian feminist was also one that, ironically, was deeply involved in parent culture fascinations with gender and gender differences, albeit from a decidedly different angle. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and thus we are relieved as a society from thinking through gender and gender differences.

Are women more emotive and caring then men, naturally? Are women better caregivers to children? Can women be soldiers in the same way men can? Can women think above their emotions? Are men really emotionally disconnected and afraid of intimacy? What pressures do men of all sexualities feel towards gender performance? These complicated questions are easily sidestepped by a pink and blue discourse that sees penises and vaginas as contrapuntal. We believe deeply, if perhaps incoherently, in gender.

Yet, aside from the obvious differences between vaginas and penises, the corporeal exists both as a physical embodiment (the actual body) and what we make of it (how we read it). For a long time, lesbians and gay men were thought to have gender confusion, identifying wrongly with the opposite gender. As lesbians and gays move more into the metropolitan mainstream, some of those ideas of gender confusion are increasingly put upon transgender people. But the echo of it remains, and is reflected in the various lesbian and gay discourses that both seek to determine new and radical agendas specific to lesbian and gay identity, as well as the tension many lesbians and gay men feel about atypical gender variance or performance in the community: butches, queens, fairies, bull daggers, drag queens, and the like, the markers of visible difference that more conservative centers of LGBT thought consider as freakish as any heterosexual conservative.

In the end, the lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, like the gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s, were exploring uncharted territory, taking something from the parent culture but struggling to define at the same time something new, something different. The challenges of these endeavors should not be underestimated, and nor should the desire, on the part of lesbians and gay men, to think through and critically analyze their relationship to the parent culture, gender norms, and challenging the meanings of being a woman or being a man. We may inherit the pink and blue discourse, but lesbians and gay men have consistently struggled with that discourse, in collaboration and conflict.

Cultural Notebook: Elegies of Loss and Memory

2007-10-10T16:38:00.000-05:00

I woke up in a sweat
Desolate
For there were no more lovers left alive
No one had survived
So there were no more lovers left alive
And that’s why love had died
Yes, it’s true
Look, its happened to me and you

— Pet Shop Boys, “Dreaming of the Queen”

While we have been having a somewhat clinical conversation on the impact of HIV disease on gay sensibility of the 1980s, it is important to not lose sight of the fact that HIV disease was a profoundly human event for gay men and lesbians of the 1980s. The sudden and chaotic loss of friends, lovers, and acquaintances, the whole restructuring of the gay world of the 1970s, has triggered apocalyptic readings of the moment on gay consciousness, not only in Kramer’s invocation of the Holocaust, but as well in Andrew Holleran’s excellent collection of essays, Ground Zero, where he wryly notes, regarding AIDS and its effects on gay identity, “Disaster, real disaster, always comes as a shock.”

Aside from the political shiftings and challenges that the LGBT community faced in the HIV crisis of the 1980s, including homophobic reaction, guilt and depression, as well as a deeply felt personal threat, gay men produced some of the most powerful and beautiful narratives of loss in literature, reportage, film, and public art. These works sought to intervene in the representation of AIDS as either afflicting deserving "sinners" or the "innocent," as well as redirect the focus away from the spectacle of disease towards a narrative of experience: what did it feel like, from the inside?

Some of the most prominent HIV/AIDS memoirs and autobiographical literature of the period are deeply affecting, like Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, Gil Cuadros' City of God, the poetry of Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam, and David B. Feinberg's Queer and Loathing. Other works, such as David Wojnarowicz's Memories Like Gasoline, In the Shadow of the American Dream, and Close to the Knives, and videos like Black Is, Black Ain't, Tongues Untied and Zero Patience, take on AIDS shibboleths and mainstream ideas of contagion with powerful narratives of resistance. John Weir’s Inevitable Decline of Eddie Socket and David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-sixed and Spontaneous Combustion are some of the first and best literary expressions of AIDS of the period. Richard Rodriguez's essay "Late Victorians" (PDF available via the link) was one of the more controversial readings of the recall to nature that to a limited extent is echoed in Kramer's call for engagement. The public art of Gran Fury, associated with ACT-UP, set the tone in the late eighties for the public expression of LGBT resistance to the death narrative of AIDS: sassy, political, ironic, and eye-catching, their efforts often indicted the Reagan administration and its lack of attention to the AIDS crisis. Their work is presented in this post, including the iconic image of the pink triangle on black background, one of the most enduring images of the period.

Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On remains, in some important way, the primary source text for the history of HIV in the 1980s, and its effect on the gay community. Susan Sontag's AIDS and its Metaphors sought to build on her earlier work on cancer. Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother is a memoir of the demise of her brother from HIV disease, an intense emotional narrative. Similarly, the powerful video Silverlake Life offers a raw vision of HIV disease through a videography of the experience of two gay men, whose death from AIDS is captured on film. While this may seem gratuitous, it serves as a reminder that HIV is not an abstraction, is not something that happens to other people, and is not something that has no effect. Behind every abstract "AIDS death" is a person, a life, hopes and dreams and aspirations. Silverlake Life jolts us out of our soporific theories into facing death literally.

The desire of gay cultural producers in the 1980s was to give voice to an experience that had been happening, up until about 1985, silently, stealthily, and quietly. The explosion of gay activism around AIDS in 1987 was a response to this lassitude, an expression of rage and grief that arguably, along with Stonewall and the assassination of Harvey Milk, permanently defined contemporary gay sensibility and changed the way the medical and government infrastructure related to AIDS. Remembering the human element of the HIV crisis serves not only to break down the barriers of distance that allow us to imagine ourselves as safe, but also serves as a memorial to the thousands of gay men who have died from HIV disease since 1980. The difficulty is in capturing the moment, the raw and sheer terror, in art. As Andrew Holleran wrote in the eighties—

Someday, writing about this plague may be read with pleasure, by people for whom it is a distant catastrophe, but I suspect the best writing will be nothing more, nor less, than a lament: “We are as wanton flies to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” The only other possible enduring thing would be a simple list of names—of those who behaved well, and those who behaved badly, during a trying time.

Acronymic: Interesting Reading

2007-10-09T14:05:00.000-05:00

How did the T get in LGBT?

The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World

2007-09-29T19:11:00.000-05:00

Teleology as a concept is a useful one for most students to learn. It can help explain quite a lot not only about how the world works, but also about how academic study, influenced by the Enlightenment, can determine our thinking patterns. In short, teleology (pronounced “tee-lee-ah-loh-gee”) can be defined succinctly as “the supposition that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.” A good example of teleological thinking or argument is the onwards and upwards understanding of human social and economic development contained in American optimism, or life will always get better. The sad fact that this is not always true, that backsliding in the development of human cultures is an important aspect of human history and experience (what, after all, were the Dark Ages, or for that matter, 20th century fascism?), has to a certain extent been banished by technological progress— science, medicine, and machines will enable human societies to continue to advance in sophistication and expectation. This is such a widespread idea(l) that is almost a truism. However, close readers of diverse works ranging from Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On to Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague will be familiar with the tendency of expectations to exceed what is possible, or rather, the role and function of hubris.

All of this is to say that, on some level, Stonewall is a teleological event. Duberman’s narrative exposition on the riots that occurred in New York City’s Greenwich Village over the last weekend in June 1969 have become, through force of argument, the ne plus ultra expression of contemporary LGBT identity and self-expression: the birth of the now. And, to a certain extent, Duberman participates in this teleological determinism: his narrative is leading to the burst of the dam, to an event, that we know now, through hindsight, was the shift from the "bad old days when we all hated ourselves" to the "new, sunny prideful" days we live in now, purportedly.

If only history and human experience were like a novel, we would all be living much more aesthetically pleasing existences (NB: I, for one, would like to model my life on Meg Schlegel). Yet, this is not the way it is. Stonewall is regarded, even within the structure of the course, as the pivot point. Yet, there are events both before and after that complicate the picture. For instance, the activities of SIR in San Francisco and the Compton Cafeteria riot, which occurred several years before Stonewall. Similarly, the rise and assassination of Harvey Milk, not to mention the emergence of HIV, are post-Stonewall moments whose impact has, in some ways, been greater than the street disturbances around Sheridan Square over a series of muggy New York nights.

