Turning back: Adolescence, narrative, and queer theory

GLQ

Volumn 5, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 1-24

  Gordon, Angus ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33749614191     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-5-1-1     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. Hereafter cited as PL.
2. Butler is aware, not only in The Psychic Life of Power but in all of her work, of the logical and grammatical difficulty of insisting that a subject performs an action of which it is itself, strictly speaking, an effect. I address some of the ramifications of this paradox for discussing adolescent subjectivity below.
3. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 35-36.
4. Judith Butler, "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 16.
5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 23.
6. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), 75-76.
7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 2. Hereafter cited as E.
8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7. Hereafter cited as GT.
9. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Cape, 1982), 266.
10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 232. Hereafter cited as B.
11. For an example of such a utopian treatment of adolescence see William Simon, Postmodern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996), 59-98.
12. Ferdinand de Saussure goes so far as to make "the linear nature of the signifier" a principle equal in importance to the more celebrated "arbitrary nature of the sign" (Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin, rev. ed. [London: Owen, 1974], 70, 67).
13. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6-26.
14. This aspect of linearity is self-evident, but it is rarely deployed or even noticed in the humanities in discussions of the "linear" nature of space and/or time, which is why I draw attention to it so emphatically here.
15. One contemporary theoretical embodiment of the temporal disjunction between the assumption of gender and sexuality is to be found in the revisionist psychoanalytic concept of "Core Gender Identity," as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: "This work [recent clinical psychology] posits the very early consolidation of something called Core Gender Identity - one's basal sense of being male or female - as a separate stage prior to, even conceivably independent of, any crystallization of sexual fantasy or sexual object choice. . . . sexual object-choice [sic] . . . is unbundled from this Core Gender Identity through a reasonably space-making series of two-phase narrative moves" ("How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay," in Tendencies [London: Routledge, 1994], 158. Hereafter cited as T).
16. Barthes, S/Z, 76.
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel" GLQ 1 (1993): 15. Hereafter cited as QP.
18. This kind of gesture may be overdetermined by the tendency of theory tout court to regard the past as something to correct or overcome, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank point out: "The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions" ("Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins," in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995], 23).
19. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has recently - and tantalizingly - introduced the term periperformative to describe "a neighborhood of language around or touching the performative" (Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Introduction: Performativity and Performance," in Performativity and Performance [New York: Routledge, 1995], 18 n. 14). If I understand their meaning, the functioning of queer in adolescence might well be better apprehended under this "new rubric" than under that of performativity proper.
20. This is, of course, an allusion to the distinction made by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 7-16.
21. Moreover, the catachrestic nature of queer and other terms of homophobic abuse frequently renders their iterative citation quite different from an act of simple reclamation. For example, Christopher Craft explains how his experience as a university student demonstrated "the boomerang trajectory of the brutal little noun faggot: sometime in 1971 or 1972 I hurled the epithet maliciously into the night air, sometime in 1976 or 1977 it returned from behind to catch me unaware. I became in that moment the unwilling object of my own previous denunciation" (Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], xvii).
22. J. L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 94-107. Austin introduces his three categories as refinements of his earlier terms, constative and performative, which, strictly speaking, refer to types of rather than to attributes of speech acts. The refinement is necessary, in Austin's view, because the same speech act may have different kinds of force, depending on its context, and most speech acts exert them simultaneously.
23. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 99.
24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," in Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, ed. Mark Edmundson (New York: Penguin, 1993), 237-66.
25. See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide, 4 vols. (Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989).
26. I use an uncharacteristic first-person plural to refer to the discipline of gay and lesbian studies not because of any reified sense of solidarity but because no other pronoun seems to answer to the task: neither they, which would appear to distance me artificially from a set of provocations to which I ought to be equally susceptible, nor it, which would occlude what in this context is the crucial fact that "gay and lesbian studies" refers to a collection of people as much as to an abstract disciplinary formation.
27. See Butler, "Freud and the Melancholia of Gender" (GT, 57-65);
28. Butler, "Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex" (B, 93-119);
29. Butler, "Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification" (PL, 132-50);
30. and Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity."
31. For an autobiographical fragment that embodies such an epistemological disturbance see Sedgwick, "A Poem Is Being Written" (T, 177-214).
32. It is important to dissociate this kind of figurative usage of the notion of melancholia from normative psychoanalytic accounts, which, as Michael du Plessis points out, have routinely ascribed melancholia to gay men and lesbians as a pathological condition. Thus du Plessis urges that "any maneuver that would attribute melancholia to gay men, or to lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons, as an essential trait must absolutely be resisted" ("Mother's Boys: Maternity, Male 'Homosexuality,' and Melancholia," Discourse 16 [1993]: 158), a plea with which I utterly concur while nevertheless regarding the concept as an irresistible heuristic metaphor.
33. Elspeth Probyn, "Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia," GLQ 2 (1995): 443.