In the Beginning Was the Word

Maybe I overuse the "X for me, Not-X for thee" template, but it encompasses so much bad faith that it's hard to resist.  Yesterday a queer friend of mine posted one of those "Labels are for cans, not for people" memes.  I have at least two reactions to this slogan; one is that you can't really have language without labels; the other is that the people who claim to dislike labels actually like them quite a lot: first for other people, but also for themselves.

For other people there are labels like: homophobe, transphobe, bigot, Bible-thumper, so-called Christians, redneck, and so on.  That leaves aside the more straightforwardly abusive neologisms, often constructed with the -tard suffix: theotard, Republitard, Reichtard, and so on.  These latter have their right-wing counterparts (libtard, etc.), but for the moment I'm talking about people who'd consider themselves liberal, rational, compassionate, loving, open-minded.  More labels, of course.

For themselves, the labels proliferate.  I was recently invited to give a presentation on LGBT history in the area, and while putting it together I was struck by how many labels were coined in the late nineteenth century -- invert, Urning, Uranian, homosexual, androgyne, third sex, etc.  These were words that sex/gender nonconformists invented for ourselves, or adopted for our use.  When I was newly out forty-some years ago, gay men were fond of labeling sexual acts and roles: French active/passive, Greek active/passive, and an older man laid out for me a full list of nationalities linked to sexual practices.  We were also fond of constructions based on "queen": chicken queen, closet queen, opera queen, and (my favorite) fish queen.  (I liked "fish queen" not because of its misogyny but because it incorporated straight men into its taxonomy, classifying them as homosexuals so twisted that they were queer for women.)  Lesbians of the period had their own system: butch, femme, butchy-femme, soft butch, and so on.  I don't know how much of this is still current, but similar self-labeling is certainly going on today: pansexual, asexual, demisexual, genderqueer, transman, transwoman, and so on.

Just a few weeks ago, Caitlyn Jenner's "I am a woman" pull quote was all over the media, and none of the anti-label people got on her case for labeling herself: indeed, they celebrated and defended her.  In this case too, the label is a moving target: "man" and "woman" are meaningless social constructions on one hand, and pre-existent, pre-social benchmarks that define who one is.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.  It's the hypocrisy, the doublethink, of those who claim to reject labels but use them anyway that I'm criticizing here.

I'm presently working my way through a collection of stories by Vincent Czyz, Adrift in a Vanishing City (Vanishing Mountain Press, 2015).  In one story, the French narrator reflects on another character who's labeled a pédé (location 2061 of the Kindle edition):

We French also say pedale, homosexual, tante, de la jacquette flottante – he whose jacket blows lightly behind him – not much else.  It is not the big deal of snow to the Eskimos who have 50 or 60 words for it to distinguish between wet, powdery, crusted, high drifts and so on.  Americans must hold most sacred of all the homosexual since they have any number of words for it – fairy, fag, tinkerbell, queer, three-dollar bill, limp-wrist, homo, fruit, pansy, queen, flit – imagine if my English were up to date.

(I wonder how true it is that French has relatively few words for men who take it up the butt; I doubt it, but my French isn't good enough for me to say. I do know that Spanish has a rich supply of such labels, rivaling what we have in English.)  Even if it were true that Eskimos "have 50 or 60 words" for snow, the variety of American terms for queer men wouldn't be the same kind of thing.  They aren't a taxonomy to enable fine-grained distinctions between varieties of homosexual, they're a ragbag of epithets for the same supposed species.  Some are abusive epithets used by ostensibly heterosexual culture cops, others are self-classifications invented and used by queers ourselves, some moved from one side to the other and back again.  As I mentioned above, though, queers are fond of proliferating labels for ourselves, which sometimes distinguish and sometimes lump us all together.  Unless you're still an adherent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- and I think a lot of laypeople are, especially in its more deterministic forms -- I don't think there's much to be learned from the existence of all those terms.

On the other hand, I think the linguist Tim Machan's reflections on language change are interesting.  From Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford, 2009, digital edition):

Indeed, as Labov has noted, language actually points to conclusions that oppose natural selection: ‘the major agent of linguistic change – sound change – is actually maladaptive, in that it leads to the loss of the information that the original forms were designed to carry’.  More generally, change and variation are responsible for a great many socially debilitating situations.  They produce mutually unintelligible languages and their attendant barriers to communication, the communication, the communicative obstacles that even regional variation can present, and the sociolinguistic drive to instruct generation after generation of students in the details of spelling, punctuation, and usage, which are never internalized and transmitted to subsequent generations in some Lamarckian fashion.  In view of the tumult of history and the blame placed on inadequate communication, I would venture that if there truly is a general drive to optimal communication, it has failed miserably.

