—Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference, 7
All three of our texts for Friday consider the value of identity politics for feminist and queer projects. The underlying practical and theoretical concern for all three is something that we've been dealing with all semester: what is it like to be a self in a world of other selves? That question is only as abstract as it is to be you; you'll think most clearly about these texts if you make the effort to keep their theoretical flights in contact with the ground beneath your feet.
A related concern in these texts, about the relation of the personal to the political, the private to the public, anticipates the discussions of the public sphere that we'll look at next week.
"Identity" occupies a slightly different conceptual space for each writer, so it will help to keep in mind the common sense of Saussure & Lacan's claim that we know the meaning of a word only through its relations of likeness and difference to other words. For Brown, for example, "subjectivity" is a synonym for identity, while for Halperin the two terms are opposed. So a basic question for all three texts concerns how the author defines identity in relation to other key terms.
Diana Fuss, from Essentially Speaking (1989)
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| Diana Fuss |
This is possible because she sees both views, in a Foucauldian manner, as discursive strategies rather than competing truths. Foucault wishes to shift our attention away from discovering the truth of sex and towards questioning how the search for that truth serves other ends; similarly, Fuss wants us to ask about the uses of constructionism and essentialism for particular purposes before we make political judgments about the either view:
As subsequent chapters will more forcefully suggest, the radicality or conservatism of essentialism depends, to a significant degree, on who is utilizing it, how it is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated. (20)Her chapter on identity politics in gay and lesbian theory seeks to save 'identity' as a political category by "re-politicizing identity politics" (102). What does she mean by this apparently paradoxical phrase? How did identity politics get unpolitical, and how should gay identity be theorized for political purposes? What strengths and weakness does she identify in essentialist and constructionist theories of gay and lesbian identity?
"Postmodern Exposures, Feminist Hesitations," from States of Injury (1995)
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| Wendy Brown |
Like Fuss, Brown deals here with objections to poststructuralist theory that claim that it's politically disabling insofar as it destabilizes the identities on which left politics, and feminist politics in particular, has often been based.
It's useful in reading her essays to take a cue from her title and keep an eye out for the keywords "hesitation" and "exposure." What does postmodernism "expose"? What causes feminists to "hesitate"?
One of her first moves in the essay is to distinguish postmodernity, a set of historical conditions, from postmodernism, the body of theory that attempts to respond to those conditions. Throughout the essay, Brown uses "modernism" to mean something like "post-Enlightenment," so that it encompasses nineteenth-century liberalism as well as the thought of Marx; that use of "modernism" is of course different than the one established in literary studies, where modernism refers to stylistic experimentation in the first half of the twentieth century. One of Brown's questions about political "modernism" is whether it adequately responds to postmodern historical conditions.
Brown uses the term "morality" in a somewhat peculiar way in this essay: morality, as Brown uses the term, is a way of thinking about ethics and politics in terms of truth, and so morality is in a relationship of tension with politics on her view. Yet this doesn't mean that she's giving up on the ethical potential of politics: this is clear when, for example, she talks about the politics she envisions as "amoral contests about the just and the good" (45). It's important to understand why such a phrase isn't just a contradiction in terms for Brown; what's so bad about "morality," which she understands in agreement with Nietzsche and against Marx (see esp. 44)?
Since Brown doesn't in the end believe that identity is useful for politics, it's also important to grasp the alternative she proposes. She's very much not, for example, arguing that women should somehow just ignore their status as women for political purposes and speak as unmarked, falsely universalized 'human beings'. "Dispensing with the unified subject," she argues, "does not mean ceasing to be able to speak about our experiences as women" (40). So what difference does it make?
David Halperin, from How to Be Gay (2012)
All my life, I’ve been told that I have no idea
how to be gay.
—How to Be Gay, 35
Before How
to Be Gay was a book, it was a college course, and as soon as it was a
course, it was a scandal. A student at the University of Michigan,
where Halperin teaches, forwarded a copy of the course title (How to Be Gay:
Male Homosexuality and Initiation) and description to the conservative National Review, which published the material on its website
without further comment. This was enough to bring down a storm of angry emails
on both Halperin and the university.
—How to Be Gay, 35
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| David Halperin |
Of course, much of the controversy depended on a
thoughtlessly straight reading of what Halperin had meant to be a
thought-provoking title for the course (and on ignoring the course description
that explained it). A course on “how to be gay” provided a perfect sound bite
for anyone eager to point to academic liberals ‘recruiting’ malleable
undergraduates into the gay ‘lifestyle’ and so forth. Only a bit less
surprisingly, the course title provoked some outrage from gays, and especially
gay men who, in some ways like Halperin himself when he was younger, strongly
identified as masculine and wanted nothing to do with the queer, campy culture
that his course was investigating. A gay newspaper in Sydney printed Halperin's course description shortly after the National Review under a satirical cartoon of a professor teaching his students how to properly recite Bette Davis's final line, a classic object of gay camp affection, from the following scene in Beyond the Forest (1949):
The line was repeated, more famously, by Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); part of the joke here is that Taylor's character is too drunk to remember the scene properly, and so confuses it with other iconic Bette Davis scenes in the camp canon:
Repeat after me, class: "What a dump!"
