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.

Everyone's Extreme But Me and Thee

I'm out of town until tomorrow (I hope), and Internet access is harder to get than I expected.  But I just remembered this excerpt from James Barr's book Fundamentalism that I've quoted before, and which fits in with what I wrote the other day about liberals and Fox News:

As with some other comparable social movements, there is always a position more extreme than the one you are talking with at any particular moment. A person whom an average mainstream Christian will regard as a rabid fundamentalist will often be found to consider himself rather moderate; beyond him there lie, it appears, whole tracts of belief that are much more intransigent and uncompromising. The fundamentalist polemicist thus puzzles people by assuming a pose of moderation. He affects to suppose, at least at times, that his is in fact a central position within Christianity. On the one side you have the severe distortions of Roman Catholicism, on the other you have the utter perversions of liberalism, and in the middle you have the sound, central and moderate position of his own conservative evangelicalism. There may indeed be persons who push the conservative evangelical position to unnecessary extremes, it is admitted, but the average sound conservative (i.e., the one you are talking to at the moment) occupies middle ground. It is thus not uncommon to find a person who holds absolutely all the tenets of fundamentalist belief, … but who nevertheless uses the term ‘fundamentalist’ not for himself but for some shadowy group of people who hold a yet more extreme position.

Easy enough, eh?  Let me add a complicating thought.  Sure, that crazy Fox News fan over there, or that wacked-out fundamentalist, might think he's a sensible moderate, but he's really extreme.  So far so good.  But are you, O real sensible moderate, as middle-of-the-road as you like to think?

My own answer to my question is that I'm not concerned with being either extreme or moderate.  If what I think is right sets me at odds with most right-thinking people, so what?  It's not exactly news, is it, that most right-thinking people have been wrong in the past?  Well, maybe it is, to some people.  After the dust has settled, right-thinking people like to rewrite history so that they were on the right side after all, and the crazy extremists who took the right position before turn out to have been right for the wrong reasons, like those who opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it was based on falsehoods and constituted aggression.  To right-thinking people, we only thought that because we were motivated by a visceral knee-jerk hatred of Bush and of the Republican Party, plus a general dislike for military violence.  (As if any of those were bad reasons.)  The right reason, according to right-thinking people, is that the war wasn't well-planned or organized, it turned out to take longer than expected, but our hearts were in the right place.  And the same people are ready to be right-thinking again, as often as it takes.  As I've said before, it's easy to be moderate if you get to pick the extremes in advance.

On the other hand, I don't mind if I agree with most people either.  After all, if most people have the good sense or good taste to agree with me, it might mean there's hope for the human race after all.

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.)

Along Came Fox

I used to know this intelligent and well-educated young lady (two or three years younger than I, which makes her young) who said she didn't pay attention to blogs, because they didn't have standards of accuracy and professionalism like the New York Times or CNN.  A few months later she was not only linking to blogs but posting memes like the one above to Facebook, and we know the high standards of accuracy and professionalism they have.  When I posted a link to the Onion's takedown of Michelle Obama's DNC speech, she sniffed that she doesn't find the Onion's so-called "humor" funny.  A couple of weeks later she linked to an Onion article that mocked the GOP candidates, commenting LOL! And as we all -- well, I, mainly -- know, typing LOL is a scientifically proven early sign of intellectual deterioration.

I agree that "we" should stop watching Fox News, if indeed "we" ever watched it.  But there is evidence that, even before Fox News was launched, people who rely on TV news are less informed about the world than those who relied on print media.  So one shouldn't stop with Fox News; one should also stop watching CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and MSNBC.  "What's left?" my friend asked, an opening I hadn't anticipated.  "Democracy Now!" I replied, seriously but also facetiously, since I was naming a professional news source distinctly to the left of the corporate media.  I'm not sure my friend got it; I had to explain it to her.

She said that she was asking for something available on TV, not just on the Internet or radio, and here I was brought up against my own ignorance.  I thought that DN is available in some cable and satellite packages, but what do I know?  (P.S. It apparently airs on some public TV stations.)  I haven't watched TV with any regularity since the late 1960s.  My friend explained that she doesn't have a good radio at home, and her computer isn't up to displaying TV video adequately.  If it's not on TV it's not accessible to her, and aside from TV news she only has time to read the New York Times.  "It's a matter of priorities," she said.

Well, yes: if one's priority is to be systematically misinformed about the news, TV is the way to go.  I can't argue with that.  If one's priority is to be informed, one may have to rearrange one's news-seeking habits.  As I've said before, I don't have time to get misinformation from the corporate media.  But if one chooses to be misinformed about news, one is in a poor position to jeer at people who choose to be misinformed by a slightly different corporate flavor.

