| Some of these are in pretty bad shape, but I thought
they'd be better than nothing. Introductory lecture >>What does it mean to be gay/lesbian? [If there's time: >>Is being gay or being lesbian the same as being homosexual?] Shively and DeCecco and Suppe:
So we lose information when we classify someone as gay or straight. The categories aren't a perfect fit onto reality--far from it. >>How important is it to you (to people in our culture) to know if someone is gay or lesbian? Eve Sedgwick: Object choice:
Other features:
Again, it seems arbitrary (from a purely conceptual point of view) that we focus so much on the gender of sexual object choice rather than on these other characteristics. (Objection: sexual orientation can't be changed, while these others can be. Answer: (a) How do you know? (b) Even if that's true, why is sexual orientation so much more culturally important?) >>So these things need explaining: How we classify people's sexual orientation, and why their sexual orientation is so important. A good part of this course can be seen as looking for answers to these questions. Social history. Cultural criticism. Philosophy. Essentialism and social constructionism. Other themes: Knowledge: types, stereotypes, the closet Oppression and resistance: subcultures, strategies of resistance (transgressive reinscription, politics), double minorities Coming out, subcultures, categorization, stereotypes My coming out story. Brief history of 'coming out' This highlights two different ways we think about being gay or lesbian: It can be something internal (a state or a trait of a particular person) or it can mean being part of a certain subculture (contrast MSMs, etc.). We talked about both of these yesterday, mostly focusing on the first one. Define subculture, social grouping, stigmatization/marginalization, oppression. Existence of gay male subculture and lesbian subculture. How are subcultures defined/maintained? Role of stigmatization. Role of power relations in categorization/grouping of people. Representations. Stereotypes. Social, epistemic, ontological issues get all mixed up. Dyer: Chapter 1 "How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation." Representation always uses the "codes and conventions of the available cultural forms of presentation." These codes and conventions restrict what can be said, but they also make it possible to say anything at all. Cultural forms do not have single, determinate meanings--"people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them." "What is re-presented in representation is not directly reality itself but other representations." Representations have real consequences for how people are treated, what people can do. Are the categories "lesbian" and "gay man" given by reality? Maybe not. But they certainly affect those who see themselves, and/or are seen by others, as falling within those categories. A representation constitutes the very social grouping that it re-presents. There are real differences in skin color, genital structure, sexual practices--but representation is the organization of those differences into comprehensibilty. Everyone belongs to social groupings, many of them: often our social groupings are "antagonistic to one another or at the least implying very different accesses to power." Chapter 3: Stereotypes Lippman: Stereotypes
Ordering: Stereotypes are one way we order the vast amount of information we take in. This process is necessary to human life--and stereotypes are a necessary part of it. (Partial and unlimited knowledge, but not necessarily untrue.) Problems: (1) The ordering is likely to be taken as absolute. The ordering then becomes fixed and limits new learning from reality. (2) The ordering process is greatly affected by power relations in society. Short cut: Stereotypes express a lot of information very economically. Reference: Expression of values: Who is the "we" who sets the values? Consensus invoked by steretypes--more apparent than real. Stereotypes enforce boundaries: insisting on the otherness of women and men, e.g. "The role of stereotypes is to make visible the invisble, so that there is no danger of it creeping up on us unawares; and to make fast, firm and separate what is in reality fluid and much closer to the norm than the dominant value system cares to admit." Delany: Being black: shade of skin, Joel being raised by white mother. Coming out: first sexual experience? Entering gay society? Identities--necessarily reductive. You take on an identity to be like someone else. Categories and gay/lesbian history Chauncey: What are some examples of stereotypes and representations of homosexuality and the gay world in the time period he discusses? How do these representations illustrate the role of stereotypes in drawing boundaries/demarcating social norms? Who is creating and maintaining these representations? Why do they change? Are their meanings universal across social groupings? Trope of inversion. Organization of sexuality according to gender performance vs. gender of sexual object choice. Instabilities and anxieties in each system of organization? Is "the closet" viable in the first system? Discuss historical details. What surprised you most? What was most important? What were some institutions of the gay world in New York? What was the relationship of this world to the straight world? How did that relationship change over the time covered by Chauncey (1890-1940)? Historical themes: (from Chauncey and Kennedy and Davis) Three myths of pre-Stonewall gay life: 1. Myth of isolation 2. Myth of invisibility 3. Myth of internalization The closet combines all three of these myths. But many gay men spoke, not of the closet, but of the gay world. The gay world was not primarily a middle- or upper-class phenomenon, so it wasn't as visible to historians. The prewar gay world has been obscured by the postwar gay world. Hetero/homosexual binarism a recent creation. Only started achieving wide currency in the 1930s. Conceptualizations of sexuality and changes in these conceptualizations are reflected in the terminology documented by Chauncey. Emergence of "gay" (consolidation of categories of fairy, queer, and trade) had two stages: (1) Combination of fairy and queer-classification based on object choice rather than gender status. (2) Disappearance of trade category. Gay world as subculture: its relationship to the dominant culture defined the parameters of its existence.
