Identity Politics: Diana Fuss, Wendy Brown, David Halperin

...deconstruction introduces a fissure between "woman" as a concept that can never be a proper name for all women and "feminism" as a movement that must--but cannot--consider "woman" as an epistemological ground for action.
     —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)

Diana Fuss

The two essays that we're reading by Fuss make an intervention in the debates about constructionism versus essentialism that we've seen in various forms this semester. On a theoretical level, Fuss makes a case that constructionism and essentialism should be seen not as opposite but rather as interdependent,even in so adamantly constructionist a thinker as Lacan.


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)

Wendy Brown

Wendy Brown is a political and not a literary theorist, and so she draws here on a somewhat different set of sources than we've seen in other works. Pay particular attention to her discussion of Butler and Seyla Benhabib, which will come up again in Amanda Anderson's essay next week.

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

David Halperin

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.

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.

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 20^th 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 20^th 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.

Camp (Wilde, Sontag, Bersani, Sedgwick)

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
     —Oscar Wilde

One must have a heart of stone to read The Ballad of Reading Gaol without laughing.
     —Gore Vidal

What [Camp] does is find success in certain passionate failures. ... The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful...
     —Susan Sontag

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "camp" as "ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals," and simply lists the word's etymology as "obscure." The first use cited is from 1909, and remarks that the word describes "actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis" and is "used chiefly by persons of exceptional want of character." 

Parmigianino, Madonna with
the Long Neck (c. 1535). Sontag
and others cite mannerist paintings
like this one, which exaggerate,
both physically and emotionally,
features of High Renaissance art,
as examples of camp sensibility
avant la lettre.

The O.E.D.'s pile of adjectives suggests something of the difficulty of defining the term, which more properly names an aesthetic relation (between audience and object) than a characteristic of the object in itself: what I take to be camp might be serious for you, and vice versa. And that's because we might judge differently what counts as "exaggerated" or "affected"--the first set of adjectives in the O.E.D. definition all name judgments, subjective but not arbitrary, about what counts as a natural or proportional response.

The claim in that first, 1909 use indicates a further problem: to use the word is to classify not only an object, but yourself. And as camp evolved into an aesthetic category, it named objects recognizable as examples of camp primarily to a (usually gay male) subculture. In "Notes on Camp" (1964; collected in Against Interpretation), Susan Sontag describes it as "esoteric...something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. ... To talk about camp is therefore to betray it." Sontag's essay, interspersed with quotations from Wilde, goes on to list a number of characteristics consonant with the O.E.D. definition: camp art values artifice and exaggeration (including attenuation); it tends to androgyny; it is "often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content"; it is citational, "sees everything in quotation marks." But she also goes a bit further: camp taste is "anti-serious," and if it's ironic, it's also "a kind of love... Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying... Camp is a tender feeling." Camp seems to lead to oxymorons: affectionate irony, loving detachment, vulnerable flaunting (or flaunted vulnerability), successful failure, glamorous abjection (hte latter phrase is Halperin's). Camp is so bad it's good. But good for whom?

Sontag also calls camp "apolitical," and I suppose that's not altogether wrong. But her remark that "to talk about camp is...to betray it" also sounds eerily like the first rule of Fight Club, and in the way it makes contestable claims about what's exaggerated, camp is often polemical if not political (see the "Storm is Brewing" video below). We've seen Bersani and Butler disagree about the extent to which the drag performances of Paris is Burning count as political, and indeed that seems like a typical argument to have about camp aesthetics. Yet if their argument seems a bit stalled, it's perhaps because they're both thinking about what counts as political in terms of camp's effects on mainstream (non-camp) culture. Is drag subversive?  If that's a question about what consequences the Harlem balls had on, say, homophobia during the '80s, then the answer is perhaps no. But then that's not really who the performances were for. 

Camp is good for those who love it, whatever else it is. Sontag writes that "camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain personal objects and styles," and Sedgwick, in her lovely paragraph on reparation, refines on this claim: 

The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as...the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance. ("Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," 149-50). 

Sontag (at least in that last quote) and Sedgwick see camp, and culture more broadly, from the point of view of those who practice it, whether as performers or spectators; for the practitioner of culture, on this view, culture is first of all a form of sustenance, of nourishment. (In Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory, the first object to provoke a reparative impulse is the mother's breast). If the available culture isn't sustaining for you, if it's hard to find (or lose) yourself seriously, through the "normal" identifications, in Titanic or Leave it to Beaver, you might have to do a bit of cultural work (as creator or spectator) to make it so.

Joseph Cornell, Box with bird's
nest and oak galls

That last sentence might explain any creative, imaginative work; perhaps what distinguishes camp from other forms of creativity is its avowedly heterogeneous artifice and its simultaneous refusal to behave as if its object is insufficient. There can be something uncanny in this, rather as it may seem strange (if you're not a bird) that a bird isn't all that bothered by the still visible bits of different materials that make up its nest. Camp is a mess, and it's home. What a dump!

David Halperin, for whom camp is a major topic throughout How to Be Gay, describes camp's way of finding nourishment in a particularly powerful way: "camp works to drain suffering of the pain that it also does not deny" (187, Halperin's italics). The example he has most proximately in mind is a group of gay men who, in the midst of the AIDS crisis, paraded as Italian widows dressed in traditional mourning; this was a way, Halperin argues, to both claim and quote (in that they're not trying to pass as widows) a public acknowledgment of grief. 

