Queer Theory 2011

queer theory dictionary

-stig*ma: belongs to a class of people, regardless of any individual’s sexual acts; taints a person, no matter how moral or immoral the sex might otherwise be; applies to the individual

-shame: negative feelings specifically attached to a sexual act; applies to sex;

-sex*u*al Mc*Car*thy*ism: American society’s refusal to see sex as anything but scandal; the alignment of prudery, prosecution, and publicity during the Bill Clinton impeachment crisis created a moral panic that even the policy and the media elites could not control; 

-se*lec*tive le*git*i*ma*cy: something that gives legitimacy to one group of people at the expense of another; marriage sanctifies some couples while leaving others out

fave quote wall

“Massachusetts law still refers to the “abominable and detestable crime against nature.” Florida criminalizes “any unnatural and lascivious act.” In the Wonderland of America’s legal codes, the sex laws are like a version of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” with a vengeance: “Tis brillig and the slithy toves did lewdly and laciviously gyre and gimble in the wabe. All prurient were the borogoves, and the mome raths did fornicate.” When the law talks this way, ordinary sexual knowledge goes on vacation, and the moralist’s battle is half won.” (Warner 13)

• By making the language of sexual laws so ridiculous that no one can possibly understand it, the moralists who fight sex make their jobs easier. Sex is confusing enough for people without having to decipher this complicated and insane language.

“Sexual deviance once was more a matter of shame than of stigma. Sodomy was a sin like fornication, not the sign of an identity. Anyone could do it. In the modern world that shame has deepened into stigma. It affects certain people, regardless of what they do. As moralists began concentrating not simply on deeds but on kinds of persons, mere sex became sexuality. The act of sodomy came to be only one sign of homosexual identity among many. It became possible to suffer stigma as a homosexual quite apart from any sexual acts.” (Warner 28)

• This is how people get bullied at school for being gay. Because the reason people are being taunted is not for one homosexual act, but for the homosexual identity. Whether or not someone identifies as being gay, they can still be made fun of or bullied for it. When I was a freshman, I became friends with my first girlfriend. Before anything had even happened between us, my “best friends” from middle school had stopped talking to me, because they thought we were lesbians. Students can be bullied for even “appearing” gay. And that is exactly the problem with identity.

“Although the Georgia sodomy statute that was the subject of that case applied to oral and anal sex for heterosexual partners as well as homosexual ones, the court decided to regard the issue only as one of “homosexual sodomy” and the rights of homosexuals. The act - a kind of sex that gay or straight or bi or other people could equally perform - became an identity. In a dizzying series of logical moves, the Court rules that Georgia could ban the sexual practice because of its connection to a despised identity, even though the law banned the practice for everybody. At the same time, the Court held that the identity could be (and in subsequent lower court decisions has been) regarded as fairly subject to discrimination because the sex, which “defines the class,” was criminal. Gotcha: the sex has no privacy protection because homos are immoral; homos are immoral because they commit, or want to commit, criminal sex acts.” (Warner 30)

• Uh, I hate my state sometimes. This is so ridiculous. Mind. BLOWN. I can’t believe that this actually stood up in court. That’s it. Ugh.

“Toys in Babeland is the project of two lesbian entrepreneurs from Seattle, where the parent store has been thriving for years. Clare Cavanaugh, one of the owners, told me that they are watching court rulings with a wary eye. (Sex toys are among the gray areas of the law.) In Seattle, their store has a large glass display window, lending queer visibility to the street and the neighborhood. In New York, the display windows stay empty, with nothing but discreetly drawn curtains. From the street, it looks like a podiatrist’s office. In Seattle, the store features a large selection of lesbian porn. In New York, the owners feel unsafe to stock any. ‘It makes me sad,’ says Cavanaugh. ‘Women come in and want it. It’s part of our mission to allow women to explore different parts of their sexuality. And when a woman comes in and says, ‘I’m having trouble getting turned on,’ I want to offer her a video. but I can’t. We’re taking chances as it is.’” (Warner 152)