End of the (19th) century: a crisis in the definition of middle-class masculinity.
Heterosexuality emerges
How does this apply to what Kennedy and Davis say about the working-class lesbian community in Buffalo? They write that the women they interviewed identified as butch or fem, not lesbian. Does butch/fem constitute a different classificatory system than our current homo/hetero binarism? Essentialism and social constructionism about sexual orientation Were the fairies gay? The queers? Trade? Wolves and punks? Two questions
This gets us into Stein's article. Stein: Natural kind/social kind. [The idea that certain catefories are given by nature goes back at least to Plato and Aristotle. Essential properties are necessary to members of that kind. Essence is the set of essential properties. Accidents/accidental properties are properties that are not essential to members of that kind. Natural kinds were originally defined in terms of essences: a natural kind is a kind such that, if a thing is a member of it, that thing is necessarily a member of it. But Stein's definition is less controversial: a category that plays an important role in correct scientific laws and explanations. ] Empty kinds: phogiston. Natural human kinds, social human kinds, empty human kinds. Essentialism about sexual orientation defined in terms of natural human kinds. Essentialism vs. social constructionism is not the same as the nature vs. nurture quagmire. For one thing, genes and environment both affect virtually every trait we have, although to differing extents. For another thing, the two distinctions are not logically equivalent: ~(natural kind -> genetic cause) but: genetic cause -> natural kind thus: genetic cause -> ~social constructionism
Constructionism challenges us to consider whether our categories are really natural kinds. Stein presents only the metaphysical level of the debate. There is also a historiographical issue of whether current categories of sexual orientation are properly applied to past cultures (and contemporary, alien cultures). And even if essentialism (in Stein's sense) is correct, we might learn more about other cultures by suspending our categories for a while and inquiring into theirs. Flavors of essentialism and their opposites Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with questions of ultimate reality: What are the fundamental constituents of reality? What are the fundamental kinds of things that exist? Why is does anything exist at all? There is a metaphysical controversy over essentialism vs. anti-essentialism: Do things have essences (remember what they are?) or do we just speak of things as having essences when in reality they don't? Within cultural studies , and more specifically gender studies and queer theory, there are a couple of issues that fall under the heading of essentialism vs. social constructionism about sexual orientation. Neither of these questions necessarily presupposes an answer to the metaphysical controversy over essentialism, although if you're an essentialist in queer theory you have to be a metaphysical essentialist as well. And many social constructionists in queer theory are metaphysical anti-essentialists because both of these positions are espoused by leading proponents of social constructionism, including Foucault. The queer theory questions are: (1) The metaphysical question: Are the current categories of homo- and heterosexual natural human kinds (essentialism) or social human kinds (social constructionism)? (2) The historiographical question: Is it appropriate to apply categories like "gay" and "straight" to figures in the past or in non-Western cultures? Finally, although Dollimore is a social constructionist, the issue of essentialism that animates Sexual Dissidence is not the issue of essentialism vs. social construction of sexuality. Instead, it is the question of personal identity or selfhood : This again is framed in terms of essentialism vs. anti-essentialism : Is there a real self (do people have an authentic or true or essential nature) or not? If you are an essentialist about personal identity, you have to be a metaphysical essentialist. But you can be an anti-essentialist about the self and still be an essentialist about less complicated things like the ultimate components of reality. Dollimore is an anti-essentialist both about the self and about metaphysical questions generally. Most social constructionists are anti-essentialists about the self, but you can formulate a version of social constructionism that is compatible with essentialism about the self. Essentialism about the self / transgressive reinscription authenticity/inauthenticity story of lone walks in Provo depends on notion of an authentic/essential self importance in 20th-c culture (Dollimore 39) "Coming out" framed in terms of ending (self)deception, acknowledging one's true self. But if there is no self, what is the status of being gay/lesbian? D. talks about essentialist naturalization of homosexuality as a political strategy. Gide's Corydon. And anti-essentialist critique of the self as a strategy: Wilde's radical re-valuing of the oppressive values of the dominant culture. Does essentialism's acceptance of the metaphysics that create the categories of oppression mean that it necessarily perpetuates that oppression? That