Queer is? Queer does?: Normativity and the problem of resistance

GLQ

Volumn 4, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 511-536

  Jakobsen, Janet R ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0345239327     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: 15279375     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-4-4-511     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Janet R. Jakobsen, working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
2. On the problems concerning the production of the "lesbian" ending to coming-out stories see, e.g., Biddy Martin, "Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s]," in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 77-103.
3. Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi.
4. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66.
5. Judith Butler makes this point with regard to kinship in "Against Proper Objects," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (1994): 14.
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 272.
7. The conversation to which Spivak refers appears as "Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze," in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 205-217
8. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, "Why the Ancient World Was Not a Golden Age, But What We Can Learn from It Anyway," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New YorK: Pantheon, 1984), 344-351
9. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol.1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 159.
10. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, quoted and translated in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 79.
11. See Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography, and Sexual Harassment (New York: Routledge, 1995).
12. Foucault used the category of "dangers" to indicate his skepticism that any action is wholly good or wholly bad. Any action runs dangers, some more pressing than others. This category allows one to evoke the polyvalent and context-determined nature of any action without abandoning judgment. Thus for Foucault (who is particularly concerned with dominations) the primary moral task is to determine "which is the main danger" and resist it: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger" ("On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress," in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 343).
13. See, e.g., Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
14. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997).
15. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 64-66.
16. Elizabeth Grosz makes a similar claim in "Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity," in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1994), 133-57. Grosz, however, makes the following claim about the relation between being and doing with regard to oppression: "I would argue that all ⋯ forms of oppression [other than that based on homosexuality] are based primarily on what a person is, quite independently of what they do. Or rather, what they do is inflected and read through who they are⋯. In the case of homosexuals, I believe that it is less a matter of who they are than what they do [that] is considered offensive" (150). I argue below, however, that there are good reasons to read various forms of oppression and resistance, including anti-Semitism and Jewishness (Grosz's example), as based on what people do. One of the shifts realized by National Socialist anti-Semitism was to enforce Judaism as an aspect of what people were rather than of what they did, so that many persons who did not recognize themselves as Jews-who did not enact Jewishness-became Jews. Similarly, much public contestation in the United States concerns the question of whether homosexuality should be read as an aspect of what people are or of what they do. This caveat points to the complexities of the relation between being and doing that cannot be resolved a priori for any particular case.
17. Here I am indebted to the students in my Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies 550a course, "Queer Theories," particularly Karen Wyndham, and to their reading of Saint Foucault.
18. On the dangers of "radical anti-normativity" see Biddy Martin, "Extraordinary Homosexuals and the Fear of Being Ordinary," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos. 2-3 (1994): 100-125.
19. on the distinction that "to be against heteronormativity is not to be against norms" see the response by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "Sex in Public," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 357.
20. For more on the definition of norms and the relation between norms and values see Jakobsen, Working Alliances, 15-19.
21. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 1-2.
22. Mary Poovey, "(International Prohibition on) Sex in America," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 366-392
23. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 357.
24. As Berlant and Warner note, "Heterosexuality involves so many practices that are not sex that a world in which this hegemonic cluster would not be dominant is unimaginable" ("Sex in Public," 357).
25. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol.3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986).
26. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 69.
27. Michel Foucault, preface to The Use of Pleasure, vol.2 of The History of Sexuality.
28. quoted in Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 333.
29. Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics," 351.
30. Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47-53.
31. E.g., Foucault states quite clearly that he wishes not to create a history of "solutions" but to trace a genealogy of problems ("On the Genealogy of Ethics," 343). In formulating his understanding of a particular "problem" for the Greeks, however, he slips in a "we": "What I want to ask is: Are we able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other? Is the pleasure of the other something that can be integrated in our pleasure, without reference either to law, to marriage, to I don't know what?" (346).
32. Ibid.,("On the Genealogy of Ethics,") 357. This regime of power is dominating in the Foucauldian sense. Foucault's definition of domination (in contradistinction to typical definitions based on the "illegitimate" use of power) turns not on the absence of hierarchy but on the restriction of opportunities for reversal or movement in a given power relation. His example is "the traditional conjugal relationship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries": "We cannot say that there was only male power; the woman herself could do a lot of things: be unfaithful to him, extract money from him, refuse him sexually. She was, however, subject to a state of domination, in the measure where [i.e., to the extent that] all [of] that was finally no more than a certain number of tricks which never brought about a reversal of the situation"
