Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, Edited by William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas

I first started reading this book early on in the pandemic. Then I didn’t read any of it for several more months. Reading theoretical writing felt impossible at the time. But now, when I’m sitting down to write this, it’s also been a long time since I finished reading the book (I think I finished last summer? Or fall), so I don’t remember much of it now. Thankfully, the practice of going through to type out quotes I marked has been a very helpful review process.

This book is similar to Imagining Queer Methods, but with a more specific focus on writing studies. Several of the authors wrote other things that I’ve read for my orals, or have since encountered/cited for other projects.

(p.3) Discussion of how entering a space as a researcher always changes that space, but beginning to do research in a space you’re already in (such as your own classroom) changes how you act, and so changes that space too.

(p.5) quote from Harriet Malinowitz- “Which of our theories of writing don’t explode when we consider their ramifications for lesbian and gay writers?”

(p.5) Quote from Kirsch saying we should always choose to write our research in genres that match the methods we chose (or choose methods that match our genres, maybe)

(p.8) “For many LGBTQ people, there is a felt sense, as much as a theoretical one, that one resistant method for maintaining our existence involves not being bludgeoned by languages intended to hurt us but pushing back, even in small ways, in order to maintain our own sense of self and community.” - Foucault’s reverse discourse

(p.9) “The realization that language and identity are interwoven and interanimated means that any discipline focused on the study of language must engage theories and rhetorics grounded in such a realization.”

(p.11) quote from Krista Ratcliffe- rhetoric is “the study of how we use language and how language uses us.”

(p.11) “But rather than assume a primarily ontological nature for language and reality, queer rhetorics begin with the assumption that critique— the calling out of language as language— represents an initial and important destabilization of meaning, not to prevent meaning or to pretend that meaning cannot be made but to ask why this meaning at this time and under these circumstances; these are fundamentally rhetorical questions”

(p.12) Rhetorics of Intentionality (as one type of queer rhetoric— the intention matters more than whether you succeed, like it doesn’t matter if you can pass as a gender, the fact that you are trying to communicate that gender means people ought to recognize that as valid). Questions how rhetorics of intentionality would change how we view rubrics and writing assessment (if intention comes above outcomes)

(p.14) Rhetorics of Failure— “a chance to eschew ‘being taken seriously’ in order to be ‘frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant’” and make a ‘detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.”

(p.15) Rhetorics of Forgetting- strategic forgetting, look for lost/forgotten people and stories, ask WHY “certain elements of our disciplinary past have been forgotten.” Why do some things have rhetorical velocity and some things stay still/left behind?

(p.16) Heather Love, reminds us to pay attention to ‘texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed’ and disrupt the progress narrative of queer history. Resist pressure to redeem the past.

(p.16) Quote from Jean Bessete’s chapter later on in the collection- “When we look for queerness in the archive, what exactly are we seeking?”

(p.16) Right after that quote, from the editors: “When we look for X, what are we strategically forgetting in order to keep X in focus? How could we acknowledge that tension in our work? Why might we need to forget X in order to discover Y?” This is like the questions of measuring sexuality and gender nonconformity— any measure you choose brings into focus some things and excludes other things

(p.25) Gary Olsen refers to traditional rhetoric as “the rhetoric of assertion”

(p.28) This chapter is by Hillery Glasby, she suggests “ambivalence as a methodology because it reduces, or altogether negates, the desire for coherence and polished texts” -seems similar to revisionary rhetoric

(p.29) “write yourself so that Others might know the Self. This can be critical self-care work since difference becomes internalized over time.”

(p.30) quote from Alexander & Rhodes- queer rhetorical practices are those “that recognize the necessity sometimes of saying ‘No,’ of saying ‘Fuck, no,” of offering an impassioned, embodied, and visceral reaction to the practices of normalization that limit not just freedom but the imagination of possibility, of potential”

(p.42) Another quote from them- “We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves.”

(p.43) paraphrase of Rhodes, “because of the heteronormative institutional locations in which teaching occurs, there may be no true ‘queer pedagogy’; there is only the possibility of teaching queer.

(Skipping over everything else I marked in Stacy Waite’s chapter since I wrote about this chapter separately in my Stacy Waite post)

(p.55) “If there were a single conceptual umbrella for thinking about queer/trans methodology, it wouldn’t necessarily translate to a focus on LGBTQA topics so much as on a commitment to rigorously (if not deviantly) questioning our deeply held disciplinary narratives.”

(p.99) In Jean Bessette’s chapter. “Cofounder [of the Lesbian Herstory Archives] Joan Nestle (2015) describes her early commitment to the word lesbian as a ‘noun that stood for all possibilities of queerness, for all possibilities of deviations…Not a role-model lesbian history, not an archive of safe stories, always my own undertaking of keeping in the archives the tensions of lesbian difference’ (239-240).” Also that LHA is “open to a diversity of visitors, unconstrained by ‘academic, political, or sexual credentials,’ race or class”

Sources To Look Up

(Rhodes & Alexander) Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self

(Rhodes) “The Failure of Queer Pedagogy”

Imagining Queer Methods, Edited by Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

Quotes I Marked

(p.4) “Many humanists embrace a ‘suspicion of method’ (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16) and assume that queer frameworks are incompatible with social science epistemologies.”

(p.7) “We thus envision a dual mandate for queer methods: to outline the conditions of queer worldmaking and to clarify, but not overdetermine, the conditions that ‘make live livable”

(p.14) Bit about Halberstam and scavenger methods

(p.15) Quotes from Munoz about evidence and how the nature of queer history means there often isn’t the traditional kinds of evidence bc leaving evidence is dangerous

(p.17) Note about “zombie categories”— categories that are invented by researchers for particular purposes but don’t catch on because they don’t resonate with people, OR categories that used to resonate with people but are now archaic holdovers

(p.29) - mentions that when Heather Love taught a queer method graduate seminar and invited several established scholars, they said they have no method. Method in queer studies undermines “queer theory’s institutional claims to inter/anti-disciplinarity”

(p.30) “To see one’s practices as beyond method and utterly undisciplined is a failure to reckon with queer scholars’ position in the university; it fails to recognize the violence of all scholarly research— even its most insurgent and intimate forms.”

(p.33) “For those trained in traditional empirical methods, adding the volatile queer to method introduces the scandal of theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies: jargon; small sample sizes, and in some cases of a single (fictional) text; unclear standards of evidence; lack of attention to representativeness; and disconnection from real people, places, and things. For those trained in the humanities, the scandal is just the opposite: the anchoring of queer to method threatens to drain its political potential by submitting to regimes of statistical reduction, the reification of identity, the overvaluing of visible behavior, and the foreclosure of the speculative, the counterfactual and the ‘not yet here’ Jose Esteban Munoz designated as queer utopia (2009, 1).”

(p.33) “Queer research in a humanities framework is not guilty of reduction, but is characterized by attentiveness to what Lauren Berlant, in an analysis of the case study as genre, refers to as ‘tender singularities’ (2007, 669). Yet the fear is that such scholarship brings its considerable methodological resources to bear on merely fictional, idiosyncratic, or hypothetical instances, far removed from the exigencies of anyone’s life.”

(p.55) Discussion on the ethical issues (and practical difficulties) of doing ethnography on a group that you’re not a part of, but argues that refusing to do the research just because of your identity is the ‘skeptic’s cop-out’ and might be the worst position, since you’re avoiding dialogue altogether. At least if you do something shitty, people can talk about it.

(p.90) Story about developing a survey instrument, via casual conversations with queer people, which helped shape how the survey instrument ended up looking. Says most item development studies are done using majoritarian beliefs about minorities, so using queer people as the starting point is unusual.

(p.105) Discussion of the shortcomings of available data on LGBT households, including that the census only looks at coupled households, which excludes single people, people who don’t live with their partners, people not willing to identify their sexualities, bi people, and trans people.

(p.106) Important discussion about how WHAT you ask about (behavior? identity? feelings experienced?) deeply determines the results you get. Also that gay people are a group that is IMPOSSIBLE to randomly sample.

(p.107) description of RDS data collection (respondent-driven sampling) - helps you get in touch with more of a community than you could on your own

(p.110) description of how the researcher used news stories about different neighborhoods as structuring tools for their interviews and how this method is useful

(p.134) Discussion of some of the difficulties in measuring GNC populations

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies, by Jonathan Alexander

One of the underlying premises of this book is that sexuality shapes and is shaped by large parts of culture, so being “sexually literate” (being able to write, read, and talk about sexuality in an informed and nuanced way) is important. So why not practice writing skills that are useful across main domains while also practicing talking about sexuality?

I first read one of the chapters, “Transgender Rhetorics,” in my feminist pedagogy class during my master’s. It was the first piece of trans-related scholarship I ever read, and I also wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Because students are asked to imagine a scene from another gender’s point of view, but write in pairs, it seems like it’s going to lend itself to stereotyping, and less about imagining the trans experience and more just imagining the experience of another gender. Someone (I think I saw it on social media, I think) once put it like this: rather than asking people to imagine if they had their body but felt like another gender, people should try to imagine that they are their real/current gender, but no one around them notices and keeps mistaking them for another gender. Like for me to imagine I’m trying to live my normal day as a woman but everyone around me suddenly reacts as if I’m a man. When I follow that line of thought, I think about all the experiences I get included in as a woman— conversations I have with other women that we wouldn’t have in the same way if men were also there, for example, conversations in the bathroom together, just conversations about shared experiences that relate to gender— and imagining being excluded from those things, on purpose, is very sad.

Just a couple days ago, I was talking with someone who explained it to me like this: when cis people write about trans people (in this case we were talking about movies about trans characters), they focus on the body, and when trans people write about trans people, it’s about the emotions.

Quotes I Marked

(p.2) “sexuality is a cultural production; it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse.” (this is a quote from Halperin not from Alexander)

(p.6) quote from Cultural Studies in the English Classroom- “Cultural studies…deals with the production, distribution, and reception of signifying practices within the myriad historical formations that are shaping subjectivities. These range from the family, the school, the work place, and the peer group to the more familiar activities associated with the cultural sphere, such as the arts and the media and their modes of production and consumption. In other words, wherever signifying practices are shaping consciousness in daily life, cultural studies has work to do.”

(p.7) quote from same book- “all texts are involved in politics and power: all tacitly endorse certain platforms of action. Language…is always a program for performance.”