It occurred to me this morning that Fox occupies a valuable space in the liberal political universe.  Before it existed, there wasn't a major network dedicated to pushing far right-wing corporate ideology, and I think that left many liberals feeling like they were standing at the edge of the flat earth, teetering too, too near the abyss.  Rush Limbaugh was only one man; with all the fat jokes in the world he couldn't be the barrier to doom that they needed.  But then came Fox News, ready and downright eager to be the Not-Liberal Media.  (In the same way, the Westboro Baptist Church gives right-wing Christians someone to their right, someone they can deplore to make themselves seem more moderate and reasonable, if only to themselves.)  It was a godsend to CNN, which soon began to move to the right itself, using Fox as cover.  (We're not extreme!  Look at Fox News, way out there!  We're moderate!  The irony is that liberals use Fox News the same way: to establish their own moderation.)   Recall the study released a few months ago which found that Fox News listeners were the least well-informed about current events, and PBS listeners the best-informed.  LOL! crowed the PBS fans, We knew the yahoos who watch Fox are dumb!  But they failed (or chose) not to notice that while Fox fans correctly answered only 28 percent of the questions they were asked about the news, PBS fans answered only 38 percent correctly.  And that's not smart.  It's just not quite as dumb.

And let's not forget: if they stopped watching Fox News, Jon Stewart and his team would lose most of their material.

Just Like a Woman

A friend of mine passed this along on Facebook.  Pop has a good point, but I've learned to be suspicious of men who talk like this, because it seems that the next words out of their mouths are often along the lines of "Now order me down on my knees and call me your bitch."

(I can't look at that photo without remembering this classic feminist shoot from the sixties:

Mick and the boys were there before, if not first!)

As it happens, though, I'm dressed in women's clothes now: Jeans.  T-shirt.  Boxers.  Running shoes.  Those who think slinky gowns, decorative handbags, and high heels when they hear "women's clothes" aren't as liberated from the standard gender stereotypes as they like to think.

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.

I And I-dentity

Speaking of identity, Dan Savage dug himself in a little deeper this week.

You may recall that a week ago he answered a question from a reader who in passing labeled himself "a poly."  Dan told him sternly "You are not 'a poly.' ... There's no such thing as a person who's 'a poly,' just as there's no such thing as a person who is 'a monogamous.'

So when tweaked by a tweet on Twitter, Dan protested, "from my perspective, polyamory and monogamy are relationship models, not sexual orientations."  But no one, not Poly or the tweeter, had said they were "sexual orientations."  As I wrote before, "sexual orientation" means which sex (male, female, or both) a person's erotic interests are oriented toward.  (We live in a strange world when pedophilia can be considered a "sexual orientation" by professional sexologists, but "polyamory" can't.)  Dan went on:

Poly can be central to someone’s sexual self-conception, and it can be hugely important, but I don’t think it’s an orientation in the same way that gay, straight, or bisexual are orientations.

Evidence?  There's none, of course.  I suppose Dan is relying here on the great circular argument that we know homosexuality is an orientation because it's inborn, and orientations are inborn so we know homosexuality is an orientation, which is therefore inborn because orientations are inborn.  This is at best an argument from definition, because there's no good evidence that homosexuality (or heterosexuality or bisexuality) is inborn.  Many gay people decided first that because they felt that their sex lives were central to their sexual self-conception, it must be inborn, and only then did the wave of research in the 90s try to find evidence to support the claim.  Another popular rationale was that they'd always known that they were gay, just as Poly wrote that "he has always known he's a poly."  If that's evidence for one, it's evidence for the other.  So far the jury is at best out, and preponderance of the evidence is against a primary role for the genes in the formation of sexual orientation.  Under the circumstances, no one can honestly claim that homosexuality is a "sexual orientation" if innateness is essential to the notion; we just can't say, because we don't know.

He concludes, "No one is legislating against polyamory here. Just thinkin’ about things."  Well, no, Dan isn't thinking, or even thinkin'.  He's just jerking the old knee.  Just like his old role model Ann Landers.  Landers used to lambaste people who wanted to get a divorce, Doctor Laura-style, because they were losers who didn't believe in commitment and responsibility.  Then her daughter got a divorce, and she changed her line to a more forgiving one.  Then Ann herself got a divorce.  As I recall, she eventually admitted that she'd made an agonizing reappraisal, and that her previous stance had been less than humane.  Dan seems to be made of sterner stuff.

No one needs anyone else's permission to claim an identity, no matter how outré or twee.  One might object that if Poly hadn't wanted permission, he wouldn't have asked Savage about it; but he didn't.  His question was whether a poly and a mono could find happiness together.  (Dan's answer to that part of it: Probably not; stick to your own kind, weirdo!)  It was Savage who took a detour to spend most of his reply telling Poly that he wasn't a poly, that there's no such thing as a poly, so there too!  It wasn't relevant to the question, just a hobbyhorse of Dan's.  He has related problems with bisexuals, and with the question of whether people who aren't born that way are protected by civil rights laws.  Well, we all have our blind spots.