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