(p.27) quote from David Bartholomae- “writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’ — that is, of being both inside and established discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak.”

(p.45) 3 kinds of sexual scripts, theorized by Gagnon and Simon (1973): intrapsychic (stories you tell yourself about sex and sexuality), interpersonal (how you talk about sex with others), cultural scripts (existing within groups about normative understandings)

(p.51) - note about how birth control and alternative ways of having children have separated reproduction and sex, so sexual identity really is more of a “lifestyle issue” than anything else.

(p.102) Describing the purpose of queer theory: “Are students questioning the naturalized structures of heteronormativity and heterosexism? Are they interrogating naturalized narrations of sexuality, identity, and normalcy?”

(p.105) “As such, the call to ‘work’ or think queerness in the classroom should not focus solely on introducing our many straight students to queer lives and stories; rather, working queerness in the writing classroom should be an invitation to all students—gay and straight— to think of the ‘constructedness’ of their lives in a heteronormative society.”

(p.106) “From a rhetorical standpoint, we could say that straights have the ‘narrative luxury’ of not having to consider their self-narration— at least not as closely and critically as many queers have had to.” (For example, you don’t have to come out as straight)

(p.107) “Since declarations of one’s straightness seem most common when that straightness is called into question or doubt, I have theorized that we could ‘tease out’ for examination a narration of straightness by playing with this ‘soft spot’ in the straight subjectivity— by poking the point where straightness must maintain itself as an identity over and against queerness.” He also talks about how he made a fake webpage called Straightboyz4Nsync and asked his students what they thought about it. The students mostly agreed it’s fine for a straight boy to like NSYNC, but any straight boy who likes NSYNC and feels the need to make a website defending it is probably not straight.

(p.193) Long block quote about a teaching technique called “Freeze frame” where you pause class discussion to do metadiscussion on what is happening in the room emotionally.

Sources I Marked

American Sexuality magazine, started by an anthropologist

James Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”

Susan Romano, “On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self”

Zan Meyer Gonclaves, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom

Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (***look up for Queer Rhetorics chapter***)

Richard E. Miller, “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone: Assessing Homophobic Student Writing”

Writing from students in a youth and AIDS project- http://homepages.uc.edu/~alexanj/voices_of_youth.htm

Bill Wolff, “Reading the Rhetoric of Webpages: Rethinking the Goals of Student Research in the Computer Classroom”

Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, by Julie Jung

Quotes I Marked

(p.3) [Jung had given her students a multi-genre assemblage of her own writing] “Their confusion made it quite clear that juxtaposing genres within a single text disrupts readings and delays meaning making, and that such disruptions can result in reader responses that force writers to revise more deeply.”

(p.4) “Researchers theorized revisions as a process through which writers see their texts again and thereby create rather than correct their written products….Donald Murray was a major contributor to this changing view of revision…In his landmark essay, ‘Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery,’ published in 1978, Murray defines writing as rewriting and distinguishes the polishing work of external revision— ‘what writers do to communicate what they have found written to another audience’ (91) — from the knowledge-making process of internal revision— ‘everything writers do to discover and develop what they have to say, beginning with the reading of a completed first draft (91). Whereas external revision involves making changes based on the needs and expectations of one’s intended reader, Murray explains that during internal revision, the audience is the writer herself rereading her evolving text to discover meanings not yet made clear; positioned as her own best reader, the revising writer creates a space for her text to respond.”

(p.8-9) Chart explaining 4 theories of revision: stage model (revision is editing), problem solving model (solve communication problems that result from your failure to communicate with the audience), social-interactive model (revision is about negotiating the situation and expectations between writer and reader), rhetorical-cultural model (delay consensus, identify and explore sites of conflict, don’t delete controversial parts but add to and analyze them)

(p.12) “In short, I ask that rhetors seek to make themselves heard by demonstrating their commitment to listening to others; I ask that you join me in finding ways to write writing that listens.” (Also argues that multigenre texts are good for creating meaningful reader response discussions)

(p.26) Passage on Mairs feeling like her whiteness prevented her from accurately reading Alice Walker so she let ‘Alice Walker teach me how to read Alice Walker.’ “With this move, Mairs illustrates how revisionary rhetors can learn to respond to texts they fear they cannot understand: They relinquish claims to mastery; by doing so they fall into despair; by falling into despair they become ready to listen.” What she did is she identified different strategies Walker was using and then used those same strategies in her own essay, to embody/feel those strategies herself.

(p.29) - talks about two authors, which she will analyze in this chapter, combining genres that are considered within and without Rhet/Comp, and how that weirdness makes readers uncomfortable, which allows them to think about things in new ways.

(p.33) Multigenre texts vs. “blurred genres” (Geertz)- multigenre texts have stark breaks (white space) when genres shift

(p.43) Discussion of how academic authority is built by tearing other people down, and how that’s mean and unnecessary, and Welch uses multigenre writing to talk about it

(p.45) “We have theorized how the personal has made its way into the academy, but we have yet to examine carefully how the academy has made its way into the personal.”

(p.49) “Because Miller opens with a moving scene about his father’s attempted suicide, I expected him to come out in favor of personal narratives in academic contexts; I continued to read his essay as if he were opposed to disembodied academic arguments. However, when Miller breaks form and reflects on his decision to do so, he demonstrates how genre— in this case, the genre of the personal narrative— creates readerly expectations about how writers position themselves in relation to disciplinary arguments. By stepping back and telling me that he knows I’m doing this, Miller illustrates how my reductive reading has forced him into a corner that he refuses to occupy. His metadiscursive commentary thus demands that I examine how genre expectations shape the way I hear a writer’s argument.”

(p.53) “rather than engage in the disciplines ‘conventions of attack/counter-strike’ (182), however, Lu chooses instead to revise her initial response to Miller’s essay by critically affirming the ways in which she, too, has deployed the same rhetorical moves that disturb her….Lu’s essay is a dramatic example of one reader’s efforts to own responsibly her reactions to a text that disturbs her. My purpose in discussing it here, however, is to suggest the degree to which Miller’s multigenre form encourages such a response.

(p.77) Describes an assignment in which she asks students to write the introductions to two different essays: a literary analysis and a rhetorical analysis of the same short story. The students enjoy this, but she realizes they suck at close reading nonfiction. “I believe rhetoric teachers bear the particular burden of teaching students how to closely read nonfiction.”

(p.82) Shows some different introductions to an early draft of a response to an essay that pissed her off. The first is very “warlike,” which goes against her beliefs against how people should engage in discourse. So she explains her ongoing thought process and shares more attempts at introductioning. One version says she “has trouble hearing” his arguments, which is very different from her initial approach. But her “final” version, which she frames as a “revision” of his essay, goes through step by step in the framing and explores her own emotional and intellectual reactions and agreements/disagreements with his essay. Then, after the framing, she writes about further research she did: she asked several male colleagues to read the essay she is criticizing, then interviews them about how they responded to it and why. My one struggle with this chapter is figuring out where her “revisionary essay” begins/ends as opposed to the rest of the chapter that DISCUSSES her revisionary essay. The sections blend together.

(p.152) Quote from Foucault about progress, in which he explains that he’s not saying humanity doesn’t progress, but that it’s wrong to ASSUME humanity has progressed. The question is not “How have we progressed?” but “How do things happen? And how do things happening now relate to things that happened in the past?"“

Sources I Marked

“The Writing/Reading Relationship: Becoming One’s Own Best Reader” by Richard Beach and JoAnne Liebman Kleine

“Fighting Words: Unlearning to Write Critical Essays” by Jane Tompkins

“The Nervous System” by Richard E. Miller

Publics and Counterpublics, by Michael Warner

I’ve heard enough people cite this book that I thought I had a general sense of what publics and counterpublics are and are about. I was kind of right, but in reading this book, I realized I was also kind of wrong. “Publics” can be anything that someone means when they refer to “the public.” Because every time we say we’re writing for “the public” or “for general audiences,” we don’t actually mean literally anyone. There’s always some additional shape to the audience we imagine, and the audience we imagine is always going to be at least a little bit different than the actual audience. As Warner says, I — as one of his readers — might join, leave, or re-join the public he is speaking to at any time, and he won’t even know it.

Quotes I Marked

(p.9) “A public is inevitably one thing in London, quite another in Hong Kong. This is more than the truism it might appear, since the form must be embedded in the background and self-understanding of its participants in order to work. Only by approaching it historically can one understand these preconditions of its intelligibility.”

(p.10) “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”

(p.11) Discussion of the tension between how a public isn’t an objective, quantifiable thing, but it also isn’t just something totally subjective and infinitely mutable.

(p.12) “One of the central claims of this book is that when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise— over the conditions that bring them together as a public. The making of publics is the metapragmatic work newly taken up by every text in every reading.”

(p.18) note about how two of the essays in this book were “written against what at the time felt like huge blockages in the sayable”

(p.18) “As I began speculating on the close relation between sexual cultures and their publics in the modern context, I came to the conclusion that one of the underlying flaws of the gay and lesbian movement was the way it obscured and normalized the most compelling challenges of queer counterpublics.”

(p.50) “[The unequal distribution of power in mass culture and the increasing involvement of the state in civil society] produce a public that is appealed to not for criticism but for benign acclamation. Public opinion comes less to generate ideas and hold power accountable and more simply to register approval or disapproval in the form of opinion polls and occasional elections.”

(p.52) Stuff about Sedgwick and “the closet” and how “the closet” is a stand-in phrase for a whole lot of rules about what can be said when and where and by whom (and who must say what when, etc.)

(p.67) “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed….Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how can this public exist before being addressed? What would a public be if no one was addressing it? Can a public really exist apart from the rhetoric through which it is imagined? If you were to put down this essay and turn on the television, would my public be different? How can the existence of a public depend, from one point of view, on the rhetorical address and, from another point of view, on the real context of reception?”

(p.70) “The result [of not feeling like you’re able to address a meaningful public with a capacity for listening, understanding, and acting] can be a kind of political depressiveness, a blockage in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie, forgetfulness….This is why any distortion or blockage in access to a public can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Externally organized frameworks of activity, such as voting, are and are perceived to be poor substitutes.”

(p.71) “What determines whether one belongs to a public or not? Space and physical presence do not make much difference; a public is understood to be different from a crowd, an audience, or any other group that requires co-presence. Personal identity does not in itself make one part of a public…Belonging to a public seems to require at least minimal participation, even if it is patient or notional, rather than a permanent state of being. Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member. How, then, could a public be quantified?”

