Literary Theory
Series 1: Handout #23
Barry on Lesbian/Gay Criticism (“Queer
Theory”): theorization started in 1990s, emerged from women’s
studies/cultural studies; went through phases similar to feminism (On the male
side this is: Legal Rights Struggle beginning in 1890s; Post-Stonewall Celebratory Era in 1970s; Post-AIDS Retrenchment in 1980s; Post-structuralist
Theorization of Sexuality in 1990s); note anti-essentialist non-link of
scholarship to identity (i.e., not all gay studies people are gay); designed to
combat heterosexism, heteronormativity,
and heterosexual privilege; also a response to middle-class, heterosexual
assumptions of second-wave feminism (Gilbert and Gubar
forget about lesbians and people of color); Queer Theory accuses feminist lesbians of essentialism and includes
gay men in the anti-patriarchal struggle; it sees all sexual behavior as a form
of performance, it is provisional,
contingent, improvisitory; there is no such thing
as hetero- or homosexual, which are inventions of medical and legal
discourse. There are no fixed identities.
Q. Is sexual orientation a political
choice, a “performance”? OR is it
something a person can’t help and therefore “natural”—if there is such a
thing? Is heterosexuality ethically
wrong if one is a feminist (male or female)?
Does
sexual orientation really exist at all?
Q. Can there be such a thing as a
lesbian or gay text? See Gay American History or The Lesbian and Gay Literary Heritage. Doesn’t sexual orientation—however it is
expressed—require historical contextualization?
See Love Stories: Sex Between Men
Before Homosexuality.
Michel Foucault (1926-1984); The History of Sexuality (1976) with
reference to Quills: The emergence and growth of bourgeois culture (e.g., Dr. Royer-Collard of Sade’s asylum) in 17th-19th centuries required
ever-increasing control of sex. On the
familial level, sex is linked to property rights, upward mobility, patriarchal
control of children and women. (Note:
historical differences in behaviors of middle-class vs. working-class with
regard to sexual freedom of women and children.) Male homosexuality is shunned because it
requires subordination of men to men (de-patriarchalization);
male and female homosexuality shunned because it is economically
counterproductive, both personally and nationally.
The
emerging nation-state (e.g.,
Napoleon and the Doctor) also has a linked interest in regulating sex: population control, monitoring birth rates,
managing the labor force, production of soldiers (In the 20th
century, this may be seen in the French laxity with regard to sex morals vs.
strictness of China—the former needed population growth, the latter needed to
control growth. Each government
inculcated values in support of its national aims. MF might say the 1950s American baby boom may
have been part of the “official” plan for war with the Soviets.)
The bourgeois, bureaucratic, capitalist,
nationalist power structure gradually imposed censorship on all non-professional
public discussion of sex. Words as
well as behaviors became subject to policing in the public sphere. Legitimate public discussion of sex
could occur under very specific circumstances, controlled by authorized
professionals in medicine, law, demography, biology, psychiatry,
psychology, and so on. Non-professionals could not talk about sex in vulgar
(non-professional) language in public without risk of punishment. Private discussion of sex (e.g., in “private”
zones—the bedroom of husband and wife, men in clubs) was tolerated because it
could not be regulated (but people still carried public expectations into
private realms—MF calls this the transgressive power
of erotic discipline).
The vital importance of sex to the power
structure and to personal freedom created an incitement to sex discourse
on two fronts:
1.
Elaborate
codification, description, and exploration of sexual behaviors by the
professional classes as a means of regulation.
Every unnamed desire had to be made into discourse, so it could be
controlled. (Names were made up for
people who practiced certain behaviors, e.g., “the homosexual.” People start to be prosecuted for sexual
behavior, e.g., Oscar Wilde in 1896; in a cultural sense,
2.
Dramatic, even carnivalesque, violations of public rules regarding vulgar
descriptions of sexual acts (illicit sex, non-technical words, sex involving important people, anything transgressive
of official power.) Remember Sade—was not his real thrill breaking the rules, sex was
just the medium by which he did it?
Writers
and artists after Romanticism (early 19th century), cut loose from
the old patronage system by bourgeois culture that disdains art, establish their legitimacy (opposition to
official power) by transgressing the boundaries of permissible discourse,
violating the boundaries between public and private, between the professional
and the non-professional (often in alliance with vestigial aristocracy,
upper-bourgeois women, and working-classes who are most opposed to values of
masculine bourgeois public culture.)
To
enhance their legitimacy and power (in the inverted economy of art, where
exclusion/punishment = authority) artist’s often claim that talk about sex is
prohibited, but, in reality, it is the #1 form of talk/writing in all venues
(see the Internet).
Q.
What happens to the transgressive
power of art when it is co-opted (sanctioned, commodified,
celebrated) by the official bourgeois institutions like museums? Is there a real difference between art and
pornography besides the relation of a work to authority (e.g., If you put Playboy in a museum, does it become art?
Q.
If homosexuals become part of the officially accepted
state culture (e.g., openly gay in the military), and part of the officially
accepted bourgeois family culture (e.g., gay marriage and adoption), has not
the transgressive, critical power of the homosexual
been co-opted by the power structure?
o
Are not military
service and marriage antithetical to the political basis for alternative sexual
identities?
o
Does not the
“conservative” (e.g., Ravitch) paradoxically preserve
the transgressive power of the alternative
(“deviant”) lifestyle, thereby retaining it’s critique
of mainstream culture by refusing to relativise and
thereby co-opt all behaviors?
o
If homosexuality
is mainstreamed (accepted by official culture, put in the cultural museum, as
it were), who will become the new transgressive
class—transsexuals (see handout)? Is
there an endpoint in the expansion of the boundaries of sexual behavior?
o
Does the endpoint
have to be the deregulation of all sexual discourse and all boundaries, public
and private. In other words, a return to premodernity,
which, paradoxically, will eliminate the desire/need for the transgressive sexual critique?