queer theory

When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty

mandy — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

In When Did Indians Become Straight?, Mark Rifkin takes on a monumental task, exploring the intersections between sexuality, race, colonization/imperialism, sovereignty and nationhood as they apply to Native American tribes and their struggles over the centuries. As someone who is both of Native descent and gay, I was intrigued.

Queer theory and Native American studies have frequently intersected as examinations of the complex and varied Native American understandings of gender and sexuality have frequently informed both Native and non-Native explorations of what it means and has meant to be queer and what the ideal future situation for queer people would look like. Having read a great deal of these examinations, I expected, perhaps, too much.

Rifkin has some good points to make about how discourses on sexuality and appropriate family structure have affected the construction of race and the recognition of peoples of color as legitimate in the eyes of the nation-state, how “tradition” has frequently been reconstructed to erase those parts of actual tribal tradition and culture that are offensive to outsiders, how the imposition of the nuclear family structure was used in the United States government’s attempts to eradicate Native American tribes as distinct peoples, etc. Unfortunately, he doesn’t make these points very well.

Rifkin’s use of language can only be described as abusive and exploitative. As a writer, I frequently wished to liberate them from his grasp and set them free to follow their natural habits in their natural habitats. Rifkin commits so many of the crimes against the English language common amongst academics that it would be tedious to list them all, but the highest of his crimes is perhaps the misuse of terms, such as heteronormativity, to mean what he needs them to mean rather than what they actually do.

The language alone would be bad enough, but Rifkin also seems to argue points that are valid in a manner that makes them seem invalid or at least suspect. For instance, in exploring the role of the nuclear family ideal in the racialization of Native Americans, Rifkin chooses to explore Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, the biography of a White woman become Seneca clan mother. Unfortunately, his focus on the circumstances surrounding the sale of Mrs. Jemison’s lands in Seneca territory as evidence for the primacy of her Whiteness glosses over the fact that much of the back and forth as to her identity as White or Seneca had little to do with racial ideology and much to do with pragmatism, land speculators using whatever twist of law and fact would most quickly grant them access to a prime investment opportunity. The evidence is not sufficient to the argument. Ultimately, it seems that in trying to bring so many ideas and theories together into a cohesive whole and to do so by relying heavily on a very limited literary canon, Rifkin’s arguments frequently become muddled and disjointed or simply fall apart at the seams.

As much as I wish that more people would explore these areas of both Native American studies and queer theory, I can’t in good conscience recommend this book.

Written by: Melinda Barton, April 7th 2011

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

alicia — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Freeman

Duke University Press

Historiography and corporeality have challenged queer theorists, or perhaps more accurately, have been fiercely challenged by queer theorists. From deconstructive viewpoints that question physicality as such, to radical disavowals of any belonging to historical legacies, the transcendental tendencies of queer thought have not come without their casualties.

In her most recent addition to the burgeoning queer theory bookshelves, Elizabeth Freeman tackles both historiography and corporeality head on. With her feet firmly rooted in historical instances, Freeman delves into queer familial structures, temporal gender performativity and (perhaps most provocatively) racial legacies of sadomasochism. Freeman eloquently challenges heteronormative teleologies, but not through deconstrunctionism or transcendence alone; instead, she lays claim to the possibilities of queer temporalities and histories.

Coining terms like erotohistoriography, temporal drag, and chrononormativity Freeman’s queer resistance is embodied in the new temporalities and chronologies that she lays out. Her refashioning of historiography is not only deeply experiential, but it is embodied as well—two strands of thought that has troubled feminist and queer thought alike for decades. More than this, in the same way Audre Lorde theorized about the potentialities of erotics, Freeman re-envisions the political potential of the historical as experienced through eroticism. She moves beyond shame and loss as traditionally explored in queer theory: Freeman’s history is one of carnal enjoyment, enjoyment that does not foreclose racial histories of pain.

Her insistence on addressing both corporeality and experientiality is most stimulating in her chapter on sadomasochism. In this chapter she criticizes queer theory’s inability to adequately unpack the racial baggage of S&M practiced and theorized in the queer community. In this chapter she outlines new ways of theorizing Marquis de Sade through Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant. The film features interracial S&M encounters between two men who engage in deeply historical play that replicates chattel slavery, and occurs in a deeply historical space, the art museum.