it necessarily reproduces the same categories? (D 50) Which is a more effective strategy of resistance? Dollimore: A ruling morality contains the seeds of its own instabilities. (Subversion and containment.) Desire is constructed. So wild, perverse desires are never completely free of the system that spawned them, and the system is usually good at containing them. Change takes a long time. But there is a way of challenging hegemonic oppression that does not presuppose radical freedom, an authentic self: transgressive reinscription. "The proximate is often constructed as other, and in a process which facilitates displacement. But the proximate is also what enables a tracking-back of the 'other' into the 'same'. I call this transgressive reinscription, which, also provisionally, may be regarded as the return of the repressed and/or the suppressed and/or the displaced via the proximate. If the perverse dynamic generates internal instabilities within repressive norms, reinscription denotes an anti-essentialist, transgressive agency which might intensify those instabilities, turning them against the norms." (33) In other words: Norms have already been "inscribed." By our actions, we are constantly reinscribing them. Transgressive reinscription is acting with awareness of existing norms, but reinscribing them in ways that turn the norms against themselves. Transgressive reinscription takes forms that are like what is normal, but are not normal--and by this combination of proximity and difference call into question the oppressive norms. Transgressive reinscription: A strategy of resistance that does not presuppose a radically free, essential self, but recognizes the constructed nature of desire. The use of existing cultural norms to highlight and intensify the instability in those norms, to show the faultlines and the human (all too human) origins of those norms (cultural rules, practices), to effect a change in those norms that will not be diminished by being subject to the cycle of subversion and containment. Marlene Dietrich Drag and butch/femme as T.R.? Gay style and camp Dollimore argues that if you're an essentialist about self, you must in the end see resistance to the norms of the dominant culture as impossible: The standard is too high; any resistance ends up being co-opted by the dominant culture in the cycle of subversion and containment. In a sense, containment is only possible because the self is constructed, not essential: If the self is constructed, even desire is constructed (remember social constructionism about sexuality), and so desire is never entirely free of the dominant culture that constructed it, no matter how wild and perverse it may be. But according to Dollimore, the idea that the only effective resistance is the pure resistance of an autonomous, authentic self is silly. That's too high a standard. You can still have effective resistance while recognizing that the self is constructed, that desire is constructed. One method of such resistance, as we noted, is transgressive reinscription. Transgressive reinscription is the use of the dominant culture's norms in ways that are slightly off--in ways that call the norms themselves into question. Transgressive reinscription gets its power from its proximity to the original norms--think here of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, dressing and behaving in an impeccably masculine manner, yet completely transgressing the expected norms for women. And Dollimore recognizes that transgressive reinscription will never be a completely effective form of resistance--nothing is. But it is resistance nevertheless, and a form of resistance that has played a prominent role in gay and lesbian life. Why is transgressive reinscription such a prominent feature of the gay and lesbian subcultures? There are at least two reasons. First, gays and lesbians are quite proximate to straights--they are usually raised in straight homes, they learn gender and sexual roles from the dominant culture, and they can pass for straight if need be. But straight society has constructed them as radically other, mostly in an effort to maintain the "integrity" or "purity" of supposedly straight institutions and norms (think of the Boy Scouts, the military, the Catholic priesthood, the nuclear family). This puts them in the perfect position to make use of the cultural codes of the dominant culture, but in a way that destabilizes those norms. Dollimore writes: The proximate is often constructed as other, and in a process which facilitates displacement. But the proximate is also what enables a tracking-back of the 'other' into the 'same'. I call this transgressive reinscription, which, also provisionally, may be regarded as the return of the repressed and/or the suppressed and/or the displaced via the proximate. If the perverse dynamic generates internal instabilities within repressive norms, reinscription denotes an anti-essentialist, transgressive agency which might intensify those instabilities, turning them against the norms. (p. 33) Another reason why transgressive reinscription is a big part of gay and lesbian culture is that gays and lesbians are generally very good at reading and manipulating cultural codes. I would say that gays and lesbians pick up these skills because we are outsiders--we have