His idea also lets us understand the quotations from Wilde and Vidal that I've taken as epigraphs: Wilde here is referring to the highly sentimentalized death of a child in a Dickens novel, but what's curious (and usually overlooked) about his remark is that he takes laughter as a sign not of detachment or indifference, but of sensitivity--of not having a hard heart. It's hard to say whether that laughter is devoid of or hysterically oversaturated with sympathy, not so much a mockery of tears as a defense against them. That Wilde, after his trial, abandoned his irony in favor of the passionate sincerity--for Vidal, the Dickensian sentimentality--of his late poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," tends to suggest the latter. 

As in most discussions of aesthetics, examples are probably worth more here than definitions. So here are a few. Sontag divides camp into two kinds: the "naive" or "pure" form, in which an object intended in earnest is taken otherwise, and deliberate camp (she finds the latter less satisfying): "Camp is either wholly naive or wholly conscious." The starkness of that either/or, though, seems to belie the both/and experience of camp (e.g., camp as both ironic and affectionate) that comes out elsewhere in Sontag's essay. With any given example and any given beholder, the question is really about what the beholder is conscious of, what the camp work of art is conscious (or unconscious) of. Of the examples below, it seems to me hard to classify neatly as wholly naive or wholly conscious either the scene from Mildred Pierce or the video by Psy--each calls forth a more mixed experience of identification and estrangement than those categories admit. Nonetheless, 'naive' and 'conscious' are schematically useful:

A lot of the films that have become camp objects for gay men are of the naive kind, popular with 'straight' audiences in their time but taken up in a different spirit by gay audiences. A central example for Halperin of the "glamorous abjection" of camp is the performance of Joan Crawford (the mother in the following clip) in Mildred Pierce (1945)--Halperin first became aware of this scene when he found himself puzzled at a boyfriend who enjoyed rehearsing Crawford's lines:

A more recent example of wholly unintended camp (and of paranoia, too) might be the following advertisement from 2009:

And of course if it's camp day, it's...

A friend of mine who knows the subject better than I do calls the following video "the Citizen Kane of camp"--wait for the ninjas before you judge:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic example of deliberate camp:

And I'm tempted to say that "Gangnam Style," with its at once affectionate and citational relation to hip-hop and other popular cultures, is a pretty good recent example of campy appeal--the American obsession with the video seems like a way of winking back at Psy's wink at an American genre. It's cultural (rather than gender) drag in both directions, perhaps--Psy does hip-hop in drag, and Americans have been doing Psy in drag:

                                             


Literarily, perhaps the surest example of camp that I can point to is the beginning of the novel that gave rise to the gothic as a genre, Horace Walpole's relentlessly oedipal Castle of Otranto (1767):

Young Conrad's birthday was fixed for his espousals. The company was assembled in the chapel of the castle, and everything ready for beginning the divine office, when Conrad himself was missing. Manfred, impatient of the least delay, and who had not observed his son retire, dispatched one of his attendants to summon the young prince. The servant, who had not staid long enough to have crossed the court to Conrad's apartment, came running back breathless, in a frantic manner, his eyes staring, and foaming at the mouth. He said nothing, but pointed to the court. The company were struck with terror and amazement. ... at last, after repeated questions put to him, [the servant] cried out, Oh, the helmet! the helmet! ... What are ye doing? Where is my son? cried Manfred. A volley of voices replied, Oh, my lord! the prince! the prince! the helmet! the helmet! Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily. -- But what a sight for a father's eyes! -- He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) is an example of more "conscious" camp--it would take more time than I have to figure out my own sense of how precisely that label fits it. (Sedgwick's reading of the novel in Epistemology of the Closet is a good place to see someone else think this through). In the hero's infatuation with Sibyl Vane, a beautiful actress at a very second-rate theater, there's a clear precedent for the 20th-century gay male affection for actresses in melodramas. And we see something of the camp taste for the decorative, the "additive and accretive," in the long chapter detailing Dorian's capricious infatuations with marginal and esoteric objects after Sibyl's death:

On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrys-oberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. (ch. 11; Norton, 2nd ed., 113)

It's hard, here, to find much distance between Dorian's erudition and Wilde's (though it may be significant that while Dorian is attached to gems, Wilde is attached to the words for them). 

Repairing Camp (Sedgwick and Bersani)
I think it might sound troubling, if you like Wilde, to suggest that his novel is 'camp,' and for good reason--one way the word can be used is pejoratively; I intend it to have that force with regard to the 'Storm is Gathering' ad above. It's telling, perhaps, that Bersani uses the word chiefly in a pejorative sense, not to name his own intense affection for something but to criticize someone else's excessive disproportionate investment in parody:

Heavy stuff for some silly and familiar campiness. ("The Gay Absence," 48, referring to an example of Butler's)

In short, Queer Nation complicates and enriches the social with its campy replications of given forms of the social. It does not put into question sociality itself. (75)

Bersani argues against both camp and seriousness--and this is odd given that Sontag thinks of camp as intrinsically unserious. Bersani won't take camp seriously, for the good reason that to do so would make it no longer camp--yet camp's unseriousness also, on his reading, seems to disqualify it as critically efficacious, and so Bersani turns to the apparently more radical, less naive imaginings of Gide and Genet. To require that critique "put into question sociality itself" is to set the bar admirably high for meaningful critique, and I admire Bersani's daring here. Yet I wonder if he leaps past other possibilities in his wariness not so much of campy parody, but rather of campy sentimentality.

