How You Gonna Keep Them in Petticoats ... ?

Some more about Stewart Van Cleve's Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota.  I'm still in his first chapter, you'll notice, which is about the period before 1900 or so.  His next case is a mid-19th century passing woman named Lucy Lobdell, who grew up in New York state, married a man and bore a daughter, moved (alone) to Minnesota in 1856, and a few years later was sent back to New York, where she was eventually committed to an institution in 1878.

I think the term "passing woman" is still the best one available for women like Lobdill, whom we know to be biological females (often because their sex was discovered after their death) who passed as male.  Sometimes they married women.  Some scholars and popularizers nowadays try to shoehorn them into categories like "transgendered," but this won't do because we usually know nothing about how they saw themselves or why they adopted masculine personae.  We nearly always see them through the eyes of others, not their own.  Ironically, those who favor "transgender" are often those who decry imposing modern categories on people who lived long ago and far away.  Van Cleve fits this pattern, as you'll see.

It happens that in 1855, while she was still in New York, Lobdell wrote and published a little book about her life and opinions, an apologia and a manifesto.

And now, I ask, if a man can do a woman's work any quicker or better than a woman herself; or could he collect his thoughts sufficiently to say his prayer with a clear idea?  No; if he was confused and housed up with the children all day, he would not hesitate to take the burn off his children's shoulders, and allow women's wages to be on an equality with those of the man.  Is there one, indeed, who can look upon that little daughter, and feel that she soon will grow up to toil for the unequal sum allotted to compensate her toil.  I feel that I cannot submit to see all the bondage with which woman is oppressed, and listen to the voice of fashion, and repose upon the bosom of death [quoted in Van Cleve, 19].

Van Cleve, who condescendingly refers to Lobdell as "Lucy," says that in this passage she was "rationalizing her ruse."  Was she?  The quoted passage is a familiar feminist diatribe against the limitations imposed on women, routine even in the 1800s, but that doesn't mean Lobdell didn't mean every word of it.  This one paragraph is all he quotes from her book, but from reading it I don't see any reason to suppose that she didn't see herself as a woman who took on a male identity for practical reasons.  Of course, once a woman has gotten a taste of relative freedom, she's not likely to want to return to slavery.  She's also likely to find that she sees the world, herself, and other people differently.  (By way of analogy, after I'd lived an openly gay life for a few months, I found it almost unthinkable to recloset myself.  I no longer thought of homosexuality as something it was proper to hide.)

A lot of people today, even those who I'd think would know better because of their vaunted politics, still seem to think that a woman would only have put on trousers as a sort of fetish, because she wanted not only to be a social Man but a Male.  Trousers, for them, are male and if a woman wears them she catches their male germs by contagion.  I understand this kind of magical thinking, having grown up with it, but I don't believe in it.  The whole point of feminism, I thought, was to reject it.  But evidently it's harder to get rid of than I thought.

Babies learn early that if Mommy covers her face, she hasn't disappeared, she's just hidden.  But many adults continue to think that if a woman covers her body with "men's" clothing, she becomes a man, and vice versa.  That's the appeal of drag, I think; deep down inside, many people believe the illusion.

Van Cleve says that around 1857 Lobdell adopted the name La-Roi, "in hopes of further obscuring what others later perceived to be a biological incongruity" (20).  He doesn't say how he knows what her hopes were.  Me, I wonder.  I don't want to read too much into an idiosyncratic spelling, but Leroi is a French name, "The King," and using "La" (the feminine article) instead of "Le" (the masculine article) strikes me as a coy, even campy wink.  (American gay men have often used the article "La" for other, not always gay men: "La Reagan" for Ronald Reagan for example.  "Miss" has also been popular: "May Miss God strike you dead!")  Did Lobdell know enough French for this to be intentional?  I have no idea. It's just as likely to be good old-fashioned American semi-literacy.  But again, passing women often adopted masculine names, and contrary to the magical thinking I mentioned above, this did not turn them into males or say anything about their subjectivity, any more than wearing a Richard Nixon mask turns me into Richard Nixon.

It is difficult [Van Cleve continues], and probably inappropriate, to use gendered language when describing Lobdell's experiences after that name change.  This is because it is unclear to what extent s/he believed in a supposed mental illness that psychologists later diagnosed.  In 1880 [23 years after she changed her name, mind you], the vagabond was admitted to a mental asylum and became the subject of an 1883 case study by P. M. Wise, who noted that Lobdell and another woman had lived in "the quiet monotony of ... lesbian love."  That study, published in Alienist and Neurologist, was among the first published articles that explicitly identified "lesbian" behavior in medical terms.

If Lobdell supported that diagnosis, then it would be wisest to use feminine words because, in that hypothetical instance, Lobdell believed that she was a sick woman.  If Lobdell rejected the diagnosis and staunchly defended adopting a man's identity, then using male words would be the best option.  Today, it is difficult to decide which term, or absence thereof, is appropriate.  Instead of a linguistic stalemate, this situation provides an opportunity for considering alternative ways of discussing identity [21] ...