So why then does Stonewall become the pivot it has become? Partially, it is good press: there were witnesses and journalistic coverage of the event that differed from pre-Stonewall moments of resistance. Second, it was sustained: out of Stonewall comes LGBT activism (“Gay Lib”) that is connected and modeled on the refusenik politics of the 1960s, including a critical relationship to dominant society and a resurrection of culturalist ideas about LGBT identity that were so important to Harry Hay and the early Mattachine founders. Obviously, another aspect is the ideological progression of authorization and deauthorization. Stonewall becomes important because it disengages with the past: it is not only different, but works to become dominant.

Yet, Stonewall is just one of many potentials that could have determined LGBT experience, in the same way that the question “What if HIV never happened?” presents us with several indeterminate pasts and futures. All of which only serves to reiterate that the appropriate critical relationship to something like Duberman’s Stonewall is as fiction: a compelling legend we tell ourselves specifically to make sense of ourselves. Fiction, of course, is not always untrue, as non-fiction is not always fact. Rather, arguably the legend is more important than the actual events, and how exactly the legend then circulates and become “true.”

Becoming Visible: Further Thinking

2007-09-21T23:04:00.000-05:00

Today's course discussion was provocative. Afterwards, some students expressed some concern that discussions were focusing on race as a comparative correlate to sexuality without truly understanding the specific dimensions and differences of either category, something I attempted to address in an earlier post. This observation, combined with Emily's prescient caution around controversial labels like "passing" and assimilation, and Karen's query on LGBT identity formation, made me think that perhaps an extended conversation about the specifics of sexuality would be helpful. In other words, what makes LGBT identity and sexuality unique as an identity formation?

As we talked about today, sexuality is in some crucial ways essentially invisible. It is very hard to tell someone's sexual proclivities and interests from a glance, although we display some of those preferences through our choice of clothing, jewelry, pins, hair style, and other identifying markers. As we have mentioned before, the central drama of LGBT identity formation, both before and after Stonewall, was/is the concept of becoming visible, what it means to be seen. So, visible markers of identity, and the choice to demonstrate or withdraw/hide those markers significantly complicates LGBT identity, making it profoundly different in some respects from other, more visible identity categories like gender and race (and for better or worse).

Another aspect that I think is unique about LGBT identity as opposed to gender or race is the specific isolation of self-realization for most LGBT folks, born as we are into for the most part heterosexual families. Thus, identity formation happens in a vacuum, with an essential aspect of identity that is profoundly different from the familial or communal unit. While this is not true for all people, for the most part such isolation, almost being marooned within the heterosexual family, is an important difference. One shares, on some level, the race-ethnicity of our parents and our race-ethnic community/communities. As well, we learn early on to identify ourselves in a gender dyad that has ramifications on our identification with a gender category (think of something most of us do everyday without thinking, which is use public communal restrooms, not to mention the gendered dynamic of friendship, play, and sartorial cultures which are relentlessly foisted on children).

Sexuality is an intimate condition, and one which for the most part is not terribly interrogated in American popular culture. We spoke in class about Erotic Regimes, and how we each form our own relationships to eroticism, the sexual, and what constitutes our sexuality is in fact confusing, disparate, idiosyncratic, and unique. So part of the peculiar challenge of organizing socio-political identities around sexuality entails confronting or refuting this essential idiosyncracy, or rather subsuming the unique and subjective properties of sexuality within the rubric of communal political and social and cultural identities.

This understanding of sexuality and sexual identities can possibly give us a window on the historical and contemporary drama surrounding LGBT identity, not the least of which is recognizing that real or not, unique or standardized, we do organize ourselves around sexuality, with the biggest kid on the block being heterosexuality. For some LGBT people, per Maddy's question/comment in class, their sexuality is subsumed within other identity categories (race, gender, class, education, geography, profession, whatever). And yet for others, for a variety of reasons, their sexual identity is foregrounded in their experiences.

