For comparable reasons, George Will believed that the conservative head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, faced a threat to national security greater than the ones confronted by her husband, the secretary of defense.8 On the one hand, right-wing defenders of Western civilization mocked “PC” progressives who, they argued, were straitjacketing free speech. On the other hand, the works of such artists as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Karen Finley should be expurgated, they argued, not funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.9 The conservative senator Jesse Helms instructed the nation to call “a perverted human being a perverted human being.” A few years later, he refused to vote for a lesbian nominated to become an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing: “If you want to call me a bigot, fine,” he said.10
No wonder, then, that feminists found themselves enlisting in the fight for gay rights. During the eighties, according to the activist-author Sarah Schulman, “a number of experienced lesbian and straight women activists were moved by their own relationships with gay men, by compassion and by political understanding of the anti-gay, anti-sex rhetoric . . . around the epidemic to join the newly formed ACT UP,” a group of protesters who used confrontational tactics to wake up the public and prod medical researchers.11 These alliances would be fictionalized by Schulman in her novel Rat Bohemia (1995).
Schulman was part of a gay avant-garde that included Tony Kushner, whose riveting two-part play Angels in America (1991) mourned the AIDS catastrophe and depicted the closeted Roy Cohn—Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and a sidekick of Donald Trump’s—receiving a secret stash of a new medication, AZT, from the Reagan administration and being haunted by Ethel Rosenberg, whom he had helped sentence to death. Similar concerns about a decimated gay community and a shaming closet would motivate academic feminists to extend their analyses of sex and gender to sexual orientation and homophobia.
THE QUEER THEORIES OF EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK AND JUDITH BUTLER
The backlash during the Reagan–Bush years helps explain the lengths to which feminist theorists would go to dismantle polarities that pitted one type of person against another type of person. By 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler were reorienting the women’s movement. What better—what more audacious—way than by blowing up normative categories of thinking? Not nature but culture was “exacting an awful retribution,” they replied to Patrick Buchanan and Chief Justice Warren Burger. Our mind-sets about sex can change for the better if we recognize the destructive scripts imposed by dualistic categories of thinking. Sedgwick and Butler’s target: so-called heteronormativity, the outlook that promotes heterosexuality as the only healthy and normal sexual orientation.
Paradoxically, Sedgwick and Butler were primarily influenced by male thinkers and often focused on gay men. From poststructuralism, they inherited the idea that language, reflecting our inherited ways of knowing, imposes meanings that remain indeterminate and multiple. Deploying the insights of the Continental philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Sedgwick deconstructed prevailing axioms of sexuality, Butler the fundamentals of sex and gender. Together, their work ushered in queer studies, and then—with the aid of Donna Haraway, who used the figure of the part-fleshly, part-metallic cyborg to explode the tenets of what it means to be human—transgender studies, masculinity studies, eco-feminism, cyber-feminism, post-humanism, and so on.
Trained as a literary critic, Sedgwick began her work by popularizing the useful word homosocial to describe male bonding. The cover of her Between Men (1985) featured the painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, in which Manet portrays two (clothed) men engaging in a conversation routed through the presence of a (naked) woman. For Sedgwick, Manet’s nude remains necessary for the intimacy to take place but irrelevant to its substance. Through a succession of close readings, Sedgwick suggests that male cronies often defend themselves against suspicions about their intimacy through an intermediary female figure and through disavowals of homosexuality. Despite both tactics, she concludes, there can be no clear dividing line between the homosocial and homosexual desires of men.
Sedgwick’s next book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990), analyzed how the hetero-/homosexual divide structures all aspects of Western ways of knowing. She begins with the anger in her community at the “virulent ruling” of Bowers v. Hardwick so as to emphasize the “antihomophobic” imperative of the work she is undertaking.12 Given her use of a vocabulary that most readers would find daunting—words like “pullulate,” “algolagnia,” “retardataire,” “defalcations,” “ukase,” and “saltation” abound—it is not surprising that early reviews faulted her “obtuse, cumbersome” prose.13 But passages of clarity and wit illuminate her point that the gender of a person’s sexual choice, rather than many other sorts of differences, regulates the categories into which we put people.