Yet another move that Freeman masters as an historian herself is her ability to renegotiate the value placed on historical texts. She gracefully moves between more canonized works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (both literary works), to Cecilia Dougherty’s Coal Miner’s Daughter and Elizabeth Subrin’s Shulie (both video pieces). In this chapter she uses Isaac Julien’s film to access Marquis de Sade, not the other way around. In doing so she successfully restructures which texts shape her historiographies: minor visual works by lesser known authors occupy the foreground of Freeman’s discussion.

This is queer theory at its best: imaginative and troubling while remaining entrenched in lived (a)historical experiences. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman finds herself among the ranks of queer theorists like José Esteban Muñoz, David L. Eng and Jasbir K. Puar. Without cleansing their hands of the complicatedness of history’s racial legacies, these theorists explore the messiness of queerness. This theory is centered on queer time and queer history’s exciting and, at times, (corporeally) violent moments.

As she herself explains when closing her remarks on S&M’s deeply racial historical potentialities, “These are not, to be sure, reparations for past damages (as if the perfect redress were possible), or the means of transcending all limitations. They are, however, ways of knowing history to which queers might make fierce claim.” Fierce, indeed.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, February 4th 2011

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

andrea — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Bruce Erickson, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

Indiana University Press

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire explores the intersections of queer studies and environmental studies and aims to trouble dominant discourses of nature and sexuality. The authors in this collection argue that we should adopt a queer ecological perspective, a “transgressive and historically relevant critique of dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.” Drawing on science studies, environmental history, queer geography, ecocriticism, critical race theory, cultural studies, landscape ecology, and LGBTQ theory, this interdisciplinary anthology presents the various possibilities for “queering ecology and greening queer politics.”

What do queer ecologies and greener queer politics look like? To answer this question, the essays use various theoretical and methodological strategies to explore how understandings of nature shape discourses of sexuality and how understandings of sex and reproduction shape perceptions and uses of the environment.

The chapters delve into topics as diverse as animal sexuality, hermaphrodite frogs, eco-porn, biophilia, lesbian rural communities, pollution and overpopulation, and penguins as environmental icons. Several themes weave throughout the entire collection, including critical analyses of homophobic and racist evolutionary narratives and the ways that particular spaces become imbued with sexual meanings. Overall, Queer Ecologies critiques the heteronormative, racist, nationalist, and colonialist narratives that structure popular environmentalist discourses.

The volume approaches these issues through three sections. In the first part, "Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality," the authors examine how sexual natures are produced through dichotomies such as animal/human and nature/culture. These essays argue that the question is not whether queer acts are “unnatural,” but rather how definitions of nature and culture (and the boundaries between them) are produced and mobilized.

The second section of the book, "Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics," explores the intersections of sexuality and nature as sites of engaged political action. These contributions critique the heteronormativity and whiteness of environmental politics and offer possibilities for radical ecologies and sexual environmental justice.

The final part of the book, "Desiring Nature: Queer Attachments," speaks to the pleasures and losses of engaging with the “more than human” world. The authors in this section explore the links between the regulation of sexuality and the destruction of non-human life. One of the most profound essays in the collection is by editor Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, who writes on the subject of mourning in queer writing about nature. Drawing on a politicized melancholic sensibility from lesbian and gay experiences of AIDS, she attempts a queer re-thinking of environmental destruction, arguing that few, if any public rituals exist to express mourning over the loss of the environment.

Overall, this collection moves forward conversations in queer and environmental literatures, and makes important connections between discourses of sexuality and nature that offer promising possibilities for productive political coalitions and more critical theories. While the authors are careful to note the materiality of bodies and spaces, the volume relies predominantly on textual analysis. The authors examine familiar cultural texts such as mainstream movies like Brokeback Mountain and Happy Feet, popular documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Readers will come away from Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire with a complex understanding of the dangerous assumptions that shape environmental discourses, as well as the importance of environmental considerations to queer theorizing and movement building. The queer ecological framework offered in this collection has valuable insights for readers across a broad spectrum of interests.

Written by: Traci Yoder, January 5th 2011

Gay, Straight and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation

mandy — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Simon LeVay

Oxford University Press

I recently had the pleasure of participating, as a feminist blogger, in a survey about the Feminist Blogosphere. Name? Age? Sex (or "gender," as she put it)? These were not difficult questions (for me) to answer. But when she asked me to identify my sexual orientation, I paused... and then I stumbled. “I’m straight, right?” I asked myself. I’m a woman married to a man. If sexuality is either one of two, possibly three, things, then quite obviously I am a heterosexual. But as Gore Vidal sharply put it: “Trust a nitwit society like this one to think that there are only two categories—fag and straight.”