The differences between Butch/Femme culture and the Kikis does seem to entail a differing approach to Erotic Regimes, both of which would undergo substantial change after Stonewall. But the whole conversation made me think of why sexuality becomes important for some people as central to who they are, and less so to others. The Kikis wanted to believe that their sexual identity formed only part of who they were, while in some ways Butch/femme culture had a much more aggressive stance on publicly proclaiming an Erotic Regime. This is following Faderman, and to certain extent continues to define LGBT identity contestations.

But if we want to avoid simple dichotomies, then we must recognize the essential subjective nature of these positions, as well as the complicated decision-making that goes into foregrounding an identity that, at the time, was literally and figuratively criminal. What does seem to be indicative of the tension and debate between Butch/Femme cultures and the Kikis is the process of deauthorization and authorization that competing ideologies engage in. A good distinction made by Lora Romero was the differences between wrong thinking and unthinking, along with the concept of false consciousness, a Marxist concept borrowed by Harry Hay and the early radicals of Mattachine. Specifically, do we look at our ideological opponents as wrong, or as unconscious (i.e., in need of enlightenment)? The difference is important. Similarly, the concept of false consciousness as it plays out in post-Stonewall culture centers on coming out and publicly acknowledging one's sexuality as a key to knowing oneself, that self-recognition in a public sphere determines our relative "health." But how is our sexuality ever truly unknown? Is "coming out" indeed a self-recognition that is akin to gaining consciousness, or does it itself stand in for the much harder work of figuring out one's identity vis-à-vis heterodominant society? (Here the historical differences in meaning of coming out which were mentioned in class might be helpful).

Certainly, Duberman's narrativization of Stonewall through personal reportage will help us revisit these questions, but for whatever reason I kept thinking of Bronski Beat's eighties gay anthem, Smalltown Boy, and the experience of dissonance and alienation that seems central to LGBT identity in ways that are unique, that alterity and a violent distinction between self and originary family and community typify the LGBT experience, at least in the anglophone world. So I offer here the video, in lieu of an actual ending to this already sonorous post. Note the ending, which is in fact a recoup of community, LGBT community.

Cultural Notebook: The Judy Syndrome

2007-09-19T16:44:00.000-05:00

The latest viral web event is the back and forth regarding this fan video on Britney Spears non-come-back "Come Back" on the VMA awards. The somewhat hysterical video has engendered a number of different responses, many of which comment on the gender presentation and sexual orientation of the fan. Additionally, this purportedly heartfelt pixilated plea to "leave Britney alone" has spawned its own cottage industry of imitators and riffs on the original, some of which are rather funny and others less so, revealing the gendered dynamics of loathing at play.

My first response, aside from disgust at the vitriol directed at the video maker for his non-conformity to masculine norms (one can be disgusted, but not necessarily because the video maker is gay-ish; you're welcome to read the comments posted on the video's homepage for examples*), is to diagnose a severe case of what I think of as the "Judy Syndrome," the deep, irrational attachment some gay men display towards divas, cinematic, musical, or otherwise. This transference onto the feminine star has its roots in pre-Stonewall cultural politics, where young gay men in particular would form strong emotional bonds with the star (such as Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis, to name but a few), based on empathy with her performative strength as well as her private human travails. This YouTube video follows in that tradition, with the disturbing added benefit of contemporary Internet narcissism, and leads us to some questions to consider (discuss amongst yourselves and in the comments section):

• Why have gay men formed strong relationships with performative female figures?
• Is this all just too stereotypical? What is behind the stereotype?
• Can you locate where you first learned that gay men had something for tragic, boozy stars?
• How are stereotypes communicated to us, and how to we imbibe them?
• What do gay men get out of the relationship to the Star, before and after Stonewall?
• What does the Star, in turn, get out of a devoted gay fan base?
• Does star worship have a correlate in lesbian cultures, and if so, what and how?

Further Reading: Daniel Harris, "The Diva in Decline"

* One must remain skeptical of all web-based personality phenomena. After perusing the video maker's video home page on YouTube, I noticed a small detail: "for business inquiries- contactchriscrocker@gmail.com." One must question whether or not the whole viral moment of self-revelation and subsequent abuse is not indeed simply part of the larger cultural diorama of star cultures, instant celebrity, and narcissism that is not meant to generate something personal, much less sincere, but is rather cynical in its marketing and self-promotional strategies. Indeed, it appears the video is one big put-on solely meant to garner attention and financial lucre.