• This makes me think of the laws in Georgia that require stores that sell sex toys to sell them as “novelty items.” Or the woman in Texas who was arrested for having Passion Parties and describing exactly what the sex toys were for. Why can’t we be honest as a culture? I mean, really. Who is it going to harm if we allow people to explore their sexuality honestly? Why are sex toys so horrible? I just can’t wrap my mind around why people are so concerned with what everyone else is doing.

critical questions 

• Why do more people see same-sex marriage as a negative institution, when they could just as easily view marriage as the ultimate conformity to heterosexual norms?
• Why does it not seem possible to think of ourselves as normal without thinking of someone else as pathological? Are there other ways to get rid of shame that do not throw it onto someone else? How do we change the dynamics here?e
• In response to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s zoning laws in New York, Christopher Street Books assistant manager John Murphy said, “We’ve been here since before Stonewall, and there have never been complaints. The school and the church have no problem with us. Only the mayor. The gay community used to fight this sort of thing. But no one seems to care anymore. And our clients aren’t going to stand up and fight the law. Giuliani knew that before he started all this. but I thought some of the gay groups would fight harder” (Warner 150). Why does it seem that gay groups don’t want to stand up and fight these kinds of laws anymore?
• Is it possible to have a politics in which marriage could be seen as one step to a larger goal, and in which its own discriminatory effects could be confronted rather than simply ignored? What would this future look like? Would it be as Warner predicts on page 146, “available to domestic partnership, concubinage, or something like PACS [in France] for property-sharing households, all available to both straight and gay people alike… and accountable to the queer ethos, responsive to the lived arrangements of queer life, and articulated in queer publics?” 

images, audio, and / or video

A dramatic reading of Jabberwocky. Youtube clip to follow in another post. I’ve always loved this poem and its queer possibilities. The reading I found is wonderful, and I keep imagining Warner’s sex codes version in my head.

MLA Citation

Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Print.

queer theory dictionary

-gen*der - what is between your ears; this does not have to match a person’s biological sex; gender can be expressed in any number of ways and is something that only an individual person can be in control of or determine

-so*cial norms - the societally constructed ideas of “normal” that make it difficult for “non-normative” people to feel comfortable with themselves and the world around them; these norms are merely social constructs, there is nothing inherently normal about them; however, the norm cannot exist without the abnormal

-nor*ma*li*za*tion - the process by which small children are encouraged to think in binary terms, in terms of normal and abnormal in all parts of their life

-gen*der dys*phor*ia - the medicalized definition for when the gender of a person does not match the sex of the person; why things have to be medicalized, I still don’t understand

fave quote wall

In the same way that queer theory opposes those who would regulate identities or establish epistemological claims of priority for those who make claims to certain kinds of identities, it seeks not only to expand the community base of antihomophobic activism, but, rather, to insist that sexuality is not easily summarized or unified through categorization (Butler 7).

- I really love this quote. So many people today want to categorize everything. I myself am guilty of wanting to know the sexuality or gender identity of the new people I meet. Why does it matter? It really shouldn’t be any of my business. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that categorization would not make a more unified movement.

The terms by which we are recognized as humans are socially articulated and changeable. And sometimes the very terms that confer “humanness” on some individuals are those that deprive certain other individuals of the possibility of achieving that status, producing a differential between the human and the less-than-human. (Butler 2)

- It’s really sad to me that as humans, sometimes we feel the need to destroy other humans in our attempts to gain social acceptance. Why is this necessary? Why do humans feel the need to put others down to feel better about themselves? I just don’t think it’s ok. Too bad we can’t all get along.

From a position of power, and from the point of view of distributive justice, what makes, or ought to make, the lives of others bearable? Somewhere in the answer we find ourselves not only committed to a certain view of what life is, and what it should be, but also of what constitutes the human, the distinctively human life, and what does not. There is always a risk of anthropocentrism here if one assumes that the distinctively human life is valuable - or most valuable - or is the only way to think the problem of value. (Butler 17)

- As an animal person, I’ve always wondered why people seem to value their own lives more than animals. But I’ve also seen the other extreme happen, where extremist animal rights activists place the lives of animals over the lives of humans, including themselves. Why can’t humans see their lives as equal in value to those of animals?