Which would seem to imply that people who insist that language is essentially for communication and demand that people communicate clearly with language may be trying to use language for a purpose it didn't evolve to perform.

Back to the desirability of labels, then.  It could be argued that labeling impedes communication, but it seems to me that the people who refuse certain labels (while, remember, embracing others) aren't really worried about that.  Inventing new labels in the name of rejecting labels is hardly an improvement in the communication department.

Take the rejection of the label "gay," which I've written about before.  I'm fascinated by the reasons people give for rejecting it.  They may see it as a pejorative, which is understandable but not so much when they want to replace it with something like "queer."  Again, from the way such people talk, they seem to believe that the word "gay" is inherently and essentially negative, which it wasn't always; sometimes they claim to prefer "queer" because it's somehow indeterminate, though given the negative baggage that attaches to it historically, this explanation makes no sense.  It sometimes is expressed precisely as a refusal to communicate, because of the supposed indeterminacy of "queer": I have my own personal special-snowflake definition of what it means, which I might or might not share with you.  Well, to each his or her own.  Take the African-American graduate student I mentioned in another post, who rejected "gay" because in his mind it referred to two "cis" men together; presumably he thought "queer" doesn't have this denotation.  But "gay" doesn't mean that: its use during most of the twentieth century involved a lot of gender nonconformity and gendered division of sexual labor.  The same goes for "homosexual," which (conflated with "gay") supposedly involves "two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender," though in fact gender nonconformity is associated with homosexuality both at the popular and at the academic level.  (There's also the notion of "a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation."  This, as I've argued before, involves a basic confusion about the "ideology.")

Another common factor in the rejection of "gay" or any other label is stigma: people will look down on me if I say I'm gay.  Another student who preferred not to label himself on a recent classroom panel explained that if he called himself "gay," or even "bisexual," people would misunderstand and think things about him that weren't true.  He didn't specify what those untrue things were.  Of course if he didn't label himself, people would also think things about him that weren't true.  They might believe him to be exclusively heterosexual, for example, or they might label him "faggot" or "punk," no matter how many women he also dates.  And often the trouble with those "misunderstandings" that people worry about is that they aren't misunderstandings at all.  I sympathize completely with the ambivalence other people feel about adopting a stigmatized identity; though they often refuse to believe it, I felt exactly the same way before I came out.  But the only way I know of to counter these misunderstandings is to face them and counteract them, as best we can.  If someone has stereotypes about gay people (and let me remind you, gay people also have stereotypes about gay people!), you won't get them to give their stereotypes up by pretending to be straight.  To add to the fun, many of the people who fear "misunderstandings" involving stereotypes do their best to embody the stereotypes when they do come out.  I can understand and sympathize with that too, but it's a consequence of the prior denial.

Labels can be misused, and I argue that this historical ignorance and self-serving, inconsistent rejection of labels constitutes misuse, because of the confusion that it engenders, probably by design.  There's no foolproof way to avoid confusion, stereotyping, historical baggage, or the limitations of labels; you just have to try to deal with these matters as best you can, in conversation with others, educating yourself and them as you go.  You won't get anywhere by refusing to use labels, because people will go on using them around you, like it or not.  So you must engage with others -- and don't assume that you already know everything and they know nothing.  As human beings using labels, we can't avoid using them altogether; we must learn to use them as well as we can.

Linguistic Polyamory on a Dark and Snowy Night

It's been a busy day, so this will be a quickie, two quotations from Sarah Schulman's new book Israel / Palestine and the Queer International (Duke, 2012).  One, from page 153, refers to Haneen, a queer Palestinian activist who visited the US on a solidarity tour Schulman organized:

Similarly, she addressed the American LBGT obsession with determining words to call ourselves. 'I find it ["queer"] useful for the time being but I am not attached to it or any other term. I am happy to move along with language. I am not looking for a term to marry. When it comes to language, I believe in short affairs."

The other, from page 166, is Schulman's own opinion:

I have always hated the "safety" discourse. Feeling "safe" is not the paramount goal of life; it's being able to move forward constructively even if one is afraid. Total safety is impossible unless other people's rights are entirely infringed, and it's not a desirable state for an adult. How '"safety" of the most dominant became the agenda of the LGBT community center is beyond me.

