Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality - Inter

Transcription

Edited by
Marie-Luise Kohlke & Luisa Orza
Sex and Sexuality
Probing the Problematics
Papers Presented at the Third Global Conference on Sex and Sexuality
Wednesday 29th November – Saturday 2nd December 2006
Cracow, Poland
Edited by
Marie-Luise Kohlke and Luisa Orza
Oxford, United Kingdom
Series Editors
Dr Robert Fisher
Dr Nancy Mardas Billias
Advisory Board
Dr Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
Owen Kelly
Professor Margaret Chatterjee
Martin McGoldrick
Dr Wayne Cristaudo
Revd Stephen Morris
Mira Crouch
Professor John Parry
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons
Dr Paul Reynolds
Dr Jones Irwin
Professor Peter Twohig
Professor Asa Kasher
Professor S Ram Vemuri
Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
Volume 44
A volume in the Critical Issues project
Persons and Sexaulity
Published by the Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
First Edition 2008
8 Inter-Disciplinary Press 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN: 978-1-904710-43-1
Acknowledgements
The editors gratefully acknowledge the kind permission of Peter Owen Ltd.,
London, to reproduce the image and text of the Raimondi/Aretino woodcut
and sonnet from Lynne Lawner, I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic
Album of the Sixteenth Century: Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano,
Pietro Aretino, Peter Owen Publishers, London, 1988, on p. 36.
We would also like to thank Kingston University, London, for kind
permission to reproduce the following images from Dora Gordine’s sculpture
collection at the Dorich House Museum:
Deceit, 1934, on p. 263;
The Chinese Philosopher, 1926, on p. 264;
Standing Female Nude (Dame Edith Evans), c.1937-1938, on p. 267;
and Above Cloud, 1944-1945, on p. 269.
Finally, we would like to thank Prabha Ganorkar for allowing us to cite her
unpublished poem ‘That Song’ in translation on pp. 237-238.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: (Dis-)Entangling Sexual Discourse
PART I
xi
Sexuality and Spirituality
Sex and Divinity: Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves
and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”
Ilana Shiloh
3
Is My Yearning for You Sexual or Spiritual?
Cultivating the Divine between Us
Tahseen Béa
9
Molecular and the Molar:
Brokeback Mountain and the Burial of Sexuality
Marek M. Wojtaszek
21
Whore, Court, Church, I Modi and the Origins of Modern Obscenity
Benjamin Jacob
33
PART II
Sex in Sociological Perspective(s)
Alberta Paints the Small Town Pink:
Rural Sexualities in the Wake of Brokeback Mountain
Adam Kaasa
45
“I don’t mind showing off a bit of my belly”:
Pre-teen Girls Negotiating the Discourse of Fashion
Julie Blanchard
57
The Psychosexual Impact of the Abortion Experience:
A Phenomenological Inquiry into Women’s Response
Bridget M. Finn
69
Sexuality, Identity and Inequality:
Examining the Interaction of Community, Family and Relationships
Jacqui O’Riordan
81
Un/Civil Partnerships: Class in Lesbian Relationships
Yvette Taylor
PART III
93
Sexual Discourse and Pedagogy
Abstinence, Welfare and Self-Control
Claire Greslé-Favier
109
Expelling Pleasure?
School-Based Sex Education and the Regulation of Youth
Erin Connell
119
Les-being and Identity Politics
Erzsébet Barát
133
The Symbolic Violence of “Protecting” Women from Sexual Abuse
Karen Morgan
143
PART IV
Sexual Citizenship and the State
Recognition, Normalisation and Sexual Rights:
The Intersexual Movement in the U.S. and Europe
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson
157
“All the License They Want”:
Homophiles Debate the Makings of a Good Citizen
John Master
169
Prostituting Margins:
A Study on a State Ethnography and Gendered Citizenship in Turkey
Aslı Zengin
179
The Legal Status of Female Sex Workers in Austria and Germany
Alice Sadoghi
191
Strange Bedfellows:
201
Feminist, Sexological and Criminological Discourses on Pornography
Kateřina Lišková
PART V
Intimate Encounters in Cyberspace
When to Make it Public or Private:
Contextualising Sexuality in Online Sex Chat
Chrystie Myketiak
213
Why Cybersex? An Experimental Study
of Putative Motivations for Engaging in Online Sex
Sebastian E. Bartoş
221
PART VI
Performative Erotics
Rural-Queer: Representations within the “Hillbilly” Trope
Jan Roddy
233
Sudden Clarity Could Kill! A Hypotheticpoetic for Voice and Cello
Shalmalee Palekar
243
slave, unchained
Luisa Orza
253
PART VII
Sexuality in Aesthetic Spaces
Perverting Performances of Collecting and Exhibiting:
A Study of Two U.S. Sex Museums
Jennifer Tyburczy
263
Polite Eroticism and Sexual Ambiguity:
The Curious Case of Dora Gordine (1895-1991)
Jonathan Black
275
Taste, Sexuality, and Performance:
Staging Same-Sex Desire in Eighteenth-Century France
Daniel Smith
291
PART VIII
Sex in Literary Dialogue
Beyond Liminality towards Similarity:
The Representation of Desire in Literature
Shani Rousso
303
Imagining Manhoods:
Voyeurism and Masculine Anxieties in East African Asian Fiction
Godwin Siundu
311
The Importance of Being in Charge:
325
Sexual Initiation and the Discourse of Power in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji
Izabella Kimak
The Bishop and the Nightie:
Sexual Dissent in the Fiction of John Broderick
Peter D.T Guy
333
The Neo-Victorian Sexsation:
Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth Century Erotic
Marie-Luise Kohlke
345
Notes on Contributors
357
Foreword: (Dis-)Entangling Sexual Discourse
The Third Global Conference on Critical Issues in Sex and
Sexuality, held in Krakow, Poland, from 29 November to 2 December 2006,
opened inauspiciously under a literal blanket of fog, which shut down the city
airport and led to flight diversions and delayed arrivals among many of the
conference delegates. The fog might be seen as a curiously apt metaphor for
the difficulties that researchers continue to face in critically examining the
subject of the long-term Inter-Disciplinary.Net project to which this
conference contributed. For all its obsessive prominence in globalised world
communities and markets, sex and sexuality as research topics retain suspect
connotations of having as much to do with narcissistic pleasure as with sociopolitical conscience and critique, of playing on sensationalising tendencies
rather than developing a critical self-consciousness of our positioning as
desiring subjects within and between competing ideological discourses on
human nature, identity, and society.
Yet the conspicuous proliferation of sexuality in myriad everyday
contexts - cinema, human rights, sex education, AIDS awareness campaigns,
gay/lesbian/transsexual/inter-sex activism, prostitution, sex crimes,
trafficking, and reproductive rights, to name only some - demands that we
accord the cultural staging of sex and sexuality serious attention, since it so
obviously impacts and shapes contemporary reality before our very eyes. The
subject of sex and sexuality demonstrates not only the by now accepted
integral enmeshment of personal with public politics, but also of individual
enactments of desire with their performance within (or in opposition to) the
collective life of the societies inhabited, both in bodily fact and fantasy.
The papers collected here offer a snapshot of the conference
proceedings, exploring various kinds of sexual terrain, including:
•
the spiritual, as in the exploration of the sacredness of the body
(Shiloh), yearning towards otherness/divinity (Béa), sublime
embodiments of desire (Wojtaszek), and the Renaissance
Church’s “creation” of obscene art (Jacob)
•
the sociological, via analysis of sexual geography in filminduced
tourism
(Kaasa),
adolescent
fashion
and
heteronormative socialisation (Blanchard), the psychosexual
impact of abortion (Finn), community and sexual identity
formation (O’Riordan), and the role of class in lesbian practice
(Taylor)
•
the pedagogical, as in ideologically weighted sex education
(Greslé-Favier; Connell), queer identity politics in the
xii
Foreword
______________________________________________________________
•
•
•
•
•
classroom (Barát), and women’s safety advice literature
(Morgan)
the political and legislative, as in inter-sex rights discourse
(Cervantes-Carson), homophile debates in early gay activist
media (Master), the legislative marginalisation of sex worker
citizens (Zengin; Sadoghi), and feminist and criminological
responses to pornography (Lišková)
the technological, as in private/public cyber-sextalk (Myketiak)
and the personalisation of internet sexuality (Bartoş)
the performative, as in hillbilly queerness (Roddy), diasporicacademic-lesbian dreamscapes (Palekar), and erotic servitude
(Orza)
the aesthetic, via explorations of sex museums (Tyburczy),
Modernist gender-blurring erotic sculpture (Black), and the
staging of same-sex desire in 18th Century French theatre
(Smith)
and the literary, explored through neo-Victorian fantasies
(Rousso; Kohlke), East African Asian fictions of masculinity
(Siundu), sexual initiation in Asian American writing (Kimak),
and early Irish queer fiction (Guy).
If as Michel Foucault claims, the nineteenth century employed the guise
of cultural policing to produce and disseminate sexual discourse, our own
twentieth and twenty-first centuries have jealously tried to outdo their
predecessors in the proliferation stakes. We continue to find ever new ways,
mediums, and justifications for speaking of and about sex and sexuality - to
the point that occasionally it seems everything said or sayable has some
primary sexual dimension. Put differently, the sexual/sexualised life appears
to be in danger of replacing the life of consciousness per se as what Virginia
Woolf once described as the “luminous halo” and “semi-transparent
envelope” surrounding human existence from beginning to end.1
Yet such a resplendent halo of sex can itself function as a quasi
Krakowian fog and obfuscation, diverting from reactionary and/or normative
tendencies that seek to appropriate, contain, marginalise, and exclude
according to sexual behaviour and orientation, rather than encouraging
tolerance, liberation, and self-actualisation. At the risk of producing still
more sexual discourse, this conference eBook tries to counteract such
tendencies by self-consciously reflecting on, interrogating, and where
necessary contesting the ideological entanglements involved in past and
present sexual discourse in its protean forms and transformations.
The Third Global Conference on Sex and Sexuality brought together
scholars from a range of countries and continents for constructive and critical
xiii
______________________________________________________________
dialogue, not only between disciplines but also between academic
researchers, artists, and wider communities. This collection provides a
window into that forum, providing a representative overview of the kinds of
topics discussed and the diversity of perspectives offered, with papers
presented very close to the format originally delivered in. (Expanded versions
of some papers will also be available in an edition of selected conference
proceedings to be published by Rodopi in 2008.) The resultant dialogue,
which continues via the on-going Inter-Displinary.Net project, re-named
“Persons and Sexuality,”2 seeks to locate exactly where specific sexual
discourses are voiced from - geographically, psychologically, historically,
and politically - and where and what these discourses aim at, particularly
where they do not acknowledge their own agendas. Hence the project aims to
facilitate a better understanding of the issues at stake. The dialogic
intersections between various parts of this eBook continue the dynamic
exchange of ideas begun in Krakow.
The editors would like to thank the contributors to this volume, the
conference organisers and the members of the Sex and Sexuality steering
group, especially Rob Fisher and Margaret Breen, for their commitment to
the Sex and Sexuality project and this eBook publication.
Notes
1
V Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in A McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia
Woolf, Vol. IV 1925-1928, Hogarth Press, London, 1994, pp. 157-165, p. 160.
2
This conference constituted the third and final event under the heading “Sex
and Sexuality: Exploring Critical Issues.” The first conference under the new
project title “Persons and Sexuality: Probing the Boundaries” took place 1922 November 2007 in Salzburg, Austria.
PART I
Sexuality and Spirituality
Sex and Divinity:
Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”
Ilana Shiloh
Abstract In contrast to Ingmar Bergman, whose films are about the angst of
the unbeliever and the yearning to believe, von Trier’s films are about the
angst of the believer and wanting not to believe. This apt observation by film
critic Thomas Beltzer conveys some of von Trier’s ambivalence towards
Christian dogma, to which he conspicuously refers in Breaking the Waves
(1996). The Danish director’s powerful and extremely intense film has been
criticised from two diametrically opposed perspectives - for being
manipulative Christian propaganda and for being a cynical subversion of the
narrative of the Passion. The principal reason for this critique is von Trier’s
conflation of carnality and incarnation, his projected vision of the sacredness
of the flesh. This vision equally informs Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A
Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which a child’s imagination transforms a
hermaphrodite into a Christ figure, discerning an invisible parallel between
the freak’s flawed sexuality and the Saviour’s flawed divinity. Both Catholic
artists, the Danish film director and the American writer, imaginatively
explore the unsettling paradoxes of the body, its simultaneous sacredness and
imperfection. These paradoxes are the subject of the present paper.
Key words: carnality, desire, flesh, incarnation, Flannery O’Connor,
sacredness Lars von Trier
1.
Introduction: Divine and Earthly Love
In The Symposium, one of the most famous studies of love in
Western thought, Socrates argues that Eros is the love of what is lacking, the
child - as Diotima explains - of Penia and Poros, of resource and poverty.1 He
conceptualises desire in terms of hunger, of a yearning for that which we do
not possess. But that yearning is not indiscriminate. Eros does not want just
anything - he craves the good and the beautiful. The platonic alignment of the
ethical with the aesthetic is echoed in the words of Gregory of Nyssa, an
ascetic-theologian of the fourth century, who envisions man’s desire for
Christ as the soul’s irresistible attraction to goodness. The Christian mystic
does not distinguish between human and divine love, between eros and
agape. Desire of God, he believes, is not opposed to the craving of earthly
pleasures, since sensual desire is also of the good, and thus conducive to the
desire of the ultimate good, which is the boundless charity and infinite beauty
4
Sex and Divinity
______________________________________________________________
of Christ.2 In the twentieth century, Roland Barthes describes amorous
voluptuousness in similar terms. “To expend oneself,” writes Barthes,
to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion.
To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life
depends is to consecrate the other as a god; I shall never
manage to solve the question the other asks me, the lover is
not Oedipus. Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse
my ignorance into truth…. I am…seized with that
exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will
remain so forever: a mystic impulse. I know what I do not
know.3
2.
Spiritual Carnality: Breaking the Waves
The conflation of the human body with the divine body as the
ultimate object of desire is the thematic core of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the
Waves.4 The film is set in the seventies, in a remote Scottish community of
devout Calvinists. The film’s protagonist, Bess, is a seemingly fragile, childlike woman, who recuperates from a nervous breakdown following her
brother’s death. As the film begins, Bess weds a stranger - Jan, a Norwegian
oil rigger - with whom she knows a brief period of total love, of passionate
erotic ecstasy. But Jan must return to his work on a North Sea oil platform,
and Bess cannot bear living without him. In her obsession and despair, she
begs God to bring Jan back, so he will stay with her forever. Her prayer is
ironically answered - an accident paralyses Jan, who is rushed ashore in
critical condition. For reasons that remain unclear (genuine concern for Bess,
the effect of drugs, or the voyeuristic perversity of the impotent), Jan urges
Bess to pursue sexual encounters with other men and tell him about her
experiences. Bess is initially shocked, but eventually acquiesces, convinced
that vicarious passion will keep her lover alive. She starts soliciting total
strangers, evoking increasing derision, condemnation, and violence, until she
finally re-visits a ship manned with sadistic sailors, fully aware of the
brutality awaiting her. Raped and mutilated, Bess dies of her wounds at the
same hospital in which Jan seems similarly doomed. But Jan miraculously
recovers. He claims the body of Bess, taking it offshore to escape the local
minister’s curse and to bury it at sea. The morning after her burial, Jan and
his workmates have a revelation - they hear bells ringing in the sky, bells that
Bess loved and that the local minister has refused to install in the church.
The alignment of human and divine love and the complex
relationship between love, goodness, and evil, are already announced in the
film’s opening sequence. “His name is Jan,” solemnly declares Bess before
the elders of the church, to which an invisible voice responds, “I do not know
him.” When Bess explains that Jan comes from the rig, a tall man reproves
Ilana Shiloh
5
______________________________________________________________
that the community does not favour matrimony with outsiders. Another voice
then asks the apparently feeble minded girl if she understands the meaning of
matrimony. “It is when two people join in God,” she answers. The first
speaker sceptically wonders whether she can assume responsibility for such a
union, not only for herself but also for another. Bess is utterly confident: “I
know I can.” “Name one thing of real value the outsiders have brought,” a
voice insists. After a moment’s reflection, Bess smilingly replies: “Their
music.”
The opening sequence foreshadows the film’s principal concerns
and narrative developments: the end is contained in the beginning. Two
worldviews and two visions of God are symbolically juxtaposed, both
verbally and visually. The scene is dominated by dark, stern elders, weary of
strangers and convinced of the frailty of human nature. They are surrounding
a brightly clad, smiling girl, radiantly uttering her lover’s name. She is
serious about God, confident about her moral power, and joyfully grateful for
the pleasures of life. In her manner and words, Plato conflates with Gregory
of Nyssa, the ethical joins the aesthetic, love of God becomes another word
for love of man and the rapture of the senses. But like Susanna, Bess will be
betrayed by the elders.5 Like Susanna, she will be hemmed in on every side,
placed in a situation from which it is impossible to escape. And unlike
Susanna, Bess will not be miraculously saved.
“His name is Jan.” In these four words, Bess introduces her
betrothed to the elders of her community, in preparation for her marriage.
Marriage vows, as John Searle has taught us, belong with a special class of
utterances - they are performative acts, assurances which not only refer to a
speaking relationship, but constitute a moral bond between speakers.6 Bess
takes her moral bond very seriously. By naming Jan, she is naming the man
who will join her in God, through whose worship she will worship God.
Naming is an act of knowledge, a manifestation of cognitive mastery. The
Old Testament forbids the naming of Yahweh, for God cannot be humanly
apprehended. Appropriately, the elders cannot name Jan. But Bess can,
because her God is different from the Old Testament God as interpreted by a
radical Calvinist community.
Throughout the film, Jan is repeatedly established as an ambiguous
and deeply unsettling God-figure. For one, he is an alien presence, arriving
from afar; he literally descends from the sky, as he comes to Bess in a
helicopter. But if his first coming is apparently from heaven, his second
coming - descended in a gurney, paralysed from the neck down - is certainly
from hell. The scenes depicting his work on the oil rig are shot in the yellow
reddish hues of burning flames and accompanied by the deafening din of
machinery. The whole set evokes infernal fire and brimstone, especially since
Jan’s accident on the oil rig eventually condemns him to an existence of
living hell.
6
Sex and Divinity
______________________________________________________________
But Bess vowed to assume responsibility for Jan when she united
with him in holy matrimony. In the first days of their marriage, she joyously
worships her lover’s body; at the sight of his nakedness, she giggles in
wonder. Her erotic attachment is rapturous and generous, and it is reciprocal.
She and Jan seem suspended in a state of prelapsarian perfection. They have
no sense of the sinfulness of the flesh, of the duality of body and soul. The
body is the soul. Alone in the church, after her wedding, Bess intimately talks
to her God: “I thank you for the greatest gift of all, the gift of love. I thank
you for Jan. I am so lucky to have been given these gifts.” In bed with Jan,
making love to him, she breathlessly gasps “thank you, thank you,” thanking
God/Jan again for the bliss of the body. As aptly observed by Loughlin,
Bess’s relationship with Jan is always part of her relationship with God, the
form that her loving God takes in her life.7
So when Jan, paralysed and impotent, tells Bess that only love can
save his life, urging her to take lovers and relate her experiences to him, Bess
does not really have a choice. Until that moment, her love combined a
generous self-offering with an ecstatic enjoyment of the senses. In platonic
terms, it conflated the ethical with the aesthetic. Jan’s request strips eros of
its aesthetic dimension but in Bess’s mind, it still leaves the moral imperative
implicit in erotic commitment. She pledged to take responsibility for the man
with whom she joined in God; and so she must.
The most unsettling aspect of Breaking the Waves is not so much
Bess’s self-sacrificial prostitution as the ambiguous effect of her goodness.
On the one hand, her boundless generosity and voluntary victimisation elicit
brutality and sadism; on the other hand, they are agents of salvation. This
ambiguity also marks the character of Jan, symbolically associated with
divinity. If Jan is a God-figure, this God, initially exuberant, is gradually
revealed as impotent, perverse, and evil.
Jan’s ethical metamorphosis from goodness to depravity is conveyed
through his transformation of eros to pornography. The dividing line between
the two concepts and attitudes is the gaze. The erotic mystery, like the
mystery of divinity, is rooted in communion and reciprocal participation; the
pornographic impulse is vicarious, voyeuristic. In the film’s final section, the
brutal shipmaster does not engage in sex with Bess: he watches her sexual
encounter with another sailor and stabs her in the back. In doing so, he
metaphorically mirrors the behaviour of Jan, whose voyeuristic impulse
condemns Bess to death. Von Trier seems to suggest that the erotic mystery,
like the mystery of divinity, is a mysterious, ongoing flux of giving and
receiving. Once joyous participation is reduced to voyeuristic observation,
the gaze distances and commodifies the object of desire, transforming the
beauty and goodness of the erotic embrace into a travesty.
Ilana Shiloh
7
______________________________________________________________
3.
Carnal Spirituality: “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”
The sacredness of the flesh, so powerfully and unsettlingly
conveyed in von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, is also symbolically suggested
in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”8 Von
Trier and O’Connor have often been compared, because of their apparently
scandalous treatment of central Christian tenets. In O’Connor’s tale, Paul’s
exhortation to the Corinthians about the sacredness of the body is
paradoxically rendered through the figure of a hermaphrodite exposing its sex
in a country fair. The hermaphrodite’s performance is the focal scene in a
narrative tracing a child’s double initiation: her introduction to the mystery of
sex and to the mystery of Christ. Both processes are triggered by the visit of
the protagonist’s two elder cousins, Joanne and Susan. The two adolescents,
convent students visiting their country folk, jokingly address each other as
“Temple One” and “Temple Two,” ridiculing the Mother Superior’s
admonition to beware of sex and remember the sacredness of their flesh.
Joanne and Susan are vastly amused by the vision of their burgeoning bodies
as receptacles of the Holy Spirit; but the child is not. She is profoundly
impressed. When the two older girls tell her about a hermaphrodite they’ve
seen at a country fair, a scandalous creature that “was a man and a woman
both,”9 the child has a revelation. In her mind’s eye, the circus performance
assumes the pattern and rhythm of Mass; the freak pulling up its blue dress
(the colour of divinity) merges with the figure of Christ. The child’s epiphany
is completed the next day when, upon returning the cousins to the convent,
she sees the huge red ball of the sun as an elevated Host drenched in blood.
Both O’Connor and von Trier celebrate the paradoxical sacredness
of the flesh. In O’Connor’s story, the androgynous body evokes Christ’s
figure on the cross, the conflation of the masculine and the feminine
suggesting the coalescence of the human and the divine. In von Trier’s film,
erotic desire is projected as the paradigm of all desire, of the human craving
for goodness and beauty. Both Christian artists explore the affinity of
carnality and the incarnation, and project the vision of the body as a temple
of the Holy Ghost.
Notes
1
Plato, The Symposium, C Gill (trans.), Penguin, London, 1999, 203a-203e.
See Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s
Mystical Writings, H Musurillo (trans. & ed.), Crestwood, New York, 1979,
p. 84; cited in G Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and
Theology, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, pp. 13-14.
3
R Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, R Howard (trans.), Jonathan
Cape, London, 1979, p. 135.
2
8
Sex and Divinity
______________________________________________________________
4
L von Trier, Breaking the Waves, Zentropa, Denmark/Sweden/France/
Netherlands/Norway, 1996.
5
According to the apocryphal writings, Susanna was a beautiful and virtuous
Hebrew wife. She was falsely accused of adultery by two lecherous elders,
who tried to blackmail her into sleeping with them.
6
See J Searle, ‘How Performatives Work’, Linguistics and Philosophy, vol.
12, no. 5, October 1989, pp. 535-558.
7
Louglin, op. cit. p. 174.
8
F O’Connor, ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost’, in The Complete Stories, Farrar
Straus and Giroux, New York, 1971, pp. 236-248.
9
Ibid., p. 245.
Bibliography
Barthes, R, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, R Howard (trans.), Jonathan
Cape, London, 1979.
Beltzer, T, ‘Lars von Trier: The Little Knight’, viewed on 11 February 2007,
<http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/vontrier.htm
l>.
Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s
Mystical Writings, H Musurillo (trans. & ed.), Crestwood, New
York, 1979.
Loughlin, G, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology,
Blackwell, Oxford, 2004.
O’Connor, F, ‘A Temple of the Holy Ghost’, in The Complete Stories, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, New York, 1971, pp. 236-248.
Plato, The Symposium, C Gill (trans.), Penguin, London, 1999.
Searle, J, ‘How Performatives Work’, Linguistics and Philosophy, vol. 12,
no. 5, October 1989, pp. 535-558.
Von Trier, L (dir.), Breaking the Waves, Zentropa, Denmark/Sweden/
France/Netherlands/Norway, 1996.
Cultivating the Divine between Us
Tahseen Béa
Abstract: I will research the treatment of female sexuality in the secular and
spiritual literatures of different cultures. Some of the questions I am keen to
investigate include: Is gender crucial to spirituality? What does the
experience of yearning include? Is the attraction created by sexual difference
pivotal to creating spirituality? How does homosexual love reach divinity? Is
body a limit, or a vehicle to reach our spiritual potential? Is spirituality
possible only by worshipping a god or a deity outside ourselves or is
spirituality a process of creating integrity of self and the other? Is the
yearning for god different from yearning for a human being, and how?
Key Words: body, Buddhism, divine, homosexuality, sexuality, spirituality,
Sufism, women’s writing, yearning
1.
Introduction: Body as the Site of the Spiritual
Speaking of body and sexuality the feminist philosopher Luce
Irigaray says, “body is…no longer just a more or less fallen vehicle, but the
very site where the spiritual to be cultivated resides. The spiritual
corresponds to an evolved, transmuted, transfigured corporeal.”1
In my work I intend to explore the extent to which body and spirit
correspond on such an “evolved, transmuted, transfigured” level. I will
research the treatment of female sexuality in the secular and spiritual
literature of different cultural traditions. This will include contemporary
feminist literature on body and desire mostly written by American and French
women writers, as well as women writers in the Sufi and Buddhist tradition. I
am interested in looking at secular and spiritual practices that engage both
body and soul, with a special emphasis on women’s bodies because of the
threat they pose to spiritual traditions. To be linked to a specific cultural or
religious tradition should not limit or inhibit women to go beyond their
cultural and spiritual inheritance and welcome other modes of accessing the
spirit.
My work will include inter-disciplinary feminist literature. In my
work I will attempt to liberate desire from previous definitions inherited from
rigid theologies. My work will constantly seek equivalence of body and soul,
sexual and spiritual, mundane and sacred.
2.
Yearning for the Other
In literary, philosophical, and spiritual writings the movement of self
towards the other is defined as yearning. The disturbing presence of otherness
10
______________________________________________________________
creates desire within thought and feeling. Self relentlessly pursues these
yearnings and tries to fulfil desire as much as possible, and yet the distance
between self and other, or self and otherness, remains inexhaustible. The
unattainable yearning for the other may be constituted as love for the other
human being who is my friend, my lover, my parent or my child; or the
nature of this yearning may bear a metaphysical quality, making it a mystical
yearning for the divine other. Yearning to encounter the other, face the other,
listen to the other, speak to the other, forgive the other, die for the other, give
gifts to the other, love the other and also kill the other are motives inspired by
a passionate desire to locate a self-otherness within. In our urgency and need
to address this yearning we make the mistake of reducing the other to our
specific cultural, social, racial, gender and sexual orientation. We are tempted
to address the mystery of otherness by reducing the mystery to a political
problem that can be resolved by political means, whereas yearning for the
other is a spiritual yearning, immersed in vulnerability, humility, loneliness it opens up our subjectivity to the other of humanity, beckoning us to offer
love.
The French feminist writer Hélène Cixous speaks of the movement
towards the other as both negative and positive. It is “negative
incomprehension,” when we are not open to the other we meet in our day to
day life. And there is also “positive incomprehension” experienced in
recognising our inability to comprehend the other who is in a relation to us
such as a friend. In Cixous’s words,
[w]hat is beautiful in the relation to the other…is when
we glimpse a part of what is secret to him or her, what is
hidden, that the other does not see; as if there were a
window by which we see a certain heart beating. And
this secret that we take by surprise, we do not speak of
it. That is to say, we keep it; we do not touch it. We
know, for example where the other’s vulnerable heart is
situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. That
is love.
Cixous goes on to say:
But there is also a not seeing because we do not have the
means to know any further…At the end of the path of
attention, of reception, which is not interrupted but
which continues into what little by little becomes the
opposite of comprehension. Loving not knowing.
Loving: not knowing.2
Tahseen Béa
11
______________________________________________________________
What is most compelling in Cixous’s thought is the emphasis on
loving the other in spite of knowing the other, and loving the other in spite of
not knowing the other. In both cases the relation with the other is based on an
ongoing process of a loving ethics that does not require complete and
adequate knowledge of why we love. It is this passionate yearning and loving
the other that defines our subjectivities.
3.
Yearning for the Heterosexual Other
To passionately yearn for the other suggests a desire for sexual
otherness. In patriarchal cultures and in most religions traditions desire
between men and women gains respect in marriage and procreation.
Sexuality is productively used in the creation of nuclear families. This is the
model that every contemporary society has inherited from their religious
traditions. In Irigaray’s words,
[t]he sexed identity necessary for the constitution of the
family is not cultivated for itself but rather for what it can
contribute to the unity of the family. Therein lies the origin
of our conception of man and of woman as two halves of
humanity rather than as two different identities, and the
reason why they are valued more as father and mother than
as individuals who have a relationship to each other.3
A relationship between a man and woman defined by religious and
social law inhibits and represses the possibility of awakening a desire
emerging out of a curiosity to understand sexual otherness. Intimacy between
men and women needs to be experienced on the basis of personal love and
personal desire without the fear of punishment for transgressing tradition. In
fact it should not be interpreted as transgression at all, for the uniqueness of
gender is a gift meant to be explored, appreciated and loved. As suggested by
Irigaray in her essay “Spiritual Tasks for Our Age,” intimacy between the
genders should be free of the burden of Original Sin because of which Adam
and Eve were punished and banished from the Garden of Eden. If the Garden
of Eden represents uninhibited recognition of each other in body and soul,
thought and feeling, if it represents an honesty of expression, a tenderness of
heart, a singularity in purpose, then men and women need to allow them
selves to re-create that lost purity. In Irigaray’s words, “[i]n order to move
beyond the redemption of ‘original sin’, we would have to find love’s
innocence again, including the innocence of carnal love, between a woman
and a man.”4 It may not be possible to re-claim this lost innocence or lost
purity simply by yearning, but it is within the realm of possibility to look
deeper into the spiritual meanings of intimacy, love, and desire. For instance
it is possible to learn to see women’s bodies beyond property valued for its
12
______________________________________________________________
potential for sexual gratification, procreation, and its able-bodied healthy
appearance. It is possible for men and women not to view gender as a
commodity and not to exchange sexuality as a means to an end.
As suggested by Irigaray what is most lacking in patriarchal gender
relations is the transcendent dimension, which allows women and men to
love each other from within the integrity of their otherness - sexual otherness,
as well as their personal otherness. Patriarchal religions have inculcated an
acceptance and compliance of some codes of behaviour that allow the
satisfaction of being spiritual without the rigor needed to evolve as spiritual
beings.
In the Sufi tradition, love for the other human being is always a
reflection of love for a higher spiritual being. For Sufis, God created human
beings, animals and the natural world to give and to receive love. Human
beings as God’s creation therefore inherit the divine gift of love. For Sufis
divine love is impassioned, full of ecstasy and joy, having the ability to reach
a high intensity of desire experienced on the sexual and spiritual level. The
thirteenth century Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi testifies to this
when he says, “the body is fundamental and necessary for the realization of
the divine intention.”5 In Sufi literature and in meditative practices, the body
and its sensuous potential are integral to reaching the spiritual dimension.
Even when the rituals of fasting and praying are practiced by Sufis, body and
desire are not divorced from the experience of divine love.
The nineteenth century Iranian woman Sufi poet Bibi Hayati, who
fell in love and married her Sufi teacher, expresses her love for him in a
collection of verse. Her poem called “The Night of Power,” in spite of using
religious images and metaphors, expresses her passionate love for her
husband. Alluding to his physical beauty she asks: “Is this the dawnbreak, or
your own face?” or “Is it the tuba-tree, date-bearing in paradise / Or your own
stature[?]” and again “Is it your hyacinth curl / Or your braided tress?” She
ends her poem saying,
Everyone faces to pray
A qibla of adobe and mud,
The qibla of Hayati’s soul
Is turned towards your face.6
Qibla being the direction in which Muslims offer their traditional prayers, for
Hayati to choose to face her husband instead is a radical gesture that
expresses her creative and sexual identity. The invocation of religious images
is a reminder of her sources of love, which are steeped in sexual and spiritual
yearnings.
The overwhelming nature of desire is a concern for many Sufis,
since they are on a journey of self-transformation and work energetically on a
Tahseen Béa
13
______________________________________________________________
higher and more intense level. In her book The Taste of Hidden Things:
Images on the Sufi Path, Sara Sviri addresses this side of Sufism:
This conjunction may create confusion and bewilderment
in the heart and psyche of the seeker who has been touched
by human beauty and affection and yet feels that these are
not the real objects of his [her] search. This confusion is, in
fact, one of the main problems on a mystical path which
emphasizes ‘ishq [passion]. Passion is an energy necessary
for the journey, but it can also become a test.7
The beauty in sexual difference creates the yearning that even Sufis
cannot resist. They honour this passion for it is this passionate attraction, and
exposure to the beauty of the other’s difference in body and soul, thought and
speech, touch and yearning, that makes space for an awakening on a higher
plane. Sexual difference when loved and understood with full integrity
provides a source of profound spiritual learning. The love between genders
may or may not reach the level of Sufi-love, but Sufi-love does acknowledge
the beauty of sexual difference.
Passion in sexual difference is also addressed in Tantric Buddhism.
Tantrics are yogis and yogins trained in the meditation practices so as to
engage in physical intimacy on a level where they are able to gather and
channel their energies to transform their experience. In Tantric traditions both
genders are equally engaged in recognising the divine in each other. This
intimate Tantric embrace takes place in extreme privacy. In Miranda Shaw’s
words:
The partners become saturated with one another’s energy at
the deepest levels of being. They consciously absorb one
another’s energy and then deliberately direct that energy
through their yogic anatomy, into the subtle nerve-centers
(cakras) along the central pathway (avadhuti). This energy
carries the quality of the partner’s emotions, consciousness,
and karmic traces. Therefore, at this level the partners
permeate one another’s being and literally merge their
karma and blend their spiritual destinies.8
At another place Shaw equates this heterosexual erotic embrace to
the creation of a mandala. In Buddhism mandala is a figure personifying
centeredness and alignment. In Shaw’s words a mandala is
generated from and infused by their [the tantrikas’] bliss
and wisdom, which radiates from the most intimate point of
14
______________________________________________________________
their physical union. They use the energies and fluids
circulating through one another’s bodies to become
enlightened beings in the center of that mandala.9
When desire and love for the sexual other is allowed to flourish outside the
bounds of rigid theologies, men and women respond to this desire in
nurturing and elevated ways.
4.
Yearning for the Homosexual Other
Unlike what patriarchy would have us believe everyone does not
yearn for sexual difference. There are those who yearn for sexual sameness their desire is for the one who shares their gender, their anatomy. Based on
my research every religion condemns same sex relationships. In the Muslim
tradition a number of Persian Sufi poets from the twelfth to the fifteenth
centuries had relations and affiliations with boys. Their poetry is a testament
to their sexual and spiritual yearnings, but the Muslim culture would
probably reject such interpretations of Sufi work. In the Buddhist tradition
too homosexuality was repressed, although Kukai, a ninth Century Japanese
Buddhist, is known to write on male love; also the seventeenth century
Japanese mystic poet Basho is known to have been bisexual. Since my paper
focuses more on female desire and its connection with the sacred, however, I
will speak of some of the works of twentieth century women writers who
were either lesbian or bisexual, such as the African American poet Audre
Lorde (1934-1992) and the English poet Elsa Gidlow (1898-1986).
In her well-know essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,”
Audre Lorde affirms and embraces the erotic aspect of the human body as an
enabling and empowering energy. For Lorde, the erotic ability is not only the
ability to connect with the other on a libidinal level but the ability to connect
with the self. From Lorde’s standpoint, human bodies are creative enough to
function on multiple levels, opening up the possibilities to reach out and
touch not only the body of the other person but also the body of earth, wind,
water, and fire. Most importantly Lorde emphasis the sensuous side of female
bodies for that allows us to go inside ourselves and gather a greater beauty
within. In Lorde’s view the sensuous body offers a raw and potent energy
which must be tapped into in all our activities. In her words,
that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for
joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived
within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and
does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an
afterlife.10
Tahseen Béa
15
______________________________________________________________
The deliberate distancing of body’s joy to marriage, god, or afterlife suggests
Lorde’s way of de-essentialising the expectations we have of these absolute
concepts and opening them up to more meanings than one. In another piece
called “Woman Forever,” she says,
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to
incorporate the strongest and richest part of my mother and
father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon
my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
I would like to enter a woman the way any man
can, and to be entered - to leave and to be left - to be hot
and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our
loving.11
Lorde is not the first woman writer to express her yearning for more
than one gender, one sexuality, one body. Cixous also addresses the same
need when she writes,
I would like to know masculine jouissance; I will never
know it; I would like to know the jouir of the other sex.
What I know is the point of contact between two
impossibilities: I will never know, you will never know.
Both at the same time we know that we will never know. In
that instant I touch at what remains your secret. I touch
your secret, with my body. I touch your secret with my
secret and that is not exchanged.12
The desire to live two different sexual experiences from within two different
bodies, to be able to inhabit masculinity and femininity, to love the other as
same and as the other - such a desire entails immense humanity, empathy,
and love. For a woman to own her desire is enough of a challenge given
patriarchal censorship; here she wishes to own not only her desire but his too,
which makes both body and desire doubly desirable, doubly pleasurable.
Elsa Gidlow is an English poet whom Andrew Harvey addresses as
the “modern gay mystic,” and describes as someone who has written “some
of the most explosive ‘tantric’ poems in any language.”13 Much like Audre
Lorde, Gidlow is keenly aware of her body’s erotic potential and how that
energy can be used in defining the world we inhabit, especially when that
experience is gay, female, and mystic. In her poetry Gidlow beautifully
brings the sexual to the spiritual, the sacred to the erotic, without sacrificing
her femaleness. In one of her poems “Love in Age,” she addresses her female
lover:
16
______________________________________________________________
All bliss known on earth I have found
In you, Woman, Lover-Beloved;
Beyond reason loved; beyond care
Of self or safety in the passionate years
When youth must find - cost no matter Haven or Heaven.
And now
in age
Your Being mirrors the Divinity.14
In the rest of the poem Gidlow’s female partner takes on the persona
of a goddess, a mystery that lives in another dimension in nature and yet
nourishes her spirit and body. In her intimacy she feels the “human veil is
rent” leaving both women open to each other psychically and spiritually,
providing them access to the ethereal and sublime existing between them and
beyond them. Gidlow ends her poem saying,
Lover-beloved, Woman
Small and strong in my arms
I know in you
The Goddess
Mystery
fecund Emptyness
From which all fullness comes
And universes flower.15
Clearly Gidlow’s female relationship extends beyond the erotic, the sexual,
and the immanent. Through her libidinal experiences she is reaching out to
the invisible, nurturing presence of the female energy in the universe which
she elsewhere refers to as the Mother.
5.
Conclusion: Yearning for the Divine Other
After discussing yearning for the other in friendship and love, in
intimacy and separation, in proximity and loss, I find it difficult to locate
yearning for the divine other as something separate and apart from the
embodied forms of yearning I have already invoked. If the divine is defined
in terms of a god outside human subjectivity and human experience, then the
self’s encounter with the other is experienced as a means to access a higher
spiritual reality. Sacrificing the sensuous body therefore becomes central to
the movement that goes beyond body. In this framework the divine other is
found in negating desire, keeping desire in check, in subordinating body to
spirit.
Tahseen Béa
17
______________________________________________________________
To invoke Irigaray, the mystery of otherness should remain virginal,
untouched, irreducible to self and all that self yearns to project on the other.
In all her works Irigaray strongly argues for a respectful distance between
self and the other, especially between those others we are intimate with.
Irigaray, owing her insight to Emmanuel Levinas, says,
Renouncing possession of the other becomes not just a
simple ascetic privation, but the means of achieving a kind
of relation we do not yet know, one that is more religious
and at the same time more likely to attain beatitude in the
here and now.16
Irigaray is using the word “renouncing” in a radically different way than how
it has been used in traditional religious contexts. Irigaray is not suggesting
renouncing the human other in our search for the divine other; instead, she
advocates renouncing our yearning to reduce the other to our needs and
thereby allowing the other to flourish in their humanity. Irigaray is presenting
a philosophy of otherness that recognises the open subjectivity of the other,
making it our ethical obligation not to stand in the way of the other’s freedom
to grow, evolve, and become divine.
In Irigary’s words:
Love of God has nothing moral in and of itself. It merely
shows the way. It is the incentive for a more perfect
becoming… God forces us to do nothing except become.
The only task, the only obligation laid upon us is: to
become divine men and women, … to refuse to allow parts
of ourselves to shrivel and die that have the potential for
growth and fulfilment…17
In other words, it would be blasphemous, even immoral to lack desire for the
other, for it is in yearning for the love of the other that we unveil the divinity
in ourselves and the other also.
Notes
1
L Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, S
Pluháček (trans.), Columbia University Press, New York, 2002, p. 63.
2
H Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, E Prenowitz (trans.),
Routledge, London, 1997, p. 17.
3
L Irigaray, ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’, in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, L
Irigaray (ed.), Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 171-185, p. 179
18
______________________________________________________________
4
Ibid. p. 179.
J Rumi, cited in S Sviri, The Taste of Hidden Things, The Golden Sufi
Center, Inverness, 1997, p. 114, and in RWJ Austin, ‘The Sophianic
Feminine in the Work of Ibn Arabi and Rumi’, in L Lewisohn (ed.), The
Heritage of Sufism: Legacy of Medieval Persian Sufism (1150-1500), volume
2, Oneworld Publications, London & New York, 1992, pp. 233-245, p. 243.
6
CA Helminski, Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure, Shambhala, Boston,
2003, pp. 135-136, italics in the original.
7
S Sivri, op.cit, pp. 114-15, italics in the original.
8
M Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1994, p. 170, italics in the original.
9
Ibid, p. 168, italics in the original.
10
A Lorde, ‘The Erotic’ [extract from ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as
Power’, in A Harvey (ed.), The Essential Gay Mystics, Castle Books, Edison,
1997, pp. 278-279, p. 279.
11
A Lorde, ‘Woman Forever’, in A Harvey (ed.), The Essential Gay Mystics,
Castle Books, Edison, 1997, p. 277.
12
H Cixous, Rootprints, op. cit., p. 53, italics in the original.
13
A Harvey, Introduction to ‘Elsa Gidlow’, in A Harvey (ed.), The Essential
Gay Mystics, Castle Books, Edison, 1997, pp. 269-270.
14
E Gidlow, ‘Love in Age’, in Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy, Diana
Press, Baltimore, 1976, pp, 78-79, p. 78.
15
Ibid., p. 79.
16
L Irigaray, ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’, op. cit., p. 182, italics in the
original.
17
L Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, in GC Gill (trans.), Sexes and Genealogies,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 55-72, p. 68-69
5
Bibliography
Austin, RWJ, ‘The Sophianic Feminine in the Work of Ibn Arabi and Rumi’,
in L Lewisohn (ed.), The Legacy of Mediaval Persian Sufism, KNP,
London & New York, 1992, pp. 233-245.
Cixous, H, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, E Prenowitz (trans.),
Routledge, London, 1997.
Gidlow, E, Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy, Diana Press, Baltimore,
1976.
Harvey, A (ed.), The Essential Gay Mystics, Castle Books, Edison, 1997.
Helminski, CA, Women of Sufism: A Hidden Treasure, Shambhala, Boston,
2003.
Tahseen Béa
19
______________________________________________________________
Irigaray, L, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, S
Pluháček (trans.), Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.
Irigaray, L, ‘Spiritual Tasks for Our Age’, in Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, L
Irigaray (ed.), Continuum, London, 2004, pp. 171-185.
Irigaray, L, ‘Divine Women’, in Sexes and Genealogies, GC Gill (trans.),
Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 55-72.
Shaw, M, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 1994.
Sivri, S, The Taste of Hidden Things, The Golden Sufi Center, Inverness,
1997.
Molecular and the Molar:
Marek M. Wojtaszek
Abstract The paper is a critical investigation of the sexual as it is created and
developed in the narrative of Ang Lee’s oeuvre Brokeback Mountain.
Employing Deleuze’s highly idiosyncratic approach to the study of the
cinematic work - one no longer conceiving art as the copy of nature, rather,
as a creation of desire - I will propose a novel and radical glance at this
broadly debated cinematic production. More specifically, I shall focus on the
notion of the sexual and attempt to unearth its fundamentally material, if
forgotten, status and force. The article, drawing on Deleuzean and Guattarian
conceptions of affectivity and desire, engages itself in the rigorous critique of
the Oedipal, transcendentally legitimised, and socially practiced construal of
men’s and women’s sexuality. Following Deleuze’s appeal for even more
abstract models of thinking sexuality (connectivity), which by no means
stands for the flight from the body, I contend that it is our self-understanding
and figuration of our bodies that incarcerate the sexual and preclude its
authentic realization and appreciation. Sexuality realizes itself through the
body; therefore, the paper looks at the (male) bodies as the film portrays them
and seeks for alternative manners of thinking the corporeal and the sexual.
Key words: affect, becoming, body, Brokeback Mountain, Gilles Deleuze,
desire, multiplicity, sexuality
The truth is that sexuality is everywhere.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus1
1.
1ntroduction
Infuriated as I have grown by the oft-recurring theme in the plethora
of articles, both in the popular press and in scholarly journals, about the
conspicuous absence of talk about sexuality in the latest film by Ang Lee,
Brokeback Mountain (2005), I wish to express my objection to such a claim,
which, in my view, testifies to an utterly negativistic and uncritical reading of
the film. Conversely, as I, in the course of this paper, attempt to demonstrate,
sexuality becomes the (molecular) driving force of the entire narrative. It is
rather its absent presence that animates the characters (Ennis del Mar and
Jack Twist) and fuels their lives. By no means does this return of neomaterialism want to revert to the phenomenological, or even
psychoanalytical, accounts of the corporeal and sexual; rather it proclaims a
radical critique of the subjectivism that they conceal, which, as Gilles
Deleuze remarks, is the last vestige of Western “dogma of transcendence”
22
______________________________________________________________
which precludes an appreciation of the libidinal, thus degrading life to a mere
preservation-directed and death-bound phenomenon.2
By now, it should come as no surprise that it is only when sexuality
is released from the constraints of the negativistic logic of desire and stripped
of its metaphysical underpinnings that life and sexuality can be experienced
affirmatively and lived on a social-desiring plane of immanence. Following
Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critiques of the discourses of philosophy and
psychoanalysis, as set forth in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus,3 I aim
to escape the commonsensical, molar construal of sexuality, reading
Brokeback Mountain as a painterly visualisation of life’s intrinsic forces and
flows (desire), as the tagline of the movie seems to admonish: “Love is a
force of nature.”4 Therefore, proposing a radical change of paradigm, in lieu
of enquiring what desire might be, this article explores how it functions and
what it produces, thus investigating its variegated material trajectories.
Disengaging from the dominant conceptualisations of the flesh, from the
entrenched trust in our putatively immaculate perception, I argue for thinking
the body as the incorporeal multiplicity, which best accounts for Ennis’ and
Jack’s becoming-erotic.
At no rate do I attempt to present a totalising critique of the film.
Rather, being critical of what Deleuze and Guattari diagnose as our Western
dis-ease, our always transcendentally supported, murderous quest for some
allegedly existing origin or sense, what they call “interpretosis,” I propose to
view the film as an assemblage of sensations. I will look into the manners by
which, instead of tracing becoming back to a certain being, it triggers,
affirms, and enhances virtual powers of life through creational and
transformational becoming-sexual. Lastly, as the film aptly shows, life as
sexuality can come to pass only if it becomes liberated from any
transcendence whatsoever, be it symbolic, familial, deathly, or subjective. It
is only in a Nietzsche-inspired Dionysian self-forgetting that the principium
individuationis is crumbled, whereby original solitude is affirmed through a
merging with everything.
2.
Immanence of Desire
“The traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset,”5
the authors of Anti-Oedipus boldly pronounce, alluding directly to the
Platonic heritage perpetuated in our structure of thinking. The logic of desire
embedded in Western traditions of thought postulates desire as the split
between the production of the desired object and its acquisition. Placing
desire on the side of acquisition inevitably forces us to think of it primarily as
a lack of the real object.6 Thus construed, desire ends up essentialised in lack,
which triggers the production of the object. Indeed, desire is thought of as a
process of production, but what it produces are merely fantasies. Functioning
according to the idealistic principle, desire doubles the reality by constantly
Marek M. Wojtaszek
23
______________________________________________________________
fantasising about it. If looked at closely, it becomes clear that the real object
that desire lacks is found in the natural or social world, whilst desire is
programmed to be endlessly producing its imaginary mirror, “as though there
were a dreamed-of object behind every real object, a mental production
behind all real production.”7 It necessarily sentences desire to the eternal
unattainability of the object and, being steered by the idealistic machine, to
the impossible coupling of the real with its representation. It is not surprising
that under such logic, predicated on the idea of lack, Ennis’ and Jack’s
experience of love becomes de-materialised, dis-embodied, delegated to
some meta-physical realm. Love as the unconditional affirmation of sexual
powers of life can only and sadly take place in “the hell in the middle of
nowhere,” away from the panopticon of the culture that erects itself upon the
burial of the libidinal.8 This drastic castration exercised on desire results in
turning two men’s existence into an unwanted mix of lies and undeserved
pain, rendering their lives miserable and pitiful, destitute of vigour and mirth,
a vicious circle of stultifying repetition. Repetition of submission, repression,
and guilt brought about by their bodies as a punishment for not giving voice
to their desire, for not letting it produce this connection, this reality, their
reality of their love. Desire, incarcerated within this dominant logic
predicated on lack, ends up dispossessed of its material and real powers.