(p.77) “Public speech must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers. The benefit in this practice is that it gives a general social relevance to private thought and life. Our subjectivity is understood as having resonance with others, and immediately so. But this is only true to the extent that the trace of our strangerhood remains present in our understanding of ourselves as the addressee.”

(p.113) “It might even be claimed that, like dominant publics, [counterpublics] are ideological in that they provide a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society”

(p.114) “There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims…but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scene, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on….Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.”

(p.145) “As conversations get closer to public topics, where opinions would have a general relevance and others’ views would have to be taken into account, people tend to shut up, deflecting currents of conversation. Even active volunteers in civic groups construct their volunteering so as to avoid risky discussion. They choose topics that allow them to avoid dissent. They frame their motives as prepolitical. Journalists and officials actively conspire to limit public discussion, diverting it into testimony that can be viewed as private passion rather than opinion or argument.”

(p.148) Discussion of different norms in academic discourse vs. journalistic discourse (propensity toward infinite complication/nuance) and how there’s very little infrastructure for discussions between the academy and the masses/between professions/disciplines and journalism

(p.150) More on academic discourse, public intellectuals, seeing academics as politics, etc.

(p.157) Some criticism of Marxism that I think is Marxists and poststructuralists strawmanning each other again. Or at least both sides being wrong about their compatibilities. You can believe in discursive/cultural hegemonies and also believe in bourgeois rule via the state.

(p.167) About tolerance and publicness and ethos and minoritization

(p.189) Immigrantphobia as “supplying a concrete phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion. Let’s call this the amnesia archive. The motto above the door is: ‘Memory is the amnesia you like.’”

(p.194) Observation that in the ancient world, sex is just a personal activity— it’s a verb that doesn’t need a direct object, like laughing, pooping, crying, dying, etc.” You just fuck, and sometimes another person is involved, basically. Who they are doesn’t have big stakes for your identity or the social meaning of the activity.

(p.195) list of activities that don’t seem like they’re related to sex/sexual culture, but they are: paying taxes, celebrating a holiday, investing in the future, teaching, carrying wallet photos, buying in bulk, etc.

Sources To Look Up

The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner

Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture, by John M. Sloop

It still feels strange to me that an academic book really can just be an introduction, several chapters of illustrative case studies, and then a conclusion. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is wrong except for an internal and definitely misguided sense that every book must make big arguments about the nature of the universe.

My partner and I are also having an ongoing discussion about materialism and its relationship with discourse, so I’m excited to read the materialist rhetoric articles cited here!

Quotes I Marked

(p.2) “That is, while cases of gender ambiguity were ‘talked about’ in ways that encouraged an undermining or questioning of the very notion of ‘aberration’ as related to sexuality and gender, bi-gender normativity was for the most part underlined and reemphasized. Significantly, one finds assumed (and not necessarily spoken) within these discourses a series of binary roles and behaviors which ultimately constitute the very notions of male and female, masculinity and femininity, hetero- and homosexual.”

(p.12) This is quoting from someone named Evans- “Once we know that a ‘real woman’ is a cultural fiction rather than an ontological birthright, have we thereby….reduced at all the rewards of continuing to be feminine in ways that society will recognize and approve?” (No)

(p.15) Longer passage about how because of medical gatekeeping, trans people need to present themselves as normatively gendered, and have social pressure to continue doing so after they get access to (XYZ). “A ___ trapped in a ___’s body” still implies that the first ___ has some essential characteristics. Which is different from being able to say “I would like to take testosterone” and being allowed to for no other reason than you’re an adult and you want to. (Even if some people genuinely do feel the first way.)

(p.7) “Here, Hale suggests that people who are [cis] should feel encouraged to write about [trans people] provided they do so in terms of investigating what the public discourse about [transness] tells us about culturla ideologies concerning gender and sexuality rather than what it tells about [trans] identity (which, Hale argues, should be left to [trans people] to investigate).” Everything in brackets is just stuff I changed to update the language

(p.18) “First, critical rhetoric places its focus on doxastic rather than epistemic knowledge. That is, rather than being concerned with knowledge of the essence of objects (e.g., the ‘truth’ about sex) or philosophical discussions about meanings, critical rhetoric is concerned with public argument and public understandings about these objects.” Rhetoric is about an emic perspective!

(p.19) “As Foucault’s work and assumptions were disseminated…almost every aspect of identity and politics was slowly subsumed under the study of discourse. In the most general sense, one of the vital implications of this observation is that those interested in political change came to think more in terms of slow rhetorical transition than in terms of overnight revolution. Lasting change is always a slow process, if only because it requires changes in meaning, and such changes are intergenerational rather than intrapersonal. In Raymond Williams’s terms, meaningful revolutions are by necessity long revolutions.”

(p.20-22)- on Greene (see “Sources to Look Up”), the materiality of discourse, and how reverse discourses and counterpublics always emerge from the dominant discourses, so they’re limited from the start. Unclear if Sloop is critiquing this or not.

(p.23) “While those in multivocal communities and academics ‘in the know’ might be able to look at these as cases of transgression and liberation [like the John/Joan case and Brandon Teena], those without community as Alfred Kielwasser and Michelle Wolf have pointed out in their discussion of televised representations of adolescent homosexuality, are most at risk precisely because the images they see of themselves are disciplined in advance by a hegemonic understanding that ‘holds them in place,’ judging them. When the only [trans] model one has was killed for ‘deception,’ one has understood [transness] only through the way it is policed.”

Sources To Look Up

Michael McGee, 1982, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric”

Ronald Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”

The Ethnographic I, by Carolyn Ellis

This book is a fictionalized version of Ellis teaching a class about autoethnographic methods. Most of the characters are real (well, fictional versions of themselves), and two are composite characters. This book made me realize how diverse autoethnography can be, that it’s easier in some ways and harder in other ways than I thought, and that counterstory seems to be a kind of autoethnography with a particular theoretical framework (CRT). That answers the main question I had from counterstory— whether it can be done about oppressions other than race. The answer seems to be no, but you can use similar methods with similar “outcome” creations for other oppressions.. But counterstory is a word that belongs to CRT writing and research.

I liked it a lot! It answered a bunch of questions I had and taught me a lot. I like that she used the method she was writing about in order to write about it. I like the hard conversations depicted, and I like the syllabus and other supplementary materials at the back. Another thing I enjoyed was the chapters that are based on her interviews with her students after she had them read an earlier draft of the book, and they discussed her construction of the book and her portrayals of each of them.

Ellis frequently co-writes with her husband Art, a communications professor. They’ve written autoethnographic pieces about some very personal things— such as an abortion that took place early in their relationship. This seems very very hard to do and I’m impressed. I wonder if their dynamic is accurately represented in the book or if they have more fights and hard times related to their shared work than depicted. Although if they did, I guess they wouldn’t keep co-writing together. It’s also wild to me that they each teach the story of their own abortion in their classes. I could never.

I particularly valued the discussions over ethics in autoethnography, particularly with getting permission from people in your life that you wish to write about. Your story is always also their story, and vice versa. I disagree with some of the choices the characters made. I’ve hurt people in the past by writing about them without taking proper ethical measures (like asking and discussing in advance), and I regret it a lot. Ellis talks about how she published a piece about caring for her mom in the hospital. The story includes some very intimate details/moments between them. She didn’t ask her mom in advance if it would be okay to write that, although years later she did share the piece with her mom and her mom was okay with it. What if she wasn’t? There’s another story in which Penny, a student who wrote about her abusive relationship, gave a performance of her piece for volunteers at a domestic violence support shelter. The event did not go well— the volunteers were super uncomfortable by what they saw as her blaming herself for the abuse and Ellis encouraging it/not supporting her. The fascinating and hard part is, afterwards, the researchers and the volunteers had a series of meetings and conversations together in which they unpacked what went wrong and why it went wrong, so Ellis is able to present a nuanced view of many different perspectives in her book, based on the conversations.

I was also left feeling very frustrated, though. We never learned anything about autoethnography during my anthropology degree! And it turns out there’s a whole ton of scholarship about issues of writing anthropology, and I didn’t know about it! I struggled with finding ways to straddle English and anthropology, my two majors, and it felt like none of the faculty knew what to do with me. But all of this was here all along! If someone had known about it, they could have told me. My whole research trajectory could have been very different. I probably would have done something different for my BA thesis. And definitely might have ended up doing something different for my PhD— going for a different discipline or a different school, maybe. It’s hard to say.

Stuff I Marked

p.22- “for evocation in addition to representation as a goal for social science research, for generalization through the resonance of readers, and for opening up rather than closing down conversation.”

p.30 - paragraph on key features of autoethnography

p.39- examples of anthropologists and publishing venues that do autoethnography/anthroliterary things. Stanley Diamond, Sapir and Benedict (published poetry), Anthropology and Humanism (journal), Laurel Richardson

p.39- discussion of factors that affect whether something is called autoethnography or ethnography, autoethnography of memoir

p.64-66- note about interactive interviewing and how it’s a good strategy when everyone involved has personal experience with the topic at hand (good for me and bi research!)

p.89- Ellis’s advice on what to do if you’re anxious about biasing your data/if people will accuse you of biasing your data

p.116— on truth vs. accuracy and the unreliability of field notes

p.117— difference between field notes and a first draft of a story

p.122- one character lists the different genres she used to write up interviews— she was just experimenting to see which ones worked best for her

p.123-126 more on truth vs. accuracy and the issue of validity in autoethnography

p.125- discussion of guy who wrote fiction based on his fieldwork bc his participants were part of an especially vulnerable population and he wanted to protect their identities extra well

p.240- Hector’s project on bicultural identity is kinda similar to my project! Reference this!

p.252- discussion of how to evaluate autoethnographic projects

p.309- how a student’s experience of pain in her body affects her writing

Sources To Look Up

Geertz, Clifford and Marcus, Marcus and Fischer (p.17) - mentioned as anthropologists dealing with issues on the intersections of anthropology and literature

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer

“Assessing Alternative Modes of Qualitative and Ethnographic Research: How Do We Judge? Who Judges?” special section in Qualitative Inquiry (journal)

Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap

This book, as well as The Ethnographic I by Carolyn Ellis, really made me realize how traditional/out-dated a good part of my anthropology education was. This book was published in 2002, and I got my anthro degree in 2016, and we certainly never talked about any of these trends except for a couple chapters on feminist anthropology in my “history of anthropological theory” class. I didn’t even know that “homegrown anthropology” (doing research on communities in the U.S. rather than “foreign/exotic” communities) was already a well established trend. I thought it was just getting started. Many chapters in this book were interesting to me on that level, yet not particularly useful for where I’m currently at w/r/t research and my relationship with anthropology.

