Ira Lightman

University of Norwich
I.Lightman@uea.Ac.Uk

 

Edwards, Tim. Erotics and Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity, and Feminism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994.

 
This book doesn’t quarrel too much with anyone, but then it doesn’t leave itself much room for polemic, so thorough is its survey of essays and books about and by gay men and feminists. It listens, which can’t be a bad thing. Tim Edwards’s procedure is to quote most of the writers he discusses at some length, and nearly always to show them in a favorable light, even when they clash with each other. Edwards is trying to settle an existing feud rather than to start a new one, and to establish the common ground on which more productively cross-disciplinary approaches to sexuality might emerge.

 

The feud at issue here is that between feminists who have written critically about pederasty, pornography, and sexist attitudes among gay men, and gay men who have responded to these attacks by writing critically about feminists’ too-sweeping (and hence homophobic, heterosexist) generalizations about gay sexuality. A good example of the latter is Craig Owens, who, in a marvellous essay from Men in Feminism cited by Edwards, argues that feminists accept Freud’s theory that anti-gay bigotry stems from repressed gay desire in straight-identified men because this theory piques the bigoted straight-identified men who are implicitly these women’s target.¹ But, says Owens, this approach fails to acknowledge genuine homoerotic feeling that hasn’t passed through a self-hating, gay-hating denial stage, i.e. it fails to acknowledge the very areas of feeling that mean most to many gay-identified men. Thus, Owens is arguing, feminist application of this “homophobia equals homoerotic” equation draws on straight experience rather than gay experience, and is in fact marginalizing of the latter. Similarly, other gay male critics of feminism cited by Edwards point out that feminist critiques of pornography begin by postulating the essence of the practice, then proceed to demonize it, and, by extension, to demonize all gay manifestations of it. This kind of feminist critique locates the abusive dimension, the insult, of a sexual practice within a straight sexual relationship, in terms of the institutionalized misogyny and oppression of women within patriarchy, and then extends the analysis without pausing to consider the quite different forms of oppression patriarchy exercises over gay men.

 

The stakes of these critiques and counter-critiques are high, for they lead feminists to associate gay men, and gay men to associate feminists, with patriarchy rather than with its active resistance. Indeed, gay men end up accusing straight feminist women not only of naively collaborating with the patriarchal enemy but of supplying that enemy with the academically legitimized weapons he needs to police the terrain of sexual difference.

 

Edwards does a good job of describing this situation. He calls particular attention to the curious protocols of the whole debate, which reflect the demographics of feminist and gay sympathizers. The former, being the larger group, offer broad generalizations and critiques of the latter, while the smaller group for the most part merely defends its own turf from unfriendly critical incursions. While feminist writers have presented wholesale critiques of the theory and strategy of gay male activism, it is almost unheard of for a gay male writer to attack the theoretical positions and institutional practices of feminist women except where these touch upon gay politics itself. This creates a fundamental and limiting asymmetry in the debate which Edwards does well to highlight, though it has nothing to do with the substance of the arguments advanced.

 

But for all its usefulness as an overview of the current state of gay and feminist politics–and the book ranges widely across such topics as pederasty, pornography, visibility, AIDS, and postmodernism–this volume seems somehow too narrow in its conception. Reading it I found myself trying to imagine a more boldly interdisciplinary or multi-voiced version of the project: a broader dialogue. It’s not so much that I wanted a more ethnographic approach. True, this book lacks the kind of oral-historical dimension that would incorporate the views of people who can’t write or can’t get published; but ethnographic work can itself produce the lack of theoretical, or simply cordial, engagement between disparate parties that Edwards laments. No, it’s Edwards’s asides–against the men’s movement, against straight men in general–and his cursory treatment of child abuse literature (which contrasts with his thoroughness on most everything else), that mark the limits to his apparent inclusiveness. Edwards addresses himself to an audience which he envisions as sharing with him a very specific and finite hierarchy of approaches and texts; he covers this material and excludes everything else. It is possible that if he had gone further afield he would have alienated some of the gay men and feminists whose solidarity the book is meant to promote. His aim, after all, is to resist the divide-and-conquer tactics of a patriarchal order. But in my view his omissions are a real weakness; there is a danger that the coalition he promotes will be too static and comfortable, too much of a closed establishment in its own right.