Instead, Deleuze and Guattari joyfully proclaim:
If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is
productive, it can be productive only in the real world and
can produce only reality…. Desire does not lack anything;
it does not lack its object…. Desire and its object are one
and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a
machine. Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is
another machine connected to it.9
It is only when Ennis and Jack do away with Oedipus, to which Deleuze and
Guattari disdainfully refer as “ideational rubbish,” that they can feel that
desire is fundamentally productive rather than lacking.10 Desire as a
productive force generates products that are real and not phantasmatic.
Deleuze and Guattari’s entire enterprise, by seeking to bind the material and
libidinal, is set to dispense with any transcendence which might block the
flow of life, crippling its sexual powers, curtailing its creative and
transformative expansion. “The truth of the matter is that social production is
purely and simply desiring production itself.”11
This horizontality comes into being only through an abolition of
subjectivity as an heir to the emptied seat of assassinated God. Anti-Oedipus
announces, “It is the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a
fixed subject.”12 Here lies the core of its scathing critique of Freudianism, of
24
______________________________________________________________
its anthropocentrism, the commencement of analysis from bounded
individual or ego. Life does not begin personally, all the less in the bounds of
the family. Desire, therefore, is not to be reduced to genital relations between
persons and sexuality limited to an act, something that two bodies do. These
genital acts, as Brokeback stresses, by no means overshadow other material
realisations of sexuality. Conversely, persons and bodies are effects of the
sexual organisation of desire. Freud’s oedipalising, transcendental structure
accounts for his, as alas, for most other theoreticians of desire’s want to have
order in the face of assumed libidinal disorder. His inability to explicate the
germinal flux of life (sexuality) makes him resort to representation
(Oedipus), which eventuates in the ultimate abandonment of sexuality
altogether.13 The film provides an excellent, if harrowing, account of how
mourning and melancholia become commonplace under such a negativistic
logic of desire. This idealistic desexualised machinery is programmed to
impose control (heteronormativity, dialectic of gender), inflict and execute
dreadful sanctions and punishments on the disobedient.
The constraining power of the dominant conception of love again
turns victorious, succeeding in forcing desire to set Ennis and Jack in search
of a dialectically opposed being, regardless of their own will. Desire gets
subjugated entirely, harnessed to the re-creation of a highly oppressive
representational system. No longer can one tell which sense of culpability is
greater in Ennis, the tragic bearer of his own desire: the shutting up of the
omnivorous mouth of desire, or the failing to adequately play his cultural and
familial roles (of masculinity, of father, of lover, of breadwinner). Jack
becomes no less tragic a character, arguably, even the more tragic one.
Unable to subject his bodily desires to such a catastrophic castration as Ennis,
he indulges himself in a chain of sexual encounters with strangers for sheer
genital satisfaction, while remaining all the while in the affectionate relation
to his mountainous companion. Jack’s case acutely shows the exasperation
and tragedy that are brought about by prohibition of the material realisation
of desire. Lack, try as Jack may, stays unrecoverable; regardless of the
number of make-outs he has, of bodies he forms connections with, he cannot
ease his restless longing for love. Desire still being in the constraints of
Oedipus, dispossessed of its material power, yoked to genital functions,
causes him to endlessly strive for the unattainable ideal, thus contributing to
the resiliency of the system and the recyclable lack at its centre. Being
dramatically trapped between bodily desires, on the one hand, and the
impossibility of living and experiencing authentic love beside his beloved
one, on the other, Jack becomes telling evidence of self-extirpation and a lifetime agony that idealistic love and meta-physical rendering of desire bring.
This orgiastic and diabolically carnal vision of desire must be kept repressed,
so that socio-cultural life may be established under the leadership of
consciousness. Considered the sinful site of desire, the body has, by
Marek M. Wojtaszek
25
______________________________________________________________
implication, to be forgotten, submerged beneath the dispassionate logic of
meta-physical love. This erasure of mat(t)er-iality is precisely the source of
all suffering that Jack and Ennis unrightfully undergo. The culture holds them
in check, disallowing an experience of passionate mutual sharing, actually
inducing them to lie to themselves, to their bodies, and respectively, to
everyone they enter into a relation with (women, wives, children). It is not
their love which brings about others’ suffering and misery, but the very
idealistic character and hypocrisy of our culture, desperately seeking to
impose conformism and utilitarianism, grounding its legitimacy in the idea(l)
of another world, pure and eternal.
3.
Materiality of Desire and Becoming-multiplicity
To capture more materially the intrinsically productive power of
desire, what is needed is a complete dis-intrication of the libidinal from the
shadows of the subject and instead, as Deleuze and Guattari propose, to think
of desiring-machines, which successfully precludes a crude subsumption of
desire under the traditional notion of bounded anthropomorphic body. It is
the function of desire to connect, to relate one erotic machine with another,
endlessly producing and devising more complex and sophisticated
configurations. Therefore, it is imperative that we renounce the
phenomenological construal of the corporeal and begin envisioning it rather
as an open multiplicity, an assemblage of connections and conjunctions,
remaining exposed and vulnerable to the flows of life in all their
unpredictability and virtual potentiality.
It becomes clear that desire is itself a multiplicity, never in pursuit of
a particular object but engaged in making connections, enabling interflows of
intensities and affects. The multiple structure of desire precludes assumed
unity of the addressee of one’s desire. One never desires something or
someone, but rather always desires an aggregate.14 What, then, is the nature
of relations between all these elements forming an aggregate for an aggregate
to become desired? There is limitlessness inscribed in the construal of an
assemblage; so too intricacy. It is difficult to speak of desire other than as a
play of divergent forces that any reality is a totality of. Desire thus viewed
might well be considered something mythical, extraterrestrial; a cosmic
interplay of molecules and forces that cannot be condensed into any symbolic
form, any theoretical definition, any corporeal phenomenon. Desire for
something is a will to pleasure generated towards a paysage, a landscape
(Brokeback), that someone and something can become. “In desiring an
object, the desire is not for the object, but for the whole context, the
aggregate; I desire in an aggregate.”15 This implies that desire as an
assemblage must be constructed out of elements and forces at one’s disposal.
This is far from saying that there is an agent who does the constructing;
“Desire is not in the subject, but the machine in desire.”16 Jack’s confession
26
______________________________________________________________
during one of their re-connections in the mountains, “Sometimes I miss you
so much that I can hardly stand it”,17 bespeaks a novel, more complex
construal of desire. It is his languishing not for Ennis as an embodied being,
neither as an idealised fixed image. Rather, it expresses a multiplicity, a
creative and affirmative blend of his bodily memories and sensations,
accounting for a living interplay of affects, both actual and virtual ones. It
testifies to the ever growing producibility and creativity of their bodies, of
desire itself. Anti-Oedipus states, “Desire does not take as its object persons
or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and
flows of every sort to which it is joined.”18
Desire disengaged from an acquisition of the desired object, “instead
of a yearning becomes an actualization;”19 a production itself, the production
of productions, a production of connections, of life itself in its real, material
dimension. Purged of its catastrophic undertones, desire becomes immanent
to life, becomes life. The chasm between the psychic and the social is
overcome by the two becoming one. Put differently, what both Ennis and
Jack desire is what they get. Jack’s and Ennis’ social desires are doubtless
different, as they are two distinct creations, differently embodied and
embedded in their walks of life. Growing up in somatophobic culture, both
feel estranged and alienated, ravenous and languishing for intimacy and
proximity, bodily connectivity, and, quite simply, touch, which they have,
especially as men, been ideologically severed from. Their love is absolutely
material, which the story visualises in a sequence upon Brokeback. Their
corporeal encounter accounts for their desperate, but beautiful, attempt to
regain what their bodies have been sequestrated of. It paints with supremely
earthly colours the picture of how beautiful and simple love can become, only
if stripped of its cultural ideologies (distance from civilisation), materially
figured (embodied and embedded in the actual context - togetherness of the
sheep), and freed from limiting and territorialising categories, as a truly
schizophrenic process (real, material flows within the bodies - body fluids
such as blood, sperm, sweat, tears, but also flows in the body politic, such as
flows of clouds, trajectories of sheep, rides of horses, drops of hail, streams
of water, etc.). This is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari suggest while
speaking of “love’s flows.”20 In a word, rehabilitating desire as social desire as a primal energy that makes the currents of the real flow - is, as the film
photographs, the way for the re-materialisation of love, its embodiment, and
the resurrection of its non-teleological becoming.
Revolutionary desire as a material and natural process, as a multicomponent machine initiating connections and making things possible, is “in
itself not a desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces,
that engineers.”21 The Brokeback episode constitutes a breakthrough of
desire; Jake and Ennis do not fall in love, as in some kind of ineluctable trap
that desire sets for them; rather, they are literally making love, producing it
Marek M. Wojtaszek
27
______________________________________________________________
thanks to this illumination of the force of nature, desire. In making love, they
materialise themselves, becoming one with nature, with each other,
permitting their bodily affectivity a carefree and joyful play. This is the
power of desire, the marine power of love, of dissolving and overwhelming,
that has forever been petrified in the hardened rocks of Western thought.
“Mountains are matched by deep ravines. Yet the sea remains: the fluid
petrified in sublime rocks still subsists as mass, surrounded by firm
ground,”22 Luce Irigaray notes. Brokeback Mountain in its very title seems to
remind of desire’s disruptive and unpredictable power dormant in each body.
It is a very special kind of metaphysics wherein the prefix “meta” refers to
the true beyond of representational thinking, otherising the “physis” and
thinking it as monstrous, and moving toward the far higher level of
abstraction that successfully “reaches the abstract machine that connects the
body to a whole of micropolitics of the social field.”23 Love does change the
world; unfortunately, this story in its entirety barely awards love any room
whatsoever. Desire is all about bodies, of whatever kind, about their
virtualities and plateaus of intensities. It is only through experimentation that
Ennis and Jack can verify whether connections with another body mobilise
the body’s flows or inhibit them. The story leaves no doubt whose bodies
interact smoothly and whose do not. What would be desire, were it not for the
bodies (human or inhuman, molar or molecular) and synergies between
them?
4.
Plateaus of Desire and Becoming-erotic
Love, thought of in identitarian terms, comes only into being when
the specificity of desire is questioned. Becoming-love is feasible only beyond
any territoriality, especially beyond persons and identities. It is Brokeback
Mountain that makes it possible for Ennis and Jack to undergo such a deterritorialisation and de-personalisation, dedicating themselves entirely to one
another in their becoming-sheep, becoming-sound, becoming-cloud,
becoming-imperceptible. The unearthing of their mobility keeps potentiality
as well as action in disequilibrium, holds potentiality in action as virtuality.
All these becomings are deeply rooted in matter; it is indeed matter that
enables the men to experience their bodies as multiplicities, multiple
becomings. In serene and virginal environs - whether herding sheep, sharing
stories by the fire or making love - they can freely enjoy peaceful moments of
self-forgetting; in un-making themselves, they make other, more complicated
and complex connections, thus going through a truly transcendental
experience, otherwise called love. “And I was changed into a cloud. Not in
ecstasy nor dissipated into the air, but a body animated throughout. Living
and aroused in each part of my flesh.”24 Jack and Ennis are making love, are
becoming-love, becoming-molecular, re-connecting to nature, away from the
vigilant eye of molar and mortifying culture.
28
______________________________________________________________
This same culture which, as Irigaray astutely claims, is afraid of the
body’s limitlessness, sentences Jack and Ennis to live in perpetual fear; fear
of the body’s becoming, of its perpetual renascence, of the jouissance bodies
can thereby generate.25 This joyful process of incessant creation of bodies
and bodily connections is by no means reduced to genital sexuality and a
vehicle for reproduction. It is rather “an opening to openness,”26 to use
Irigaray’s term, to unadulterated and uninhibited flows of forces, affects and
intensities, and most importantly, to time. The body can no longer be figured
as “either sketched on the horizon of orgasm. Or deposited as a memory of
what orgasm forgets;”27 simply as an object, a means toward any end.
Nothing could be further removed from the becoming-love than such a
positioning of the body. Surely, this involves a radicalisation of the notion of
the body; living body as the incorporeal, completely open and intrinsically
sexual, driven by desire, functioning by making connections with other
bodies, triggering flows of energies and intensities. The body rediscovers its
multiplicity in desire, its intrinsically sexual character, prompting it to ever
more expansion and experimentation. Deleuze and Guattari hold that love is
this very creative novelty of connection, this joining of multiplicities of
bodies, these bodies-multiplicities: “To join them to mine, to make them
penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s.”28 The Brokeback
episode of Jack’s and Ennis’ lives can justifiably be an epitome of a sheer
bliss that love evokes. Being disentangled from merciless cultural
surveillance, liberated from meta-physical obligations and duties, they can
experience an authentic return to the materiality of their bodies, their forces
and becomings, their playful multiplicities. The film stages a retrieval of
love, the most basic capacity of life to produce connections, a genuine return
to the innocence of life. “Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities.”29
This multiplicity is no doubt a driving force in the intercourse
scenes. “Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming
as a hundred thousand,”30 Anti-Oedipus insists. Desire is not about dualisms,
binaries, dialectical charades of any sort: subject - object, inside - outside,
active - passive; rather it bespeaks its potential for continuous change and
creation. Jack and Ennis, making love, render their multiplicities and enter
into new, seductive and exciting relations. To view these powerful moments
of intimacy as prurient amounts to a total misrecognition of the sexual
powers of life. Rather, these, like any other, literally sexually charged scenes,
remind us of the temporal frailty and spatial fragility of the relations bodies
form, of the virtual power of time, and consequently, affirmation and
enjoyment of every tiny intensity that our bodies through desire give (affect)
and steal (are affected).31 This implies openness to the flows of varied
charges of intensities that bodies produce, simultaneously actively and
passively, which orient to pleasure enjoyed on plateaus rather than as a
climax-fixated pursuit. The fairly little attention drawn to the sex acts in the
Marek M. Wojtaszek
29
______________________________________________________________
film seems in keeping with the erotology of plateaus, which frees Ennis and
Jack from an orgasmic obsession and allows more experimentation and
appreciation of the material and multiple erotic expressivity of life, an
affirmation of life as desire through an eternal journey between plateaus,
between intensive states of becoming.
Throughout, the story of two painfully solitary young men earning
their most precious gift quite unexpectedly herding sheep, making their own
love, echoes the silent but vibrant shimmering flow of desire, as a life force.
Their bodies immediately turn into multiple and material flows of sheep,
streams, clouds, horses, sounds, becoming always more. Put otherwise, the
immanence of desire conditions the very enactment of love, its
materialisation, its becoming, of their becoming-love. It does not need any
transcendental assurances, best expressed in the clichéd and misleading “I
love you,” which, quite tellingly, is never uttered by Jack or Ennis. As a
matter of fact, they never refer to their affection as “love.” There are two
crucial points to this. First, being brought up in the so-called Western
context, they might revere this word, thinking it appropriate to a heterosexual
relationship, whilst theirs remains an outburst of unbridled and traumatising
desire (Ennis’ articulation, “If that grabs hold of us…”).32 Or second, they
might well sense that what their bodies produce is something of a radically
different character and significance to them from their sustained relations
with women, a feeling verbally inexpressible, a play of intensities and affects
that is so overwhelming that it can only be lived and experienced in the hereand-now, a veritable immanence of time, of love. This is definitely not a
question of them being cowboys, or being unsophisticated or not refined
enough to speak their desire. Desire does not need verbalisation; rather, it
appreciates a body, welcoming experimentation as life’s basic mode and
capacity of living the sublime, as the men do on Brokeback Mountain. The
enigmatic sublime that desire carries is not to be confused with anything
other than this-worldly, rooted in matter, affirmative recognition and
acknowledgement of its vitality, fluctuating differences, its multiple
becomings beyond any territoriality.
Notes
1
G Deleuze and F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Continuum, London & New York, 2004, p. 322.
2
Here, Deleuze follows Foucault’s description of the Western tradition of
thought as a “subjection to transcendence.” M Foucault, The Archeology of
Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Pantheon, New York, 1972, p.
203.
30
______________________________________________________________
3
G Deleuze and F Guattari, op. cit.; G Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, Continuum, London & New York, 2004.
4
A Lee, Brokeback Mountain, Focus Features Home Video, Los Angeles,
California, 2005, DVD recording.
5
G Deleuze and F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, op. cit., p. 26.
6
Ibid., p. 26.
7
Ibid., p. 27.
8
A Lee, op. cit.
9
10
Ibid., p. 328.
11
Ibid., p.31
12
Ibid., p. 28.
13
The term is borrowed from Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm,
New York, Simon & Schuster, 1973; cited in Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus, ibid., p. 127.
14
G Deleuze and C Parnet, Dialogues II, Continuum, London & New York,
1987, p. 71.
15
Ibid., p. 77.
16
17
A Lee, op. cit.
18
19
E Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays in the Politics of Bodies,
Routledge, New York & London, 1995, p. 195.
20
21
Ibid., p. 366.
22
L Irigaray, Elemental Passions, Routledge, New York, 1992, p. 73.
23
G Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., p. 8.
24
L Irigaray, op. cit., p. 99.
25
Ibid., p. 53.
26
Ibid., p. 59.
27
Ibid., p. 77.
28
G Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., p. 39.
29
Ibid., p. 40.
30
31
It is in Anti-Oedipus that Deleuze and Guattari underscore that “Desire
knows nothing of exchange, it knows only theft and gift.” Deleuze and
Guattari, ibid., p. 203.
32
A Lee, op. cit.
Marek M. Wojtaszek
31
______________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Deleuze, G, and F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Continuum, London & New York, 2004.
Deleuze, G, and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Continuum, London & New York, 2004.
Deleuze, G, and C Parnet, Dialogues II, Continuum, London & New York,
2006.
Deleuze, G, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995,
Semiotext(e), New York, 2006.
Foucault, M, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,
Pantheon, New York, 1972.
Grosz, E, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays in the Politics of Bodies,
Routledge, New York & London, 1995.
Irigaray, L, Elemental Passions, Routledge, New York, 1992.
Lee, A, Brokeback Mountain. Focus Features Home Video, Los Angeles,
California, 2005. DVD recording.
Whore, Court, Church, I Modi
and the Origins of Modern Obscenity
Benjamin Jacob
Abstract: Intertwining sex and blasphemy, early pornography is situated at
the centre of a complex web, which binds Renaissance Classicism, an
increasing scientific urge to find material “truths,” and political tensions that
existed between Court and Church. This paper asks why this infamous genre
emerged at this time and what purpose(s) it performed. It sketches how
sexually graphic texts incorporated and depended upon the central tenets of
the European Renaissance to provide a combination of instruction, revelation,
and the most enduring and notorious form of social critique and moral
commentary that Europe had ever seen. Starting in Italy with a notorious
collection of engravings and sonnets called I Modi (1524 and 1527) this
paper considers how the themes of I Modi were influenced by political,
artistic, and religious currents of the time and how these themes paved the
way for later pornographic and obscene texts. What emerges is an exploration
of how the obscene brings onto the stage of public life that which an
increasingly modern civilisation required to be stifled. It considers how these
texts’ depictions of bodies as unveiled and opened represent an opening of
the eyes of their readers to a scathing and satirical criticism of civilisation’s
ruling institutions.
Key Words: Pietro Aretino, courtesan, erotica, I Modi, obscenity,
pornography, Marcantonio Raimondi, Renaissance, Giulio Romano
1.
Introduction: Sex, Knowledge and Truth
In The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault suggested that
nineteenth century Europe developed a confessional attitude to sex and the
body, which associated these subjects with knowledge and gave them a new
kind of power. “What is peculiar to modern [Western] societies,” he writes,
“is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated
themselves to speaking it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”1 In
this way, he goes on, sex became “a revelation of truth … A great sexual
sermon.”2
In fact the trinity of sex, knowledge, and truth that Foucault ascribes
to the nineteenth century can already be located in a much earlier era. In
Renaissance Europe - specifically Italy - sexually graphic texts first came to
be represented through modern methods, which were received, and in turn
formed, by a recognisably modern response. This response, or attitude,
viewed these texts as dangerously powerful and capable of revealing
uncomfortable truths. Thus, during the Renaissance, themes of light and truth
34
Whore, Court, Church and the Origins of Modern Obscenity
______________________________________________________________
came to be located in erotic representations of the human body. Combining
illustration and text in a way previously common to religious works, these
new obscene books hinged on the axis of lies versus truth, where the physical
truth of the body challenged the shallow, abstract truths of Court and Church.
This paper concentrates on the first, most notorious and influential,
modern obscene book: a collection of sixteen images, later accompanied by
sonnets, called I Modi - The Fashion - which appeared at that specific time
because it was a product of the fashions and values of its day. Neo-Platonism,
Classicism, the neo-classical cult of the whore, Medieval Christian attitudes to
sex, and the hypocrisy of the Papal court, all filtered through the skills of three
Renaissance talents - an artist, an engraver, and a writer - to create Europe’s
first modern, obscene text. What follows, considers each of these influences
and the form, themes, and content of I Modi.
2.
Renaissance Attitudes to Sex
First, and perhaps most significantly where attitudes towards
obscenity are concerned, the Renaissance inherited medieval attitudes to sex.
Central to prevailing attitudes was the Church, which presented the pleasures
of the flesh as belonging to the events of the Fall and ultimately linked to
damnation. Sex was regarded as a sin and sexual desire as a depraved craving
associated with evil and the devil.
Various contradictions occupy this Christian attitude to flesh. On
one level the more the Church became concerned with sex, the more sex
became its obsession. Instead of repressing it, sex was given significance.
Moreover, and ironically, there was a place for flesh in Christianity. Flesh
was embodied in Christ himself, variously depicted as a feminised body
feeding the Church with his blood, the Christ child with an erect penis
symbolic of his future resurrection, or nude on the cross with (or without) a
loincloth that emphasised the divine genitals as much as they served to veil
them. Furthermore, monks were among the most prolific creators of sexually
graphic material of the time, and their often surreal drawings of copulation
between men, men and women, and men and animals, which appear in the
margins of illuminated manuscripts, confirm that to see the medieval era as a
period of austere sexual repression does not match its reality or necessarily
reflect the values of everyday life.
Similarly, there were two sides to the Italian Renaissance. On one,
fornication and adultery were crimes, and the Pope, church officials, and all
good citizens obeyed the moral code set down by Church doctrine. Alongside
this, however, ran a day to day existence where prostitution was legal and the
Vatican, monasteries and priories were notorious for corruption and
debauchery.3 It is said, for example, that in 1501, Pope Alexander VI
celebrated All Saints Eve by watching fifty naked courtesans crawling on all
fours.4
Benjamin Jacob
35
______________________________________________________________
Into this world, the re-emergent popularity of classical aesthetics
and paganism increasingly pushed man and the pleasures of the present (as
opposed to the glory of the afterlife) to the centre of Renaissance art and
thought. So, at the hands of Renaissance artists, we find naturalistic
depictions of pagan mythology, especially those with erotic themes. Danae
and the golden shower, Venus and Mars, Leda and the Swan became popular
subjects, often transported to contemporary settings in order to reinforce a
link between the classical glory of the contemporary and ancient worlds.
Similar Renaissance treatments were made of Christian subjects, which
began to openly articulate Christianity’s traditionally repressed sensuality.
Significant in this respect, just as she had featured prominently in the art (and
sometimes literature) of the ancient world, we find the high-class prostitute
emerging as a favoured subject in the Renaissance.
Courtesans were politically powerful figures - etymologically
courtesan derives from courtier - and they comprised a significant part of
Renaissance Rome’s culture. In a city of celibate church figures, concubinage
was accepted, and among the sizeable number of Roman residents who
survived off selling sex, courtesans played on their status as luxury consumer
goods. They fashioned their hair in recognisable styles and wore veils that
temptingly revealed their shoulders and breasts. Thus, these women
combined sensuality and the neo-classical cult of female beauty, evoking the
Heterae of old, as well as the wealth and sensual possibilities of the present.5
These courtesan properties came to infuse Renaissance images of Flora,
Venus, and Aphrodite. Ever influential Christian iconography also found
itself incorporated into this fashion. Provocative depictions of Mary
Magdalene, the patron saint of prostitutes, combined the suggestive
sensuality of Christianity and the classical cult of the whore. Showing Mary
clad in the yellow veil of a contemporary courtesan - as some Renaissance
artists did - brought her into the every day world of the Renaissance.6 The
point I wish to make is that Renaissance classicism did not abandon Christian
subjects and values. Rather, aspects of Christianity remained central to
Renaissance attitudes to sexuality and its increasingly sensual imagery.
Indeed, it is to the Vatican itself that we must turn in order to locate the
origin of Europe’s first modern, obscene text.
3.
I Modi and the Nature of Its Affront
In 1523, as retaliation for late payment by Pope Clement VII, a
talented artist and apprentice to Raphael, called Giulio Romano, drew sixteen
sexual images onto the walls of the Vatican’s Sala di Constantino. Romano
then approached one of the most accomplished engravers of the day,
Marcantonio Raimondi. Raimondi transformed Romano’s drawings into
engravings. In 1524, they published the prints in booklet form. No complete
original prints exist, only a few fragments in the British Museum, some
36
______________________________________________________________
surviving woodcut copies, and a set of watercolour and ink copies made in
the mid-nineteenth century by Count de Waldeck (apparently from Raimondi
originals). These sources provide a reasonable, if incomplete, impression of
what the first plates may have looked like.
The first thing we notice about them is that these images are
typically Renaissance in form and content. Classical influence manifests
itself on various levels. Lists of sexual positions, for example, were common
in the ancient world - even Raimondi’s contemporaries suggested that he
took the idea from ancient Greek guides to sexual positions and brothels.7
Within the images themselves, the rendering of the figures and their
composition are comparable to Raphael’s. Alongside them, classical myth is
evoked by Cupid pulling a cart and men whose features resemble the satyrs
of antiquity. As Lynne Lawner has shown, further evidence of I Modi’s
classical roots can be seen in the way one image is lifted directly from the
carvings of a second century B.C. sarcophagus.8 Moreover, tapping into
contemporary artistic fashions, from their hairstyle and setting, the female
figures are recognisable as courtesans.
Exactly why these engravings received such immediate notoriety is
often left undiscussed. After all, many famous Renaissance artists were
producing canvases of a sexual nature, most of which survived intact. A
number of factors, however, set I Modi apart.
Bawdy works, like Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), had been
published much earlier, and around the same time as I Modi’s appearance,
satirical Academic pornography enjoyed a limited circulation among Italy’s
elite. Unlike these works and the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, I
Modi’s unique threat was that, printed in bulk, its distribution could reach a
more or less indiscriminate readership and, thanks to its illustrations, its
message did not require literacy skills for its interpretation.
Second, in many of these images ambiguity surrounds the orifice
being penetrated by the male. Sodomy was treated as a serious transgression
throughout Europe at the time. In Renaissance and late Medieval Italy, it was
the only sex crime referred to as a sin; rape, for example, was seen as a
passionate lapse, rather than evil.9 Sodomy, however, struck at God (as
evinced by the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah) and at society by threatening
its basic organisational levels - male-female, natural-unnatural, family and
reproduction. In practice, homosexual and heterosexual sodomy were
widespread (the latter as a form of birth control); however, transcripts from
trials in Venice indicate that, if found guilty, a sodomite could expect public
mutilation, execution, and the burning of his remains.10 The suggestion of
sodomy within several of I Modi’s images, therefore, represents a particularly
objectionable and conscious affront to Renaissance Rome’s secular and
religious moral code as well as the social structure.
Benjamin Jacob
37
______________________________________________________________
Third, this work is set apart from others because, with little pretence
of mythical content, I Modi shows bodies copulating for their own sake.
These are naturalistic arousing scenes of casual sex presented neither as a
warning, nor as a suggestive joke at the expense of dim-witted husbands (as
occurs in the Decameron). Also, unlike the monk’s pornographic doodles,
here sex acts are not squeezed into the margins. Books had long been the
medium for conveying knowledge, but as a book, I Modi does not place God,
science or philosophy at its centre. Instead it presents sex and the body as a
new kind of knowledge and truth.
4.
Aretino’s Sonetti Lussuriosi.
Perhaps aware of their origins on the walls of the Vatican and his
own role in their production, when the Pope learned of the sixteen prints, he
ordered all copies destroyed. Romano fled to Mantua. The engraver,
Raimondi was less fortunate. Captured, he was thrown in the Vatican prison.
Two years later, with the aid of a popular writer, Pietro Aretino, and the
negotiations of a future cardinal, Raimondi was released.
Aretino is a central figure in the development of these sixteen prints.
Indeed, to this day, they are commonly, if misleadingly, known as “Aretino’s
Postures.” In a letter, Aretino tells how,
After I arranged for Pope Clement to release Raimondi… I
desired to see those figures which had driven [some among
the Papal court] to cry out that [their creators] should be
crucified. As soon as I gazed at them I was filled with the
same spirit that had moved Giulio Romano to draw them
[and] … I tossed off the sonnets which are [now] to be seen
below the original pictures. With all due respect to
hypocrites, I dedicate these lustful pieces to you, heedless
of fake prudishness and asinine prejudices that forbid the
eyes to gaze at the things they most delight to see. What
harm is there in seeing a man mounting a woman? Should
beasts, then, be freer than we are?11
In 1527, beneath new renditions of Raimondi’s engravings, a second edition
of the sixteen postures was produced. It contained Aretino’s sonnets. By
Papal decree, almost all copies of the new edition were destroyed. More
forceful action against the authors was no doubt prevented by the Sack of
Rome, which occurred the same year and effectively ended the Roman
Renaissance.
38
______________________________________________________________
Figure 1. Image number 11 and the accompanying sonnet
taken from the woodcut copies ostensibly made from the
Raimondi/Aretino original. The female figure - the
procuress - gazes at the cavorting figures and mirrors the
presence of the voyeuristic reader. (Reprinted from Lynne
Lawner’s I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album
of the Sixteenth Century: Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio
Romano, Pietro Aretino, Peter Owen Publishers, London,
1988, p. 83, with kind permission from Peter Owen Ltd.,
London.)
Benjamin Jacob
39
______________________________________________________________
Mocking, satirical, anti-clerical and explicit, Aretino’s sonnets are
an interpretation and extension of the images. Ostensibly, they provide the
figures in each picture with voices, for the sonnets take the form of dialogues
in vulgar Italian between the performing man and courtesan. The collection
opens with the voice of a male lover proclaiming, “Let’s fuck, my love, let’s
fuck, since all of us were born only to fuck/ You adore the cock and I the
cunt. The world would be nothing without this act.” This is an inclusive
statement - “all of us” - which positions sex, not God, Church, art,
civilisation, or love as giving the world its principal meaning. The second
stanza continues, “If it were proper to fuck after death, I’d say let’s fuck
ourselves to death, then we could fuck Adam and Eve.”12 The Christian
afterlife is evoked as a place of sensual delights and Adam and Eve as all too
human.
Other sonnets frankly discuss sodomy. In sonnet 10, the man objects
to the woman’s request for anal sex, explaining that “I can’t commit this sin.
That kind of thing is meat for [Cardinals and Bishops]/ They always have
depraved tastes.” Another sonnet explicitly debunks any (perhaps defensible)
notion that these copulating figures represent mythical Gods. In Sonnet 12,
therefore, the woman addresses her lover as, “Mars, you Malatesta-like
coward, you shouldn’t push a woman under you like that. One shouldn’t fuck
Venus with blind fury, but instead be measured and polite.” The man replies,
“I’m not Mars, I’m Ercole Rangone/ And you beneath me, you’re Angela
Greca not Venus.” Ercole Ragone was a contemporary nobleman, a public
figure of the time, and Angela Greca a well-known courtesan.13 In this way,
the sonnets emphasise that the images show real courtesans and personages
of the day.
The neo-Platonic form of the dialogues of I Modi (a trope which
recurs in Aretino’s later work of erotic story-telling, Ragionamenti) play on
the conceit of eavesdropping on whores confessing intimate secrets. Of
course, the voice is really Aretino’s, and in sonnet 15, he directly addresses
the reader saying “Come view this, you who like to fuck/Without being
disturbed in that sweet enterprise.”14
These lines illustrate a central theme of both images and sonnets:
that of sight. “Come view this,” writes Aretino. His earlier cited letter
explains that seeing the images inspired him to compose the verses, which he
dedicates to those whose “prejudices forbid the eyes to gaze at the things they
delight to see. What harm is there in seeing a man mount a woman?”
(emphasis added). In part this dwelling on sight links to early-modern
thought, which regarded the eyes as sexual organs. But accompanying this
component is another one of voyeurism. Figures in the images reflect the
voyeuristic readers of the sonnets, as they gaze at these conventionally
hidden scenes (see Figure 1). As such, I Modi introduces a combination of
40
______________________________________________________________
voyeurism and the erotic gaze, which became stock components of later
pornographic and obscene material.
5.
Conclusion: Obscenity Unveiled and Unveiling
Just as significant, however, are the issues underlying this visual
component. Like so much else in I Modi, its emphasis on the gaze reflects
contemporary concerns. Sight, for example, permeated Renaissance
discourse. In short, following aspects of Platonism, sight had an integral role
in the process of apprehending physical truths. Sight was central to
Renaissance education and knowledge. But what knowledge or truth did the
images and terminology of I Modi reveal?
They revealed for the first time, in a widely available way, acts
which had previously not been seen by the public: ostensibly moral, civilised
aristocrats and prelates cavorting with whores. It removed these public
figures from their pedestals and revealed their “true” nature. Its subversive
challenge to social hierarchy and its anti-clerical bent are evident, not least in
its suggestion that sodomy is a penchant of the social elite. On a level of
wider significance, I Modi opened the acceptable façade of Renaissance Italy
to the naked truth of man’s bestial nature.15 In doing so, it lives up to one of
the Latinate roots of the word “obscene:” ob scaenus, that which is “off the
stage” of public life, and not openly shown for the sake of public good. I
Modi, indeed, is obscene because it brings into the limelight what was
previously unseen on the public stage.16 It did so not to disapprove of man’s
sexual urges but to rail against the hypocrisy and false premises upon which,
it suggests, socially acceptable beliefs were based. The same themes return at
the core of all later European, sexually graphic works, from those by the Earl
of Rochester and the anonymous authors of erotic classics like L’École des
filles, to the notorious works of the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille.
In closing, we should note that the Church and papal court had one
further role to play in the creation of modern obscenity. To designate material
obscene depends as much on its reception as its content. So, struggling with
the formation of a new European identity, the reaction of the Vatican created
a genre of “obscene” literature. Yet, in forbidding it, the Vatican made
obscene texts the equivalent of Eden’s fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
Prohibition secured the notoriety, and simultaneously the attraction, of I Modi
and all the obscene literature which followed, for it endowed it with man’s
perennial association between taboos and places of secret knowledge. It is
therefore due to the Renaissance, the printing press, classicism and
Christianity, that obscene literature’s form, themes, and its illicit attraction
were secured.
Benjamin Jacob
41
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
M Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, London, 1978, p. 35.
2
Ibid., p. 7.
3
See G Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in
Renaissance Venice, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford, 1985,
pp. 77-82; and L Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the
Renaissance, Rizzoli International, New York, 1986, p. 88.
4
I Tang, Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation, Channel 4 Books,
London, 1999, p. 81.
5
Lawner, op. cit., pp. 4-5.
6
Ibid., p. 69 and p. 178.
7
L Lawner, I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Sixteenth
Century: Giulio Romano, Marcantonio Raimondi, Pietro Aretino and Count
Jean-Frédéric-Maxmilien de Waldeck, Peter Owen Publishers, London,
1988, pp. 30-31. This paper is indebted to many aspects of Lawner’s
excellent study.
8
Ibid., pp. 35-38.
9
Ruggiero, op. cit., p. 96.
10
Ibid., pp. 108-125.
11
P Aretino, cited in Lawner, I Modi, op. cit., p. 14. All English quotations
and translations are from Lawner.
12
Ibid., p. 62.
13
Ibid., p. 80 and p. 84.
14
Ibid., p. 90.
15
P Findlen, ‘Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy’, in
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins
of Modernity, 1500-1800, Zone Books, New York, 1996, pp. 49-108, p. 59
and p. 77.
16
H Ellis, ‘The Revaluation of Obscenity’, in More Essays on Love and
Virtue, Constable and Co., London, 1931, p. 104. See also P Michelson,
Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity, State University of New
York Press, New York, 1993, p. xi.
Bibliography
Aretino, P, Ragionamenti: The Harlot’s Dialogues, Vol. 1, B Kirby (intro.),
Brandon House, North Hollywood, 1966.
Boccaccio, G, The Decameron, GH McWilliam (trans.), Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1972.
42
______________________________________________________________
Ellis, H, ‘The Revaluation of Obscenity’, in More Essays on Love and Virtue,
Constable and Co., London, 1931, pp. 103-142.
Findlen, P, ‘Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy’, in
Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the
Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, Zone Books, New York, 1996,
pp. 49-108.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, London, 1978.
Lawner, L, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance, Rizzoli
International, New York, 1986.
Lawner, L, I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album of the Sixteenth
Century: Marcantonio Raimondi, Giulio Romano, Pietro Aretino
and Count Jean-Frédéric-Maxmilien de Waldeck, Peter Owen
Publishers, London, 1988.
Michelson, P, Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity, State
University of New York Press, New York, 1993.
Ruggiero, G, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in
Renaissance Venice, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford,
1985.
Tang, I, Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation, Channel 4 Books,
London, 1999.
PART II
Sex in Sociological Perspective(s)
Alberta Paints the Small Town Pink:
Rural Sexualities in the Wake of Brokeback Mountain
Adam Kaasa
Abstract: The success of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, filmed in Alberta,
Canada, will have long-term effects for the strategies of the destinationmarketing organisation (DMO) Travel Alberta and for the sexual geography
of the province. Travel Alberta is using the gay-themed film as a marketing
tool, even though Alberta is not marketed as a gay and lesbian destination.
This paper investigates the tactics Travel Alberta employs to salvage the
marketing potential of Brokeback Mountain. An analysis of the Travel
Alberta website shows a privileging of Alberta’s brand image of “nature.”
Content analysis of three daily newspapers identifies a contrast between
words found under the topic of “Nature” and words found under the topic
“Gay”. This further associates Brokeback Mountain with the “natural” brand
image of Alberta, while simultaneously distancing the province from links to
homosexuality. Within the context of film induced tourism and sexual
geography, a counterfactual hypothesis emerges introducing a
counterintuitive narrative of queer political possibility in Alberta. Future
studies would continue the analysis of print media, government documents,
and the embodied practice of queer persons to identify multi-scalar strategies
enabling the reconciliation of global economic opportunities, on the one
hand, and local moral or political expediency, on the other.
Keywords: Brokeback Mountain, DMO, film-induced tourism, Ang Lee,
queer tourism, sexual citizenship, sexual geography, Travel Alberta
1.
This is Alberta
Imagine, if you can, the shock I experienced sitting down in
November 2006 to take in the icy blue eyes featured in the latest of the James
Bond franchises. And no, the shock didn’t emerge from seeing David Craig
naked on a chair having his balls whipped by an effeminate man all the while
screaming for more. (Those of you who haven’t seen the film now have a
reason to see it…) Rather, to my horror and slight bemusement, my shock
was reserved for a shorter, but altogether different scene. There, in a packed
London cinema, caught between the colour bombs of the latest Sony flat
screen and yet another mobile phone commercial, was a taste of home. A
one-piece, neon ski suit whisks down a grainy, dizzying mountain shot, timed
to the kind of Canadian rock that you might half expect at the end of a 1990s
after-school special or accompanying a poorly funded civic pride film. Lord
of the Rings brand scenic pan-shots cut to images of hotels, big smiles, and
46
Alberta Paints the Small Town Pink
______________________________________________________________
even bigger perms. This is Alberta, we’re told. Isn’t it time you try the
experience?
As I slouched down in my chair, I realised the wasted money
Alberta has spent hiring Ruder Finn, a New York based communications and
services agency, to promote Alberta in the print and electronic media. Looks
like rehashed goods - and to an audience who only knows Alberta as one of
the unfortunate names of Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, a different
approach may have proved slightly more effective. Nevertheless, this kind of
direct place marketing, merged with the realm of cinema, is a growing feature
in what is now called film-induced tourism. It is not surprising, then, that in
2006 the provincial marketing organisation (DMO) Travel Alberta decided to
make Brokeback Mountain its key focus.
It was a letter to the editor in The Edmonton Journal that said it best:
there is a “hypocrisy flowing” in “welcoming the world to ‘gay friendly’
Alberta.”1 Imagine a province recently created - only joining the Dominion of
Canada on September 1, 1905 - with a large and influential agricultural
history and rural population, under a seemingly endless rule by its
Conservative Party, which obstructs the burgeoning rights of gays and
lesbians at every opportunity.2 This is the province of Alberta, Canada. Now
imagine the film Brokeback Mountain, an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 2000
short story that depicts the romance between two male ranch hands in rural
America of the 1960s, which was shot on location in Alberta’s vast and
diverse landscapes and subsequently became the core of a new provincial
tourism marketing strategy incorporating film-induced tourism. The
hypocrisy, the irony that follows, is not hard to perceive.
2.
Queering Brokeback Alberta
The use of Ang Lee’s recent cinematic masterpiece by the
destination marketing organisation Travel Alberta to promote tourism to the
Province of Alberta demands pause. Because of the gay-themed storyline,
Brokeback Mountain’s use in place promotion marks the intersection of
burgeoning literature with film-induced tourism, urban entrepreneurialism,
and the problems of current geographies of gay and lesbian travel. My
research question, then, is divided into two parts. First, given that Alberta is
not recognised as a gay and lesbian travel destination, what prevents Travel
Alberta from using Brokeback Mountain as an impetus to subversively
promote a new “gay friendly” Alberta? The related question emerges: how
does Travel Alberta use Brokeback Mountain in its marketing strategy
without accentuating the contradictions between the homosexual theme of the
film and Alberta’s own homophobic governmental policies? Second, what
are the implications of Travel Alberta’s policies on the sexual geography of
Alberta?
Adam Kaasa
47
______________________________________________________________
Two disparate yet telling works of scholarship inform the theoretical
basis of this study. Annette Pritchard and Nigel J. Morgan’s Tourism
Promotion and Power demonstrates the gendered layers woven together to
construct tourist landscapes and argues that new research needs to investigate
“marketing materials which privilege particular discourses over others.”3 I
will argue that Travel Alberta chose to privilege the discourse of nature over
the discourse of sexuality in its use of Brokeback Mountain in a placemarketing campaign. In Queer Diffusions, Larry Knopp and Michael Brown
produce a much more nuanced characterisation of queer theory with respect
to spatialisation:
One way of doing this in the context of queer politics and
scholarship is by revealing the ways in which heterosexism
is an incomplete, incongruous, nonhegmonic, and spatially
diffuse set of social relations and practices full of
possibilities for subversion and reconfiguration, rather than
how it is a coherent, complete, spatially fixed, and
hegemonic one.4
In line with Knopp and Brown’s provocation, the second part of my research
question tackles the implications of Travel Alberta’s privileged marketing
discourse in terms of its contradictory effects on sexual geography. I will
argue towards a reading of Travel Alberta’s policies that reveals their
incompleteness and incongruence and offers the possibility to re-imagine, or
in Knopp and Brown’s words “reconfigure,” Alberta as a queer frontier.
The phrase “queer frontier” is useful here. The term queer situates
the phrase within a history of queer theory that actively attempts to reveal
instances of heteronormative social, cultural and political assumption. For
Annamarie Jagose “[q]ueer is a zone of possibilities always inflected by a
sense of potentiality that it cannot yet quite articulate.”5 The term frontier is
imagined as the edge of understanding, constantly pushing the boundaries of
possibility. The “queer frontier”, then, is the outcome of Travel Alberta’s
policies - an outcome that holds a radical potential for the sexual geography
of Alberta that “it cannot yet quite articulate.”
The following four assertions act to illustrate and contextualise the
research within the emerging literature First, film-induced tourism, though
difficult to measure in impact, is fuelled by global media and embraced by
DMOs interested in increasing exposure. Consequently, film-induced tourism
is expected to grow exponentially in André Jansson’s “mediatised”
marketplace.6 Second, gay and lesbian tourism represents a sizable and
disproportionate share of the global tourist market and has led to the
development of a key circuit of cities and gay hallmark events, which
dramatically improve the global profile of those places favoured by its
48
______________________________________________________________
discerning clientele. Third, DMOs spend considerable time and effort nichemarketing destinations to gay and lesbian consumers, based not only on
economic expediency but also on increased political pragmatism within a
globalised urban entrepreneurial discourse. Fourth, and finally, gay and
lesbian identity formation has been linked to both tourism and to the media in
terms of developing and promulgating a repository of social cues and shared
histories.7
Within this context, my original research questions can be
reformulated as follows: Why does Travel Alberta not use the success of the
gay-themed film Brokeback Mountain to profit from emerging trends in gay
and lesbian film-induced tourism? What strategies has Travel Alberta
employed in the place marketing of Alberta to a wider audience that prevent
Alberta from becoming a gay and lesbian destination? What are the social
and spatial implications of these policies, despite their “non-queer”
intentions, for the potential politics of a queer frontier in Alberta?
3.
Marketing Alberta
The Travel Alberta Strategic Tourism Marketing Plan 2006 - 2009
is the authoritative policy document for Travel Alberta and is updated
annually. Travel Alberta is acutely aware that it is still relatively unknown in
terms of Canadian destinations, and therefore its number one goal remains to
“[e]nhance awareness of Alberta as a tourism destination in all markets,”8 to
make the province a “‘must visit’ destination.”9 In addition, the company
aims to “expand and enhance” its presence in all scales of markets,10 so as to
push “destination awareness through relationships with media and public
relations.”11 In terms of awareness, its language is extremely clear.
In terms of visitors, the majority of people who travel in Alberta are
Albertans. Any effective marketing plan, then, has to avoid dissonance with
the self image of Albertans, in creating an image of Alberta to sell both
within and beyond it boundaries. Arguably, to a province rife with iconic
images of frontier masculinity, moreover one that consistently provides
institutional obstacles to the rights of sexual minorities within a Canadian
context, the use of the most famous “gay cowboy” movie to sell the province
just doesn’t quite jive - no matter how many bottles of Jack Daniels you’ve
gone through.
In a speech to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta on March 7,
2006, the Minister of Economic Development, Clint Dunford, responded to
doubts about this increased reliance on film-induced tourism and its positive
impact on the economy of the province:
Well, it will be quite important … to make sure that your
regional economic development alliances and other
consortia get in on the film business because, one, it’s big
Adam Kaasa
49
______________________________________________________________
and, of course, it has a tremendous attraction. One of the
objectives that we have here in this department is to
increase the film industry even further. It’s important that
we provide information to travel magazines…. Our travel
call centre, by the way, since Brokeback Mountain, to get
back to that movie, has received a tremendous number of
calls…. So this is tremendous. It’s big business, it can be
big business, and we plan to make it a bigger business.12
Travel Alberta had to tread carefully to make sure Alberta and homosexuality
did not become conflated. They accomplished this through the judicious
construction of niche marketing. The website is country specific, so that
Alberta performs a different role depending on your country of origin. To
Europe, Alberta is the postcard of Brokeback Mountain; the film features
prominently, and there are movie maps galore awaiting the intrepid traveller.
Tourists from Asia or Mexico are not so lucky. Curiously, however, on the
website devoted to Alberta’s largest market share - mainly the three
provinces of Alberta, British Colombia and Saskatchewan - there is no
mention of, no photos of, not even the slightest peep of Brokeback Mountain.
In terms of avoiding dissonance, Travel Alberta gets two thumbs up.
4.
Alberta vs. Homosexuality
The second part of my research depends on a content analysis of
articles in three major daily newspapers, two regional (The Edmonton
Journal and The Calgary Herald) and one national (The Globe and Mail).
The discursive language privileging the discourse of nature over the
discourse of homosexuality proves telling. The language used to describe
Alberta’s wilderness borders on the sublime, leading one writer to call it “an
inspiration…a Shangri La,”13 while another depicts it as “soul restoring
scenery.”14 According to the articles, Alberta has “wild and dramatic
landscapes,”15 “sweeping landscapes,”16 “breathtaking landscapes,”17 is an
“iconic, rugged landscape,”18 with “vast territories,”19 “spectacular vistas,”20
and “huge blue skies.”21 In terms of physical attributes, the articles mention
“golden light,”22 “snowy foothills,”23 “lush grasslands,”24 and “herds of
animals,”25 next to “purple mountain majesties,”26 “alpine meadows,”27 and
“malachite-green rivers.”28 These poetic references seem out of place in
articles concerned with the economic impact of film production, and they
become semantically privileged in comparison to the language used to write
about homosexuality.
Although most articles’ mention of sexuality is limited to the careful
descriptor “gay cowboy movie,”29 the language used to describe Brokeback
Mountain’s homosexual theme refers either to the tragic and lonely, or to the
controversial and provocative. The gay story line is written about as a “love
50
______________________________________________________________
affair,”30 at once “alienating,”31 “forbidden,”32 and “under siege,”33 an
“illusion of love,”34 which is eventually “torn apart by passion,”35 leaving a
“gloomy” “pair of deuces going nowhere,”36 caught in a “clandestine
romance”37 of “quiet desperation,” “damp coldness” and “shallowness.”38
Alternatively, the gay story line concerns a “love that dare not speak its
name,”39 which is “unconventional” and “provocative,”40 issuing a
“dangerous social statement” that is both “risky” and “controversial.”41 By
comparing the words under the topics “Nature” and “Gay”, two inferences
can be drawn. First, given that, though fictional and personal, Brokeback
Mountain is a stark representation of the historical plight of rural gay men,
the absence of articles critically engaging with the socio-political issues of
gay and lesbian Albertans proves deeply ironic. Second, the sublime
language attributed to “Nature” is not connected to the homosexual romance
in the film. Rather, drastic differences remain between the language
employed under “Nature” and the language under “Gay”. This results in
Brokeback Mountain being connected to the natural landscape of Alberta but
Alberta being prevented from becoming connected to the homosexual story
line of the film. Travel Alberta is only interested in marketing the site of the
film shoot but is not interested in marketing the place of the story. The
semantic privileging of “Nature,” highlighted by the content analysis of three
daily newspapers and fundamental to Travel Alberta’s marketing of
Brokeback Mountain, is best represented in the words of one journalist who,
having mulled over the Oscar winning potential of the film for its acting and
directing, its music, and its socially relevant script, finally declared that
“Alberta’s landscape deserved an Oscar.”42
5.