Israel / Palestine and the Queer International is, in my opinion, Schulman's best book since 1998's Stagestruck.  I recommend it highly.

The Great American Indian Berdache

From queer, Stewart Van Cleve went on to take on the berdache.  I was mildly surprised to see him give the word even as much coverage as he does, since I thought it was generally agreed to be obsolete, having been replaced by "Two Spirit" or by the actual indigenous terms.  "Two Spirit" was invented in 1990 as a blanket term for what, for now, I'll call gay Indians.  It invites the same objections as "gay," since the people who invented it were already affected by, and reacting to, American gay culture and activism, so it's historically specific (late twentieth-century North America) and culturally overreaching (subsuming the vast variety of pre-Columbian peoples under one rubric).  Following Will Roscoe, Van Cleve reports that two spirit is an English translation of "the Anishinaabe/Objibwe term niish mantoag."  That's one linguistic and cultural strand out of many.  If it's inappropriate to use homosexual to refer even to pre-1870 Europeans, as fundamentalist Foucauldians insist, then it's inappropriate to apply two spirit to Native Americans before 1990.  (I've even encountered some non-indigenous gay Foucauldians who claimed that two-spirit was equivalent to gay, which it certainly is not.  Some white New Agey gays have tried to appropriate two-spirit for their own use as well.)  The problem could be avoided by loosening the strictures of scholarly terminological determinism, but the field is too attached to that limitation in principle, though not in practice, to do so.

Bardache was the word applied by early French explorers to some "native" individuals they encountered, mostly male, who adopted (or were assigned) feminine dress, mannerisms, and work assignments.  They also took male sexual partners.  I'm not absolutely certain about this yet, but it appears that "berdaches" did not copulate with other "berdaches": the trade/queer divide applied, as in later American and other cultures.

It's not clear why the French thought that berdache was the right word for these men.  Its history has been traced to the Arabic (or Persian?) bardaj, "slave."  Supposedly it eventually came to refer to a "catamite," from a Latinized form of Ganymede, the beautiful boy who was raptured by Zeus to serve as his, erm, cupbearer: in practice it meant the "passive" partner in a male homosexual relation, and that is why the (evidently classically-educated) French trappers applied it to the effeminate Indians they encountered, because that was what they were.  But here's something odd, and an indicator for future research on my part: it just occurred to me to look up berdache and bardache in an online French-language dictionary and encyclopedia.  The bucket came up dry, with no references, historical or contemporary, for either word.  Van Cleve, however, claims that berdaj was "a Persian word for 'intimate male friend'" (17), which I have never heard before and can't find attested elsewhere.

The first thing to remember is that an etymology doesn't tell you the meaning of a word, it only tells you its history.  Words do funny things over time; they may reverse meanings or take on other seemingly unrelated ones.  Eventually "Western" anthropologists adopted and adapted berdache to mean specifically Native North American males who took on feminine dress and work assignments.  (By "specifically" I mean that if a similar role occurred in other societies -- South or Southeast Asia, say -- anthropologists would not call them berdaches but something else, hijra or katoey or bakla perhaps.  So, while the term's origin is less than felicitous, it no longer means or connotes "catamite," especially when the anthropologist is gay or lesbian, and it was the best word available to the profession before two-spirit was invented.  I should think that the fiercest defenders of indigenous intellectual property wouldn't want non-indigenous anthropologists to use two-spirit anyway.

The role of the berdache in Land of 10,000 Loves relates to a famous painting by George Catlin, "Dance to the Berdache":

Like many Euro-Americans who encountered sexual practices they disapproved of, Catlin was repulsed by the ceremony and its focus.  According to Van Cleve, a late 18th-century fur trader named Alexander Henry said that "this creature, called Ozaw-wen-dib, was now near fifty years old and had lived with many husbands" (16).   Participants in the dance depicted in the painting were Ozaw-wen-dib's present and former "husbands" who "voluntarily got up to dance."  There are over a dozen of them in the painting; it would seem that by modern Homo-American standards, the indigenous term A-go-kwa should be translated "slut," a Homo-American term which means "someone who's getting more than you are."