In his discussion of the men in Paris is Burning and of Butler's account of them, Bersani writes that Butler "rather touchingly sees in the kinship in the various 'houses' ... a lesson for all of us who live outside the heterosexual family" (51). He concludes:

...the houses sustain their members 'in the face of dislocation, poverty, homelessness.' But the structures that sustain those ills are in no way threatened or subverted; here resignification is little more than a consolatory community of victims. (52, my emphasis)

It seems right here not to be consoled, if being consoled would entail obliviousness to the conditions that marginalize gay men and transsexuals. Yet it's not clear that avoiding such false consciousness requires us to believe that these men are suffering from false consciousness themselves, that they're merely victims drugged by the opiate of familial affection. The 'houses' may look camp, and camp is a mess--but it can still be a home.

At least it can on Sedgwick's reading of camp as reparative. Note the odd parallel in Bersani's passage between two quite different kinds of sustenance, of nourishment: the houses "sustain" the men, but this is of little value on his reading because the social conditions that put them there are also sustained. For Bersani, there seems to be a zero-sum game in effect here: any sustenance for a person that doesn't prevent the sustenance of poverty is just false sustenance, consolation, drug, fake food. It's impossible to see the houses as whole "objects" in themselves, in Sedgwick and Klein's sense; for Bersani, they have meaning only in relation to "sociality itself."

For Sedgwick, though, camp and other reparative practices are valuable insofar as they teach us "the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture--even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (150-151, my emphasis). Camp can be a "weak" practice without losing its value; this kind of vulnerability might be congenial at least to some moments in Bersani's own thinking about the value of powerlessness.

Perhaps the radical potential in Sedgwick's argument is to allow us to risk a kind of sentimentality in readings like this without either blindness or guilt--to find Butler's discussion of the houses "rather touching" without having to assume that it must therefore be naive or deluded. Sedgwick argues that the real problem here isn't that reparative practices are sappy and sentimental, but that we lack theoretical vocabularies to describe them in other terms (150). Passionate attachment, whether to persons or things, perhaps always has to take the risk of appearing excessive, of being unrequited by its object and unsanctioned by its community.

Rubin, "Thinking Sex," and Bersani, "The Gay Absence"

The two essays we're reading for Wednesday, by Rubin and Bersani, have a somewhat common set of opponents in thinkers who either see sex as inherently negative (dirty, vicious, etc) or who wish to avoid looking squarely at sex acts even as they write about sexuality. Their responses are quite different, however. Rubin's essay challenges the pervasively negative valuation of sex ("sex negativity") among feminists and in mainstream culture. Bersani, developing a line of argument that he began in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (1987), wishes in "The Gay Absence" (a chapter of Homos [1995]), to embrace that negativity as a theoretical resource in itself. In what follows, I'll try to give some context for Rubin's essay; a second section tries to link her essay, from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, to Thom Gunn's treatment of the themes of pleasure and danger in a section of his poem "In Time of Plague"; a final section below offers some brief thoughts on "The Gay Absence," particularly as it picks up on a wariness already present in Rubin's essay of normalizing tendencies -- what's the trouble with normal? -- in queer politics. 

Feminism and Pornography (the so-called "sex wars")

Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin is a cultural anthropologist whose dissertation, a study of 'leather' culture among gay men in San Francisco, was one of the first anthropological studies of a sexual subculture. She's best known for two essays, "The Traffic in Women," a piece of which we looked at very briefly in the context of Sedgwick's theory of homosocial relations among men, and "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."

"Thinking Sex" was written at a time of heightened conflict within the feminist movement. A considerable number of feminists, most notably Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Adrienne Rich, had begun investing their energies in anti-pornography arguments and legislation in the 1980s. Though their theoretical arguments against pornography were radical, questioning the very possibility of consensual sex in a culture of sexual violence, there was broad support in the U.S., much of it from conservatives,  for the restrictions on pornography that they saw as the first steps towards farther-reaching reform. Rubin will point out that feminists and social conservatives make strange bedfellows (2394), and this is one practical reason that she's wary of anti-porn arguments.

Her reasoning is ultimately philosophical and not simply tactical, though. We've seen Leo Bersani write appreciatively of MacKinnon and Dworkin's  analysis of sex as intrinsically violent while demurring from the anti-pornographic conclusions that they drew from it. "They have given us," he says with stunningly deadpan contrarianism, "the reasons why pornography must be multiplied and not abandoned" ("Rectum," 22). Rubin will challenge not just their conclusions but their analysis, for while Bersani would like to dissociate sex and love, Rubin is more interested in arguing that pain and differentiated roles can be parts of loving sex. 

Adrienne Rich, recall, makes a passing and somewhat pejorative reference to "whips and bondage" in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1597 and note); Rich feels that porn and S&M alike threaten the model of love that she values, "loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity" (N 1597). For Rubin, a lesbian and also a sadomasochist, such a formulation seems exclusionary; if your experiences of love and sex involve role-playing and pain, "mutuality and integrity" may appear to have no necessary relation to love, at least if they're taken to mean sameness and tenderness. What's more, if the law fails to recognize that the sexual acts you prefer (anal sex, bondage) can be consensual--see Rubin's discussion of consent on 2397-9--MacKinnon and Dworkin's critique of consent can seem oppressive rather than liberating. 