 

My most general objection to the book has to do with what might be seen as a kind of residual Freudianism, or at least scientism, in its tone. Freud has always seemed to me the archetypal distrustful outsider, the sort of commentator on gay sexuality who is handled in today’s gay press with amused indifference or mocking disbelief. He sits in his office, sees someone for an hour, sums him up with reference to his own tiny range of models of peoples’ lives, and comes to a conclusion, finishes the day, locks up the office, and goes home to dinner party functions and relations only with heterosexuals. He offers sweeping scientific theories on the basis of very brief and shallow acquaintance with his objects of study–and this makes him a figure of some amusement to writers of the gay press, who speak from detailed knowledge of lives led differently. It seems that Tim Edwards can’t, except in occasional brief anecdotes, draw on this latter, indigenous tradition of writing about gay sexuality, but must instead locate his work in the tradition that’s home to Freud. Perhaps this is academically required of him. And perhaps his publishers, Routledge, encourage his use of the voice of the distrustful outsider as well, as a voice of greater authority or at least greater appeal to a straight readership. In any case, the book seems closer in this respect to the community of straight “experts” on homosexuality than to the gay community on the streets.

 

Aside from from this general question of tone and positionality, I would also raise some more specific questions about the book’s arguments, arguments in which a residual Freudianism is again discernable. Edwards cites the work of Sheila Jeffreys, who has battled to deny any comradeship, as a lesbian, with advocates of sado-masochism. Her argument is that S/M glorifies heterosexist and misogynist oppression as well as child abuse, by eroticising them. Her opponents argue that, on the contrary, eroticizing power destabilizes and dethrones it. This debate strikes right to the heart of the struggle to build a coalition of the sort Edwards advocates. A coalition between S/M practitioners, both gay and straight, and gay non-S/M practitioners would need, as Edwards indicates, to be based on shared values of some sort. But what Edwards and most other commentators seem not to recognize is that these values can be detached from a specifically sexual agenda and cast in terms of the radical reform of the structure of society; it is a matter of shared social values, not shared sexualities or sexual attitudes. To return to Craig Owens’s essay in Men in Feminism, it is divisive to define homoerotica as always filtered through homophobic repression, because this doesn’t recognize, and indeed therefore marginalizes, the majority of homoerotic experiences (which are oppressed, not repressed). But it does not therefore follow that the remedy for this situation is more detailed analysis of gay men’s sexual experiences, S/M sexual experiences, or any other sexual experiences. Freud thought that he could cure mental unease by providing a way of talking exhaustively about sex abstracted from love. It seems to me that the disputants in debates about the common ground amongst sexualities still proceed from the assumption that one must seek “cures” for certain sexual problems–that the way to fix what is wrong with the social order is to fix what is wrong with people’s sexuality.

 

I can suggest more clearly what I mean by considering the way Edwards handles childhood. For Edwards, the key–indeed the only–question for gay men to ask about childhood remains the Freudian question of when and how sexuality is formed there. Under the subheadings “Definitions of Childhood” and “Constructions of Childhood Sexuality,” he provides a rather one-dimensional analysis of a very problematic and contentious area, in order to get quickly to the debate over sexual relationships between young gay adolescents and their older lovers–relationships which Edwards is eager to destigmatize. This approach bypasses what seems to me the most crucial set of questions. What really takes place, in social terms, during childhood? What lessons do children learn about social relations, relations of power? How and in what way are children silenced, stopped from asking difficult or awkward questions? What interventions might be made into the institutional practices that produce childhood as we know it? These are not questions that can be adequately addressed through case histories in childhood sexuality, yet they should be of fundamental interest to anyone interested in effecting social change of a sort sufficiently radical to dehegemonize patriarchy.