Our very sense of personhood is linked to the desire for recognition, and that desire places us outside ourselves, in a realm of social norms that we do not fully choose, but that provide the horizon and the resource for any sense of choice that we have. (Butler 33)

- It’s interesting to me that the social norms that we fight against are the very things that enable us to create communities around similar interests and beliefs. If we did not have labels, how would we find others that we can relate to? An online forum for queer youth, helping them to accept their queer identities, would not be nearly as effective if not labeled for youth struggling with queer issues. Or would it? Would those youth (or adults) find each other still, even without the words to identify each other?

critical questions

- Why do we insist on assigning a gender identity to children in utero? If we take the idea that gender and sex are different things, then why do we insist on buying blue things for boys and pink things for girls? Are yellow and purple really “gender neutral?” 

- Butler writes, “The view that the desire to become a man or a transman or to live transgendered is motivated by a repudiation of femininity presumes that every person born with female anatomy is therefore in possession of a proper femininity (whether innate, symbolically assumed, or socially assigned), one that can be either owned or disowned, appropriated or expropriated.” How is this different for transwomen? (Butler 9)

images, audio, and / or video

The clip I chose to link to this week is the trailer for Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m A Cheerleader. I could not find the exact clip I wanted, the clip of the participants in the True Directions program’s final exam - mock coitus with someone of the opposite sex. However, parts of it can be seen in this trailer. When Butler mentions the film in her chapter on the David Reimer case, I knew instantly what scene she was talking about. So here it is.

MLA Citation

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

queer theory dictionary

-aph*ro*des*ia - a dynamic ensemble that included desire, pleasure, and act, according to the ancient Greeks; only relative to free men, as subordinates could not exercise this kind of ethical control and were under the control of other people; “the point was not to abstain from pleasure or refuse to engage in courtship of either women or boys and men; the point was to pursue potential lovers and enjoy their bodies and one’s own in ideal, manly, appropriately measured ways; ethos or ethics is a way of life (McWhorter 115)

-bo*dy pol*ic*ing - the mentality of modern women that we must constantly be in control of every aspect of our body; the consequences will be dire if we do not maintain this control; who needs the jailer when the inmates police themselves?

-hys*ter*ia - Victorian illness in women caused by “congestion in the womb;” symptoms include weeping, sensitivity to light and cold, strange hallucinations, and fatigue; the character of Mrs. Daldry from Sarah Ruhl’s In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) exemplifies this condition (Ruhl 12-13)

-paroxysm - Victorian name for an orgasm; seen as a medical treatment for hysteria in women; patients were manually stimulated to orgasm to release the congested juices in the womb; after the dawn of electricity, vibrators were used to more quickly stimulate the patient; doctors believed that healthy women would have adverse reactions to paroxysm

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“[The Greeks] understood desire as a longing that comes only after pleasure has been experienced and at the moment when memory of pleasure is invoked through a depiction or mental representation of the acts that are likely to bring it about. (A virgin, therefore, cannot experience sexual desire, nor can a lifelong teetotaler desire a good wine.) Desire is neither logically nor chronologically prior to the pleasurable acts that nowadays we might see as its satisfaction.” (McWhorter 114)

- While I’ve never heard this theory put into words before, it has always made sense to me that desire would follow pleasure, as the Greeks believed. How else would you know what you are desiring if you have never experienced it before? Perhaps the desire we feel before experience pleasure is simply the desire to know and to understand sexual pleasure.

“Women are expected to learn about nutrition and devise and follow dietary regimes to manage both their own weight and health and that of their husbands and children; women are expected to abstain from extramarital sex and be discreet in manner and dress so as not to arouse men to savage passion; women, whose bodies are often depicted as dirty and disorderly and foul smelling, are expected to give no evidence that any biological process is going on inside us while brothers, husbands, boyfriends, and colleagues discuss their farts and hold belching contests at festive gatherings. … You must master that body and keep it under strict surveillance at all times.” (McWhorter 140)

- Patriarchy expects women to keep their own bodies in line with the “rules” of society. The double standard for men and women is clear here. Perhaps in more recent years have men been expected to keep to a certain standard of dress and appearance, but never to the extent of women. I think the saddest part is that women are expected to hide natural bodily functions. There are still men and boys who refuse to believe that women poop. How is that even possible? Did they go through high school biology?