The first version of "Thinking Sex" was first delivered as a paper for a 1982 conference on sexuality at Barnard College in New York City--the conference itself was a contentious event among feminists; for more context, see the Norton introduction to Rubin's essay. There's also some brief, useful background at a website on Lesbian History created by Rubin's University of Michigan colleague Esther Newton. The essay was first published in a volume derived from the conference, entitled Pleasure and Danger (1984).

It's important to note that Rubin doesn't simply counter the often quite sophisticated arguments about why porn is bad with a broad counterclaim that 'porn is good.' What she's after is a better, more nuanced way to define (and thus combat) precisely what's unjust or oppressive in it without also colluding with anti-feminist puritanism. So in her discussion of porn, she acknowledges that the industry as it exists is "hardly a feminist utopia" and "reflects the sexism that exists in the society as a whole" (2395). This seems wry and cool-headed--but is it sufficient as critique?

The same is true for Rubin's defenses, often abundantly referenced but sketchily articulated, of practices like prostitution (and "commercial sex" more generally) that we tend to associate, and not without good reason, with violence exploitation. Her essay seems an invaluable but also at times an unsettling theoretical resource; what aspects of her argument do you find most useful or illuminating? What aspects of it would you question or challenge--are the points at which you find yourself more closely aligned with a thinker like Rich than with Rubin's position?

Pleasure and Danger

Ewan McGregor, in Trainspotting (1996, dir. Danny Boyle)

Their mind is the mind of death.

They know it, and do not know it,

and they are like me in that

(I know it, and do not know it)

and like the flow of people through this bar.

Brad and John thirst heroically together
for euphoria – for a state of ardent life

in which we could all stretch ourselves

and lose our differences. I seek
to enter their minds: am I a fool,

and they direct and right, properly

testing themselves against risk,

as a human must, and does,

or are they fools, their alert faces

mere death’s heads lighted glamorously?
     —Thom Gunn, from "In Time of Plague"



What does heroin have to do with heroism?

Gunn's "In Time of Plague" draws its power, its fierce attractiveness, from its willingness to take the risk of placing somewhat crazily self-destructive behavior on a continuum, even a level, with classical virtue. Brad and John, in 1980s San Francisco, have asked the poem's speaker to share a needle with them--the particular sort of euphoria they have in mind is heroin. Yet Gunn in this poem is attuned to how close the edge of death is to the quick of life--to how beautiful these two strangers are in their eagerness to risk death (or at least HIV), and to the passing, pulsing moment in which he feels tempted to take that risk with them.

Thematically, what these lines recognize is that both euphoria and death are states in which we lose ourselves, states of de-individuation. Aesthetically, their achievement lies in a patient discovery, in quite ordinary words, of a refined vocabulary for our many different ways of losing ourselves in each other (knowing, being like, liking, euphoria, stretching, losing, being fooled, ardency, glamor); in the lineation that brings "I" and "they" into nearly parallel formation (knowing it and not), then disperses them to different sides (right and left) of the poem; in the speaker's refusal either to claim moral superiority in his hygienic separateness, or to indulge in a fantasy of complete identification with others. 

For Brad and John, the identification is complete, and they share lines in the poem as they share drugs:

      Brad and John thirst heroically together... 

The speaker, on the other hand, is less heroic and less successful in his desire for merger with others. The verb that names his desire is abstract rather than embodied ("seek," not "thirst"), and it's left hanging at the end of a line in separation from its object:
                                                    I seek
     To enter their minds....

Thirsting together doesn't add up to knowing one another, here, any more than being aware of death (one way of knowing it) is equivalent to undergoing it (a second sense of knowing). Nor does Gunn's consciousness of his desire for these two men lead him to actually share a needle with them. But his refusal isn't a refusal of kinship, and in the poem's most surprising shift from the plural to the singular (from "they" to "a human"), Gunn brings these two potentially marginalized men straight back to the center of our common ethical experience: in some way, 

          they['re] direct and right, properly 
     testing themselves against risk 
     as a human must, and does.

From Gunn to Rubin
This poem seems to me like a good point of entry into Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex" because it asks us, first, to see the relationship between pleasure and danger, desire and risk, sex and mortality--these associations are ancient--but also, and more urgently, to see afresh how these linked experiences of sex and death have been lethally literalized for some in the present moment, while they remain sources of heightened consciousness and enriched experience for others. Brad and John may be dying already; Gunn is writing a poem. Whatever the difference between Gunn on the one hand and Brad and John on the other, it's surely not as wide as that between life and death. And it surely is.

Rubin's diagram of the sexual behaviors coded 'good'
(inner circle) and 'bad' (outer circle)

More clearly: we all enjoy certain thrills, certain risks. And we should. But for most of us, these are managed risks, expressions of strength, and the fact that we can take pride in those risks has much to do with why we're able to manage them so successfully. Imagine if downhill skiing, for example, were understood to be the most perverse of all pleasures--one that could be undertaken only at night and far away from settled areas, and under constant threat of exposure and prosecution. We'd have fewer skiers; skiers would be likely to internalize the low moral evaluation of their source of pleasure; a greater proportion of skiers would be injured or killed. Mainstream Americans might be afraid to let skiers near their kids--they might learn to ski!--and might look the other way in the event of skier-bashings.

