gay studies

Privilege: A Reader

admin — Sat, 08 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Michael Kimmel, Abby L. Ferber

A historian once said that the more one can know about something, the more you can control it. Michel Foucault was specifically talking about the control of psychiatric patients, prison inmates, and people's sex lives, but we can certainly extend his thoughts to a plethora of other examples. What Foucault did not say, however, was how exposing and learning about power and dominance can lead to their dismantling.

After more than two decades since his passing, the inheritors of Foucault's ideas make an appearance in a handsome new book that explores the invisible power of privilege; namely the privilege of being White, heterosexual, and middle class in America. Privilege: A Reader is a collection of essays compiled and edited by Michael Kimmel and Abby L. Ferber, both scholarly experts in masculinities and ethnic studies respectively. The book takes on a welcoming and accessible feel with essays that come a personal place, many written from a first-person perspective by heavyweights like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Tim Wise.

Some, like Allan Bérubé's experience as a gay rights activist brings to light the complications of being White in anti-racist gay rights movement. Not being White, I found Bérubé's angst about pointing out the Whiteness of influential gay groups in the U.S. an eyeopener. For White people, it seems, it was convenient to remain racially invisible and to depend on the unspoken rules about keeping that Whiteness unchecked. Awkward silences, defensiveness, and hostility form the repertoire of White discomfort when the racial gaze is turned to Whiteness.

In Michael A. Messner's piece on "Becoming 100 Percent Straight," he raises questions that heterosexual people rarely ask: how do we know for sure we're straight? And what made us straight? Messner's question is interwoven in a study of his own sexuality that touches on his memories as a young man who was infatuated with a male classmate and friend. In repressing this infatuation, he belittles and rejects his friend—a process Messner calls the heterosexualisation of his masculinity.

With every chapter I am reminded of the discomfort the topic of privilege raises and how important that it should remain unsettling. I learn that Black men and working class White people, as privileged groups, are highly contested categories in the face of institutional racism and poverty. And dishearteningly, I discover that the gateway to social mobility undermined by the unearned privilege of being accepted to Ivy League colleges by virtue of having parents who are alumni.

Kimmel and Ferber's book takes us on a journey of self-reflection, of deconstructing the power of invisibility, and asks us some difficult questions about our many roles in maintaining oppression. But it does not try leave us beset with racial or class guilt. Rather, it invites us to pursue, both on a theoretical and practical level, ways of recognising the overlapping nature of social privileges and overcoming differences in the name of solidarity against oppressions.

Though Privilege: A Reader could be a more comprehensive, far-reaching catalogue of dominance, both insidious and overt, if it had taken on board the narrative of privilege from other non-White experiences and interrogated what being able-bodied and cisgendered mean. The absence of trans, disabled, Asian, and Native American voices speaks, ironically, of Kimmel's and Ferber's privilege of omitting these important experiences that are key to dismantling the edifice of privilege.

I praise Privilege: A Reader nonetheless, for its courage to speak from a place that prefers to remain silent, for raising attention to a things that want to stay hidden, and its overall critique of life's many taken for granted experiences and “common sense.” I'm sure Foucault would be proud of that.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, May 8th 2010

Homophobias: Lust and Loathing Across Time and Space

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by David A. B. Murray

Duke University Press

Homosexuality seems to always be a topic of interest for researchers, at least in this day and age. Perhaps it is most interesting because sexuality is one of the most private aspects of a person’s life, and nothing seems to generate interest in quite the way that something so mysterious and private can. Homophobia, like homosexuality, varies in degrees of presence, and is often intertwined with the complexities of the cultural, economic, and political workings of the environment it finds itself situated. In Homophobias, edited by David A. B. Murray, the topic of homophobia and its prevalence is examined across cultures and time.

Of particular interest to me has always been the weaving together of racism and homophobia, which is discussed in the article by Brian Riedel titled, “Stolen Kisses: Homophobias as ‘Racism’ in Contemporary Urban Greece.” Ratsismós, which is the Greek word for racism, encompasses much more than the North American conceptualization of “race,” as stated in this article, in that racism is not restricted to a form of discrimination based on phenotype. In the context of the North American concept of racism and its history, relating racism to homophobia would be and is often vehemently protested by people of color. The argument lies in the views of many who are victims of racism that a person can more or less hide sexuality, while one cannot hide his or her skin color. However, with the linguistic structure of the aforementioned word and its encompassing of not only a race but also a nation or tribe—as opposed to a specific group of people based on phenotype—one would be forced to contemplate how one relates to the other.

