Gender criticism

In an influential recent essay, "Theory, Pragmatisms, and Politics," Cornel West has written that "to be an engaged progressive intellectual is to be a critical organic catalyst whose vocation is to fuse the best of the life of the mind from within the academy with the best of the organized forces for greater democracy and freedom from outside the academy" (West 34-35). One image that keeps recurring to me, as a way of recording both the extreme condensation and the extreme temporal discontinuities by which our profession represents the world around it, is that of the progressive academy as one of several erogenous zones for our culture.⁽²⁶⁾ This image seems thematically available to me, no doubt, as it might not to some "otherwise-engaged" intellectuals, because the path of my own engagement travels so much through the politics of gender and sexuality. Even for other political projects, however, the erogenous-zone metaphor may usefully record some of the representational circumferences across which we struggle to orient ourselves. For example, Naomi Schor has identified the clitoris as the appropriate figure, in rhetorical theory, for the trope of synecdoche itself, a trope that she argues may be retrieved from the gender-binarized structuralist and poststructuralist conflation of all figures into (an often phallicly-figured) metaphor and (an often vaginally-figured) metonyny (Schor, 219). The clitoris also makes literal, as for that matter may mouth, anus, and some other zones chargeable as erotic, the space of an irreducible difference from procreation that homosexuality may be in the best position to represent, as well, for other sexualities--perhaps even, if it can stand for a displacing resistance to the untransformed reproduction of labor, for other institutions.⁽²⁷⁾

Emily Dickinson writes, in her underquoted poem #1377,

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has

That lawful Orchards mocks--

How luscious lies within the Pod

The Pea that Duty locks--⁽²⁸⁾

In this reading, of course, the P. that Duty locks would have to stand, in the first place, for the Profession or its Professional--the highly innervated node that might be hot enough to, as West puts it, "fuse" an individual history with a collective future, and the mind of the academy with (implicitly) the body of the political. The P. could also stand for the locked potentials of pleasure whose release in the form of unalienated labor would signify a decisive rupture in the arid economy of our current surround.

I value the erogenous image, however, also because it records, in addition to desire and pleasure, the equally strong pressure of the non-discretionary or even the compelled in any of our relations to political life. The local, intense, irrepressible throb that marks a site of "sexuality" seems in a way to militate against West's judicial, almost connoisseurial program of fusing "the best of the life of the mind from within the academy with the best of the organized forces for greater democracy and freedom from outside the academy." His formulation seems to suggest an apollonian--one might say Arnoldian--political privilege of distinction that must, after all, be thought to inhere in the life of the mind. I would be surprised, and indeed disturbed, to learn that that was how most of us arrived at the politics that really motivate us, or for that matter at our truly productive critical projects and insights. If each of us held an open competition of politics and ideas in the privacy of our mind, choosing the best and following it both within and outside of the academy, then we would be as likely as not to find an Edward Said in the vanguard of feminist theory, an Elaine Showalter in the private councils of the PLO. Or for that matter, some new movement of an even more right-thinking and ideologically sound description could sweep into view tomorrow--indeed, a new one could sweep into view every year--and each of us would perforce enrol in its train. Of course, the degree to which something like that is true marks at the same time a commoditized faddishness, a valuable sinuosity, and a very considerable level of underlying privilege and entitlement that do characterize a certain set of critical milieu. But the truth is, we forge our politics out of the impacted, anachronistic residuum of who we are and what we need, even as we do understand who we are and refine the art of our necessities under the pressure of our politics and theory.

This can hardly be to say that our theory or politics can be read in any transparent way off of anything so static or given as to be called identity. If gay and lesbian theory demonstrates any one thing, it demonstrates--more radically even than can the theory of gender or race--how difficult, distortive, and incoherent, though at the same time how profoundly consequential, are such processes as the self-assignment or allo-assignment of a definitional identity within a hierarchized system of specification. I would be the last critic to argue that the rigid notation of gender, class, race, sexuality could map the important data for anyone's locus of creativity and struggle. Yet the fact remains that each person, like each institution, has such loci of maximum potential, and has them characteristically. Our paths to them are very particular paths, and often--perhaps always--oblique; if cognitive work can expand or transform them, the process is a slow one that goes finger's breadth by finger's breadth. It is a rare figure (one thinks, perhaps, of an Audre Lorde) who has managed to feel and think a way through to an experiential understanding that makes more than one politics, one's own politics. The process cannot be an a priori one for the approach to any new or other politics.