Conclusion: Heteronormativity and Alberta’s Queer Frontier
Previous scholarship has problematised the liberal, democratic, and
tolerant policies that favour gay and lesbian spatial visibility.43 A new
homonormative citizen emerges, proving detrimental to the project of queer
politics.44 From a queer perspective, and operating in the context of the
continued heteronormative colonisation of queer space, Travel Alberta is
right not to follow current DMO trends like film-induced gay and lesbian
tourism that increase gay and lesbian spatial visibility. Refusing the rhetoric
that conservative, seemingly hegemonic beliefs and policies are synonymous
with heteronormativity, a counterfactual hypothesis arises that Alberta
actively holds the possibility for a different and distinctively queer future.
David Bell and Jon Binnie offer a general theoretical framework of
the processes relating urban entrepreneurial governance to the creation,
marketing, and eventual normalisation of queer space. The core of their
argument revolves around both the “globalisation of the gay village model
and the globalisation of entrepreneurial urban governance,” which leads to
the production of a desexualised space reeking of consumption and the “logic
Adam Kaasa
51
______________________________________________________________
of assimilationist sexual citizenship.”45 Drawing on the work of Shane
Phelan, Bell and Binnie suggest that the intersection of urban processes,
globalisation, and the creation of sexual space “is inappropriate to the task of
reimagining sexual citizenship,”46 producing the new homonormativity. Far
from the radical queer politics of liminal spaces, de-territorialised identities,
and rhizomatous action, Lisa Duggan proposes that the new homonormativity
is
a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative
assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them
while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay
constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture
anchored in domesticity and consumption.47
Although processes of assimilation are decidedly fluid and complex, Bell and
Binnie assert that the intersection of sexual space with urban
entrepreneurialism remains a causal node in the production of
homonormativity. Indeed, Jasbir Kaur Puar cautions that behind the liberal
spatial disruptions of heteronormativity, queer space remains “unexamined in
terms of racial, class, and gender disruptions.”48 Bell and Binnie’s thesis
outlines the negative consequences of current governance policies regarding
sexual space and a queer political project, consequences that exclude queer
bodies marked by differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, age,
ability, etc.
Given the negative consequences associated with increased spatial
visibility, a counter intuitive and sympathetic reading of Travel Alberta’s
policies emerges. By acting in opposition to most regions’ fierce promotion
of both gay and lesbian tourism and gay and lesbian space, Alberta holds a
counterfactual approach to sexual geography. Given the detrimental
consequences to queer space that accompany popular trends in place
promotion, Alberta emerges with the counterintuitive possibility for a queer
frontier. Although following conservative policies that are in opposition to
improving gay and lesbian rights, Alberta’s politics are “incomplete,
incongruous” and “nonhegmonic,”49 allowing for transformative possibilities
of reconfiguration.
Notes
1
M Billett, ‘Brokeback Mountain: Gov’t loves the scenery, but not the
lifestyle’, The Edmonton Journal, 20 February 2006, sec. A, p. 19.
2
I use the terms “gay and lesbian” to represent a population demographic
based on preconceived, though problematic, sexual identities. I use the term
52
______________________________________________________________
“queer” in reference to a social, cultural and political project that aims to
destabilise heteronormative assumptions that pervade existing social, cultural
and political practices, institutions, and spaces.
3
N Morgan and A Pritchard, Tourism Promotion and Power: creating
images, creating identities, Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1998, p. 132.
4
L Knopp and M Brown, ‘Queer Diffusions’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, vol. 21, 2003, pp. 409-424, p. 413.
5
A Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York University Press, New
York, 1996, p. 2.
6
A Jansson, ‘Spatial Phantasmagoria: The Mediatization of Tourism
Experience’, European Journal of Communication, vol. 17, 2002, pp. 429423, p. 429.
7
K Weston, ‘Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imagery and the Great Gay
Migration’, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, vol. 2, 1995, pp 253-277, pp. 255256 and p. 269.
8
Travel Alberta, Travel Alberta Strategic Tourism Marketing Plan 20062009, Travel Alberta Canada, Calgary, 2006, p. 3.
9
Ibid., p. 4.
10
Ibid., p. 10.
11
Ibid., p. 14.
12
C Dunford, ‘Tuesday, March 7, 2006 1:30 p.m.’, Alberta Hansard, 7
March 2006, viewed on 22 July 2006,
<http://www.assembly.ab.ca/ISYS/LADDAR_files/docs/hansards/han/legisla
ture_26/session_2/20060307_1330_01_han.pdf >.
13
R Secord, ‘There’s a cloud over this cheery story’, The Calgary Herald, 8
July 2006, sec. A, p. 21.
14
J Harrison, ‘Cowboy Country: Fusing Alberta Heritage into country
decorating today’, The Calgary Herald, 23 April 2006, sec. D, p. 3.
15
Secord, op. cit., p. 21.
16
W Lafortune, ‘Travel industry awaits Brokeback effect’, The Calgary
Herald, 4 February 2006, sec. G, p. 1.
17
Anon, ‘Brokeback builds tourism’, Calgary Herald, 22 December 2005,
sec. C, p. 2.
18
J Stone, ‘Brokeback should capture Best Picture’, The Edmonton Journal,
3 March 2006, sec. G, p. 5.
19
W Lafortune, ‘Brokeback country: Where the cowboys are real: Tour
Alberta’s “golden light” area’, The Calgary Herald, 11 March 2006, sec. G,
p. 6.
20
A Burroughs, ‘Director returns to thank Calgary: Brokeback Mountain has
crew gushing’, The Calgary Herald, 17 November 2005, sec. E, p. 1.
21
Harrison, op. cit., p. 3.
Adam Kaasa
53
______________________________________________________________
22
Lafortune, ‘Brokeback Country’, op. cit., p. 6.
T Babin, ‘Brokeback vs. Unforgiven’, The Calgary Herald, 2 March 2006,
sec. C, p. 2.
24
Lafortune, “Brokeback Country,” op. cit., p. 6.
25
Ibid.
26
J Adams, ‘Hollywood North, Take 87’, The Globe and Mail, 11 February
2006, sec. R, p. 3.
27
G Clarke, ‘Can Calgary be a city of Justice?’, The Calgary Herald, 10
March 2006, sec. A, p. 24.
28
J Moore, ‘We call it Moose Mountain ’round here’, The Calgary Herald, 3
March 2006, sec. SW, p. 18.
29
T Babin, ‘Alberta teen lists truck from Brokeback Mountain on Ebay’, The
Edmonton Journal, 26 March 2006, sec. A, p. 3.
30
W Lafortune, ‘Real take on Brokeback’, The Edmonton Journal, 11 March
2006, sec. L, p. 5.
31
D Germain, ‘Gold-rush: Alberta-made Brokeback Mountain grabs four
Globes’, The Calgary Herald, 17 January 2006, sec. D, p. 1.
32
D Germain, ‘Young and old trot into Globes’, The Calgary Herald, 16
January 2006, sec. C, p. 7.
33
Adams, op. cit., p. 3.
34
Burroughs, op. cit., p. 1.
35
S Ohler, ‘Alberta wants bigger piece of Hollywood North’, The Edmonton
Journal, 13 February 2006, sec. A, p. 1.
36
J Partridge, ‘Mountain’s Time: Alberta film industry riding high as
Brokeback leads nominees’, The Calgary Herald, 1 February 2006, sec. C, p.
1; and Moore, op. cit., p. 18.
37
A Burroughs, ‘Director goes Brokeback to basics’, The Calgary Herald, 22
December 2005, sec. C, p. 1.
38
Ibid.
39
R Remington, ‘Rural homosexuals often flee to city: Living out of the
closet still difficult’, The Calgary Herald, 12 December 2005, sec. A, p. 3.
40
S Taylor, ‘Don’t fence me in’, The Globe and Mail, 15 July 2006, sec. D,
p. 15.
41
C Lemire, ‘Brokeback builds mountain of acclaim’, The Calgary Herald,
13 December 2005, sec. E, p. 1; K Baker, ‘Oh, say, did you see…’, The
Edmonton Journal, 4 March 2006, sec. D, p. 9; and L Dohy, ‘Acting puts
jingle in cowboy’s jeans: Nanton rancher recruited for Stampede ads’, The
Calgary Herald, 8 July 2006, sec. B, p. 4.
42
K Monk, ‘Party Crasher’, The Calgary Herald, 6 March 2006, sec. C, p. 1,
emphasis added.
23
54
______________________________________________________________
43
B Skeggs, ‘Matter out of place: visibility and sexualities in leisure spaces’,
Leisure Studies, vol. 18, 1999, pp. 213-232, p. 228.
44
D Bell and J Binnie, ‘Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism
and Governance’, Urban Studies, vol. 41, 2004, pp 1807-1820, p. 1814.
45
Ibid., p. 1814 and p. 1818.
46
Ibid., p. 1810.
47
Ibid., p.1816.
48
J Puar, ‘A Transnational Feminist Critique of Queer Tourism’, Antipode,
vol. 34, 2002, pp. 935-946, p. 935.
49
Knopp and Brown, op. cit., p. 413.
Bibliography
Adams, J, ‘Hollywood North, Take 87’, The Globe and Mail, 11 February
2006, sec. R, p. 3.
Anon, ‘Brokeback builds tourism’, Calgary Herald, 22 December 2005, sec.
C, p. 2.
Babin, T, ‘Alberta teen lists truck from Brokeback Mountain on Ebay’, The
Edmonton Journal, 26 March 2006, sec. A, p. 3.
Babin, T, ‘Brokeback vs. Unforgiven’, The Calgary Herald, 2 March 2006,
sec C, p. 2.
Baker, K, ‘Oh, say, did you see…’, The Edmonton Journal, 4 March 2006,
sec. D, p. 9.
Bell, D, and B Jon, ‘Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and
Governance’, Urban Studies, vol. 41, 2004, 1807-1820.
Billett, M, ‘Brokeback Mountain: Gov’t loves the scenery, but not the
lifestyle,’ The Edmonton Journal, 20 February 2006, sec. A, p. 19.
Burroughs, A, ‘Director goes Brokeback to basics’, The Calgary Herald, 22
December 2005, sec. C, p. 1.
Burroughs, A, ‘Director returns to thank Calgary: Brokeback Mountain has
crew gushing’, The Calgary Herald, 17 November 2005, sec. E, p.
1.
Clarke, G, ‘Can Calgary be a city of Justice?’, The Calgary Herald, 10
March 2006, sec. A, p. 24.
Dohy, L, ‘Acting puts jingle in cowboy’s jeans: Nanton rancher recruited for
Stampede ads’, The Calgary Herald, 8 July 2006, sec. B, p. 4.
Dunford, C, ‘Tuesday, March 7, 2006 1:30 p.m.’, in Alberta Hansard, 7
March
2006,
viewed
on
22
July
2006,
<http://www.assembly.ab.ca/ISYS/LADDAR_files/docs/hansards/h
an/legislature_26/session_2/20060307_1330_01_han.pdf>.
Adam Kaasa
55
______________________________________________________________
Germain, D, ‘Gold-rush: Alberta-made Brokeback Mountain grabs four
Globes’, The Calgary Herald, 17 January 2006, sec. D, p. 1.
Germain, D, ‘Young and old trot into Globes’, The Calgary Herald, 16
January 2006, sec. C, p. 7.
Harrison, J, ‘Cowboy Country: Fusing Alberta Heritage into country
decorating today’, The Calgary Herald, 23 April 2006, sec. D, p. 3.
Jagose, A, Queer Theory: An Introduction, New York University Press, New
York, 1996.
Jansson, A, ‘Spatial Phantasmagoria: The Mediatization of Tourism
Experience’, European Journal of Communication, vol. 17, 2002,
pp. 429-443.
Knopp, L and M Brown, ‘Queer Diffusions’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, vol. 21, 2003, pp. 409-424.
Lafortune, W, ‘Brokeback country: Where the cowboys are real: Tour
Alberta’s “golden light” area’, The Calgary Herald, 11 March 2006,
sec. G, p. 6.
Lafortune, W, ‘Real take on Brokeback’, The Edmonton Journal, 11 March
2006, sec. L, p. 5.
Lafortune, W, ‘Travel industry awaits Brokeback effect’, The Calgary
Herald, 4 February 2006, sec. G, p. 1.
Lemire, C, ‘Brokeback builds mountain of acclaim’, The Calgary Herald, 13
December 2005, sec. E, p. 1.
Moore, J, ‘We call it Moose Mountain ’round here’, The Calgary Herald, 3
March 2006, sec. SW, p. 18.
Monk, K, ‘Party Crasher’, The Calgary Herald, 6 March 2006, sec. C, p. 1.
Morgan, N, and A Pritchard, Tourism Promotion and Power: creating
images, creating identities, Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1998.
Ohler, S, ‘Alberta wants bigger piece of Hollywood North’, The Edmonton
Journal, 13 February 2006, sec. A, p. 1.
Partridge, J, ‘Mountain’s Time: Alberta film industry riding high as
Brokeback leads nominees’, The Calgary Herald, 1 February 2006,
sec. C, p. 1.
Remington, R, ‘Rural homosexuals often flee to city: Living out of the closet
still difficult’, The Calgary Herald, 12 December 2005, sec. A, p. 3.
Secord, R, ‘There’s a cloud over this cheery story’, The Calgary Herald, 8
July 2006, sec. A, p. 21.
Skeggs, B, ‘Matter out of place: visibility and sexualities in leisure spaces’,
Leisure Studies, vol. 18, 1999, pp. 213-232.
Stone, J, ‘Brokeback should capture Best Picture’, The Edmonton Journal, 3
March 2006, sec. G, p. 5.
56
______________________________________________________________
Taylor, S, ‘Don’t fence me in’, The Globe and Mail, 15 July 2006, sec. D, p.
15.
Travel Alberta, Travel Alberta Strategic Tourism Marketing Plan 2006-2009,
Travel Alberta Canada, Calgary, 2006.
Weston, K, ‘Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imagery and the Great Gay
Migration’, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, vol. 2, 1995, pp. 253-277.
“I don’t mind showing off a bit of my belly”:
Julie Blanchard
Abstract. This paper explores the relationship between gender, sexuality, age
and fashion using material from focus groups with girls aged eleven and
twelve, undertaken at a secondary school in Essex, U.K. Drawing on Joanne
Entwistle’s model of fashion as situated bodily practice, which recognises
both the discursive nature of fashion and its location on a material body, I
demonstrate how girls’ everyday practices of dressing and talk are implicated
in the discursive constitution of identity. This paper argues that fashion and
talk about fashion in part construct the possibilities and limitations for preteen girls’ identities. Identities are regulated by heteronormative discourses,
and peers, parents, and schools play a large part in this regulation. I maintain
that although the popular media describes young girls as flaunting their
bodies in ways inappropriate for their age, schoolgirls actually embody the
struggle to constitute themselves as properly heterosexual, feminine, and
fashionable, yet simultaneously as restrained, virginal, and covered up.
Key words: bodily practice, body, discourse, fashion, gender, girls,
heteronormativity, pre-teen sexuality, sexy
1.
Introduction
Girls have recently been receiving much media, political, and
academic attention; everyone, it seems, is expressing interest in their welfare,
achievements, behaviour, and appearance.1 Yet, despite the concern about
ever younger girls being pressurised into awareness of ideas of fashionable
femininity and body image, the particular combination of pre-teen girls and
fashion is still under-explored by academic researchers. One of the reasons
they have been left unconsidered is because of the positioning of pre-teen
girls as dependent upon adults; they are perceived to lack the agency or status
to make autonomous decisions. However, it is recognised by marketing
companies that there is money to be made by targeting this pre-teen audience;
the childrenswear market has grown to be a £6 billion industry in Britain,
with the largest sector being clothing for girls.2
In order to investigate the relationship between fashion and girls, the
main theoretical model of fashion that I adopt follows the framework set out
by Joanne Entwistle in The Fashioned Body.3 I consider fashion as a
discursive practice, in order to understand the axes of gender, age, and
sexuality. Foucault used the notion of discourse to examine institutionalised
ways of speaking about the body which regulate and manage bodies. As
Entwistle suggests, Foucault’s ideas can be productively applied to fashion
58
______________________________________________________________
and the body, allowing me to consider fashion and dress as discursive sites or
strategies of power, knowledge, and truth, in order to distinguish how girls’
bodies and their sexuality are constituted.
However, fashion is not only a discourse but an everyday practice
that is lived in and acts on the body. Getting dressed is an ongoing practice;
skills must be learnt from how to tie shoelaces to understanding how to
present ourselves in socially permitted ways.4 Therefore in order to address
girls’ bodies this paper focuses on the girls themselves and how they
negotiate the discourses seeking to construct them as particularly aged and
gendered beings. In what ways, both as individuals and as a group, do they
take up, re-interpret, or reject popular, parental, pedagogical, and fashion
discourses, subject positions, and the material objects of fashion to construct
themselves as girls? Using focus groups as a research tool, the interaction of
young girls is investigated in order to identify the processes and negotiations
that take place between them.
British girls aged eleven and twelve have just made the move from
primary to secondary school, seen as heralding a new developmental stage,
and are hovering on the borderline between childhood and adulthood. The
problem perceived with the fashionable clothes for this age group is that they
are too adult, with padded bras, thongs, and cut-off tops seen as revealing too
much flesh or framing the body in sexually provocative ways thought
inappropriate for this age of girl.5 In a culture in which fashion is still
understood to be predominately a frivolous feminine pursuit, constructing the
body as adult, sexual, and erotic, how do young girls, perceived as “innocent”
negotiate this discourse of sexuality? I examine girls’ self-surveillance of
their fashioned bodies and the policing of their dressed bodies through
physical or discursive interventions of peers, boys, school representatives,
and parents.
2.
Idealised Images of Femininity
To start the discussions in the focus groups I wanted the girls to
consider some idealised feminine bodies, so I began by showing two pictures
of all female bands popular with girls of this age group, Girls Aloud and the
Pussy Cat Dolls. Catherine Driscoll describes how the constant reforming of
body image is a continual process for girls.6 So although body image locates
a unified representation of self, it is not necessarily stable and never
independent of socio-cultural definitions of body, image, and self. Therefore
body image is affected by the images of other bodies that girls see portrayed
around them of fashion models, pop stars, and other idealised bodies. In these
pictures the women are all wearing outfits which reveal cleavage, stomachs,
or legs, and one of the most consistent features of these women is their
slimness, as discussed here by two girls:7
Julie Blanchard
59
______________________________________________________________
Jessica:
Francesca:
and all of them are skinny, there’s none
of them that are particularly fat
not even fat, like curves or something
These women are part of what Susan Bordo calls “homogenizing and
normalizing images and ideologies concerning femininity and feminine
beauty.”8 Just as one of the girls notices that these are women without any
roundness, so Bordo describes how the ideal of femininity has grown thinner
and how any softness must be replaced with toned muscles, hence the
contemporary ideal of exposing the taut stomach. These images provide the
norm against which the girls continually measure, judge, and discipline
themselves.
However, the pop stars’ clothing was not well-received. Although
girls liked individual items, their scantiness was seen as inappropriate, as the
following three extracts show:
Laura:
they hardly cover up their bodies!
((laughter))
Alice:
um, I don’t really like that one cos it’s
too revealing, that one ((pointing to the
red top))
Jasmine:
yeah I don’t like the pink dress, I don’t
like the middle one with the blonde hair
(
)
it’s like wearing a bikini
I don’t like that one
it’s like summink you’d wear on the
beach9
Harriet:
Helena:
Natalie:
Jade:
The outfit Jade refers to is also described as “like a nightie.” The women’s
small outfits are seen as too revealing and therefore appropriate only for
wearing to the beach or in bed, where wearing only a few small pieces of
clothing is acceptable. Words such as “slutty” and “tartish” are used
frequently to describe the outfits, and the women are criticised as “showing
all that flesh,” being “slags,” “over the top,” and “too in your face.”10 Here
we see the pervasive moral discourse of femininity at play, with reference to
the whore/virgin binary; the woman, revealing her flesh in sexual display is
the whore/slag/tart. Efrat Tseëlon describes the historical associations
between sin, the body, women, and clothes, which inform moral and social
discourse today, seeking to condemn women for their immodest or sexually
alluring dress.11 Many writers also discuss the relationship between the
60
______________________________________________________________
construction of present-day Western femininity and the exposure of skin, in
which the properly feminine women must expose the slim, worked on body.12
Yet simultaneously women and girls are responsible for protecting their
modesty and “pure” sexual status through dress that appropriately covers the
body. How girls interact with this dichotomy of revealing/covering the body
is explored throughout this paper.
In answer to why these women wear such clothes, the girls discuss
how wearing them helps sell their music and how being a pop star equates to
being a model. Modelling epitomises the dominant characteristics of Western
femininity, such as the importance of appearance and the fetishisation of the
body.13 In order for women to be successful in society, girls recognise that it
is important to expose skin in sexual ways; the girls are aware that women’s
sexuality is bound up with commodification. However, the girls believe that
they do not have the appropriate slim or adult female body to wear these
clothes, and the girls explain that they did not own clothes like this and
would not be allowed to wear such outfits in any case. The one outfit that was
thought to be “the nicest” by each group was a brown top and white skirt
combination worn by one of the Pussy Cat Dolls:
Georgia:
Alisha:
someone might actually wear what she’s
wearing compared to some of the others
all the others we can’t wear
Thus the girls recognise that they cannot wear the types of clothes most of the
women are wearing. They know that this way of dressing is not thought
appropriate for them as pre-teen girls; they do not want to be labelled slags or
tarts.
The one combination that is deemed suitable includes a short t-shirt,
exposing stomach but not cleavage; the display of the stomach by the girls
themselves is discussed by two of the girls:
Danielle:
Steph:
Danielle:
Steph:
I don’t mind showing off a bit of my
belly
I like my belly
[I don’t mind a bit of that…but not like
them
[I don’t mind a bit, but not like ((moves
arms apart in a flasher motion))
Exposing a bit of belly is acceptable; in fact, showing the midriff has become
what Anita Harris calls “the new universal bodily sign of sexy, cute, can-do
girl femininity,” where the “can-do girl” is a contemporary discourse about
the self-actualising and high achieving modern young girl.14 Yet whilst it is
Julie Blanchard
61
______________________________________________________________
acceptable to reveal the stomach, Steph explains that not so much body
should be revealed that you end up “flashing.” There is a tension that these
girls are aware of between showing a little flesh and revealing too much.
The use of the flasher motion is the gesture used to refer to a man
who exposes his genitals in public; therefore it could suggest that Steph is
drawing attention to the sexual nature of the women’s display of skin. This
kind of sexual display is recognised as inappropriate for these girls:
Georgia:
cos if you think, they’re like your role
models, you think you could actually
dress like them but sometimes it just looks
wrong
Despite knowing that these pop singers could be considered their role
models, Georgia points out that it would look “wrong” to dress in similar
ways. In another group, Natasha also recognises this tension between
following a role model and wearing age-appropriate dress: “there’s stuff to
look up to and stuff that you shouldn’t.” In Lee Wright’s study of clothes that
are designed to be fashionably small and not fit the body, the clothes are
deliberately created to emphasise body shape and size.15 Wright discusses
how the wearing of small clothes is most popular amongst young women and
seeks to emphasise the adult body and to replicate the growing out of clothes
that happens as a child grows. It could be that on a young girl’s body small
clothes, which make the body seem bigger, might suggest the body’s
maturation from that of a child to an adult. Girls are aware of this conflict
within fashion and popular discourses, between the revealing of the idealised,
sexualised, adult feminine body, and the innocent girl body.
3.
Fashionable Femininity and Policing the Girl Body
The majority of the girls also felt that it was important to have
knowledge of fashion, so as to avoid being criticised for not being in fashion.
The girls’ need to constantly deliberate and reach consensus as to what is
currently in fashion and what is “normal” allows the girls to survey and
correct themselves in line with the norm.16 The most frequently chosen
favourite fashion item was shorts, with trousers or jeans a close second.
Although popular media and parental discourse would have us believe that
girls of this age group are already dressing in ultra-fashionable, bodyrevealing clothing, shorts and trousers were chosen as preferred items and the
reasons given were that they are especially “comfortable” and “practical”
clothes. As one respondent put it, these clothes allow a girl to “just run
around and muck about and have fun with your mates.”
Therefore, it could be argued that actually girls of this age are not
interested in wearing clothes that show off their bodies. However, as seen
62
______________________________________________________________
earlier, they are very aware of age-appropriate discourses and of the problems
of being labelled a “tart” or “slag,” which would be associated with
constructing yourself as a sexy girl through revealing fashionable dress.
Therefore, the girls used the language of practicality to defend their clothing
choices, a phenomenon discussed by Elizabeth Wilson, who states, “we
expect a garment to justify its shape and style in terms of moral and
intellectual criteria we do not normally apply to other artistic forms.”17
Wilson describes how even our language reflects the moral implications of
what we wear and how in the appraisal of clothing we frequently use the
adjectives “right” and “good,” which are also used to discuss conduct. So by
repeatedly using the terms “practical,” “comfortable,” and “good” to describe
certain pieces of clothing, the girls are constructing themselves as sensible,
good girls.
This tension that the discourse of fashion highlights between
constituting yourself as the good, sensible girl versus the sexy, tarty girl is
also manifest in the girls’ discussions about boys. Hence when Natasha asks
the others if they wear clothes to try and impress people the response is
negative, but Steph jokingly suggests they might try to impress the boys.
When I ask the girls if they agree that they want to impress boys, they now
change their “no” to a “sometimes.” Steph says very emphatically, “we like
the lads;” the implication being that Steph assumes universal heterosexuality
for all the girls, and the conversation then moves on to discussions of various
boys that they fancy. In spite of the danger of being constituted as a “tart” for
girls dressing in sexually attractive ways, there is no doubt here that dressing
to impress would be aimed at attracting boys. This assumption of
heterosexuality is inherent in a heterosexual matrix that produces what
Adrienne Rich calls “compulsory heterosexuality.”18 Within this compulsory
heterosexual matrix, the construction of “girl” is the construction of the
heterosexual girl, positioned as the object of male desire.19 This positioning
would suggest that there is therefore limited possibility for the girl to be
constructed as anything other than a gendered, heterosexual subject.
Although there are fashionable items such as thongs made for this
pre-teen age group and the girls do sometimes wear them, wearing them
remains problematic. After a couple of girls admitted that they owned thongs
but had only worn them in the holidays, one of the girls stated:
Alice:
I never at school, maybe on weekends but never at
school, just in case boys might go schhff
((gestures lifting up skirt))
Clearly, it is not necessarily the thong that is the issue but the wearing of one
under a skirt which is most problematic. In two groups girls expressed
concern about exposing underwear whilst wearing skirts; and if wearing a
Julie Blanchard
63
______________________________________________________________
thong, buttocks would also be revealed. Clothes simultaneously cover the
body and draw attention to that which is concealed; therefore underwear both
covers genitals and draws attention to the genitals it covers. As discussed
earlier, girls are socially constructed as responsible for ensuring they remain
constituted as virgin through appropriate covering of the body, and as
Deborah Youdell states, “to take responsibility for the control and constraint
of the body in general and sex in particular.”20 It becomes clear that the boys’
behaviour controls what girls can wear; the boys may reveal girls’ underwear,
so that it is up to the girls to ensure that they do not expose too much. It is
also clear that the schools’ regulation of girls’ dress, i.e. requiring them to
wear a skirt, produces the feminine subject and manages the girl body.21 The
skirt also requires girls to sit and move in certain ways and, as cited earlier,
prevents girls from “mucking around” with their friends, thereby encouraging
appropriate feminine passivity.
Parents also play an important role in girls’ relationship with
fashion, and in each of the focus groups there was much animated discussion
about the “really horrible dresses” that they had been dressed in by their
mothers, which were agreed to be frilly and flowery. These dresses were
disliked, because they were part of being “little” and constituted the girls as
ideally feminine, innocent little girls. Girls rejected this earlier construction
of them as little children by their mothers. However, most girls admitted that
their parents still affected what they wore, either by buying for the girls or
prohibiting the girls from wearing certain items of clothing. Although parents
had dressed the girls in dresses when they were younger, several girls
mentioned that very short skirts were not allowed. As Harriet says, “my mum
don’t like me wearing really short skirts,” and Laura admits that she is not
allowed to wear skirts as short as the pop stars. Once again the discourse of
fashion creates a tension around creating an age-appropriate feminine
identity. This tension is between dressing in an appropriately feminine way
by wearing a skirt and in an inappropriately adult, sexual, feminine way by
revealing the body too much in a short skirt.
That girls wearing clothes that show off the body is considered to
construct the girls as “adultly” sexual is exemplified in discussion below. I
asked why they wouldn’t wear this sort of thing and they replied:
Zoe:
Jessica:
Francesca:
because it=
=well you can’t really go out showing
boobs
yeah, I wouldn’t get further than my
bedroom door without my dad coming up
and saying get changed. It used to be
alright but as I’m
64
______________________________________________________________
Jessica:
Francesca:
Jessica:
[yeah, absolutely “you’re not going out
like that”
getting older, he gets more worried
I think it’s cos he’s worried you might
get raped and stuff
As discussed earlier, skimpy clothes are seen as being provocative and here
are thought to potentially invite rape. This cultural stereotype of the sexual
woman, who is responsible for luring men and whose arousal of men’s
desires is her fault, remains a widespread one.22 What a woman was wearing
at the time of a rape is often cited in rape cases; if the clothes are deemed
“sexually provocative” the woman is understood to be “asking for it.”23 Here
we can see that this apportioning of sexual blame on the basis of women’s
dress is already undertaken by pre-teen girls.
4.
Conclusion: Circulating Power
Nancy Fraser argues that Foucault’s notion of power as capillary
describes how power “circulates throughout the entire social body down to
even the tiniest and apparently most trivial extremities.”24 This notion of
power, she suggests, emphasises the “politics of everyday life” and is useful
to interrogate the everyday struggles of power that take place over the social
practice of getting dressed and decisions about what is to be worn. Power
struggles over clothes thought too revealing by parents are passionately
fought over, because around sexuality there is an “especially dense transfer
point for relations of power: between men and women, young people and old
people, parents and offspring, teacher and students.”25 Yet Georgia describes
how “when I think about buying something, I always think about what my
mum and dad are going to say before I actually buy it.” Girls’ bodies are
policed by their parents in such a way that girls also internalise this
regulatory voice, and it becomes part of their self-surveillance.
From the evidence presented in this paper, it is clear that girls
interact with the discourse of fashion, debating the meanings of fashion
before reaching consensus. Girls’ fashion, bodies, and identities are produced
and regulated by their peers, boys, parents, and pedagogues, and these girls
are well aware of the potential dangers of fashion in constructing them as
“tarty” or as “asking for it.” Young girls internalise the norms of heterosexual
femininity and negotiate the virgin/whore dichotomy through the selffashioning of their bodies in relation to others and otherness.
Julie Blanchard
65
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
For some of the main issues discussed see: A McRobbie,‘Good Girls, Bad
Girls? Female Success and the New Meritocracy’ in D Morley and K Robins
(eds.), British Cultural Studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, pp.
361-372.
2
Key Note, Childrenswear May 2004: Market Report, Key Note Ltd.,
Hampton, 2004.
3
J Entwistle, The Fashioned Body, Polity Press and Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
4
Ibid., p. 7.
5
See, e.g., S Hayman, ‘Kids pay price of our sexual society: Wearing a thong
at eight’, Daily Mirror, 28 April 2005, p. 6.; and I Knight, ‘Leave these kids
alone’, The Sunday Times: News Review, 11 April 2004, p. 4.
6
C Driscoll, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural
Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002, p. 239.
7
All the girls’ names have been changed to protect their anonymity.
8
S Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,
University of California Press, London, 1995, p. 62.
9
Transcription symbols are as follows:
Symbol
Meaning
[
Left brackets indicate the point at which the current
speaker’s talk is overlapped by another’s talk
=
Equal signs indicate no pause between the two speakers
( )
Empty parentheses indicate inability to hear speaker’s talk
(word)
Parenthesized words are possible hearings
(( ))
Double parentheses contain researchers descriptions rather
than transcriptions
10
Slag, slut, and tart are all derogatory terms used to describe an overly
sexual girl/woman.
11
E Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity, Sage, London, 1995.
12
J Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, Routledge,
London, 1994, p. 44; A Harris, Future Girl: Young Women in the TwentyFirst Century, Routledge, New York & London, 2004, p. 86; and Entwistle,
op. cit., p. 181.
13
Craik, op. cit., p. 70.
14
Harris, op. cit., p. 91.
15
L Wright, ‘Outgrown Clothes for Grown-up People’, in J Ash and E
Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1992, pp. 49-57, p. 53.
16
Bordo, op. cit., pp. 25-32.
66
______________________________________________________________
17
E Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion & Modernity, Virago, London,
1985, p. 49.
18
A Rich, ‘Compulsory Hetrosexuality and Lesbian Experience’, Signs, vol.
5, no. 4, 1980, pp. 630-660; cited in J Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 9.
19
S Watson ‘Single-sex education for girls: Heterosexuality, gendered
subjectivity and school choice’, British Journal of Sociology of Education,
vol. 18, no, 3, 1997, pp 371-384; cited in C Charles, ‘Rethinking discourses
of heterosexuality in single-sex girls’ education’, paper presented at the
Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education,
28 November-2 December 2004, viewed 27 June 2005,
<http://www.aare.edu.ac/04pap/cha04818.pdf>.
20
D Youdell, ‘Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender and sexuality
constellations are constituted in secondary schools’, Gender and Education,
vol. 17, no. 3, 2005, pp. 249-270, p. 255.
21
In British schools uniform is usually mandatory and in this particular
school the uniform includes a skirt that must be worn by all girls, unless
exempt for religious reasons (i.e. Muslim girls may wear trousers).
22
See, e.g., Bordo, op. cit., p. 6; and Tseëlon, op. cit., p. 35.
23
N Wolf, The Beauty Myth, Vintage, London, 1991; and S Lees ‘When in
Rome’, The Guardian, 16 February 1999, pp. 6-7; cited in Entwistle, op. cit.
p. 22.
24
N Fraser Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in
Contemporary Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 24; cited in
A Brooks, Postfeminism, Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms,
25
M Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 103 (first published in
French in 1976).
Bibliography
Bordo, S, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body,
University of California Press, London, 1995.
Brooks, A, Postfeminism, Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms,
Butler, J, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
Routledge, New York, 1999.
Charles, C, ‘Rethinking discourses of heterosexuality in single-sex girls’
education’, paper presented at the Annual Conference of the
Julie Blanchard
67
______________________________________________________________
Australian Association for Research in Education, 28 November-2
December 2004, viewed 27 June 2005,
<http://www.aare.edu.ac/04pap/cha04818.pdf>.
Craik, J, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, Routledge,
London, 1994.
Driscoll, C, Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural
Theory, Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.
Entwistle, J, The Fashioned Body, Polity Press & Blackwell, Oxford, 2000.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol.1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990 (first published in
French in 1976).
Hayman, S, ‘Kids pay price of our sexual society: Wearing a thong at eight’,
Daily Mirror, 28 April 2005, p. 6.
Harris, J, Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century, Routledge,
New York & London, 2004.
Key Note, Childrenswear May 2004: Market Report, Key Note Ltd.,
Hampton, 2004.
Knight, I, ‘Leave these kids alone’, The Sunday Times: News Review, 11
April 2004, p. 4.
Tseëlon, E, The Masque of Femininity, Sage, London, 1995.
Wilson, E, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion & Modernity, Virago, London,
1985.
Wright, L, ‘Outgrown Clothes for Grown-up People’, in J Ash and E Wilson
(eds.), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1992, pp. 49-57.
Youdell, D, ‘Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender and sexuality
constellations are constituted in secondary schools’, Gender and
Education, vol. 17, no. 3, 2005, pp. 249-270.
The Psychosexual Impact of the Abortion Experience: A
Phenomenological Inquiry into Women’s Response
Bridget M. Finn
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the major findings,
conclusions, implications, and resultant explanatory theory of the
psychosexual impact of abortion based on a qualitative inquiry exploring the
impact of the abortion experience of nine women, who self-identify as
Catholic and who are enculturated by Western ideology with regard to the
abortion issue. A triangulation of qualitative data sources from four different
groups derived at four different times and means is combined with the
qualitative phenomenological method.
Key Words: abortion, Catholicism, psychosexual impact, reproductive
rights, sexuality, unwanted pregnancy
1.
Operational Definition of the Terms
The following definitions of terms are used in this study:
A. Abortion: the intentional termination of a pregnancy prior to that
pregnancy issuing in live birth.
B. Sexuality: the sexual knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviours
of individuals; anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of the sexual response
system; roles, identity and personality; individual thoughts, feelings, and
behaviours with regard to sexual behaviour; and ethical, spiritual, and moral
concerns of such.
C. Psychosexual impact: the interrelationship of psychological and sexual
outcomes.
2.
Demographics
A. The participants of this inquiry are white women.
B. The participants of this inquiry identify as having a Catholic religious
affiliation.
C. The participants of this inquiry had a first trimester abortion no less than
five years prior to the study, and since 1973 when abortions became legalised
in the United States.
D. The participants of this inquiry are at least 30 years of age.
3.
Introduction
Under the veil of traditional research paradigms, the findings of this
study cannot be generalised to all women who have experienced abortion.
But under the auspices of new paradigm research, the concept of human
validation and generalisability derives from confirmation and verification
70
The Psychosexual Impact of the Abortion Experience
______________________________________________________________
experienced by the consumer of research who finds meanings applicable to
her life.1 We are all experts within the given context of our personal history
and, as such, must be recognised as authorities of that life. That is, a woman
who has an abortion is the expert on the meaning of the human response to
abortion. Therefore, this research can be generalised not only to some women
who experienced abortion, but to any woman who, while reading this study,
identifies basic truths that she has also experienced, according to
phenomenological suppositions.2
Professional literature exploring the experience of abortion indicates
that the events characterising the abortion decision are ordered along a
temporal dimension beginning with the circumstances preceding the abortion,
encompassing the termination of the pregnancy, and ending with the impact
of the decision and the post-abortion decision reaction.3 The flow of
successive moments of women’s experience with abortion is most often
articulated into episodic patterns. These temporal configurations include the
past, the present, and extend potentially into the future.4 To understand
women’s reactions to the abortion experience, it is necessary to look at how
the factors involved interacted with the termination of the pregnancy and
identify their role and significance in relation to the affective response to the
abortion decision and its subsequent psychosexual impact. Thus, this research
study began with an exploration of the events preceding the abortion
procedure. The women were asked to begin their narrative with a reflection
on the thoughts and feelings related to the pregnancy. The affective reactions
to the experience of abortion are better understood as a result of the prior
exploration into the thoughts and feelings regarding the pregnancies.
4.
Findings
A. It was the unwanted pregnancy, rather than the abortion, that constituted
the identifiable trauma for these women. The abortion is perceived as the
necessary solution to end the trauma.
The enquiry supports the finding that the pregnancy, rather than the
abortion is the identifiable trauma. All of the women characterised their
reactions to their pregnancy as a perceived loss of control and “lifethreatening situation.” As well, all of the women reported positive feelings of
relief post-abortion. These positive feelings may be associated with the
subsequent perception of personal control regained post-abortion.
B. The women conceptualise the unwanted pregnancy, not the abortion itself,
as a moral issue.
This part of the research enquiry sought to explore the ways in
which the women felt their moral values may have been impacted as a result
of the abortion experience. The women were asked to define for themselves
what “moral values” meant to them. The women described this as what is
Bridget M. Finn
71
______________________________________________________________
“right” and “wrong” for them, as what is “good” and what is “bad” for them.
They all stated that they believe moral values can change over time as new
experiences occur. All of the women describe their decisions to abort their
pregnancies as “good” and “right.”
There is an underlying premise or assumption that abortion is a
moral issue.5 When asked to discuss the issue of morality with regard to their
experiences, the women consistently focused this discussion around their
pregnancies, not their abortions.
C. Received Catholic religious beliefs and values did not enter into decisions
to terminate pregnancies, and they did not create any conflict for the women
during any aspect of the abortion experience, including post-abortion
adjustment.
Research exploring the relationship between Catholicism and
abortion fails to provide for the varying conceptualisations held by Catholic
women regarding what it means to be Catholic. Thus, this part of the enquiry
began by asking the women to offer a description of their personal
conceptualisation of Catholicism. All of the women evaluated Catholicism
with negative descriptors. Further, all of the women adopted an ideology that
is inconsistent with Catholicism prior to the abortion experience.
The sexual hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its implications for
women were realised by the participants prior to their abortion experiences.
The women discussed an awareness of this sexual hierarchy, and it is from
the basis of this conceptualisation that they described the impact of
Catholicism on their abortion experiences. The women regard the
conceptualisation of the experience of abortion within Catholicism as one
which is developed under the conditions of patriarchy. As a result, these
women perceive their abortion experiences within an environment of
patriarchal bias. This is revealed in discussions around the interconnectedness
of Roman Catholicism’s opposition to abortion with positions held by the
church on other issues such as birth control and the subordination of women
within the church.
This is consistent with the work of Mary Daly, who in her
discussion of religion and abortion, argues that in order for the experience of
abortion to be comprehended adequately, it must be viewed within the
context of a sexually hierarchical system.6 According to Daly, a woman
whose consciousness has been aroused can say that an experience such as
abortion makes her aware of herself as an outsider, not someone who
belongs.7
The narrative of the women revealed that their abortion experiences
marked a separation of values and beliefs, and a detachment from the
Catholic Church. For these women, the abortion experience had more of an
impact on the religious belief system of Catholicism, rather than Catholicism
72
______________________________________________________________
influencing their decisions to have an abortion, or influencing their postabortion adjustment.
D. Abortion affected relationship dynamics with sexual and emotional
conflict.
The women reported that their abortion experiences served as
catalysts for change in their relationships; both emotional and sexual conflict
occurred within their relationships at the time of the unwanted pregnancy and
post-abortion. Post-abortion there was an altered quality of attachment in the
relationships as the women began to view and experience their partners
differently. Namely, the women began to realise or acknowledge the negative
qualities of the partners and/or their relationships post-abortion. The
relationships were permanently changed as a result of the unwanted
pregnancy and abortion experience.
Interestingly, the women’s evaluations of their relationship dynamic
post-abortion did not depend upon their perceptions of the male partner as
either being supportive or non-supportive. Some of the women described
their partners as supportive. Understanding relationship dynamics with the
male partner at the time of the abortion, including sexual dynamics, is an
important addition to the abortion literature, as research examining this
relationship typically focuses solely on the impact of the male partner’s
support in the woman’s adjustment post-abortion.8
E. The women reveal a redefinition of self post-abortion.
All of the women in the study indicated that they came out of the
abortion experience as changed women. They perceived themselves as
having grown in several dimensions as a result of their experiences. These
dimensions include an increased inner strength and a greater sense of
independence. In addition, their abortion experiences resulted in a broader
sense of self, as it brought about an association and identification with other
women who have experienced abortion. The personal identities of these
women are tied into their abortion experiences, as these experiences represent
a mark of individuation and separation, leading to a redefinition of self. This
is important as abortion research has traditionally been focused on the
examination of the potential of negative reactions post-abortion.
The results of many studies indicate that although unwanted
pregnancy and the decision to abort may be psychologically and emotionally
difficult, the impact for most women is, nonetheless, psychologically benign.9
The positive psychological and emotional outcomes reported by the women
in this enquiry challenges the dominant ideology of post-abortion
psychological and emotional impact as being either negative or benign, and
introduces the idea that the experience can be positively transformative.
Bridget M. Finn
73
______________________________________________________________
F. The abortion experience impacts women’s sexual behaviour and
functioning with short-term fear of pregnancy and short-term lack of, or
decrease in, sexual desire.
All of the women resumed sexual intercourse approximately three to
four weeks post-abortion. They described feelings of fear and nervousness
upon resuming sexual intercourse as a result of the possibility of experiencing
another unwanted pregnancy. However, these feelings were short-term for the
women as a result of contraceptive use post-abortion. In addition, the
negative feelings described were confined to the relationship at the time of
the abortion experience and did not impact upon subsequent intimate/sexual
relationships, again, this being due to feelings of security resulting from
continued and correct contraceptive use post-abortion.
The abortion experiences resulted in a short-term impact on sexual
desire post-abortion for most of the women. Two reasons were
communicated: emotional distance experienced in the relationships of these
women at the time of the abortion and fear of another unwanted pregnancy.
It is significant to note here that despite this impact on sexual desire
within the relationship at the time of the abortion experience, the women
resumed sexual intercourse. This is not surprising considering the way in
which women are taught to conceptualise sexual expression. According to
Michelle Fine, female sexual expression is often associated with dangers,
such as the potential of an unwanted pregnancy.10 There is a void in our
dialogue regarding women’s sexual expression; namely, the emphasis on the
importance of and entitlement to, sexual desire and physical pleasure. As a
result, women may not regard sexual desire and physical pleasure as
necessary components of sexual expression, and may engage in sexual
activities regardless. This perspective is revealed particularly in the narratives
of five of the women, all of whom stated that sex with their partners was not
satisfying, neither before nor after the abortion, yet they continued to engage
in sexual intercourse.
G. The women revealed an increased awareness of the importance of sexual
health care post-abortion.
The abortion experiences of these women led to an increased
awareness of the importance of sexual health care, and the procurement of
contraception, as a means to control reproductive destinies. This was evinced
by consistently scheduling and attending gynaecological appointments, and
accessing and using contraception. This heightened awareness did not depend
upon past exposure to gynaecological examinations. There was one woman in
the enquiry for whom the abortion procedure was the first experience with
and exposure to a gynaecological examination, and she described the same
impact as the others.
74
______________________________________________________________
The impact of the abortion experience was described further to
include a conscious connection between sexual health care and personal
identity as women. The women communicated that the abortion was in
essence an impetus for an awakening to their potential and ability to
reproduce. The experience brought about awareness that as women, they
have specific, different, and unique sexual health care needs.
Typically, enquiry regarding subsequent sexual health care has been
limited in that it occurs only at the follow-up visit, and is focused primarily
on the assessment of the percentage of women who return for this follow-up
visit.11 This research enquiry fills a void in the existing literature, as it
provides a broader look at the abortion experience and its impact upon sexual
health care. It does this by exploring the thoughts and feelings associated
with sexual health care post-abortion and over a longer period of time
thereafter.
H. The abortion experience marked the beginning of a continual process of
taking personal responsibility for sexual activity.
The abortion experiences of these women marked a conscious
connection between sex and the potential for pregnancy. This finding is
congruent with the research of Dianne Marguerite, which asserts that for
some women, the abortion experience represents the first conscious
connection between sexual activity and conception.12 This connection had not
been made prior to the abortion experience by some of the women, who were
not using birth control or were using it inconsistently, or incorrectly, when
engaging in sexual intercourse. Post-abortion, contraceptive use became
associated with an avenue to prevent the identified trauma of unwanted
pregnancy. The women developed an association between contraceptive use
and a sense of actively taking personal control to avoid the trauma. Further,
by providing and taking charge of the use of contraception, the women felt
that they were asserting personal control within their sexual relationships.
I. The women stated that the abortion experience translates into political
awareness and activism.
The abortion experiences of these women led to a political
awareness of the larger societal controversy over the issue, and the abortion
issue has become the most relevant issue for them politically. Preserving
reproductive choice and autonomy for self and others has become a
significant focus. Voting decisions in the political arena are made with
specific attention to reproductive choice.
J. The psychosexual impact of the abortion experience can be conceptualised
as a phenomenon with an interwoven nexus of themes, which begin prior to
Bridget M. Finn
75
______________________________________________________________
the actual medical procedure, at the time of the unwanted pregnancy, and
continue to the present time.
The meaning of the psychosexual impact of the abortion experience
has interwoven and interconnected aspects. The meaning attached to the
experience has changed over time, beginning as a personal trauma, associated
with a sense of immediacy and urgency, and evolving into a larger, more
global focus on the reproductive rights of women. This study reveals that the
abortion experience is a complex phenomenon that transcends the sum of its
parts. The experience becomes a part of the woman, interwoven into her
personal, sexual, and political identities.
The abortion experiences of the women in this enquiry have come to
represent the importance and power of personal control and choice regarding
reproductive destinies, which is the essence of what becomes interwoven into
the identities of the women.
These stated perceptions of the women emerge as interwoven
themes and are the basis for the final model of women’s response to the
psychosexual impact of the experience of abortion. These themes are:
exercising choice, marking a separation from the Catholic Church, revealing
a feminist moral perspective, redefining of self, taking personal responsibility
for sexual activity, altering of the quality of attachment, avoiding the trauma,
increasing/enhancing the cognisance of sexual health care, and
awakening/increasing political awareness.
The chronological order of these interwoven themes is not
mandatory. The phenomenon of the psychosexual impact of the experience of
abortion seems to approach a linear direction during the initial common
experience of the trauma of unwanted pregnancy. Thereafter, a more circular
or interwoven nexus of themes occurs.