Quotes I Marked

p.123- “Must the solution, then, to our marital woes [between gay male anthropology and lesbian anthropology] be a kind of intellectual bisexuality or perhaps cross-dressing? To put ourselves into each other’s worlds, if not each other’s heads, must we be willing to experiment with sexual identity, to undermine definitions we have long believed in, and perhaps to submit ourselves to the uncertainties of crossing gender boundaries?” Context is, gay male anthropology looks at “men who have sex with men” as a behavior, whereas lesbian anthropology looks at sexuality primarily as a political identity

p.195- safe sex education as particularly anthropologically vital during the AIDS crisis (as opposed to celibacy propaganda) because “lots of sex without shame or monogamy” was a big part of the ethos of gay liberation so people definitely would not have wanted to give that up.

p.206- linking barebacking fantasies with vampire fantasies (Garber!!)

p.229- people Valentine considered to be trans men were called lesbians by their own community, and people he considered to be trans women were called gay by their own community. What do you do when people definitely meet the criteria for a group (like trans) but don’t use those words themselves? This is at the Legends Ball, mostly African American and Latinx, House of Xtravaganza was there

p.230- references to “the transgender spectrum” (on materials from the Gender Identity Project founded at the Center), included “drag, cross dresser, cross-gender, femme queen, bigender, transvestite, transsexual, FTM, MTF, NewWoman, NewMan, and …. “ as potential categories

p.233- quote from Jayne County, a trans woman here writing about Atlanta in the 1960s: “There were certain divisions in the gay world even then, but we didn’t have the words for them. Everyone was just gay as far as we were concerned; that was the word we used…It didn’t matter whether you were a very straight gay man, or a screaming street queen, or a full-time drag queen, or a transsexual who wanted to have a sex change: you were gay” - here, straight gay man means a man who is gay but is normatively masculine

p.235-238- more on butch queens, femme queens, and being “gay”- it’s not contradictory or confusing if “gay” means any deviation from sexual and/or gender norms

Sources to Look Up

p.117- Weston (1991- Families We Choose, 1993, 1998), Kennedy (1993), Newton (1979, 1993), Lewin (1993)- all lesbian-feminist anthropologists whose feminism influenced their gay anthropology

p.122- Suzanna Walters (1996) writing about how the “queer sensibility” entails a “denigration of feminism”

p.131- some gay language studies- Murray (1979), Tannen (1984), Read (1980) and Goodwin (1989)

Writing Studies Research and Practice, Edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan

Stuff I Marked

p.xii- passage about “pasisonate attachments” (like Joan’s “passionate utterances”) and wondering where “research end(s) and memoir begin(s)”

p.17 - extended quote about narrative and epistemology in the sciences. talks about ideographic vs. nomothetic. How historical sciences (paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology) are about telling stories about the past (based on data)

p.17 “While the value of personal stories is now widely accepted in composition, it is important to articulate what qualities of observation, analysis, or representation we require if we are to accept any particular narrative account as a persuasive instance of research”

p.20 “I also believe that it is important to recognize that we have invested a great deal of intellectual capital in rhetorical conventions that primarily use ethos (rather than method) to provide evidence that the researcher has produced an authentic account of her experiences or observations. That is, a great part of our ‘index of reality’ rests on textual conventions to suggest that the researcher has ‘been there.’”

p.26- role of emotion in research design

p.30- “passionate attachments” (Royster) and beginning with your own experience/feelings and using that as a guide in historical research

p.38- thing about the value of “eliciting autobiographical narratives in interview-type settings” and how telling a self-story is also a form of self-formation and co-research

p.39- on how the researchers adapted their methods to be more unstructured/semi-structured.

p.41- Framing of questions— “Can you tell us some stories about….?”

p.80- Extended passage on “Doing ethnography” vs. “Adopting an ethnographic perspective” vs. “Using ethnographic tools” and how each of these can/cannot be applied in writing studies

p.115-116- Autoethnography as a “literate art of the contact zone.” Quote from Mary Louise Pratt- autoethnography as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.

p.199- draws a distinction between “textual-qualitiative researchers” (people who study published texts) and “empirical-qualitative researchers” (people who study day-to-day interactions between people, some of which may be written)

p.201- on “bias” and phenomenology and how our investments in research ALWAYS shape our perceptions

p.210- “Rhetorical studies does concern itself with how writing works in public domains, but its history and strong historiographic traditions make situated studies of mundane literacies, technologies, and work difficult to value.”

p.211- concept of a research stance- “a position or a set of beliefs and obligations that shape how one acts as a researcher” (I think this relates to how you decide you want to situate yourself politically to the topic/people)

Sources To Look Up

Wendy Bishop, Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing It Up and Reading It

Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

Lankshear and Knobel, Handbook for Teacher Research: From Design to Implementation

Johanek, Composing Research

Glaser and Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory

50 Song Memoir by The Magnetic Fields

These posts have always really just been notes for me and I’m assuming nobody else will do more than skim them, but this one’s really gonna be written just as notes and not for someone else. Merritt says he doesn’t want anyone to have favorites off of this album or listen to songs individually. They are supposed to be listened to in order, all the way through. I like this, and even before I knew he thought that, it’s always how I’ve listened to it. Although that’s partially because I’ve most often listened to it as background music while working or cleaning.

‘66 Wonder Where I’m From- He moved around so much when he was little he has a complex sense of “home”

‘67 Come Back as a Cockroach- About reincarnation and karma, also about veganism. Makes me think of children’s bright imaginations

‘68 A Cat Called Dionysus— I love this one and want a cat named Dionysus

‘69 Judy Garland— Some of the stuff in this one is made up, and Merritt was too young at the time to actually be aware of the Stonewall riots, but this is about that and its a lovely fantasy version

‘70 They’re Killing Children Over There— Merritt goes to a concert when he’s little where the singer sings about how they’re killing children over there (meaning Vietnam) but he thinks they mean on the other side of the building. So, it’s humorous but deeply embedded in global events from the perspective of a 4 year old.

‘71 I Think I’ll Make Another World— this is just a lovely piece about children’s imagination

‘72 Eye Contact— this is about Merritt hating eye contact and how he would prefer to connect with people while…not doing that. This made me wonder if Merritt is autistic, and it seems that while he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, he thinks he probably is, and his friends who have been diagnosed agree. I also learned that he always has his concerts be very muted in sound, which is not actually due to his autism but due to a separate hearing condition that makes loud noises feedback loop in his left ear. I would very much like to go to a quiet concert by a band I love.

‘73 It Could Have Been Paradise— about all the different places Merritt and his mom lived when he was little, as his mom tried to find spiritual fulfillment in a lot of different ways and Merritt just either hung out with local kids or read books by himself. The places seem like paradise, and his mom thought they might be, but they weren’t.

‘74 No- This is about Merritt’s young (8 year old?) self (and his present self) making fun of other people’s faith-based beliefs that they don’t have any evidence for. As someone who became an annoying, angry, and immature atheist at around the same age, I feel this.

‘75 My Mama Ain’t— this one is also about Merritt’s mom’s search for spiritual fulfillment. She tried a lot of things, and Merritt lovingly (I think) pokes fun at the lines she draws (at crystal healing) while also emphasizing that while she has silly beliefs, she’s also a smart lady

‘76 Hustle 76— This is a fun song about Merritt seeing a commercial for a bad quality disco record on TV and wanting it, and dancing and having a good time

‘77 Life Ain’t All Bad— this might be my favorite diss track ever, about one of Merritt’s mom’s ex boyfriends, who was particularly horrible. It’s just so eviscerating while being deliberately vague in order to punish him by not even giving him the satisfaction of being discussed. He also explicitly meta-discusses his memoirs (“When I write my memoirs…”) in this song.

‘78 Blizzard of ‘78— While the blizzard raged outside, Merritt just played music with his friends and started his first (very bad) band and read a lot of science fiction. This made me think about my parents’ stories of the blizzard of ‘77 (which hit their part of NY, which the blizzard of ‘78 did not.) My parents’ did not have a fun time, though. Some people they knew died and my dad nearly got trapped in a car in a snowbank.

‘79 Rock ‘N Roll Will Ruin Your Life— this song is about Merritt and his mom arguing about him wanting to be a musician. She says that it may seem glamorous and fun, but it sucks, just like it ruined his biological father’s life (who Merritt did not meet until his 40s). But he says he’s not interested in the groupies anyway, because he’s shy and gay, and he has hypercausis (his ear disorder) anyway, so he can’t do loud noises. The threat is that it will “make you sad, and I mean sad,” but the joke’s on her, because Merritt is already sad. (I read somewhere an interview with one of his friends, where someone asked if another musician was the most depressed musician ever, and he said, something like ‘Well I guess you’ve never met Stephin Merritt”)

‘80 London By Jetpack— this is about the New Romantic music scene in London and very 80s fantasies of the future (jetpacks). “It's not the going up
It's not the coming down
It's the zooming 'round"
Yep this is what it feels like to be a teenager and immersed in something you love. There’s a verse about him living in London once more and “declar(ing) it’s 1980” and they’ll all fly around in their jetpacks and it will be perfect

‘81 How to Play the Synthesizer— this is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. It’s weird and sounds weird and I like it.

‘82 Happy Beeping— this is about a rude note another one of his mom’s boyfriends left him after he got annoyed that Merritt was just listening to music and playing the synthesizer all the time instead of doing his homework. He said “Happy Beeping.”

‘83 Foxx and I— this is about one of his musical role models and their shared interests, a fantasy of them hanging out and exploring the world and becoming machines together (something Foxx said in an interview he would like to do)

‘84 Danceteria! - this is about Merritt hanging out with his friends at the club Danceteria and all of the music they experienced there, and how Danceteria was definitely more important than school and helped them learn more things that felt meaningful to them

‘85 Why I Am Not a Teenager - He is a teenager during this time, and this song is about how much he rejects being one, because nobody listens to you and you’re horny all the time but there’s AIDS so you can’t have sex and you have no money, but he has dreams for when he’s older

‘86 How I Failed Ethics— a humorous story about Merritt being too disagreeable the first time he took ethics, so he failed and had to take it again. The second time, he was just as precocious but didn’t give the professor an excuse to fail him because he did all the work (and created his own ethical system). Later, he dropped out to be a musician.