One consequence of this condensation and embeddedness is the extreme difficulty, not at all to say impossibility, of doing or thinking coalition politics at more than a superficial level. A second consequence, one that has been severely underestimated by the current academy, is simply the recalcitrance of the barrier that a relative privilege in our mode of labor is inevitably going to oppose to most of our investment of real creativity, courage, and steadfastness in a class-based political analysis. But another consequence is the very possibility of any political commitment that can be responsive to a strong theoretical moment, but whose energies, needs, and desires (and for this we are very fortunate) can also, in altered forms, outlast it.

NOTES:

Some portions of this chapter are adapted from the Introduction to my Epistemology of the Closet, @1990, University of California Press.

1. See, for example, MacKinnon, 1982.

2. For valuable related discussions, see King, "Situation," and de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference."

3. *See, among others, Frye, "Politics," pp. 128-51, and Irigaray, "This Sex," 170-91.

4. See, for instance, Newton, "Mythic"; Nestle, "Butch-Fem"; Hollibaugh and Moraga, "What We're Rollin'"; Case, "Towards"; de Lauretis, "Sexual Indifference."

5. See on this, among others, Grahn, "Another."

6. On James Dean, see Golding, "James Dean"; on Garbo and Dietrich, see Dyer, "Seen."

7. This is not, of course, to suggest that lesbians are less likely than persons of any other sexuality to be contract HIV infection, when they engage in the (quite common) acts that can transmit the virus, with a person (and there are many, including lesbians) who already carries it. In this particular paradigm-clash between a discourse of sexual identity and a discourse of sexual acts, the former alternative is uniquely damaging. No one should wish to reinforce the myth that the epidemiology of AIDS is a matter of discrete "risk groups" rather than of particular acts that can call for particular forms of prophylaxis. That myth is dangerous to self-identified or publicly-identified gay men and drug users because it scapegoats them, and dangerous to everyone else because it discourages us from protecting ourselves and their sex or needle partners. But for a variety of reasons, the incidence of AIDS among lesbians has indeed been lower than among many other groups.

8. See, for example, Winnow, "Lesbians."

9. According to the repressive hypothesis, the history of sexuality could only be that of the "negative relation" between power and sex, of "the insistence of the rule," of "the cycle of prohibition," of "the logic of censorship," and of "the uniformity of the apparatus" of scarcity and prohibition: "Whether one attributes it to the form of the prince who formulates rights, of the father who forbids, of the censor who enforces silence, or of the master who states the law, in any case one schematizes power in a juridical form, and one defines its effects as obedience" (82-85).

10. "The important thing," Foucault writes for instance of early psychiatric investigations, "is that they constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth was to be masked at the last moment. The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth and falsehood, that the truth of sex became something fundamental, useful, or dangerous, precious or formidable: in short, that sex was constituted as a problem of truth. What needs to be situated, therefore, is not the threshold of a new rationality whose discovery was marked by Freud--or someone else--but the progressive formation (and also the transformations) of that `interplay of truth and sex' which was bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, and which we may have modified, but . . . have not rid ourselves of." (56-7)

11. In "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," I discuss further the relation between the history of masturbation and that of homo/heterosexual identities.

12. Quoted in Boswell, Christianity, 349 (from a legal document dated 533) and 380 (from a 1227 letter from Pope Honorius III).

13. Press characterizations of the accusations in the 1810 Vere Street scandal, quoted from Randolph Trumbach, ed., Sodomy Trials (New York, 1986), in Cohen, "Legislating," 200.

14. Lord Alfred Douglas, "Two Loves."

15. "Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses" (27).