33. ("The Ethic of Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom," interview by Paul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Müller, trans. J. D. Gauthier, in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987], 12). It is clear that women and slaves in ancient Greece also lacked options for bringing about a fundamental "reversal of the situation."
34. Foucault offers an alternative reading of Kant in "What Is Enlightenment?" (Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, 32-50)
35. Ian Hacking suggests that overall Foucault takes seriously the spirit if not the letter of Kant's texts ("The Archaeology of Foucault," in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986], 27-40).
36. However, the increase in and intensification of bureaucratic institutions, described by Jürgen Habermas as "colonization of the lifeworld," sets limits on the possibilities of enacting this spirit or attitude ("Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present," in Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader, 103-108 [response to "What Is Enlightenment?"].
37. The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. [Boston: Beacon, 1984-1987]).
38. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
39. Martin, "Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s]"
40. for more on the complexity of norms of femininity see Martin, "Sexualities without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," in Femininity Played Straight: The Significance of Being Lesbian (New York: Routledge, 1996), 93.
41. On the problem of social movements that reproduce the conditions they set out to contest see Jakobsen, "(Re)producing the Same: Autonomy, Alliance, and Women's Movements," chap. 2 of Working Alliances.
42. Berlant and Warner, "Sex in Public," 548 n. 2.
43. Susan Gubar, "Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of 'It Takes One to Know One,'" in Feminism beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 133-154
44. Audre Lorde talks about a "mythical norm" to remind us that no one fully embodies it; further, the denial required to maintain the "mythical" belief on the part of some people that they do embody the norm is what costs the rest of us so much ("Age, Race, Sex, and Class: Women Redefining Difference," in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches [Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing, 1984], 116).
45. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 106, 104.
46. Here Bell makes a Bourdieuian point. In the first seven pages of Distinction, for example, Pierre Bourdieu offers the following set of binaries: sacred-profane, beautiful-ugly, tasteful-vulgar, quality-quantity, form-substance, liberty-necessity, upper-class-lower-class (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984]).
47. On the incoherence of homophobic discourse see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
48. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel" GLQ 1 (1993): 15.
49. See also Ann Pellegrini, "Building Bodies: Transgressive Performances in Religion," panel discussion at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 1997.
50. Karen Anderson, pers. com., 1997.
51. Moishe Postone, "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to 'Holocaust,'" New German Critique 19 (1980): 107.
52. This development has been traced by Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Plume, 1990).
53. Leisa D. Meyer, Creating GI Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women's Army Corps during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
54. John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100-113.
55. See Irena Klepfisz, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yidishkayt in America," in Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches, and Diatribes (Portland, Ore.: Eighth Mountain, 1990), 143-166
56. We see this phenomenon in Supreme Court associate justice Antonin Scalia's dissent from the decision on Colorado's Amendment 2 in which the "fact" that "gays" were a "small minority" yet had the political ability to establish antidiscrimination policies in some localities-hardly an earthshaking development-showed that they held "inordinate power," which the state of Colorado was justified in legally restricting for the sake of all. A similar dynamic is at work in discussions of race in affirmative action hiring policies when changes in labor market segregation that are small relative to the structure of the labor market as a whole are considered to have "solved the problem" of race or even to have gone "too far" the other way.
57. Didi Herman, The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
58. Jakobsen, "Working the Public: Social Change in Diverse Public Spheres," chap. 4 of Working Alliances.
59. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 64.
60. See, e.g., Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
61. See Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 1-30.
62. For more on agency as a play on norms see Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
63. For a more extensive explanation of the relation between alliances and agency see Jakobsen, Working Alliances, 19-22.
64. Wolf's analysis appears in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).
65. See Laura Levitt, Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (New York: Routledge, 1997).
66. One obvious point of twinning here is "camp," both Jewish and queer, as Pellegrini indicated on the American Studies Association panel. The term camp, with its clear references, in a Jewish context, to sometimes horrific types of camps, was also problematized by Levitt in her remarks. On "inside-out" see Diana Fuss, ed., Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991).
67. Henry Abelove, pers. com., May 1997. For a brief rendition of his reading of Frank O'Hara see Abelove, "The Queering of Lesbian/Gay History," Radical History Review 62 (1995): 55.
68. In fact, certain forms of ambivalence may enable the production of such relationships. See Kobena Mercer's use of ambivalence in rereading the Robert Mapplethorpe series of black nude photographs in "Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary," in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Seattle: Bay, 1991), 169-210.
69. see also Janet R. Jakobsen, "Agency and Alliance in Public Discourses about Sexualities," Hypatia 10 (1995): 133-154
70. Miranda Joseph, pers. com., May 1996.
71. Aihwa Ong, "Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies," Inscriptions 3-4 (1988): 79-93.