“Oh but that’s beautiful! A bit sad, isn’t it? Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold onto the sadness or to banish it - I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?” (Ruhl 26)

- This quote from Mrs. Givings made me really think about music and how we transfer emotions through songs. Do we instinctively listen to sad songs when we’re already sad because we want something to relate to? Or does listening to those songs make us even more sad because we’re taking in someone else’s sadness through their song?

“Look - there - another window lit - golden - the rest of the house dark - an incomplete painting. I love incomplete paintings - why do painters always insist upon finishing paintings? It’s unaccountable - life is not like that!” (Ruhl 49)

- Leo’s statement about art and the incompleteness of life made me think about art and impressions of art. Why does art have to be an exact replica of reality?

critical questions

- Do we instinctively listen to sad songs when we’re already sad because we want something to relate to? Or does listening to those songs make us even more sad because we’re taking in someone else’s sadness through their song? Is that how happy songs keep our good moods up, through absorbing someone else’s happiness? What about angry songs? Do they do the same thing?

-Why did the Victorians believe that using a vibrator in a healthy woman would cause adverse reactions? Clearly they believed female masturbation was bad, but why did they not make the connection that using a vibrator on a woman suffering from hysteria was the same thing? How could they not make the connection that both are sexual, instead of one being sexual and one being medical?

-When and how did the shift in thinking about sex condemnation happen? McWhorter says that “the parts of [the] discourse that look nowadays like condemnation of sexual wantonness - such as condemnation of promiscuity or premarital sex - were condemnation all right, but the girls condemned were not necessarily thought to have wanted the sex they had. When a girl got pregnant out of wedlock, for example, she was condemned for failing to restrain her boyfriend or for trying to trap some poor man into marrying her; in other words, she was condemned for failing to stand her ground or for engaging in manipulation and deceit. She was not condemned for wanting to have sex for sex’s sake.” (McWhorter 103)

MLA Citation

McWhorter, Ladelle. “Disorientation Or, Beyond Sex-Desire.” Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington, IN: IU Press, 1999. 101-135. Print.

—-. “Natural Bodies Or, Ain’t Nobody here but Us Deviants.” Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington, IN: IU Press, 1999. 137-137. Print.

Ruhl, Sarah. In The Next Room or the vibrator play. New York: Samuel French, 2010. Print.

queer theory dictionary

-sex*u*al in*ver*sion - “broad range of deviant gender behavior” (Halperin 1); a way of explaining sexual and gender differences among humans, since people feel the need to categorize everything; negative connotations from the words themselves, as inversion implies something that is not normal; the words also imply that if something is inverted or reversed, then it can be inverted again to become normal again

-psy*cho*log*i*cal her*maph*ro*dism - an explanation for same sex feelings that stayed fit logically into the theories of sexual inversion; this explanation said that a man who experienced same sex desire was simply man with the soul or mind of a woman; instead of desiring someone of the opposite sex, those with this “pathological condition” desired a “normal” member of the same sex

-vice - something desirable but not something to be touched; something illicit or illegal but incredibly attractive; generally connected with something criminal or perverse

-eu*gen*ics - a response to changing demographics in the United States; positive eugenics encourages the “right” people to breed, while negative eugenics does what it can to prevent the “wrong” people from breeding

fave quote wall

“I can’t,” said the girl, “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I can’t,” said the girl. “That’s all that I mean.” (Hemingway 1)

-“The Sea Change” is the first of Hemingway’s short stories that I’ve read, and I absolutely loved it. I can entirely relate to the situation the two characters in the story find themselves in. I have been that girl who broke up with a guy because she was in love with a girl. More than once. And on one occasion, a boyfriend told me he was interested in guys. I also see the difference between can’t and won’t. Someone who won’t stay with you could possibly do it. But someone who can’t stay with you physically cannot bear to do it. Their new knowledge keeps them from being able to. Once you understand and acknowledge something like homosexual attraction, you can’t go back from it.