The fact that I lead a heteronormative life means that I am “normal,” “average,” and “healthy,” doesn’t it? And as I have been leading a universally accepted lifestyle, I am afforded the privilege of thinking of sexuality—not as something that forms the core of one’s identity—but rather as something within a spectrum, and something that enhances one’s identity. When homosexuals have demanded the right to be so-called Lesbians and Gays as part of a movement of identity distinction and defense of their acceptability, I have often thought that, in actuality, said lesbians and gays are no different from me, just people with sexualities that fall elsewhere on the spectrum. But according to the neurologist Simon LeVay, heteros and homos are different on neurological, hormonal, and genetic levels.

May Simon LeVay’s overview of the science of sexuality, which he was instrumental in founding, Gay, Straight and the Reason Why, be admitted into the pantheon of sexual discourse housing Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, et al.—though he is in disagreement with many queer theorists having identified, as he claims, the scientific reasons for human homosexuality. Disputing the Kinsey scale and its seven categories, for instance, LeVay points out that most “non-heterosexual men are homosexual; few say that they are roughly equally attracted to both sexes.” However, he also points out that pathology doesn’t enter into “who we love”: “There’s nothing wrong with gay people,” he writes in his introduction. “I’m gay myself, and happy to be so. There are some differences between us and the rest of humanity, certainly, as I’ll discuss in this book. Some of these differences are trivial, and some may influence people’s lives in interesting ways…”

I really enjoyed reading this book. Surprised? I was. In the first place, I struggle to understand science. But LeVay has written this text with laypeople like me in mind. Technical terms are italicized when first employed and subsequently defined in a comprehensive glossary at the back of the book. Hence, reading about neurons and genes and hormones was like reading a recipe for shortbread cookies. While my literary academic background in sexuality and queer theory came in handy and my prior interest kept me engaged, I do believe this book is appropriate for anybody with rudimentary knowledge of sexuality and a genuine interest in understanding it.

One practical dilemma arises were society to apply LeVay’s finding—that homosexuality results in part from a size discrepancy in a cluster of nerves found in the hypothalamus—to everyday life: we’d need “new rules.” If most men, for instance, are heterosexual, but those who aren’t have a smaller than normal INAH3, then could homosexuality and its physical cause be considered a disability? Are homosexuals, with their observed differences from heterosexuals, disadvantaged because of this physical abnormality/disability (not taking into account the social stigma against homosexuality, whatever its root)? And what about people with normal INAH3 who exhibit homosexual longings or tendencies? What is our science? “All mental traits, including sexual orientation, have some durable representation in the brain,” LeVay reports. I find Ashley Judd, and not Angelina Jolie, sexually attractive. Can an explanation for that be found in my brain, or is it beyond pathology and part of the aforementioned “who we love” question? Can sexuality have a spiritual component?

LeVay’s discussion of gender is problematic for queer theory enthusiasts like me. While he concludes that gender traits are a “kaleidoscopic blend” amongst homosexuals, his science contradicts often this notion. He affirms that gay men are on average more “feminine” by their own account, and lesbian women more “masculine” by their own account, than their straight counterparts. This plays into the reductive Freudian (among other) expectation that human sexual relationships must consist of symbiotic masculine and feminine parts. Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests homosexuals have different anatomical makeup than heterosexuals. LeVay does not shy away from using potentially pejorative language: “…lesbians who identify as ‘butch’ have a higher (more male-like) waist-hip ratio than do straight women, whereas lesbians who identify as ‘femme’ have the same ratio as straight women. Because the waist-hip ratio rises if people become overweight, this difference does not necessarily represent a constitutional difference between butch and femme lesbians: It could simply be that butch lesbians have less interest in dieting or maintaining a ‘feminine’ profile.”

Gay, Straight and the Reason Why is full of these types of observations, the things we’re thinking about when we ponder about our human differences, but are often afraid to say aloud; and I give LeVay a lot of credit for his candor. Ultimately, his observations and those of his colleagues detailed herein make our eliminating the language and expectation of gender seem far, far away. But I appreciate good, thorough, critical discourse such as that which can be launched with documented research of this kind. I hope this text finds its way into many graduate seminars across many areas of study: from science to literature and film, and more!