5
Implications
As a result of the findings of this study, there are a number of
implications of importance for women of reproductive age, members of the
reproductive health professions, members of the counselling and psychology
professions, educational professionals, religious institutions, legislators and
the governmental sector, and society at large. All of these groups, both
individually and collectively, need to broaden their understanding of the
experience of abortion in order to understand the complexity of the issues of
reproductive choice. Implications include:
A. Curriculum Implications
There is a need for curricular inclusion of the experience of
abortion. This inclusion should not be limited solely to sexuality education
curricula. The experience of abortion as a complex phenomenon has far
reaching implications for a number of educational fields including law,
76
______________________________________________________________
medicine, religion, psychology, and philosophy. A feminist pedagogy that
addresses patriarchal dominance should be considered, as it takes into
account the social context in which abortion occurs.
B. Implications for Contraceptive Education
Discussions of the purpose of birth control in the lives of girls and
women need to move beyond the myopic view that its sole purpose is the
prevention of pregnancy. As this research enquiry has revealed, issues of
personal and sexual power and control are very much associated with
contraceptive use. Therefore, contraception education needs to broaden its
lens to empower women, to unveil the strength and power that comes from
taking personal responsibility for sexual activity. Prevention of pregnancy is
merely one benefit of contraceptive use; we need to start talking about the
psychological, emotional, and sexual benefits as well.
C. Implications for the Catholic Church
Leaders of the Catholic Church may want to reflect on the reality of
the social context of the lives of women who self-identify as having a
Catholic religious affiliation. They need to acknowledge that women’s lives
are affected by a combination of cultural and social influences, as well as
spiritual ones. A predictable effect of not doing so is the relocation of
women’s spiritual energy outside the established domain, an effect which is
revealed in this enquiry. Consideration of these realities may shed light upon
reasons for the decrease in numbers of female parishioners.
D. Implications for Research
Qualitative research allows for a more comprehensive perspective of
a given phenomenon. People are complex beings; therefore, all aspects of
human response should be explored. Human participants’ research is
benefited by inclusion of a qualitative lens, so that personal truths and
meanings can be heard and known, and general theories challenged.
6.
Summary
This discussion of the experience of abortion has come full circle
and ends where it began. There are deep questions beneath and beyond what
is publicly debated regarding abortion, such as why should women be in
situations of unwanted pregnancy at all? When concrete decisions have to be
made concerning whether or not to have an abortion, a complex web of
circumstances demands consideration. Despite this, controversy abounds with
its myopic focus on the unanswerable question of “when does life begin?”
This question is, for some, the central issue in the abortion debate.
However, this is a question for which there is not, never has been, and likely
never will be, a unanimous answer. Thus, should women passively submit to
Bridget M. Finn
77
______________________________________________________________
the situation of an unwanted pregnancy until the impossible answer is
produced? More important however, as this enquiry reveals, is the notion that
women who are faced with the situation of an unwanted pregnancy are not
asking that question.
We need then to focus on the obvious, though often overlooked
question: who is creating these constructs, and who is expected to bear
unwanted children? Historical analysis of abortion reveals that the
conceptualisations and symbols surrounding the abortion controversy have
been the creations of our patriarchal authoritarian Western society. Far from
reflecting the experiences of women, they function to falsify these
experiences. Thus, the controversy over abortion in our society is constructed
so that it serves to screen out experience by responding only to the questions
considered meaningful within the boundaries of prevailing thought structures,
which reflect sexist social structures.13 Therefore, the constructs created by a
patriarchal power structure cannot be considered to reflect a balanced or
adequate vision of the reality of the experience of unwanted pregnancy and
abortion.
Only by providing forums where women feel free and safe to tell
their stories, without judgment, will we come to realise the depth of the
abortion phenomenon. In order to grasp the implications of this process, we
must recognise that women have had the power of naming taken from them.14
Women have not been free to use their own voices to name, or provide
meaning for, their abortion experiences. The imposing of meaning by our
patriarchal society has been false, because it is partial. Thus, inadequate
meanings have been taken as adequate, and partial truths have been taken as
whole. Those who have not shared in or lived the experience themselves
impose meaning from the privileged distance of those who have at best a
“knowledge about” the subject.15 Listening to the voices and stories of the
women who have lived the experience of abortion allows for the emergence
of new perceptions of reality.
This enquiry reveals the complexity surrounding the situation of
unwanted pregnancy and abortion. These are not stories about medical
procedures. They are stories about personal survival. They are about having
the power to choose when and if to have children. They are about the
devastation that occurs when a woman is faced with an unwanted pregnancy.
They are about the force of a woman’s determination to end an unwanted
pregnancy. They are about the aftermath. They are about the right to control
one’s reproductive destiny. They are about the meaning of abortion in
women’s lives. One may be tempted to disregard the power of these stories as
truths, as they are only the stories of nine women. Yet as Gloria Steinem
reminds us:
78
______________________________________________________________
Make no mistake; these are not “little” stories. They are
voices in a worldwide chorus that is adding the female half
of humanity to the goal of global democracy. And, the
point of democracy is not what gets decided. The point is:
Who decides?16
Notes
1
C Moustakas, Heuristic Research, Sage, Newbury Park, California, 1990,
pp. 24-134, p. 49
2
Ibid., pp. 136-138.
3
See, e.g., G Faria, E Barrett, and L Goodman, ‘Women and Abortion:
Attitudes, Social Networks, Decision Making,’ Social Work in Health Care,
vol. 11, no. 1, 1985, pp. 85-99; D Marguerite, The Ways in Which Women
Integrate the Experience of Abortion in Their Lives, PhD Thesis, University
of Oregon, 1994, pp. 27-84; and DE Polkinghorne, ‘Qualitative Procedures
for Counseling Research’, in E Watkins and L Scheiner (eds.), Research in
Counseling, Lawerence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1991, pp.13-68.
4
See Marguerite, op. cit., pp. 91-12; and Polkinghorne, op. cit., pp. 13-68.
5
See T Byrnes and M Segers, The Catholic Church and the Politics of
Abortion, Westview Press, San Francisco, California, 1992, pp. 14-67; D
Callahan, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality, MacMillan, New York,
1970, pp. 34-93; G Crum and T McCormack, Abortion: Pro-choice or Prolife?, The American University Press, Lanham, Maryland, 1992, pp. 52-121;
and N Davis, ‘The Abortion Debate: The Search for Common Ground, Part
1’, Ethics, vol. 103, no. 3, April, 1993, pp. 520-529.
6
M Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation, Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1973. pp. 23-78.
7
Ibid., pp. 86-113.
8
See JM Robbins and JD DeLamater, ‘Support From Significant Others and
Loneliness Following Induced Abortion’, Social Psychiatry, vol. 20, 1985,
pp. 92-99; B Major, P Mueller and K Hildebrandt, ‘Attributions,
Expectations and Coping with Abortion’, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, vol. 48, 1985, pp. 585-599; and B Major and C Cozzarelli,
‘Psychosocial Predictors of Adjustment to Abortion’, Journal of Social
Issues, vol. 48, no. 3, 1992, pp. 121-142.
9
See P Mueller and B Major, ‘Self-Blame Self-Efficacy, and Adjustment to
Abortion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 57, no. 6,
1989, pp. 1059-1068; JD Osofsky and HJ Osofsky, ‘The Psychological
Reaction of Patients to Legalized Abortion’, American Journal of
Orthopsychiatry, vol. 42, 1972, pp. 48-60; NE Adler, HP David, BN Major, S
H Roth, NF Russo and GE Wyatt, ‘Psychological Responses After Abortion’,
Bridget M. Finn
79
______________________________________________________________
Science, vol. 248, 1990, pp. 41-44; and R Illsley and MH Hall, ‘Psychosocial
Aspects of Abortion: A Review of Issues and Needed Research,’ Bulletin of
the World Health Organization, no. 53, 1976, pp. 83-103.
10
M Fine, ‘Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing
Discourse of Desire’, in L Weis and M Fine (eds.), Beyond Silenced Voices:
Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools, State University of New
York Press, New York, 1987, pp. 75-99.
11
See Major and Cozzarelli, op. cit., pp. 121-142; JP Lemkau, ‘Emotional
Sequelae of Abortion’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 12, 1988, pp.
461-472; Robbins and DeLamater, op. cit., pp. 92-99; L Cohen and S Roth,
‘Coping with Abortion’, Journal of Human Stress, vol. 10, 1984, pp. 140145; and Major, Mueller and Hildebrandt, op. cit., pp. 585-599.
12
See Marguerite, op. cit., pp. 22-63.
13
See Daly, op. cit., pp. 87-131.
14
Ibid., pp. 131-134.
15
Ibid., pp. 123-143.
16
G Steinem, ‘Forword’, in A Bonavoglia (ed.), The Choices We Made:
Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, Random House,
New York, 1991, pp. 1-4, p. 2.
Bibliography
Adler, NE, HP David, BN Major, SH Roth, NF Russo, and GE Wyatt,
‘Psychological Responses after Abortion’, Science, vol. 248, 1990,
pp. 41-44.
Byrnes, T, and M Segers, The Catholic Church and the Politics of Abortion,
Westview Press, San Francisco, California, 1992.
Callahan, D, Abortion: Law, Choice, and Morality, MacMillan, New York,
1970.
Cohen, L, and S Roth, ‘Coping with Abortion’, Journal of Human Stress, vol.
10, 1984, pp. 140-145.
Crum, G, and T McCormack, Abortion: Pro-choice or Pro-life?, The
American University Press, Lanham, Maryland, 1992.
Daly, M, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s
Liberation, Beacon Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1973.
Davis, N, ‘The Abortion Debate: The Search for Common Ground, Part 1’,
Ethics, vol. 103, no. 3, April, 1993, pp. 520-529.
Faria, G, E Barrett, and L Goodman, ‘Women and Abortion: Attitudes, Social
Networks, Decision Making’, Social Work in Health Care, vol. 11,
no. 1, 1985, pp. 85-99.
Fine, M, ‘Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing
Discourse of Desire’, in L Weis and M Fine (eds.), Beyond Silenced
80
______________________________________________________________
Voices: Class, Race, and Gender in United States Schools, State
University of New York Press, New York, 1987, pp. 75-99.
Illsley, R, and MH Hall, ‘Psychosocial Aspects of Abortion: A Review of
Issues and Needed Research’, Bulletin of the World Health
Organization, no. 53, 1976, pp. 83-103.
Lemkau, JP, ‘Emotional Sequelae of Abortion’, Psychology of Women
Quarterly, vol. 12, 1988, pp. 461-472.
Major, B, and C Cozzarelli, ‘Psychosocial Predictors of Adjustment to
Abortion’, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 48, no. 3, 1992, pp. 121142.
Major, B, P Mueller and K Hildebrandt, ‘Attributions, Expectations and
Coping With Abortion’, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, vol. 48, 1985, pp. 585-599.
Marguerite, D, The Ways in which Women Integrate the Experience of
Abortion in Their Lives, PhD Thesis, University of Oregon, 1994.
Moustakas, C, ‘Phenomenological/Heuristic Research,’ in Heuristic
Research, Newbury Park, California, 1990, pp. 24-134.
Mueller, P, and B Major, ‘Self-Blame, Self-Efficacy, and Adjustment to
Abortion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 57,
no. 6, 1989, pp. 1059-1068.
Osofsky, JD, and HJ Osofsky, ‘The Psychological Reaction of Patients to
Legalized Abortion,’ American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, vol. 42,
1972, pp. 48-60.
Petchesky, RP, Abortion and Woman’s Choice, Northeastern University
Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1990.
Polkinghorne, DE, ‘Qualitative Procedures for Counseling Research’, in E
Watkins and L Scheiner (eds.), Research in Counseling, Lawerence
Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1991, pp. 13-68.
Robbins, JM, and JD DeLamater, ‘Support from Significant Others and
Loneliness Following Induced Abortion’, Social Psychiatry, vol. 20,
1985, pp. 92-99.
Steinem, G, ‘Forword’ in A Bonavoglia, The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five
Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, Random House, New
York, 1991, pp. 1-4.
Sexuality, Identity and Inequality: Examining the
Interaction of Community, Family and Relationships
Jacqui O’Riordan
Abstract This paper draws on research carried out in the south west of
Ireland over a period of two years, from 1998-2000, which examined a
complexity of factors that came together in influencing gender identities. The
research focused on the formation and development of relationships and
livelihoods within the particular community context of a long established
host tourist community. It questioned dominant assumptions current in
modern Ireland that presume the achievement, or near-achievement of gender
equality. This paper highlights a combination of influences and practices of
relationships, family, and community that combine to “normalise” women’s
sexuality. It argues that a central discourse closely links heterosexuality with
motherhood and marginalises lesbian motherhood, within this particular
community context. Thus, boundaries on women’s activities, aspirations, and
practices are set that interact with the formation of identities, including
sexual identities. These assumptions and practices are embedded in daily
routines of women’s lives and livelihoods and are informed through the
social construction of a normative heterosexuality.
Key Words: community, employment, equality, family, gender, Ireland,
lesbian mothers, motherhood, sexuality, women
1.
Introduction
This paper draws on research undertaken between 1998 and 2000, which set
out to interrogate a contemporary and widely held assumption in Ireland,
namely that equality between women and men is being, or even has been,
achieved. Factors that underlie this assumption are many. They include a
perceived growing individualism, consumerism, and freedom of expression
prevalent in contemporary Irish society, including greater freedom in sexual
expression and identity. This paper argues that while it is evident that greater
forms of sexual and gendered expressions are opening up in this new order,
underlying assumptions prevail that privilege a normative heterosexuality,
based on structurally unequal gender relations. In the first instance, the wider
research context is outlined, including an overview of aspects of the research
methodology, and reference is made to some of the more recent changes
taking place in Ireland that are of particular concern. Thereafter, I focus on
the contexts of women’s lives as encountered in the research regarding issues
of identity and sexuality. I argue that a range of class and gender based social
forces come together, which serve to perpetuate traditional gender roles and
privilege heterosexuality.
82
Sexuality, Identity and Inequality
______________________________________________________________
2.
Research Background and Context
Ireland has undergone considerable change over the latter part of the
twentieth century. Patterns of belief, lifestyles, economic and social
opportunities are now vastly different to the expectations and realities that
predominated a mere thirty or so years ago. While a discussion on the detail
of these changes is outside of the remit of this paper, it is now generally
accepted that (i) women will continue in employment throughout their life,
and (ii) households are becoming more democratic and the power previously
vested by the state in “the man” as head of household is contested. Whether
to marry, co-habit, or remain single, all are now real and viable options for
most people, and we see a diversity of household formations emerging,
including married and co-habiting households, single-person households,
single-sex households and single-parent households. As adults, we may move
in and out of these and other adult life choices any number of times, without
being publicly stigmatised. Such factors indicate, to many, a growing
tendency towards individualism, as proposed by Ulrick Beck, as well as
theories that propose greater freedom and equality in personal intimate
relationships.1
It is also worth pointing out that in Ireland there is a widely held
belief that the achievement of gender equality can be measured by the
participation of women in areas of public life, from which they have
previously been restricted, particularly employment. However it is arguable
that this belief avoids addressing more private areas of life, work and
activities more traditionally associated with women. In this scenario of
equality, women are allowed entry to areas previously prohibited to them,
with few supporting mechanisms for other areas of responsibility. In
addition, criticisms of long established structures, norms, practices and
policies are largely unwelcome.
Furthermore, it is argued that three key elements - caring,
reproduction, and family - continue to underlie concepts of womanhood in
Ireland.2 Together with elements of heterosexual love and attraction they
“effectively obscure the issue of male control.”3 However, they sit
uncomfortably with “individual definitions involving personhood, … with all
its implications as regards individual autonomy, individual choices, rights
and responsibilities.”4 This dilemma grasps the complexity with which
women now living in contemporary Ireland struggle - opposing ideologies of
womanhood. On the one hand, there is the traditional one that encompasses
dependency and invisibility, in a framework of the heterosexual family unit.
On the other hand, there is the prospect of individuality and choice. They
operate together within structures that now pull women in opposite
directions. Again, Pat O’Connor argues that “[w]omen in Ireland, regardless
of their age, life stage, ascribed class position and participation in paid
employment, are surrounded by structural and cultural cues which define
Jacqui O’Riordan
83
______________________________________________________________
their lives.”5 She goes on to note that this does not imply that women, as a
block, experience their position in similar ways. Rather, she argues that the
assumptions that underlie these cues foster images that promote the
naturalisation of caring characteristics over those of independence and
individuality. This paper focuses on the dilemmas women face in this
context, as they emerged within the research.
The research from which this paper is drawn was multi-dimensional.
Qualitative in nature, it sought to explore the dynamics of gender relations
within the day to day lives of women and men living and working in a
tourist-oriented, largely rural area, in the south west of Ireland. One strand of
this research focused on women who are currently engaged in combining
unpaid caring and livelihoods. Insights gleaned from the (fifteen) women’s
experiences in this series of interviews and accounts of the trajectory of their
lives are central to this paper. The women ranged in age from twenty-two to
forty-five years of age and came from largely working class backgrounds.
Seven were married and living with their husbands at the time of our
conversations, three were in long-term relationships, living with their
partners, and five were lone parents, living with their children; two of these
had been married and were now separated; three were single never-married
women. More than half of all the women had grown up in the area, attended
school locally and were now living in the locality. Those women who were
migrants into the area (six) had lived originally in England, Dublin, and other
parts of Ireland. They came to live in the area because of a combination of
employment opportunities and personal contacts in the area. The majority
identified as heterosexual with a small minority identifying as lesbian.
Taking as a starting point the issues that have been highlighted
through these in-depth interviews, it is possible to weave together the manner
in which women’s life courses have been influenced, at different times, by
community and family influences, as well as the structural and cultural cues
to which Pat O’Connor refers.6 Of particular relevance to this paper were
references to what I interpret as instances of “policing,” namely gender and
sexuality “policing,” which led me to reflect on the manner in which
women’s sexuality is being defined through recourse to accepted practices,
within the structure of everyday activities and relationships. During the
research process it became evident that the foundations of such “policing”
became more apparent in the context of motherhood, when assumptions
about the naturalness of motherhood, work associated with motherhood, and
its association with heterosexuality became more distinct. In the particular
research context, where people lived in a largely rural community, often with
low levels of education and at some distance from support groups operating
in cities and larger towns, some stark choices were being made.
84
______________________________________________________________
3.
Employment Influences
As mentioned earlier, access to employment is viewed as an
important indicator in Ireland of a move towards greater gender equality.
However, my research findings indicate that the local employment context
operated to facilitate opportunities for greater freedom and choice for
younger women and conversely acted in limiting these choices later on.
As is common in host tourist communities, women worked mostly
in service areas, as waitresses, chefs, shop workers, office workers, and in
community work.7 Access to employment was often through informal means
and informality permeated conditions at work. Girls heard about employment
opportunities through family and friends, and tended to take jobs where they
would be working with friends. Younger women with few family and caring
responsibilities found themselves in positions where they could lead
independent lives within the local context, often having a number of different
jobs simultaneously. However, as they accumulated caring responsibilities,
this potential became more limited. In all cases when women became
mothers they took on primary child caring responsibilities. In so doing they
reduced their employment hours or looked for more part-time work, even
when retaining primary breadwinning household responsibilities. Women
referred to the choices that they had made about having children and the
increased responsibility as part of the “price of motherhood.”
Evelyn Mahon notes the tendency there now is in Ireland for young
women who leave school with minimum qualifications to only marginally
benefit from developments in employment, which, she argues, favour more
qualified professional women, working in more secure and full time
employment.8 This follows a process of involvement in low paid and low
skilled employment, rendering women’s involvement in employment highly
responsive to changes in hourly rates, overall household income, taxation
policies, and welfare rates. She argues that the combination of a familyoriented taxation system and the lack of provision of state-sponsored services
that support women’s involvement in employment leads to the reinforcement
of traditional gender roles, which are now becoming more defined along
class divisions. This view seems to characterise women’s relationship to
employment as encountered in this research.
Furthermore, fears that lesbian women expressed concerning being
found out by their colleagues, reiterated the manner in which gender norms
operated with the assumption and privileging of heterosexuality. Such fears
revolved around anxieties that colleagues would discover their sexual identity
and this might result in negative consequences for their future employment.
Such fears were sometimes fuelled by colleagues’ banter and negative
reference to sexual stereotypes other than heterosexual. In this way, isolation
from the prevailing norms within a small community emerged in relation to
the experiences of lesbian women in the workplace.
Jacqui O’Riordan
85
______________________________________________________________
It can be argued that the characteristics of the employment context,
while being flexible and adapting to suit individual circumstances, ultimately
facilitated more traditional assumptions about the role of women and also
privileged heterosexuality. Heterosexual women were encouraged to
combine their productive and reproductive activities within a low skilled and
often informal employment structure. Lesbian women interacted complexly
and sometimes fearfully with local employment conditions, availing
themselves of the flexibility dominant in the locality to maintain their
invisibility.
4.
Household, Family and Relationships
The women with whom I spoke had between one and four children;
mostly they had one or two children, while one had three and another had
four children. The youngest was just a few months old and the eldest thirteen
years of age. All of the mothers had been involved in long term relationships
when they first became pregnant, although at times the pregnancy itself
signalled the beginning of the end of that relationship, as the women reflected
more on it.
A. Pregnancy and Issues of Identity
The process of pregnancy and childbirth itself, their health and wellbeing throughout it, were experienced at psychological, emotional, and
physical levels. Women wanted to recount and speak about their pregnancies,
and this often started a process of reflection for them. The vast majority were
heterosexual and whether planned or not, their pregnancy was accepted
within the dominance of heterosexuality that operates in Irish society
generally.
Being pregnant and becoming parents affected women in important
ways. They now assumed roles as primary carers and prioritised caring for
their children. They adjusted their employment and personal lives
accordingly in the context of high costs and limited availability of formal
childcare facilities. As women and mothers they operated within the choices
available to them, and within assumptions made by and of them. Our
attention is drawn to underlying notions about work and workers, supports
for, and contradictions between caring and employment commitments.
Women’s identities were envisaged with reference to discourses around our
notions of work, workers, and mothers. The perpetuation of unequal
involvement in aspects of unpaid, caring, and emotional work by women as
mothers was facilitated, justifying and normalising women’s disproportionate
participation in such work, while simultaneously deflecting attention away
from women’s needs and onto the welfare of children.
86
______________________________________________________________
B. Becoming Mothers in Heterosexual Couple Households
The extra work and new set of priorities that a newborn baby brings
to any household was distributed on the basis of roles and expectations
operating within everyday lives of the couples. Mostly, the women assumed
the major responsibility for caring for the children. This was expressed in
ways such as not feeling happy about other people caring for the baby,
perhaps feeling a need to compensate for the lack of attention from fathers;
concerns for the babies’ health; expressions that babysitters might not be in a
position to fully care for and monitor the children. They often began to view
their employment as secondary, even when they retained major provider
responsibilities. While it was common for the new fathers to help and support
the women, usually this was done within a breadwinner ideology, with the
new mothers and fathers mostly viewing the role of father in a financial
supportive capacity. Men were perceived to be largely unable to cope with
young children, and women were concerned that they would become
frustrated if caring full-time for children in their homes. Where they cared for
their children themselves full-time, women also experienced such frustration;
they commented on loneliness, isolation, and stress, especially when they had
little social outlets. However, these women often felt guilty about feeling
lonely or isolated, generally because they felt that they ought to be grateful
for the support offered to them, mostly by family members. Feeling lonely
led to a belief that they were inadequate and were demanding more than they
were entitled to in their lives. While not a state of affairs they relished, it was
one that was accepted as part of the choice they believed that they had freely
made to become mothers, in other words the price of choosing motherhood.
C. Becoming Mothers and Single Parents
A further issue that arose in the community context was that of
prejudice aimed at single mothers. This was subtle in nature and differed
depending on whether or not the women had previously been married. There
was a perception that those who had never been married were more readily
accepted, in that they were perceived not to have taken the step of leaving
their partners or to have failed in a marriage. Those who were separated felt
an extra bias directed at them because of their status. Such prejudice was
never direct or overt. Rather, it was felt by the women through becoming
uncomfortable in the presence of their friends’ male partners and husbands.
They may also have been cautioned by older women that friends might
become suspicious, in light of their separated status. Clear messages also
came to women from family members, that another pregnancy would be
unwelcome: their ongoing relationships, if any, were closely monitored.
The subtlety of such opinion should not lead us to underestimate its
strength, particularly when viewed in the context of the interconnections and
dependency women often had with their families regarding child-care and
Jacqui O’Riordan
87
______________________________________________________________
general support, as well as the role of family in perpetuating inequality.9
Again in this regard, loneliness was identified as an issue. Women
commented on their feelings of isolation, particularly during the long winter
evenings. Such feelings have also been expressed by women in singleparenting situations more generally in Ireland.10 Finding it difficult to stretch
often meagre financial resources, socialising was very limited. Furthermore,
while the support of family may often have been forthcoming in assisting
with work/care commitments, it was less evident in facilitating socialising.
Some women also expressly commented on their reluctance to call on
parents/siblings to baby-sit, especially when they were lone-parenting, in
case they should be thought of as asking for too much assistance and/or as
careless mothers and irresponsible parents. Those who continued to have
some type of social life commented that they socialised only in places with
which they were very familiar and in which they felt safe and secure from
intolerance.
D. Silence on Homosexuality
The difficulty I had in locating lesbian and gay couples living
openly within the locality raised its own set of issues. In the first instance,
this would seem to confirm the continuation of the hidden nature of the gay
and lesbian population generally in Ireland,11 as well as limitations to the
acceptance of alternative sexual identities, especially outside of the main
urban centres and their surroundings.12
For those lesbian women with whom I spoke the dominance of
heterosexuality clearly arose in the context of pregnancy and motherhood.
This was most noticeably stated in discussions around choices that lesbian
women made not to become pregnant. Such decisions were made in the
context of tensions associated with a stigmatised view on homosexual and
lesbian identity prevalent in Ireland,13 and an associated perception that
children reared in single sex households would potentially suffer from
teasing and harassment. It can also be viewed in the context of a persistence
of conservative views on sexuality in Ireland.14 Such views are consistent
with the findings of Whelan, who argues that “Irish values are distinctly
conservative in relation to abortion and sexual freedom.”15
Along with this went a perceived need to keep a low profile, in an
attempt to direct attention away from any differences in identity that might be
associated with being lesbian. Withdrawal from contact with friends and
sometimes from contact with family members was evident. This might have
been subsequent to adverse, exaggerated, or clumsy reactions to their
“coming-out,” indicating a poor general understanding of lesbian and gay
sexuality locally. Professional and community support to facilitate an
understanding and acceptance of homosexual identity did not emerge to any
extent within the local context. At best, people were lucky to come into
88
______________________________________________________________
contact with sympathetic family and friends. At worst, they were the objects
of sneers and innuendo, had to endure intimate personal questioning, and the
ridiculing of homosexuality, as well as various references to real
masculinities and real femininities. Sometimes they were subjected to
unhelpful professional advice, ranging from viewing homosexuality as a
phase to advising them not to engage in homosexual sexual practices.
A range of supports were available, mostly initiated and run on a
voluntary capacity, but requiring one to be in a position to travel to adjacent
larger urban centres. The centre most likely to be identified was Cork City,
located some ninety kilometres away. With an already diminished selfesteem and a likelihood of confusion relating to sexuality, the prospect of
approaching another set of strangers in an unfamiliar environment must at the
very least be a frightening prospect. Such a scenario also raises issues of
class and geographical distance, from what elsewhere has been identified as a
largely middle-class and professional gay community.
Always, the hegemony of heterosexuality limited opportunity for
open and accepted lesbian relationships and social interaction locally. Such
factors can place a great deal of stress on relationships that might now have
to cope with issues that would often be dealt with through a network of
friendships and casual social contact.16 The result is that these factors make it
difficult for lesbian women to be fully part of this small, if transient and
hospitality-focused community, and their options on motherhood are further
limited. Continued interaction has to be balanced with a complex series of
truths and half-truths, carefully adjusted to conceal. While the current
dialogue within lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities in Ireland focuses on
discussion around the inclusion or exclusion of transgender and queer
politics,17 fear, isolation and a distancing of the individual from local
community life all emerged as realities for lesbian women in the locality.
5.
Conclusion
We can see from the above discussion that women, as mothers,
became more associated and responsible for the care of their families.
However, this option was very closely and actively associated with
heterosexuality. Various factors came together to set the boundaries of
heterosexual normative behaviour.
When aspects of women’s lives overstepped the boundaries of
behaviour acceptable to dominant ideas on gender and sexuality, they faced
prejudice to varying degrees. While this prejudice no longer has the formal
sanctions enforced by state and moral authority common in Ireland in the
past, it nevertheless continues in subtle forms, distancing and marginalising
those who do not conform. It has particular class and geographical
dimensions. Subtle and not so subtle signals indicated the parameters of
acceptable behaviour, ranging from private familial spheres to social life and
Jacqui O’Riordan
89
______________________________________________________________
to participation in employment. Women were in a sense free to ignore these
messages and cues, but only through paying the price of greater distance
from family and community. It is suggested that gendered power structures
continue to inhibit women’s choices, placing them in positions of inequality
structured through prevailing ideas about gender and sexuality.
Notes
1
See U Beck and E Beck Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 1995; A Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, Polity,
Cambridge, 1992; and CM Bateson, Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture
and Generation in Transition, Random House, New York, 2000.
2
See P O’Connor, Emerging Voices: Women in Contemporary Irish Society,
IPA, Dublin, 1998.
3
Ibid., p. 108.
4
Ibid., p. 108.
5
Ibid., p. 108.
6
Ibid., p. 82.
7
See ECohen, ‘The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and
Findings’, in Y Apostolopoulos, S Leivadi, and A Yiannais, (eds.), The
Sociology of Tourism, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 51-74; P Breathnach, M
Henry, S Drea, and M O’Flaherty, ‘Gender in Irish Tourism Employment’, in
V Kinnaird and D Hall, (eds.), Tourism: A Gender Analysis, John Wiley and
Sons, Chichester, 1994, pp. 52-77; and JC Gavaghan, and G O’Donnell, A
Socio-Economic Profile of Killarney, a Report Prepared for Killarney
Technology Town Working Group, Tralee, 1997.
8
E Mahon, ‘Class, Mothers and Equal Opportunities to Work’, in Women,
Work, and the Family in Europe, Routledge, London & New York, 1998, pp.
170-181.
9
See P Baker, K Lynch, S Cantillon, and J Walsh, Equality: From Theory to
Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire & New York, 2004; O Benjamin,
and O Sullivan, ‘Relational Resources, Gender Consciousness and
Possibilities of Change in Marital Relationships’, The Sociological Review,
vol. 46, no. 4, 1999, pp. 794-820; and S Dallos and R Dallos, Couples, Sex
and Power: The Politics of Desire, Open University Press, Buckingham,
1997.
10
A McCashin, Lone Mothers in Ireland: A Local Study, Research Report
Series, Oak Tree Press, Dublin, 1996.
11
Census data in Ireland does not include information on sexual identity, and
there has not been any systematic study that attempts to estimate the
lesbian/gay/bisexual population in the state. There are now a number of
lesbian/gay/bisexual support groups working to promote diversity of sexual
90
______________________________________________________________
identity, including Outhouse (Dublin), LINC and the Other Place (Cork), and
Gay and Lesbian Network (GLEN). Sexual orientation is included among the
nine grounds on which discrimination is prohibited in Equality legislation in
Ireland. The above indicate that lesbian/gay/bisexual sexual orientations are
of themselves a basis for discrimination and marginalisation within Irish
society.
12
G O’Brien, Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences, Curragh Press, Dublin,
2003; GLEN and Nexus, Poverty: Lesbians and Gay Men, Combat Poverty
Agency, Dublin, 1995.
13
GLEN and Nexus, ibid.; P O’Connor, op. cit., p. 2.
14
See T Inglis, ‘Foucault, Bourdieu and the Field of Irish Sexuality’, Irish
Journal of Sociology, vol. 7, 1997, pp. 5-28.
15
CT Whelan, op. cit., p. 214.
16
See S Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, Chardon Press, Berkeley,
1997.
17
Within student politics, at least, in Ireland current debates are ongoing on
these issues.
Bibliography
Baker, J, and K Lynch, S Cantillon, and J Walsh, Equality: From Theory to
Action, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York, 2004.
Beck U, and E Beck Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1995.
Bateson, MC, Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in
Transition, Random House, New York, 2000.
Benjamin, O, and O Sullivan, ‘Relational Resources, Gender Consciousness
and Possibilities of Change in Marital Relationships’, The
Sociological Review, vol. 46, no. 4, 1999, pp. 794-820.
Breathnach, P, and M Henry, S Drea, and M O’Flaherty, ‘Gender in Irish
Tourism Employment’, in V Kinnaird and D Hall, (eds.), Tourism:
A Gender Analysis, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1994, pp. 5277.
Cohen, E, ‘The Sociology of Tourism: Approaches, Issues and Findings’, in
Y Apostolopoulos, S Leivadi, and A Yiannais, (eds.), The Sociology
of Tourism, Routledge, London, 1999, pp. 51-74.
Dallos, S, and R Dallos, Couples, Sex and Power: The Politics of Desire,
Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997.
Gavaghan, JC, and G O’Donnell, A Socio-Economic Profile of Killarney, a
Report Prepared for Killarney Technology Town Working Group,
Tralee, 1997.
Jacqui O’Riordan
91
______________________________________________________________
Giddens, A, The Transformation of Intimacy, Polity, Cambridge, 1992.
GLEN and Nexus, Poverty: Lesbians and Gay Men, Combat Poverty
Agency, Dublin, 1995.
Inglis, T, ‘Foucault, Bourdieu and the Field of Irish Sexuality’, Irish Journal
of Sociology, vol. 7, 1997, pp. 5-28.
Un/Civil partnerships: Class in Lesbian Relationships
Yvette Taylor
Abstract: This paper explores the difference that class makes in same-sex
relationships, where there has been a tendency to suggest that lesbians “do
things differently.” Such a redress, namely the inclusion of class inequality in
the framework of sexual “difference,” is of importance given the recent and
continued UK/European demands for “sexual citizenship,” as manifest in the
Civil Partnership Act (U.K.). This legislation promises inclusion into the
mainstream state - and the mainstream family - as sexual citizens are granted
a degree of “tolerance,” arguably based on their middle-class consumer based
“respectability.” My purpose is to explore the material and subjective ways
that class manifests itself in intimate relationships, forcing an awareness of
the other inequalities faced by lesbians as they negotiate their increasingly
“equal” rights.
Key words: civil partnerships, class inequality, identity, intimacy, lesbians,
same-sex relationships, sexual citizenship
1.
Introduction: Civil Partnerships
There has been increasing recognition of same-sex relationships
across Western Europe,1 with the introduction of the Civil Partnership in the
U.K. (December 2005) effectively mainstreaming same-sex rights and, some
would say, creating the opportunity for same sex couples to marry in all but
name. With this Act has come the proliferation of new sexual stories, taking
up much page space in both the lesbian and gay press and international
media. Commentaries and controversies have been born out of the
celebration of (monogamous) coupledom extended to same-sex partners,
albeit those who conform to a perceived tolerable ideal lifestyle. Opposition
to or disapproval of civil partnerships has come from a number of varied
groups and points of view. Along with the expected outrage from various
evangelical Christian groups, aghast at the appropriation of a sacred
heterosexual ceremony by parodists and deviants, there has also been vocal
opposition from those who believe that gays and lesbians have no place
within an institution, or a facsimile of an institution, which by its very nature
is seen as reinforcing firmly conservative, heteronormative family values.
Sexuality is placed within the private, monogamous (tax-paying, dualincome) household possibly extended to “but for” lesbians; i.e. lesbians
exactly like idealised heterosexuals but for, as Ruthann Robson puts it, the
sex of their partner. The problem with civil partnerships it would seem, is
much like the problem with a wedding itself. It’s all well and good in theory,
it’s heavenly to look through the magazines and dream of the special day and
94
Un/civil Partnerships
______________________________________________________________
all the joy it will bring, but what happens when the fireworks are over and
how does one translate marital dreams into practical, civil reality? And what
happens if you can’t afford the white wedding in the first place? What if your
gift list is a copy of the Argos catalogue? In the debate around the
introduction of Civil Partnerships many pertinent issues have been raised and
discussed. The questions around the propriety of gays and lesbians engaging
in such non-deviant practises have created a number of thought provoking
stances. However, within this collage of intellectual debate, sardonic
comment, and images of couples in various and varied states of dress, the
issue of class has, surprisingly, been somewhat ignored.
So what impact does class have on the issue of civil partnerships?
How do working-class gay people view them, interact with them, and, if at
all, benefit from them? Is a white wedding a white wash for all the niggling
inequalities, or does class difference bring its own very special gift to the
engagement party? For many working-class lesbians and gays, civil
partnerships may mean little at best, given that extension of pension rights,
one of the most tangible and practical benefits of the new arrangement, are
less likely to apply. Conversely, it can be argued that the implications and
consequences of civil partnerships may actually be restrictive and penalising
for some working-class partnerships. One example of this, and for those in
receipt of benefits quite a major change, is that when either partner in a samesex couple applies for a means tested state benefit, the income of both
partners will be taken into account. Prior to such legislation same-sex couples
were invisible to means testing; now they are not and this applies whether
same-sex couples have a registered civil partnership or not. “Only fair” some
may cry; “if they want equality then they have to take the heterosexual rough
with the smooth,” but with the removal of this differentiation, civil
citizenship has different implications for different people. On one hand, the
invisibility of same sex couples, within the context of means tested benefits,
was historically something of an in-joke. While righteous indignation could
be expressed about bureaucratic discrimination, at the same time it was quite
good to “get one back” on the government by being exempt from dual
income means testing. They lose out; we win by default. Along with the loss
of this “special” exemption comes the issue that by including same sex
couples in means testing, the local authority is, to some extent, forcing
benefit claimants to come out on paper. All well and good in a society in
which all things are equal and discrimination does not exist on any level, but
within our own does this not force those who are economically and socially
most vulnerable to place themselves in an even more precarious position?
This paper draws upon Economic and Social Research Council
funded research Working-class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders,2 which
examines the significance of class and sexuality in the lives of women who
self-identify themselves as working-class and lesbian. It is based upon
Yvette Taylor
95
______________________________________________________________
interviews with fifty-three women living in a range of localities in the U.K.:
the Highlands, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in Scotland, and Yorkshire and
Manchester in England. My purpose is not to pathologise respondents’
relationships but instead to explore the ways that class manifests in intimate
relationships, forcing an awareness of the “other” inequalities faced by
lesbians as they negotiate their “equal” rights. I hope to empirically explore
the significance of class inequalities in lesbian relationships, which are
somewhat swept away in the policy mainstream.
There have been extensive feminist critiques of marriage as an
institution which perpetuates gender and sexual inequalities. Cathy highlights
aspects of marital ownership and dependence, suggesting that things are
different for lesbians:
You talk to mainstream women [about] class you end up
talking about “Well, it’s who you marry.” I think that’s the
thing with lesbians, that’s what’s different, a woman can
change her class by marrying the right fella, that he can
kinda drag her up into whatever class ’cause she then
belongs to the husband and joins his family or whatever.
For lesbians that’s different, you don’t have that even if
you end up dating a middle-class girl. (Cathy, 37,
Manchester)
Nor are things much different since the advent of “gay marriage.” The Civil
Partnership Act, in transferring the model of monogamous heterosexual
coupledom over to same-sex relationships, perhaps fails to “un-do”
hierarchies of intimacy, possibly aggravating the distinction between
un/acceptable lifestyles, while extending economic dependencies. Further,
the proliferation of commercial services, from “bride and bride” attire to
“gay” wedding cakes, may well represent an acceptance offered to the
efficient consumer, but such inclusion is still rather precarious and unequally
available.
Cathy comments that things are “different” for lesbians and this
difference has been widely commented upon. Lesbian relationships are often
depicted as examples of “pure relationships,”3 shaped by “equality” and
“sameness.” Such qualities are seen to reform patterns of intimacy, structured
through a “family of friends” rather than through couple relationships alone.
Much has been said about ever increasing “families of choice,” which are
free from heterosexual family formations and traditional obligations, yet this
again fails to consider class as an important component in generating
resources and opportunities to live “differently,” in well-protected and
resourced communities. In privileging accounts of “reciprocity” and
“accountability” in lesbian relationships, inequalities and challenges within
96
______________________________________________________________
lesbian relationships are smoothed over. “Sameness” is highlighted with
reference to shared gender, but there is little attention to the “differences” of
class within this. The dominant academic position tends to emphasise
individual agency, creativity, autonomy, choice, and mutual responsibility in
establishing “pick and mix” relationships, rather than being confined to
traditional family ties. However, other factors such as poverty and
unemployment have an impact on “picking and choosing.” There are
continued tensions and withholding of important identifications, as well as
classed resentments. To be a lesbian is not, alas, to belong to one open and
equal happy family. Different things and different experiences have different
meanings, even in bed.
2.
Class Dis/Identifications in Intimacy
Class is a significant factor in shaping the sense of self, and many
interviewees wanted this affirmed and taken seriously by partners, or
prospective partners. Class also contributed to ideas and feelings about
“attraction” and “worth,” even in relationships with other self-identified
working-class women. Several women were themselves engaged in complex
processes of de/valuations, as they estimated other women’s class positions
and challenged partners’ identifications.
Rather than reinforcing intimacy, class was often problematised,
with women questioning their partner’s working-class position and disputing
their entitlement to identify: “But she thinks she’s working-class … but I
think she’s just kidding on” (Amy, 29, Edinburgh). These judgements and
differentiations, based on often painful and conflicting comparisons,
produced resentments and generated distance rather than proximity,
sameness, or closeness. This is again indicative of the emotional meanings
and embeddedness of class, which generate claims of il/legitimacy; those
with little emotional investment and/or experience of class inequalities are
disregarded as flawed “fakes.” The process of comparison and contrast
verges on competitiveness, as several women in my study sought to find out
if their partners really were working-class, if they had earned the right to
define as such. The felt resentment, when partners unjustifiably claimed the
term “working-class,” is a huge contrast with the positioning of workingclassness as something to be escaped from, a slur and a one-way judgement:
My ex … said she was working-class when I first met her
and I thought, you so aren’t … looking at the house that
your mum and dad live in … But, em, it caused her a
problem ’cause she couldn’t believe that I was challenging
the fact that I didn’t think she was, you know. (Grace, 30,
Edinburgh)
Yvette Taylor
97
______________________________________________________________
Challenging a person’s class generates hurt and disbelief, but these same
feelings were responsible for causing Grace’s doubt. While Grace dismissed
her girlfriend’s claims by pointing to the material markers of “privilege,”
these markers remain intact.
In order to contextualise these tensions it should be noted that many
women also spoke of the positive elements associated with relationships with
other (“proper”) working-class women. For example, Sukhjit speaks of being
able to share experiences and coming to a better understanding of her own
life events, realising that “her” problems were in fact social problems:
She had quite a strong working-class identity, she grew up
around the miners’ strike, so it’s a very different kind of
working-class experience, but when I used to say things
she’d say “Yeah!” It kinda astounded me, it was the first
time I thought “This isn’t just to do with being Asian,” and
being brought up in this Asian environment when my
parents didn’t work, it’s also about something bigger than
that. (Sukhjit, 29, Manchester)
Differences within this relationship were displaced through shared
understandings and the ability to empathise across different experiences.
Personal disclosures were respected, rather than patronised, and reinterpreted rather than devalued. Similarly, Jo claims that she is not only able
to share a similar culture with her working-class partner but also a sense of
humour, informed by class position. Such jokes told by “outsiders” would
take on a different set of meanings, as they would not have the right to find
them funny:
So we automatically connected on that and just like kind of
stories about like, you know, stories about how it can be
difficult if you’re kind of growing up working-class but
you can laugh about that as well, you know. Like our kind
of drunken Irish grandfathers or whatever. But yeah, I think
it’s humour. (Jo, 30, Glasgow)
The intersections between class and sexuality recreate expectations and
assumptions about “worth,” “decency,” and “excess,” often materialised on
the bodies of working-class lesbians, yet also expressly refused and
simultaneously re-invoked by them.
3.
Commonalities and Distinctions
Many women spoke of being able to relate to other working-class
people, generating a sense of empathy, understanding, and affirmation of life
98
______________________________________________________________
experiences and identities, whereas middle-class individuals and lifestyles
were viewed as remote and distanced from their lives. There is something
very attractive about not having to explain. Class was felt to be important in
the physical aspects of attraction, as an embodied characteristic, revealed
through accent and appearance, something to be “read” and understood:
It almost feels like that [class] kinda manifests itself on a
kind of physical level in people … I feel like it’s more
possible to be more fully myself … Em, yeah I think it’s
security, it’s that, it’s something to do with like how people
have to make their way in the world and if somebody just
had to be more kind of, they’ve had to hold it together
themselves a bit more and they’ve had to struggle a bit
more, that’s written into someone’s face and that attracted
me. (Fiona, 29, Edinburgh)
The ability to “read” a physically embodied working-class narrative is seen
as reassuring and reaffirming, a case of knowing what you are going to get
from the picture on the label.
Kelly talks about “inter-class” relationships as possibly being
problematic, a factor, which she feels, is rarely acknowledged:
’Cause if people are Hindu or Jewish or Christian people
go, “Oh, how difficult is it having an inter-faith
relationship?” People are more aware of it. But class, if you
said an “inter-class relationship,” people would think you
were being totally off your head and being over the top but
it isn’t any different. If you’re having an inter-faith
relationship, whatever religion, it’s just part of somebody’s
identity which is important. It’s like, people often talk
about non-Jewish people going out with Jewish people but
she’s middle-class, she has a different culture. (Kelly, 23,
Yorkshire)
Kelly’s comments suggest that “inter-class” interconnections may not be all
that “interesting;” the “difference” class makes is often not intriguing but
both irrelevant and “extreme.”
In a class divided society, class position is equated with personal
status and worth. Who you are seen to be with invariably says something
about who you are. Differentiations between the “deserving” and
“undeserving” poor are widely circulated and to this extent working-class
people may feel the need to prove their “decency.”4 Despite the
commonalities, interviewees also described difficult encounters with other
Yvette Taylor
99
______________________________________________________________
working-class women. Kelly and Lisa, who had previously emphasised the
importance of shared working-class experience, expressed negative views
about other working-class women, that is, the ones who might drag them
down. Here, the distinctions between the decent or educated working-class
and the uneducated masses are drawn, with working-class women being
positioned as unable to hold a “proper” conversation. I am sure Lisa and
Kelly would reject this assertion - but in their own personal relationships they
too are making judgements on the basis on class:
K: It does affect the way I think about relationships as well.
I really don’t mean to sound awful but the relationships
I’ve had before in the past, em, with women who are very L: Oh, very working-class, you couldn’t have a
conversation with her, could you?
K: But it sounds awful when you say it. I’ve been out with
two women before who’ve basically got a school education
and nothing at all above that and even though you might
fancy them physically and get on great in that sense, in
other things, I’m going to blush now, on a different level,
you can’t have a conversation with them … It just doesn’t
work. I don’t want to sound elitist or anything like that
(laughs). I get told off for using big words when I’m
around people like Sue and Sandra, who I’ve had
relationships with before, very, very working-class. How
do you end a relationship by saying “I’m sorry I can’t talk
to you” (laughs)? I can’t do it.
L: You need to have your mind stimulated and not just your
clit! (laughs). (Kelly, 23, and Lisa, 23, Yorkshire)
The physical and emotional aspects of attraction are seen as opposing and
incompatible, and working-classness can serve to generate distance rather
than compatibility.
For many women in my study, negotiating the positive and negative
meanings of working-class positions produced complex tensions. Ali speaks
of an ex-partner as a member of the “decent” working-class, with a class
consciousness and political opinion and she contrasts her ex-partner with her
current partner. Her current partner is described as “common as muck”
because of her “choice” language use, her conversations, her behaviour, and
her (in)ability to socialise in the “correct” manner - all embodied aspects of
class position. Class in this case is fine so long as it is classy; selling the
Socialist Worker is good, eating chips wrapped in it is not. Ali is ashamed
about her partner’s “obviousness” and “roughness” and attempts to silence
100
______________________________________________________________
her while in “polite” society. Here her descriptions convey an image of
excess and vulgarity, replicating typically classed judgements:
She talks as common as muck - which is [a] terrible thing
to say, isn’t it? That is awful. I’m trying to think of some of
the things. As I said, she swears a lot … There’s no sort of,
there’s no edges … it’s awful, you know, I feel awful
saying all this now. (Ali, 42, Manchester)
Ali’s narrative is laced with qualifiers and tensions, also apparent in her
opposing emotions regarding the positive/negative aspects of workingclassness. It would seem that to negotiate class is to walk a tightrope with a
potential fall either into vulgarity or pretentiousness, both of which can be
painful and, like all falls, embarrassing. Paradoxically, as well as being
“embarrassing,” Ali also perceives Helen as “genuine” and “real.”
It’s as if I’m embarrassed by her, what I would call class,
yet I’m not because it’s something I admire in people and
it’s something I look for in people is that, a good
genuineness of working, I always consider working-class
people to be genuine. (Ali, 42, Manchester)
This is an account that is very difficult to unravel, as Ali appears to be taking
the words back before they have even been fully formed. She is aware of the
way in which her comments can be read and attempts to justify them by
appealing to her audience, appealing to the classed assumptions that she
believes are universally understood by “us” about “the others.” In making
investments in relationships everyone also makes investments in themselves,
and working-class lesbians have to manage devaluations of working-class
identity, which produces dis/identifications in intimate encounters.
4.
Gravy train and Chip Shop: Class Changes and Class Constants
Inequalities within relationships extended to the varying cultural and
emotional resources differentially available and capitalised upon within the
relationship. The inability to match the spending power of middle-class
partners, and to gain the comforts this entailed, extended beyond the
economic and informed notions of self-worth.
Some women felt dependent on middle-class partners, unable to
negotiate middle-class leisure environments and “ways of being.” Refusals
and challenges occurred as women described middle-class cultural and social
practices as “pretentious,” even if the shame and embarrassment felt within
these same social settings was not displaced.
Yvette Taylor
101
______________________________________________________________
Becky challenges the equation between money and knowledge but
notes the ways in which she was being re-produced as an ignorant, apolitical
working-class woman in a previous relationship:
She kinda looked at me as a silly little working-class girl
who couldn’t possibly have an idea or couldn’t possibly
have thoughts or feelings on anything, you know, political.