‘87 At the Pyramid— another song about a disco club, this time about a specific memory that stuck with Merritt about a guy he thought was hot but didn’t talk to. He says he doesn’t know why this memory stuck with him, of all the times he went there, but it did.

‘88 Ethan Frome— this is just a song about how much Stephin Merritt likes the book Ethan Frome. I love that so many of the songs on this album are just about seemingly mundane things from each year of his life that just happen to be what’s salient for him about that time.

‘89 The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo— I can’t seem to find anything online about an actual 1989 Musical Marching Zoo or anyone talking about something by that name, so this might just be a fantasy band that Merritt would like to have/would have liked to have (“they’re coming to play inside of your mind”) (“and this is the band that I wanted to be”) It seems like his least favorite part about being a musician is being seen as his individual self (his face, name, distinguishing features) and would like to be anonymous (like wearing an animal head) and really just play his music

‘90 Dreaming in Tetris— this is about Merritt’s brain being totally filled with music at all times (like how when you play a lot of Tetris your brain can’t stop picturing Tetris) and also the existential despair of the AIDS crisis and the Cold War/feeling of impending nuclear doom

‘91 The Day I Finally… — (Snap) — in the lyric notes, Merritt says ‘91 is when he started feeling seriously depressed and so this song expresses how he felt at that time. He plays the whole thing in one go (all instruments at once, instead of recording each track separately)

‘92 Weird Diseases — a weirdly fun song that just lists the various ailments he’s had over the course of his life. He does list “Maybe Asperger’s” here. The next line is “if that exists” but one annotation online suggests that this isn’t doubting autism as a real thing, but due to the fact that Asperger’s got removed from the DSM and reclassified as autism instead of as a separate thing. Also says “from the time I was a young boy, I could feel neither anger nor joy” because he was on powerful tranquilizers since strong feelings triggered seizures. He also mentions Krishna here, which made me reflect on how he really does reference Hindu gods a lot in his songs, and that must be because of his exposure via his mom’s spiritual journeying. Until now I figured he was just informed and liked to have diverse religious references in his music

‘93 Me and Fred and Dave and Ted— this is about Merritt living in a very small home with three other men, pets, and bugs. It seems that they were all mutually in love with each other. The verses about each man suggest some problems/distance from them in retrospect, but Merritt does seem to have place in his heart for this time.

‘94 Haven’t Got a Penny— this is about being poor and depressed because you’re poor. Lyrics Genius notes that The Magnetic Fields were pretty unsuccessful until 1999, when 69 Love Songs came out (and was very popular). I didn’t know 69 Love Songs was so old until just now (I started listening to the album in 2011ish and was the first time I’d heard of the band).

‘95 A Serious Mistake— (obligated to mention this is the year I was born in order to make my professors feel old, especially since now my students say things that make me feel old) This song is about getting into a romantic relationship you know will be a bad idea but doing it anyway because love!

‘96 I’m Sad— the beginning of this song is literally “I’m sad/You made me sad” It’s directed at a person (although it’s vague enough that you can’t really infer much else about them), but I sing this to myself whenever I’m sad for any reason. The instrumentation/music is very dramatic in a way that feels both real and funny at the same time.

‘97 Eurodisco Trio- this song is about being very sad and lonely, while making music as the Future Bible Heroes, which Merritt referred to as a Eurodisco Trio. The chorus is just “We’re a Eurodisco Trio” repeated in 4 languages. The versus are about Merritt contemplating suicide, crying, and feeling lonely.

‘98 Lovers’ Lies — the lyric booklet says this is about an ex who was a pathological liar and told everyone he was HIV-positive even though he wasn’t (among other lies)

‘99 Fathers in the Clouds— this is about how Merritt wants neither his biological father nor his “father in the clouds” (God), and how he has nothing to say to his bio father if he did meet him. Yet he admits their lives do have some odd similarities.

‘00 Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers— marathon dances were 19th and early 20th century events where you would literally try to dance as long as possible (and maybe do drugs). This song is about how even when people stop dancing (and singing), the dances and music always continue in a mystical way and echo around in the spaces they used to be in.

‘01 Have You Seen it In the Snow? — Lyrics Genius website says this song is placed as the ‘01 song because it’s about NYC and ‘01 is 9/11. But it’s about how people say New York is dirty and ugly and there’s no natural beauty (and that’s sometimes true) but sometimes it’s so beautiful, especially in the snow. I wish I’d remembered this song on our good snow days this month! Lots of people have told me that winters in NYC used to be like this a lot, but we haven’t had one like this in years. And I think we probably won’t get any more snow this winter.

‘02 Be True To Your Bar— this is exactly what it sounds like, about being loyal to the bars that you call your own, and being grateful to the role they play in your social life (and in Merritt’s case, his professional life— he almost always writes songs in bars)

‘03 The Ex and I— about becoming fuck buddies with your ex!

‘04 Cold-Blooded Man- I’m not sure if he’s saying his ex (I assume a different ex than the previous song) is the Cold-Blooded Man or if he’s saying his ex wants a Cold-Blooded Man even though that seems to make no sense at all. The note from the lyrics booklet does not clarify this for me.

‘05 Never Again— a very sad breakup song, made sadder by a lyric that suggests that despite his joy at NYC in the snow, he can’t even enjoy that anymore

‘06 Quotes- about some negative press coverage he got that he says was taking his words out of context (he said a song from a racist movie was catchy, people took that as saying the song and movie are good/unproblematic. Also he apparently published a “best music” list that was only music by white people.)

‘07 In the Snow White Cottages— about a time in his life when he lived in a particular set of houses in/near LA

‘08 Surfin’ — about how stupid he thinks surfing is as an activity. He lived in LA during this time too

‘09 Till You Come Back To Me- another breakup song about being sad

‘10 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea— apparently Merritt wrote a score to a silent film about the novel, and when he went to San Francisco to perform it at a festival, he had a very nice romantic time

‘11 Stupid Tears— another sad breakup song, in which he’s mad at himself for crying

‘12 You Can Never Go Back to New York— this is the year he moved back to New York after living in LA, and the song is about how the New York you left will never still be there when you get back, even if you only leave for a short time. But there are good sides (new potential lovers!) and bad sides (the things you loved aren’t there anymore)

‘13 Big Enough For Both of Us— this is about Merritt pining (and lusting) for someone who is far away. The thing that is big enough for both of them is both his heart and his penis, both of which he would like to share with the person.

‘14 I Wish I Had Pictures— he wishes this because his memories are fading and there are so many things he wishes he could hang on to

‘15 Somebody’s Fetish— this is about how no matter your quirks or oddities, someone somewhere will be attracted to you, and he, a very lonely person, wants to write this song to make other lonely people feel a little bit better that someone is out there who will love them

After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Edited by Janey Hailey and Andrew Parker)

This book is not what I thought it would be. I think I assumed, based on the title, it would be people in lgbtq studies who don’t consider themselves queer theorists. But instead, it’s queer theorists being asked “is queer theory over, if it is over, what happens next, and how does your work you’ve been doing since your queer theory work still relate to queer theory, if it does?”

The pagination is continuous from other issues of this volume of the journal.

Stuff I Marked

p.437 “I have lost the sense of permission to drag readers through a complex process to reach a conclusion I might have just told them in the beginning, using the opinion form, or some other genre.”

p.438 - idea that for many, wanting to desire and wanting to be desired and wanting to have had and have been had are all better than actually being sexually intimate with someone, because being intimate is so vulnerable and scary.

p.479- “So queer denotes not an identity but instead a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other. At the risk (the certainty) of oversimplification, one could say that even if one is born straight or gay, one must decide to be queer.”

p.486-487- “In the field of sexuality studies, the space-time problem looked somewhat different but was related: the anachronists collapsed time by universalizing identity across time, while the ethnocentrists collapsed space by geographically universalizing a culturally specific model of “gay.”

p.497- separating the wedding as a symbolic form from “marriage” as an institution, also noting same-sex marriage as an individualistic goal rather than a collective goal like healthcare or immigration or welfare. Can you be pro-wedding but anti-marriage?

p.502-503- “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains an unresolved terrain. Or rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”

p.516- “Queer theory never worked out how to play multiculturalism. It could not write itself into a narrative of minority inclusion drawing on the powerful rhetorics of civil rights struggle in the United States. A formation called ‘lesbian and gay studies’ has had more success, though it has often needed to make a racial analogy in ways that have invited accusations of appropriation.”

Stuff To Look Up

Susan McCabe, “To Be and to Have: The Rise of Queer Historicism”

p.487-

The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, edited by Jeremy Mulderig

Samuel Steward was born in 1909 and was a very unusual man. I had never heard of him before until reading this book. He went by lots of different pseudonyms in his different professions— he was a columnist, an erotica writer, an English professor, and a tattoo artist. He lived alone for most of his life, and was never interested in committed romantic relationships. He was an alcoholic. He was an extremely thorough record-keeper, which included keeping a “Stud File” of every sexual encounter he ever had (and there were a lot—more than 2,000 encounters with more than 800 people). In reading just the introduction of the book, I was left wondering, how can one person literally fit all of that into one life? The partial answer is that professor and tattoo artist were not simultaneous careers, and he happened to live in a variety of different situations that lent themselves to a lot of potential for sex (for example, growing up in a boarding house— he slept with many of the tenants, and many of his classmates in high school, some of his students, many of his tattoo clients, and had a relationship with a porn studio where they would send him hustlers and in return he would give them discounted tattoos). He was also the go-to artist for Hell’s Angels for awhile, and assisted Kinsey in his research. Kinsey couldn’t officially have out gay co-researchers, for fear of being accused of biasing the results, but Steward was an unofficial collaborator. They talked often, and Steward agreed to engage in some S&M sessions while being observed, since Kinsey was interested in that. Kinsey was also interested in why people get tattoos, so Steward kept a detailed log of all of his clients and the tattoos he gave them, and passed along the info to Kinsey.