The cartoon, which Halperin discusses in his book, was interesting for both recognizing and disavowing the sort of thing that would belong in Halperin's course. And isn’t a course about how to be gay, the paper's satire implied, just propounding the very stereotypes that gay men had worked so hard to overcome since Stonewall? And yet only someone already familiar with the culture satirized in the cartoon would be able to laugh at it.
The line was repeated, more famously, by Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); part of the joke here is that Taylor's character is too drunk to remember the scene properly, and so confuses it with other iconic Bette Davis scenes in the camp canon:
Repeat after me, class: "What a dump!"
The cartoon, which Halperin discusses in his book, was interesting for both recognizing and disavowing the sort of thing that would belong in Halperin's course. And isn’t a course about how to be gay, the paper's satire implied, just propounding the very stereotypes that gay men had worked so hard to overcome since Stonewall? And yet only someone already familiar with the culture satirized in the cartoon would be able to laugh at it.
Halperin had come to this sort of gay culture
as an outsider himself, though, and his interest lay not in arguing that (for example) Joan
Crawford’s status as a gay male icon reflected some gay male essence, but
rather in discovering how and why gay male sensibility in the 20th
century had attached itself to her (or Bette Davis or Judy Garland or
Volkswagon Golfs or Broadway musicals). And if Halperin could learn this, he
could teach it, at least to the extent that any other sensibility (Renaissance,
Victorian, modernist, etc etc) could be taught. “How to Be Gay” would initiate
students not into gay male sexuality—a tall order for women and straight men,
to be sure—but into gay male culture, as it had been shaped by the history of
gay men in the 20th century. In that sense, you can learn to be gay even without being gay, and even if you are gay, gay culture is something you
have to learn (and can remain free to embrace or not).
In the brief selection we’re reading, Halperin
sees his project as a turn away from the “identity politics” that have shaped
discourse by and about queers over the past couple of decades. His concerns here seem to me resonant with (though
not identical to) the critique of gay aspirations to ‘normality’ that we’ve
seen authors including Rubin, Halberstam and Bersani up to this point. Indeed,
Halperin’s book is an implicit critique of, among other important scholars, David
Halperin. You might have noticed Bersani’s passing reference, in “The Gay
Absence,” to a passage from Halperin’s One
Hundred Years of Sexuality that we looked at earlier this semester in
connection with Foucault; Bersani worries that Halperin’s comparison of sexual
to dietary preference, for its erudite hilarity, is an instance of “de-gaying,”
of erasing the specificity of gay sexuality:
...it is not immediately evident that differences in sexual preference are by their very nature more revealing about the temperament than, for example, differences in dietary preference. And yet, it would never occur to us to refer a person’s dietary object-choice to some innate, characterological disposition or to see in his or her strongly expressed and even unvarying preference for the white meat of chicken the symptom of a profound psychophysical orientation, leading us to identify him or her in contexts quite removed from the eating of food as, say…a “pectoriphage” or a “stethovore.” (Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 26-7; cf. Bersani, "The Gay Absence," 56)In light of that statement, the following passage from our selection in How to Be Gay surely marks a reorientation:
The ultimate effect [of identity politics] has been to imply that the spectrum of minority identities is no more shocking or offensive than a banquet of ethnic cuisine at an international food festival: a smorgasbord of delectable but insignificant and meaningless variations, open to all... Stepping back from the details of queer life, we take shelter in inoffensive generalities. (72)Yet Halperin's response to the bland reduction of gay specificity, while akin in some ways to Bersani's--Halperin echoes Bersani's valuation of "anticommunitarian" queerness when he calls gay subjectivity "anti-social" (80)--also has a very different content and tone--and we might discuss those differences if they interest you.
This week I thoroughly enjoyed reading Diana Fuss’ The Question of Identity Politics. Although I found it difficult to understand some of her arguments, the overall picture of what she was saying definitely resonated. One piece that I found difficult to understand was when she stated, “This tension between the notions of ‘developing’ an identity and ‘finding’ an identity points to a more general confusion over the very definition of ‘identity’ and over the precise significance of ‘lesbian’”(Fuss 100). My overall question is, what really is the difference she wants us to see in “finding” versus “identifying.”
ReplyDeleteAnother part of her argument that I thoroughly enjoyed was her view on “the personal is the political” (Fuss 101). She posits, “While I do believe that living as a gay or lesbian person in a postindustrial heterosexist society has certain political effects (whether I wish my sexuality to be so politically invested or not), I also believe that simply being gay or lesbian is not sufficient to constitute political activism” (Fuss 101). This leads her to the point of “one can be engaged in political praxis without ever leaving the confines of the bedroom” (Fuss 101). Overall I would definitely like to discuss this point, because although it makes sense, it is rather harsh and brings about the connotation of anger.
