Queer Bodies of Knowledge: Constructing Lesbian and Gay Studies

Lynda Goldstein

Department of English
Pennsylvania State University
lrg4@psuvm.psu.edu

 

Abelove, Henry, Michele Anna Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

Gever, Martha, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar, eds. Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. New York: Routledge, 1993.

 

As the newest kid on the interdisciplinary block looking for legitimation (with not a little attitude), Lesbian/Gay or Queer Studies (depending upon one’s political affiliations) poses a number of obvious challenges to academia and publishers. One of these, of course, has to do with the strategic, if not essential, reliance of lesbian and gay studies on a particular kind of identity politics that parallels the institutional maneuvering of other “minority studies” programs. Indeed, lesbian and gay studies can be charted along much the same trajectory as Women’s, African-American, Asian-American or Latino/a Ethnic Studies, all of which were institutionalized (however tenuously in these times of “down-sizing” colleges) at historically specific moments at the conjuncture of their respective (and overlapping) political activism, cultural production, and scholarship. Indeed, lesbian/gay studies shares more with these other emergent subdisciplines than a certain path toward discursive legitimation within the academy (though this is not to suggest that the struggles of every field of study have all been identical). It also often shares theoretical frameworks, and even some specific objects of study. The Harlem Renaissance, for example, has been a recurring area of focus, as queer studies has sought to rethink cultural history in terms of the intersections of sexuality, class, gender, and race.

 

Begun as an inclusion of queer contributions to history here, a special topics course on lesbian and gay “coming out” literature there, and a rigorous theoretical interrogation of sexuality as a constitutive category of subject formation elsewhere, queer studies has reached critical mass in the “gay nineties.” This is evident in the increasing number of gay and lesbian studies undergraduate programs in and across the various humanistic disciplines; the special collections at university and large public libraries from coast to coast; and the critical/theoretical work on the cultural inscriptions of sexuality, much of which would be far more difficult to assemble without the explosive production of identifiably, often “in your face,” queer culture, most especially in literature/comics, theater/performance, music, the visual arts, film/video, and popular style/fashion. My emphasis here on popular cultural productions should not indicate that queer studies traffics exclusively in the popular (though the intersection of queer and popular is an intriguing one), as any study of homoclassics or anthrodrag surely indicates.

 

Perhaps nothing suggests the critical materiality of lesbian and gay studies more substantially than the queer line of critical and theoretical work coordinated by Routledge, cagey publisher to the stars of queer theory. Indeed, as hefty as Routledge’s two anthologies delineating the field of Cultural Studies, and with much the same cutting-edge rationale guiding its journey through the contestatory fields of academic discourse, the compendium anthology, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, establishes itself as an indispensable introduction to the field, at least as it is determined within the (inter)disciplinary boundaries of the arts and humanities. Published just two years after Inside/Out (a collection of essays theorizing lesbian and gay sexual politics and culture edited by Diana Fuss and published by Routledge in 1991), How Do I Look? (the conference proceedings from “How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video” organized and edited by Bad Object Choices) and the “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities” issue of the journal differences (edited by Teresa de Lauretis), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader collects forty-two contemporary essays from a variety of disciplines, many of them no doubt known to readers from their previously published incarnations in journals. I mention the earlier collections because they were all distinguished by a theoretical approach that might be broadly defined as that of “cultural studies,” an approach that The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader has not merely adopted but sought to extend by encompassing an even wider range of disciplines and sites of investigation.