He wrote an autobiography, but it was published in a highly abridged form. This book is a combination of text from the original longer draft, the final shorter published version, and text from his diaries and letters.

The only part that pissed me off is how easily Steward just traipsed around getting academic jobs. At one point he literally walked into someone’s office and asked if there were openings. The idea of doing that now is just laughable. But I feel this way about any academic talking about their job market experience if that experience happened more than 30 years ago.

Stuff I Marked

p.8- quote from a sociologist studying Chicago gay culture in the 30s who found that in most of his interviews, the people emphasized their discovery of gay culture over their private realization of attraction, and how joining the gay world in Chicago also meant joining a new community of living, working, and socializing in different places/with different people. Participating in gay culture and adopting a gay identity as part of one’s sense of self (separately from one’s actual previous sexual activity) were often concurrent. This is similar to in Look Both Ways— being where it’s okay/cool to be gay makes it more likely you’ll feel comfortable/want to be part of it!

p.10- autobiography as rhetorical rather than “strictly factual” accounts

p.193— Kinsey absolutely rejected the words “normal” and “usual.” Instead, he said “majority practice.”

p.194— Steward’s memories are that Kinsey was either straight or very good at keeping his non-straightness a secret. He certainly had no indication Kinsey was straight. But a different book I read recently (maybe Baumgartner?) said very casually that Kinsey had male lovers in addition to loving his wife.

p.195- apparently the Vatican has a huge collection of porn

p.202— “generalizations about tattoos are extremely dangerous and unreliable. Your reaction to a tattoo is established only be the fashion in which your own emotions and observations, your backgrounds and personality, are fused together.” He also notes 32 different motivations for why people get tattoos, 25 of which were sexual in some way, and the most common of which was to assert your masculinity.

p.210— accounts of some of the strangest and/or most overtly homosexual tattoos he gave

Look Both Ways, by Jennifer Baumgartner

Baumgartner is a journalist who worked for Ms. in the early 90s and has covered bisexuality in her writing across her career. This book is partially history/analysis and partially memoir from her own experiences talking to people, going to events, and working in feminist and queer spaces.

Lots of good reflections/personal experiences relating to the things I’m interested in— fashion and sexual identity, conversational sign posts and bisexual identity, etc. It’s also a little more recent than books like Vice Versa (about 10 years later), so while Ms. and Ani DiFranco were still The Big Thing before “my time” (I do listen to Ani DiFranco though), the cultural references feel a bit closer to me, or I can at least point to memories in my own childhood and recognize how 3rd wave feminism, which I was unaware of, impacted me. Like “girl power" as a slogan to aspire to.

I think it’s an interesting place to be, say, in middle school or in high school, and so to be aware of a cultural phenomenon but not REALLY be able to participate in it, since you’re still too young to do a lot of things by yourself and have no money. That doesn’t directly apply to me in this respect, since I was too young even for that, but I am reflecting on the things that I DID feel that youth-induced FOMO and angst and longing about, and simultaneously thinking about how young teens have felt the same way forever. It makes me think about everyone who was too young in the 60s/70s to participate in all of the activism going on (or at least participate in the ways they may have wanted to), but old enough to know about it and want to be a part of it. I also wonder how this phenomenon works differently for people like me, who needed to ask their parents to drive them to any given thing, vs. people growing up in cities where you’re able to go places without your parents from a much younger age via public transit.

Passages I’ve Marked

p.5- story about how news reported that a study that found bi men don’t exist, but the actual study found that the real results were basically the opposite— almost all the men in the study sexually responded to both men and women in some way, just the extent of the arousal varied (and was small in many participants)

p.26- “AC/DC” as slang for bi, feminist atmosphere of Ms. creating the necessary conditions for JB to experiment with women, song “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule

p.50 - paragraph on the problems with the word “bisexual” and problems with its alternatives. “As a label, bisexual sounds pathological, academic, and a little embarrassed —- like the identities ‘stay at home mom’ and ‘runner up.’” “Or, as writer Jenny Weiss put it in Girlfriends magazine, “Of all the words for bisexual, the worst is probably bisexual.” This is a big mood.

p.51- “The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate- regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship with the word feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.”

p.52- references Garber’s section on Tiresias, notes that the importance of this story is that it shows that the WHOLE STORY/whole picture is what makes a bisexual, not any snapshot in time.

p.78- “The fact is, second-wave women thought about looking both ways a lot, even though they rarely described their lives or insights as bisexual. Instead, they were woman-identified women or political lesbians (gay in the streets if not in the sheets, to paraphrase rock critic Ann Powers)”

p.100 - description of the outfits of Ani DiFranco fans as emblematic of third wave feminism and bisexuality

p.105- Baumgartner and Gloria Steinem both date “when it was okay for women to be bi” as starting in the early 90s

p.108- extended quote reflecting on Liza Featherstone’s own sense of fashion and gender/sexuality presentation as a bisexual

p.123-126- different examples of bi women talking about the loss/exclusion they felt when they got into long term relationships with men

p.141- some thoughts about how dating women changes how women approach dating men and expectations for being in a relationship

p.156-157- some thoughts about bisexuality and the objectification of women and the male gaze, coming to see yourself as a sexual agent instead of perpetually as a sexual object, and how dating women changed Baumgartner’s relationship with porn

p.170- more about p.141, but also pointing out that just because dating a woman may help you clarify what you want when dating a man, sexism/internalized sexism means you might still not be good at actually COMMUNICATING those things to/with men

p.175— “stereotype threat”- the presence of someone from a dominant group diminishes the performance of a non-dominant group, subconsciously. Can make people from non-dominant groups feel less confident, less smart, like they have less agency, and so act that way.

p.189- describes the “feeling out if someone is gay and implicitly communicating to them that you are also gay” as “embroidery” and notes that her own go-to embroidery is finding ways to work in the phrase, “my ex-girlfriend”

p.194— same as above, mentions the difficulties of having “to constantly crowd every conversation with sign posts (“ex-girlfriend,” “ex-boyfriend,” “baby’s father”) to indicate the whole person I am”

p.220- more about the relationship between sexuality and gender presentation for bi women (shift in it becoming more okay in 3rd wave feminism to be lipstick/femme than it was in the 2nd wave)

Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence, by Cheryl Glenn

I guess the first thing this book makes me think about is neurodivergent speech patterns. Some people (I think mostly autistic people, but maybe also other groups) pause “too long” or “not enough” or “aren’t good at turn taking” in conversations, and that affects how they are perceived. This is very much a rhetoric of silence, or rather, people ought to be aware of differences in speech patterns that might mean silences (or lack of silence) should be interpreted differently than they might be used to. Lots of autistic people identified with Beth Harmon on The Queen’s Gambit, and in reading people’s tweets about it/her, I saw 1) non-autistic people arguing that Beth was cold to one of the guys she slept with, in part because she went back to reading her book after they had sex, and in part because of how she froze when he first kissed her 2) autistic people saying they felt her going back to reading showed that she felt comfortable with him, enjoyed the sex, and was now returning to her previous task and was happy to have him stay or go. I think there’s a bit of dialogue where he asks if she’d like him to stay or go, and she says it’s up to him. He feels hurt because he feels like that means she doesn’t care about him, but some people argued that she was being considerate of his needs and simply stating her non-preference in a direct way.

Glenn doesn’t really talk about this category of issues around silence, but she does discuss how positionality affects how one’s silences are interpreted, and who can be silent. If a white man is silent, he’s just a man of few words. If he’s a rich man, he’s powerful. If a Black man is silent, he’s uncooperative, or sullen, or unintelligent, or rude. Women’s silence might be interpreted as unintelligence as well, or lack of confidence, or rude, or modest and appropriate, depending on the situation and other aspects of the women’s identity.

Glenn cites Johannesen, who lists 20 different potential functions of silence. I would say about 5 are rhetorically “positive,” meaning relating to an interest in engaging with the other person or agreeing with them (silence due to thinking seriously about what to say, silence due to agreement, silence due to being emotionally moved, silence due to not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings, companionable silence), around 13 (I think this is the most arguable) are some kind of negative (meaning the person is not or is not interested in being engaged in the conversation), and the rest are “neutral.” I think the neutral and negative are the most arguable because things like “the person is silence because they feel no urgency to talk on this matter” is not inherently negative, but could easily be perceived as negative (why don’t you think this is important?).

Some examples/case studies Glenn talks about:

• Bill Clinton’s sex scandals and the chosen or enforced silence of his lovers, victims (of unwanted sexual advances), and family members

• The Clinton administration’s silencing of a federal appointment nominee— they told her not to speak publicly until her confirmation went through. She was not allowed to respond to many allegations and misinterpretations of her work.

• The stereotype that Native Americans are silent or value silence more than other kinds of people.

• Anita Hill’s original silence and then forced speaking (via court order) against Clarence Thomas, then how the committee re-silenced her

Recognize: The Voices of Bisexual Men, Edited by Robyn Ochs and H. Sharif Williams

This anthology is similar to Getting Bi, but its content is more focused (just on bi men), and the section themes are different: identity, challenging labels, liminality, institutions, “anger, angst, and critique,” bodies and embodiment, religion and spirituality, traveling, and relationships. Each chapter is also longer, on average, than the ones in Getting Bi.

I’m really glad they made this book. Many of the men say they thought they were the only bi men in the world, or at least were the only bi men they knew. One chapter is an exploration of phallagocentrism and bi visibility— how if a man is even a little bit interested in another man, or a penis, he is Gay. Women have more leeway. Bi women are more visible. I can name a handful of bi women characters from television (usually ethnically ambiguous side characters who serve as love interests to a more important white male character), even if the representation is not very good. But I can only name two bi men from TV off the top of my head, and that’s only because my partner reminded me of one of them (Blaine, on Glee) today. (The other one is Wolf from Future Man, who I actually really adore as a character.) Another difference is that bi women are seen as “secretly straight,” while bi men are seen as secretly gay.

I don’t know if this is true, but I think I’m also left with the impression that bi men are more likely to stay closeted for longer.

I also wonder if there’s any patterns between bi people (across genders) who start out being very sure they have same sex attractions and take longer to accept/embrace their different-sex attractions, vs. people who start out being very sure they are straight and have to realize they also have same-sex feelings.