 

It may well be that there is no market for gay writers who would take up the analysis of childhood in a more thoroughgoing way. Gay publishing has its hands full already. But more gay arguments need to be brought against the rather uncomplicated picture presented by advocates of pederasty here. More gay writers need to undertake a radical rethinking of childhood such that, instead of simply defending themselves against the charge (by feminists and others) that they advocate abusive behavior, they can work in tandem with the feminist and children’s rights movements to envision new, more enabling familial and educational environments for children to inhabit. The sort of thing Edwards calls for–the creation of more lesbian and gay youth movement groups, where a young gay teenager can find understanding and companionship without the potentially unwanted sexual attentions that come when this understanding is sought among older men–is probably a good step. But it does not go much distance toward addressing the way childhood as such is constructed in our society, nor does it locate the common value out of which to forge an alliance between child-rights and gay-rights advocates.

 

I am not suggesting that other recent writers on childhood and sexuality have done much better. The child-rights books, such as Susan Forward’s Betrayal of Innocence, ² are compelling in their indictment of child-abuse crimes by parents and relatives, but their treatment of gay sexuality is crude at best, often explaining male-male abuse as a failure in the abuser’s heterosexual marriage, without considering the ways that patriarchy encourages and sustains such “failures.” By ignoring the pressures of patriarchy, Forward leaves no room for the gay victim of incestuous rape who wants to denounce the rape but not the fact of being gay. Edwards’s fellow queer theorists have not succeeded very well, either. In her new collection of essays, Tendencies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick proposes that we regard all gay adults as “survivors,” since they have survived the relentless homophobia that hounds a great many gay teenagers literally to death. ³ Given that two thirds of all teenage suicides are committed by gay teens, one is sympathetic to this terminological move. But Sedgwick is here appropriating the language of child-rights campaigners in a way that is bound to antagonize them. For in this latter parlance, “survivor” is the name taken by those who were physically abused in childhood but who reject the media name for them: victim. By eliminating the distinction between survivors of childhood physical abuse and gays in general, Sedgwick is in effect delegitimating the whole approach of the anti-abuse movement.

 

All such commentators will continue to play a zero-sum game, moving no closer toward any sort of practicable coalition, until new and more far-reaching arenas of dialogue are opened up. Interestingly, one of the places where the most advanced work on the construction of childhood is being done is the men’s movement. But this movement’s anti-gay and anti-feminist tendencies are sufficiently notorious to keep almost anyone outside the movement–Forward, Sedgwick, Edwards–from engaging its discourse on childhood seriously. Even a critic as generous and inclusive in his approach as Edwards leaves these sorts of impasses largely uncontested. The best he can do is to suggest that gay men might in fact learn something from feminist critiques–that being gay does not necessarily preclude one’s collaborative relation to patriarchy–and that feminist critics might in fact learn something from gay writers who question the range of applicability of feminist theory.

 

This is not a new point; it doesn’t shift the ground of debate in any significant way. But it is given a new intensity by the occasional passages of personal and autobiographical comment that Edwards introduces to his argument. Because so much of the book is written in a removed cool prose, the moments of autobiography make Edwards seem vulnerable and prepared to admit to being flummoxed sometimes. In this way he perhaps acknowledges the limits of his particular scholarly procedures, of his capacity as an “expert,” and produces evidence of a life lived mutually and fruitfully between a gay men and his women friends–a life that doesn’t seem to be reflected anywhere in the public debate he surveys, but which might be the starting point for a new approach. One returns from these autobiographical excursions to the cool prose with a sense of going from an exciting present to a stuffy past. The cool prose remains diplomatic and patient with its authors, but Edwards’s unwillingness to sustain it without interruption perhaps implies a kind of exasperation with all the disputants and even with his readership. I myself would have liked to see this exasperation made more explicit and central to the whole project, but what Edwards has given us is certainly worth having. His is a book that shows us how much important work remains to be done before we will truly succeed in opening the diverse fields of sexual and social activism to each other.

 

Notes

 

1. Craig Owens, “Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism,” in A. Jardine and P. Smith, eds. Men in Feminism (London: Methuen, 1987).

 

2. Susan Forward, Betrayal of Innocence (London: Penguin, 1988).

 

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1994).