 

Indeed, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader is in many ways a continuation of the work begun by Inside/Out. In her introduction, editor Diana Fuss asks, “how can we work [the hetero/homo opposition] to the point of critical exhaustion, and what effects–material, political, social –can such a sustained effort to erode and to reorganize the conceptual grounds of identity be expected to have on our sexual practices and politics?” (1). Certainly one might argue that The Reader represents one effect of working the binary opposition of sexuality, if not to exhaustion, then to a fatigue productive of a visibility of gay and lesbian sexualities. That is, it embodies an attempt to “reorganize” sexuality studies from an oppositional stance that comes dangerously close to solidifying the epistemology of polarity. For those who believe that Gay and Lesbian Studies may only exist, however visibly, in contestation with the (supposedly hetero) core curricula, The Reader proposes a more troubling and independent existence while acknowledging its relational positioning. If as Fuss writes, “any outside is formulated as a consequence of a lack internal to the system it supplements” (3), then we might suppose that the outside status of lesbian and gay studies has everything to do with the constitutive lack of sexuality studies within the academy. In bringing queer studies in from the cold outside, does The Reader make it all too easy for interrogations of sexuality to operate as a “queer thing”? Moreover, in its bid to legitimate an emergent field does it do so at the expense of the political leverage discursive marginalization can accord? These are most difficult negotiations, as both Fuss and the editors of The Reader acknowledge, though Abelove, Barale, and Halperin more decisively throw their lot in with legitimation. It is their intention, after all, that this collection serve as a primary textbook for courses in Gay/Lesbian Studies 101.

 

The volume’s usefulness in the classroom is admirably indicated by its categorical grouping of contents, its Users’ Guide, its alternative organization by disciplines, its essay header notes establishing the authority of the essayist and summarizing the essay’s arguments, and its briefly annotated but extensive bibliography. What all of these together provide is a map with which to navigate the territory of gay and lesbian studies, not only for the undergraduate (though some of these essays may be too difficult for students who are not already conversant with the theoretical debates that animate recent battles over humanities curricula) but for the instructor as well, who may have a thorough knowledge of queer studies in her own field but a lesser acquaintance with work in related disciplines. Fortunately, The Reader collects essays that are theoretically and literally conversant, if not always in agreement, making for a coherent and provocative approach to delineating lesbian and gay studies as a discipline of knowledge. Further, in its organizational structure along lines of thematic interest (for instance, “Politics and Representation” and “The Evidence of Experience”), The Reader suggests the extent to which queer theorists are, indeed, reorganizing the ontological grounds of sexual identity within historically specific cultural contexts. (The editors of The Reader, by the way, choose “lesbian and gay” over “queer” for reasons of institutional efficacy given some already established programs. While suggesting “lesbian and gay” retains a queer reverberation, signalled by The Reader’s inclusion of activist concerns and transgendering phenomena, it is not one that includes bisexuality. This omission poses rather interesting questions to be left for a review of the several recently published anthologies on bisexuality.)

 

Just what does one find in The Reader? Gayle Rubin’s still extraordinary (and revised) “Thinking Sex” initiates the volume, deftly moving feminist theory in the direction of queer theory, an expansive move that others, such as Barbara Smith in her feminist and African-Americanist grounded essay, “Homophobia: Why Bring It Up?,” similarly make in this first section on “Politics and Representation.” In part, essays such as Rubin’s and Smith’s address the limitations of theory that is singularly invested in an identity politics; they pose a kind of coalition politics of theory which would (re)present the problematics of representation of our selves (however that might be defined) within politicized and intersecting cultural fields. For Rubin, this means, in part, tracing the history of “sex panic[s]” in Anglo-American culture since the nineteenth century, a history that reveals moments of repressive police action against populations designated “deviant” or “obscene” within a hierarchized system of sexuality and sexual practices, especially around sado-masochistic images and pedophilia. To fully comprehend how these practices are policed by the state, Rubin argues “that it is essential to separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence” (33). Such a move is not to be confused with separating feminism (whose primary concern is gender) from queer theory, however; each has much to contribute to the other. It does mean being very careful not to collapse terms so that differences of social life, and their attendant politicization, are elided. It also operates as a cautionary tale to assimilationist lesbians and gays whose “we’re just like you” liberal politics demonizes non-vanilla (in both the erotic and racial senses) sexual practices.