I marked three places in this book to come back to:

p.27 - notes that closeted bi men married to women might be the biggest bisexual demographic and/or the one most in need of outreach and community.

p.96-97- the author’s bisexual literacy journey (from expository nonfiction to memoirs to Tumblr) and notes that sometimes being bisexual IS confusing and you ARE confused about your sexuality while still being bisexual. Sometimes the activism around “bisexuals aren’t just confused” (which is important) swings too far the other way, such as in his case— he felt like it was not okay for him to be confused.

p.105- talking about how activities through his union helped him feel comfortable with his sexual identity. Haven’t seen this before!

An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing, by Paul B. Preciado

This is a collection of columns written by Preciado over the course of several years, mostly about European politics (focusing on France, Spain, and Greece), trans and queer issues, and reproductive rights. Preciado is a philosopher, professor, and museum curator who has lived a fairly nomadic life. He identified as a lesbian for most of his life, then began taking testosterone but was uninterested in being pinned down by a gender label, and then ultimately conceded to getting legally recognized as a man in order to avoid some practical challenges (like people always getting confused and questioning him/getting him patted down when he showed his passport that identified him as a woman). His parents are/we conservative Catholics, but they have been working on their relationship and his parents have since voted for more progressive gender/sexuality causes.

One thing I distinctly remember is that in Spain, when someone gets a gender marker and name change, they are announced in the newspaper alongside all of the other births for the day, and their birth certificate is destroyed. They become legally newborn, in some ways, even though they are already existing. I know in at least some parts of the U.S., you have to “publicly declare your intention to change your name,” but my friends say that in their experience, that just means putting up a note on a bulletin board in the county courthouse. So, it’s technically public but not really.

An excerpt:

“The first person to learn it [the name change going through], before my lawyer, was my mother. She read the paper, as she does every morning, and saw this name mentioned in the birth announcements. She panicked….She called me up: ‘What’s this all about?’ My mother was witnessing my birth, once again. In a way, she brought me back into the world, this time as a reader. She gave birth to her son, born outside her body, as printed text.”

I also think the introduction to the book is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read. I think it does all of the things The Argonauts does that people praise it for, but written from a trans perspective instead of being a cis woman exploiting a trans person’s story and identity. (Even though Nelson’s partner offered extensive comments on early drafts and even contributes writing to the book, he also describes Nelson writing about him as akin to subjecting an epileptic to a strobe light. So, I think the lines of consent are problematic at best, given the enormous pressure he must have been under to be okay with her writing a book about their lives together, given that she is a professional memoirist.)

The introduction interweaves personal narrative, dreams, theory, philosophy, history, and poetry. The first sentence is, “As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life.” If we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, why not? He then describes a dream that stuck with him about having apartments on all of the planets, but not being able to afford it. The person he was talking to recommended he give up the apartment on Uranus. Upon waking, he researched the planet, and discovered the term Uranism, a term coined by Ulrichs to mean “being of the third sex” or being gay. Uranians were conceived of as feminine souls in masculine bodies drawn to masculine souls. As a Roman god, Uranus’s gender and sexuality are complex— Venus arises directly from his castrated genitals. Preciado says he cannot give up the apartment on Uranus. He sees his trans identity as a new form of Uranism. He “brings news from Uranus,” which is not, as the West originally thought, the ceiling of the world (a la Dante’s Paradiso).

He says he did not start taking testosterone to become a man. He did not view it as “treating” a medical condition of “gender dysphoria.” He rejects what he calls the pharmacopornographic system. He says he took testosterone to “become unrecognizable” by that system, to begin adventuring beyond gender. Only the material constraints of a gender-binary world eventually forced him to shape himself (in part) to masculinity.

I would like to read Testo Junkie, his autotheory book about his use of testosterone.

Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World, Edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley

This book was published in 2009 and contains chapters on What is Bisexuality, Coming Out, Why “Bi"?, Life Stories, Crossing Lines, Relationships, The Language of Desire, Bisexual Community, Bisexual Politics, and Bisexual Worlds. Some contributions are very short (only one paragraph), and some are several pages. The contributors seem highly educated overall, and are from 49 different countries.

I was especially interested in the “Why Bi” chapter and the “Bisexual Worlds” chapter. Why Bi is all about why people choose this label over (or in addition to) other labels. Several people say they feel pansexual is more accurate, but they choose bi in public because people understand it better or because it has a longer political history. The Bisexual Worlds chapter is about how bisexuality is conceived of differently in non-U.S. cultures. It addresses myths (like all Arab men are bisexual) and the variance in prejudices against bi people vs. gay people in different places, variance in what is tolerated vs. not, variance in what behaviors are considered normal vs. abnormal, and more.

I marked for myself the passage by Jenny Kangasvuo, a Finnish bisexuality researcher, who is also Finnish and bisexual herself. She describes how she didn’t relate to descriptions of bisexuality in the U.S. and UK and felt those cultures differed meaningfully than what it means to be bi in Finland. So, she made that the focus of her research as an anthropologist. I want to reach out to her to see if we can talk about research methods. But she also writes about how researching bisexuality has made her feel disconnected from her own identity, since she now views identity categories as constructed and abstract and objects of study. I don’t know if my research will end up making me feel the same way, but I think it is important to be aware that researching something about yourself professionally does change your relationship with that thing.

Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, by Heather LoveT

This book wasn’t what I expected it to be, but I found it very useful! Love’s central argument is that living in a post-Stonewall, Gay Pride, “It Gets Better” world means critics (and non-critics) have a lot of political pressure to avoid focusing on the Bad Feelings, or at least find ways to turn them into politically positive bad feelings. And the idea that we’re supposedly liberated, that things are better now than in the past (which is true!), that we’re supposed to have pride, makes people feel bad if they are still suffering, still experience shame around their sexuality, still feel isolated or like they can never achieve the life they’d like to live.

Love chooses 4 modernist novels that address these “backward” or negative queer affects in different ways. One is by a man (Pater) writing shortly before Oscar Wilde’s trial, which some consider a good benchmark for the beginning of modern homosexual identity. Love argues that the novel shows that Pater can feel the shift that is occurring, the big changes that are right on the precipice of emerging, but does not want to participate in them himself. He chooses isolation, privacy, secrecy.

The second author is Willa Cather, which Love uses to pose the question: while contemporary critics may want to do queer reclamation projects and “rescue” historical queers to reclaim them as our own, some of these people may not want to be claimed. Cather, Love argues, is one of them. She disdained lesbian identity and homosexual activity, preferring instead the romantic friendship— or possibly non-romantic friendship. She lived with a female companion for nearly 30 years. It’s an interesting situation, wherein today’s readers say “you’re one of us” and Cather speaks back from the past, “No I’m not. That’s gross.” Love resists diagnosing these authors with internalized homophobia, because while that may be accurate, such a diagnosis explains away the feelings that are uncomfortable to contemporary critics. We like to think about historical queers as yearning for the kinds of freedom and acceptance that we have today. And probably that’s true for some of them. But some, like Cather, did not want that. So, she may be what Kent and Moore would call a proto-lesbian, but she certainly would certainly be angry about such a categorization.

The third author is Radclyffe Hall, who wrote the infamous Well of Loneliness. People hated it when it was published (it was put on trial for obscenity) and they hate it now (for being a picture of lesbian misery and upholding the stereotype of lesbians as “mannish”). But some lesbians are masculine. Some lesbians use he/him pronouns, but still do not consider themselves men. And some lesbians are miserable. Critics disagree about whether the main character, Stephen Gordon, hates herself/her body, or if she hates the society that makes it impossible to live the life she would like to live given her body. She feels like she’s too masculine for other lesbians (who want women) to want her, but too feminine for straight women to want her.

Other critics have pointed out that while WoL has been historically read as a lesbian novel, it could also be read as a novel about a trans man. This is complicated— because at the time, they didn’t have separate conceptions for gay people and trans people in the same way we do now. They had the concept of the “invert,” who was attracted to people of the same sex because they were really a heterosexual soul in the wrong body. So, Gordon is an invert, who hates other inverts, and can’t be reduced to “just” a lesbian or a trans man. Gender and sexuality are more closely tied for Gordon than how Western culture thinks about them now. I think it’s important to note that some people still feel this way, feel that their gender and their sexual identity are highly intertwined, while some people feel like they are separate issues altogether. And what if you’re non-binary, so there is no “opposite sex” or “same sex,” and “heterosexual” and “homosexual” are categorically unavailable for you? (Some non-binary people do not feel this way— like there are non-binary lesbians— but other people do.)

The last book is Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, set in Paris during the 1848 revolution. Basically, the lesbian lover dies, the revolution fails, it ends unhappily. Love refers to both revolution and a romantic happy ending as “impossible,” but I’m unclear if that’s her word or Warner’s word, used in the novel. In terms of discussing books that make modern readers uncomfortable because we want to shy away from the negative affects, this is the one that I felt repulsed by the most. Specifically because of the notion of giving up that a socialist revolution is ever possible. On the one hand, it totally makes sense that both the characters would feel this way (their revolution failed) and that Warner would feel this way (the Spanish Civil War ended with the socialists getting murdered, and she was writing while Stalin was busy degenerating the Soviet Union from a real workers’ state to an isolationist bureaucracy.) But on the other hand, my emotions want to reject anything that takes this position, even though it’s a totally real and understandable position. Love talks about “Left Melancholy” - a different book I read recently talks about “political depression.” A sense of political hopelessness is super real, super widespread, and something that we on the Left need to deal with, both in ourselves and in others. So I need to let Warner and her book have those feelings, because that was/is real— and that’s Love’s point. That we need to push through our discomfort to engage with these texts as they are.