She was very shocked that I knew anything about politics.
Em, as far as I suppose money went it was very much
“Well you’re working-class what do you expect?” - which
had a huge effect. She also had a rolling bank account that
her mum and dad continued to put money into and I
worked in a chip shop so as far as our kinda lifestyle
together was that I was constantly having to match that and
I couldn’t you know, I couldn’t match that. (Becky, 22,
Edinburgh)
Economic dependence has rarely been theorised outside of heterosexual
relationships.5 It is her ex-girlfriend’s economic capital which generates a
certainty and security about where she belongs, while Becky’s “lack” of
capital is expected and her lack of value reinforced. Becky also speaks of
being economically dependent in her current relationship, as did several other
women, noting that they were or had been “kept.” Doris also notes the
different relationship towards money that she and a previous partner had. She
rejects her materialism and defends herself against any possible accusation of
freeloading:
I ended the relationship, so if I was on a gravy train so to
speak I’d have got on that one and stayed. But I didn’t want
that, that didn’t make me happy, don’t go out with someone
for money, it doesn’t impress me, things like that don’t
impress me. It’s nice, yeah, you know, you think “that’s
nice” but if it affects the way you are then there’s no point.
(Doris, 40, Manchester)
Often women in relationships with middle-class women would get
very irritated by the “frivolous” spending of partners and their lack of
concern about money, causing resentments which lead Kelly to view an expartner as a “spoiled brat.” Her challenge to economic privilege is made
within her own framework that she, personally, has a problem or an
“unhealthy” relationship with money. Money, or lack of it, has perhaps more
meaning for her than her ex-partner, hence her fear of it and inability to
spend it, even though she now has a higher income. Again this reveals the
102
______________________________________________________________
ways in which “past” experience impacts upon “present” selves and produces
envy, annoyance and resentment in relationships:
K: But I had Cat, she’s been poor all her life as a result of
risky behaviour, where she’s put herself in situations
where’s she’s been irresponsible … Cat hasn’t really grown
up with the cultural stuff but she’s grown up wealthy, so
she doesn’t have the same way of life. She doesn’t look
after anything. She will have money and blow it like that,
but see I can’t do that ... it annoys me in a relationship
because when you’re wanting to do things together like go
out for a meal or something like that and she’d blow it on a
bottle of perfume which cost £60 quid and “I’ve got no
money” … You know, it does affect your relationships
because somebody’s relationship with money, I mean, I
started looking at my own relationship with money ’cause I
think I’ve got issues (laughs). Just, I won’t spend it!
(laughs) (Kelly, 23, Yorkshire)
Within this relationship both Kelly and her now ex-girlfriend Cat may have
had “issues” with money, but they did not experience this equally; for one
this evokes memories of going without when it was not there, for the other it
involves a cycle of risking and spending. The “common” issue does not
generate commonality.
Mavis had rejected the possibility of relationships with middle-class
women - the differences caused by class were too vast. Mavis notes the
requirement on the part of working-class women to “understand” middleclass women, while middle-class “certainty” is seen to protect middle-class
women from such a requirement:
working-class people understand middle-class people in a
way that middle-class people don’t understand us, because
they’ve never made an attempt, they’ve never had to
understand us, whereas we’ve had to understand them and
why they despise us so much and why they treat us the way
they’ve treated us and why they think we’re unintelligent
and we can’t be educated … There’s a whole background
that [the] middle-class don’t share, there are privileges that
they’ve had that they take for granted, em, and as I say
they’ve never made an attempt to understand because they
have their place in the world, they can step out into the
world with absolute certainty that they’re accepted, that
Yvette Taylor
103
______________________________________________________________
they’re acceptable. I think we’re always struggling with our
respectability, you know. (Mavis, 52, Edinburgh)
Here the invalidation of respectability becomes the invalidation of struggle
and the invalidation of history.
5.
Conclusion
The material, cultural and subjective components of both class and
sexuality bear upon a range of relationships, indeed they may well be the ties
that bind, detach, and dis/connect. This is, in many ways, at the heart of the
conflicts and negotiations which have become evident since the introduction
of Civil Partnerships. As long as they represented a theoretical ideal of
equality, a yearned for acknowledgement of citizenship, the practical issues
surrounding such a formalised union could be overlooked. Now that they are
a reality, lesbians and gays can finally engage officially in the classed
constructions that so often inform relationships and relationship choices.
These struggles are not novel or new. As can be seen from the narratives of
respondents, the issues pre-date the legislation and will persist long after
Civil Partnerships have developed and mutated. Civil Partnerships do not
cause classed tensions in queer relationships any more than marriage does in
straight relationships. What is different and novel is the multifaceted ways in
which legislation has served to both foreground queer relationships within the
context of straight ones, to compare and contrast as it were, to provide a
structure in which to formalise formerly “looser associations,” and by doing
so subject them to a more rigorous scrutiny, classed or otherwise. That which
was officially invisible, under the radar, is now real and regulated. Lesbians
and gays can now take the Queen’s shilling, as it were, and join a special
regiment of the marital army, but wearing the uniform leads to visibility and
that may not always be welcome. A wedding, be it white or pink, does not
smooth out all inequalities and disadvantages felt within a relationship, and
sometimes all that is left after a big day is debt, old cake, and a slot of
questions from the Department of Health and Social Security.
Notes
1
In October 1989 two Danes became the first couple to enter a same-sex civil
union. In the years since then, over twenty-two countries, including the U.K.,
have taken steps towards providing legal recognition to same-sex
relationships. Nearly half of countries in the European Union offer some such
legal recognition, ranging from full civil marriage in Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Spain, to domestic partnerships in Portugal and Slovenia. In
Intersections between Feminist and Queer Theory, Chet Meeks and Arlene
104
______________________________________________________________
Stein note that America is virtually alone among advanced nations in its
widespread resistance to same-sex partnerships. See C Meeks and A Stein,
‘Refiguring the Family: Towards a Post-Queer Politics of Gay and Lesbian
Marriage’, in D Richardson et al. (eds.), Intersections between Feminist and
Queer Theory, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2006, pp. 136-155.
2
This article draws upon my larger 2007 ESRC funded research project
Working-class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders. It provides insight into the
experiences of self-identified working-class lesbians, offering a critique of
queer theory and an empirical interrogation of the embodied, spatial and
material interconnection between class and sexuality.
3
See A Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and
Eroticism in Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992. See also GA
Dunne, Lesbian Lifestyles: Women’s Work and the Politics of Sexuality,
Macmillian, London, 1997.
4
See e.g., B Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, Sage, London, 1997.
5
See Dunne, op. cit.; L Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in
Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998; and J Weeks et al., Same
Sex Intimacies: Families of Choice and Other Life Experiments, Routledge,
London, 2001.
Bibliography
C Meeks and A Stein, ‘Refiguring the Family: Towards a Post-Queer Politics
of Gay and Lesbian Marriage’, in D Richardson et al. (eds.),
Intersections between Feminist and Queer Theory, Palgrave,
Basingstoke, 2006, pp. 136-155.
Dunne, GA, Lesbian Lifestyles: Women’s Work and the Politics of Sexuality,
Macmillian, London, 1997.
Giddens, A, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism
in Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992.
Hennessy, R, Profit and Pleasure. Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism,
Taylor and Francis, London, 2000.
Jamieson, L, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies, Polity
Press, Cambridge, 1998.
Raffo, S (ed.), Queerly Classed: Gay Men and Lesbians Write about Class,
South End Press, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997.
Richardson, D, and J McLaughlin and M Casey (eds.), Intersections between
Feminist and Queer Theory, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2006.
Skeggs, B, Formations of Class and Gender, Sage, London, 1997.
Taylor, Y, ‘Real Politik or Real Politics? Working-class Lesbians’ Political
“Awareness” and Activism’, Women’s Studies International Forum,
vol. 28, no. 6, 2005, pp. 484-494.
Yvette Taylor
105
______________________________________________________________
Weeks, J, and B Heaphy and C Donovan, Same Sex Intimacies: Families of
Choice and Other Life Experiments, Routledge, London, 2001.
Weston, K, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1997.
PART III
Sexual Discourse and Pedagogy
Abstract: In the past twenty-five years debates on the U.S. welfare system
have been centred on the issues of teenage pregnancy and illegitimacy.
Today, abstinence is staunchly promoted by the current administration with
pregnancy and illegitimacy still in mind, as well as sexually transmitted
diseases. In spite of the fact that abstinence is advocated by the Bush
administration and conservative think-tanks as first and foremost an issue of
public health, part of what is at stake is still the conflict between different
conceptions of welfare. The purpose of this article is to underline how
discourses surrounding sexual abstinence before marriage education are used
by the current administration to promote a conservative vision of welfare.
These discourses suggest that the major cause of poverty in America is not
structural but moral. The poor are poor because they lack moral values and
by helping them financially the current welfare system maintains them under
a dependency that erodes their work-ethic and their morals. In contrast, for
conservatives, sexual abstinence promotes morality, marriage and selfcontrol. In direct line with American narratives of achievement through selfimprovement and hard work they also claim that the self-discipline learnt
from being sexually abstinent brings success in every area of life: in studies
and work, health and marriage.
Key words: abortion, George W Bush, conservative Christians,
contraception, morality, Ronald Reagan, sexual abstinence, teenage
pregnancy, United States, welfare.
1.
Introduction
In this paper I wish to demonstrate how sexual-abstinence-onlybefore-marriage programmes in the contemporary United States are a tool in
the promotion of a conservative vision of welfare. The goal of the first
abstinence education programmes in the early 1980s was to curb the alleged
teen pregnancy epidemic, which was thought to be occurring at the time.
Discourses surrounding teen pregnancy, and its correlate illegitimacy, have in
the past twenty-five years been central to debates on the U.S. welfare system.
Since his coming to office George W. Bush and his administration have
continued to promote abstinence to reduce both teen pregnancy and also
sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). However, a closer analysis reveals that
the reason for the current administration’s support for abstinence is not so
much a question of public health as the defence of a conservative vision of
welfare. My contention is that for the current administration, as well as for
pro-abstinence think-tanks, pro-sexual-abstinence-discourses are a tool in the
110
______________________________________________________________
promotion of a conservative vision of welfare, which in the past twenty-five
years has been the main approach to questions of premarital sexuality and
teenage pregnancy.
2.
A Conservative Vision of Welfare
The vision of poverty, social help and the family developed by the
Bush administrations and think-tanks, such as the Washington based Heritage
Foundation, clearly highlights the role that abstinence can play in promoting
conservative moral values and marriage. Their idea of welfare is directly
inspired by the nineteenth century concept of “social Darwinism,” which
promotes a “survival of the fittest” ethos. In their view, there are two
philosophies of welfare: a “permissive philosophy of welfare entitlement”
promoted by liberals and a “morally constructive philosophy of welfare.”1
For many conservatives, poverty in the United States is not so much material
as “behavioural.” In opposition to the liberal vision, which states that poverty
generates destructive behaviours, they believe that it is the destructive
behaviours of what they call the “underclass” that cause poverty. The current
welfare system inherited from the 1960s is therefore, in their view, bound to
fail, as it assists the poor financially while ignoring the behaviours that
impoverish them. In contrast the “morally constructive philosophy” targets
the culture of the “underclass,” characterised by the erosion of the “ethos of
marriage, work, and education.”2 Conservatives argue that most of the poor
could easily climb out of poverty if they were to develop better moral values.
This would help put an end to the increase in illegitimacy and divorce which,
according to the Heritage Foundation, are “powerful factors contributing to
virtually every other social problem facing the nation.”3 Consequently, its
researchers explain, policies targeting out-of-wedlock births and divorce
reduction programmes should be central to welfare reform. Thus abstinence,
which defines marriage as the only appropriate frame for sexual activity and,
according to the Bush administrations, develops “respect, responsibility, and
self-control,”4 is promoted as a central element to this reform of welfare. The
main function of such a discourse is to displace the problem of poverty from
a structural level, which needs to be taken charge of by society in general and
the government in particular, to the individual level of private morality.
3.
Abstinence and the Teenage Mother
The first federal use of abstinence to buttress this conservative
vision of welfare was the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA) of 1981, also
dubbed the “Chastity Act,” which inaugurated government funding of
abstinence programmes. The goal of this act was the prevention of teen
pregnancy through abstinence education. In the 1970s, in order to support
teenagers’ access to contraception and sex information, sexual liberals
created the myth of a teen pregnancy epidemic, arguing that to protect young
111
______________________________________________________________
women, and by extension society, from poverty - the inevitable outcome of
teen pregnancy - contraception and abortion should be made easily
accessible. However, this epidemic was turned against its creators as
conservatives used it to argue that contraception and abortion were not the
remedy but the cause of the problem, as they encouraged teens who should
not be sexually active to be so. Abstinence would thus come to be defined as
the best solution to the question of teen pregnancy. Consequently, the AFLA,
which promoted abstinence education, was also strictly against abortion and
family planning and promoted “adoption as an alternative for adolescent
parents.”5
It is in this context, although teen birth rates were actually steadily
decreasing since 1960, that discourses on teen pregnancy became inextricably
linked with discourses on the welfare system. The construction of the single
teen mother as a welfare mother and more particularly as the black “welfare
queen” of the Ronald Reagan era - a racial construction that I unfortunately
do not have space to develop in detail here - was derived from the idea that
illegitimate births, especially to teenagers, were the main source of poverty in
America and drained the welfare state of its funds. Single teen motherhood
was considered to be generating a cycle of poverty and welfare dependency.
The teenage family, particularly the unmarried family, was deemed an
inappropriate environment for raising children.
This vision is today at the heart of the pro-marriage and proabstinence rhetoric of the G. W. Bush administrations as well as of the
Heritage Foundation and other abstinence proponents. However, it appears to
be more ideologically motivated than fact based. Indeed, research has since
shown that the burden of being a single mother persists whether one is a
teenager or older and that poor single mothers are usually already poor before
having a child. Moreover, the consequences of teen pregnancy might not be
as extreme as previously thought, as most teenage mothers appear to “catch
up to their peers in educational and economic attainment by age twentyfive.”6 Nevertheless, constructing single pregnant teenage girls as
irresponsible and engaged in an unstoppable cycle of failure and welfare
dependency was a useful strategy for conservatives. First, it allowed for the
regulation of teenage sexuality under the guise of teenage pregnancy being
the taxpayer’s problem, as teenage sexual irresponsibility had repercussions
on the spending of the welfare state. Second, it displaced the cause of
poverty. Instead of being structural, poverty could become a question of
personal behaviour. Third, it polarised racial anxieties by putting the blame
for poverty in the U.S. first and foremost on the black population and on
black women in particular through the image of the black “welfare queen.”
Most importantly, this construction of teenage mothers as welfare mothers
reasserted the need for the traditional family as the best frame for the rearing
of children and as the best remedy against welfare dependency. Putting the
112
______________________________________________________________
blame for poverty on teen pregnancy and the decline of the traditional family
was a means of going against the changes in the family that had occurred in
the population at large since the sexual revolution. Whereas it was difficult to
blame supposedly rational adults for the changes occurring in the family, like
cohabitation or single parenthood, teen pregnancy offered the opportunity to
declare these changes harmful for a part of the population supposedly made
less rational by raging hormones.7
Up to the present day, discourses around teenage pregnancy and
illegitimacy have continued to develop along the same conservative lines as
in the 1980s, in spite of scientific investigations arguing that they are not in
and of themselves the main causes of poverty in the nation. These discourses
were even reinforced by President Clinton in the mid-1990s when he
repeatedly raised the issue of teen pregnancy to top priority, as in the
government’s launching in 1996 of the National Campaign to Reduce Teen
Pregnancy.
Throughout their discourses, abstinence-proponents like the Bush
administrations and the Heritage Foundation display a strong opposition to
unmarried families, which they consider to be a root cause of poverty and a
bad environment for child rearing. The current administration’s position on
teenage pregnancy and the means to prevent it is as follows:
The sexual revolution that began in the 1960s has left two
major problems in its wake. The first is the historic increase
in non-marital births that have contributed so heavily to the
Nation’s domestic problems including poverty, violence,
and intergenerational welfare dependency. The second is
the explosion of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) that
now pose a growing hazard to the Nation’s public health.
To address these problems, the goal of Federal policy
should be to emphasize abstinence as the only certain way
to avoid both unintended pregnancies and STDs.8
For the Bush administrations, abstinence is the one and only means to
prevent teen pregnancy and STDs, another financial burden on the health care
system. The type of abstinence education they promote is defined as
“abstinence-only” before marriage, as it solely teaches children about
abstinence and mentions contraception only in terms of failure rates. The two
successive Bush administrations have supported several anti-abortion laws as
well, among others the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, and the
Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which outlaws the transport of a
minor across state borders in order to obtain an abortion. They were also
involved in the limitation of the over the counter delivery of emergency
contraception to women over eighteen.
113
______________________________________________________________
4.
Abstinence and Self-Control
Abstinence discourses play a crucial role in the promotion of the
conservative vision of welfare defended by the Bush administrations. One of
their major arguments is that abstinence guarantees teenagers a better
professional and emotional future, whereas promiscuity inevitably dooms
them to a life of disease, emotional instability, and welfare dependency.
Pro-abstinence discourses, though they present sexual choices in
terms of morality, do not openly construct an image of sexually active
teenagers as immoral but rather present an image of premarital sex as
immoral. In their words teenagers are pressured into wrong sexual choices
by, among other things, the sexual revolution, a lack of parental presence,
peer pressure, or media portrayals of promiscuity. For conservatives,
“children” are therefore not immoral per se, but innocent victims of an oversexualised society.
Hence teenagers must be rescued from the negative influence that
surrounds them and be told, as a federal website asserts, that premarital sex is
a “poor sexual decision,”9 while abstinence is the “best choice emotionally
and physically.”10 Moreover, sexually active teenagers are described by proabstinence literature as often being drawn to sex by a previously existing
depression caused by parental neglect or child abuse, among other factors.
The Heritage Foundation reinforces this dramatic picture by asserting that
teenage sex is related to higher rates of depression and suicide attempts,
greater risks of teenage pregnancy, abortion, or STD infection, as well as a
higher likelihood of future marital instability.11
But if premarital sex is presented by pro-abstinence discourses as
leading to personal failure, abstinence-before-marriage is defined as quite the
opposite: the key to personal, social and professional success. This is made
especially clear by Heritage Foundation researchers, who claim that abstinent
teenagers are “less likely to be depressed and to attempt suicide; to
experience STDs; to have children out-of-wedlock; and to live in poverty and
welfare dependence as adults [and] more likely to have stable and enduring
marriages as adults.”12 Moreover, they explain, abstinence is also linked to
higher academic achievement and consequently might lead to significantly
higher incomes.13 In their view this is due to the fact that abstinent teens will
not be distracted from their studies by sexual activity or by the emotional
disturbances sexual relationships can be the cause of. Secondly, they argue
that “abstinence and academic achievement are promoted by common
underlying character traits.”14 Abstinent teenagers “are likely to have greater
future orientation, greater impulse control, greater perseverance, greater
resistance to peer pressure, and more respect for parental and societal values
[all of which] contribute to higher academic achievement.”15 This quote
draws a bleak image of the “promiscuous” teenager as having little ambition,
as favouring instant gratification, and being more easily influenced by peers
114
______________________________________________________________
than by meaningful adults, while being averse to societal values and thus
possibly delinquent. This way sexual activity is equated with a host of
undesirable behaviours, while premarital abstinence is defined as the proper
path to social integration and success.
This connection of sexual abstinence, and other types of abstinence for example from alcohol - with personal and professional success and
morality is nothing new. Indeed, it is central to the American narrative of
success, the idea that hard-work, delayed gratification, and self-control lead
to success, whereas laziness and instant gratification lead to moral laxity and
failure. This was best illustrated by America’s most famous self-made man:
Benjamin Franklin (1771-1790). In his autobiography Franklin explains how
his early practice of temperance and hard work helped him rise above his
initially poor circumstances and become a prominent public figure.16
Franklin’s belief in discipline and hard work was strongly grounded in
America’s religious heritage. Protestantism as it was and is still practiced in
the U.S. is based on the idea that material success in earthly life proves
whether an individual is chosen by God. The key to success was the “puritan
work ethic” of hard work, continence, and frugality. Abstaining from acting
on one’s physical desires and overcoming them would enable the believer to
invest all his energy in achieving material success. This tradition was at the
heart of many American social movements, among them the Male Purity
movement in the nineteenth century.17 Its leaders advocated temperance and
delayed gratification in sexuality and alimentation to prevent the growing
number of young men living alone in urban centres from falling into
immorality and, subsequently, poverty.
Today, abstinence proponents fit into this American heritage when
they advocate the idea that abstinence will lead teenagers to success in both
their private and public lives, while promiscuity will lead them to
professional, personal and moral failure. The narrative of success and the
Puritan work-ethic explain how the conservative vision of welfare promoted
by abstinence-proponents can be a powerful one in the United States, in spite
of the fact that, in order to function, it relies on an ignorance of “economic
and class structures” as pointed out by the feminist theologian Rosemary
Radford Ruether.18
5.
Conclusion
Contemporary pro-abstinence discourses are instrumental to the
promotion of a conservative vision of welfare grounded in the traditional
family structure and deeply influenced by cultural and historical visions of
success and work. Abstinence education fits particularly efficiently into this
vision of welfare, as it reinforces many of its central tenets. Thus, proabstinence discourses promote self-control, delayed gratification, and the
sublimation of sexual energy towards higher purposes. They also advocate a
115
______________________________________________________________
return to the traditional heterosexual family cell and challenge what
conservatives see as the cause of its erosion: the sexual revolution. In
addition, they question some of the sexual revolution’s major gains: the
access to abortion and contraception and sexual freedom.
Through pro-abstinence discourses, conservatives disturbingly
equate sexual promiscuity, immorality, and poverty. Thus they stigmatise the
poor in general, especially African-Americans, and poor unmarried women in
particular. This use of abstinence raises the ghost of social Darwinism and of
a vision of welfare where the necessarily immoral poor should be denied
financial support and provided only with moral re-education. Such a vision
supports itself by the stigmatisation of poor single mothers who, it is claimed,
face poverty as a consequence of their promiscuity, while promoting a liberal
economy that scarcely provides unmarried mothers with the means of
achieving self-sufficiency.
Notes
1
R Rector, ‘Implementing Welfare Reform and Promoting Marriage’ in SM
Butler et al. (eds.), Priorities for the President, The Heritage Foundation,
Washington D.C., 2001, pp. 71-96, p. 73.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p. 81.
4
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ‘Talk About Preparing for
the Future,’ 16 October 2006, viewed on 10 September 2006,
<http://www.4parents.gov/talktopics/future.htm>.
5
U.S. Congress, Adolescent Family Life Act, United States Code/Title 42,
The Public Health and Welfare Chapter 6A - Public Health and
Service/Subchapter XVIII - Adolescent Family Life Demonstration Project,
1981.
6
WS Pillow, Unfit Subjects: Educational Policy and the Teen Mother,
Routledge Falmer, New York & London, 2004, p.116. In this quote Pillow
refers the reader to the following: K Luker, Dubious Conceptions/ The
Politics of Teenage Pregnancy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1996; A Phoenix, ‘The Social Construction of Teenage
Motherhood: A Black and White Issue?’; and DL Rhode, ‘Adolescent
Pregnancy and Public Policy’, the latter both in A Lawson and DL Rhode
(eds.), The Politics of Pregnancy/Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy,
Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, pp. 74-100 and pp. 301-335
respectively.
7
KM Sands, ‘Public, Pubic, and Private: Religion in Political Discourse,’ in
KM Sands (ed.), God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life,
Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2000, pp. 60-90, p. 78.
116
______________________________________________________________
8
The White House, ‘Working toward Independence: Encourage Abstinence
and Prevent Teen Pregnancy’, February 2002, viewed on 16 October 2006,
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/welfare-book-06.html>.
9
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ‘Talk Tips”’, 16 October
2006, viewed on 12 September 2006,
<http://www.4parents.gov/talktips/index.html>.
10
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ‘Parents, Speak Up!’, 16
October 2006, viewed on 12 September, 2006,
<http://www.4parents.gov/downloads/parentguide.txt>.
11
See R Rector, ‘Abstinence Promotion’, in The Heritage Foundation, Issues
2006: The Candidate’s Briefing Book, The Heritage Foundation,
Washington, D.C., 2006, pp. 99-104, pp. 100-101.
12
R Rector et al., ‘Teenage Sexual Abstinence and Academic Achievement’,
27 October 2005, viewed on 16 October 2006,
<http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/whitepaper10272005-1.cfm>.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
See B Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings, Penguin Books,
London, 2003.
17
See E Abbott, A History of Celibacy, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2001; and
JP Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2000.
18
RR Ruether, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family, SCM
Press, London, 2001, p. 192.
Bibliography
Abbott, E, A History of Celibacy, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Butler, SM, et al. (eds.), Priorities for the President, The Heritage
Foundation, Washington D.C., 2001.
Franklin, B, The Autobiography and Other Writings, Penguin Books,
London, 2003.
Lawson, A, and DL Rhode (eds.), The Politics of Pregnancy/Adolescent
Sexuality and Public Policy, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1993.
Luker, K, Dubious Conceptions/ The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.
Moran, JP, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2000.
Phoenix, A, ‘The Social Construction of Teenage Motherhood: A Black and
White Issue?’, in A Lawson and DL Rhode (eds.), The Politics of
117
______________________________________________________________
Pregnancy/Adolescent Sexuality and Public Policy, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1993, pp. 74-100.
Pillow, WS, Unfit Subjects: Educational Policy and the Teen Mother,
Routledge Falmer, New York & London, 2004.
Rector, R, ‘Implementing Welfare Reform and Promoting Marriage’, in SM
Butler et al. (eds.), Priorities for the President, The Heritage
Foundation, Washington D.C., 2001, pp. 71-96.
Rector, R, et al., ‘Teenage Sexual Abstinence and Academic Achievement’,
27
October
2005,
viewed
on
16
October
2006,
<http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/whitepaper102720051.cfm>.
Rector, R, ‘Abstinence Promotion’, in The Heritage Foundation, Issues 2006:
The Candidate’s Briefing Book, The Heritage Foundation,
Washington D.C., 2006, pp. 99-104.
Ruether, RR, Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family, SCM Press,
London, 2001.
Rhode, DL, ‘Adolescent Pregnancy and Public Policy’, in A Lawson and DL
Rhode (eds.), The Politics of Pregnancy/Adolescent Sexuality and
Public Policy, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, pp. 301335.
Sands, KM, ‘Public, Pubic, and Private: Religion in Political Discourse’, in
KM Sands (ed.), God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public
Life, Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 2000, pp. 6090.
U.S. Congress, Adolescent Family Life Act, United States Code/Title 42, The
Public Health and Welfare Chapter 6A - Public Health and
Service/Subchapter XVIII - Adolescent Family Life Demonstration
Project, 1981.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ‘Talk about Preparing for
the Future,’ 16 October 2006, viewed on 10, September 2006,
<http://www.4parents.gov/talktopics/future.htm>.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, ‘Parents, Speak Up!’, 16
October
2006,
viewed
on
12
September,
2006,
<http://www.4parents.gov/downloads/parentguide.txt>.
the White House, ‘Working toward Independence: Encourage Abstinence and
Prevent Teen Pregnancy’, February 2002, viewed on 16 October
2006, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/welfarebook-06.html>.
Expelling Pleasure?
School-Based Sex Education and the Regulation of Youth
Erin Connell
Abstract: This paper advances the thesis that sex education emphasises the
harmful consequences of sexual activity, often at the cost of considering the
pleasurable consequences. I argue that STI/HIV and pregnancy prevention is
the strategy that frames much of the regime alongside and in spite of acts of
resistance. Indeed, while students are encouraged to clarify and assess their
own values about sex and sexuality and make choices that are best for them,
certain values and choices are presented as wise for teens, particularly
abstinence and safer sex strategies. By considering the ways in which
morality and risk discourse operate through health discourses, and the
concomitant absence of pleasure in sex education, I argue that the school
supports a sexual regulation of youth.
Key Words: pregnancy, prevention, regulation, sex education, schools, STI
prevention, youth
1.
Introduction
The Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education state that
effective sex education should encourage young people to consider both the
pleasurable and harmful consequences of sexual activity.1 Like many other
Western countries, comprehensive sex education is emphasised and the
Guidelines promote a sex education that helps people achieve positive
outcomes, such as self-esteem, respect for self and others, and rewarding
sexual relationships, and avoid negative outcomes, such as unintended
pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV, and sexual
coercion.2
Formal education is a provincial/territorial responsibility in Canada.
Each province/territory is responsible for the development and
implementation of school-based curricula. By considering the provincial
curriculum and the second generation documents developed by public school
boards, public health units, and community organisations - the policy and
practice - of two provinces, Ontario and Alberta, this paper advances the
thesis that sex education - best understood as a “regime of practices” emphasises the harmful consequences of sexual activity, often at the cost of
considering the pleasurable consequences.3 In brief, I define “regime” as the
current state of play in a particular field. “Field” refers to a locus of power
relations, a structured system of historically dynamic practices and
expressions of agents, which presuppose and generate a specific form of
interest. Here, the field is the school. “State of play” refers to the range of
Expelling Pleasure?
120
______________________________________________________________
practices that can be diagnosed in a specific field by way of careful
exploration of their strategies and tactics. The micro-level strategies and
tactics of a particular field also shape and are shaped by global strategies at
the macro-level, and by exploring this dynamic interplay we can discern the
interests, the strategists behind the strategies, and the subjectivities they
produce. A regime, then, can be seen as a system of strategic selectivity and a
generator of strategies. As a matrix of practices, it is a summary concept,
with an emphasis on structures rather than the structural, which moves
beyond conceiving the school project in terms of restrictive-permissive
ideology. As such, I argue that STI/HIV and pregnancy prevention is the
strategy that frames much of the regime alongside and in spite of acts of
resistance. By considering the hybridity of health, risk and morality and the
concomitant absence of pleasure in sex education, I argue that the school
supports a sexual regulation of youth and - intentionally or otherwise - builds
in anxiety.
2.
Values and Choices: Imparting Knowledge about Abstinence
As Alberta Education’s Guide to Education notes, “[s]tudying
controversial issues… provides opportunities to develop the ability to think
clearly, to reason logically, to open-mindedly and respectfully examine
different points of view, and to make sound judgments.”4 Indeed, the aim of
Alberta Learning’s Health and Life Skills programme, in which sex education
is situated, is “to enable students to make well-informed, healthy choices and
to develop behaviours that contribute to the well-being of self and others.”5
Similarly, Ontario’s Healthy Living strand “will provide students with the
knowledge and skills they need to develop, maintain, and enjoy healthy
lifestyles, as well as to solve problems, make decisions, and set goals that are
directly related to personal health and well-being.”6
As such, students are exposed to decision-making models that
require them to identify problems, solutions, and the advantages and
disadvantages of each solution. Students are also encouraged to reflect upon
their values to guide the decision-making process. Students practice making
decisions in a range of hypothetical situations, ranging from friendship
dilemmas, to negotiating independence from parents, to sexual decisionmaking. Activities such as these, which encourage students to clarify and
assess their own individual attitudes and values about sex and sexuality and
make choices that are best for them, is consistent with a Canadian liberal
democratic education. However, certain values and decisions are presented as
wiser than others for teens.
Abstinence is first introduced in Grade 7 in both the Alberta and
Ontario curricula as a “healthy choice” and a “positive choice.”7 A popular
way to encourage students to consider abstinence is by brainstorming the
reasons teens have sex and the reasons teens do not have sex (table 1).
Erin Connell
121
______________________________________________________________
Table 1 - Considering Abstinence8
Some Poor Reasons for Having Sexual Intercourse
• Curiosity
• To show that you really love the other person
• Too embarrassed to say “STOP”
• To feel loved
• To be more popular
• To rebel
• I was drunk! (or stoned)
• To feel independent
• To improve the relationship
• To go along with what others seem to be doing
• To prove that you’re a woman or that you’re macho
• To prove that you’re good at sex
• To prove that you are grown up
Reasons Why Many Teens Don’t Have Intercourse
• Practice abstinence for religious reasons and personal
moral beliefs.
• Abstinence can be a sign of emotional maturing and
integrity.
• Reduces the risk of sexually transmitted disease.
• The only method of birth control that is 100%
effective.
• Shows that they can withstand peer pressure.
• Avoid upsetting parents.
• Allows the relationship to build and grow closer in
non-sexual ways.
• In some ways, postponing is a test of love.
• Allows people to explore a wider range of ways to
express love and sexual feelings.
The explicit message here, of course, is that all of the reasons teens might
identify for having sex are “poor”. In the event that students do not naturally
reach this conclusion, teachers are often advised to direct the discussion to
such a conclusion:
It will be important to bring out that some of these reasons
[to have sex] will not meet the intended need, and in fact,
will create many more problems. Other reasons may be
Expelling Pleasure?
122
______________________________________________________________
appropriate in the future, but only when certain conditions
(i.e. in a committed relationship such as marriage) are in
place.9
Following this, students are advised of the many advantages of abstinence
because there are consequences to having sex: physical consequences
(pregnancy, STDs); emotional consequences (guilt, disappointment, sadness,
anxiety, feeling used, anger, regret, depression); social consequences (a bad
reputation, lack of life goals realization); and spiritual consequences (conflict
with spiritual beliefs). The explicit promotion of abstinence and emphasis on
the dangerous consequences of sex is also reinforced by guest speakers - the
teen mom or the person living with AIDS.10
3.
Sexual Limit-Making and Other Abstinence Skills
Following this, students learn the “how-to”s of abstinence, the first
being sexual limit-making. A popular activity is the physical intimacy ladder,
whereby students are to identify ways of showing affection ranging from
least to most intimate (table 2). Students are then to identify where on the
ladder they would cease sexual activity, or “at what point they would stop,
talk and say no to sexual intercourse.”11 In order to further guide sexual limitmaking decisions, teachers are to discuss possible “points of no return:”
“kissing on the couch is likely to lead to further physical displays of
affection… a couple at home alone is the location most likely to lead to risky
behaviour”12 and prolonged kissing and French kissing comprise “the Danger
Zone, as teens tend to make different choices when they are sexually
aroused.”13 While students are informed that “sexual feelings and desires are
natural… they do not have to be acted on… Avoiding behaviours that are
conducive to sexual activity is an important aspect of abstinence.”14
Table 2 - Line of Progression15
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Being together (dating)
Holding hands
Hugging
Kissing
Kissing – simple
Kissing – prolonged
Kissing – French
Making out
Sexual activity (oral sex, mutual masturbation)
Sexual intercourse
Erin Connell
123
______________________________________________________________
Another “how-to” of abstinence is the development of refusal skills
(table 3).16 Scripts and role-plays aim to prepare students for real life
situations by eliciting responses to sexual pressure. In response to “pressure
lines,” students are taught how to say no - say no thanks, ignore the pressure,
walk away, reverse the pressure, change the subject, and/or hang out with
people who have chosen to avoid risk behaviours.
Table 3 - Refusal Skills Script17
Elizabeth: I don’t know if I am ready for sex yet.
Peter: But everyone’s doing it! You’re such a prude.
Elizabeth: Not everyone is doing it, I’M NOT. Don’t
believe everything you hear, 40% of 17 year-olds are
virgins. I’m not a prude, actually I’m smart to wait for
someone who respects me.
Peter: You can’t just get me all worked up and then stop!
Elizabeth: I’m not going to have sex with you for the first
time just because you are uncomfortable down there.
Anyways, if we have sex, I think you should wear a
condom.
Peter: Condoms don’t feel good. It’s too unnatural.
Elizabeth: So is dying from AIDS or having a baby at my
age…
Peter: If you loved me you would have sex with me!
Elizabeth: If you loved me you wouldn’t pressure me into
having sex before I am ready.
Peter: C’mon, your place or mine?
Elizabeth: Both, you go to your place and I’ll go to mine.
The final “how-to” of abstinence encourages students to consider
age-appropriate ways to show affection.18 In order to delay sexual
involvement, students consider a range of non-sexual activities, such as
talking on the phone, sending a card or a note, making a compilation of
songs, videotaping a special message, dedicating a song on the radio, doing
homework together, going for a walk, or washing a car together. Activities
involving any kind of physical intimacy are generally limited to a quick hug,
blowing a kiss, or a cuddle.
Expelling Pleasure?
124
______________________________________________________________
By the time STI/HIV education is introduced in the curriculum
(Grade 7 in Ontario, Grade 8 in Alberta), sexual activities are categorised in
terms of risk. Non-sexual activities such as the aforementioned ageappropriate ways of showing affection, as well as kissing, hugging, touching
would be considered no risk. Low risk activities include intercourse with a
condom and oral sex with a condom, and high risk activities include
unprotected intercourse. Lesson plans and activities impart factual
information on the symptoms, transmission, treatment and prevention of
STIs/HIV. However, there seems to be a tendency to emphasise the longterm, serious consequences of STIs/HIV, such as cervical cancer, death,
infertility, and pelvic inflammatory disease. To avoid such consequences and
to mitigate risk, students are encouraged to “choose” no and/or low risk
activities, use condoms, and get tested for STIs/HIV; they are also
consistently reminded that abstinence is the only 100% effective way of
preventing STI/HIV.
4.
Prevention and Resistance
Pregnancy prevention and contraception are introduced in the
Ontario and Alberta curricula in Grade 8. While students learn the various
methods of pregnancy prevention and their advantages/disadvantages, much
emphasis is placed on effectiveness rates (table 4).
Table 4 - Contraception Efficacy19
Method
Abstinence
The Pill
Condom
Withdrawal
Typical
User
Effectiveness
Not known
97%
85%
81%
Perfect
User
Effectiveness
100%
99.9%
97%
96%
Students make the best choice (abstinence), good choices (the pill, the
condom), and poor choices (withdrawal). Although there is only a 4%
difference in typical user effectiveness between the condom and withdrawal,
withdrawal is deemed “not effective,” “unreliable,” “not a contraceptive
method,” “a myth method,” and “not recommended.”20 While withdrawal
perhaps shouldn’t be promoted as a primary method of pregnancy prevention,
it is, however, a “great deal better than nothing” and is always available as a
back-up method.21 By not discussing withdrawal in terms of efficacy and
advantages/disadvantages, like other pregnancy prevention methods, the
reasons for which people choose it to prevent pregnancy - such as health
Erin Connell
125
______________________________________________________________
risks, side effects, and lack of availability of technological methods - are
overlooked.22 Such an omission also supports a general mistrust in nontechnological methods of pregnancy prevention as well as mistrust of male
self-control.23
This is not to say, however, that there aren’t spaces of resistance and
agency. For example, activities that aim to link students with health services,
in order to obtain contraception and STI testing, recognise that not all teens
say no to sex. At the same time, these activities support the main strategy of
the regime and accommodate a “responsibilising” discourse by reminding
students of their responsibilities to self and others. In addition, some
programs include anti-homophobia education, most often offered by
community-based agencies such as gay/lesbian services or Planned
Parenthood - a worthwhile and important endeavour. However, I would argue
that such programmes perhaps fit more with the anti-bullying/safe schools
agenda of both provinces rather than a sex education program. Sex education
is still very much a heterosexual education.
In sum, by considering the discourses and practices of sex education
put into play by the ministries of education, schools boards, public health
units and community-based organisations, I have argued that there is a
preoccupation with the harmful consequences of sex. For teens who do
decide to be sexually active, there are good choices and poor choices, high
risk behaviours and low risk behaviours. And abstinence is presented as a
good and responsible choice for teens. Students are educated away from their
sexuality - love and curiosity are not good reasons to have sex - and teens are
to consider non-sexual ways to show affection. There are dire physical,
social, emotional, and spiritual risks to sex that are also particularly gendered
- the effects of sex on reputation explicitly refer to female subjectivity, as
does the pervasive discourse of romance where abstinence is not only a test
of love, but leads to greater trust in marriage. Given their precocious sexual
instincts, teens must identify and maintain their sexual limits. Girls, in
particular, must resist boys’ pressure lines, supporting the idea that sexual
desire in males is aggressive, which can result in male entitlement and female
victimisation as well as a crisis in male identity. The strategic selectivity of
the regime, the way in which strategies get worked up by participants, then, is
framed by the potential for pregnancy and STIs/HIV and shapes, and is
shaped by, health, risk and morality concerns.
5.
Conclusion: The Health-Risk-Morality Paradigm
Intentionally or otherwise, the health-risk-morality paradigm builds
on anxiety and does so by drawing into the educational project the presumed
anxieties of parents and educational administrators. I suggest that the ways in
which young people are constituted as regulated and regulating sexual
subjects converge with concerns regarding the transition from childhood to
Expelling Pleasure?
126
______________________________________________________________
productive adulthood and responsible citizenry, especially when we consider
sex education in the context of “character education” that is mandated in
Alberta and will be introduced in Ontario in 2007. It is both the
uncontrollable sexual instinct of youth sexuality and the causal power of teen
sex - leading to innumerable possible pathologies - that has the potential to
disrupt the smooth transition from childhood to adulthood. It is clear that teen
pregnancy and STI/HIV would, in sum, ruin one’s life, as exemplified in
personal lifeline activities that require students to plot major events, such as
their first “real” job, marriage, parenting, graduation, and travel, on a timeline
and then consider how teen pregnancy or STI/HIV would disrupt these plans
and goals. Indeed, students are particularly cautioned about the physical,
social, and economic costs of teen pregnancy. As such, the school provides a
social space in which a government of the body is deployed and has a certain
goal or image of the good, of the sexual. The school aims to articulate its
sexual project against outside influences, particularly those connected to
widespread concerns about our increasingly sexualised culture and the
erosion of discipline and surveillance in the modern family.
These concerns are, of course, not new. For example, STI
prevention has been an on-going concern since WWI,24 and the emergence of
HIV/AIDS in the 1980s profoundly influenced the content and delivery of
sex education in much of Canada.25 The arguably alarmist tone of
contemporary STI prevention education - that STIs cause death, infertility,
cervical cancer - has a certain resonance with those of the anti-masturbation
campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
problematisation of teen pregnancy in Canada in the 1970s and the “oral sex
epidemic” this past decade point to ongoing concerns about youth sexuality
and how the school project, engaged in a population health strategy, deploys
biopolitical tactics that aim to prevent health problems, manage risks, and
promote a certain moral citizenry. The strategic selectivity of the regime,
then, speaks not only to how sexual practices in schools are organised, but
also to how the imperatives that drive sex education, the conditions that
support it, and the subjectivities produced by it support a historically specific
moral project.
To conclude, I am not advocating for a sex education that does not
take into account the potentially negative consequences of sex. Rather, I am
trying to account for a sex education that emphasises the dangers of sex as
well as insights as to how certain strategies are taken up and how the student
subject is constituted and constituting. Additionally, I also wish to consider
different possible regimes of sex education that can accommodate a discourse
of desire and discussion of the pleasurable consequences of sexual activity.
Indeed, in elicitation research, youth consistently report that they need sex
education that talks about STD prevention and contraception; but, they also
want a sex education that is respectful of their choices and takes into account
Erin Connell
127
______________________________________________________________
feelings, arousal, foreplay, weighing alternatives, and making choices, gay
and lesbian lifestyles and identity, and confidential access to information.26 It
seems to me, then, that adolescents might be more interested in pursuing a
strategy of pregnancy and STD prevention in the context of positive sexuality
and interpersonal relationships rather than in the context of health, morality,
and risk. A sex education regime framed around the strategy of rewarding
sexual relationships would be premised on the fact that sexuality is an
inherent part of being human and we are all sexual beings from birth until
death. While it is important to know how to say no to sex - and it would seem
that young people are in fact already saying no, since survey research
indicates both a trend towards a reduction in lifetime sexual partners and a
trend of stable to declining age of first intercourse27 - it is equally important
to know how to say yes, to know when it feels right to say yes, the conditions
under which one says yes. And this can mean saying yes to a range of
practices that fall along the continuum between non-sexual activities and
intercourse. Indeed, there has been a shift away from discussing
“outercourse” or non-penetrative sexual activities, in light of the recent “oral
sex epidemic,” which speaks more to adult anxiety about teen sexuality than
the promotion of safer sex, let alone the acknowledgement of sexual desire
and pleasure in young people. Intentionally or not, current sex education
practices seem to educate young people away from their sexuality. In order to
foster the development of sexual subjectivity, to take into account the dangers
and pleasures, there must be greater integration of a discourse of desire into
sexuality education programmes.
Notes
1
See Health Canada, Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education,
Health Canada, Ottawa, 2003.
2
Ibid., p. 1.
3
My theoretical conception of “regime” draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept
of field, Bob Jessop’s strategic-theoretical approach to the state, and Michel
Foucault’s analytic of power.
4
Alberta Education, Guide to Education: ECS to Grade 12, Alberta
Education, Edmonton, September 2005, pp. 82-83.
5
Alberta Learning, Health and Life Skills Kindergarten to Grade 9, Alberta
Learning, Edmonton, 2002, p. 1.
6
Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-9: Health and
Physical Education, Ministry of Education, Toronto, 1998, p. 10.
7
Alberta Learning, op. cit., p. 12; Ministry of Education, op. cit., p. 19.
8
Ontario Physical and Health Education Association (OPHEA), Health and
Physical Education, Grade 7, OPHEA, Toronto, 2000, pp. 218-219.
Expelling Pleasure?
128
______________________________________________________________
9
City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 7, City of Hamilton,
Hamilton, 2002, p. 42.
10
Public District School Board Writing Partnership, Education Course
Profile: Healthy Active Living, Grade 10, 1999, viewed on 15 September,
2006, <http://www.edu.gov.on.ca>; Windsor-Essex County Health Unit,
Teaching Healthy Sexuality, 2005, Windsor-Essex County Health Unit,
Windsor, no page number.
11
OPHEA, Health and Physical Education, Grade 8, OPHEA, Toronto,
2000, p. 194.
12
City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 8, City of Hamilton,
Hamilton, 2002, p. 92.
13
Calgary Pregnancy Care Centre, Take Charge, undated, no page number.
14
Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Elementary Sexual Health Manual: A
Guide for Teachers, Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Thunder Bay, 2005,
pp. 77-78.
15
Calgary Pregnancy Care Centre, op. cit., no page number.
16
Calgary Pregnancy Care Centre, ibid.; Calgary Regional Health Authority,
‘Choosing Abstinence, Lesson 1, Grade 7’, in Teaching Sexual Health, 2006,
viewed on 2 October 2006, <http://www.teachingsexualhealth.ca>; Calgary
Regional Health Authority, ‘Studying Contraception, Lesson 1, Grade 8’, op.
cit.; City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 7, op. cit., pp. 23-24;
City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 8, op. cit., pp. 33-38;
OPHEA, Health and Physical Education, Grade 7, op. cit., p. 177; OPHEA,
Health and Physical Education, Grade 8, op. cit., pp. 193-194; Regional
Niagara Public Health Department, Growth and Development Lesson Plans
for Grade 8, 1998, Regional Niagara Public Health Department, St.
Catharines, p. 19; Thunder Bay District Health Unit, op. cit. pp. 93-95;
Toronto Public Health, ‘What’s the Rush?’, no date, viewed on 13 September
2006, <http://www.toronto.ca/health>; and Windsor-Essex County Health
Unit, op. cit. pp. 90-91.
17
Windsor-Essex County Health Unit, ibid., no page number.
18
Calgary Health Region, ‘Choosing Abstinence, Lesson 1, Grade 7’, op. cit.;
Calgary Health Region, ‘Examining Abstinence, Lesson 1, CALM’, op. cit.;
City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 7, op. cit., pp. 67-69; City
of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 8, op. cit., pp. 52-54; OPHEA,
Health and Physical Education, Grade 7, op. cit., p. 173; Regional Niagara
Public Health Department, Growth and Development Lesson Plans for Grade
8, op. cit., p. 14; Thunder Bay District Health Unit, op. cit. pp. 77-78;
Toronto Public Health, op. cit., pp. 11-13; and Windsor-Essex County Health
Unit, op. cit., pp. 76-77.
Erin Connell
129
______________________________________________________________
19
C Dailard, ‘Understanding “Abstinence”: Implications for Individuals,
Programmes and Policies’, The Guttmacher Report on Public Policy,
December 2003, p. 4.
20
City of Hamilton, Growing and Developing Grade 8, op. cit., p. 107;
Calgary Health Region, ‘Contraception, Lesson 1, CALM’, op. cit.; OPHEA,
Health and Physical Education, Grade 8, op. cit., p. 200; Thunder Bay
District Health Unit, op. cit., p. 109; Calgary Health Region, ‘Contraception,
Lesson 1, CALM’, op. cit.; Regional Niagara Public Health Department,
Growth and Development Lesson Plans for Grade 8, op. cit., p. 25; and
Algoma Public Health Unit, op. cit.
21
R Miller, ‘Withdrawal: “A very great deal better than nothing”’, SIECCAN
Newsletter, vol. 3-4, 2003, pp. 189-190, p. 190.
22
M Bissell, ‘Withdrawal: Historical, Cultural and Current Perspectives on
its Use’, SIECCAN Newsletter, vol. 3-4, 2003, pp. 191-192, p. 192.
23
ibid.
24
J Cassel, ‘Making Canada Safe for Sex: Government and the Problems of
Sexually Transmitted Disease in the Twentieth Century’, in D Naylor (ed.),
Canadian Health Care and the State: A Century of Evolution, McGillQueen’s University Press, Montreal, 1992, pp. 141-192.
25
M Barrett, ‘Sexuality Education in Canadian Schools: An Overview’, The
Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, vol. 3, 1994, pp. 199-208.
26
E Maticka-Tyndale, ‘Sexual Health and Canadian Youth: How Do We
Measure Up?’, The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, vol. 10, 2001, pp.
1-17, p. 14.
27
W Boyce, et al., Canadian Youth, Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Study:
Factors Influencing Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviours, Council of
Ministers of Education, Toronto, 2003, pp. 77-78 and p. 84.
Bibliography
Alberta Education, Guide to Education: ECS to Grade 12, Alberta Education,
Edmonton, 2005.