Further Viewing: Todd Solondz, Storytelling

The Monstruous Homosexual & The Loose Woman: Girls and Boys, Beware!

2007-09-19T10:09:00.000-05:00

As our reading for today demonstrates, the fifties marked a return of a rabid anti-LGBT sentiment in public and social mores (as contrasted with the general openness of the war years) that was deeply linked both to the hegemony of fantastical gender normativity in the immediate post-war era as well as McCarthyism's linkage of the homosexual with Communism.

Here are a couple of classic propaganda films and cautionary sexual warnings for from that era, that while providing some laughs, indicate both a real social and political fear over LGBT people that arguably persists today, as well as inculcating sexual caution and fear in girls. These fears are grounded in a potent soup of the unconscious, gender normativity, and gender disgust, as much as in sexual antipathy towards "unnatural" lesbian and gay sex, contained again in the metaphorical relevance of Ian Young's formulation of the Myth of the Homosexual, a strict understanding of gender behaviors and norms, and Shelley's Monster. How instructive are the differences between the films, and what do they tell us about the relative sexuality of men and women?

While we may chuckle at the outrageous hysteria of these "educational" films, how far have we moved, in a deep structural understanding of LGBT identity and gender normativity, away from these fears? The continuing dynamic of visibility is a contestation over the nature of that occular presence and social change and reaction.

Here, on the one hand, LGBT visibility is used as a means of social control and pathology, Shelley's Monster come to life in the guise of badly dressed homosexuals. On the other, Stranger Danger appropriate rewards for those who stay within the guidelines of heterodominant normativity and punishments for those who don't (As one reviewer on YouTube summarized Girls Beware!: "a trilogy of tragedies brought about by teenage girls' attempts at independent behavior. Covers do's and don'ts in the babysitting situation. Develops the problem of the 'PICK UP' and the girls who go with boys that are too old."

What's in a Name? 2: Electric Boogaloo

2007-09-17T22:09:00.000-05:00

"There are lots of people who are part of the LGBT community that may not identify as a lesbian, bisexual or gay person."

Naming troubles...

The comments are, ahem, enlightening.

What's in a Name?

2007-09-17T01:24:00.000-05:00

Snips and snails and puppy dog tails, sugar and spice and everything nice? Per our conversation in class, a brief primer on terminology (click on the hyperlinks for more information):

LGBTQ (QAI)
Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer (Questioning/Ally/Intersex)

Often in the upper midwest you will see GLBT instead of LGBT. The acronym is a political creature, created out of the necessity of alliance, although it sometimes remains unclear what each category has in common with each other. There is tension, in other words, within the acronym between the various constituencies contained therein.

Lesbian
A woman-loving woman, i.e., a homosexual woman; also a woman-identified woman (political/lesbian-feminist). Origin of the term: the Isle of Lesbos, the home of the reknowned poet Sappho.

Gay
A man-loving man, i.e., a homosexual man. Origin of the term: gay vernacular of the interwar years of the 20th century, serving as a secret code to identify one another in a manner unknown to heterosexuals. Can sometimes be broadened to include lesbians as well as gay men, although this usage is increasingly archaic.

Bisexual
Someone who is capable of sexual attraction to either sex. Bisexual identity can sometimes be deeply politicized in the LGBT community, especially around questions over the possible retention by bisexuals of heteronormative privilege, which several pro-Bi critics have responded to.

Transgender
a) a person who has changed genders, or desires to change genders, from birth gender to felt gender, or b) someone who through dress, behavior, or politics, challenges the traditional gender binary of male and female, without necessarily modifying the body.
Related terms: transman, transwoman, transsexual

Queer
Reclaimed epithet; political description of identity whose standpoint is critical of heteronormative and mainstream lesbian and gay identities. Emerged in the early 1990s as a political movement, esp. associated with the organization Queer Nation. Also the name of a theoretical approach in the study of lesbians and gay men. Theoretically, Queer includes alternative or marginal heterosexual identities as well.