But Van Cleve overlooks something important.  By his criteria, and according to the standard Anglo-American scholarly consensus, two-spirit people were not queer in their own societies.  Far from violating indigenous gender or sexual norms, they occupied a more or less comfortable niche; there was a place for them -- an honored place, according to the current consensus.  If they represented "an alternative to the male-female gender dichotomy," it was an alternative that their societies had provided for them as part of their gender systems.  They did not call the assumptions of their social orders into question, they accepted them.  (Some of us feel the same way about well-known analogues of the two-spirit in our own culture; I wish I could remember who it was who called drag queens the loyal opposition to our gender norms.)

Needless to say, I'm skeptical about the scholarly consensus on the two-spirit; to me it comes suspiciously close to romanticizing the Noble Savage who rejected simplistic binaries and intolerance of those who were different.  But I still have a lot to learn before I can confirm or reject my suspicions.  As I say, it's a subject for ongoing and future research.

(The title of the post is culturally appropriated from Sherman Alexie's poem "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel."  Thanks, Mr. Alexie.)

If Nobody Else Jumped Off a Bridge, Would You?

One of the pitfalls of promiscuous reading is the multiple contacts. You read one book, it leads you to another, and another. Thousands of contacts in a lifetime, Dr. Kinsey! And sometimes you feel cheap and used afterwards. I picked up Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s The lenses of gender: transforming the debate on sexual inequality (Yale University Press, 1993) because I’d seen it cited here and there, and it sounded interesting and useful. But from her opening pages Bem made some strange assumptions:

I was recently asked to write a brief essay for Feminism and Psychology on “how my heterosexuality has contributed to my feminist politics.” That essay turned out to be rather different from what the editors expected because, although I have lived monogamously with a man I love for over twenty-seven years, I am not now and never have been a “heterosexual.” But neither have I ever been a “lesbian” or a “bisexual.” What I am – and have been for as long as I can remember – is someone whose sexuality and gender have never seemed to mesh with the available cultural categories, and that – rather than my presumed heterosexuality – is what has most profoundly informed not only my feminist politics but also the theoretical analysis of this book.

When I say that my sexuality does not mesh with the available cultural categories, I mean that the sex-of-partner dimension implicit in the three categories of heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual seems irrelevant to my own particular pattern of erotic attractions and sexual experiences. Although some of the (very few) individuals to whom I have been attracted during my forty-eight years have been men and some have been women, what those individuals have in common has nothing to do with either their biological sex or mine – from which I conclude, not that I am attracted to both sexes, but that my sexuality is organized around dimensions other than sex [vii].

I detect a note of smugness here, especially in the “(very few)” aside. How dreary for you, Professor Bem. But what bothers me is how stupid some of these statements are. To say that someone is “bisexual” is not to say that her sexuality (whatever that is) is organized around a sexual dimension, whatever that means. Rather, it means that someone, the person using the term, is looking at the sexual “dimension”, for lack of a better word, of a person’s life. It need not be supposed to define every aspect of the person, any more than height or weight or eye color does. If I say that I am five feet, eight inches tall, would Bem say that I am organized around a dimension of height? For that matter, if I were to say that I’m a Methodist, would I be saying that I was organized around a dimension of religion? I might be, but I would as likely be simply describing that dimension, one of many that could be adduced. If anything, Bem reveals here that she is thoroughly invested in essentializing these traits.

A “bisexual” is someone whose sexual experiences (which can include attractions not acted on) have encompassed people of both sexes. Bisexuals (which in this sense includes people who don’t identify themselves, even inwardly, by that term) respond erotically in a wide range of manners, or styles. Some want basically the same things from their partners regardless of their sex, others want one thing from males and another from females. Many say, as Bem does, that they are attracted to the person and not the sex. According to the usage of some self-identified “bisexuals,” then, Bem does fit into that category, so she’s either inexcusably ignorant for a psychologist writing on this topic, or she’s disingenuous.

Granted, many people ignore these differences, but a prominent psychologist should know better. Bem’s certainly not the only one who makes this mistake. What is really alarming is the way she adopts a very popular but dishonest defensive stance, defining her term narrowly and unrealistically so that it conveniently and oh so coincidentally doesn’t include her case. (I’m not gay, even though I’ve had sex with thousands of men and no women, because I don’t do drag, or see the same guy more than once, or because I believe in marriage and most gays are just a bunch of sluts, or because I am only a top [my partners are queer, not me!], or only a bottom [see, I never get an erection – men don’t turn me on!], or because I’ll do anything but kiss [kissing’s queer, cowboys don’t kiss!]. And so on, and on. You’re not fat, Eric – you’re big-boned!)