Alberta Learning, Health and Life Skills: Kindergarten to Grade 9, Alberta
Learning, Edmonton, 2002.
Algoma Public Health Unit, ‘Lesson Plans’, in Sexual Health/STIs, 2003,
viewed on 26 June 2006, <http://www.ahu.on.ca>.
Barrett, M, ‘Sexuality Education in Canadian Schools: An Overview’, The
Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, vol. 3, 1994, pp. 199-208.
Bissell, M, ‘Withdrawal: Historical, Cultural and Current Perspectives on its
Use’, SIECCAN Newsletter, vol. 3-4, 2003, pp. 191-192.
Boyce, W, and M Doherty, C Fortin, and D MacKinnon, Canadian Youth,
Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Study: Factors Influencing
Expelling Pleasure?
130
______________________________________________________________
Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviours, Council of Ministers of
Education, Toronto, 2003.
Bourdieu, P, and LJD Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992.
Bourdieu, P, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1977.
Calgary Health Region, ‘Lesson Plans’, in Teaching Sexual Health, 2006,
viewed on 2 October 2006, <http://www.teachingsexualhealth.ca>.
Calgary Pregnancy Care Centre, Take Charge, Calgary Pregnancy Care
Centre, Calgary, no date.
Cassel, J, ‘Making Canada Safe for Sex: Government and the Problems of
Sexually Transmitted Disease in the Twentieth Century’, in D
Naylor (ed.), Canadian Health Care and the State: A Century of
Evolution, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1992, pp.
141-192.
City of Hamilton Social and Public Health Services Department and the
Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, Growing and
Developing Grade 7, City of Hamilton Social and Public Health
Services Department, Hamilton, March 2002.
City of Hamilton Social and Public Health Services Department and the
Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, Growing and
Developing Grade 8, City of Hamilton Social and Public Health
Services Department, Hamilton, March 2002.
Dailard, C, ‘Understanding “Abstinence”: Implications for Individuals,
Programmes and Policies’, The Guttmacher Report on Public
Policy, December 2003, pp. 4-6.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, Vintage
Books, New York, 1978.
Foucault, M, ‘Power and Strategies’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, C Gordon (ed.), Pantheon
Books, New York, 1980, pp. 134-145.
Foucault, M, ‘The Subject and Power’, in HL Dreyfus and P Rabinow (eds.),
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, pp. 208-226.
Health Canada, Canadian Guidelines for Sexual Health Education, Health
Canada, Ottawa, 2003.
Jessop, B, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place,
Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1990.
Maticka-Tyndale, E, ‘Sexual Health and Canadian Youth: How Do We
Measure Up?’, The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, vol. 10,
2001, pp. 1-17.
Erin Connell
131
______________________________________________________________
Miller, R, ‘Withdrawal: “A very great deal better than nothing”’, SIECCAN
Newsletter, vol. 3-4, 2003, pp. 189-190.
Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-9: Health and
Physical Education, Ministry of Education, Toronto, 1998.
Ontario Physical and Health Education Association, Health and Physical
Education, Grades 7-9, Ontario Physical and Health Education
Association, Toronto, 2000.
Public District School Board Writing Partnership, ‘Education Course Profile:
Healthy Active Living, Grade 9’, 1999, viewed on 15 September,
2006, <http://www.edu.gov.on.ca>.
Public District School Board Writing Partnership, ‘Education Course Profile:
Healthy Active Living, Grade 10’, 2000, viewed on 15 September,
2006, <http://www.edu.gov.on.ca>.
Regional Niagara Public Health Department, Growth and Development
Lesson Plans for Grades 7-8, Regional Niagara Public Health
Department, St. Catharines, 1998.
Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Elementary Sexual Health Manual: A
Guide for Teachers. Thunder Bay District Health Unit, Thunder
Bay, 2005.
Toronto Public Health, ‘What’s the Rush?’, in Sexual Health Information, no
date,
viewed
on
13
September
2006,
<http://www.toronto.ca/health>.
Windsor-Essex County Health Unit, Teaching Healthy Sexuality, WindsorEssex County Health Unit, Windsor, 2005.
Erzsébet Barát
Abstract: Language and sexuality research has recently seen a heated debate
around whether the linguistic constitution of sexuality should still be focused
on matters of identity or shift to desire. I want to argue that this is a nonproductive dichotomy. We need to stop the counter-effective spectator sport
of academic struggle among ourselves and see desire as one aspect of the
articulation of sexual identity. I will analyse the case of an initiative brought
about by the Hungarian Lesbian NGO Labrisz that approached secondary
schools in the country and offered help with the sexual education of the
pupils by organising discussions of dissident sexual orientation. I will carry
out an ideological critique of the NGO leaflet sent to the school directors. I
argue that, for a pedagogical initiative to successfully inhabit the weaknesses
of the heterosexual norm, we should not exclude the discussion of desire but
see it as an important dimension of sexual identity, especially for a project
launched in the name of authenticity.
Key words: desire, language, Labrisz, les-being, lesbianism, sexual
education, sexual identity, sexuality, Tamsin Wilton.
1.
Language and Sexuality Research
I would like to use this occasion to advance a dialogue about the
implications of rethinking the identity category of lesbian, or rather that of
dissident sexuality referred to as “meleg” (warm = “gay”) in Hungarian in the
light of the ongoing debate in language and sexuality research. British
linguists, led by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick,1 propose that we should
go beyond the dominant, mostly U.S. based approach represented by William
Leap, Anna Livia and Kira Hall.2 The U.S. research frames the particular
projects in terms of the concept of identity, while the British approach
suggests that the study of language use encompasses other dimensions of
sexuality, above all, that of the erotic, discussed under the general heading of
desire. Based on the textual analysis of the sex-educational project Melegség
és megismerés (“Gayness and Knowledge”) launched in 2002 by Labrisz, the
Lesbian Civil Organization in Budapest, I shall propose that the debate on
whether language and sexuality studies should be evolving in terms of
identity or desire is a non-productive dichotomy and that one cannot
delineate sexuality along either dimensions, but should perceive it at the
intersection of both.
Labrisz was and is the only officially registered Hungarian lesbian
activist group. It was registered in November 1999 with 11 members. In 2002
the Lesbian organisation sent a letter to the directors of all Hungarian
134
______________________________________________________________
secondary schools (approximately 1300 institutions) promoting a sexeducation programme. The letter included a leaflet which, in nine points,
sums up the most common stereotypes the organisation perceives to be
dominant in contemporary Hungary, with each derogatory stereotypical
belief followed by a counterargument. In the letter the NGO expresses its
hope to foster a safe space for classroom inquiry about “outlaw” sexual
identities through discussions with self-identified and therefore authentic
members of such communities. The text I am going to analyse in this paper is
the actual leaflet, in order to see what can be learnt about the self-perception
of the NGO.
2.
Feminism and Sexuality
The main thrust of my argumentation in this paper is informed by a
re-articulation of two different positions on identity. One is Judith Butler’s
acknowledgement of the need to theorise sexual difference within
homosexuality.3 However, Butler does not really go beyond the declaration
that there is a dense site of signification of LGBT identifications outside the
theoretical language of academia, and she only implies the argument that
non-academic discourses of sexuality can be “much more instructive” for
theory in this regard, because they have been “historically embedded in gay
communities.”4 In this regard both the Labrisz project itself and my choice of
their project for discussion seem to be in line with Butler’s expectations. As a
non-academic text, it may be more of a source for queering the meaning of
“lesbian” than academic discourses. When I argue for queering the identity
category of “lesbian,” I wish to suggest the possibility of keeping it open,
preventing it from an exclusionary closure of identification. This formulation
of openness goes beyond Butler’s concern, who introduces “queer” in order
to argue against the deployment of any identity as always already
exclusionary. Such a position, however, is extremely counter effective when
it comes to actual political struggles, like that of the education project of
Labrisz. The position I found most helpful for seeing identity as potentially
open to change and therefore inclusionary is that of Tamsin Wilton.5 She
argues for a dynamic les-being, i.e. she emphasises lesbian doing, while still
making a “politically strategic claim” to the identity category of lesbian.6
This is a position that can cut across the dividing boundary between queer vs.
lesbian feminist concepts of identity. As Wilton observes:
What is certain is that the politics of naming is at the heart
of lesbian studies. It is not so much “the lesbian” which we
study, as the multiple, shifting processes which the lesbian
body inhabits and enacts at the permeable meniscus
between the social and the self.7
Erzsébet Barát
135
______________________________________________________________
3.
Discourse Analysis of the Leaflet
The rest of the paper looks at the various meanings emerging in the
wake of the Labrisz-letter. The discourse analysis of the meanings of lesbianness and gay-ness will firstly explore the extent to which the NGO text
successfully exploits the weaknesses of the heterosexual norm by
deconstructing various stereotypes and, secondly, the extent to which it offers
any genuine alternative discourse of “outlaw” sexuality, which strategically
“queers” the subject position of the lesbian, keeping it potentially open to
change and preventing it from an identity fixation.
As previously mentioned, the nine stereotypes are meant to serve as
the sites for developing a competing perspective that should support the
NGO’s “visibility” project, when introducing themselves as LGBT members
in the classroom. In my analysis I shall expose the rhetoric of argumentation
in the counterclaims and the implied meaning of the emerging LGBT
identities.
1) Egy homoszexuális kapcsolatban az egyik fél férfi, a
másik női szerepet játszik.
Ez nem igaz. Egy homoszexuális kapcsolatban a társaknak
mindkét nemi szerep jellegzetességeit meg kell osztaniuk
valahogyan. Vagyis egyikük sem “játssza” a másik nemet.8
1) In a homosexual relationship one party plays the role
of the man and the other that of the woman.
That is not true. In a homosexual relationship the partners
should share the characteristic features of both genders one
way or another. That is, neither [one] is “playing” the
other gender.
What is contested by the NGO’s logic in Item 1 is the denial of a
differential way of being non-normative, the degradation into pretence, the
hetero/homo divide itself. However, there is no contestation of an equally
bipolar mobilisation of gender. Instead of seeing gender as a dividing
principle of categorisation, it is reduced into “two genders.” As a result, the
implied claim to a non-linearity between sexuality and gender in the
statement “the partners should share the characteristic features” runs into a
self-jeopardising contradiction. The claim to sexual multiplicity cannot be
supported by a male/female polarity of gender roles retained in the phrasing
“of both genders.”
2) Nincsenek tartós kapcsolataik.
Nem igaz. Nagyon sok leszbikus és meleg tartós
párkapcsolatban él. Az, hogy sokan nem merik ezt
136
______________________________________________________________
felvállalni a környezetük előtt, súlyos teher, ami
megnehezíti az együttélést - mégis sokan tudnak tartós
kapcsolatban élni.
2) They have no permanent relationships.
Not true. Many lesbians and gays live in permanent
relationships. The fact that many do not dare to be open
about it in public is a heavy burden that makes cohabitation difficult - nevertheless, many are able to live in a
stable relationship.
A perspective of ambiguous hybridity informs Item 2. A discourse
of self-blame - “do not dare” (because cowardly) - merges with an implied
criticism of the hostility enacted by those representing the dominant social
behaviours and values. This is summed up by the collocation “heavy burden”
that indicates oppressive forces imposed from outside. Nevertheless, this is a
successful displacement of the original logic of the stereotype that rests on
the implied meaning of some unruly, volatile (homo)sexuality that pushes
LGBT people on to yet another affair. The success consists not so much in
the stability of the gay relationships, which could easily run the risk of
normalisation, as in the achievement of such in spite of an extremely hostile
and as such stressful environment.
3) A meleg férfiak pedofilok és gyerekeket
molesztálnak.
Nem igaz. Sokkal-sokkal kevesebb homoszexuális férfi
molesztál gyerekeket, mint heteroszexuális.
3) Gay men are paedophiles and child molesters.
Not true. There are a lot less homosexual men molesting
children than heterosexual ones.
Missing in Item 3 is the contestation of the criminalisation of
“outlaw” sexualities in the first place. The alleged higher number of
perpetrators on one side, so to speak, will not contest the legitimate/criminal
act divide itself. Moreover, it could easily be countered by the same
quantifying logic, arguing that the lower number is “due to” the lower ratio of
gay men in the general population and as such “naturally confined” as a
“minority” concern only.
4) A homoszexualitást gyerekkori trauma okozza.
Nem igaz. Senki nem tudja, mitől “lesz” valaki
homoszexuális. Különböző elméletek vannak, amelyek
Erzsébet Barát
137
______________________________________________________________
sokfélét állítanak az örökletességről és a környezet
hatásairól. A legtöbb homoszexuálisnak semmi nehézsége
nem akadt gyerekkorában.
4) Homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma.
Not true. Nobody knows what makes someone “become”
homosexual. There are various theories, which contend
various propositions about heredity or social influence.
Most homosexuals experienced no hardships in their
childhood.
Note here that there is no hypothetical question formulated to the
same effect as at the end of Item 5 below. Something like: Why should we
need to know it at all? Do we (want to) know the “causes” of heterosexuality
in our childhood? Without that critical voice, there is the danger of slipping
into an obsession with the original cause. And any quest for a shared origin
will inevitably mobilise the same exclusionary logic of collective
membership that motivates the heteronormative myth of belonging. Besides,
because of the psychological pathologisation of “outlaw” sexualities evoked
by the word “trauma,” this slippage comes to be informed by the moralising
logic of accountability, or discipline. Nevertheless, the quotation marks
around “become” constitute a potential site for departure from the logic of
anchoring sexual identity once and for all. They may echo the difference
between “I am a lesbian,” as compared to “I advocate lesbianism” as
formulated by Wilton,9 where the dynamism of the transitive verb can
successfully contest the effect of the copula of “be,” which would imply the
transparent assumption of a self-contained location for good.
5)
A
homoszexuálisok
gyerekei
maguk
is
homoszexuálisak lesznek.
Nem igaz. Számos kutatás azt bizonyítja, hogy az azonos
neműek által felnevelt gyerekek nem lesznek gyakrabban
homoszexuálisok, mint az ellenkező nemű párok gyerekei.
De felmerül a kérdés is: Miért volna baj, ha így volna?
5) The children of homosexual people will be
homosexual too.
Not true. Many studies prove that children raised by same
sex couples are not more likely to become homosexual than
children of other sex couples. But there arises the question
too: Why should it be a problem if that were the case?
138
______________________________________________________________
As observed above, Item 5 is a successful contestation of the
origin(al sin) model, even if the polarity and complementarity of the two
genders is left in place by the distinction “same sex” vs. “other sex couples.”
This success is the effect of the question at the end of the contesting
paragraph, reversing the stereotype against its own logic.
6) A homoszexuálisok minden velük azonos neműhöz
vonzódnak.
Nem igaz. A homoszexuálisok nem válogatás nélkül
vonzódnak minden azonos nemű emberhez. Éppen olyan
magas elvárásokat támasztanak a társukkal szemben, mint
a heteroszexuálisok.
6) Homosexuals feel attracted to everyone of the same
sex.
Not true. Homosexuals do not feel attracted to everyone of
the same sex indiscriminately. They have as high
expectations of their partners as heterosexuals.
The homogenising problem with the NGO’s general strategy of “we
are people just like them” emerges the most tellingly at this point: its
direction goes always only one-way. Seen from the problem of unidirectional
comparison, the issue of the missing question after Item 4 (and in general
from the end of all entries besides Item 5), can be reformulated in terms of
this reinforcing normalisation of heterosexuality, which always functions as
the point of departure for any comparison of the various sexualities in
question.
7)
Ha
pozitív
információkat
terjesztünk
a
homoszexuálisokról, akkor többen válnak meleggé.
Nem igaz. A melegek megismerésétől nem lesz valaki
homoszexuálissá. Másrészt viszont többen mernek
melegként élni, mióta az információk csökkentik az
előítéleteket és az elutasítást.
7) If we spread positive information about homosexuals,
then there will be an increase in their number.
Not true. Knowing about gay people does not make you
homosexual. On the other hand, there are more people
daring to live as homosexuals since the information about
them reduces prejudice and repudiation.
Erzsébet Barát
139
______________________________________________________________
Item 7 is the most visible moment of the missing displacement of
the dominant logic. It could easily have been formulated as a question, such
as “Why should we be concerned about the growth of their number anyway?”
Since the self-defined objective of the NGO is to create a space in the
classroom where the students could try to define for themselves the meaning
of “outlaw” sexualities, the systematic use of these questions of displacement
could have been a more effective strategy than staying within the dominant
culture’s logic of “we are as nice as you/them” - even if the questions may
provoke some explicit homophobic responses in the classroom. Perhaps, the
NGO participants’ reports after the encounters to the effect that the students
did not articulate a strongly homophobic disposition, indeed hardly any at all,
in comparison with the emerging voices in the media and the political field,
could have to do partly with this strategic avoidance of a more
confrontational formulation of the contestations. Interestingly, the NGO
members were much more ready to explain the high level of tolerance of the
students in terms of the disciplinary power of the classroom setting itself.
8) Azért lesz valaki homoszexuális, mert nem jó a
kapcsolata a másik nemhez tartozókkal.
Nem igaz. A homoszexualitásnak semmi köze ahhoz, hogy
valaki mennyire vonzza a másik nemet - azt jelenti, hogy
valaki vele azonos neműekhez vonzódik.
8) One becomes homosexual because his/her
relationship with members of the other sex is not good.
Not true. Homosexuality has nothing to do with how much
one attracts members of the other sex. It means that one
feels attracted to others in his/her own sex.
With Item 8 we have arrived at the point where I must address the
other most telling feature of the NGO’s avoidance strategy, the embarrassing
avoidance of any explicit implication of sexual practices - except in the
context of the criminal conduct of male paedophile practices in Item 3! This
self-inflicted silencing of “outlaw” sexual practice through wordings such as
the desexualised choice of “relationship” and the barely charged term of
“attraction” instead of “desire” or “pleasure”, so as to avoid the unspoken but
assumed accusations of “doing” homosexuality in the classroom when
talking about it, only serves the interest of that kind of zero tolerance. Such
evasion remains caught within the homophobic logic that conflates physical
injury and discursive injury, in order to silence any form/degree of “outlaw”
erotic explicitness as a case of disseminating pornography.
The strategic avoidance of this aspect of LGBT identity is made
explicit both in the cover letter addressed to the schools, saying that their
140
______________________________________________________________
representatives will refuse to talk about actual sexual practices, as well as in
the course of the training for the participating NGO members, which
emphasises the importance of refusing to discuss actual practices for fear of
situations they could not handle in the classroom. My point here is that this
self-inflicted silencing can easily link the dispersed points of trauma in Item 4
and the argument of frequency in Item 5, and turn the former into the cause
of the latter: accusing non-heterosexual parents of a criminal act in exposing
their children to some sort of pornographic sexual behaviour. This trajectory
may easily construct a shared ground between Items 4 and 5 and the already
criminalised act of “child molestation” in Item 3! Instead of affectionate
caring and erotica, we have merely the medical discourse of heterosexuality,
evoking some mechanistic, clockwork activity (if any at all), in fact justifying
the unsaid outrage over the inherent pornography attributed to “outlaw”
sexualities, which are implicated in machine-like dehumanising brutal acts.
9) A melegek és a leszbikusok szándékosan provokálnak
a viselkedésükkel.
Az, amit egy heteroszexuális pár esetében senki sem tart
feltűnösködésnek, például hogy jegygyűrűt hordanak,
kézenfogva mennek az utcán, vagy az asztalukon tartják a
másik fényképét, azonos nemű szerelmesek között sokan
provokativnak itélik. Petig ezek a gesztusok hozzátartoznak
egy kapcsolathoz - mindenkinek jogában áll kimutatni az
érzelmeit.
9) Gays and lesbians intend to provoke with their
behaviour.
Anything that in the case of a heterosexual couple is not
considered to be showing off, such as wearing a wedding
ring, walking hand in hand, keeping the photo of the other
on their desk, is considered by many to be provocative in
case of same sex lovers. Yet these gestures are part of a
relationship - everyone has the right to show their
emotions.
My point above about the missed chance of displacing homophobia
through voicing “outlaw” erotic sexual practices, moments of affectionate
desire, etc. is in fact supported by the success of the line of argumentation in
Item 9. Note, straight away, the difference of the opening in this session.
There is no need for the usual denial “Not true.” for framing the
counterargument. Why? Arguably, because the direction of the displacement
here is not caught within the logic of the contested stereotype. Instead, we
have an appeal to the logic of some legal discourse: sexuality is rearticulated
Erzsébet Barát
141
______________________________________________________________
in terms of the universal right to one’s feelings, and, by way of implication,
to their open enactment. Even if the gestures of affection the homosexual
lovers are said to perform (such as wearing rings, walking hand in hand, let
alone displaying a picture of the loved one at one’s place of work) have
nothing to do with erotica proper, their mitigated emergence in relation to the
“lover” may work as textual sites for recognition. Once the NGO discourse
seems to trust its own capacity to handle the emerging space for passion, no
matter how mitigated, there can emerge a shift in perspective. I’m afraid the
NGO’s investment in the importance of authenticity cannot come about
without this different framing of the matter. Even more to the point, this
moment of emancipation comes from within the position of the NGO trusting
their own desires. Furthermore, this choice of word is much more in line with
the semantic field of the term of self-reference “the warm.” In Hungarian the
following attributes would be all designated by “warm”: warm welcome,
cordial affection, cosy home, warm heart, soft colour. They could open up a
safe discursive space for coming out - for enacting our pride about our
passionate homosexuality.
4.
Conclusion
If the ultimate aim of the project is to make students recognise and
know that “[t]hey [LGBT people] are just like any other people,” then the
perspective of this counter-discourse is untenable because, as my analysis has
shown, it will end up caught within the normative discourses of homophobia,
re-inscribing the normality/deviance divide and rendering homosexual erotic
desire and pleasure as perversion and, as such, rightly criminalised acts of
unruly forms of sexuality. The latter is especially problematic in my view
because of its exclusionary identitarian move. It consists in reducing and
confining “outlaw” sexualities, in fact, to sex as an ontological category, and
one that is inherently “sick.” As a result, it legitimises the ideological
investments of the various normative institutions in controlling the
subversive power of non-normative sexualities by silencing gay erotica,
anchoring this technology of discipline in and through an appeal to the right
to privacy, while hiding the flip side of any rights rhetoric, i.e. the duties and
responsibilities expected to be delivered in return to the state.
To sum up my position then, it is precisely the expected unruliness
of “outlaw” sexual desire and pleasure that emerges in Item 9 as a potential
source of queering the (self-)policed boundaries of LGBT identities.
Notes
1
D Cameron and D Kulick, Language and Sexuality, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge & New York, 2003.
142
______________________________________________________________
2
W Leap (ed.), Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination and
Appropriation in Gay and Lesbian Languages, Gordon and Beach, Buffalo,
New York, 1995; A Livia and K Hall (eds.), Queerly Phrased: Language,
Gender and Sexuality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
3
J Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge,
London & New York, 1993, p. 238.
4
Ibid., p. 239.
5
T Wilton, Lesbian Identities: Setting an Agenda, Routledge, London & New
York, 1995.
6
Ibid., p. 42.
7
Ibid., p. 49.
8
Már nem tabu – tanári kézikönyv a melegekről, leszbikusokról,
biszexuálisokról, transzneműekről, Labrisz Egyesület, Budapest, 2002. The
following Hungarian quotes derive from the same source; translations are my
own, emphasis added.
9
Wilton, op. cit., p. 37.
Bibliography
Butler, J, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, Routledge,
London & New York, 1993.
Cameron, D, and D Kulick, Language and Sexuality, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2003.
Leap, W, (ed.), Beyond the Lavender Lexicon: Authenticity, Imagination and
Appropriation in Gay and Lesbian Languages, Gordon and Beach,
Buffalo, New York, 1995.
Livia, A, and K Hall (eds.), Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and
Sexuality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997.
Labrisz Egyesület, Már nem tabu - tanári kézikönyv a melegekről,
leszbikusokról,
biszexuálisokról,
transzneműekről,
Labrisz
Egyesület, Budapest, 2002.
Wilton, T, Lesbian Identities: Setting an Agenda, Routledge, London & New
York, 1995.
The Symbolic Violence of “Protecting” Women
from Sexual Abuse
Karen Morgan
Abstract: In order to illustrate the way in which women are subjected to
symbolic violence, this paper draws on advice aimed at women regarding
sexual violence. Arguably, the discourses reiterated in both texts subject
women to a form of social control disguised as “appropriate” behaviour.
Thus, those who follow the advice are perceived as behaving sensibly,
whereas those who ignore the advice may be seen as unreasonable or
irrational. In relation to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, the
compliance of women with the implied moderation of their own behaviour
may be seen as a form of consent to domination. Failure to comply with the
“advice” results in women victims of sexual abuse being seen as to blame,
thus maintaining the status quo. The indications are, therefore, that even
before violence takes place, women are subjected to a legitimate form of
power through which symbolic violence can be exercised.
Keywords: Pierre Bourdieu, fear of crime, safety advice, sexual violence,
social control, symbolic violence,
1.
Introduction
In this paper, I look at some of the advice provided to women in the
interests of protecting them from violence. I suggest that much of this advice
serves to play upon and exacerbate women’s fear of crime, and that because
of this it can, in itself, be seen as a type of violence. Not only does the advice
subject women to a form of social control, but under the guise of
“commonsense” it creates an implicit division between women who follow
the advice and those who do not. Women are persuaded that they should
behave in a particular way, avoiding particular areas and people (specifically
men). Accordingly, in the interests of avoiding physical and sexual violence,
women are subjected to alternative forms of oppression. As Beate Krais
states:
Physical violence just draws attention to the fact that in the
oppression of women elementary modes of domination
play an important part and that, therefore, we have to look
at the complementary mode of domination, too - namely at
symbolic violence.1
When referring to “elementary modes of domination”, Krais is referring to
the interactions which take place between individuals both within and outside
144
______________________________________________________________
family relations, and which, through symbolic violence, act upon women to
maintain a form of domination.
2.
Symbolic Violence
The concept of symbolic violence was developed by Pierre Bourdieu
and Jean-Claude Passeron,2 in order to try to specify, in theoretical terms, the
indirect processes of order and social restraint as opposed to more direct,
obviously coercive forms of social control.3 Although not a particularly
straightforward concept, symbolic violence is, according to Bourdieu,
“instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to
the dominant (and therefore to the domination).”4 Its danger and its
immanence can be explained by the fact that it is a “gentle and often invisible
violence.”5
However to refer to “symbolic” violence does not mean that we
should forget or minimise physical violence. To perceive “symbolic” as a
“purely ‘spiritual’ violence which ultimately has no real effects [is a] naïve
distinction.”6 Symbolic violence as a structure of domination is a “product of
an incessant…labour of reproduction” in which a variety of agents, including
the church, the state, education, and families are all involved.7 Crucially,
there is an element of the dominated unwittingly contributing to their state by
“tacitly accepting…the limits imposed on them.”8 In Bourdieu’s terms,
therefore, there is an element of consent to the domination. However, to
suggest this does not mean to suggest that women want to be abused!
Individuals are not willingly and knowingly putting themselves in positions
where they may be open to abuse. Rather, as Krais points out, while an
individual may be in a position to be able to “decode the relevant signals and
to understand their veiled social meaning,” this is “without recognising them
consciously as what they are - namely as words, gestures, movements and
intonations of domination.”9 The whole point is that the “embodied form of
the relation of domination cause[s] that relation to appear as natural.”10 The
state of compliance is not given voluntarily, nor is the complicity “a
conscious deliberate act; it is the effect of a power, which is durably inscribed
in the bodies of the dominated, in the form of schemes of perception and
dispositions (to respect, admire, love etc).”11 Symbolic violence is, above all,
subtle. It must be disguised “beneath the veil of an enchanted relationship,
lest it destroy itself by revealing its true nature and provoking a violent
response from the victims or forcing them to flee.”12 In the guise of
something else, perhaps love, support, concern, it glosses over its true effects
- namely to impact upon or alter the behaviour of the one over whom it is
being exerted.
Overt forms of violence on the other hand, tend to attract social
disapproval and may, eventually, result in the victim running away or
somehow escaping. Thus symbolic violence is an efficient and effective
Karen Morgan
145
______________________________________________________________
mode of domination. In disguising its true nature it forestalls any unwanted
reactions from either the victim or from observers. This masking of power is
precisely what enables a dominatory relationship to persist. It is exercised
“through strategies which, if they are not to destroy themselves by revealing
their true nature, must have been disguised, transfigured, in a word,
euphemised.”13
3.
The “Violence” of Safety Advice
Symbolic violence is most frequently (although not invariably)
exercised through language.14 We all experience times when we recognise
that “words can be used as instruments of coercion and constraint, as tools of
intimidation and abuse, as signs of politeness, condescension and
contempt.”15 However, symbolic violence is so pervasive precisely because
we do not, at the time, recognise it for what it is. While we may be confused,
or feel uncomfortable, at the same time these effects may be legitimised and
rationalised as “normal” or as a matter for commonsense, rather than as
abusive. So, how does all this translate into my contention that women’s
safety advice may be seen as a form of symbolic violence? I now turn to
some of the advice provided by the Home Office, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust,
and Victim Support.
The plethora of advice given out by various agencies and by the
Home Office overwhelmingly implies that, despite violent crime being seen
as a social problem, it is the responsibility of the individual to avoid
potentially violent situations. As the Home Office leaflet Your Practical
Guide to Crime Prevention makes clear, “it is the job of the police to fight
crime, but we can all help to bring crime down.”16 This guide provides ten
pages of advice on “personal safety” and explains that the “best way to
minimise the risk of attack is by taking sensible precautions.”17 A more
recent edition of the leaflet, Be Safe, Be Secure, points out that “violent
crimes by strangers in public places are still rare,” but again emphasises that
by taking “sensible precautions” the risk of violent crime can be lessened still
further.18
The original Home Office leaflet more explicitly directs its advice at
women rather than men. For example, in respect of safety “out and about,”
the recommendations include carrying a personal alarm at night, avoiding
taking short cuts through dark alleys or parks, walking facing the traffic “so a
car cannot pull up behind you unnoticed” as well as crossing or re-crossing
the road if you fear you are being followed. Making it clear that the advice is
specifically aimed at women, the accompanying pictures in the leaflet are all
of lone women in various situations - walking along a street at night, talking
to a taxi driver, checking the back seat of a car and so on. The last part of the
section on personal safety notes that “sadly women are in fact more likely to
be at risk from men they know.” There is, however, no advice on how to
146
______________________________________________________________
avoid danger from known men,19 simply on how to react after the violence
occurs (involving the police, obtaining legal advice, etc).
The 2003 version of the leaflet offers general personal safety advice,
purportedly aimed at both men and women, on how to remain safe on public
transport and how to avoid being robbed, before turning its attention to more
specific gendered advice. For women, the emphasis is unambiguously on
sexual assault, and it is clear that it is men that pose the danger: “try to move
to where there are other women.”20 The leaflet is somewhat contradictory in
noting that while “minor sexual assaults are more likely to happen in
crowded places,” “sexual assault and rape are more likely to happen in less
busy areas.”21 While, like women, men are also advised to stay in public
well-lit places (although those familiar with busy city centres on a Saturday
night may not be quite so sure that these are safe areas), the emphasis here is
on “stop[ping] a confrontational situation turning into an aggressive one… If
you feel yourself getting angry with someone, or they get angry with you, try
to move away. It takes a brave man to back down from a fight.”22 Although
there is brief mention that men may be victims of sexual assault, the 2003
leaflet, as does the 1994 version, draws on essentialist notions of women as
potential victims of male desire, and men as easily angered and prone to
aggression. While pointing out that “despite popular belief, rape by a stranger
is very uncommon,”23 still the emphasis, as noted previously, remains on
women avoiding any form of sexual abuse. Acknowledging that women’s
fear of sexual abuse by strangers has less basis in reality than many would
suppose, the leaflet nevertheless justifies this fear by noting that whether in
crowded or quiet public places, women are potentially at risk.
As Elizabeth Stanko states, approaches to crime prevention have a
tendency to increase women’s fear of crime. They fail to
take into account women’s own knowledge and
precautionary strategies, normalize women’s concern for
personal safety and keep the burden of safety firmly upon
individual women’s shoulders - formulating a new version
of blaming women for their victimization.24
Safety advice is presented to women in such a way as to make it appear
“natural” that women take precautions - in other words, women are disposed
to the social order imposed on them through symbolic domination.25 In
effectively advising women against being (at least on their own) in any public
space - crowded or otherwise - women are subjected to a form of social
control.26
In many ways, therefore, the safety advice literature is coercing
women to behave in particular ways. In attempting to allay the fear, it could
be suggested that it is in fact adding to it. The hopelessness of the situation
Karen Morgan
147
______________________________________________________________
for women who are sexually assaulted is emphasised by the Home Office: “If
you are attacked, you must decide whether to defend yourself, which may put
you at risk of further injury. Or it may not be possible to defend yourself.”27
And yet, as the 2003 Home Office leaflet points out, “women are more likely
to be at risk in the home than outside it.”28 Although men are explicitly
informed that “a lot of women’s fear of crime comes from men’s actions,”
the emphasis is on interactions with unknown women in public spaces.29
Thus men should avoid starting conversations with women on their own,
should not walk too closely behind women, and should respect their personal
space; they should avoid making comments about women who walk past and
finally “remember that ‘no’ means ‘no’.”30 The leaflet does not point out that
most violence against women is as a result of men’s actions (hence the fear).
Nor does it suggest ways in which men might alter their behaviour in order to
reduce women’s risk and fear of violence in the private sphere. For women
experiencing domestic violence, the options are stark. “You may report your
partner to the police and try to have them [sic] kept away”.31 Alternatively
“you may decide to leave the house and go to a friend’s or relative’s house ...
or to a refuge or hostel.”32 Either way, the responsibility lies with the woman.
4.
The Onus of Responsibility
Carol Gardner notes that it is “women’s alleged responsibility for
their own victimization,” which results in them having to become
“streetwise” and to take a variety of precautions.33 This responsibility is not
confined merely to behaviour in public, but also applies to behaviour in the
private sphere and extends as far as not “nagging” or even to removing
oneself from the house when a potentially violent partner is drinking. Failing
to comply with this “advice” results in the woman victim of domestic or
sexual abuse being seen as somehow to blame. As Robert Elias puts it, the
consensus seems to be that “if it is not simply evil savages and misguided dogooders who cause crime, then it is also victims.”34 The Suzy Lamplugh
Trust echoes much of the commonsense advice provided by the Home
Office; however it goes a step further in explicitly suggesting that women’s
responsibility for their own safety extends to the clothes they wear: “we all
have the right to wear any clothes we wish…[but] we do need to consider the
effect they may have on others.”35 The Victim Support literature also
indicates that there is an element of individual responsibility, which women
should bear in mind in relation to their own behaviour in avoiding potentially
violent situations. Although there is unambiguous reference in the Victim
Support literature to the fact that “many assaults are committed by someone
the woman knows, including partners and close friends. Whoever the attacker
was, the important thing to remember is that it is not your fault,”36 at the
same time the “personal safety” information they distribute places emphasis
on the need for women to “take care.” Thus, the status quo is maintained by
148
______________________________________________________________
reiteration of the dominant position - that it is incumbent on women to take
precautions rather than on men to take control (of themselves).
The danger of crime prevention strategies is that, in placing the
blame on the individual and thus ignoring the cause of the crime,
“[i]ndividuals see themselves not only as potential victims but as potentially
responsible for preventing their own victimization.”37 Furthermore, the
dominant discourses in relation to women’s safety from “public” violence
results in them becoming increasingly isolated from their wider communities
and forces them to “[retreat] into their homes as ostensibly safe havens,
where their resultant dependency on men makes them even more vulnerable
to abuse.”38 Where private violence is acknowledged, notwithstanding the
fact that women are, in terms of the dominant discourse, consigned to their
homes, the onus is still placed firmly on the woman to remove herself from
the situation - indeed the original Home Office leaflet explicitly states that
“in the longer term, you have to plan what you will do to alter your
situation.”39
Brian Williams states that a great deal of crime prevention policy is
based upon an implicit form of victim-blaming.40 Women are encouraged by
the police to stay indoors, or at least to go out at night only when
accompanied, on the assumption that they are responsible for taking sensible
precautions to prevent their own victimisation. When it appears that there
may be a “serial rapist” around, for example, it is women who are expected to
stay away from public spaces. As Jill Radford and Elizabeth Stanko point
out, this is a perspective that “rests prevention on situational
deterrence…[and moves] the responsibility for crime prevention to the
individual through adequate security and reasonable precaution.”41
Consequently, for many women, the reality of violence (and the fear of
violence) means living in “an assiduous state of vigilance and the deployment
of well-developed coping strategies.”42 The censure heaped upon women,
who appear not to behave “sensibly,” indicates that even before the obvious
violence takes place, women are subjected to a legitimate form of power,
through which symbolic violence can be exercised.
5.
Fear of Crime
Fear of crime has been defined as an “emotional reaction
characterised by a sense of danger and anxiety…produced by the threat of
physical harm…elicited by perceived cues in the environment that relate to
some aspect of crime.”43 The fact that, as indicated above, danger to women
is mostly associated with public spaces - despite women being most at risk in
private places - can be seen as constituting a “spatial expression of
patriarchy,” which reproduces traditional ideas about women’s roles.44
Research indicates, as Rachel Pain notes, that women’s fear of crime stems
from behaviour socialised in childhood and adolescence, and which becomes
Karen Morgan
149
______________________________________________________________
internalised as a part of everyday life for women. These behaviours, in turn,
reinforce ideas about femininity and sexuality, about how to act in public
spaces, how to dress and so on - in other words, the inculcation of such
behaviour forms part of the habitus for women; it is what Bourdieu refers to
as “durably inscribed” on or in the bodies of women.45 The social rules
governing the way women are expected to act insist on certain “standards.”
When women “fail” to meet these standards, the consequences can be severe.
Despite the fact that women’s victimisation patterns are different from men’s,
in that women are more likely to know their attackers and assaults are most
likely in the home, it is still the stranger on the street that we most fear. For
many women, encounters with men in public spaces are “unpredictable,
potentially uncontrollable and hence threatening.”46 Yet in private,
confrontations may be just as unpredictable and uncontrollable.47
Still, as mentioned before, symbolic violence is unrecognisable for
what it is. Through a process of misrecognition, “power relations are
perceived not for what they objectively are, but in a form which renders them
legitimate in the eye of the beholder.”48 This domination can be maintained
only if participants fail to recognise it as such. This is the point of the safety
advice given to women; it does not appear to be a form of oppression. On the
contrary, it is a matter of commonsense. What woman wants to put herself in
a potentially dangerous situation? We all do whatever we can to protect
ourselves.
6.
Conclusion
The “durable effects” that the social order exerts on women include
convincing women that they should comply with the commonsense “advice”
they are offered.49 It then becomes a short step from seeing such advice as a
matter of commonsense to blaming women victims for their own fate because
they have apparently failed to heed the advice. Nadya Burton points out that
the “victim control strategies” implicit in crime prevention advice severely
restrict the freedom of women to go where they want. However, at the same
time, in focusing on “stranger-danger,” the very strategies meant to protect
them mean that women are unprepared to face the most likely danger, that of
violence from friends, family members, or acquaintances. “By encouraging
the avoidance of potential violence only, [crime prevention
strategies]…leave women more rather than less fearful, and powerless in the
face of violence they have been unable to speak about.”50 The advice given to
women may be seen as a contributory factor in increasing women’s fear of
crime and thus, by implication, the various forms of non-physical violence,
including symbolic violence, to which women are subjected.51
How do we counter this however? There appear to be no easy
answers - as I already noted, of course women are anxious to protect
themselves and so are going to adopt a variety of precautions as a matter of
150
______________________________________________________________
commonsense. Despite the fact that most violence against women is
committed within the home, of course women want to be able to feel safe on
the streets. Bourdieu suggests that it is not enough to believe that resistance
to domination can be achieved through a process of consciousness raising.
While this might help to some extent, it is, he claims, only a “thoroughgoing
process of counter training, involving repeated exercises [which]…durably
transform habitus.”52 Perhaps, therefore, it is only by continuously making
women’s presence felt on the streets, both on an individual and a collective
basis, that we can hope to reach a situation in which many women do not feel
themselves to be effectively excluded from public areas because they are too
afraid to be out there.
Notes
1
B Krais, ‘Gender and Symbolic Violence: Female Oppression in the Light
of Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Practice’, in C Calhoun, E LiPuma,
and M Postone (eds.), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, Polity, Cambridge,
1993, pp. 156-177, p. 172.
2
P Bourdieu and J-C Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture, Second Edition, Sage, London, 1990.
3
R Jenkins, Pierre Bourdieu, 2nd edition, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 104.
4
P Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 35.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., p. 34.
7
Ibid.
8
P Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 169.
9
Krais, op. cit., p. 172, emphasis added.
10
Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, op. cit., p. 35.
11
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, op. cit., p. 171.
12
JB Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Polity Press, Cambridge,
1984, p. 56.
13
P Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, Polity Press in association with Basil
Blackwell, Cambridge, 1990, p. 126.
14
See, e.g., P Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1991.
15
Thompson, op. cit., p. 67.
16
Home Office, Your Practical Guide to Crime Prevention, Home Office
Public Relations Branch, London, 1994, p. 2.
17
Ibid., p. 3.
18
Home Office, Be Safe, Be Secure: Your Practical Guide to Crime
Prevention, London, Home Office Communications Directorate, 2003, p. 18.
Karen Morgan
151
______________________________________________________________
19
cf. EA Stanko, ‘When precaution is normal: a feminist critique of crime
prevention’, in L Gelsthorpe and A Morris (eds.), Feminist Perspectives in
Criminology, Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1990, pp. 171-183.
20
Home Office, Be Safe, Be Secure, op. cit., p. 24.
21
Ibid., pp. 24-25.
22
Ibid., p. 26.
23
Ibid., p. 25.
24
Stanko, op. cit., p.179.
25
26
cf. K. Soothill, and S. Walby, Sex Crime in the News, Routledge, London,
1991.
27
Home Office, Be Safe, Be Secure, op. cit., p. 25.
28
Ibid., p. 32.
29
Ibid., p. 26
30
Ibid., p. 26.
31
Ibid., p. 33
32
Ibid., p. 33, emphasis added.
33
CB Gardner, ‘Safe Conduct: Women, Crime and Self in Public Places’,
Social Problems, vol. 37, August 1990, pp. 311-327, p. 312.
34
R Elias, Victims Still: The Political Manipulation of Crime Victims, Sage
Publications, London, 1993, p. 14.
35
Suzy Lamplugh Trust. Live Life Safe: Guidance Sheet: Personal Safety on
Foot, 2006, <http://www.suzylamplugh.org>.
36
Victim Support, Rape and Sexual Assault: Information for Women,
London, Victim Support, 2005, p. 2.
37
S Walklate, Victimology: The Victim and the Criminal Justice Process,
Unwin Hyman, London, 1989, p. 161.
38
J Radford and EA Stanko, ‘Violence against women and children: the
contradictions of crime control under patriarchy’, in M Hester, L Kelly, and J
Radford (eds.), Women, Violence and Male Power, Open University Press,
Buckingham, 1996, pp. 142-157, p. 67.
39
Home Office, Your Practical Guide, op. cit, p. 11.
40
B Williams, Working With Victims of Crime; Policies, Politics and
Practice, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 1999.
41
Radford and Stanko, op. cit., p. 76.
42
RH Pain, ‘Social Geographies of Women’s Fear of Crime’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 22, June 1997, pp. 231-244, p. 234.
43
J Garofalo, ‘The Fear of Crime: Causes and Consequences’, Journal of
Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 72, 1981, pp. 839-859; cited in P
Williams and J Dickinson, ‘Fear of Crime: Read All About It? The
152
______________________________________________________________
Relationship between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of Crime’,
British Journal of Criminology, vol. 33, Winter 1993, pp. 33-56, p. 34.
44
G Valentine, Women’s fear of male violence in public space: a spatial
expression of patriarchy, unpublished PhD thesis, Department of Geography,
University of Reading, 1989, cited in Pain, op. cit., p. 231.
45
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, op. cit.; Bourdieu, Masculine
Domination, op. cit.
46
G Valentine, op. cit., cited in Pain, op. cit., p. 235.
47
ibid.
48
Bourdieu and Passeron, op. cit., p. xxii.
49
50
N Burton, ‘Resistance to Prevention: Reconsidering Feminist Antiviolence
Rhetoric’, in SG French, W Teays, and LM Purdy (eds.), Violence Against
Women: Philosophical Perspectives, Cornell University Press, New York,
1998, pp.182-200, p.196, emphasis added.
51
K Morgan and S Thapar-Björkert, ‘“I’d rather you’d lay me on the floor
and start kicking me”: Understanding symbolic violence in everyday life’,
Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 29, September-October 2006, pp.
441-452, p. 448
52
Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, op. cit., p. 172
Bibliography
Bourdieu, P, The Logic of Practice, Polity Press in association with Basil
Blackwell, Cambridge, 1990.
Bourdieu, P, Language and Symbolic Power, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Bourdieu, P, Pascalian Meditations, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000.
Bourdieu, P, Masculine Domination, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Bourdieu, P, and J-C Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and
Culture, Second Edition, Sage, London, 1990.
Burton, N, ‘Resistance to Prevention: Reconsidering Feminist Antiviolence
Rhetoric’, in SG French, W Teays, and LM Purdy (eds.), Violence
Against Women: Philosophical Perspectives, Cornell University
Press, New York, 1998, pp. 182-200.
Elias, R, Victims Still: The Political Manipulation of Crime Victims, Sage,
London, 1993.
Gardner, CB, ‘Safe Conduct: Women, Crime and Self in Public Places’,
Social Problems, vol. 37, August 1990, pp. 311-327.
Home Office, Your Practical Guide to Crime Prevention’, Home Office
Public Relations Branch, London, 1994.
Home Office, Be Safe, Be Secure: Your Practical Guide to Crime Prevention,
Home Office Communications Directorate, London, 2003.
Karen Morgan
153
______________________________________________________________
Jenkins, R, Pierre Bourdieu, 2nd edition, Routledge, London, 2002.
Krais, B, ‘Gender and Symbolic Violence: Female Oppression in the Light of
Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Practice’, in C Calhoun, E
LiPuma, and M Postone (eds.), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives,
Polity, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 156-77.
Morgan, K, and S Thapar-Björkert, ‘“I’d rather you’d lay me on the floor and
start kicking me”: Understanding symbolic violence in everyday
life’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 29, SeptemberOctober 2006, pp. 441-452
Pain, RH, ‘Social Geographies of Women’s Fear of Crime’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 22, June 1997, pp. 231244.
Radford, J, and EA Stanko, ‘Violence against women and children: the
contradictions of crime control under patriarchy’, in M Hester, L
Kelly, and J Radford (eds.), Women, Violence and Male Power,
Open University Press, Buckingham, 1996, pp. 142-157.
Soothill, K, and S Walby, Sex Crime in the News, Routledge, London, 1991.
Stanko, EA, ‘When precaution is normal: a feminist critique of crime
prevention’, in L Gelsthorpe and A Morris (eds.), Feminist
Perspectives in Criminology, Open University Press, Milton
Keynes, 1990, pp. 171-183
Stanko, EA, ‘Challenging the problem of men’s individual violence’, in T
Newburn, and EA Stanko (eds.), Just Boys Doing Business? Men,
Masculinities and Crime, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 32-45.
Suzy Lamplugh Trust, Live Life Safe: Guidance Sheet: Personal Safety on
Foot,
2006,
Viewed
1
November
2006,
<http://www.suzylamplugh.org>.
Thompson, JB, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Polity Press, Cambridge,
1984.
Victim Support, Rape and Sexual Assault: Information for Women, Victim
Support, London, 2005.
Walklate, S, Victimology: The Victim and the Criminal Justice Process,
Unwin Hyman, London, 1989.
Williams, B, Working With Victims of Crime; Policies, Politics and Practice,
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 1999.
Williams, P, and J Dickinson, ‘Fear of Crime: Read All About It? The
Relationship between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of
Crime’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 33, Winter 1993, pp.
33-56.
PART IV
Sexual Citizenship and the State
Recognition, Normalisation and Sexual Rights:
The Intersexual Movement in the U.S. and Europe
Abstract: This paper continues a long-term research project on sexual rights.
The initiation point was the development of a normative and political
proposal for the conceptualisation of sexual rights as human rights, in the
absence, within the United Nations Charter, of rights based on sex and
sexuality. In this paper, I examine one angle of the political work that the
Intersex Society of America has developed in the past fifteen years and the
impact it has had over the landscape of both the international human rights
and the medical community in regard to the definitions of sexual identity,
sexuality, and sex as the bases for human rights. The political work of this
Society has been not only important but crucial for contesting the
dichotomous boundaries of sexual assignment, yet at the same time they have
pushed for the normalisation of “hermaphroditism” and gender dimorphism.
Comparisons with dissenting voices within the movement, reveal, however,
political effects that seem beyond their intentions. While acknowledging their
definite contribution to the reorientation and redefinition of the “intersex
condition,” I argue that the effect (intended or not) of their political discourse
has been conservative rather than challenging binary systems of sexual and
gender assignment.
Key Words: human rights, intersex organisations, intersexuality, queer
theory, sexual alterity, sexual identity, sexual politics, sexual rights, social
movements.
In memory of Elenita,
who brought us so much joy;
we will miss you dearly.
1.
Introduction
In this paper I will provide an analysis of the political and justice
claims of the contemporary intersexual movement in the United States.1 For
over a decade and a half the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) has
positioned itself as a central organisation in an emerging global intersexual
movement. Through multiple political initiatives it has put forward an
ambitious agenda for constructing specific rights for intersexual people and
for re-conceptualising hermaphroditism as intersexuality. In fact, the platform
for their new proposed rights is based largely on a cultural prerequisite, that
is, on a process of conceiving and defining intersexuality from a new vantage
point: one no longer linked to hermaphroditism and all that might be evoked
by its history and mythology. The Intersex Society of America explains in
158
Recognition, Normalisation and Sexual Rights
______________________________________________________________
their mission statement that the organisation “is devoted to systemic change
to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with
an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.”2 But
how does it seek to produce these changes? What are the political routes that
the organisation and movement thinks of travelling in order to become a
social, political and cultural catalyst for transformation? How do its members
understand their condition, how do they relate to their cultural contexts and to
the systems of meaning within which they are obligated to develop their
political work?