These are, of course, pretty much the conditions under which a lot of sexual pleasure on the outer circle of Rubin's diagram (above at left, and see 2391) has had to be sought out, and Rubin tries to devise conceptual tools that will allow us to map these activities differently and less harmfully. I'd add they can help us to understand not only how certain sex laws have been unthoughtfully structured, but also those like Brad and John, who seem to be both gay and intravenous drug users, might let the healthy search for love and pleasure turn into something truly self-destructive. It's harder for pleasure to be a way of caring for the self, or others, when that pleasure is shot through with shame.

There's a resonance here with Bersani's argument that if the rectum isn't literally going to be a grave for gay men, whether through unsafe sex or homophobic violence, then we need to receognize or even celebrate it as a site of the self's (and not the body's) temporary and psychological (and not literal) undoing in sex. More generally, we all recognize numerous ways of enjoying controlled risk, pleasurable danger, that range from healthy to heroic. 

Yet because we also think about such activities as ranged on a conceptual map where the sexual and the non-sexual occupy different continents, rather than one in which genital pleasures involve and overlap with other pleasures, we tend to judge them according to radically different criteria. Boxing is a sport, but masochism is a perversion; dinner followed by sex is a date, while food in bed or sex in the kitchen is kinky; whipping a consenting adult is assault (see 2398), while tackling one in the right costume in the right place is football; an image of a bound man might be erotic, or religious (see the images by Reni and Mapplethorpe at the bottom of the post).

Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979).
Mapplethorpe's photos of gay and leather subcultures were
at the center of a controversy over NEA funding at the end
of the '80s. Sen. Jesse Helms proposed banning grants
for any work treating "homoerotic" or "sadomasochistic"
themes. When Helms showed the photos to his colleagues,
he asked "all the pages and all the ladies to leave the floor."

My point isn't to suggest that there aren't important differences between these activities, or that  there aren't for each individual some clear distinctions between sexual and non-sexual pleasures.  It's not even to suggest that football is sadomasochistic (which would be cheaply provocative and conceptually sloppy). Rather, it seems worth pointing out that 1) we allow people considerable freedom to take pleasure in danger in many areas of life; 2) psychologically and sometimes physically speaking (and I have in mind here activities like consensual S&M and emphatically not unprotected intercourse), sex provides such pleasure in danger; 3) the level of risk or violence involved in these different activities has nothing to do with why some are marginalized and others celebrated. 4) social and legal marginalization can contribute to (but not determine) how, and for whom, healthy thrills turn into bad risks.

Spielberg, Man with leather vest and whip.

Bersani, "The Gay Absence"
...what's certain is that [the sexual instinct] refuses to be integrated into the social, because there is in eroticism a revolt of the instant against time, of the individual against the universal; by wishing to channel and exploit it, one risks killing it, because one can't make use of living spontaneity in the way one makes use of inert matter; furthermore, one can't compel it as one compels a liberty... 
     —Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 67,  
          trans. modified)

In "The Gay Absence," Bersani elaborates the argument about "the inestimable value of sex as...anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving" that he had begun in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" (22). 

His title for this chapter from Homos (1995) refers to the normalizing arguments that were becoming increasingly influential among in queer politics at around this time, most prominently in Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal (1996). Bersani worries that the representation of gay men and lesbians and other queers as 'just like everyone else' is at best a way to defer the acknowledgment of sexual difference required for any lasting change in the status of sexual minorities. (These defenses of homosexuality, he writes, "mount a resistance to homophobia in which the agent of resistance has been erased"--56). Beyond this, however, he wants to draw on gay "sexual specificity" (see 41), the particular psychological underpinnings of homosexual desire, as a theoretical resource for rethinking sociality itself.

At the end of "Is the Rectum a Grave?," Bersani had suggested that 

it may...be in the gay man's rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him. That judgment...is grounded in the sacrosanct value of selfhood, a value that accounts for human beings' extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence. (29-30, my emphasis)

He continues this line of argument in "The Gay Absence" as he engages with Wittig's discussion of the 'straight mind':

So the tonal sign of the straight mind is its seriousness: differences are validated by the thinker's demonstration of how seriously he takes his own statements--and this may be the only validation we can give to the philosophic myth of truth. (40-41, my emphasis)

It's perhaps surprising to see a theorist so wary of the value of 'seriousness.' Isn't theory supposed to be serious? But Bersani seems to mean by seriousness not so much sincerity or intellectual rigor as that attitude to one's words that makes one eager to pass beyond language and into violence to defend them. (If I've understood him rightly in this, then my wish here would be for terms that allow us to distinguish between the curious and open-minded conviction [I don't see this as an oxymoron] that we ought to have in moral argument and, on the other hand, the sort of phobically rigid argument that seeks assent rather than response).

If 'seriousness,' understood in Bersani's specific and non-obvious sense, is an intrinsically violent mode of relationality, then what alternatives are available? Drawing on Freud's understanding of all sexual desire as involving both identification and difference, Bersani suggests that "homo-ness itself necessitates a massive redefining of relationality" (76, author's italics). This is because "its privileging of sameness has, as its condition of possibility, an indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the the perspective of a self already identified as different from itself" (59). And so it is an "an outlaw existence," at once "unacceptable" and "indispensable" (76).