Intersex
A person born with either indeterminate genitalia or the genitalia of both traditional sexes. Formerly described by the word "hermaphrodite."

Homosexual
A person demonstrating same-sex desire or sexual love.

Usage of all above terms in any moment depends on several different factors, including nuance, specificity, and politics, for all of the terms above are political on some level or another. When addressing someone on an individual level, one should attempt description that hews as closely as possible to the individual's self-conception (i.e., lesbian v. queer; transgender v. transvestite*). In cases of general description, remain cognizant of ulterior political meanings (i.e., gay v. homosexual; queer v. gay*). If anything, the nuances of the LGBTQ nomenclature of description reveals the constant shifting of terms, politics, and strategies of self-description since the modern emergence of LGBT identities in the late nineteenth century.

*Possible political interpretations of nomenclature

lesbian v. queer— since queer denotes a particular political agenda, on occasion it is not appropriate to use queer to describe someone who may or may not see themselves within this identity designation.

transgender v. transvestite— These are not the same thing, although many people confuse these terms. One has to do with felt or corporeal gender identity, the other with sartorial gender performance or presentation. Caution is urged in describing often times deeply personal states. Appropriate descriptive terms include transgender, transwoman, transman, or indeed transvestite, although the "trans" in each of the terms does not connote similar meaning.

gay v. homosexual— Many, but not all, lesbian and gay people feel homosexual is a clinical descriptive terms that does not capture the totality of the socio-cultural experience of lesbian and gay communities. Lesbian, Gay, or LGBT captures this socio-cultural as well as sexual state of being in a manner that signifies cognizance of the difference.

queer v. gay— Again, these terms are not necessarily synonymous, although for some LGBT people, Queer does capture their sense of different identity. In this contrast, depending on who is making it, gay can mean mainstream and queer radically resistant, or alternatively, queer is trendy and polemic and gay is more descriptive of a basic identity free of political meanings, although gay is also a political term.

Other Terms:
of indeterminate, colloquial, or derogatory function, usage contextual and with caution—
Fag/Faggot, Dyke, Lezzie, Homo/'Mo (both derived from Homosexual, and considered derogatory), DL (Down Low), MSM (Men Who Have Sex With Men)

Race & Sexuality: Some Perspectives

2007-09-13T14:39:00.000-05:00

The comparison of race and sexuality is one fraught with tension. Although falling under the rubric of cardinal master identity categories, such identities are not necessarily transparent or comparable to each other, although as master categories, they operate similarly, in terms of defining ourselves on some powerful and tactile level. Thinking of our discussion in class, yesterday, as well as a recent post on Camren's blog, I thought it might be instructive to have a brief, succinct comparison of the two.

Both of these identity categories are grounded in history, and as such, their meanings shift and change. Both seem to be invested in a sense of difference, as in people (or practices ) that are different from "us," or alternatively, what we consider the norm. A good place to start is in questioning the norm as well as the "us," and how the norm develops or is influenced by by ideology and social needs and perception (as D'Emilio seeks to trace; and in this last place is a clue as to how to locate the "us" ).

Race is one of our most powerful and persistent myths. We believe in race, it strikes us as an objective (innate) category, although race does not exist in any tangible sense in nature, which is to say that there is no scientific basis for the genetic variation that we describe as "race." Yet, race is one of the most prominent markers of human identity. How this comes to be is grounded in history. Different peoples and societies were always aware of phenotypical differences, of course (differences in skin color, hair texture, body structure, etc.). Ancient societies had various conceptions of the meanings of these differences between peoples, and other ways of structuring power and privilege in their societies (class, rank, heredity, etc.). Race, in the way that we understand it, however, is of a much more recent vintage, only emerging during the Enlightenment and triggered by the end of a long period of European socio-cultural isolation. Early modern Europeans began to venture into the larger world, and were confused by the different types of people they encountered, most often characterizing these distinctions along religious lines (Christian vs. Jews, Muslims, and "heathens"). Jews and Muslims of course were familiar to the early modern European. What was challenging was the confrontation with physically different people who had no identifiable spiritual practice. Did they have souls? Were they indeed human?