Even from a human rights framework and perspective, the Intersex
Society has articulated rights that are quite complex, and in many ways quite
unusual. At the centre of their system of rights lies the crucial demand for the
right to decide sexual assignment. Yet, the subject of these rights, the person
entitled to exercise these rights is only a subject to be, an entitled person who
from birth will have to wait until s/he crosses that age threshold when
children (arbitrarily) become adults and thus are capable of making those
kinds of decisions. To the extent that intersexuality has been completely
medicalised since the 1950s and has been defined as the domain of
psychological and medical communities, intersexual justice claims would
require first, to de-legitimise professional entitlement claims and, second, to
re-appropriate and redefine intersexuality as a terrain for individual rights.
Despite the courageous move of the Intersex Society to challenge
the intrusion of both psychology and medicine in defining intersexuality, the
construction of the new proposed rights do not necessarily seek to transcend
the boundaries of science, nor do they attempt to undermine the systems of
sexual and gender assignment. As the Intersex Society explains:
This approach does not advocate selecting a third or
ambiguous gender. The child is assigned a female or male
gender but only after tests (hormonal, genetic, diagnostic)
have been done, parents have had a chance to talk with
other parents and family members of children with intersex
conditions, and the entire family has been offered peer
support.3
I will concentrate on the discourse of the Intersex Society of North
America, but will contrast it to dissenting voices within the U.S. context, and
more notably to European organisations and discourses that are critical of and
separate themselves from the political agenda of the ISNA. I will pay
particular attention to the processes through which the Intersex Society seeks
to normalise the condition, experience and identity of intersex people. My
main argument is that the political agenda and claims to specific rights of the
central and dominant discourse of this organisation and movement (embodied
159
______________________________________________________________
in the Intersex Society of North America) have a conservative rather than a
destabilising effect over current regimes of gender and sexual assignment:
instead of challenging the binary systems of gender and sexual identification,
the political and discursive consequences are to normatively reinforce both.4
2.
Human Rights or the Equalisation of Victimhood
One of the most impressive political campaigns, which gave the
Intersex Society public notoriety, was developed with the twofold purpose of
denouncing a double political and moral standard for judging human rights
violations and unveiling the systematic and massive perpetration of these
crimes over the humanity of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people every
year in North America. While there had been a forceful feminist movement to
stop the practice of genital mutilation in regions of Africa and Asia, which
mobilised for decades enormous economic and political resources, the stark
contrast is that the extensive and wide practice of genital mutilation in the
United States and Canada had not received any attention whatsoever. How
could the same practices be judged in such a diametrically different way;
some as clear violations and others as nothing to be concerned about? How
could awareness for injustices abroad turn to national blindness? How to
explain this odd pairing? What kind of social and cultural forces might be at
work to make this moral and political contradiction socially tenable?
In 2002, a national university campus effort proposed to take up the
intersex issues as part of the mobilisation to stop violence against women. A
campaign statement read as follows:
The notion “genital mutilation” evokes an image of the
traditional, ritualistic cutting of young women’s bodies in
Africa, but its equally ritualistic high-tech version is widely
practiced in the U.S. and other Western countries in relative
secrecy. Since the 1950s, children born with intersex
conditions, or physiological anomalies of the reproductive
and sexual organs, have been “treated” with “normalizing”
surgeries that many survivors say are damaging to their
sexual and emotional well-being.5
The plea strongly calls for what I would describe as an equalisation of
victimhood. If we are concerned about the fate of African women, whose
bodies are being ritualistically mutilated, we should also be concerned with
what happens to some of our own. If we are outraged with social practices,
however old and culturally anchored, that cut into young female bodies,
putting at risk their health and irreversibly damaging centres of pleasure, we
should feel morally obligated to extend our solidarity to intersex people who
live through similar experiences and suffer from the same consequences. If
160
______________________________________________________________
we believe that genital mutilation should be halted in Africa, we should also
want to halt it in North America. Furthermore, the outrage is that these crimes
against humanity are occurring not in places across the globe, where we are
“accustomed” to placing them and which we have constructed for these
practices, or in underdeveloped nations where international law has little
effect. No, these crimes are taking place in nations “where they should not be
happening,” in contexts that are suppose to be defined by the rule of law and
the unconstrained respect for the human rights of all citizens. We should feel
particularly outraged that these criminal acts are happening in the midst of
our home nations, in the United States, Canada and many of the so-called
Western countries, with the silent and probably blind consent of their
societies and governments, and under carefully scripted medical procedures
and supervision. But somehow the criminalisation of North American and
Western physicians was a lot more difficult to sell than the criminalisation of
African adult men (and women) upholding and reproducing the cultural
principles of patriarchal systems of domination.
Within civil society, the main political target of this campaign was
to mobilise empathy from feminist, gay, and human rights movements alike
in North America, but also to tap into a generalised societal concern with
human rights justice in the whole world and not only in the developing part
of our world. Yet, all of these movements and the population sectors they
represented (and currently still represent) were politically unresponsive to
their claims and to their public invitations for the construction of political
alliances.
When we approached the board of a national women’s
organization for help, the organization’s representatives
responded that IGM [Intersex Genital Mutilation] was a
terrible practice, and someone should stop it. But why, they
wanted to know, was IGM a women’s issue? …. To help
board members…understand [Riki Wilchins recalls], I
showed them how to make a diagnosis. Holding up a thumb
and forefinger about a quarter inch apart, I said “female.”
Moving them about three-eighths of an inch apart, I said
“intersex.” I repeated this finger movement from “female”
to “intersexed” over and over until heads began to nod.6
Wilchins goes on to describe how gay, lesbian and transsexual movements
were equally unresponsive and how the issue was finally taken up in the
United States only by the transgender movement.
An argument for explaining the political unresponsiveness can be
articulated by way of a critique of identity politics. Social movements that are
organised around identity tend to develop and embrace perspectives that
161
______________________________________________________________
narrowly define relevant issues. Lack of social recognition and the demand
for special rights substitute notions of universal justice or generalised change.
Social grievances that politically mobilise people are linked to specific
experiences that are lived by certain people under certain contextual forces.
And in so far as these distinct experiences, which define specific forms of
marginalisation and inequality, are not linked back up to societal and
systemic dynamics, the politics of identity can produce profound forms of
political fragmentation and alienation. Movements will then turn inward,
severing ties to general claims for justice, and will find substantive reasons
for working only on issues of their own empirical and political realities.
Technical justifications will follow, and scarce financial and human resources
will be applied in a prioritised fashion only to support battles and struggles on
obvious core issues to the movement and organisation.7
Western feminism has represented African genital cutting
as primitive, irrational, harmful, and deserving of
condemnation. The Western medical community has
represented its genital cutting as modern, scientific,
healing, and above reproach. When will Western feminists
realize that their failure to examine either of these claims
“others” African women and allows the violent medical
oppression of intersex people to continue unimpeded?8
Whether the critical bar was raised as a reaction to feminist unresponsiveness
or might have other reasons is not at all clear. Nonetheless Cheryl Chase, the
executive director of the Intersex Society of North America, articulates a
clear and harsh critique of the lack of solidarity and political double standards
of these feminist positions. And while the overall campaign was not
successful in a traditional sense, the problematic issue of Intersex Genital
Mutilation had been made a political problem to the extent that it was
squarely placed in the realm of public deliberation.
Political alliances are no doubt difficult to build, we all know that,
but at the same time the history of political mobilisations from the bottom up,
in many of our countries, is full of glorious examples of broad alliances being
forged in the heat of transformational moments. In other words, I believe
there is more that is going on here than just a loss of clear-sightedness
produced by the dynamics of a politics narrowly defined by identity needs.
The unresponsiveness went beyond movements and was shared by
governments and other political organisations.
As Nancy Ehrenreich and Mark Barr point out, the opposition
between African cultural practices and Western medical procedures create a
comfortable veiling of U.S., North American, and other Western
exceptionalisms. Under the cover of science and medicine, Intersex Genital
162
______________________________________________________________
Mutilation has been rationalised as a surgical sex-corrective procedure and
thus narratively separated from a cultural practice and, of course, radically
differentiated from a human rights violation.9
More than a section in the most recent 2005 publication of the
legendary feminist publication “Our Bodies, Ourselves” has been the impact
that the Intersex Society has had on medical and legal associations. While
current discussions are very far removed from achieving a full medical
reversal or a revamping of criteria, decisions and procedures, the impact over
medical communities and their current ways of thinking is sizeable.
As Kate Haas’ research has documented: “Genital reconstruction is
rarely medically necessary.”10 Yet, it has been performed since the 1950s,
when the model for treatment designed by a medical team at Johns Hopkins
University became the accepted and dominant way to deal with intersexual
characteristics. So, if they are not medically necessary, what justifies them?
Physicians perform the surgeries so that intersexed children
will not be psychologically harmed when they realize that
they are different from their peers. Physicians remove
external signs that children are intersexed, believing that
this will prevent the child and the child’s family from
questioning the child’s gender.11
The medical establishment has taken upon itself the control of sexual and
gender ambiguity. Physicians have become sexual and gender gatekeepers,
occupying highly socially and culturally charged functions. In the name of
science they correct deviant bodies and abnormal beings, adjusting them to
the demands of the normative systems of sexual and gender assignment.
Their interventions assure that these systems remain dichotomous,
undisturbed, stable, and fixed in the U.S., North America and other Western
countries. And they do all of this to help intersex children and their families.
But most importantly they fulfil these functions for our benefit, for the
benefit of our societies and cultures. Without their judicious interventions we
would all live within contexts of more sexual and gender fluidity, of a greater
diversity of possible identities; in their minds this would not only be
unacceptable, but chaotic and even disastrous.
The Intersex Society opposes early surgical interventions and the
model that physicians use to justify them, instead sustaining “the belief that
the person with an intersex condition has the right to self determination
where her or his body is concerned. Doing ‘normalizing’ surgeries early
without the individual’s consent interferes with that right.”12 Yet, the
opposition to normalising surgeries can be politically misleading, unless
compared and tempered with the Intersex Society’s position on gender and
hermaphrodites.
163
______________________________________________________________
We advocate assigning a male or female gender because
intersex is not, and will never be, a discreet biological
category any more than male or female is, and because
assigning an “intersexed” gender would unnecessarily
traumatize the child…. The mythological term
“hermaphrodite” implies that a person is both fully male
and fully female. This is a physiologic impossibility. The
term fails to reflect modern scientific understandings of
intersex conditions, confuse clinicians, harm patients, and
panic parents.13
This alternative does not propose a de-medicalisation, nor does it
advocate a transformation of the binary systems of sexual and gender
assignment. The society’s members take both medicine and culture as given
frameworks of action, life, and experience. They are not challenging the
professional power of medicine over defining sexual identity; instead they
only contest the particular way in which the prevalent medical model
currently defines intersexuality. They are not disrupting the systems of
meaning that determine sex and gender in a dichotomous and binary fashion,
nor are they seeking to undermine the power of the normative to define
identities within restrictive categories and subordinating processes; instead
they are demanding that these happen with the full and consensual
participation of individuals.
3.
Concluding Remarks: Who Wants to Be a Hermaphrodite?
I want to end my paper by situating my reflections and analytical
intentions under the theme of our session and taking up the challenge posed
by its title: “How far is NOT far enough?” And just in case you did not notice
the particular emphasis of the title, let me point it out for you: the word “not”
that links and qualifies the connection between the idea of “how far” and “far
enough” appears in uppercase script. Curious choice, I might say. It is a
curious political choice to decide to emphasise the word “not.”
Overall, I am not sure that transformational politics is a matter of
degree. In the particular case of the intersexual movement, I am not sure that,
pushed far enough, their current positions would move away from a politics
of modification and reformism. Is reformism a position that changes when
pushed far enough?
To be sure, I am a staunch defender of the achievements of the
intersexual movement. Their campaigns, lobbying activities, and political
efforts, their services and support groups have all impacted institutions,
organisations, and perspectives, and most importantly have raised the quality
of life of many intersexual people. Their fantastic work has made an
enormous difference and I am sure will continue to positively impact public
164
______________________________________________________________
discussions about intersexuality and help to reorient cultural images and
medical procedures alike. What worries me (and some dissenting voices in
North America and Europe),14 however, about the political orientation of the
Intersex Society has to do with alterity and perhaps the loss of a
transformational politics of alterity. Was there a need for the Intesex Society
to sever all ties to the history and mythology of hermaphrodites? Is it really
justified not to advocate for a third, fourth, and even fifth gender and sex? Is
the problem of intersex medicalisation resolved when associations of
physicians become convinced of using an improved and more respectful
model to treat intersexuality?
Engaging in practical and reformist political activities should not
imply the abandonment of larger goals that are situated beyond betterments
and modifications. Larger goals oriented towards the transformation of
frameworks need to be present and debated all the time. Among other things,
they work as correctives to reformists politics. Without a politics that seeks to
transform systems and structures, a practical and reformist politics is
perpetually at risk, I believe, of turning into a politics of accommodation.
In closing let me entertain a question: Who wants to be a
hermaphrodite? ... I do … Perhaps, we all do ... Or, allow me to make a moral
and political translation: we should all want to be hermaphrodites (and here I
am thinking of whether I need to capitalise the word “should”). Could this be
a public therapeutically oriented statement of intimate desire? It certainly
could. Could it be a revelation of internal conversations? I would like to think
so. Could it be a public disclosure of intimate searches and personal
struggles? It might. Could it be a political statement of queer politics? Yes,
most definitely.
I do, I do, and I do. Perhaps, we all do. We should all want to be
hermaphrodites, which would be one way of grounding the practical and
reformist in the utopic and transformational politics of alterity.
Notes
1
This paper was written in the most inspiring environment of the Amélie
Restaurant in Barcelona, Catalunya. Thanks to Martín, Betty and Sandra for
allowing me to write rather than resolve the multiple technical issues of the
restaurant. Most loving thanks to my Pichi; it is a dream come true to be
together.
2
Intersex Society of North America, 15 August 1993, viewed on 28
November 2005, <http://www.isna.org>.
3
A Dreger, ‘Shifting the Paradigm of Intersex Treatment’, Intersex Society
of North America, undated, viewed on 28 November 2005,
<http://www.isna.org/compare/>.
165
______________________________________________________________
4
For a full and critical development of how I propose to conceive sexuality
as the basis for human rights see A Cervantes-Carson and T Citeroni, ‘A
Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality, Power, and Human Rights’, in MS
Breen and F Peters (eds.), Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings
on Sex and Sexuality, Rodopi & Inter-Disciplinary Press, Amsterdam & New
York, 2005 pp. 185-202. For an assessment of the complex relationship
between sexuality, citizenship and claims to rights, I want to mention the
following, as a frame of reference to the larger research project: S Benhabib,
The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era, Princeton
University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2002; J Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender
Insubordination’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), The New Social
Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 333346; A Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the
Construction of Sexuality, Basic Books, New York, 2000; M Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977,
Pantheon Books, New York, 1980; D Fuss, ‘Theorizing Hetero- and
Homosexuality’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), op. cit., pp. 347-352;
D Halperin, ‘Queer Politics’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), op. cit.,
pp. 294-302; A Honneth, ‘Personal Identity and Disrespect’, in S Seidman
and JC Alexander (eds.), op. cit., pp. 39-45; K Plummer, Intimate
Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues, University of
Washington Press, Seattle & London, 2003; S Seidman, Difference Troubles:
Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge & New York, 1997; S Seidman, ‘From Identity to Queer Politics:
Shifts in Normative Heterosexuality’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.),
op. cit., pp. 353-360; N Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory,
New York University Press, New York, 2003; J Weeks, Sexuality, 2nd
edition, Routledge, London & New York, 2003; IM Young, ‘Justice and the
Politics of Difference’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), op. cit., pp.
203-211.
5
Intersex and the Movement Against Violence Against Women, ‘Every Day
Five Children in the U.S. Have Their Healthy Genitals Mutilated. Why
Include Intersex in V-Day? University Campus Campaign’, undated, viewed
on 26 November 2006, <http://www.intersexinitiative.org/vday/index.html>.
6
R Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, Alyson
Press, Los Angeles, 2004, pp. 79-80.
7
For a substantive discussion on identity based social movements, see, e.g.,
N Fraser and A Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange, Verso, London, 2003; LJ Nicholson and S Seidman,
‘Introduction’ in LJ Nicholson and S Seidman (eds.), Social Postmodernism:
Beyond Identity Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp.
166
______________________________________________________________
1-35; and SE Alvarez, E Dagnino, and A Escobar (eds.), Cultures of
Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements,
Westview Press, Boulder, 1998.
8
C Chase, ‘Cultural Practice or Reconstructive Surgery? U.S. Genital
Cutting, the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards’, Genital
Cutting & Transnational Sisterhood, vol. 126, 2002, pp. 145-146.
9
N Ehrenreich and M Barr, ‘Intersex Surgery, Female Genital Cutting and
the Selective Condemnation of Cultural Practices’, Harvard Civil RightsCivil Liberties Law Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2001, pp. 72-140.
10
K Haas, ‘Who will make room for the Intersexed?’, American Journal of
Law and Medicine, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, pp. 41-68, p. 42. Surgical
interventions are medically justified in some cases, e.g. when there are
urinary tract obstructions. But these constitute, in any case, a very small
fraction of the total of corrective surgeries performed.
11
Ibid.
12
Intersex Society of North America, op. cit.
13
Ibid.
14
See, e.g., M Holmes, ‘In(to)Visibility: Intersexuality in the Field of Queer’,
in D Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian,
Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities, Harrington Park Press, New
York, 1998, pp. 221-226; R Kaldera, ‘Agdistis Children: Living Bi-Gendered
in a Single-Gendered World’, in D Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image
and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities,
Harrington Park Press, New York, 1998, pp. 226-232; and the website of the
French-speaking Intersex Network of Europe (FINE), 8 October 2002,
viewed on 15 November 2006, <http://www.webglaz.ch/fine/>. This
European Network based in Geneva, Switzerland, mentions as the third goal
of the organisation the following: “To promote all initiatives which foster
understanding, acceptance and assistance to persons living with a natural
atypical intersexed state, hermaphrodism, or androgyny. That is, people who
because of their phenotype have the morphological and/or psychological
characteristics associated with both official sexes, male and female.”
Bibliography
Alvarez, SE, E Dagnino and A Escobar (eds.), Cultures of Politics/Politics of
Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements,
Westview Press, Boulder, 1998.
Benhabib, S, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global
Era, Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2002.
167
______________________________________________________________
Butler, J, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in S Seidman and JC
Alexander (eds.), The New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary
Debates, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 333-346.
Cervantes-Carson, A, and T Citeroni, ‘A Project for Sexual Rights: Sexuality,
Power, and Human Rights’, in MS Breen and F Peters (eds.),
Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and
Sexuality, Rodopi & Inter-Disciplinary Press, Amsterdam & New
York, 2005, pp. 185-202.
Chase C, ‘Affronting Reason’, in D Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image
and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender
Communities, Harrington Park Press, New York, 1998, pp. 205-219.
Chase C, ‘Cultural Practice or Reconstructive Surgery? U.S. Genital Cutting,
the Intersex Movement, and Medical Double Standards’, Genital
Cutting & Transnational Sisterhood, vol. 126, 2002, pp. 145-146.
Chase C, ‘Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex
Political Activism’, in RJ Corber and S Valocchi (eds.), Queer
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, pp.
31-45.
Dreger, A, ‘Shifting the Paradigm of Intersex Treatment’, Intersex Society of
North America, undated, viewed on 28 November 2005,
<http://www.isna.org/compare/>.
Ehrenreich, N, and M Barr, ‘Intersex Surgery, Female Genital Cutting and
the Selective Condemnation of Cultural Practices’, Harvard Civil
Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, vol. 40, no. 1, 2001, pp. 72-140.
Fausto-Sterling, A, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of
Sexuality, Basic Books, New York, 2000.
Foucault, M, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977, Pantheon Books, New York, 1980.
Fraser, N, and A Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition: A PoliticalPhilosophical Exchange, Verso, London & New York, 2003.
French-speaking Intersex Network of Europe (FINE), 8 October 2002,
viewed on 15 November 2006, <http://www.webglaz.ch/fine/>.
Fuss, D, ‘Theorizing Hetero- and Homosexuality’, in S Seidman and JC
Halperin, D, ‘Queer Politics’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), The
New Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates, Routledge,
London, 2001, pp. 294-302.
Haas, K, ‘Who Will Make Room for the Intersexed?’, American Journal of
Law and Medicine, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, pp. 41-68.
168
______________________________________________________________
Holmes, M, ‘In(to)Visibility: Intersexuality in the Field of Queer’, in D
Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian,
Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities, Harrington Park
Honneth, A, ‘Personal Identity and Disrespect’, in S Seidman and JC
Intersex and the Movement Against Violence Against Women, ‘Every Day
Five Children in the U.S. Have Their Healthy Genitals Mutilated.
Why Include Intersex in V-Day? University Campus Campaign’,
undated, viewed on 26 November 2006,
<http://www.intersexinitiative.org/vday/index.html>.
Intersex Society of North America, 15 August 1993, viewed on 28 November
2005, <http://www.isna.org>.
Kaldera, R, ‘Agdistis Children: Living Bi-Gendered in a Single-Gendered
World’, in D Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity
in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender Communities,
Harrington Park Press, New York, 1998, pp. 226-232.
Nicholson, LJ, and S Seidman, ‘Introduction’, in LJ Nicholson and S
Seidman (eds.), Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 1-35.
Plummer, K, Intimate Citizenship: Private Decisions and Public Dialogues,
University of Washington Press, Seattle & London, 2003.
Seidman, S, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual
Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York,
1997.
Seidman, S, ‘From Identity to Queer Politics: Shifts in Normative
Heterosexuality’, in S Seidman and JC Alexander (eds.), The New
Social Theory Reader: Contemporary Debates, Routledge, London,
2001, pp. 353-360.
Sullivan, N, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory, New York University
Press, New York, 2003.
Weeks, J, Sexuality, 2nd ed., Routledge, London & New York, 2003.
Wilchins, R, Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer, Alyson
Books, Los Angeles, 2004.
Young, IM, ‘Justice and the Politics of Difference’, in S Seidman and JC
“All the License They Want”:
Homophiles Debate the Makings of a Good Citizen
John Master
Abstract: The 1950s emergence of a homosexual press, the most enduring
legacy of the homophile movement, created a venue in which homosexuals
across the United States began to express a rudimentary politics of sexuality.
This paper examines a 1958 contretemps on the pages of the Los Angelesbased ONE Magazine. The journal celebrated its fifth anniversary by
publishing a reader’s withering denunciation against members of the gay
community who used the movement to seek “all the license they want” to
engage in public sex or other activities that brought scorn upon the entire
community. A torrent of replies from other readers followed. Defenders of
the writer’s view emphasised the importance of respectable comportment if
homosexuals wanted to be treated equally; detractors, the importance of
accepting homosexuals as they are. Their debate demonstrates how
homophiles contested competing notions of the behaviours and mannerisms
that should be associated with homosexuals and a homosexual political
movement. The homophile activists who published ONE adopted a more
militant tone than their staid competitors, a spirit which resonates with postStonewall activism as readily as with its own period.
Keywords: gay history, homophile, homosexuality, homosexual press, Jim
Kepner, media, ONE Magazine, sexuality
1.
A Magazine for Homosexuals
In January, 1958, ONE Magazine, the first commercial periodical in
the United States devoted to homosexual issues, marked its fifth anniversary
with an issue that came closer to self-flagellation than self-congratulation.
Certainly, some celebratory elements were at hand. The issue’s lead editorial
recalled a number of the magazine’s proudest moments, starting with its very
existence at a time when homosexuals were under incredible duress across
the nation. More prosaically, the perpetually cash-strapped publishers gushed
over the moment when they could afford to include colour and illustrations in
the layout. Momentous though that change was, they counted their proudest
deeds to be editorial content that pushed back against repressive authorities.
For example, they hailed a 1953 article in which Dale Jennings described his
arrest, trial, and acquittal on sex charges - at the time thought to be the first
instance a homo “beat the rap.” The Jennings defence had been funded by the
Mattachine Society, and news coverage of the trial’s positive outcome
spurred creation of Mattachine chapters across the nation. The editors also
touted a 1954 article, which had blasted a police crackdown against
170
“All the License They Want”
______________________________________________________________
homosexuals in Miami. They billed their story as the first occasion on which
“the homosexual had ever dared ‘to talk back’.” Other highlights of the first
five years included persuading heterosexual cultural luminaries, such as
Alfred Kinsey and Norman Mailer, to contribute non-fiction articles.1
As protective as the editors were of their achievements, they always
understood that their publication really belonged to its readers. Though the
editors envisioned the magazine playing a “leading” role in gay politics, they
defined the publication’s role as creating a venue in which multiple
viewpoints could be heard, rather than as a vehicle by which the staff could
impose its views on a passively receptive readership. In that spirit, the
magazine had never been shy about printing letters criticising content.
Indeed, the monthly “Letters” feature at the end of each issue evolved into a
space where readers could debate the meaning and nature of a homosexual
identification at mid-century merely by making themselves heard.
The fifth anniversary issue included a letter whose author accused
the magazine’s editors of contributing not to society’s acceptance of
homosexuals but in furthering their marginalisation. Her remarks touched off
a debate among the readership that illuminates many of the uncertainties and
tensions within the homophile movement. It also suggests that homosexuals
identifying with this political movement of the late 1950s were neither the
tormented, put-upon victims of repression nor the staid, decorous
assimilationists history has generally portrayed them to be. Instead, many
appear to have already cultivated a sense of gay identity that sounds
remarkably like the outright militancy of the gay liberation and gay pride era,
still more than a decade in the future.
2.
Questioning the Homophile Mission
The spark for this discussion was a critique written by Geraldine
Jackson, who occasionally contributed articles and fiction during the
magazine’s early years. Described by the editors as a “blast from a long and
continuing subscriber,” they chose neither to ignore her missive nor to
relegate it to the Letters section that concluded each issue. Instead, they
printed her withering commentary as a feature article, the purpose of which
was to raise questions regarding future directions for both the magazine and
the homophile movement. Its three pages constituted about ten percent of the
magazine’s content.2
Essentially, Jackson accuses the magazine of being far too negative
in its depiction of homosexual lives. The litany of the magazine’s sins
included gloomy creative writing, articles by experts with negative views of
homosexuality, and a creeping sexualisation of the magazine’s content, which
struck Jackson as altogether disturbing.
If ONE Magazine’s creators wished the publication to serve as a
vehicle by which gay men and lesbians could debate the place of sexuality in
John Master
171
______________________________________________________________
their lives, printing Geraldine Jackson’s blistering diatribe was a brilliant
move, for its publication prompted a remarkable exchange. During February
1958, the home offices in Los Angeles accumulated so much reader
responses to her article that they inaugurated a new feature in March, called
“Readers on Writers,” which was to run whenever a particular article or story
generated an especially large or vociferous response. In this inaugural version
of “Readers on Writers,” all of the letters responded to Jackson. To further
emphasise the importance the editorial staff attributed to fostering such
exchanges, they placed the new feature near the front of the magazine, rather
than at the back with the “routine” letters.3
In terms of my overall research, I analyse this discussion, and others
like it, as a testament to the importance of the homosexual press in general
and ONE Magazine in particular to the development of a national community
of homosexuals, bonded by a shared politics as well as a shared mode of
sexual expression. For our purposes today, however, I think the debate from
1958 stands as a snapshot of how the varying ways in which homosexuals,
caught in the uncertainty of the 1950s, constructed their own individual
sexuality and their connections to a wider community. Exchanges such as this
one enabled sometimes isolated individuals to share with one another ideas
regarding their own subjectivity as homosexuals and reflect on precisely
whom their ideas of community included and excluded. As the discussion
below makes clear, they did not all stand together.
This paper will focus on both Jackson’s critique and the response it
provoked to illustrate how very little those who saw themselves as
participating in the homophile movement understood about the implications
of what they were doing, what it all stood for, or who should be included or
excluded. I will focus on two aspects of Jackson’s complaint, firstly what she
terms a “dirge mentality” pervading much of the content and secondly her
dissatisfaction with what she perceived as the magazine’s increasing
emphasis on sex since its launch.
As regards the “dirge mentality,” Jackson essentially argues that the
magazine’s content is too negative. Before going further, however, a few
words are appropriate about the mission of the magazine at the time of its
inception. The founders, several of whom were still with the corporation in
1958, envisioned a publication that could ease the hostile climate against
homosexuals by stimulating discussion of homosexual issues. In the early
years, content studiously avoided allusions to the sex part of homosexual.
Concerned about inadvertently violating obscenity laws, the editors favoured
content that reflected views “from the scientific, historical, and critical
perspectives.”4 This approach endowed the magazine with a somewhat
scholarly tone that was, perhaps, lacking in general interest. Indeed, as part of
promoting discussion of homosexual concerns, early magazine issues often
included material written by experts entirely unsympathetic to homosexuals’
172
______________________________________________________________
reality, including some who condemned it as perversion. Carefully avoided
was outright advocacy of a homosexual lifestyle, which almost certainly
would have aroused the censor - and not in the way one would prefer.
Essentially, the editorial staff during the first five years viewed the
magazine as an educational enterprise. Since it was evident to them that
society had nothing to fear from homosexuals, they hoped open discussion of
relevant issues would lead more heterosexuals to reach the same conclusion.
Thus, they had no need to act as outright champions of homosexual causes.
Given their concerns about criminal liability for obscenity during the 1950s,
they carefully pruned any hints of actual sexual activity from their
discussions of this uniquely sexual problem.5
Instead, the magazine’s content in its early years chronicled police
oppression, legal oppression, and the loneliness of gay life. Often, the
homophile desire to air all sides of the “question of the sex variant” meant
reprinting material from mental health or sociological experts, many of
whom held views that portrayed homosexuals as damaged goods. While a
segment of the readership no doubt found such visibility to be worthwhile at
any price, Jackson forcefully suggests that the approach may have run its
course: “Why in the name of heaven do you reprint articles that eternally
damn us? ... Why do you pass on [the] vicious and hostile attitudes to
thousands of homosexuals who are starved for a ray of friendliness and
guidance?”6 Jackson’s next comments clearly indicate she had had enough of
the magazine’s caution about advocating too forcefully for homosexuals:
You have let us down - we thousands upon thousands of
homosexuals for whom you have been our spokesman.
How? Exactly here’s how: your entire approach to the
subject of homosexuality is NEGATIVE! Your whole
attitude on the subject is either apologetic, “Please excuse
us for being, you great, big wonderful heterosexuals,” or it
is pleading, “Please let us live too, you great, big wonderful
heterosexuals!” The heck with both of these attitudes. How
about this one; “We’re here, and we’re here to stay and
‘them as don’t like it can lump it’ - be they heterosexual
OR homosexual.”7
Statements such as this attest to the vast hunger many members of the
community had to dispel constructions of homosexual life that reflected only
a doom and gloom mentality. Indeed, Jackson concludes her letter with a
plaintive demand for uplifting articles. “I just want a POSITIVE
APPROACH. Is THIS too much to ask?”8
Clearly, the negativity chapped Jackson raw. She was willing to
accept sourpuss views of homosexual lifestyles when voiced by experts from
John Master
173
______________________________________________________________
outside the community; however, sourpuss views of homosexual lifestyles
embedded within poetry and fiction penned by members of the group and
featured in a magazine, the ostensible purpose of which was to ameliorate the
effect of such expert views, rankled. From the October-November 1957 issue,
she singled out a poem entitled “Lost Souls.” “Lost Souls” depicted a
character musing about whether anyone else “amidst the sea of faces” before
him shared a “tortured soul with thoughts akin to mine/ Bitter thoughts….”
To Jackson, such gloomy sentiments go on “ad nauseam,” leaving her to
wonder whether homosexual romance offered any happy alternatives:
Doesn’t [“Lost Souls”] paint a wonderful future for
homosexual love? Sure homosexual love has its
disappointments as well as the heterosexual variety, but
must we ALWAYS sing a dirge about it? Doesn’t love
EVER work out in homosexuality? From reading your
magazine, I would say not! Your poetry, almost to the last
line and in almost every issue … impresses me with a
nostalgia, a tremendous yearning for things never had - in
short, it sounds like a batch of bawling babies LOOKING
for a love they never had rather than mature adults grieving
for a love they once had and lost.9
Disgusted at the bleakness of such writing, she encouraged the editors to
publish creative material rooted in some other mood and to “delete all sob
stories … as you would the plague.”10
Many readers rejoiced at the demand for a brighter tone. Miss S of
Wichita acclaimed Jackson’s condemnation of the negative: “Cheers for
Geraldine Jackson! … May ONE graduate out of the arty, sob-sheet class this
year and thereby increase its value a thousand-fold. We want the POSITIVE
APPROACH!” Mr R of Miami, no doubt recalling a melodramatic 1954
cover story about police crackdowns in his hometown, noted that “from
articles in ONE a reader would get the impression that we [in Miami] are
being driven from pillar to post, scourged in the streets, and unable to walk
abroad in safety. It just isn’t so.” Joining the debate in the June issue, Mr J of
San Francisco thought the magazine should steer a middle course. “Keep
your mag well balanced. Most all homo books are tragic. Don’t let that enter
your mag. We must have some tragedy, but not all.” Even while agreeing
with Jackson that “most of ONE’s writers do whine,” the aforementioned Mr
R also offered an antidote: “What we need is a resolute ‘yawp’ and a scoffing
at defeat.”11 The discussion signals an important evolution in the post-war
gay identity: no longer would homosexuals quietly accept bleak appraisals of
their lives. At the very least, they were yearning for something more
meaningful than they had; and while I don’t think they quite yet perceived
174
______________________________________________________________
something called “gay pride” to be that which they yearned for, the
discussion certainly suggests that the seeds for gay pride were sown well
before bearing fruit in those raucous evenings in Greenwich Village in 1969,
which garner all the attention in the history books and in the social memory
of gays and lesbians themselves.
3.
Should There Be Sex in Homosexuality?
Jackson also took the magazine to task for paying too much
attention to the sordid side of homosexual life. In chronicling the various
ways in which the magazine covered the problem of police targeting gay men
cruising for sex in public areas, she feels the magazine sacrificed the claim
for civic responsibility and equality it touted in its mission statement. Public
sex clearly lay outside Jackson’s conception of the “positive approach.” The
most egregious progenitor of this view of gay life was the monthly column
“Tangents,” a news digest which recapped the ways in which homosexuals or
homosexuality made news in mainstream publications.
In that capacity, Tangents functioned as a veritable watchdog both
of the police and of local media that hyped the constables’ exploits at
rounding up and arresting the “perverts” during periodic sweeps of venues
favoured by men for anonymous sex. Jackson opined that such coverage
undercut homophile goals, because Tangents “does almost NOTHING but
publish the perverted side of life which involves homosexuals.” She brooked
little sympathy for those men caught up in these sweeps, concluding that such
folks “are constantly in legal trouble - primarily because they ask for it!”12 As
with her complaints about the magazine’s tone, her complaints regarding the
sexualised content would also spawn contentiousness within the community.
The author of the Tangents column, Jim Kepner, defended his turf in
March in a section of the column he dubbed “A Cocktail for Miss Jackson.”
The name connoted a double meaning: while addressing her complaint that
the column devoted too much ink to the bar scene, Kepner also used the
occasion to reveal that Los Angeles resident Jackson had tipped a few back in
the city’s gay dives herself - and with him no less! Kepner essentially boiled
Jackson’s complaint down to a public relations problem. In his view, she
appeared to ask, “How can we promote tolerance if we only present our
unsavoury side to the public?” He insisted on the neutrality of the Tangents
column. Following the passage quoted above he proceeded to list a few
examples of such coverage, nearly all of which exemplify some form of
“nastiness.” These examples included an item from a London paper about a
British magistrate who blamed homosexual behaviour for a surge in crime;
an item from the San Francisco Chronicle about homosexual acts inside a
state mental hospital; an item about a black Mississippi teacher “who
attempted suicide after his arrest on a charge of ‘molesting’ a white boy and
carrying indecent literature;” an item about New York police shooting a
John Master
175
______________________________________________________________
suspect wanted for preying upon “bachelors” whom he assaulted after
“striking up acquaintanceships in taverns;” and a final item from nearby
Pasadena about two young school teachers who died in an apparent murdersuicide for no reason discernible to the authorities.13
Each case conveyed real or implied sexual conduct that would have
offended mainstream morality. Because mainstream media outlets tended to
mention homosexuality only in light of such scandalous occurrences - or
perceived scandalous occurrences - Jackson deemed Kepner’s column guilty
of contributing to the negative tone she ascribed to the magazine as a whole.
His defence emphasised that the column’s purpose was to reflect what
mainstream media outlets already reported about homosexuals. Kepner, after
all, invented nothing; he merely compiled and conveyed what was already
out there. The strategy reflects one of the homophiles’ core beliefs: that
discussion of homosexual issues would help to change “bad conditions.”
Kepner concluded his defence by addressing some remarks directly to his
drinking buddy. “No, Miss Jackson, the ‘gay life’ isn’t all sweetness-andlight. The picture isn’t always pretty, but if we want to clean it up, we can’t
look the other way…”14 Indeed, highlighting the travails of gay life was the
first step in fighting against them.
Where Kepner sought to defend the magazine’s content against
Jackson’s charges, some readers climbed aboard her bandwagon. Mr R of
Miami applauded her stance because “not a few of the issues [she raised]
have caused me the most acute embarrassment.” His remarks indicated a
deep resentment that some homosexuals’ indecorous public behaviour would
come to represent the entire group in the public imagination. Like Jackson, he
evinced little sympathy for those whose actions sullied their own and the
group’s reputations alike:
All too often … [ONE] seem[s] to be asking only that the
most disreputable and inconsequential members of
homosexual society be granted all the license they want to
conduct themselves in a fashion which is thoroughly
obnoxious to me, and I am sure, to others…. The element
which has difficulties with the law invites them.… None of
us have an easy time of it, but some of us have enough guts
to realize there are compensations for those who have a few
standards above the gutter and adhere to them.”15
Mr R’s letter demarcates an “Us” and “Them” fissure within the homosexual
community. Like Jackson, Mr R overlooks the institutionalised homophobia
that drives gay men to rely on public sex and that drives the authorities to
persecute them. His claim to a higher moral standard and relegation of the
176
______________________________________________________________
unlucky to the “gutter” suggests that this division would be contested bitterly
and deeply.16
One of the most emotional responses came in a letter from a woman
in Chicago. Miss G had no use for Jackson’s moralising. She worried that
those who had yet to locate the community would lose a “light in the fog” if
the magazine discontinued its coverage of the bar scene. Notice how she
connects the magazine’s function to the development of homosexual
community:
I’m so damn mad at her! … She can stand and look down
her nose at her brothers and sisters and deny them. I’ll tell
her a thing or two about wandering around in a terrifying
fog. I’ll tell her about kids who hang in bars.… They’re
crazy mixed-up kids. They fly from one love to another and
each broken heart is a real broken heart. Yes, I know. I
should. I was one of the mixed-up kids. Your magazine
should be a light in the fog to them. They are the ones who
need you and not Miss Snob.17
Miss G’s heartfelt concern for the fog-bound reflected how personally some
people reacted to Jackson’s sex-phobic approach to gay sexuality. It also
crystallises the idea that the magazine itself had become a means by which
some people could access the homosexual community.
4.
Conclusion
While the editors of ONE can hardly have appreciated the strong
critique of their efforts penned by reader Geraldine Jackson, the conflicted
and conflicting responses to her missive signalled the readiness of
homosexuals to debate the meaning of their lives and their place in American
society. Jackson’s “blast” occasioned a very public debate among lesbians
and gay men about the meaning of homosexuality, and that debate revealed
simmering tensions within the gay and lesbian community of the 1950s.
A number of the criticisms voiced during this debate may contradict
one another. On the one hand, Jackson’s basic accusation that the
homophiles’ philosophical approach toward assimilation was too timid
speaks volumes about the ineffectiveness of the wider homophile movement.
Her call to liberate the magazine from the views of experts hostile to
homosexuality dovetails nicely with the idea that a magazine devoted to
understanding homosexuality should seek to uplift a downtrodden group.
Such views make Jackson seem almost prescient given that “gay pride” had
yet to become the foundational principle of the community’s political
activism. Indeed, her proposed attitude adjustment - “We’re here, and we’re
here to stay and ‘them as don’t like it can lump it’” - not only anticipates the
John Master
177
______________________________________________________________
gay pride outlook of the late 1960s and the 1970s, but uncannily prefigures
the defiant, in-your-face mantra “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”
popularised by queer-era gay activists of the 1980s and 1990s. In that respect,
at least, the editors, authors, and readership of ONE surely helped to cultivate
the era of gay liberation and gay pride, which at their time of writing still lay
more than a decade into the future.
Notes
1
W Lambert [pseud. D Legg], Editorial, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, January
1958, 4-5. Although the editorial carried Legg’s pseudonymous by-line, the
entire staff no doubt helped to select the highlights.
2
Editorial headnote to ‘6 Years After’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, January 1958,
p. 26.
3
The March 1958 issue also included the regular Letters section at the end;
however, it was a truncated affair, taking only two pages rather than the usual
three to four. In contrast to the single-issue addressed by the letters featured
in “Readers on Writers,” these letters (as they usually did) commented on a
variety of issues. Following its debut here, “Readers on Writers” recurred
twice more in 1958: once in response to an article exploring religious takes
on sodomy (June) and once in response to Hollister Barnes’ [Dorr Legg’s]
pre-gay pride screed “I am Glad to be Homosexual” (October).
4
Mission statement printed in the second issue, ONE Magazine, vol. 1,
February 1953, p. 4. For a broad survey of the emergence of the gay press in
the middle-third of the century, see R Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of
a Gay and Lesbian Press in America, Boston, Faber and Faber, 1995.
55
In fact, the magazine’s content led it into varying degrees of conflict with
federal authorities on at least two occasions, one of which eventually resulted
in a legal case that reached the Supreme Court of the United States. For
details, see my dissertation, J Master, ‘A Part of Our Liberation’: ONE
Magazine and the Cultivation of Gay Liberation, 1953-63, PhD Thesis,
University of California, Riverside, March 2006, especially Chapter 3.
6
G Jackson, ‘6 Years After’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, January 1958, pp. 2629, p. 27.
7
Ibid., p. 27.
8
Ibid., p. 29. Words capitalised for emphasis in this and other quotes are
from the original.
9
Ibid., p. 27. The poem ‘Lost Souls’ is here quoted from her letter. The poem
originally appeared in the October-November 1957 issue.
10
Jackson, op. cit., p. 29.
11
Letters of Miss S of Wichita and Mr R of Miami, in ‘Readers on Writers’,
ONE Magazine, vol. 6, March 1958, pp. 12-14. Letter of Mr J of San
178
______________________________________________________________
Francisco, ONE Magazine, ‘Letters’, vol. 6, June 1958, p. 30. Mr R’s
criticism of the article about gay life in Miami references the same item cited
by the editors in their five-year anniversary editorial as one of the magazine’s
proudest moments. (See note 1.) In the original responses, none of the writers
italicised or underlined the name of the magazine.
12
Jackson, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
13
D MacIntire [pseudonym of Jim Kepner], ‘Tangents’, ONE Magazine, vol.
6, March 1958, pp. 17-18.
14
Ibid., p. 18.
15
Mr R of Miami, op. cit., 12-13.
16
Although arrests for public sex abated in the ensuing decades, elements of
this discussion about the role of sexuality in gay life continues to inform
debate among homosexuals into the present.
17
Letter or Miss G of Chicago, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, March 1958, p. 12.
Bibliography
(unattributed), Editorial headnote to ‘6 Years After’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6,
January 1958, p. 26.
Jackson, G, ‘6 Years After’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, January 1958, pp. 26-29.
Letter of Miss G of Chicago, ‘Readers on Writers’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6,
March 1958, p. 12.
Letter of Mr J of San Francisco, ‘Letters’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6, June 1958,
p. 30.
Letter of Mr R of Miami, ‘Readers on Writers’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6,
March 1958, pp. 12-13.
Letter of Miss S of Wichita, ‘Readers on Writers’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6,
March 1958, p. 14.
MacIntire, D [pseud. of Jim Kepner], ‘Tangents’, ONE Magazine, vol. 6,
March 1958, pp. 17-18.
Master, J, ‘A Part of Our Liberation’: ONE Magazine and the Cultivation of
Gay Liberation, 1953-1963, PhD Thesis, University of California,
Riverside, March 2006.
Mission Statement of ONE Magazine, ONE Magazine, vol. 1, February 1953,
p. 4.
Streitmatter, R, Unspeakable: The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Press in
America, Boston, Faber and Faber, 1995.
Prostituting Margins: A Study on a State Ethnography and
Gendered Citizenship in Turkey
Aslı Zengin
Abstract: My ethnographic study of licensed and unlicensed sex worker
women in Istanbul explores how specific types of the state and gendered
citizenship are constructed. Tracing the women’s experiences, their dealings
with state actors, and legal issues related to prostitution, I show how sexuality
is central to constituting a margin through which an analysis of the state and
its subjects could be facilitated. On the other hand, instead of regarding sex
worker women as the passive actors who are put into a marginal position, I
suggest that their practices and experiences also determine the scope of
marginality. That is to say, both their marginality and subjectivities are
constructed at the same time and are constituents of each other.
Keywords: citizenship, margins, prostitution, sex workers, sexuality, the
state, Turkey
1.
Introduction: Prostitution and the Turkish State
In Turkey, prostitution can be practiced legally according to the
framework drawn by special codes, which originally date back to 1930 but
were modified in 1961 and 1973.1 The existing conventions cover only
female sex workers, while transsexual and male sex workers fall outside the
established rules related to legal prostitution. The most important outcome of
these conventions was the creation of a commission called Fight against
Prostitution or CFAP (Fuhuşla Mücadele Komisyonu), which is responsible
for implementing the codes and bylaws specific to licensed and unlicensed
sex workers. CFAP is composed of three branches: management, health, and
executive respectively. The management branch comprises the head of the
Provincial Health Directorship and an officer hired by her/him, the senior
police chief and a commissioner hired by her/him, an officer from the vice
squad, a consultant from the dispensary combating venereal diseases, and a
specialist from Social Services. The branch of health consists of an
appropriate number of doctors and nurses, and they perform medical
examinations of the sex workers and check the health conditions in the
brothels. The last branch, executive, is composed of the senior police chief,
officers from the vice squad, civil police, clerks and file clerks. They are all
responsible for identifying, designating and registering women who are
involved in sex work, revealing the hidden places where sex work is
facilitated, bringing those who are suspected of being involved in sex work to
the hospital for medical examinations, closing the places of prostitution if
180
Prostituting Margins
______________________________________________________________
necessary, and implementing and enforcing the rules agreed upon by the
commission.
Seemingly, CFAP is structurally organised against the threat of
venereal diseases; therefore, it designs its acts appropriately to control the
flow of diseases born out of sexual interaction. However, practices associated
with such an organisational design expand further into the everyday lives of
licensed and unlicensed sex worker women through diverse institutional
actors. These practices take the form of registration, surveillance, health
controls, the tracking and exposure of illegal sex activity, and spatial
controls. Hence these practices open a wide field of action through which
operations, the role of state agencies, and the interventions of a range of
social actors can be shown. Consequently, this entire domain of prostitution
involves multiple interactions between “the state” in Turkey and the
licensed/unlicensed female sex workers. As Akhil Gupta states:
looking at everyday practices, including practices of
representation, and the representation of (state) practice in
public culture helps us arrive at a historically specific and
ideologically constructed understanding of “the state.”2
In this light, I propose to consider the practices of CFAP as a site where sex
worker women come into contact with “the state,” in the process of which the
categories of “the state” and a particular type of gendered citizenship as
“licensed/unlicensed” sex worker are constructed. In the context of this
analysis, the following central questions emerge: How does the state
symbolically construct itself with respect to legal and illegal sex work? What
is the role of marginality in constructing specific subjects as
licensed/unlicensed sex works vis-à-vis “the state”? To what extent can we
speak of the margins of the state to understand the ways of which “the state”
comes into existence in sex worker women’s lives? To what extent do the
state’s diverse constructions converge or diverge?
2.
The Project, Background and Methodology
As regards the methodology employed in search for answers, I
initially intended to pursue ethnographic research in Istanbul. I deliberately
selected such a vast research field, because my method was to shadow sex
workers and conduct semi-structured interviews. Since I was not allowed to
undertake research in either brothels or the hospitals, in which the health
controls over sex workers are exercised, my interviews were carried out
through a chain of people eventually connecting to a sex worker, who ideally
put me in contact with one or more other sex workers. Therefore interviewees
were neither inhabitants of the same area nor did they work in the same
environment. Moreover, they fell under diverse categories of age and
Asli Zengin
181
______________________________________________________________
background. Nevertheless, visiting some night clubs and private “working”
houses, where night life is highly active, inevitably created a map of specific
places that are mainly concentrated in the districts of Aksaray and Taksim.
Unfortunately, however, the club owners remained barriers between me and
the women, prepared to talk with me themselves but not allowing me direct
contact with the sex workers.
My reasons for conducting interviews with both licensed and
unlicensed sex worker women are two-fold. Firstly, and most importantly,
sex worker women’s narratives seem to be an appealing site to depict the
practices between them and “the state.” The way sex worker women present
their encounters and engagements with the state agencies is central to my
research in pursuing specific constructions or imaginaries of “the state” and a
specific type of gendered citizenship respectively. In that sense, the modes
and/or mediums through which both licensed and unlicensed sex workers
speak also serve as analytical tools for comparing and contrasting different
imaginaries of “the state” and citizenship relating to the diverse social worlds
inhabited by those employed in sex work. Secondly, although I had planned
to carry out interviews with the local state officials, it turned out that I was
not permitted to raise questions related to prostitution. Various institutional
actors recommended that I conduct alternative research projects, i.e. projects
not based on prostitution. It thus became clear that the only way to be
informed about the relation between “the state” and prostitution was to talk
directly with the sex worker women themselves.