Written by: Rachel Moehl, January 1st 2011

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia. The metaphor refers to the time when slaves could be whipped for selling sugar from the plantations for any reason; it embodies both transgression and forbidden pleasure. Tinsley points out that using the term is “stealing language itself” to evoke a “transformative desire” to change the status of women and challenge the injustices of society.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature incorporates black, queer, and feminist theory into its analysis. It draws on literature, history, geography, anthropology, economics, and linguistics to paint a colorful, multilayered portrait of Caribbean women. Texts from Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad (along with occasional references to Cuba, Grenada, Aruba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the region) are used to explore the history of sexuality and the complications of Creole traditions. Tinsley begins with love songs sung by black working-class women to their female lovers, along with accounts of birthday parties and erotic dances and religious ceremonies, as well as messages exchanged in the symbolic language of flowers, to show the intricacies of gender identities in the West Indies.

In succeeding chapters she turns to Luminous Isle, an autobiographical novel by the white Jamaican woman writer Eliot Bliss, then to the erotic poems written in the 1920s by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican Woman, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel, No Telephone to Heaven, and, finally, Dionne Brand’s poetry collection No Language Is Neutral, in order to trace “their poetics of decolonization” and to point out how these texts suggest reconfiguring gender history to acknowledge the strength and beauty of Afro-Caribbean woman-identified women. Tinsley’s brilliant, sensitive explications, her frequent references to artworks from the area, and her descriptions of lush landscapes make reading her work a delight and a surprise.

However, I do wish that she had studied more than one Hispanic writer, Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro Espín. But I understand that bringing in a substantial number of texts in Spanish would have enlarged her project’s boundaries to perhaps unmanageable proportions. Several references to U.S. interventions in Grenada also left me wanting more information on the effects of North American activities in the region. I hope that Tinsley herself or one of her readers will expand on the groundbreaking work she has done in this book. I highly recommend it to a cosmopolitan audience.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 3rd 2010

Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Deborah M. Withers

HammerOn Press

Since the late 1970s, Kate Bush has been the original weirdchik in modern female pop music—press- and tour-shy, highly literate and culturally aware, witchy and Catholic, English and Eastern, masculine and high-femme. Above all, Kate has that voice, which she debuted at age nineteen with her song 'Wuthering Heights,' an eerie tale told from the point of view of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost. If there had been no Kate Bush, there would have been no Tori Amos, and most likely no PJ Harvey or Bjork either. Deborah M. Withers is unsurprisingly a big fan of Kate's body of work as well as a self-identified queer woman and academic who draws on Kate's music and the gender theories of Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Adriana Cavarero, and Donna Haraway to present feminist and queer interpretations of Kate Bush albums.

Normally, this is the kind of ambitious academic project that I love and that my friend Brendan calls 'grad school crap.' Withers applies her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink theories to all of Kate's albums and her film The Line, the Cross and the Curve, mostly by cherry-picking fairly obscure lyrics and describing musical beats that she believes support her particular idea for that song or album. Withers has created the idea of what she refers to as the 'Bushian Feminine Subject' or the BFS, which is the 'I' in all of Kate's songs; the BFS can be either male or female, of any race, and refers essentially to the character that Kate becomes for each song. It's an interesting interpretation since far too often the casual music fan thinks that every 'I' in a song refers to the musician herself. (For example: Kate's song 'Cloudbusting' is sung from the point of view of Wilhelm Reich's son.) Withers also wants to provide her own view into Kate's music since Kate has long been interpreted via the white, male, heterosexual music critics of the 1970s and 1980s. I am certain that Kate's occasionally difficult lyrics and complex musical arrangements point to something deeper than what is perceived superficially, but I am unconvinced by Withers' hodge-podge of queer, feminist, post-structuralist, and post-human (a new one to me) theories. She makes much of the Bushian Feminine Subject's putative queerness, racial appropriation, male and female performance, suicide, and rebirth.