These questions might strike us today as barbaric, but to Europeans of the period, especially the English, who were culturally parochial and relatively unsophisticated (as opposed to Mediterranean cultures), these were crucial questions because they were linked to the Bible. If Adam and Eve were the father and mother of human society, then there by definition must be but one family of man. How then to explain the different kinds of people Europeans were encountering in their voyages? In short and to cut to the chase, these questions simmered for awhile until an socio-economic imperative forced a convenient answer. The economic exploitation of the western hemisphere demanded and supported new, modern theories of human diffentiation that informed several technological phenomena: the conquest, mass conversion, and destruction and displacement of indigenous communities in the western hemisphere and the Atlantic slave trade, being the two most prominent. Our ideas of race and the meaning of race, therefore, are much more modern than we may believe, if we think about it at all.

Sexuality, in our contemporary understanding, is of even more recent vintage. It is often considered a subjective (chosen) category, although we tend to relate to sexuality both as a subjective and objective category (Respectively and colloquially, "making bad choices" vs. "born this way"). As D'Emilio, Young, and others have observed, LGBT identity does not emerge as a category until the late 19th century and the increasing medicalization of human behavior, a process underwritten by the same empirical practices that inform 19th century European colonization of Africa and Asia (and whose "practice run" had been the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries). So, in some sense, race and sexuality are connected in that they are both related to 19th century positivist science, although racial difference has a longer and more measurably traumatic history. Homosexual sexual acts have a long history of practice (both with social approbation and opprobrium), as Camren notes, but the slide of the act into identity is only secured in the 19th century. Contemporary cultural politics, questions of morality, as well as the longer history of race (no matter how ill informed such a history might be) make an easy comparison between sexuality and race problematic, although not impossible, and indeed, such conversations have the potential to reveal the interconnected nature of discourses of domination and social control.

Above is an image created by Chicana lesbian artist Ester Hernandez, that references the importance of the adoration of the Guadalupe Virgin in Mexican and Mexican American culture, but recasts that adoration as also symbolic of lesbian love and desire by taking a common working class/cholo masculine practice (tattouage of the image of the Virgin on one's body as a symbol of veneration) and recasting it as a veneration of the Sapphic feminine (the rose offered). For this image Hernandez received death threats, as has artist Alma Lopez, partially because it is a homoerotic religious image, and partially because it confirms the presence of LGBT people within racial communities. (NB: some cultural discourses in non-white racial communities associate homosexuality with colonization and whiteness). Sometimes, some white LGBT people will too quickly collapse sexuality into race in a comparative model, while alternatively, some heterosexual people of color will deny the presence and legitimacy of LGBT folks/LGBT people of color by appealing either to religion (generally rightist) or colonization and assimilation (generally leftist).

Obviously, neither response takes into account the similarities and differences in the formation of these identity categories, nor the complex way in which they interact with, again, differing but similar types of ideological domination, heteronormativity and white supremacy, not to mention those who straddle these purportedly distinct lines of identity. But the responses do reveal the extent to which many people think of identity in terms of hierarchy: an either/or model that cannot see how race and sexuality discourses influence each other. The tension between objectivity and subjectivity between the categories obfuscates the fact that both race and sexuality are simultaneously objective and subjective.

This conversation just scratches the surface of the many complexities implicated by race and sexuality. At the very least, it is a place to start.

Identity Troubles

2007-09-12T14:00:00.000-05:00

Following our conversation today, I thought about the difficulties, yet again, of identity and difference. D'Emilio is interested in the struggle of LGBT people to define themselves against the backdrop of heteronormativity and heterodominant society, which is telling LGBT people that they are unnatural, sick, and diseased. The question of dominant identities discussed in class also seemed to speak to a particular struggle around identity, our own identities and the identities we collate ourselves within, that is linked to the desire of ideology to be invisible.