"Indeterminate identity" requires a rethinking of liberal notions of sociality insofar as we imagine sociality as grounded in relations among integral and voluntaristic subjects. (Those of you who read Zizek's "Courtly Love" may recognize some aspects of his critique of the liberal social contract in Bersani's argument). "Outlaw" sociality would be non-contractual, non-normalizing. (What would it be, though?)

I'm not sure how much time we'll have to discuss "The Gay Absence" this week, but here's a reason to work through it nonetheless: in the space of this fairly short chapter, Bersani engages with Freud, Foucault, Wittig, Rich, Butler, Sedgwick, and Warner--and his engagements with these other theorists are at once concise, respectful and contentious; his essay is at once a great way to start reviewing for the final exam and an excellent model for the sort of work you might aspire to in your final papers.

Mapplethorpe, Untitled (1973)

Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian (c. 1616)

Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading"

    "Perhaps you do not know that 'jewel-case' ['Schmuckkästchen'] is a favourite expression...for the female genitals."
     "I knew you would say that."
          —Freud, Dora, p. 61

Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And "Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities, the concatenation that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. (93)

We will start, therefore, from what might be called "local centers" of power-knowledge: for example, the relations that obtain between penitents and confessors... (98)

No "local center"...could function if...it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if [it] did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as its point of application or final outcome, but as its prop and anchor point. ... one must conceive of the double conditioning of a strategy by the specificity of possible tactics, and of tactics by the strategic envelope that makes them work. Thus the father in the family is not the "representative" of the sovereign or the state; and the latter are not projections of the father on a different scale. ... But the family, precisely to the extent that was insular and heteromorphous [i.e., independent and differently structured] with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great "maneuvers" [of the state, of psychiatry, and of other institutions]. (100)
     —Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I

This book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition. 
    —Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 1

The Gender of Paranoia
Recall that Freud's central study of paranoia, on Schreber, concerned a male judge--we couldn't ask, perhaps, for a better symbol of what Lacan would call "the law of the father." Indeed, Freud, in a passage that Sedgwick quotes in her essay (see 125), identified his own psychoanalytic theory and "the systems of our philosophers" more generally with the structure of paranoia: paranoia thus connotes intellectuality and masculinity.

Those tenuous and of course sexist connotations acquired some importance when Freud later was confronted with a case of paranoia in a woman that didn't easily fit into his theory that paranoia was caused by repressed homosexual desire. During the incident that triggered her fear of persecution, the woman remembered hearing the ticking of a clock--in fact, she said this sound was what triggered her fear. Freud explained the sound in two rather contradictory ways: 1) the sound was merely an "accident," not a cause of the delusion but simply an ambient sound that the woman's pre-existing delusion latched onto to explain itself; 2) the sound wasn't real at all, but nor was it accidental; it was merely an imagined equivalent for a repressed physical sensation, a throbbing in the woman's clitoris.

This is one of those recurrent moments in psychoanalysis where it's impossible to tell whether the delusion in question is Freud's or the patient's. What's striking here, however, is how Freud's reluctance to tolerate a detail extraneous to his theory, a mere "accident," leads him to incorporate that detail into his interpretation by grounding it in the woman's body. This interpretive move is oddly at once both totalizing and superfluous; Freud can and does (in parts of the study that I'm not rehearsing here) manage to account for this woman's case without altering the theory of paranoia he had developed while studying Schreber, and yet he takes an extra step to interpret this unexplained remainder; he creates a remainder (in his text) to get rid of one (in hers). We have here something like the structure of disavowal that Freud describes in his study of the fetish, where the paradigmatic fetish was the maternal phallus. But of course that phallus, unlike the clitoris, is an imagined and not a real detail.

In a rather extraordinary reading of Freud's case study, "Female Paranoia: The Case for Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism," Naomi Schor draws two implications from the simultaneous prominence and marginality of this detail (the clock/clitoris) in Freud's text: 1) "female theorizing is grounded in the body" (154), and 2) "female theory is clitoral" (158), a phrase that she later explains by glossing the clitoris as "coextensive with the detail"; feminist criticism, argues Schor, should thus be characterized by "a hermeneutics focused on the detail" (159-60). Her aim here is to make more visible "the differences between socially acceptable [i.e. typically male] and deviant [i.e. typically female] forms of system-building" (151). (This essay is the conclusion to Schor's 1985 book Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction).

I'm summarizing this here both to console myself for leaving Schor, a really wonderful theorist and critic who I hope you'll read someday, off of our syllabus, and also because I think her theory of paranoia provides a precedent for, and an interesting alternative to, Sedgwick's. It's a precedent in that it moves from a theory of paranoia to a practice of close reading; Sedgwick does something quite similar. Yet Sedgwick doesn't see this movement as gendered or rooted in the sexed body, and is perhaps unconcerned with this thanks to the very success of theorists like Schor and herself. At least in literary studies, it would be hard after the work of the past couple decades any longer to think of theory as a paradigmatically male enterprise.