At 157 pages, Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory seems more like a particularly ambitious college thesis than a book-length treatise on an important female artist with far-reaching cultural impact. It isn't poorly written, but it does appear to reach too far in its quest to assign theoretical meaning to Kate Bush's records. I was more curious to delve further into Withers' source materials than into the book itself. I might still recommend it to fans of Kate Bush and those who are into high theory; it is a short read and interesting and entertaining in its own right.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, June 17th 2010

Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Leila J. Rupp

New York University Press

Sapphistries is an epic journey through real and fictional love between women. It is so epic that the author, Leila J. Rupp, had to coin a new term to describe this type of book. It is not just a history; it is an interweaving of prehistoric musings, fictional accounts that draw on suppositions of what it must have been like in times when no evidence was left of when and where these kinds of love was forbidden, right up to the modern day. I say these kinds of love because Rupp has effortfully but effectively convinced me that I need to know about the whole she-bang. It’s not easy to keep track of lesbians throughout history when people didn’t self-identify as such.

This book takes in the whole gamut of potential interpretations of women-loving-women: social males, women who live as men but retained their female identity, third and fourth gender identities, women passing as men, two spirits, secret weddings, school girls having accepted but secret relationships as a cultural yet unofficial rite of passage in various modern cultures... as a run-of-the-mill modern lesbian, I was a little overwhelmed. This varied interpretation of ‘Sapphistries’ is extremely broad, and definitely widened my perspective on what I think the author would like me to consider a part of my culture.

Primary and secondary source material across the span of human history is combined with fictional accounts throughout the book. I personally found the interweaving of fictional accounts and historical details a little too seamless at first. I had to flip back and forth a few times mid-tale to remind myself which was which, but I eventually got the hang of it and had a much better contextualized grasp of what I was reading. I thoroughly enjoyed the re-tellings and re-imaginings of ancient women-loving-women. With Rupp's first-person interjections and a storytelling tone, the book reads like a long and enjoyable university lecture delivered by a witty, warm, and knowledgeable teacher.

I would recommend this book for women’s studies, literature, queer theory, or history syllabuses. I even suspect it would make for an excellent module on its own, with some supplementary reading thrown in. It’s no coffee table book—this is some serious reading and I personally would want a sherpa to guide me through it the next time I read it.

Sapphistries is particularly invaluable for queer theory because of the vastly broad picture it presents of the grand scope of women who love women—regardless of whether they identify as queer or not. This book opened my eyes to the many positive and negative perceptions and lifestyle choices of those who were a part of ‘Sapphistry’ in the past, and I look forward to seeing how it informs future study and thought.

Written by: Chella Quint, March 21st 2010

Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Valerie Rohy

SUNY Press

Valerie Rohy’s exploration of the efforts to define both queer and Black identities and their subsequent intersections is as interesting as it is illuminating, as presented in Anachronism and Its Others, whether it is a discussion of the temporal implications of Frederick Douglass’ thought presented in his autobiography or demystifying the nebulous concepts of "queer time." Anachronism and Its Others also investigates how the modern field of sexology has recently made a connection between homosexuality and blackness, often for the negative purpose of justifying homophobic and/or racist socioeconomic worldviews.

One of Rohy’s strongest observations in Anachronism and Its Others is the split between "queer" and "straight time" as she notes within the initial chapters of the book. The idea of straight time as a historical metanarrative told through the evolution of American culture as defined by the goals of majoritarian interests is revelatory. As Rohy states, straight time is "promoted as the best form of progress and the only 'real temporality.'" The author illustrates an important connection to scientific racism as it forms the grounding of those seeking to connect homosexuality and Blackness with threats to the White family, to its perceived superior vitality, fecundity, and ability to function as the carriage of the national society. Rohy’s weaving of modern constructions of ethnic and sexual identity, the connection of contemporary sexology with scientific racism and the attempt to negate any alternatives to a Caucasian heteronormative national paradigm are brilliant.

Such connections and observations lead one to an important question: How does one combat attempts to frame progress and time itself as concepts in opposition to the existential utility of sexual and ethnic minorities within a particular society? As threats to the forward movement of that society? Rohy’s argument against the idea of "straight time" and other justifications of a narrowly defined national culture and destiny are made through the intellectual dismantling of its philosophical buttresses: contemporary sexology and its cousin scientific racism appear to be one large step toward answering such a daunting challenge.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, February 12th 2010

The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By S. Bear Bergman

Arsenal Pulp Press

Gender, sex, and queer theory aren’t exactly what come to mind when I think of an easy read. I remember being duped into reading one of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s books, Sexing the Body, which begins with the story of a female athlete, Maria Patino, stripped of her medals when it was determined by doctors that she had been born with a condition known as androgen insensitivity. She was biologically male, but her body did not respond accordingly.