 

Such a warning is also evident in Smith’s short essay, in which she explicitly works against the hierarchizing of oppression all too evident among some activists and theorists who are willing to further their own political or pedagogical agenda by sacrificing the queers to the oppressive actions of our culture. “What happened at Blues [a police raid against a working-class bar for gays and lesbians of color] perfectly illustrates the ways in which the major ‘isms’ including homophobia are intimately and violently intertwined” (100). What Smith’s and Rubin’s essays both demonstrate in their very different ways are the inextricability of theory and praxis, the necessity to carefully analyze the multitudinous forms of social and cultural oppression, and the responsibility of all activists and theorists (not that these are so easily separated) to work at the intersections and along the fluid boundaries of identity categories. These are concerns shared by a number of essays included in this anthology: Kobena Mercer’s investigation of race, sexuality, and eroticism in Mapplethorpe’s work (a site also privileged by Richard Meyer’s “Mapplethorpe/ The Discipline of Photography”), Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s reading of Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, and Deborah McDowell’s uncovering of Nella Larsen’s lesbian passing masquerading as racial passing under the burden of the morally upright Harlem Renaissance. And Phillip Brian Harper’s wonderfully rich analysis of the place of eloquence in African-American discourse–of the tensions between speech and silence, hetero and homosexualities, Black Nationalism and assimilation–in the face of newscaster Max Robinson’s death by AIDS, serves as a model for disentangling the complexities of cultural identity formation.

 

Another major theoretical paradigm threading its way through the collection is initiated by the second essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet.” Like Rubin, Sedgwick looks to the nineteenth century, firmly establishing it as the historical moment for the political and cultural parameters of modern lesbian and gay identity. Here she outlines the contradictory status of the closet, arguing that it “has given an overarching consistency to gay culture and identity throughout this century” by mapping a double-bound system of secrecy and disclosure onto identity formation such that “the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization, in this case the node at which any gender is discriminated” (59). What concerns Sedgwick is the systemic incoherence of thinking about sexuality and gender in Euro-American culture dating from the late nineteenth century, an incoherence that ought not to be stabilized by queer theorists but continuously and productively interrogated. In large part, this is precisely the project adopted by The Reader: each wrangles with the epistemological incoherences of identity, representation, and social practices, often with brilliant results.

 

For example, Lee Edelman takes up the visibility/ invisibility nexus of gay male sexuality in “Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” Obviously punning on Sedgwick’s title, as well as on the stage play and film, Tea and Sympathy (a sense of humor also refreshingly evident in Marjorie Garber’s “Spare Parts,” excerpted from her book Vested Interests, in which she examines surgical transsexualism as a privileged site of the constitutional instabilities of gender and sexuality), Edelman considers Walter Jenkins’s arrest in 1964 for undisclosed sexual activity in the men’s washroom of a Washington, DC YMCA as “a signal moment in which to examine the shifting ideological frameworks within which homosexuality could be read in relation to American national identity” (555). The collision of public and private indicated by the police surveillance of this urinal tryst, like the closet/coming out oscillation of Sedgwick’s essay, raises questions about the stability of the homo/hetero binary, especially as the precise sexual act was unobservable from the vantage point of the police. The unresolvable tensions of sexual/gender border patrolling are further investigated by Stuart Hall in “Deviance, Politics, and the Media,” while the visibility/invisibility binary figures in Teresa de Lauretis’ “Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation,” as well as in Sasha Torres’ essay on prime time television and Danae Clark’s “Commodity Lesbianism,” all of which demonstrate that lesbians as social subjects are rigorously situated on the invisibility side of the fence.

 

The Reader‘s reliance on cultural-studies paradigms is most evident in the several essays that foreground cultural/historical specificity, as well as the immediacy of political activism, to combat early lesbian and gay studies tendencies toward universalizing experience. To this end, John D’Emilio argues that lesbian and gay identities are the result of capitalist economies. Anthropologists Alonso and Koreck deconstruct the catch-all term “hispanics” and its debilitating effects upon AIDS education among various Latino/a populations whose sexual practices are not necessarily commensurate with Anglo-determined sexual identities, while Tomas Almaguer maps identity and behavior among Chicano men. Cindy Patton documents the imposition of idealized bourgeois family values onto a demonized “Africa” without borders that is read as having bred a peculiar and distinct strain of AIDS. In one of the few excursions out of the “modern” period of lesbian/gay identity (along with David Halperin’s and John Winkler’s respective work on the constructions of homosexuality in classical Greece and Sappho’s lyric poetry), Charlotte Furth considers the fluidity of gender boundaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century China. And Serena Nanda explores the indeterminacy of the Hijira in Hindu mythology and contemporary social practice, while Harriet Whitehead surveys the body of work on the Native American berdache to demonstrate the efficacy of a methodology of comparative cultural analysis, a kind of destablized theoretical crossing that works to carefully maintain differences of specific systems of gender meaning in each culture under investigation.