Conspiracy Theory (or, Theory's conspiracy against theories)
Sedgwick's essay begins with an anecdote, a conversation that she had about AIDS during the 1980s, the formative years for her own writing, as they were for the essays we've read by Butler, Bersani and Nunokawa. We've seen in Wednesday's essays the extraordinarily intense felt disparity, for those near to AIDS patients in the '80s, between the urgency of the situation and the slow pace of the governmental and scientific response to it. While official discourse about AIDS tended to represent it as a disease that would need to be contained before it became a truly serious problem, those who were losing friends and family and lovers in the prime of their lives felt that response to be radically, even murderously disproportionate to the crisis, and to the response that would be undertaken for a disease if it were primarily affecting, say, wealthy white children rather than gay men and drug users. In these circumstances, it began to feel non-crazy to ask if public indifference to the disease was motivated by a deliberate effort, even a conspiracy, on the part of those in power.

To this suspicion, Sedgwick's friend responds basically that there might be a conspiracy, but so what? "What would we know then that we don't already know?" And what would we do with that truth that we shouldn't already be doing in response to the overwhelming evidence that much of the country doesn't care about AIDS victims?

For Sedgwick--and for me, and, if you've ever had a moment during this course when you wondered silently aloud whether everything really has to be about sex and gender--that response is liberating.

Her friend's question suggests that we might displace our energies from an ever more persistent attempt to reveal bad hidden truths--which often seem to be the same old bad truths (patriarchy, phallocentrism, homophobia), revealed again and again-- and towards more localized, less totalizing interpretive and ethical projects--non-paranoid projects. Especially in feminist and queer theorizing, Sedgwick will suggest, historical circumstances that seem to warrant a bit of paranoia have made theory and paranoid knowing indistinguishable from each other; this singular idea of Theory has thus foreclosed the possibility of other ways of doing theory, of theories. That we can turn away from paranoiacally structured theory doesn't automatically mean that we should, she emphasizes. But she wants us to at least be aware that paranoid knowing is one kind of knowing among others.

In what follows, I'll say a bit more about the "hermeneutics of suspicion"--a term you may have run across before in other courses--and about the difference that Sedgwick describes between "strong" and "weak" theories.

I'll leave a second major idea from the essay for you to comment on and question: Sedgwick calls the specific alternative to paranoia that she describes in this essay "reparative," and I'll leave that term for you to trace through the essay and, if you wish, to discuss in her comments. Sedgwick borrows the term from the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who associates "reparative" activity with the "depressive position." Klein's "depressive position" shouldn't be confused with a diagnosis of what we now call clinical depression; the depressive position involves certain kinds of sadness, but in Klein's (and Sedgwick's) view, it's a recurring part of any healthy and ethical human life. (See esp. page 128 on this, though Sedgwick will develop the idea further in the final pages of the essay).

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Raphael, The Transfiguration (1516-1520)

As Sedgwick explains, the phrase "heremenutics of suspicion" was used by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to describe a method of interpretation (hermeneutics is interpretation) common to Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.

We're of course quite familiar now with how this works in Freud: because the thoughts that most trouble us are repressed and not available to consciousness, we have to look for evidence of them in otherwise innocuous expressions: dream images, slips of the tongue, half-conscious gestures such as Dora's fidgeting with her reticule (or purse). Such interpretive procedures apply to cultural as well as personal expressions: "love" has been culturally idealized as the noblest of emotions precisely to help us forget its connection to sex, and so forth. Even a denial, for Freud, is suspected of being a confession of precisely what it denies.

For Marx, economic self-interest rather than sexual desire is the privileged object to be unveiled. In every society, particular classes seek to represent their interests as universal values, and interpretation proceeds by stripping those values of their apparent universality to show how they serve the interests of a particular class (usually, in the modern era, bourgeois capitalists).

Nietzsche's wide-ranging philosophical investigations in some ways encompass those of Marx and Freud. (Freud admitted to having read some of Nietzsche's works, but his remarks have seemed to later readers to downplay the substantial influence suggested by similarities between the works of these two authors). In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), Nietzsche describes Greek tragedy as structured by the transformation of suffering into beauty. He uses Raphael's Transfiguration, above, as an emblem of this process, and indeed it's a useful image of how any hermeneutic of suspicion sees the mind and the world: any time you see an idea or image resembling the top half of the painting, an image of bliss, exaltation, clarity, you expect automatically that somewhere beneath that image lies darkness, suffering, confusion. Here's Nietzsche's rather stunning conclusion to The Birth of Tragedy, in which his use of the term "transfiguration" is meant to recall his earlier discussion of Raphael's painting:

From the foundation of all existence, the Dionysiac substratum of the world, no more can enter the consciousness of the human individual than can be overcome once more by that Apolline power of transfiguration... Where the Dionysiac powers have risen as impetuously as we now experience them, Apollo, enveloped in a cloud, must also have descended to us; some future generation will behold his most luxuriant effects of beauty.       

But anyone would intuitively sense the necessity of this effect if had once, even while dreaming, imagined himself transposed back to life in ancient Greece: strolling beneath rows of tall Ionic columns, glancing up towards a horizon carved from pure and noble lines, beside him reflections of his transfigured form in gleaming marble, surrounded by people solemnly walking or in delicate motion, with harmonic sounds and a rhythmic gestural langauge--must he not, to this continuous influx of beauty, raise his hand to Apollo exclaim: 'Happy race of Greeks! How great must Dionysus be among you, if the Delian god thinks such enchantment necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!' -- But one who was of this mind could find himself answered by an aged Athenian, glancing up at him with the sublime eye of Aeschylus: 'But consider this, too, wonderful stranger: how much did this people have to suffer to become so beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both deities!' (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, §25, trans. Shaun Whiteside)

Nietzsche is, of course, perhaps the most formative influence for the thought of both Foucault and Butler (and we'll see Wendy Brown draw on his thought in a rather different way in the coming weeks). And it's perhaps in Foucault that we can find a precedent for the distinction that Sedgwick draws, following Silvan Tomkins, between "strong" and "weak" theories.