After this first anecdotal queer foray, Fausto-Sterling dives head first into the theory and science of it all. Although wildly interesting, theory is something that I can only take in small doses, and Sexing the Body took me some time to read. This is where S. Bear Bergman’s book enters at a seemingly oppositional point in style. The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You is a collection of essays on queer and transgender issues that begins like the story of Maria, and continues in this vein for the duration of the book while still getting the important, theoretical points across and engaging the reader in a way that almost no queer theory book has before.

This is not to say that Bergman’s book isn’t smart. It is. It’s full of big words and heady concepts, but ze delivers them in a way that is thoughtful to the reader, a kind of fireside chat of topics that are usually spoken about in academic settings. Bergman’s gift of storytelling illuminates the evolving nuances of queer and trans life, and one of the greatest elements of hir book is that ze has a way of making the personal not only political, but public and shared as well.

Most essays begin with a story from Bergman’s life, and then weave the details of the stories, which deal with queer life in practice, into queer life in theory. Some essays are on the cutting edge, like “Passing,” which deals with the use, or misuse, of a word that inflicts responsibility of understanding onto the person in question. Not only does Bergman discuss the problematic use of this word, ze offers a solution-reading-that assigns responsibility to the observer. Other essays, like “The Velveteen Tranny,” is an honest and heartfelt look at Bergman’s dissatisfaction with the sexes and genders that are culturally provided–even the non-normative ones-and ache that surrounds the desire to feel real.

The essays in The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You are at times hilarious, thought provoking, sad, and even painful. Few books discuss queer and trans topics in such a personal way, and this book does a great service to contributing to the growing canon of queer literature. By making hir experiences visible, Bergman provides yet another narrative within the LGBTQ discourse, and lengthens the spectrum of possibility even further, one essay at a time.

Written by: Krista Ciminera, January 14th 2010

Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

admin — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kane Race

Duke University Press

Pleasure Consuming Medicine is the deliciously (and ambiguously) titled new work by the Senior Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Kane Race. His difficult but rewarding text joins a number of new works about the pleasures (not just punishments) of drug use. New works by Sarah Maclean, Joao Biehl, Philippe Bourgois, Lee Hoffer, Merrill Singer, and others have begun to flesh out in ethnographic richness the theoretical provocations of the French social theoretician Michel Foucault. Race theorizes the limits to community and political mobilization efforts insofar as they are tied to drug use and to sexual identity and networking. Insights from ethnography, queer theory and drug and gender studies address the illegality of drug use and the perceived deviance of drug users. Nevertheless, he pitches his argument not at the level of degradation and addiction, but rather, at the possible unity and the undoubted pleasures of members of communities who identify and who can be mobilized politically through consumptions of drugs and pursuit and experience of sexual pleasure.

The book is comprised of seven densely written but rewarding chapters, each being titled by means of double entendres, for example, “Recreational States,” “Exceptional Sex,” and “Consuming Compliance.” It will appeal to academic researchers and to gay and lesbian, feminist and queer activists, but will not perhaps be appreciated by many policy-makers, public health officials or casual readers. Pleasure Consuming Medicine is not an easy read, but those who are well versed in critical theory, social history, and queer studies and who proceed slowly and contemplate his complex argument, will be greatly rewarded. It would be appropriate to use in graduate-level courses in several fields.

Race’s account of the centrality of the Azure Party, the piece de resistance of Sydney, Australia’s annual lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender fest, is just as humane as it is intellectual. Such events are typically analyzed as instances of mass escape and debauchery by members of sexual minorities. By contrast, he argues that it was also “a crucial apparatus within which the notion of community was given popular resonance” in terms, for example, of dealing with the threat and reality of HIV and AIDS. Race explores the ethics of drug use (both in public and more privately), but resists the usual tendency to frame drug use and (gay male) sexuality in terms of marginalized, deviant men in search of (sexual) ecstasy and (pharmaceutical) Ecstasy. Pharmaceutical companies make the drugs that their reps shill to the doctors who prescribe that they be obtained from pharmacists, each of whom, then, does his or her part to proscribe their use and denigrate their users. Much irony ensues.