 

Yet the experiences of populations within specific historical and cultural contexts ought not to be the project of gay and lesbian history, argues Joan Scott, in her rigorously explicated essay, “The Evidence of Experience.” Arguing that experience too often serves as the ontological foundation for identity, politics, and history, Scott recommends that we not focus on “the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but [focus on] the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself” (412), the narratives of knowledge that constitute that which we call experience. Such a shift in focus has repercussions not only for considerations of autobiography (to which all coming-out literature is indebted) as Biddy Martin’s work on lesbian autobiography acknowledges, but for activist politics and production as well, a consideration which is less consistently realized in Queer Looks. Where The Reader works toward a theoretical and thematic coherence while maintaining a queer commitment to analyzing incoherences, Queer Looks works toward incoherence, a queering of the body of knowledge (re)produced by the more academically integrated Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

 

Less interdisciplinary in its approach, concentrating on lesbian and gay film and video (all of which is “independent” in its production and distribution histories), Queer Looks expands upon the territory mapped by the aforementioned How Do I Look anthology. More playful in its collection of essays, screenplays/stills, and interactive lampshades (the latter a “Take Back the Light: Lesbian Visibility Lampshade” by Donna Evans and Jean Carlomusto which combines the rigor of theory with the pleasure of popular culture and activism in this year of lesbian chic: think of it as Teresa de Lauretis lite), Queer Looks has no aspirations for legitimacy in academe. Rather, its project is to give its intersecting activists, theorists, and film/video makers the space to work out the possibilities of representational practices by, for and about lesbian, gay, and queer subjects. To an academic, this anthology may seem terribly uneven. While many of the essays consider the ways that queerness is inextricably bound to other categories of identity, most notably race (those of Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Jackie Goldsby and Kobena Mercer are obvious examples), some of these (Goldsby) and several of the others (e.g. Barbara Hammer’s “The Politics of Abstraction”) rely upon “experience” in ways that Joan Smith warns are not as productive as thinking about how we structure that experience as identity. Yet the strengths of Queer Looks lies less in its rigorous analyses (though there are these, most especially John Greyson’s “Security Blankets”) than in its proliferation of contending viewpoints that provoke thought, agreement, and dissension for the reader. In their often brief formats these 38 contributors generate queer perspectives on work that remains unavailable to most audiences outside large gay/lesbian film festivals.

 

Neither of these collections is exhaustive. Race continues to be a category most often examined in conjunction with queers of color, “lesbians” appear as theoretical specters or social subjects with narrowly defined experiences, pornography is distanced to the AIDS education category, and the work of a Sadie Benning (legit as her Whitney Biennial inclusion has made her) is overlooked for multiple analyses of Isaac Julien’s and Marlon Riggs’s works (fine as they are). What is obvious in both of these collections is the queer bent that cultural studies has so productively taken. Each provides a wealth of analytical material with which to engage the cultural productions of lesbians and gay men, thereby suggesting ways of thinking about other work not specifically approached within these volumes. For any instructor who has faced a colleague’s snide “but there’s no such thing as lesbian and gay studies,” or any budding film maker who just doesn’t see herself in Hollywood, The Reader and Queer Looks respectively and together provide just the kind of coherent critical and activist incoherence that is needed. These anthologies mark the moment when “queer”–both as a productive knowledge of bodies and as a set of (re)productive bodies of knowledge, is at last finding a place of rest and motion in an institution near you.