As with Kristen, I enjoyed reading Diana Fuss' The Question of Identity Politics. I also want to point to a similar area that Kristen points to in our reading on page 101. She says "the personal, I argues, is not political." This is an interesting reversal of the typical feminist motto, "the personal is political." What I think Fuss is trying to get at here is the fact that the personal should not always be political, that the government should not be invested in such personal matters as sexual identity. Fuss goes on to continue to say that "challenging the reduction of the political to the personal is the first step towards re-assessing and re-politizing 'identity politics'" (102). What I think Fuss is trying to get at hear is that we need to remove the personal from the political by making 'identity politics' a political issue to begin with. Our identity shouldn't have to be a political issue, even though it often becomes one. The personal should be removes from the political, and we need to politicize this very idea to make it happen. Even here, I am getting tongue-tied trying to explain this concept! Hopefully we can all hash it out more in class!
ReplyDeleteOne point I was particularly interested in with Halperin's "How to be Gay" was how he identified certain emotions with the gay identity and the gay subjectivity or sexuality. During the devastation of HIV/AIDS, Halperin writes that the emotions of grief and anger "expressed not individual sensibility but the personal experience of collective devastation. The more personal they were, the more exemplary they could come to seem--exemplary of gay men's suffering, loss, and victimization as a group" (79). However, there were "bad" gay emotions, too. Such emotions as narcissism, shame, and self-loathing--unlike grief and anger--were "merely personal, in the sense that they expressed not group identity but individual feelings" (79).
ReplyDeleteHalperin further writes, "The point [of turning grief into anger, mourning into militancy] was to express our personal and collective insistence that HIV/AIDS was a public health catastrophe, [...] not the working out of the inner logic of the male homosexuality itself" (80). In order to do this, the gay community had to rid itself of the "bad" emotions, thus (nearly) eliminating the presence of the gay subjectivity.
I guess my question would be: How exactly are the above emotions distinguished by identity and subjectivity? Really, how are grief and anger not subjective? Halperin does explain his reasoning, but I think I'm struggling with how he views these emotions in comparison to how I typically perceive them. Either way, I'm looking forward to discussing Halperin's text in class.
I'm a little embarrassed (and therefore kind of being a hipster) by being so unoriginal with the text that I was most fascinated by, but I also really enjoyed Fuss' "Question of Identity Politics." On page 98, Fuss explores the difference between gay men and lesbians, both of whom are grouped under the umbrella term “homosexual”. She acknowledges the “adversarial relation” between gays and lesbians, continuing to self-awaredly generalize that “current lesbian theory is less willing to question or to part with the idea of a ‘lesbian essence’ and an identity politics based on this shared essence…then the stronger lesbian endorsement of identity and identity politics may well indicate that lesbians inhabit a more precarious and less secure subject position than gay men” (98). I don’t know if I should have considered this before, but I had never thought about the difference between male homosexuality and female homosexuality; it’s all come down to something black and white for me as same-sex desire. And essentially, I don’t believe that Fuss would argue with me there; she posits that the differentiation and segregation caused by identity politics.
ReplyDeleteThis Thanksgiving a family friend asserted that she “just LOVED gay men”. After regrouping (her comment had come out of absolutely nowhere) various members around the table questioned her reasons. She came back with the completely obvious reasons that they give great fashion advice and they’re great listeners. But the thing is, gay men have individual identities which I believe are much more valid than their collective or political identities. When one says that she loves an entire group of people, her perception of said group should be questioned.
Just like everyone else, I am intrigued by the idea of identity politics. I found the piece by Fuss incredibly interesting, though a little difficult.
ReplyDeleteI was recently discussing an idea similar to this the other day with a few friends while watching Harry Potter. One of my friends' boyfriends had to throw in the "you know Dumbledore is gay, right?" I'm about to go all Harry Potter nerd right now, but 1) What am I supposed to do with that comment? Is that supposed to make me love Dumbley any less? 2) Why does it matter? If a character is presumably straight, no one brings it up or includes that in their analysis of said character. However, if a character is gay, it becomes the most important part of their identity. Who is to say that all people who are homosexual have certain unifying characteristics, or that being gay necessarily changes who they are as a person? I think that, although Fuss is not talking about this specifically, she would definitely have a lot to say about this.
I thought Halperin's argument that gay pride and social justice can act as a form of suppression was really interesting, because I've never thought about it like that before. He says on page 71 that "for all its undeniable benefits, gay pride is now preventing us from knowing ourselves." In their effort to promote homosexuality as something socially acceptable, they seem to have reduced gayness to a single faceted identity. It seems like we'd been making progress with these kinds of issues, if slowly, but here it seems more like a "one step forward, two steps back" kind of situation. This is the first time I've come across an argument like this, so it was interesting to see a different point of view to the normal social justice.
ReplyDelete