At which point Van Cleve dilates upon gender neutral pronouns for a bit.  But he's set up a false dilemma.  The evidence he's given indicates that Lobdell saw herself as an oppressed woman who passed as a man to improve her lot in life.  In the absence of any evidence that she saw herself as male, using masculine pronouns is like calling me "Dick" because I put on a Nixon mask for an evening.  There are other issues raised by neuter pronouns, which I'll put off for another time.  For now, the "diagnosis" is unimportant.  If Van Cleve wants to follow Foucault, he should bear in mind what the philosopher wrote about diagnostic classifications as functions of power.  Even if Lobdell came to accept the diagnosis in the end (and Van Cleve admits he doesn't know), was she persuaded to accept her doctor's scientific delusions, or were they imposed on her?  Did she decide to love Big Brother, or was she made to?

In 1858, after Lobdell had been in Minnesota for a little more than a year, her sex was "discovered and exposed," says a writer Van Cleve quotes (21).  She was tried for impersonating a man, but the jury refused to convict her, on the grounds that "'the right of females to "wear the pants" had been recognized since the time of Justinian.'"  For reasons Van Cleve leaves vague (no doubt because he doesn't know either) Lobdell was deported to New York anyway, where he says "the asylum waited" -- in 1880, twenty-two years later.  That's a long wait.  I'd say that Van Cleve is distorting or confusing chronology here.  It's as if he can't wait to get her into the doctor's clutches.  It sounds to me like Lucy "LaRoi" Lobdell's story is more complex and interesting than Van Cleve can get his mind around.  It's not only laypeople who try to put human lives into simpler boxes than reality demands.

I Like Your Queer Theory. I Do Not Like Your Queer Theorists.

I don't think I'll finish reading Stewart Van Cleve's Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).  It was such a nice idea, too: a survey of LBGTQ life in Minnesota, drawing on archival materials held at the University of Minnesota, where Van Cleve was formerly an assistant curator.  But it turned out to be badly written, and bogged down immediately in a misunderstood theoretical mire.

Queer Theory itself isn't really the problem; if Van Cleve hadn't misunderstood it, he'd probably have found some other framework to misunderstand.  But when theoretical cluelessness combines with scrambled facts, it's just more than I care to endure.  For example, on page 14:

The word gay, while essential in the twenty-first century, was not widely used in its current sense during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it will not be used here to describe these earlier times.

Really?  From what I've read, gay is widely regarded as inessential by twenty-first century academics, even when they're discussing late twentieth-century English-speaking American life.  They do their best to denigrate it and to seek alternatives, though their reasons are never very clear.

Similarly, words like lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or straight are generally inappropriate in any historical analysis before the Second World War, unless individuals used that language.

And yet those who agree with Van Cleve exhibit a curious reluctance to adopt the terminology used by individuals in a given period.  There could be valid reasons for this, for example that, before Stonewall, there was virtually no such thing as a public homosexual identity.  Homosexuals were seldom allowed to speak for themselves as homosexuals in media, even if many had wished to do so.  Another is related: public discourse about homosexuals used the language of the courts, the Church, the clinic.  Using this terminology takes the side of the forces that oppressed homosexuals.  The words they/we had for ourselves were usually in-group code, as gay was itself until the late 1960s, and weren't intended to be used and understood by the general public.  A lot of us delighted to think of ourselves as a more or less secret society, a guild or occult association with its own jargon, folkways, and rituals.  The idea that we might demand to be seen as an integral part of the larger society, on an equal footing with heterosexuals, was as outrageous to most of us as it was to straights.  That one was a bugger or a tribade was a thrilling but shameful secret, an identity to be used only among one's fellow shirtlifters and sapphists, not before normal people.  I have doubts as to the appropriateness of "identity" to refer to such labels in the first place. Though all this is known well enough by scholars of the period, it seems to me that they don't take it as seriously as they ought.  It's probably a measure of just how much has changed since 1969 that younger gays can't imagine living as their uncles and great-aunts did, doomed to a hopeless search for love in smoky bars, in a murky twilight world between the sexes, etc., etc.

Left without such words, it is at first difficult to describe sexual activity between members of the same gender.  Can it also identify alternatives to the male-female gender dichotomy?  Would those described by the word actually identify with it?  Or would the word act as an artificial border that contextualized a spectrum of identities as it left them undisturbed?

Here Van Cleve goes wrong at the end of the first sentence: it's not sexual activity between members of the same gender but between members of the same sex that is at issue.  The sex/gender distinction, intended to distinguish between "the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women" and "the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women," turned out to be rather more difficult to map than its proponents expected.  But now the confusion has come full circle, only with "gender" given priority.

Now, gay can and does "describe" -- better, refer to -- sexual activity between persons of the same sex, whether they are same-gender or not.  It can also refer to alternatives to the male-female gender dichotomy: it includes drag queens, sweater fags, leather boys, flaming sissies, and ordinary nebbishes.  Though it has tended to refer primarily to males, that wasn't always the case, and a good many lesbians call themselves gay.  Internationally it has been adopted and adapted to a wide range of other types, though usually to non-masculine males. It's often claimed that gay is too narrow a category, but the real objection seems to be that it's too embracing.