I, for one, do think on some level that dominant identities are as traumatic as marginal ones, although we might not recognize them as such. For instance, even though heterosexuality is a dominant identity, it has constrained and overdetermined the choices available to straight men and women, even as it bestows upon them blessed "normality." Similarly, white identity controls white people as much as it might serve as a distinction of privilege and power in our society. This isn't meant to undermine a real understanding of dominant identities as powerful, but rather to say, I guess, that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

That said, we often feel trapped by our identities: they can seem inexorable. And partially this is because they masquerade as natural, organic, and therefore, infallible. This is related to our discussion of biological determinism that we tend to write on the body uncritically, following Paglia. It is also related to the fact that ideology likes to hide. One of the ways it hides is through pretending it is natural, the way the world is, "common sense." Yes, the body has certain functions and uses, but that does not and cannot limit the body itself to those appropriate use values, right? If we uncritically embrace that the human body is designed for procreation, then what does that tell us, really? A narrow reading would be that any other use of the body outside of procreation (for pleasure, for instance, or alternatively, nothing) is wrong.

Yet, we are not the sum of our parts, right? If that were the case, then human societies would be very different than they are today. The LGBT struggle in the 19th century was firstly to recognize that there were "others" like yourself. Later, the fight would be to legitimize the particular sexual and social expressions of LGBT-identified people as normal, an incomplete task, largely.

Because it seems so hard to embrace a synthetic, historically-grounded understanding of identity as fluid, many LGBT people today try to naturalize their sexuality in the (problematic) ways that race and gender have been naturalized: in other words, that your skin color/racial classification and our various body parts have some sort of deep meaning for the person you are, or are ingrained in the genetic structure. Therefore, LGBT are innocent of choice and are born that way, so it is morally and ethically wrong to discriminate against them. Yet, as touched upon in the last post, identity seems much more complicated than a compendium of facts about your identity, like the description of an object: height, width, depth. Perhaps a more interesting question is how parts of ourselves become important in the societies in which we live, and why.

Welcome/Identity Questions

2007-09-10T13:19:00.000-05:00

Welcome to WGST 111! Please make sure to review the documentation that was distributed in class today and come Wednesday prepared with any questions you may have regarding either the syllabus for the blog assignment page. Copies of the syllabus and assignment are now available on Moodle.

Subsequent to our introductions in class, I was thinking of the challenge of studying identity in an academic framework. Identity, of course, is something that we tend to think of as inherently personal, close to the bone, literally who we are. Yet, one of the problems with this understanding of identity is that it confuses, I would argue, the layered nature of our identities with a simplistic transparency. Identity is not like looking through a window. It is not revealed truth, although most of us tend to think of identity this way.

For instance, who we are and who we become is influenced by a number of crucial factors, some of which are corporeal (written on the body, or flow from it) and some of which are in fact not. Race, skin color, and gender tend to be the categories US society turns to when explaining "how we are," primarily because they are so literal. But, in fact, we are strange compilations of both the physical as well as the socio-cultural: what language(s) we speak, where we grew up, the nature and quality of our familial lives, our friendship networks and influences, our educations, our "taste" cultures. For example, which is more important: a shared skin color or racial designation (race and skin color are not necessarily identical to each other) or education, language, and place of birth? Another way of putting this is what does a white Norwegian have in common with a white Minnesotan (ethnicity undefined)?

These other, invisible factors lead to significant differences between and within purportedly unitary and universal cardinal categories (esp. race and gender) that some, in exasperation or perhaps cynicism, have taken to mean that we cannot categorize or draw analytical conclusions because we are "all so different/unique." Alternatively, some ignore such differences to focus on the group, usually out of a desire for political strategy (the strategic essentialism of Gayatri Spivak is but one example of this thinking).

But, it seems to me that we must learn to be bilingual in this sense— in other words, to recognize that group dynamics and identities exist "for reals," but they are also undercut and complicated by other ways of imagining identities that do not speak to either the literal body or even necessarily located practices (cultural, linguistic, sexual, or otherwise).

Part of the challenge of engaging in an intellectual study of identity is also being willing and able to let go of preconceptions in the struggle to see we may be able to learn or know part of the story, but never the whole story, partially because, following historian Joan Scott's brilliant exegesis, experience is not communicable.

If indeed experience is not communicable, then how do we understand how experience helps guide and shape our worlds, as surely it must? This is part of the task we shall be undertaking this semester.