Picking targets

At the risk of putting myself on the wrong side of this argument, as much as I agree with Jill that not tolerating homophobia — represented in the case of Miss California by her distaste for same-sex marriage — is not intolerance as most people would define it, isn’t the real problem that we are so quick to attack the beauty pageant contestant for saying what President Obama, to just take the most prominent example from many “left” politicians who take the same stance, believes?  Why does he get a pass but she doesn’t?  Isn’t just too easy to attack the beauty pageant contestant for being everything we expect from a beauty pageant contestant (who isn’t reminded of the notorious Miss Teen USA video while reading about this controversy)?  Perhaps we should start wrestling with a President of the United States who utilises the language of equality, but continues to advocate for a position of distinct inequality?

The validation of “gay history”

There’s really not much reason to respond to Larry Kramer’s recent speech on “gay history” (via Tenured Radical), except to note just how disappointing it is that these attempts to cordon history off from gender studies, “gay history” from gender studies continue.  It’s quite clear that Kramer’s vision of “gay history” is a male one, having little to do not only with lesbian history, but with the links between gender oppression and sexuality.  Certainly one has to wonder if Kramer has actually read George Chauncey’s work, being the one historian of sexuality Kramer seems to recognize as worthy, but also being a deeply nuanced thinker who incorporates both queer and feminist theory into his scholarship (Kramer seems to forget that one of the central arguments of Gay New York is that a historical shift from a sexual identity fundamentally premised on gender roles to a more modern one based on sexual object choice occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century).  I honestly find it sad that one would want to enclose their object of study so tightly that obvious links become excluded.

I did want to highlight, however, these two paragraphs, in which I see Kramer as having his cake and eating it too:

Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now.

Do you know that men loving men does not require the sexual act to qualify them as homosexuals? My American Heritage unabridged dictionary lists two definitions for homosexuality: the first: “sexual orientation to persons of the same sex; and the second: “sexual activity with another of the same sex.” In other words, it is not necessary, nor should it be, to have had sex with another of the same sex, to maintain that a person is homosexual. Why, then, do academics, indeed everyone, insist on this second definition over the first? This theory makes it all but impossible in many cases to claim a person as one of us.

Let’s ignore how odd it is for such a staunch defender of “gay history,” to declare it “preposterous…that then was different from now.”  More interestingly, in the first paragraph, Kramer posits his essentialist view of history on the premise that because homosexual acts (between men of course) have always taken place — have indeed been essentially similar throughout history — there have always been homosexuals.  In the second paragraph, Kramer, not very delicately distorting the views of historians of sexuality unwilling to just call Abraham Lincoln “gay,” asserts that homosexual desire by itself is enough “to maintain that a person is homosexual.”  Kramer attempts, here, to encompass all possibilities: that although young Greek men, for instance, were not supposed to find pleasure in sex with older men, they were homosexuals because they had sex with them.  But also that adult Greek men were homosexual because did find pleasure in their desire, even though the act itself was more about relative power difference than sexual object choice.  Kramer, in other words, covers his bases.

Ultimately, despite his defiant assertion that “he is not queer!” — presumably because “he IS gay!” — Kramer reveals a fundamental lack of self confidence in his own identity.  He needs to cover his historical bases because he needs to have a solid past because only then will he himself be validated.  The Greeks were gay and thus gay people today can draw pride from being descendents of Socrates.  Just as he attempts to cordon the discipline of history away from the dangerous influence of queer theory, he attempts to cordon off gay male identity from the influence of others.  To see the links between gay men and women, between gay men and lesbians, between gay men and queers would be to dillute the implications of gay Greeks.  Because if women’s history and queer theory have just as much claim on such “gay” historical luminaries, then what’s left for gay men like Larry Kramer?

The new experts

I went to a showing of a new short documentary, L’ordre des mots, yesterday. The film focused on the lives of several trans- and intersex activists in France, presenting individual stories of gender nonconformity and participation in a movement that seeks access to medical care and legal recognition of new gender identities. Following the presentation, the audience was able to address the two young directors of the film, as well as two of the documentary’s subjects. What could have been an interesting discussion and, importantly, a teachable moment for those not familiar with the issues, however, unfortunately turned into an all so common exercise in puffing-out chests, taking an incredulous tone with the questioners from the audience and moderator: “we have this gender thing figured out,” the directors and activists implied, “why haven’t you rubes?”

I find this attitude all too common amongst young activists within feminist and LGBT communities.  As the title of the film implies, the directors have an awareness of the work of Foucault, asserting at the beginning of the discussion that they removed their voices, along with those of surgeons and psychiatrists, in order to empower the voices of trans- and intersex people in relation to the often overwhelming cover of “expert” opinion that creates the norms the documentary’s subjects struggle against.  The push against the “expert” was echoed later in the discussion as one trans- women featured in the film asserted that any person should be able to receive medical treatment and/or surgery “on demand” in order to realize their proper gender identity.  The theme of the discussion, then, turned on a rejection of expert knowledge in full favor of individual subjectivities.  The implication being that because experts’ medical categories that reinforce gender norms and inhibit the expression of trans- and intersex subjectivities, experts can simply be removed from the equation, thus enabling individuals to express their gender identity — with legal acknowledgement from the state apparently — with impunity.  Witness one of the film’s subjects, and very rude respondent during the discussion, unproblematically identifying as an “undefined” gender.

And yet, little acknowledgement of the almost symbotic –while also exploitative [in both directions, even if not symmetrical!]– relationship between medical authorities and trans- and intersex identities traced by Joanne Meyerowitz in her brilliant How Sex Changed.  One of Meyerowitz’s arguments — and there are many in this rich book — is that it wasn’t until scientists showed that they could change a human beings’ sex, that people decided that they wanted to do so.  In other words, capitalism created a new desire.  And, it must be said, such a desire is no less valid or valuable to society, for being in part a response to the activities of experts.

But also, the idea that one could remove oneself from the purview of the expert is founded upon a fundamental misreading of Foucault.  If there is anything Foucault taught us, it’s that you can’t escape.  One can only push back, attempting to reshape the terms of the discourse in your favor.  Or perhaps asserting yourself as a different kind of expert: positioning as the valid purveyor of a counter-discourse that will, most likely and we hope beneficially, incorporated into the dominate discourse.  In fact, two strategies with the same result.  In any case, the documentary’s subjects and its creators were not, despite their claims, attempting to do away with the expert, their rhetoric to the contrary.  Rather, they were positioning themselves as a new kind of expert.  One that accepts the multivarious forms of human gender expression and sexual forms, certainly.  But also one that laughs at, rather than takes seriously, those who aren’t quite so ready to accept their expertise.  They, after all, have it all figured out.