Would those described by the word actually identify with it?  Often not, but that's often a problem with stigmatized identity and behavior.  As with the secret-society aspect of gay life, stigma is also generally downplayed or ignored by today's scholars of homosexuality.

As the reader may have noticed, Van Cleve is building up suspense: Oh my, there seems to be no suitable word for the sensitive gay scholar to use to refer to same-sex-loving people of before 1990 or so!  Whatever shall we do, wherever shall we go?  It will come as no surprise that he has the solution up his sleeve:

The admittedly imperfect answer is a word with a past of its own.  A derogatory descriptor in the mid-twentieth century, the word queer has been embraced by scholars as appropriate for historical analysis.  Shorter, more elegant [!], and ultimately more descriptive than the acronym "Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Questioning/Intersex" (LGBTQI), queer ultimately describes a host of identities that challenge the existence of sexual normalcy and the dominance of the gender dichotomy.  A still fluid term, queer functions as an adjective when it used to describe historic figures, places [!], and organizations.  The word provokes and simultaneously defines the social order by calling its assumptions into question.  Queer has come to describe many who are not easily categorized using contemporary terms [14].

Isn't that a fabulous coincidence?  But queer fails the test Van Cleve posed at the end of his previous paragraph: Would those described by the word actually identify with it? Probably most would not, especially those before the mid-twentieth century even in America and England and a fortiori those outside the English-speaking world.  It was also resisted fiercely by many gay Americans of my generation when it resurfaced in the early 1990s, not only because it was "a derogatory descriptor" but because of its transgressive connotations: they didn't want to challenge the status quo, they wanted to be part of it.

More seriously, queer does not "challenge the existence of sexual normalcy and the dominance of the gender dichotomy," it assumes the existence of normalcy and takes a stance outside of it; ditto for the dominance of the gender dichotomy.  Queer is one half of a binary, with normal (or some equivalent) at the other pole.  As I said earlier, most gay -- or, if you prefer, queer -- people we know about before Stonewall, though they often lived satisfying lives, seem to have seen themselves as stunted, deformed outsiders, and counted themselves lucky if the "normal" world left them more or less alone.  There were a few who considered themselves to be an elite, superior to the sheeplike masses, but this fantasy also assumed a divide between themselves and the normal.  Here gay has the advantage of having been chosen by ourselves, even if originally as a camp password: for a time it was more or less neutral, unlike most of the words straights had for us.

One virtue of queer, from Van Cleve's perspective, is that it doesn't really mean anything, so it can be used for all the purposes he asked for and more. But that also is queer's limitation: if it can mean anything, it also means nothing. (One benefit of typing these excerpts in by hand is that I notice features I missed on first reading, such as Van Cleve's excessive fondness for the word "describe," especially where it's not really the right word for the job.  One word doesn't "describe" anything; "refers to" would be more accurate.  I think he's giving the word more power and coverage than it really has.  And since "queer" can cover so many styles and cultures, it can hardly "describe" them.)  Van Cleve acknowledges where he's coming from when he writes that "queer has been embraced by scholars as appropriate for historical analysis."  Having consumed a good deal of the production of the queer academic endeavor, I suspect that its very meaninglessness is a major reason for its being embraced by them.  For the first wave of Queer scholars twenty years ago, it had the added frisson of safe transgression: Wow, I'm like using a derogatory word and reclaiming it!  Take that, heterosexist hegemons!  My fearless intervention will strike down your Western-style binaries like Luke Skywalker struck down Jabba the Hut!  Not that there's anything wrong with that -- anything that puts some spice into the hard life of a graduate student is fine with me, and I'm sure a lot of senior faculty look like Jabba.  But it doesn't excuse the conceptual confusion that the use of queer has sown.

Ironically, queer ends up violating the very stricture its advocates hope to evade by its use: it smothers all the variety of pre-Stonewall non-heterosexual life under a single monocultural name and category.  That isn't an objection in itself, since if you're going to subsume a wide range of behaviors and styles and terminology from an even wider range of cultures and periods under a single word, as well queer as another.  But gay could do the job as well, or as badly.  It isn't the word but how it's used that matters.

Van Cleve omits to mention that in scholarship queer works not only as an adjective and a noun, but as a verb, as in Queering the X, where X can be almost anything (752,000 hits!): the modern English-speaking scholar looks at all of human history with a queer eye.  The verb is also performative: by queering the X, the scholar marks his or her territory and advances toward tenure.  I'd thought that one aim of recent scholarship was to abandon the pretense of objectivity and embrace the scholar's subjectivity.  I've argued here before, for example, that it doesn't matter whether the author and director of Georgy Girl meant Georgy to be readable as a baby dyke, because she is readable as one and it enriches the film to do so.  A straight viewpoint wouldn't notice this possibility and would probably reject it indignantly.  A queer perspective also is supposed to reject the hetero/homo binary by recognizing that primarily heterosexual people often have homosexual desires or overt experience, and vice versa; but this insight is neglected in most queer scholarship I've seen.

It isn't the word that matters but how it's used, and in this book queer is used carelessly, thoughtlessly.  Come on, queer scholars: embrace the verb, embrace your subjectivity.  You could do so much worse.