to pay conscious attention to the codes of straight society because it's not really our society. The closet has played a role here, too, by forcing expressions of homosexuality underground, into sophisticated forms that use straight cultural codes to carry queer messages. Think here of all the examples from The Celluloid Closet. A couple of obvious instances of transgressive reinscription are butch/femme in the lesbian community and drag in the gay male community. Both use gender roles that have been defined by straight society in ways that end up calling these gender roles into question. Note the element of dressing up in both butch/femme and drag--supporting the idea of transgressive reinscription as an activity that plays with surfaces and appearances, that doesn't rely on claims of authenticity for its subversive force. Butch/femme and drag, as well as the "nellie queen," are part of what Dyer calls the "in-betweenism" type. This type is based on the old trope of homosexuals as "inverts" or the "third sex," neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine. In-betweenism is not the only representation or typification of homosexuality that can be seen as transgressive reinscription. The macho type approaches societal expectations about masculinity from the opposite direction of drag--it exaggerates masculinity. Dyer writes, "whereas in-betweenism is predominantly conceptualized in relation to biological androgyny, macho is far more clearly the conscious deployment of signs of masculinity. In this way macho is close to the other predominant forms of gay male ghetto culture, camp and drag" (42). The sad young man is a type that falls between boyhood and manhood. His sadness echoes the posture of Christ on the cross, as well as St. Sebastian and other Christian martyrs. Finally, lesbian feminism of the kind examined by Dyer represents femininity as an almost magical quality, tied to tropes of the earth, reproduction, the mystery of life, and nature. In a reversal related to André Gide's arguments in Corydon , these images present lesbianism, traditionally regarded as a perversion, as profoundly natural. Something to pay attention to in Dyer's article is the complexity of the gay types he discusses. Types, remember, have at least two sides--how they appear to the dominant culture, and how they appear to the subculture--and many functions--political, social, practical, textual. Types are produced by complex processes that draw on the codes of the dominant culture and the subculture. A question worth asking at this point is, Is there such a thing as gay style? Susan Sontag argues for the importance of gay sensibility to modern culture. "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony" ("Notes on Camp" 290). Her nomination for a representative homosexual sensibility is camp. (I don't think she argues that camp is THE gay style, just that it has a special connection to homosexuality, that the two are especially compatible.) Sontag makes a lot of claims about camp--it's a complicated subject, and she doesn't claim to be able to give a neat definition of it. Here are a few important characteristics of camp in Sontag's account:
With all the resonances between Sontag's analysis of camp and what Dollimore calls Oscar Wilde's postmodern, anti-essentialist aestheticism, it's no wonder that Sontag dedicated her "Notes on Camp" to Wilde. So is camp a (or the) gay style? Dollimore doesn't think so. For one thing, for there to be a single gay style, there would have to be an essence of gayness, and we've seen what Dollimore thinks of essences in general. Rather, camp is a contingent feature of the gay subculture. But why it's a feature of the gay subculture needs explaining. Transgressive reinscription, says Dollimore, is always ambivalent--because, in a way, it strengthens the norms it is transgressing. Again, think of butch/femme, drag, the gay male "macho" style. See Dollimore's excellent discussion of the macho style, pp. 321-22. Another element here is the diversity within gay and lesbian subcultures--the multiplicity of types, the queens, macho men, sad young men, and others in gay male subculture (and the various types in the lesbian milieu). Dollimore: And if those subcultures discredit any notion of an essential or unitary gay desire, they also constitute a crucial enabling condition of transgressive reinscription. More than that, they help constitute it. This is why transgressive reinscription should not be understood in terms of discrete transgressive acts which "succeed" or "fail" in some immediate sense. Reinscription is an oppositional practice which is also a perspective and language (sensibility?) constantly interpreting and re-presenting all sections of a culture including its dominant and subordinate fractions, its conventional (e.g. heterosexual) as well as deviant (e.g. homosexual) identities. (322) Camp, as Sontag presents it, is a coalescing of what Dollimore calls transgressive reinscription into a sensibility. As such, camp shares the ambivalence of transgressive reinscription. Camp reinforces the norms of beauty that it subverts, as well as the gender roles that it plays with. Camp also claims to be apolitical, a claim that can represent a very political abdication of control and responsibility. Return to main menu |