If there be a scene or event around which this text revolves, it’s the swooping down of disciplinary forces in 2007 upon denizens of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, the Azure Party. As gay, lesbian, straight, and gender-bending partiers engaged in the technocultures of music, dance, and licit and illicit drugs, supervised by and being cared for by members of volunteer medical teams, a tremendous panic swept over the crowd when policemen and canine drug-sniffers busted into the crowd. Some revelers swallowed their drugs to avoid detection and thus overdosed. Others breached the gates and were arrested thusly. Others reacted with (mild) violence to police presence and thus damaged their reputation further.

His argument is often subtle, for example, asking us to think of “the dance party” not as “the transparent radiation of community,” but rather, “as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated.” The rewards are there for the reader who takes the time to appreciate the complexities of dance party culture and social theories about it.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., November 22nd 2009

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Heather Love

Harvard University Press

Feeling Backward is a brilliant book that attempts the “impossible” and succeeds. Using Michel Foucault and Eve Sedgwick as theoretical touchstones, and incorporating Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” Heather Love “feels backward” to reimagine and connect with aspects of a queer past that had been rendered invisible. In doing so—in risking (as she puts it) the fate of Lot’s wife in turning back to revisit a painful past—she embraces the ruins, the “fugitive dead,” the loneliness and failures and all the “negative affect” that need to be reclaimed as part of that history.

She invokes José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of a “gay shame day parade” to help insist, in her reconception of queer history, on those aspects of queer experience otherwise rendered too painful, too unhelpful, too outside the margins of “modern gay identity.” All of the literary figures she chooses to exemplify her project are liminal, largely rejected as part of gay historiography as it has been constructed since the early 1990s. And yet it is figures as diverse and complex as Walter Pater, Willa Cather, and Radclyffe Hall that provide Love with opportunities for “emotional rescue.” She dismisses the ancient admonitions against personal involvement with historical subjects and seeks passionately the play of recognition she feels in the struggles of these figures and their often subtle and disguised “queer performativity,” to use Sedgwick’s term.

Cather is one of those authors who, like Love herself, reaches into the past for a sense of community and identity and yet who does so with great ambivalence and a complicated pathos concerning her own gender and sexual identity. It is precisely that ambivalence—and the loneliness and melancholia it stirs—that need to be understood and confronted.

Another object for reclamation in the backward march is romantic friendship or, more generally, the examination of a mode of intimacy that has remained relatively free of stigma and yet contains much of the erotic and social connection between same-sex people that also needs to be included in queer historiography. And yet the indeterminacy of the term and its historical ambiguity renders it a kind of shadowy and poorly understood phenomenon in literature and history.

Queer theory has challenged the categories of sexual identity, even the notion of identity itself. As Love reminds us, so many have felt left out of the categories which were designed, in part, to help forge the sorts of connection and recognition, current and historical, that Love sees as desirable in our backward reach. The troubled, the alienated, the stigmatized, the personal catastrophes are a necessary part of queer history, as traumatizing as that history can be. Love moves bravely backwards to that murky time, the “queer life before Stonewall,” and then crosses the modernist line backwards to feel what has been lost. In doing so she has made a profoundly imaginative and powerful contribution to queer history, and yet her book remains reasonably accessible to those with some background in queer theory and literature.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 1st 2009

Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0000

By Julie Abraham

University Of Minnesota Press

Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities is a survey of the presence of homosexuality within urban contexts throughout modern Western history. Following a concise preface synthesizing the extraordinarily broad and encompassing history of the relation shared by homosexual communities and cities, she fittingly opens with a chapter tracing the lesbian body throughout urban and literary history, exploring Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal and Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes. The author acknowledges her challenge to recent assumptions regarding “the union of homosexuals and cities, namely, that the homosexuality of the city is always male,” and emphasizes an often overlooked facet of urban studies. Her treatment of the legibility of the lesbian and her privileging of this body is an important and refreshing contribution to LGBTQ studies.

Abraham is a Professor of literature and of LGBT Studies and Metropolitan Lovers evidences a marked emphasis on the relevance of literary perspectives to sociological interpretations of the city. She notes that it is in fact literature that has taught us how to “read” urban homosexuality and alludes to literary/philosophical figures such as Susan Sontag to enhance her portrayal of the theatricality of urban social life. A generous number of photographs and illustrations offer a satisfying visual element that becomes crucial to understanding the complexities of gaze and spectacle in the formulation of the modern city. Events such as Stonewall are not left unexamined in Abraham’s study as she attempts to portray as comprehensive history of the Western urban landscape through the lens of LGBTQ theory.