A monosexual will respond differently to different desired individuals of her own preferred sex. Identity doesn’t necessarily agree with practice: many people who consider themselves heterosexual (or, more likely, as not-gay or not-queer or not-that-way) or homosexuals have a considerable amount of erotic experiences with people of both sexes. I don’t experience my own sexuality as “organized around [the male] sex”, or as my being attracted to a “sex.” Rather, I find that my desires and emotions, and later practices, that are generally classified as sexual occur only in relation to males. I have had a good deal of interaction with women, including very dear friends, but never have been stirred erotically by them. I have no idea why this is, but to say that my “sexuality” is organized around sex would seem to me to be pretending to know more than I or anyone knows about the roots of sexual desire and practice. (More likely it’s circular, like saying that opium puts you to sleep because of its Dormative Quality.)

Many people assume that terms like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “bisexual” encode a particular model of sexual organization; but this assumption is usually made on the basis of little or no evidence. Despite the work of Kinsey and many others who resisted the siren call of essentialism, such things continue to be widely assumed, even by avowedly anti-essentialist writers and scholars. Bem seems to imply that maybe some other people are “attracted to both sexes” and their sexuality is organized purely around a sexual dimension or dimensions. Those people really are bisexuals, but not her! I’m not sure there is any good reason to believe so, but perhaps Bem will provide some evidence as I read further.

On the other hand, she speaks of these “categories” as though she doesn’t think they refer to real entities in the real world, so maybe there are no bisexuals; but in that case she’s as much a bisexual as anyone else. On the next page she writes:

In the early 1970s, I focused almost exclusively on the concept of androgyny … because that concept seemed to challenge the traditional categories of masculine and female as nothing before had ever done. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, I had begun to see that the concept of androgyny inevitably focuses so much more attention on the individual’s being both masculine and feminine than on the culture’s having created that concepts of masculinity and femininity in the first place that it can legitimately be said to reproduce precisely the gender polarization that it seeks to undercut. Accordingly, I moved on to the concept of gender schematicity because it enabled me to argue even more forcefully that masculinity and femininity are merely the construction of a cultural schema – or lens – that polarizes gender.

Notice how she dwells on the word “concept”, as though concepts were unproblematically tied to words, and their ramifications were mystically packed into concept and word, so that they need only be unpacked by the intrepid theorist. This is, I think, precisely what is meant by “essentialism.” If I disagree with that notion strongly, it’s not because I believe that words can mean anything arbitrarily, and that the question is simply who is to be the master. Words do carry meanings with them, as historically and culturally shaped constructions, and of course the theorist brings her own baggage with her. But though words and concepts are culturally constructed (as is the theorist), it is impossible to find a word that by its nature stands outside of history and culture, enabling the theorist to take a Goddess’ eye view of humanity without reproducing the assumptions she seeks to undercut. (I’ll be looking soon at Thomas Nagel’s discussion of “objectivity,” The View from Nowhere. I expect it to be as entertaining as The Lens of Gender.)

In pursuit of this Holy Grail, people go from word to word, concept to concept, in quest of the one that will magically free them from the chains of culture. Queer came into use a few years after The Lens of Gender was published; I wonder if Bem jumped onto that bandwagon too. But a look at the succeeding literature showed that it too failed. Usually unaware of what they were doing, opponents of binary thinking fell into a queer / not-queer binary. Critical of the time-bound connotations of “homosexual,” queer theorists smeared the word over all times and cultures. Some thought it was preferable to the innocuous “gay,” relishing the supposed transgressive possibilities of “queer” as they sought advancement in the conformist halls of academe, as though the word itself could automatically turn their formulaic dissertations and papers into something dangerous. (If you get a Ph.D. by using it, dears, it can’t be too transgressive.) And while queer theorists weren’t watching, “gay” became a pejorative (as in “That Is So Gay”). Many younger gay people especially began to reject “gay” as something analogous to “nigger,” a nasty word that we shouldn’t use of ourselves. Words and concepts are inescapably unstable, slippery and indeterminate. A theorist’s job, it seems to me, is to try to tease out certain possibilities and implications of a word or concept, and for the length of an article or book, pin it down to one meaning. “Androgyny” will do as well for Bem’s project as any other term she can appropriate; the hard part is not to avoid being limited by it, but to avoid being sidetracked by all the other possibilities one has tried to exclude.