Passages I Marked

p.12- “Literature accounts for experience at the juncture of the psychic and the social”

p.12- “For Williams, the primary value of feeling…is diagnostic. In paying attention to things like tone, dress, and habit, one may discover ‘social experiences in solution.’ It is possible to detect impulses that are not yet organized as movements,; we can understand and respond to a historical moment that is not yet fully articulated in institutions as the dominant mode of existence.”

p.18- “While the field of queer studies has emphasized the limitations of reverse discourse, its methodology remains deeply bound to the strategy; it retains a faith in the possibility of transforming the base materials of social abjection into the gold of political agency.”

p.23- about Love’s resistance to “the central methodology of cultural criticism: ideology critique.” references Sedgwick on paranoid vs. reparative reading. Makes me think about, what would it mean to write as a celebration, not as a picking apart?

p.31- “Recently, long-standing debates about gay and lesbian history have shifted from discussions of the stability of sexual categories over time to explorations of the relation between queer historians and the subjects they study. The turn from a focus on ‘effective history’ to a focus on ‘affective history’ has meant that critics have stopped asking, ‘Were there gay people in the past?’ but rather have focused on questions such as: ‘Why do we care so much if there were gay people in the past?’ or even, perhaps, ‘What relation with these figures do we hope to cultivate?’”

p.41- “Rather than making alliances with the dead through taking up and extending [identificatory] impulses, Traub offers a genealogy of identification, considering why it is that ‘looking at ourselves in the mirror’ has become the dominant methodology in gay and especially in lesbian studies….Though Traub suggests that it would be impossible to completely rid historical or political practice of the impulse to identification, she links the pleasures of identification to cognitive failure. In the final passages of her book, Traub effects a turn away from identification and toward desire, suggesting that we might approach figures from the past ‘not as subject to our identifications, but as objects of our desire’ (354). In this way, Traub hopes to borrow some of the pleasure of psychic and historical identification and reinvest it in desire, which she understands as an authentic encounter with another who is different from and external to the self.”

p.42- “Traub’s attention to the pain that is at the heart of lesbian and gay historiography is welcome, as is her call for an investigation of the psychic costs of repeated encounters with the ‘empty archive’” This is important for me!!! Psychic costs of bi invisibility and researching it! There are two more important quotes on this page about the psychic trauma that motivates a lot of queer historical and cultural work. Traub says this can be useful on a personal level but is not useful on a collective or research level.

p.43- “In his work on genealogy, Foucault argues for the need to develop a historical method that does not rely on the past to secure the stability of the present”

p.44- this is a quote from Foucault- “The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.”

p.44- “Queer critics have generally understood the concept of identity to be both politically and philosophically bankrupt. Although such critiques of identity have made for important changes in gay and lesbian politics and theory, it seems that the queer stance against identity has short-circuited important critical work on the history of identity. Identity is, as many of these critics have attested, a deeply problematic and contradictory concept; nonetheless, it remains a powerful organizing concept in contemporary experience.”

p.47- stuff about Foucault having emotional encounters while doing archival research in the Bastille- makes me think about how the relative lack of archival materials from the more-distant past makes it easy to decide what to look at, since there isn’t (as) much to choose from. But with the recent past (basically since the internet became widespread), there’s just SO MUCH that it’s hard to even find things.

p.51- “Such is the relation of the queer historian to the past: we cannot help wanting to save the figures from the past, but this mission is doomed to fail.”

p.129-130- “The inventiveness of a whole range of queer historical practices might be understood as a result of the paired necessities of having to ‘fight for it’ and to ‘make it up.’”

p.130- “Warner’s figuring of the revolution as an ‘impossible object of desire’ is significantly at odds with a forward-looking, scientific Marxism, but it is at the heart of the novel’s attention to a politics of affect.”

p.146- “If the gaze I have fixed on the past refuses the usual consolations—including the hope of redemption— it is not, for that reason, without its compensations. Backwardness can be, as Willa Cather suggests, deeply gratifying to the backward. Particularly in a moment where gays and lesbians have no excuse for feeling bad, the evocation of a long history of queer suffering provides if not solace exactly, then at least relief.”

p.156- quote from Queer Nation’s statement about why they chose the word Queer

Sources I Marked

Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams

Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, by Jasbir K. Puar

I wanted to read this book primarily so I could figure out what a queer assemblage is, since that’s a framework I’ve encountered at conferences and don’t really understand. I still don’t really understand— or rather, my understanding is that assemblage theory boils down to “any social thing is super complicated and built out of separate complex social things that are changing in their own ways on their own time.” Kind of like how the human eye evolved from several other separately-evolving systems, maybe. As a social framework, assemblages seems basically like dialectical thinking.

I already had a decent understanding of homonationalism and its relationship to the War on Terror via the introduction of Sodometries, where Goldberg analyzes a cartoon of Saddam Hussein in the context of post-9/11 politics and significant gay rights court cases. While that’s just one example, the concepts and relationships are explained well. So, I feel like this book primarily taught me about more examples— like the torture at Abu Ghraib, and how homophobia (and sexism) in other countries is used to justify U.S. imperial interests (like justifying the war in Afghanistan) but ignored in other places (like Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally). Puar also talks about queerness as regulatory (being “anti-norms” is its own kind of pressure) and secular queerness (which is basically Christian secularism) means queer identity feeds into Islamophobia, since Christianity is naturalized in the U.S.

But, I’m supposed to be thinking about methods as I read this.

So, I kind of see the method in this as looking at stickyness (I think that’s a Sarah Ahmed term) around/between social objects. I don’t feel like Puar is arguing that these confluences of nationalism and homophobia have been intentionally engineered, either at a national level or by individual propagandists, but they certainly exist, and keep cohering around each other. And saying “here’s how stuff is, and how it’s interacting with each other” is valuable, even if you don’t get at the Why (although Puar does get at the Why).

I think another important thing to learn from this discussion is how capitalism (and therefore imperialism) is super flexible and adaptable. Capitalism requires oppression, because dividing workers helps keep everyone down (paying undocumented people less than minimum wage means documented people are less likely to try to get paid more, because aren’t they already lucky, and why wouldn’t the employer just hire more cheaper people?) and keeps workers blaming each other for stuff instead of the bosses (like the fear of immigrants and blaming poor people for their own poverty). But, capitalism doesn’t need oppression in any particular form.

Lots of people profited an enormous amount off of slavery. But abolishing slavery didn’t destroy capitalism. The economic system adapted— to sharecropping, Jim Crow, prison labor, etc. In the same way, while homophobia functions(ed) as a tool to enforce gender and familial norms, and to keep some people in a marginalized surplus labor force (thereby keeping wages/costs down), now capitalism has adapted again. Homonormative families are more than welcome to participate in the market— the gay wedding industry, the gay tourist industry, the commodification of gay culture, etc.

Martinez talks about this too in relation to racism— it’s one of the tenets of critical race theory, that any reform/scrap of progress that is made, white supremacy will find a way to co-opt it.

It’s also similar to Moore’s argument in Dangerous Intimacies— that England started adapting its nationalist self-image to include homosexuality and homoeroticism, instead of always placing homosexuals in other countries (France, Turkey, Italy).

All kinds of special oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) are bound up with capitalism (people in specially oppressed groups also have higher rates of poverty and other money-related difficulties) yet also operate separately from it (e.g. wealthy Black people still experience racism, wealthy white women still experience sexism). And maybe that’s kind of what an assemblage is— seeing those overlaps and how the pieces interact with each other while still seeing them as separately-changing parts.

Making Girls into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity, by Kathryn R. Kent

This book is kind of the American counterpart to Dangerous Intimacies, despite being by different authors. Each chapter looks at a different book or set of books to see how women’s relationships with each other function in relation to the broader culture. For example, Chapter 1 takes a look at the figure of the spinster as a type of proto-lesbian.

Kent’s analysis partially builds off of a subversion of the Electra Complex. Instead of saying daughters libidinally desire their fathers, Kent argues that girls desire their mothers and convert that desire into the desire to become their mothers later in life. Instead of internalizing the mother’s gaze through fear (like the panopticon), children internalize the mother’s gaze through love. Kent calls this the disciplinary-tutelary paradigm, and argues that the shift into the industrial age disrupted this model for bourgeoise white women because aspects of the mother/daughter relationship were displaced by other women’s places— women’s colleges, boarding houses, etc. Intimacy and love are vital for subject formation and identification, and identification is always also desire (the desire to be like or near). Certainly, lots of wlw joke today about the perennial problem of figuring out “Do I want to be her or do I want to be on her?” (And the answer is often both)

I think this book could have been a companion to D’Emilio’s analysis of how capitalism created the conditions for homosexual male identity, but about women, but Kent goes in a totally different direction. Instead, she sees emerging proto-lesbian intimacies as “resistances” to the conflation of reproductive labor and productive labor. This is based off of a misreading of Marx (pages 154-155), which Kent imports from Andrew Parker who imports it from Hannah Arendt. They argue that Marx is arguing in The German Ideology against all waste, excess, all labor expended without utility, that he views reproduction as the only valuable sexual expression, that productivity reigns supreme. This is just not true. Marx is saying that under capitalism, objects must have utility in order to have economic value, and labor has no economic value if the thing the labor went into isn’t sellable. And the “labor is the life-activity of the species” bit is saying that people naturally like to do and make things! The whole point of that section is that wage labor, by making us do work in order to have money instead of doing work because we like it, takes away all of the pleasure in working. Like how when people monetize their hobbies, they like those hobbies less.

So, since a lot of her argument in the book is based around this (wrong) idea, I’m not finding the book overall very useful, even though I think some of the readings are interesting. For example, Kent’s reading of Little Women and Jo March’s gender and relationship with her mother, and the next chapter about the early Girl Scouts handbook.

The Girl Scouts chapter discusses how, when the GSs were formed, people were very nervous that they were trying to make girls into Boy Scouts, and that would make them masculine, and that was bad. So, the handbook, while emulating the Boy Scouts in some ways, also makes sure to emphasize traditionally feminine qualities. The idea is that masculine women CAN be made as well as born, even though women ought to be made feminine because that is the way they naturally are. It’s a contradiction. This chapter also shows how scouting is bound up with nationalism, citizenship, and class norms. Girl Scouts is about how to become a Good Middle Class Woman, and if it did its job right, would bring some “masculine” qualities/activities into the fold as acceptable feminine activities, rather than making girls inappropriately masculine. It doesn’t challenge gender norms, just shifts around the boundaries of gender. Just like rainbow capitalism and homonationalism have shifted the boundaries of sexuality so that now there are appropriate ways to be gay without challenging bigger social structures.

(Personally, I’m glad to be affirmed in my childhood sense that Girl Scouts was an inferior version of Boy Scouts designed to make girls feel included while really just making them be Girls instead of letting them learn/do boy stuff. But since I was never in Scouts, it was also fascinating to see how the early iterations of the GS handbook emphasized nationalism and capitalist thrift- selling cookies of course, but also opening a savings account, managing one’s allowance responsibly, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, etc.)

I was also interested to learn that Boy Scouts in England originated when the end of the colonial age meant boys didn’t get the exposure to nature and bonding and practical training in masculinity and nationalism that they would have otherwise gotten.