“A lot of the pleasure I felt in being gay was bound up with the thrill of talking bad about it.” (Love 1)

-Wow. What an intense statement. I think this really shows the depth of gay shame in the mentality of many gay people. To find pleasure in talking bad about a part of yourself is something that I cannot imagine. While I wasn’t always ok with being gay, I never openly talked bad about it. I mean, maybe to myself, but never to anyone else. But then again, I guess that would count.

“Consider a child born in the summer of 1944. Later she became a scientist. Does a portrait of her at age two-one hand holding a water-filled test tube up to the light, the other grasping a measuring cup-give evidence of the early expression of an inborn inclination to measure and analyze, of her genes leading her down the road to the research laboratory? Or is it testimony to her feminist mother’s determination to find nontraditional toys for her young daughter?” (Fausto-Sterling 1)

-I find it really interesting that we tend to see “signs” of homosexuality in children, such as the mom in the video on the gay gene who saw her son’s apparently flamboyant walk as a sign that he would later be gay. Yet we do not always see other things as signs of future interests or professions. I suppose one could argue that I am biologically inclined to love horses and riding. From a very young age, the signs were there. At not even 2 years old, I refused to pick out a Cabbage Patch doll and instead insisted on riding the carousel, to the dismay of my pregnant mother. As far back as I can remember, I did not walk or run, but I trotted and cantered. My friends and I spent our time on the playground cantering around, jumping any obstacle we could find. Am I biologically hard wired to like horses? Who knows, but I know that I still enjoy cantering around campus like a horse.

“It happens that a man in whom the homosexual instinct is yet only latent, or at all events held in a state of repression, tries to form a relationship with a woman. This relationship may be ardent on one or both sides, but-often, doubtless, from the latent homosexuality of the lover-it comes to nothing. Such love-disappointments, in a more or less acute form, occur at some time or another to nearly everyone. But in these persons the disappointment with one woman constitutes motive strong enough to disgust the lover with the whole sex and to turn his attention toward his own sex.” (Ellis 323)

-I think the problem with this theory is that it disregards people who have never had a experience with the opposite sex, whether it be sexual or romantic. It also disregards people who have never had a sexual or romantic experience with the same sex. Pretty much, it implies that experience is necessary to know your own feelings. My first experience with anyone was with a girl. Even before this experience, I knew I was attracted to women more than men, even if I was in denial about it. But I guess, in the age of sexual inversion theory, everyone had to find a reason for homosexual feelings, and dissatisfaction with heterosexual love fit the bill fairly well.

critical questions

-Why do we look for early signs of homosexuality in our children’s behavior when we don’t see signs of other future interests or behaviors? The imaginations of children are incredibly vivid. A child may go through periods of wanting to be a doctor, astronaut, fashion designer, and princess, yet we do not see these as signs of the future.

-Why is it so hard for some people to understand the difference between can’t and won’t in Hemingway’s “The Sea Change?” When the female character says she can’t come back to the male character, what does she mean?

-How do sexual inversion and homosexuality differ? How are they the same? Does sexual inversion allow more room for trans expression? Does homosexuality give people an identity category, something to identify with and sometimes hide behind? 

-question

images, audio, and / or video

The video clip for this week relates directly to Halperin’s “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.” I decided to link to a clip of “The Origins of Love,” a song from the film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This clip illustrates Aristophanes myth in a song with powerful lyrics.

MLA Citation

Ellis, Havelock. “The Theory Of Sexual Inversion.” Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Random House, 1927.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. “Gender Systems: Toward a Theory of Human Sexuality.” Sexing the Body. 2000.

Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Hemingway, Ernest. “The Sea Change.” The Complete Short Stories. Scribner’s, 1987.

Love, Heather K. “Emotional Rescue.” Gay Shame. Halperin and Traub, eds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009.