Another telling blunder is Bem’s dismissal of “masculinity and femininity” as “merely the constructions of a social schema”. (My italics.) It isn’t only opponents of social constructionism who think, mistakenly, that a social construction is something illusory and arbitrary, invented out of thin air to confuse and control people: far too many social constructionists believe it too. Theory is also one of the constructions of a social milieu, as are those concepts and terms in whose coils theorists struggle, Laocoon-like. A word is very much a social construction, but you cannot ignore or change its meaning arbitrarily. A text is a social construction, but not just any meaning can be assigned to it. A social construction is built partly from immaterial ideas, and partly from human bodies; “race” and “sex” are examples of such constructions.

The word “tree” has no inherent connection to the object it refers to. It could just as easily be “arbol” or “나무” or “mti”. The connection is socially constructed, but it’s not an arbitrary construction: if you want to be understood by a speaker of English, “tree” is the sound-meaning construction you must use. (The example of language generally shows that social constructions are not mere illusions that we could see through and overcome by an act of will. You can’t learn a new language by recognizing that your old one is merely a social construction; it takes long hard work.) “Bisexual” has its limitations as a description of people’s sexuality, but it’s more useful, In My Hubristic Opinion, to point out and clarify those limitations rather than to refuse to use it where it applies. People who claim they don’t like to use labels are usually strongly attached to the use of the label “label.”

It seems to me that many theorists and critics (mathematicians and scientists too) feel smothered by the world: by their gross material bodies, by the constraints of history and culture and sociality generally. They forget, or never learned, that these constraints are what give us the possibilities of thought and choice to begin with. In this they remind me of religious (not only Christian) ascetics who hoped to escape the illusions of Maya, the Cave, the Flesh, to fly free in a realm of pure asocial spirit. The very difficulty they have in getting free of those “mere” social constructions suggests how powerful social constructions are, how bound by them we are despite these folks' insistence that they are Not Of This World, or at least, of This Cultural Schema. Dismissing them so lightly is a sort of sleight of hand to distract the audience from the “mere” constructionism that is going on in the classroom or on the page. (Just as essentialists’ or absolutists’ appeal to Nature aims to distract you from the historical and cultural in their performance.)

Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. Prefaces and introductions often don't connect well with what follows, and many writers theorize badly but do good research. Maybe the rest of The lenses of gender will be more useful.

Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures
by Gayatri Gopinath
Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005

Okay, what I want to know is: How could Gayatri Gopinath write a book on queers in the South Asian diaspora without even mentioning Chutney Popcorn? I suppose it could be argued that Nisha Ganatra's desi-dyke indie film doesn't merit the extended discussion Gopinath grants to Bend It Like Beckham, Monsoon Wedding, or Ian Iqbal Rashid's 1996 short film Surviving Sabu, but that's the point: it should at least be argued.

At first I thought Gopinath's "queer diasporas" might reckon with the way so many Euro-American lesbians and gay men have imagined ourselves as a diaspora, the exiled children of Lesbos or Sodom scattered among the nations, searching for the lost history of our people and a way back to our homeland. The association of queers with certain places is rich with possibility for her theme; but no.

Despite Gopinath's avowed intent to "take queer female diasporic subjectivity as the starting point" (79) of her discussion, she devotes most of her first hundred pages to South Asian diasporic boy culture, from the British Asian bands Cornershop and ADF to Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul, mostly to defend them against imputations of sexism or homophobia. While Gopinath speculates freely about the inner lives of South Asian males, she has little to say about female subjectivity: women remain objects, not subjects, in this book.

She does get excited over a single scene in the film East is East (2000, dir. Damien O'Donnell), in which a young "biracial" woman, working with her brothers behind the family fish and chips shop, does a Bollywood-inspired lip synch routine crossed with the chimney sweeps' dance from Mary Poppins. Gopinath sees this as "a resounding rejection of the father-son drama of Oedipal hatred" (83), and "a powerful rejoinder to Enoch Powell's calls for an all-white Britain, in that it evokes an alternative realm of public culture that is available to South Asian immigrants in the diaspora" (88). Whooo! look out Enoch Powell, Mina is in da house! I agree it's an entertaining scene, but I'm not persuaded it's queer. (Gopinath's analysis, though, is like, totally gay.) For Gopinath, though, as for many of her fellow scholars, the word "queer" functions performatively: it is the intrepid scholar who queers the diaspora merely by using the word.