The tone of Metropolitan Lovers is a bit less erudite than it would appear to be based on Abraham’s scholarly career and university publisher. Her writing is lucid, accessible, perhaps more to the casual reader interested in a general introduction to an LGBTQ study of Western cities than for an academic researcher. This is not to say, however, that Abraham does not offer an insightful survey highlighting the relevance of homosexuality to the construction of the modern city. The work also provides an implicit introduction to the exercise of “queering” texts previously understood in heterocentric terms and will most certainly contribute to and stimulate future scholarship and interrogations of what it means to be urban and queer.

Written by: Melissa McCarron, June 30th 2009

Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions

admin — Sun, 10 May 2009 16:53:00 +0000

By Michael Snediker

University Of Minnesota Press

“The year I told my parents I was gay was also the year of my first encounter with depression,” writes Michael Snediker in the opening line of his detailed introduction.

This line struck a nerve as I know a few people who, personally, are still on the same boat. I have seen an aunt and an uncle, a lesbian and gay respectively, ostracized by the conservative, über-religious society they live in. They have suffered self-doubt, identity crisis, and depression the moment their secrets have been revealed.

Snediker’s scholarly work Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions aims to counterpoint the negativity that revolves around queer theory, which is often melancholy, self-shattering, shame and death driven, with the help of poetic lyrics coming from Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, Jack Spicer and Elizabeth Bishop. The author’s queer optimism “doesn’t aspire toward optimism,” rather “to find happiness interesting.”

He chose the aforementioned poets as there is more to their work than their melancholic poetics; that deep inside there hides a smile that has a long-lasting effect on anyone who might want to read beyond their quatrains. It seems to be an ambitious task. By using different theories (from Michel Foucault’s to Judith Butler’s) and other bodies of work from literary critics, Snediker successfully managed to give his readers fresh views on the poets’ selected literary works to search for the ultimate quest for enjoyment and personhood.

For example, when most of the literary critics were convinced that Crane’s last work, "The Broken Tower," suggested his impending death, which they all agreed showed “deeper insight and wisdom” than his earlier poems, Snediker refuted that there was another oeuvre that could be written at the same time of his intended last poem, "The Circumstance," that salvaged the “broken stones” that “were dismantled” in "The Broken Tower." Meaning, behind the sadness of Crane’s there lingered his own optimism. Perhaps. Crane, who committed suicide in April 1932 by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico from the steamship SS Orizaba, regarded himself as a failure, partly literary and partly due to his homosexuality. His critics saw his works as difficult to understand. Yet, in the 1930s America, Crane was one of its victims: misunderstood and gay.

Snediker, an assistant professor of English at Queens’ University in Ontario, Canada, didn’t arrange his chapters chronologically, instead thematically, with each chapter relating to each other. Hence Dickinson went after Crane’s.

As a childhood favorite, I was aware of Dickinson’s masochistic tendencies. Her dedication to producing poems engorged with pain, dying and death always made me smile. This drove Snediker to probe through her works.

He also posed some questions concerning Spicer’s serial poem Billy the Kid could be his own way of struggling with his own identity. Could it be the poet’s “aggression against himself?” or some “internalized homophobia?” Was the poem about the poet’s fascination with multiplicity, the character’s ability to elude death? The famed Billy the Kid who always comes back through the numerous films where he kills and dies again and kills and dies again greatly inspired Spicer. He, by the way, was a reader of Dickinson.

How about a connection, not a spiritual one but in terms of idealization, between Crane and Bishop? Was this a sort of queer love on the part of Bishop, who never mentioned her homosexuality throughout her works unlike her contemporaries’ confessional poetry? Did she think of Crane when she composed some of her works?

These are only tips of the iceberg, if you may call them. I have learned so many things after reading Snediker’s book; it is like a new world opening up with so many perspectives and possibilities. I remember a discussion with a friend years ago about poetry: the beauty of reading poems is that it is open for interpretation. Everyone can draw his or her own conclusion. There are no boundaries.

What’s also good about Snediker’s Queer Optimism is that it is not only the homosexual community that can profit from it, but all of us, who possess different colors and sexual orientations, because pain, love, and happiness are universal.

Written by: Elen P. Farkas, May 10th 2009