Strong and Weak Theories
Sedgwick doesn't, of course, use "strong" and "weak" to mean good and bad, though insofar as we take our idea of what a good theory is from a science like physics, a strong theory may seem good, better under all circumstances than a weak theory: a theory is "strong," in Sedgwick's terms, insofar as it is broadly (even universally) applicable, and insofar as it can reduce order complex phenomena according to clear and simple principles. Einstein's formula for the equivalence of matter and energy, E=mc^2, is paradigmatic of "strong" theory in this sense: it holds true for all matter and all energy, and explains their relationship in terms of just two variables and a constant. Lacan's theory of language--all language, all signification--as an expression of patriarchal law is likewise a strong theory.

Strong theories are both powerful and reductive--in fact, powerful insofar as they're reductive. And Tomkins notes that affective theories are strong insofar as they're not predictive; for the paranoid, that is, paranoia is a strong theory not because it really protects the paranoid person from bad surprises, but because it allows him to perceive the world as saturated with such surprises. If I'm sure the government is out to get to me and, in spite of my strenuously scrupulous preparation of my tax return, I'm selected by the IRS for an audit, this won't make me question my paranoia; it will make me more paranoid, make me ask myself how I could have been more careful in the preparation of my tax return. (See 134-5 on this).

This self-reinforcing tendency of paranoia makes it "strongly tautological," Sedgwick explains, and of course we've all felt this in dealing with strong theories this semester. Another phallus, really? Dora feels this when she tells Freud that she know he'd see the jewel-case as a sexual symbol. Indeed, the quotation from Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet is, as she knows, a perfect example of strong theory: the homo/hetero distinction structures all knowledge in the modern West, she argues, and any theory that fails to take account of this will be marred by this blindspot.

Weak theories, conversely, are weak not in that they're faulty, but in that their applicability is local rather than universal. A weak theory can seem "little better than a description of the phenomena it purports to explain" (Tomkins, quoted 134). But here we trade off explanatory power for descriptive sensitivity; if a weak theory can't explain everything, it might nonetheless be successful at explaining one thing, one person or group of persons--think of Halberstam's investigations of butchness--or one text.

Joseph Cornell, Parrot Box

For Sedgwick, as a literary scholar, close reading is the paradigmatic form taken by weak theory. "But who reads The Novel and the Police," she beautifully asks, "to find out whether its main argument is true?" (135). Miller's paranoiacally Foucauldian study of surveillance and discipline in the nineteenth-century novel, in other words, is valuable Sedgwick not primarily because it shows how pervasive disciplinary practices are (or because it fails to show this), but rather because that supposition, that strong theory, leads Miller to exquisitely responsive, revelatory, loving and challenging interpretations of particular novels. One could say the same thing of Sedgwick's reading of "The Beast in the Jungle," I think.

Strong and weak theory, then, are not mutually exclusive; rather, they always coexist and inform one another.


This is true already in Foucault (and I'd argue in Freud as well). In the passages I've quoted above, Foucault begins a discussion of power by claiming that it's "everywhere"--a paradigmatically strong theoretical claim. But as he goes on to distinguish between strategies and tactics, and to describe the interdependence of broad forms of power (e.g., scientifically licensed homophobia) on "local centers" of power (e.g., the relationship of confessor and penitent, or the bourgeois family unit), we see him doing something very like what Sedgwick admires in Miller: Foucault's hermeneutics of suspicion leads, at its best, to a quite imaginative perception of the particular social forms inhabited by power. When he insists (against a certain kind of psychoanalytical interpretation) that the father is not the "representative" of the sovereign, or vice versa, we can see this as a moment when strong theory becomes stronger (in a different sense) through weakness: against the possibility of a monotonous repetition of the same, a perpetual parade of phallic fathers, Foucault's paranoiac alertness to the ubiquity of power is transfigured here into a heightened perception of its evolving historical forms.

A box made by Joseph Cornell
(Cornell is one of the artists associated by Sedgwick
with "reparative practices" on p. 150)

There's a practical value in all of this to keep in mind with regard to your own writing in the coming weeks: for good reasons, students and teachers alike give much attention to the thesis--what Sedgwick calls Miller's "main argument," above--as a sign of a paper's value, and surely this is important; yet it's no more important than, and indeed dependent upon, the interpretive and analytical work done by each paragraph, and the art and effort that go into the crafting of each sentence. And so in her first book, which had reduced dozens of gothic novels to a few characteristic tropes and conventions, Sedgwick wrote sentences like the following:

"The gorgeous narrative work done by the Foucauldian paranoid, transforming the simultaneous chaoses of institutions into a consexutive, drop-dead-elegant diagram of spiralling escapes and recaptures, is also the paranoid subect's proffer of himself and his cognitive talent, now ready for anything it can present in the way of blandishment or violence, to an order-of-things morcelé that had until then lacked only narratability, a body, cognition" (Coherence of Gothic Conventions, quoted 132).