In an attempt to demonstrate that dividing people up into hetero- or homosexuals should not be considered inevitable, Sedgwick lists alternative classifications that would work just as well: for instance, “Some people like to have a lot of sex, others little or none.” To illustrate the distinctiveness of gay persecution, Sedgwick compares homosexuals to another stigmatized but not visibly identifiable group: Jews in anti-Semitic societies who, like Queen Esther, could remain closeted or come out. The “distinctive structures” that pertain to the homosexual closet explain the incongruities of the analogy. When Queen Esther comes out as a Jew, no one tells her that she is just going through a phase or asks her how she knows that she is really Jewish. This and other complications stem from “the plurality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire.”14
Sedgwick tackles two contradictory approaches to defining same-sex desire. First, minoritizing versus universalizing ideas. The minoritizing view assumes that there is a distinct population of persons who “ ‘really are’ gay,” whereas the universalizing view supposes that sexual orientation is unpredictable and that heterosexuals experience same-sex desires, and vice versa. Second, “inversion” versus “gender separatist” models of same-sex desire. The butch may be imagined as a male-identified woman or as a male psyche trapped in a female body; however, the lesbian separatist wants not to cross gender boundaries but instead to embrace her gender as a “woman-identified woman.”15 Sedgwick then explores how the permutations of these paradigms generated the gay literary canon.
Nor should we suppose that this tradition must be a small subset of authors, especially if we recall the ways in which universalizing views of same-sex desire have coexisted with minoritizing ones. Invoking Saul Bellows’s query about a Tolstoy of the Zulus, a tongue-in-cheek Sedgwick asks, has there ever been a gay Socrates, Shakespeare, or Proust? She answers with the question “Does the Pope wear a dress?”16 The canon, in other words, has always included gay writers, a fact that her teacher Allan Bloom surely knew.
Sedgwick herself was targeted as a danger to American culture, sometimes even before she could articulate her ideas. She explained that the conservative culture warrior Roger Kimball lambasted the title of one of her essays, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” as “an index of depravity in academe” in a book that went “to press before the offending paper was so much as written.”17 (He found the title in the program of a Modern Language Association convention.) In her subsequent essays and books, the undaunted Sedgwick would go on to explore her situation as a woman identifying with gay men, a Buddhist poet and textile artist, and a breast cancer activist. In all this work, she made it a point of political honor neither to disavow nor to claim a gay orientation, though she was married for forty years to the psychologist Hal Sedgwick, whom she met as an undergraduate at Cornell and who is today the keeper of her archive.
Like Epistemology of the Closet, the other founding text of queer theory, Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), never uses the word queer. Whereas the prose Sedgwick used to undercut the hetero-/homosexuality bifurcation could be needlessly esoteric, the se
ntences Butler crafted to undermine conventional ideas of gender and sex came draped in abstractions. Eight years after the publication of Gender Trouble, she won Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest.18
In the 1999 preface to a reissued Gender Trouble, Butler addressed “the difficulty of its style.” There might be “a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty,” she believes. “If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, . . . then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given.”19 Today, when we use the pronouns “they/them” for a nonbinary or genderqueer individual—someone whose gender identity is not exclusively masculine or feminine—it is clear what she means.
Denaturalizing identity, along with sex and gender, was Butler’s difficult project.20 Trained in philosophy, she remains “permanently troubled by identity categories” because they control what they claim to describe.21 A preconception of what women or lesbians are or should be always lurks within the category. For the people who fall under the rubric women do not necessarily share common characteristics, except to the extent that they experience sexism, while the people grouped under the term lesbians may have little in common except the sexism and homophobia they encounter. In other words, these identity categories—even when narrowed down to contain only, say, Chicana women or Black lesbians—lump together people who are quite diverse. The political solution involves not revaluing the category but rather “interrogating” or “queering” the framework that privileges men and heterosexuals.
Butler’s second subversive intervention did just that by contesting widely accepted concepts of the sex/gender system. For more than a decade, most feminists associated sex with the fixity of biology (nature), gender with the fluidity of social conditioning (nurture). According to Butler, however, both sex and gender are socially constructed and variable. Both are constituted by words and acts that create the impression of a preexisting state. Gender seems natural only because it “produces as its effect the illusion of a prior and volitional subject. In this sense, gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express.”22
Because the idea that gender is a compulsory performance without a prior performer is hard to handle, many readers latched on to Butler’s reference to drag shows. Drag dramatizes how volatile gender can be. Yet at the end of the usual drag show, female impersonators generally disclose the secondary sex characteristics beneath the masquerade. The display of such characteristics would be irrelevant to Butler, however, given her argument that sex is also socially constructed. Whether defined through chromosomes or genital type or reproductive capacity, the sex of the physical body can be interpreted only through the cultures into which we have been inducted.23 About sex and gender, Butler seemed to be saying, “There is no there there” (as Gertrude Stein once so infamously remarked about Oakland).24
Butler challenged her readers to think outside the cognitive boxes in which we are all contained. If gender is performative, it can be performed in an unlimited number of ways. Like Sedgwick, she wanted to rethink conventional ideas because they condemn so many men as well as women “to a death within life.”25 To counter the conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality in language saturated with those concepts; to argue that gender, sex, and sexuality are surprisingly malleable: these imperatives make the projects of Butler and Sedgwick utopian.