In the essay, “The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia” by Tom Boellstorff, an examination of masculinity and national belonging takes place. Boellstorff defines political homophobia as a “cultural logic that links emotion, sexuality, and political violence,” and states that homophobia is often specific to geography and history. He writes that this definition was exemplified in an anti-American newspaper in Indonesia that gave former President Bush a makeover in the form of lipstick, earrings, and a leather jacket, equating him to an emotional transvestite. This was to signify the failed masculinity Bush displayed in seeking allies to attack Afghanistan, as opposed to a one-on-one duel with Osama Bin Laden; thus, by those standards, Bush was operating as a non-normative male.

Suzanne LaFont’s “Not Quite Redemption Song: LGBT-Hate in Jamaica” captures how firmly heterosexism is institutionalized in Jamaica, in that prejudice and discrimination against LGBT people are tolerated and supported partly by police and politicians. She states that there is a moral superiority held by Jamaica over Western liberal sexual ideology. The institutionalized discrimination of gays also evidenced by the outspokenness of Jamaica’s music artists attests to this held superiority and is reinforced with the continued support of artists that speak out so strongly through their music, even promoting murder against gays.

Homophobias is a well-edited collection of how homophobia is captured across cultures, time, and space. It also questions how homophobia—an exclusive prejudice against homosexuals—can exist as a universal form of discrimination, and how that discrimination can exist in various forms from political emasculation to violent attacks. Homophobias serves as an important collection of works with which to move past preconceived ideas of what one thinks constitutes homophobia.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, March 24th 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

Desiring Arabs

admin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:19:00 +0000

By Joseph A. Massad

University of Chicago Press

On September 24, 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran drew derisive laughter from a group at Columbia University when he announced, "In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon." Joseph A. Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia, was likely among the few who were not mocking this assertion. In Desiring Arabs, Massad rejects Western sexual epistemology, which he sees as the colonizing mission of "Gay International": "an academic literature 'describing' and 'explaining' what they call 'homosexuality' in Arab and Muslim history to the present; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called 'gays' and (much less so) 'lesbians' in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds."

He argues that the consequence, if this Western "progressive" epistemology takes hold, will be the suppression of same-sex desire and practices as they have been and remain a part of Arab and Muslim culture. The larger frame is the damage wrought by orientalist scholarship that framed much of Arab expression of desire as "deviant"—the "love of beardless boys" being a phenomenon that needs to be explained away and eradicated. There are no homosexuals (as there are no hetereosexuals) because those categories are ahistorical and culturally constructed and fail to account for the complexity and ambiguity of “Arab desire” as understood through a decolonized historical frame of reference.

As "an act of archiving," as Massad refers to his own study, this book is remarkable and will be required reading for those studying contemporary Middle Eastern culture. He draws on a wealth of historical texts, as well as a range of contemporary criticism, to stitch together a revised notion of Arab intellectual history and, particularly, the "problem" of its sexual "licentiousness." His work is not as stylish as Edward Said’s, nor is he the memorable phrasemaker his mentor was. But he is an accomplished intellectual historian, one to be reckoned with. As a polemic, however, the book is stunningly shallow and under-documented.

I write this review on the morning a Saudi Arabian court ordered forty lashes for a 75-year-old woman who was visited by two (unrelated) men, one for whom she had served as a nursemaid and had the audacity to bring her bread. I imagine the author’s chiding me for my sympathy for the "international human rights agenda," another one of those obnoxious Western colonizers accusing the Arab world of a cultural "retardation."

I find it laudable that Massad warn against the dangers of epistemological binaries. That he leads us towards different transhistorical methods of understanding sexual desire in the literature, from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction, is of great scholarly value. But his lack of sympathy for other groups struggling against oppression—or even those trying to reconstruct a sense of identity not based on someone’s notion of pathology—is troubling. In fact, his argument against the discourse of universalization leads, I think, to a new sort of binary: belief in the possibility of universal human liberation/colonization or cultural isolation and a militant defense against interference.

He is at his weakest when he departs from his role as archivist and critic of Arab cultural history and flails against international rights movements. He quickly smacks down the "white Western women’s movement, which has sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movement in non-Western countries." He claims that the series of events including the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 led only to major schism, and he footnotes a couple of one-sided, obviously biased accounts to support his claim. This is not only bias, but bad scholarship, and bad scholarship, even in a potentially important book, is troubling indeed.

Written by: Rick Taylor, March 28th 2009

American Studies (Volume 48, Number 2): Homosexuals in Unexpected Places?

admin — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Edited by David M. Katzman, Sherrie J. Tucker, Norman R. Yetman

American Studies Association

In this special issue of American Studies, the editors promise a review that will challenge the preconceived notions of “metronormativity” in the LGBT community. From Dartmouth in the 1920s, to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to the eroticization of the rural male in the work of a visual artist, to Small Town USA, the gays are everywhere. What is surprising about this is that we’re supposed to find this surprising.