Gopinath declares at the outset that "The concept of a queer diaspora enables a simultaneous critique of heterosexuality and the nation form while exploding the binary opposition between nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy" (11). These binaries flood back into her writing as fast as she disowns them, however: "home" and diaspora, queer and gay/lesbian, East and West, appear as mutually exclusive categories, rather than the amorphous, overlapping zones they are.

This gets her into trouble when she finally essays an extended analysis of queer South Asian texts. She refuses even to consider the possibility of any common ground between queer South Asians and queer "Euro-Americans" (and her fond notion that Americans and Europeans share a single construction of homosexuality shows just how ignorant she is). Consider Ismat Chughtai's 1940 Urdu story "The Quilt", in which a Muslim Indian tomboy observes a neglected wife cavorting with her female servant under the eponymous bedspread. Gopinath sternly informs the reader that "the text refuses to allow particular configurations of homoerotic desire to settle into stable structures of sexual identity" (148). So there! and never mind that the story's author herself referred to the relationship as "lesbian."

Comparing "The Quilt" to Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire, in which two sisters-in-law fall in love, Gopinath claims that for South Asian women "this privatized, seemingly sanitized `domestic' space can simultaneously function as a site of intense female homoerotic pleasure and practices", against a supposed Western "narrative of`lesbian' sexuality as needing to emerge from a private domestic sphere into a public, visible, `lesbian' subjectivity" (155). This is a false antithesis. Homoeroticism has often been nurtured and harbored by domestic space in the West (see, for just one famous example, Radclyffe Hall's 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness), and Fire ends with flight and exile for the two lovers. After denying it for several pages, Gopinath grumpily admits that "the two women eventually do leave the confines of the household rather than continue to exist within it", but that's far too mild: Radha, the older woman, is abandoned by her husband and mother-in-law in the hope that she'll burn to death.

You'd think, reading Gopinath, that American lesbians and gay men chose "identity" and "visibility" out of sheer perversity, instead of as a defensive response to assault and expulsion by our families and straight society in general. "Homonormative" American lesbians and gays are busily burrowing their way back into the "private domestic space" Gopinath accuses them of trying to escape. (Two words: "PFLAG"and "marriage.") And Gopinath's main theme is a demand for more queer female visibility in South Asian culture.

Gopinath completely misses elements of both works that a queer reading, diasporic or not, ought to highlight. There's the bitterly satirical humor of "The Quilt"; its use of a naive narrator to allow the reader to label what the narrator can't; and the author's argument, when the story was tried for obscenity in 1943, that it was important to expose these nasty goings-on, instead of sweeping them under the rug. There's the familiar closeting strategy of Deepa Mehta's insistence that "the lesbian relationship in [Fire] is merely a symbol of an extreme choice my heroines make. ...[I]t is not a lesbian film ... rather, I think of it as humanistic" (157). It's hard to think of a queer movie since The Children's Hour that we haven't been told isn't "about homosexuality." Gopinath is annoyed with Mehta for resorting to "the rhetoric of women's emancipation and personal choices" when her film was under literal attack by Hindu fascists who stormed the theaters in which it was shown, but it's hard to see why, when she can't make up her own mind whether Fire's heroines are lesbians or not.

But Gopinath's blind spots and blunders are normal in her field: the faux-impersonal style, the ignorance about the American gay life and culture it attacks, the invidious East-West dichotomies, the historical naiveté turn up in work after work of contemporary queer scholarship. (Gopinath seems genuinely surprised to find similarities between the experiences of Punjabi women sweatshop workers in the West Midlands and Chinese women sweatshop workers in San Francisco. Girl, read Elana Dykewomon's great sweatshop novel Beyond the Pale!)

I don't mean to jump on the anti-queer theory bandwagon here. Gopinath's problem is her misuse, through assiduously cultivated ignorance, of theories whose radical potential has been contained through the inertia of great institutions. Like so many of her colleagues in the academy, Gopinath seems to believe that merely invoking the deities "Post-colonial! Queer diaspora! Impossible desires! Destabilized identities!" will magically transform her very middle-of-the-road work into something innovative, even radical. Alas, when the smoke clears Impossible Desires is just another unremarkable contribution to that genre of neo-Orientalist ephemera known as post-colonial studies. Gopinath's theorizing isn't queer enough: whoever believes on the names of Fanon, Said, and Foucault will not be saved. And her elision of queer female South Asian subjectivity remains mysterious.