Unlike Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), which eschewed a personal investment in the fate of homosexuals,26 Sedgwick’s and Butler’s publications would convince many feminists that gay men’s rights are women’s rights. Their ideas, vigorously debated in the academy, were confusing but also revolutionary. However, as political philosophers pointed out, it is difficult to imagine who would enlist in feminist and antihomophobic activism if no one acknowledged being a woman or a homosexual.27
Was the emergence of feminist theory a radical intervention in reactionary times or simply a reflection of those times? Did intellectualizing replace or impede organizing? On Gay Pride Day, in 1993, the action group Lesbian Avengers handed out cards that said “Lesbians! Dykes! Gay Women! We want revenge and we want it now.” According to Sarah Schulman, they kept their activism going by “stay[ing] away from abstract theoretical discussion.”28 Speaking about the impact of Continental theory on feminist academicians in 2005, Gloria Steinem said, “Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.”29
Maybe theoretical resistance to the category women recycled the same anxiety about second-class status that Denise Levertov and Elizabeth Bishop had earlier expressed. Was the anti-identity politics of queer theorists a product of academic elitism, and did it neglect the material conditions to which real people are subject?30 One is tempted to ask, what would Audre Lorde think?
ANNE CARSON’S POETICS OF LOVE AND LOSS
Audre Lorde didn’t live to see feminist academic theory take over the ivory closet, but other poets certainly did. Among the most celebrated is the classicist Anne Carson, a literary figure of whom Susan Sontag said, with uncharacteristically incoherent enthusiasm, “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.”31 From the start, Carson has been knowledgeable about theory; and in 2013, when she was visiting at NYU, she and Judith Butler put on a performance of Carson’s revisionary translation Antigonick.32 Earlier, during the nineties, she had embarked on sophisticated analyses of the silencing of women.
Her first scholarly book, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), was both an homage to Sappho of Lesbos and an investigation of ancient erotic bonds between men and boys or men and women. Her collections of poetry, in particular the early Glass, Irony & God (1995), focus on the central question she asks in “The Glass Essay”—“What is love?”—while exploring the bleakness of love’s ending.33 Brooding on the pains and perverse pleasures of Eros, Carson also muses on “the gender of sound” as defined by Greek culture, in the essay of that title.34
“Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day,” she observes in this theoretical piece, explaining the “ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder, and death” by tracing the subliminal parallel between a woman’s upper mouth (the one that has teeth and a tongue) and her lower mouth (the messy, leaky vagina). For the Greeks, “female sound” is “bad to hear” because it is irrational, bestial—a “highpitched piercing cry” uttered both on bawdy occasions outside the city limits (as in the Bacchae) and at funeral lamentations—whereas male sound is “urbane and orderly.” Women utter “a particular kind of shriek, the ololyga”—a term that was to evolve into our English “ululate.”35 Women’s voices, then, must be silenced or muted, lest they become howls of rage, desire, or lamentation.
“The Gender of Sound” appears almost as an annotation at the end of Glass, Irony & God, which begins with the long poem titled “The Glass Essay,” a work that is simultaneously a meditation on Emily Brontë, a low-key howl or ololyga of lamentation uttered by an abandoned woman, and a dramatization of a glazed-over mental state that follows a traumatic breakup. The plot of this lyric essay is quite simple. After a lover resonantly named Law abruptly leaves her, the protagonist goes to see her mother, who “lives alone” “on a moor in the north” where “Spring opens like a blade.” Here, as she “stride[s]”—Brontë-like—across a “moor, paralyzed with ice,” she struggles to come to terms with the moment that broke her heart “into two pieces.” “When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die,” she confesses, adding dryly, “This is not uncommon.”36
He abandoned her “on a black night in September,” as “A chill fragment of moon rose.” Standing in her living room, averting his eyes, he oddly said, “Not enough spin on it,” and then,
I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said
. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.
Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.
He moved onto me.
Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself
thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
There was no area of my mind
not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of mind and body begs the question.
Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out.
“That was a night that centred Heaven and Hell, / as Emily would say,” the speaker comments, but soon notes, tersely, “He left in the morning.”37
That the failed relationship between the really or allegorically named Law and the woman who laments his leaving is central to the “Glass Essay” doesn’t mean it dominates the book. Glass as window glass, looking glass, and glace (French for ice) insistently recurs as an objective correlative for loss, isolation, paralysis. Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights help Carson place her speaker in a tradition of gothic erotic cruelty and ferocious loss; remember how Heathcliff “clings at the lattice in the storm, sobbing / Come in! Come in! to the ghost of his heart’s darling,” separated from her by the glass that lets him see and hear her but keeps her out. Notes Carson, Emily put into Heathcliff “in place of a soul / the constant cold departure of Catherine from his nervous system. . . . She broke all his moments in half.” And she adds, “I am not unfamiliar with this half-life.”38
Still Mad Page 26