In the introduction to this issue, Colin R. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, introduces us to the concept of metronormativity, the idea that queer spaces are somehow solely urban. Unfortunately, this concept is not one that has ever been taken seriously in queer studies. Surely, the young gay person finding freedom in the big city is a common story, but it has never been the only or predominant one amongst those well-versed in queer history. As we move from the introduction, each of the four essays claiming to explore “unexpected” homosexuality falls short.

The first two, set in 1920's Dartmouth and the work camps of the CCC, are perhaps just as stereotypical and just as expected as the “metronormativity” myth. Homosocial environments have known been long as places where queerness can flourish virtually undetected, especially since activities that would be considered queer in mixed-gender environments (like men portraying women in the theatre) lose that connotation in homosocial ones. Unfortunately, this means that the line between true queerness and situational homosexuality and pseudo-queer activities become coded as queer by the outside observer, a mistake made all too frequently in these two essays.

In the third, “Southern Backwardness,” the reader is expected, one presumes, to be shocked by the eroticization of the rural, a ho-hum standard ploy in gay male erotica. The muscle-bound rube, the working class male, the hard-living blue collar hero, all have been the subject of gay male (and straight female) fantasy for a very long time. What, I ask, is new, interesting or exciting about that?

Finally, in the fourth essay, we get to the only particularly new or interesting view of queer youth culture, the claiming and queering of spaces inextricably connected to white bread, suburban Americana: donut shops, Wal-Mart, book stores and public libraries. The emergence of a queer youth culture is new, a product of the decades-long struggle to eliminate the closet as a force in the lives of young gay people. However, the locations chosen are not particularly surprising to those of us intimately familiar with the youth culture (queer or otherwise) of the suburbs. Ensconced in the middle of white bread America, there isn’t much of a choice for suburban youth but to claim places such as these as free youth spaces.

Ultimately, the most expected (though no less disappointing) aspect of this “unexpected” look at non-metro homosexuals is that the lesbian is invisible. Considering the lesbian love of claiming non-metropolitan locales and the particularly suburban and rural bent to much of lesbian culture, the absence of the Sapphic is particularly inappropriate here.

My recommendation? Skip it. At this late stage, there are a plethora of queer studies journals that do a far better job of illuminating the lives and histories of LGBT Americans.

Written by: Melinda Barton, March 16th 2009

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation?

admin — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:12:00 +0000

By Craig A. Rimmerman

Westview Press

The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Assimilation or Liberation? is a history of post-Stonewall GLBTQ activism as seen through three focused battles: the AIDS crisis, the ban on gays in the military, and the conflict over gay marriage. Craig Rimmerman presents a detailed breakdown of each, assembling them into a supposed study of the differences and relative importance of assimilationist and liberationist strategies. The result of his work here is a book deeply limited as a piece of writing and as an argument, but deeply compelling as a piece of history.

In aesthetic terms, Rimmerman is not much of a writer. His sentence structure is clunky, his rigid adherence to the classic “tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; tell them what you told them” structure almost laughable. In terms of structure and argument, his insistence on a thesis overly simplistic and overly focused—that both assimilationist and liberationist movements are needed for political progress—limits the energy and momentum of his book, and the book’s surveying take on its subjects makes many of the chapters and segments feel rushed. He fails to define terms key to making a leftist book accessible to a broader public, such as “the Christian Right,” while defining basic terms about the lesbian and gay movements that any leftist audience would understand. As such, _The Lesbian and Gay Movements _can be a frustrating book to read.

However, the facts in the book are indubitably fascinating and well-assembled. Rimmerman is a professor of political science and public policy at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and his skill as a teacher is clear in his work here. He presents shocking facts as part of a collection. He casually and gracefully introduces elements of the pre-Stonewall gay liberation (“homophile”) movements that are rarely seen in mainstream press or history. He breaks down the historical steps of each of his topics in a clear and accessible manner. A few days after reading The Lesbian and Gay Movements, I found myself using information I had gained directly from the book in a discussion with my students about Ronald Reagan, and the details of Bill Clinton’s disappointing performance with regard to gay and lesbian rights—particularly with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy—were new and deeply informative.

The Lesbian and Gay Movements is not, in the end, a very good book. It is, however, a marvelous teaching tool. I’ve been privileged to use it as such already and hope that many other educators will find the same use for it. I also hope that students at Hobart and William Smith Colleges will take any opportunity available to take a class with Craig Rimmerman. His skills as a teacher shine through every part of this book.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, April 17th 2008