16. Quoted in Watney, "Rhetoric," 77, from Weeks, Sexuality, 45.

17. Sedgwick, Epistemology (1990) makes this argument much more fully. We have recently witnessed a perfect example of this potent incoherence in an anomalous legal situation of gay people and acts in this country: while the Supreme Court in Bowers v. Hardwick has notoriously left the individual states free to prohibit any acts that they wish to define as "sodomy," by whomsoever performed, with no fear at all of impinging on any rights safeguarded by the Constitution--at the same time a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1988 (in Sergeant Perry J. Watkins v. United States Army) that homosexual persons, as a particular kind of person, are entitled to Constitutional protections under the Equal Protection clause.

18. For instance, on a day chosen at random: a married male law professor of 61 "died of a heart attack"; a twice-married 91-year-old female art collector, like an 85-year-old male ex-Cambodian Premier, simply "died"; a married male author of 74 "died of heart failure"; a married 86-year-old male executive "died of congestive heart failure"; an 86-year-old male dentist with a son and three grandchildren "died of a heart attack," as did a 70-year-old married male probation officer; a 91-year-old married male surgeon "died after a long illness," and so did another man, a 51-year-old Zairian band leader with 17 children; an unmarried but 90-year-old male jazz drummer "died of kidney failure"; and a Polish political leader who was only 47, but had a wife and son, "died of bladder cancer." But in the obituary of a 30-year-old actor, survived by his mother, grandmother, and two brothers, "a spokeswoman for the New York Shakespeare Festival, Barbara Carroll, said he died of a heart attack" (New York Times, 18 October 1989, p. 11 (national edition)). Interestingly, this invidiously differential practice seems to have changed literally overnight (on Sunday, 10 June 1990): since Monday, 11 June 1990, it has evidently been Times practice for all obituaries to specify the source of information about the cause of death. On 14 June 1990, for example, reports of non-HIV-related deaths were attributed to "a mortuary spokeswoman" or to the "family" or (in two cases) "wife" of the deceased; the epistemological status of these reported deaths is no longer different from that of an advertising executive who "died of complications from AIDS, a company spokesman said" (p. B13). The net result seems to be that AIDS has installed an evidentiary skepticism in the media's views of any report of death.

19. He continues: "This assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it context the reality of illness, suffering, and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS" (3).

20. "What," he retorts against a comment quoted from Foucault, "is `the gay life-style'? . . . More importantly, can a nonrepresentable form of relationship really be more threatening than the representation of a particular sexual act . . . ?" (220)

21. "All gay men know this" is the evidence he offers for one of his assertions--one that contradicts the theory he has just been quoting from several other gay men (208).

22. Trollope, Barchester, 169-70; the passage is quoted, and this understanding of "moderate schism" is elaborated, in Miller, Novel, 114-39.

23. Katz, 147-150, 232n; for a thorough overview of the vexed chronology of the two terms "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality," see Halperin, 155, notes 1, 2; 158-9 n. 17.

24. For a discussion of the current salience of the gay-marriage issue, see Stoddard and Ettelbrick.

25. Clearly, however, there are ways in which the very force of this utopian investment can work against what many would ordinarily think of as its guiding political principles. On hiring and graduate-admissions committees, for instance, I see in myself as well as in my colleagues how much this utopian investment in a potential for unalienated intellectual/affective labor and collaboration, leads us to think in individualistic terms of the choice of potential soul-mates for ourselves or companions for our deepest projects; where in any other context of economically consequential personnel decisions we would view very skeptically choices that did not have the firmest demographic/statistical support. It is this mechanism and our institutional defences of it, of course, that have made academia so much slower than many other industries to show significant numerical effects under equal-opportunity laws. The possibility that mechanistic and number-based change may precede and even be a prerequisite for deeply-rooted imaginative change can be difficult for us to conceive, and the more difficult as we are more involved with the sense of our profession as a space that could be at once representative, exceptional, and transformational.

26. This image was suggested to me by Karen Swann's discussion of feminist criticism as an erogenous zone for the larger project of literary criticism.

27. I might make explicit, too, that I find I can only hear Cornel West's evocative phrase "critical organic catalyst" as a weirdly elongated way of pronouncing "clitoris."

28. It was Paula Bennett who, in an important article, first called attention to the clitoral salience of this poem (Bennett, 1990).