Apart from conducting interviews, I also focused on written texts
and documents related to prostitution and female sex workers. As Paul
Ricoeur states, “text is any discourse fixed by writing.”3 Therefore, the means
through which these texts speak is crucial to my research. In particular the
spatial and sexual implications of the earlier mentioned legal framework and
historical conventions construct specific marginal categories as licensed and
unlicensed, and at the same time, formulate “the state” and citizenship in
response to each category. So how these discursive and textual processes
inform encounters and interactions between “the state” and the sex workers is
very much related to the specific comprehension of “the state” and the
construction of citizenship.
3.
Life-Style Interventions for Licensed Sex Workers
The practices of the CFAP confine licensed female sex workers to a
legally determined lifestyle. One of the most important functions of the
CFAP is the registration process of sex workers. Those women designated as
sex workers are given reports (karne) to certify their officially authorised sex
worker status in the brothels, which are regulated by the state. These reports
not only restrict sex workers to brothels, but also establish relations between
these women and various state agencies existing in or accredited by the
182
______________________________________________________________
commission, for instance, via medical consultations, results of which are
recorded on the women’s reports. Licensed sex workers are obliged to go to
hospital twice a week for their routine health control and to take a blood test
every three months. The justification behind this practice is to prevent the
spread of venereal diseases to the society at large, since sex worker women
engage in sexual relations with so many men. These medical examinations
open a space for intervention by several institutional actors, as the women’s
records of regular health checks are surveyed and inspected by the members
of the executive branch in CFAP. According to the commission’s practice,
sex workers are required to present the records to the relevant state agencies
whenever requested to do so. Anyone who evades the medical examinations
two consecutive times is taken as a “fugitive,” and the police, being one of
the main actors in the commission, have the right to bring that individual to
the hospital by force. In this context, the reports of licensed sex workers may
be conceptualised as establishing a checkpoint in a wide disciplinary control
mechanism, where the police play the central role of routinising
consultations, checking reports, and enforcing compliance among licensed
sex worker women.
Sex worker women’s interactions with the institutional actors are not
limited to the police only, as the commission encompasses an assortment of
officials from diverse state institutions. The practices of those state officials
go beyond ensuring the regular health checks, in the sense that established
rules and bylaws provide them with many rights to institute norms and
standards in relation to licensed sex workers’ lives. For example, in order to
determine the exact place where sex worker women work, they can be
prohibited from travelling, or restricted to dwelling as well as working in the
brothels. Furthermore, the organisation of spaces for legal prostitution is
bound up with strict rules and regulations. Article 48, for instance, outlines
specific criteria stipulating that brothels “can not be established around the
places where official buildings or institutions, religious or educational places,
sports fields, general meeting, feasting and entertaining areas lie.”4
Establishing brothels on the edges of public life renders licensed sex worker
women invisible in everyday life. Such isolation, which diminishes the
possibility of licensed sex worker women’s encounters with the public,
overlaps with their exacting working hours and conditions. One of the
licensed sex worker informants emphasised the existing situation in the
following words: “Everyday, you go in the morning and work till midnight…
you are like a slave in there...living in a closed place without seeing either the
sunlight or the shadow…”
One notable result of such practices, derived from legal norms and
standards, is that of licensed sex worker women being forced to adopt a
particular fixed kind of lifestyle. As an effect of interventions by the
functionaries of the state, these women acquire lives that can be
Asli Zengin
183
______________________________________________________________
conceptualised in the framework of margins. My intention is to employ
Veena Das and Deborah Poole’s definition of margins of the state as an
analytical category to depict the “relationship between violence and ordering
functions of the state” in the case of licensed sex worker women, who belong
to the state’s sexualised “margins as a space between bodies, law and
discipline.”5 These women’s rights are regularly violated, as in being
deprived of travelling freely or dwelling wherever they want, and moreover,
being effectively compelled to continue working as prostitutes once
registered as such (since henceforth obligated to appear for health checks,
carry licence documentation for inspection, etc.). This rights violation can be
thought of as Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception “in terms of practices
that lie simultaneously outside and inside the law,”6 because article 18 of the
constitution implies that nobody can be forced to work. Yet according to the
accounts of some women, once they are registered as licensed sex workers,
they are not allowed to quit this form of work. Furthermore, they cannot
utilise their social security rights in line with the citizenry benefits that are
meant to be available in general. For instance, although they should be
insured by the state as a condition of working in the brothels, there are only a
small number of retired sex workers in Turkey. In that sense, Das and Poole’s
statement that “individuals are reconstituted through special laws as
populations on whom new forms of regulation can be exercised” is very
much applicable to licensed sex workers.7 The state as a sovereign power
breaks up its bond with the general law (embodied in the constitution) and
splits sex workers along different axes of membership and inclusion, by
constituting and applying special laws in relation to prostitution. At this
point, it is significant to emphasise that, rather than being mutually exclusive,
the arts of governing and sovereignty go hand in hand. As Mitchell Dean puts
it, “the relation of the arts of governing and sovereignty is not the
replacement of one by the other but each acting as a condition of the other.”8
On the one hand, the existence of a sovereign state is a prior condition for
opening political spaces for licensed sex workers, in which the arts of
government can operate. On the other hand, a set of regulations specific to
these women is a necessary condition of the world inhabited by the sovereign
state’s particular actors.
4.
States of Exception: Unlicensed Sex Workers
The state actors play a crucial role in another significant issue:
illegal prostitution. Besides the analysis of everyday encounters of licensed
sex workers with “the state,” the examination of unlicensed sex workers’
habitual interactions with the same institutional actors is equally crucial for
my analysis. As previously mentioned, the CFAP is responsible for tracing
and catching illegal sex workers and revealing the hidden places where
illegal sex activity is practiced. Article 20 of the convention, according to
184
______________________________________________________________
which the commission organises its structure and practices, demands a
detailed investigation of any woman suspected of being involved in
prostitution. The same article states that “if such a suspicion is confirmed on
the basis of secret and in depth investigation, first, the reasons behind her
drift to prostitution are to be explored, and then, further precautions are to be
considered so as to make her return back to an honourable life.”9 If those
“precautions,” which are not clearly stated in any article of the convention,
do not prove effective, the state continues to exercise the role of gatekeeper
of “honour,” which is defined in consistency with the culturally specific
gendered norms that codify women’s multiple sexual relationships with men
as dishonourable. To put it explicitly, as per article 22, a woman proven to
be a prostitute is officially photographed and numbered via a registry card,
which records the woman’s photo, followed by her first name, surname, age,
birthplace, legal domicile, and the place where she is going to undertake sex
work.10 Moreover, the woman’s identity card is taken away, in return for a
receipt, attached to the registry card, and she is also given a consultation
identity card (hüviyet muayene cüzdanı),11 which shows the number of her
registration card. Since this registration process is performed by the CFAP,
the question of legitimacy arises, due to the fact that, on the one hand, the
commission is fighting “against” prostitution, whilst on the other, it
establishes the very legality of prostitution through its own practices and
regulations. So the everyday encounters of unlicensed sex worker women
with the institutional actors are composed of processes of contestation,
negotiation and collaboration, at the same time as they are (re)shaped through
the legal criteria. But as opposed to the case of licensed sex worker women,
the practices of the legal criteria can be manipulated towards different ends
by the state’s same actors in their interactions with illegal sex worker women.
Especially the relations between the police and unlicensed sex
workers are quite alien to the official thinking related to codes and bylaws
about prostitution. Investments in the affiliations between these actors can
mainly be categorised under corruption, consisting of bribery, bargains with
pimps, and spying on women by policemen. One of the unlicensed sex
worker women I spoke to told me about the arbitrary motivations of
policemen in applying the legal procedures, when they catch illegal sex
workers. According to her, policemen sometimes gather women together in
Taksim and bring them to the police station. Most of the time, however, they
then elicit bribes from the women or force them to perform sex acts, before
releasing them. She gave me another account of the collaborative work of
policemen and the hotel owners, who are involved in illicit sex activity. As
one of the main actors in the illegal sex sector, the police effectively
“prostitute” themselves. I find Timothy Mitchell’s conceptualisation of the
state effect useful to analyse the policemen’s violations of the law, since they
lay claim to the right to shift between legality and illegality. As Mariane C.
Asli Zengin
185
______________________________________________________________
Ferme cites Mitchell, “one way a state effect is produced is by drawing of
boundaries.”12 By shifting and (re)drawing the boundary between illegality
and legality, the police promote an economy of corruption. It is crucial to
conceive this corruption not only in monetary terms, but also in terms of
“intimacy,” since the policemen allow themselves to be “bribed” with the use
of the bodies of sex worker women. Begoña Aretxaga points out that “there is
a strange intimacy between the state and the people,”13 and continues by
quoting from Veena Das:
at the margins of the polity and at the local level,
encounters with the state are often experienced in an
intimate way where power is experienced close to skin,
embodied in well-known local officials, through practices
of everyday life.14
5.
Conclusion: Sovereignty, Legitimacy and the State
In this context, the intimacy between the police and the unlicensed
sex workers helps to conceptualise the construction of “the state” as a
sexualised body rather than a neutral one. However, the acts of policemen are
not only shaped through heterosexual forms of control, but also through
spatial forms of sovereignty. That is to say, compared to the brothels, a wider
space of corruption is opened in the streets, where most of the unlicensed sex
worker women try to earn money. While the police’s acts are bounded with
so many institutional actors in the brothels of the state, they are dependent on
the policemen’s personal choices in the streets, since only the police are
authorised to trace and catch the illegal sex workers operating there. The
police become an effect of a sovereign power, deciding whether to be/act
inside or outside the law in each case of identified unlicensed sex workers.
I want to draw attention to another point related to the same question
of the legitimacy of “the state” in establishing borders between the licensed
and unlicensed sex worker women. As mentioned above, the legal power of
the police opens up “illegal” spaces for everyday encounters of unlicensed
sex worker women with “the state.” Another example of that type of
interaction is realised when women are spied on in order to be caught and
registered as licensed sex workers. In one unlicensed sex worker’s words,
pimps conspire with the police to compel women to work for male procurers
rather than themselves. If a woman is repeatedly caught while involved in
illicit sexual activity, the police begin the process of registering her, a
“service” for which they are remunerated by the pimps. The notable point in
this context is the role of illegality in the construction of legality, since
corruption facilitates women’s work in brothels, or in other words, under the
control of “the state.” The attempt to construct legality creates a field for
strategies, negotiations, tensions, and contestations among various social
186
______________________________________________________________
actors in their encounters with “the state.” Hence, corruption provides an
analytical tool for understanding the construction of “the state” with respect
to the particular context of illegal sex work. As Akhil Gupta indicates,
“instead of treating corruption as a dysfunctional aspect of state
organizations, I see it as a mechanism through which ‘the state’ itself is
discursively constructed.”15 I find Gupta’s suggestion very useful to analyse
the construction of “the state” through corruption not only through discourse,
but in everyday practices also. It is in the corruptive endeavours to register
women in legal prostitution that a border between licensed and unlicensed
sex workers is constituted. This border is one of the most important
analytical tools for my research due to the fact that it constructs two diverse
spaces, on the one hand, the brothels, and on the other, the streets, hotels, and
private houses, with the imaginaries and constructions of “the state” differing
in each. As Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson state, “through specific
metaphors and practices, states represents themselves as reified entities with
particular spatial properties (… properties of ‘vertical encompassment’).”16 I
think this framework helps to understand and explain the corruptive practices
of the police, in which the metaphors of encompassment and verticality are
embedded. Moreover, the capacity for corruption in the subject of the police
can be thought as both producer and product of spatial and scalar hierarchies
of “the state.” For example, the police’s surveillance of unlicensed sex
workers both represents and embodies state hierarchy and encompassment.
To conclude, the sex worker women, upon whom particular bylaws
and codes are enforced and who accordingly are deprived of many social
rights, stand on the edges of public life, and hence belong to a sexual margin
of “the state.” Not only the legal arrangements determine and constitute the
margin and its subjects, but also a variety of actors and their activities. The
strategies and practices around health controls, the organisation of sex work
spaces, and the surveillance of women are fruitful sites to depict how certain
categories of populations are established in a series of interactions and
engagements with “the state.” Therefore, encounters with either consultants
or police serve to substantiate the specific constructions of “the state” and
gendered citizenship in relation to sex worker women in Istanbul. This kind
of analysis helps us to keep ourselves aloof from seeing “the state” as a
reified total entity and facilitates an understanding of its construction and
imagination in everyday practices. Most of the available texts on the subject
consider sexuality an irrelevant issue to conceptualising “the state” and
citizenship formation. However, this paper has demonstrated how the
concepts of “the state” and citizenship, which are seemingly unrelated to
sexuality, crucially owe their constructions to sex and sexuality in the
specific contexts of licensed and unlicensed female sex workers in Turkey.
Asli Zengin
187
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
R Gazete, Genel Kadınlar ve Genelevlerin Tabi Olacakları Hükümler ve
Fuhuş Yüzünden Bulaşan Zührevi Hastalıklarla Mücadele Tüzüğü, 19 April
1961, viewed on 15 January 2005,
<http://www.hukuki.net/www.saglikhukuku.net/index.php?article=52 >.
2
A Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: the Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of
Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, 1995,
pp. 375-402, p. 393.
3
P Ricoeur, ‘What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding’, in JB
Thompson (ed.), Paul Ricoeur Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 145-164, p. 145.
4
R Gazete, op. cit.
5
V Das and D Poole, ‘State and Its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’, in
V Das and D Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State, School
of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 2004, pp. 3-35, p. 10.
6
G Agamben, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2005, p. 15.
7
Das and Poole, op. cit., p. 12.
8
M Dean, ‘“Demonic Societies”: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty’,
in TB Hansen and F Stepputat (eds.), States of Imagination: Ethnographic
Explorations of the Postcolonial State, Duke University Press, Durham and
London, 2001, pp. 41-65, p. 50.
9
R Gazete, op. cit.
10
In the Turkish version of the article, genel kadın is used instead of
prostitute. The deployed vocabulary of genel imports the meaning of “being
accessible to everyone” in the representation of sex worker women and
constructs them as accessible to every man in the society. I use the word
“man” on purpose, because women, apart from the ones working in the
brothels, are not allowed to go into these buildings. Therefore, the process of
linking genel kadıns to the spaces of the state (the brothels) and conditioning
them to the access of every man opens up a field of analysis to examine
sexualisation of those spaces, and thus sexualisation of “the state.”
11
Another name for this, hüviyet muayene cüzdanı, is the report (karne),
which I mentioned in the above accounts of my proposal.
12
T Mitchell, ‘Society, Economy and the State Effect’, in G Steinmetz (ed.),
State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, New York, 1999, pp. 76-79; quoted in MC Ferme,
‘Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances of the Sierra Leonean
State’, in V Das and D Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the
State, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 2004, pp. 81-117, p. 82.
188
______________________________________________________________
13
B Aretxaga, ‘Maddening States’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 32,
2003, pp. 393-410, p. 403.
14
V Das, ‘The State at its Margins: Comparative Ethnographies’, Advanced
Seminar Series, School of American Research, in press, Santa Fe, 2003;
quoted in Begoña Aretxaga, ibid., p. 396.
15
A Gupta, op. cit., p. 376.
16
A Gupta and J Ferguson, ‘Spatializing States: Towards an Ethnography of
Neoliberal Governmentality’, American Ethnologist, vol. 29, no. 4, 2002, pp.
981-1002, p. 982.
Bibliography
Agamben, G, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2005.
Aretxaga, B, ‘Maddening States’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 32,
2003, pp. 393-410.
Das, V, and D Poole, ‘State and Its Margins: Comperative Ethnographies’, in
V Das and D Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State,
School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 2004, pp. 3-35.
Dean, M, ‘“Demonic Societies”: Liberalism, Biopolitics, and Sovereignty’, in
TB Hansen and F Stepputat (eds.), States of İmagination:
Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, Duke
University Press, Durham and London, 2001, pp. 41-65.
Ferme, MC, ‘Deterritorialized Citizenship and the Resonances of the Sierra
Leonean State’, in V Das and D Poole (eds.), Anthropology in the
Margins of the State, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe,
2004, pp. 81-117.
Gupta, A, ‘Blurred Boundaries: the Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of
Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no.
2, 1995, pp. 375-402.
Gupta, A, and J Ferguson, ‘Spatializing States: Towards An Ethnography of
Neoliberal Governmentality’, American Ethnologist, vol. 29, no. 4,
2002, pp. 981-1002.
Mitchell, T, ‘Society, Economy and the State Effect’, in G Steinmetz (ed.),
State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn, Cornell
University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1999, pp. 76-79.
Resmi, G, Genel Kadınlar ve Genelevlerin Tabi Olacakları Hükümler ve
Fuhuş Yüzünden Bulaşan Zührevi Hastalıklarla Mücadele Tüzüğü,
19 April 1961, viewed on 15 January 2005,
<http://www.hukuki.net/www.saglikhukuku.net/index.php?article=5
2>.
Asli Zengin
189
______________________________________________________________
Ricoeur, P, ‘What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding’, in JB
Thompson (ed.), Paul Ricoeur Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 145164.
The Legal Status of Female Sex Workers
in Austria and Germany
Alice Sadoghi
Abstract: Sex work forms a grey area in Austrian legislation. In contrast to
the increasing tendency of liberalism towards prostitutes and sex workers on
the European stage, the Austrian legislator regulates prostitution only insofar
as obligations of women are concerned, with an enormous lack of
correspondent rights on the other hand. This paper shows a history of
development of prostitution in the field of criminal law. Whereas working as
a prostitute was strictly forbidden and sanctioned with severe punishment
until 1974, it is now admissible with reservations. The Federal States have
the power to settle the rules for prostitutes. That is why sex workers have to
undergo periodical medical tests and are only permitted to work in some
areas under the restrictive control of police forces. The actual status of
lawlessness regarding prostitutes appears an inequity in the civil,
employment, and social law sectors. Furthermore the women concerned miss
out on fundamental rights of the constitution. Although the state denies
awarding them the status of “workers,” prostitutes have to pay high taxes. In
addition they cannot prosecute their claims for salary, have difficulties in
getting health insurance, and face discrimination concerning their rights for
privacy and equality.
Key words: Austrian law, civil law, discrimination, employment law,
fundamental rights, history, prostitution, social law, tax law.
1.
Austrian History of Prostitution in the Field of Criminal Law
During the absolutist regime prostitution was considered a criminal
act, which faced severest punishment. In the eighteenth century Maria
Theresia introduced the code of criminal law (the so-called Constitutio
Criminalis Theresiana). According to the code, prostitution was not only
regarded as the sexual intercourse between two unmarried people of different
sexes, but also referred to the cohabitation of two unmarried people, and even
the obscene behaviour of a single woman.1 The sanctions for these kinds of
actions were harsh fines or arrest. At this time all sexual activities outside
marriage were penalised as prostitution. There was no special penalty for
professional prostitutes. Although the law referred to the actions of
unmarried “people,” in practice only women were sentenced for this kind of
crime.
A few years later Joseph II enacted a new code of criminal law (the
so-called Constitutio Criminalis Josephina). Now anyone, whether man or
woman, who earned his or her living with professional hetero- or homosexual
192
Female Sex Workers in Austria and Germany
______________________________________________________________
prostitution, was considered a political delinquent and could be served with
arrest.2 The new law restricted the elements of the crime of prostitution by
introducing the essentials of remuneration and professionalism.
The turn of the nineteenth century led to the new code of criminal
law by Franz II in 1803. Heterosexual prostitution was now merely seen as a
minor offence, which was punished by the police. Only when it caused
illnesses or public nuisance, was it sentenced as a crime by a judge.3
Homosexual prostitutes in contrast were always deemed criminals and
therefore prosecuted by the court. Prostitution in general was a
misdemeanour, which could only be committed by women. The following act
of law, the code of criminal law of 1852, did not make any changes to the
status of prostitutes. While prostitution continued to be regarded as an
offence, which was pursued by the police, in practice only those engaged in
homosexual prostitution and prostitution with harmful side effects were
convicted by the courts.
An innovative act passed in March 1873 created new methods of
dealing with prostitutes after they had received their sentence.4 In addition to
the penal sanction, all criminals were now set under police supervision, they
were forbidden to frequent particular places and were sometimes forced to
stay within designated areas. Furthermore prostitutes were sent to labour
camps were they were subjected to harsh treatment such as forced labour.5
Some years later in 1885, an additional act (the so-called
Landstreichereigesetz) brought in additional penalties for prostitutes.6 All
prostitution became an offence and no longer a misdemeanour and was
penalised by the police with prison sentences up to six months. Prostitution
only was defined in the code of criminal law, whereas the modalities of
punishment and treatment were described in a different act of parliament.
During the National Socialist regime prostitutes were condemned
and punished with prison sentences, but the Nazis also sent women to
concentration camps, where the “non Arian” prostitutes were impelled to
service the German soldiers.7 The Gewohnheitsverbrechergesetz raised the
retributions for people who were sentenced for prostitution more than once
and allowed their deportation into labour and concentration camps.8 In a
sense, prostitution became a kind of hard labour, with “working girls”
sterilised against their own will and forced to serve the soldiers.
After the Second World War prostitutes’ legal status before 1938
was reinstalled, but it took the Austrian legislature until 1974 to abolish
punishment of female prostitution. Nearly fifteen years later the
discriminating rule that punished male homosexual prostitution was repealed
too. Since 2006, neither male or female homo- or heterosexual prostitution is
illegal under Austrian criminal law. Only profiteers from prostitution or
actions that take advantage of prostitutes’ work, such as procuration,
pornography, and human trafficking, continue to be criminalised by the penal
Alice Sadoghi
193
______________________________________________________________
code. The steady development that had initially excluded prostitution from
the code of criminal law and placed it under single acts of parliament peaked
when the Austrian Supreme Court declared prostitution as legal and the
legislators removed the incriminating paragraph from the penal code.
Since that day the nine Austrian federal states have the power to
settle the rules for prostitution in several sectors but not including criminal
law. That is why sex workers at present have to undergo periodical medical
treatment to prevent them transmitting HIV and other sexually transmitted
infections (STIs) and are only permitted to work in designated areas under
the restrictive supervision of police forces.
The above brief history shows that whereas working as a prostitute
was strictly forbidden and sanctioned with severe punishment, first in the
code of criminal law and then in single regulations, it has, since 1974,
become admissible and accepted, though still with reservations.9 Despite this,
both male and female sex workers continue to face significant discrimination
by the law. The Austrian legislature regulates prostitution only insofar as the
obligations of prostitutes are concerned, whereas there is an enormous lack of
correspondent rights on the other hand.
2.
The Actual Status of Lawlessness of Austrian Sex Workers
A. Civil Law
According to the Austrian Supreme Court, the contract between a
prostitute and her client is immoral and therefore invalid. As a consequence a
prostitute always has to insist in payment in advance. If she does not do so, a
client who is unwilling to pay has the legal right on his side. No Austrian
court will sentence him to pay for the service he has claimed from the
prostitute. In the leading case a man owed two prostitutes more than 200,000
Austrian shillings (approximately 11,130 pound sterling or 14,534 euros) for
two luxury days at a sauna club. This amount included the work of the
prostitutes as well as several drinks and snacks at the club. He refused to pay.
When the prostitutes and the owner of the club went to court, they were told
that they had no right to claim this money and that the suitor did not have to
pay a single shilling. The work of the prostitutes was regarded as immoral
and therefore not worth paying; the owner of the sauna did not get his money
because he had sold drinks to clients of prostitutes. In other words he had
attempted to make a profit from prostitution, from a legal but immoral action,
and therefore had no right to complain about the withheld money.10
Prostitution in Austria is legal. Nevertheless courts regard the work
of prostitutes as immoral and therefore not valid for protection by the law.
Due to the impossibility of demanding their rights for payment in a legal
way, prostitutes are sometimes forced to cooperate with people who make
suitors pay - very often in an illegal way,11 for example via intimidation,
including physical threats.
194
______________________________________________________________
B. Tax Law
Prostitution is considered the oldest profession in the world. In fact,
however, the Austrian Trade, Commerce and Industry Regulation Act does
not consider prostitution as a business. That means that work as a prostitute
does not need to comply with the rules of the trade regulations. As mentioned
above, it is the duty of the federal states to regulate prostitutes’ work.12
Although prostitution is not a business as defined by the law, prostitutes have
to pay income and turnover taxes. Paradoxically their self-employed income
is listed as income from a business enterprise in the tax law.13 The Austrian
higher administrative court has emphasised several times that prostitutes’
income is categorised as earnings from business enterprise.14 Although their
work is not protected by the strict rules of the trade regulations, sex workers
have to pay high taxes, because their salaries are classified as commercial
rather than personal earnings.
C. Social Legislation
Prostitutes face discrimination regarding social legislation as well.
No insurance company regards prostitutes as employees. As a consequence
sex workers have no ability to participate in the insurance system. They only
have the possibility to insure themselves as self-employed persons. Risk
exclusions concerning sexual illnesses such as AIDS often prevent prostitutes
even from doing that. Due to this kind of injustice prostitutes regularly lack
health, accident, and unemployment insurance. When they eventually quit
their jobs due to age, they do not receive a pension.15
D. Labour Legislation
On top of that the Austrian state refuses to award prostitutes the
status of workers. As a result they face tremendous inequity. Fundamental
rights of working people, such as general safety for workers, the protection
against unlawful dismissal, the legal protection for expectant mothers, and
many more health and safety conventions, are not conceded to prostitutes
despite their practical status as workers. Furthermore they have no employee
representation. Accordingly, sixteen-hour working days and six to seven-day
working weeks are not a rarity. In addition procurers dictate all the conditions
of work. Many women carry out their jobs in small rooms with little daylight,
sometimes under very bad hygienic standards.16
E. Fundamental Rights
Article 7 of the Austrian constitution contains the right of equal
treatment before the law. This means that all persons have the same rights
and obligations and that the same facts have to be treated in the same way.17
Despite this, several rules of the federal states ban only female prostitutes
from certain restricted areas, whereas male prostitutes are not even
Alice Sadoghi
195
______________________________________________________________
mentioned. The Austrian Constitutional Court has pointed out that this status
does not contravene the constitution, because it is the quantitatively greater
female prostitution that leads to harmful effects for society, so that it is
acceptable to set up rules that only apply to female prostitutes.18
In practice these laws are not compatible with the constitution,
especially as male homosexual prostitution is increasing. The Constitutional
Court is simply ignoring reality when it talks about the higher numbers of
female prostitutes and the effects thereof. Legislators who only restrict the
work of female sex workers effectively act against the Austrian
constitution,19 violating the spirit, if not the letter, of its governing principles.
Article 8 of the European catalogue of human rights guarantees the
value of privacy and family life. By common consent, federal states are not
allowed to regulate private prostitution, which in no way affects the public.
That is why the rules of the federal states only control prostitution in public,
whereas private sex work for “friends” at home is not controlled. Some
people go even further and point out that sexuality and sex work are part of
our own privacy and that no official has the right to restrict our sexual
behaviour, even when it is enacted in public and/or as professional
prostitution.20 In fact the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg has pointed
out several times that sexuality in general is a part of private life.21
Regulations that restrict or force prostitutes to modify their
behaviour could also be said to infringe other fundamental rights, such as the
freedom of acquisition and the right of individual freedom.
3.
International Agreements
Since 1904 much work has been undertaken at international level to
counteract the negative effects of prostitution and protect the women
concerned. The World Charter for the Rights of Prostitutes was set up in
1985 and demanded equal treatment of prostitutes in the fields of human
rights, taxes, health care, conditions of employment and organisation. In fact,
the European regulations for prostitution are heterogeneous. Whereas
Sweden criminalises only the suitors following the principle of abolition,
Germany and the Netherlands accept prostitution as a kind of work and
realise the principle of decriminalisation. Austria on the other hand considers
sex work as legal but immoral and therefore implements the principle of
regulation.22
4.
The Situation in Germany - an Ambitious Model
In contrast, the German legislator has ended the discriminatory
situation of law regarding prostitutes and, consistent with the changing
attitudes of society, passed a new act in 2002. Since then the contract
between a prostitute and her client is valid, and therefore she has the right to
claim her salary in the courts. Furthermore prostitution is viewed as a kind of
196
______________________________________________________________
work. People concerned have the ability to work for an owner of a brothel
and enjoy the protection of employment law regulations. On top of that they
are now part of the compulsory national and health insurance schemes and do
not have to struggle to obtain insurance cover. Compulsory medical checkups
no longer exist. As an alternative, sex workers are able to access medical care
voluntarily.23
5.
Conclusion
Although prostitutes in Germany still have to pay taxes, the
legislators have started to address other areas of inequality and discrimination
by not only legalising but morally recognising prostitution and by awarding
sex workers fundamental rights, such as their right for payment. The Austrian
law, on the contrary, is very ambiguous when it legalises prostitution itself
but denies prostitutes basic rights and assists their discrimination and
inequitable treatment. The history of Austrian prostitution proves that
prohibitive laws and sanctions merely cause sex work to be pursued in
secrecy. Similar tendencies at the international level also indicate that
prohibition is not the way forward. The growing liberality in society and antidiscrimination law have to result in a change of the present legislation in
Austria. In supporting the developments in German law, I demand the
acceptance of prostitutes as hard working members of Austrian society with
the same rights and obligations as other people. Therefore the contract
between a prostitute and her client has to become valid, people need to be
given the right to enter insurance arrangements, to rely on fundamental
rights, and to benefit from existing and future labour protection provisions.
Notes
1
“Obscene” in the meaning of lecherous. Art 81 Constitution Criminalis
Theresiana.
2
§§ 75f Consitution Criminalis Josephina.
3
§§ 245f StG 1803.
4
‘Gesetz vom 10. Mai 1873 womit polizeistrafrechtliche Bestimmungen
wider Arbeitsscheue und Landstreicher erlassen wurden’, RGBl 1873/108.
5
§§ 7f, §§ 13ff Act of Parliament from 10 May 1873.
6
RGBl 1885/89.
7
S Gleß, Die Reglementierung von Prostitution in Deutschland, Duncker und
Humblot, Berlin, 1999, p. 90. U Wickert, ‘Tabu Lagerbordell’, in I
Eschenbach (ed.), Gedächtnis und Geschlecht, Campus, Frankfurt/Main,
1992, pp. 41-50, p.44.
8
dRGBl 1933/133.
Alice Sadoghi
197
______________________________________________________________
9
For further details of the history of prostitution, see A Sadoghi, Offene
Rechtsfragen zur Prostitution in entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Perspektive,
Trauner Verlag, Linz, 2005, p. 39.
10
OGH 28.06.1989, 3 Ob 516/89.
11
H Krejci, ‘§ 879’, in P Rummel (ed.), Kommentar zum ABGB, Orac,
Vienna, 2000, § 879 Rz 75. P Apathy, ‘879’, in M Schwimann (ed.),
Praxiskommentar zum ABGB, Orac, Vienna, 1997, § 879 Rz 11. H Koziol
and R Welser, Grundriss des bürgerlichen Rechts, Manz, Vienna, 2002, p.
162.
12
A Gerscha and C Steuer, Kommentar zur Gewerbeordnung, WEKA,
Vienna, 1999, § 1 Rz 3. A Hanusch, Kommentar zur Gewerbeordnung,
LexisNexis, Vienna, 2004, § 1 Rz 2. W Kinscher, Die Gewerbeordnung,
Manz, Vienna, 1996, § 1 Rz 5.
13
§ 28 EStG P Quantschnigg and W Schuch, Einkommensteuer-Handbuch,
Orac, Vienna, 1993, § 23 Rz 1.2.ff.
14
VwGH 17.3.1986, 84/15/0048.
15
W Schrammel, ‘Vom Werksvertragserkenntnis zur umfassenden
Sozialversicherung’, Arbeits- und Sozialrechtskartei, Linde Verlag, Vienna,
1997, pp. 330-340, p. 333. Caritas, Prostitution in Oberösterreich, Linz,
2004, p. 6.
16
H Ratzenböck, ‘Wege in die Prostitution’, in B Cizek (ed.), Prostitution
und Pornographie, Institut für Familienforschung, Vienna, 2001, pp. 50-60,
p. 52. Caritas, op. cit., p. 6.
17
T Öhlinger, Verfassungsrecht , WUV, Vienna, 2003, p. 326.
18
VfSlg 7965/1976.
19
B Toth, Die Prostitutionsgesetze der Länder: Kompetenz - Systematik Grundrechte, PhD thesis, University of Vienna, Vienna, 1997, p. 174.
20
Ibid., p. 136. See also H Stolzlechner, ‘Der Schutz des Privat- und
Familienlebens (Art 8 EMRK) im Lichte der Rechtsprechung des VfGH und
der Straßburger Instanzen’, Österreichische Juristenzeitung , 1980, pp. 85123, p. 85.
21
EuGRZ 1979, 566. EuGRZ 6825/75.
22
Sadoghi, op. cit., p. 53.
23
L Dammann, ‘Die Diskriminierung geht weiter’, Forum Recht Online, vol.
1, 2003, pp.10-15, p. 15.
Bibliography
Apathy, P, ‘§ 879’, in M Schwimann (ed.), Praxiskommentar zum ABGB,
Orac, Vienna, 1997.
Alakus, B, Sex-Zwangsarbeit im NS Konzentrationslager, Die Aussteller,
Vienna, 2005.
198
______________________________________________________________
Bargon, M, Prostitution und Zuhälterei, M. Schwimann (ed). SchmidtRömhild, Lübeck, 1982.
Beck, R, Prostitution, Verein Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis,
Cologne, 2001.
Caritas, Prostitution in Oberösterreich, Linz, 2004.
von Dücker, E, Sexarbeit. Prostitution: Lebenswelten und Mythen, Museum
der Arbeit (Hamburg) exhibition catalogue, Edition Temmen,
Bremen, 2005.
Dammann, L, ‘Die Diskriminierung geht weiter’, Forum Recht Online, vol. 1,
2003, pp. 10-15.
Flicker, E, Prostitution und AIDS, Institut für Soziologie, Vienna, 1993.
Frohnert, A, Dimensionen der Prostitution, Poly- und Monogamie, Weidler,
Berlin, 1992.
Geisler, A, Gehandelte Frauen, Trafo, Berlin, 2005.
Gerscha, A, Kommentar zur Gewerbeordnung, WEKA, Vienna , 1999.
Gleß, S, Die Reglementierung von Prostitution in Deutschland, Duncker und
Humblot, Berlin, 1999.
Grenz, S, (Un)heimliche Lust, VS, Wiesbaden, 2005.
Hanusch, A, Kommentar zur Gewerbeordnung, LexisNexis, Vienna, 2004.
Kahmann, J, Weibliche Prostitution in Hamburg, Kriminalistik, Heidelberg,
1981.
Kinscher, W, Die Gewerbeordnung, Manz, Vienna, 1996.
Koziol, H, and R Welser, Grundriss des bürgerlichen Rechts, Manz, Vienna,
2002.
Kraft, S. Zucht und Unzucht, Hugendubel, Munich, 1996.
Krejci, H, ‘§ 879’, in P Rummel (ed.), Kommentar zum ABGB, Orac, Vienna,
2000.
Lacroix, P, Weltgeschichte der Prostitution, P. Rummel (ed). Eichborn,
Frankfurt/Main, 1995.
Malkmus, K, Prostitution in Recht und Gesellschaft, Lang, Frankfurt/Main,
2005.
Neuweg, S, Die andere Arbeit, Linz, 1990.
Öhlinger, T, Verfassungsrecht, WUV, Vienna, 2003.
Quantschnigg, P, and W Schuch, Einkommensteuer-Handbuch, Orac, Vienna,
1993.
Ratzenböck, H, ‘Wege in die Prostitution’, in B Cizek (ed.), Prostitution und
Pornographie, Institut für Familienforschung, Vienna, 2001, pp. 5060.
Ringdal, N, Die neue Weltgeschichte der Prostitution, Piper, Munich, 2006.
Alice Sadoghi
199
______________________________________________________________
Sadoghi,
A,
Offene
Rechtsfragen
zur
Prostitution
in
entwicklungsgeschichtlicher Perspektive, Trauner Verlag, Linz,
2005.
Schrammel, W, ‘Vom Werksvertragserkenntnis zur umfassenden
Sozialversicherung’, Arbeits- und Sozialrechtskartei, Linde Verlag,
Vienna, 1997, pp. 330-340.
Schulte, R, Sperrbezirk, Syndikat, Frankfurt/Main, 1984.
Self, H, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of Law, Cass, London, 2003.
Stolzlechner, H, ‘Der Schutz des Privat- und Familienlebens (Art 8 EMRK)
im Lichte der Rechtsprechung des VfGH und der Straßburger
Instanzen’, Österreichische Juristenzeitung , 1980, pp. 85-123.
Toth, B, Die Prostitutionsgesetze der Länder, Vienna, 1997.
Weldy, O, Frauenhandel - moderner Sklavenhandel, Linz, 2005.
Wickert, U, ‘Tabu Lagerbordell’, in I Eschenbach (ed.), Gedächtnis und
Geschlecht, Campus, Frankfurt/Main, 1992, pp. 41-50.
Zimmermann, U, Die öffentlichrechtliche Behandlung von Prostitution.
MVK, Tübingen, 2002.
Strange Bedfellows: Feminist, Sexological and
Criminological Discourses on Pornography
Kateřina Lišková
Abstract: Questions of gender and sexuality are currently being addressed by
discourses of science and law enforcement with the ultimate aim of defining
and controlling sexual citizenship. This paper is a sociological analysis of the
discourses on pornography produced by both sexology and criminology in
the contemporary Czech Republic. The paper is organised around two main
topics: 1) sexuality, morality, and social cohesion; 2) the resonance of
sexological and criminological discourse with anti-porn feminism.
Key words: anti-pornography feminism, criminology, gender, pornography,
sexology, sexuality,
1.
Sexuality, Morality and Social Cohesion
Criminological discourse in particular relies heavily on presumably
shared notions of cultural norms regarding what constitutes non-offensive
and moral sexuality. Interconnected with the scientific notions of natural,
healthy and mature sexuality that are offered by sexology, they together
constitute a disciplinary power that attributes normalcy and legality to the
conduct of some, and pathology or criminality to others. My aim is to analyse
two recent books dealing with pornography written by well-known Czech
sexologists and criminologists. The two exemplary texts are Morality,
Pornography, and Criminal Vice by a collective of authors including
criminologist Jan Chmelík and sexologist Petr Weiss,1 and Pornography or
Provoking Nakedness by the sexologist Radim Uzel.2
Sexuality is, not surprisingly, a main topic of both studies. For
criminologist Chmelík and his collective, sexuality is twofold. Good and
healthy sexuality is a key society-building element: “human sexuality is at
the beginning of the deepest connection between people and is basic for the
well-being of individuals, couples, families, and society.”3 On the other hand,
there is bad and dangerous sexuality which, according to this text, constitutes
an enormous threat to society: sexual debauchery should be criminalised,
especially if youth (supposedly sexually innocent) are involved - because
according to the authors, “society is interested in the proper moral education
of youth” and “youth must be protected against all negative influences
including undoubtedly lack of sexual restraint.”4 Pornography is framed by
Chmelík et al. as the polar opposite of morality: “Everything immoral is
mostly connected to pornography.”5 The authors’ definition of porn is:
202
Strange Bedfellows
______________________________________________________________
sexual acts depicted in an obtrusive, distorted and unreal
manner, sexual contact with exaggerated violence and
perversity such as showing anal and oral intercourse, etc.
(…). Through pornography, human beings are reduced to
the very physiological core - overemphasizing reactions to
basic sexual stimuli.6
In this influential criminological account (praised by the chairman of
the Supreme Court Senate of the Czech Republic), pornography stands for
the “skewing of moral values,” is “degrading to human dignity,” and
“elicit[s] feelings of shame and repulsiveness” - all of which are contrary to
“natural sexuality free of commercial efforts, aggression and perversity.”7 In
conclusion, the authors view pornography as a potentially criminal sociopathological element, which is especially dangerous to youth.
Given all this, the question remains - how to reconcile the
presupposed criminal essence of porn with another claim: “Pornography is
induced by a natural need to cover one of the basic life needs of humans.”8
Generally, the views of Chmelík et al. echo those of other acclaimed Czech
sexologists and psychologists, such as Slavomil Hubálek and Ivo Pondělíček,
who claim: “Recently, the liberalization process has reached an extent which
is unparalleled within the last two millenniums. Time is up, thus, for a change
of direction.”9
In contrast, the views of sexologist Radim Uzel seem to be totally
opposite - at least at first glance. Uzel perceives the attacks against porn as
negative stances towards nakedness and sex as such.10 For Uzel, pornography
stands for sexual openness, which in his account is very much needed: it aids
in the prevention of sexual exploitation;11 it is the everyday sublimation
which keeps a man going.12 In short, pornography is “socially and
individually beneficial.”13 According to Uzel, it is “not true that pornography
subverts social ties.”14 On the contrary, it is the “confused fight for a legal
ban on porn which is siphoning off the means to fight real crime,” but most
of all it is “a governmental attempt at legally enacting morality.”15 Uzel calls
for the liberalisation of sexuality and for sexual education: “We should try to
revise the deeply rooted view that sexual feelings and sexual knowledge are
inappropriate and unhealthy for youth.”16
This sexologist’s positive and affirming stances towards sexuality
and pornography would be welcome if they were unambiguous. However,
that is not the case. The first discrepancy worth noting is Uzel’s claim that
“consuming pornography is not a dark side of human being but his adequate
part, the expression of which is inappropriate to be ashamed of.”17 So why
does he announce “under oath” in the very introduction of his book that he is
not “a reader or a consumer” of porn himself?18 The more important
inconsistency has to do with the character of pornography. Uzel attributes
Kateřina Lišková
203
______________________________________________________________
several fundamentally different qualities to porn, apparently not realising
their mutually exclusive nature. First, he argues that porn is a fantasy, one
“being bought mainly because it is different from real life, it is an idealized
reality.”19 Second, only ten pages later he claims, “pornography is a mirror
hall of human sexuality … it defines humans as sexual animals … it is a
concise metaphor for sex.”20 Thirdly, porn ceases to be either fantasy or
metaphor, because “porn deals with sex in its true essence, that’s why
pornography is being neglected.”21 These apparently contradictory views
concerning idealised reality, animal drives, fantasy, and even the essence of
sex might appear simply vague, but in fact are used to serve specific purposes
that will be examined later in my paper.
Further problems are revealed when we focus on Uzel’s broader
notions of sexuality. Although he claims that “porn is not all that horrible”,22
sex for him equates with breeding, because he adds “couples having sex are
not ruining the earth, they are rather populating it.”23 This explanation more
that anything else carries a latent message about sex being exclusively
coupled, heterosexual, and reproductive. Uzel’s heteronormativity is obvious
despite his manifest support of the rights for sexual minorities. In a passage
critical of social conservatism, he states “we know very well [of] our
numerous countrymen who would want to have this country free of
homosexuals, prostitution, drug addicts, abortion and alcohol.”24
Inexplicably, this statement is followed by a comment which essentially
endorses the conservative argument: “Well, I think many problems would
disappear then.”25 Here he gets very close to the notion of homosexuality as
something “bizarre” or “sickly distorted,” which would sound like “commonsense” homophobia if it were not also the standpoint of other well-known
Czech scholars, such as psychologist Hubálek and sexologist Pondělíček.26
Thus two ideal types define the Czech scientific continuum
regarding porn. At one end is the seemingly liberal sexologist Uzel, who
cheers for porn as a means of social cohesion, sexual liberation, or at least an
educational tool, and at the other end is the criminologist Chmelík, who
cautions against the perils of sexual chaos caused by pornography usage.
2.
The Resonance of Sexological and Criminological Discourse
with Anti-porn Feminism
The criminologist’s understanding of porn resonates with the way in
which porn is understood by anti-porn feminists. According to the
criminologist Chmelík, sexual arousal involves a risk of aggressive behaviour
which is prone to increasing as a result of watching porn. Porn “stimulates
the idea that women are docile victims.”27 The criminologist and anti-porn
feminists are in agreement, however unreflected upon, regarding the
supposed dehumanisation and objectification of women through porn:
“woman in pornographic materials is being dealt with mostly in an inhuman
204
Strange Bedfellows
______________________________________________________________
way, she is perceived as a useless thing serving only to satisfy man’s sexual
filthiness.”28 The same has been argued by anti-porn feminists Andrea
Dworkin,29 Catharine MacKinnon,30 Susan Brownmiller,31 Laura Lederer,32
Diana Russell,33 and many others, and more lately by some European
feminists against pornography, such as Heather MacRae,34 Susan Baer,35 and
Catherine Itzin.36 However, the central criminological category in defining
pornography is morality, whereas anti-porn feminists focus on
discrimination.37
Pornography, in the view of both the Czech criminologist and antiporn feminists, is closely linked to violence against women. Chmelík presents
porn as synonymous with abuse and traffic in women - as does the feminist
Kathleen Barry, who calls pornography female sexual slavery.38 In the
criminologist’s perception, as well, pornography triggers violence against
women. But when he describes rape, his consonance with feminists comes to
an end. Chmelík focuses on the rape victim, stressing four distinctive
features:
1) “the victim’s masochism” (“some masochistic women
find it sexually stimulating to be abused, so that they
compel men to do it;”)
2) “the victim’s role in guilt” (“provoking conduct on the
part of the victim, women who provoke men by
flirtatiousness, loudness, slinkiness, baring parts of their
bodies and thus work up sexual desire in him (…) this
category contains cases where the victim consented to
intercourse only to change her mind immediately before the
act;”)
3) “the aggressor’s small role in guilt” (when a man is
under the influence of drugs or alcohol;) and
4) “the hyperbolizing of repercussions” (“the damage on
the victim is minimal, the woman does not have any visible
marks on her body, has previously had intercourse with the
man in question etc.”).39
This list reproduces all the classical rape myths as they were identified and
unravelled by feminists in the late 1970s. However, this contemporary Czech
criminologist repeats them all as a scientific truth. Since this is the approach
informing the attitudes of judges, it is not surprising that Czech courts do not
sentence drunken rapists whose victims are deemed “flirtatious” prostitutes.40
It is paradoxical that this criminologist, who reproduces rape myths
exposed by feminists, shares with the same feminists a condemnation of
pornography. This shared focus of a mainstream criminologist and an
influential stream of feminism on pornography is not random. It reveals a
Kateřina Lišková
205
______________________________________________________________
socially conservative tone, which is to be expected from criminology as a
status quo-preserving discipline by definition, but which is undesirable within
feminism, which is and should be a socially dynamic power.
On the other hand, the sexologist Uzel does not hold anti-porn
attitudes and claims that men, women, and society in general benefit from its
existence. However, some of his arguments likewise resonate with those of
anti-porn feminists, as becomes apparent when Uzel writes about the
insurmountable differences between men and women. Such opinions are also
held by many anti-porn feminists. Susan Griffin argues that men and women
cannot speak to each other, because women speak the language of nature.41
Mary Daly insists on the necessity of creating a new gynomorphic
vocabulary for women, which is, according to her, very much needed in a
polarised society.42 And Carol Gilligan claims women have an essentially
different way of thinking and moral reasoning from men.43
Despite these similarities, Uzel himself is explicitly anti-feminist.
What he despises about feminism is its focus on equality and political goals.
Uzel states that “the fuel to all feminist movements is basically hatred
towards men, often skilfully masked.” According to him, “all feminists are
unified in this hatred.”44 Thus, while positioning himself as the liberal
alternative to standard scientific anti-porn discourse, he at the same time
maintains deeply conservative views.
Uzel’s knowledge of feminism, however, is fairly limited.
According to him, anti-porn feminists “disapprove of oral sex” and allegedly
perceive porn as “a conspiratorial perversion jeopardizing family and
nation.”45 Uzel is particularly horrified by Brownmiller and Lederer, two
prominent anti-porn feminists. However, there is a congruity between their
opinions and his, a congruity of which he is unaware. Brownmiller argues
that sexuality is biologically given and men are predators by nature.46
Similarly, Uzel stresses the naturalness of hard, promiscuous, predator-like,
bodily-oriented sexuality for men, and softer, relationship and love-oriented
sexuality for women.47 This characterisation of feminine sexuality is shared
by most anti-porn feminists, e.g. by Robin Morgan,48 Kathleen Barry,49
Adrienne Rich,50 and Dworkin.51
Anti-porn feminists regard pornography as discrimination against
women, but the sexologist Uzel claims that as long as the majority of pornconsumers are men, feminist campaigns against porn are oppressive to men.
Anti-porn feminists hold that porn causes violence against women, while
Uzel presents violence as inherent to sex, using the example of praying
mantises - given his anti-feminism, it is hardly pure chance he chose a
species where the female commits violence against the male.52 Given
widespread sexualised violence against women in society, Uzel might have
instead chosen a “violent-male-species” example - but that would not have
resonated with his political beliefs.
206
Strange Bedfellows
______________________________________________________________
3.
Conclusion
The Czech scientific continuum of approaches to pornography is
defined by uncompromising deprecation on one side, according to which
pornography usage is immoral and results in increased aggressiveness and
general sociopathy.53 On the other side of the continuum, there are
sexologists who do not hastily condemn porn users, but who instead stress
the essential, biological differences between female and male sexuality,54
thus reproducing and reinforcing the gender binary. The irony here is that the
“conservative” anti-porn writer utilises language actually used by at least one
section of the feminist movement, while the “liberal” wing of scholars
espouses an explicitly anti-feminist agenda. This framing of the debate
excludes from the realm of Czech science the possibility of a non-anti-porn,
pro-sex feminist position.
Notes
1
J Chmelík et al., Mravnost, pornografie a mravnostní kriminalita, Portál,
Prague, 2003.
2
R Uzel, Pornografie aneb provokující nahota, Ikar, Prague, 2004. (My
translations throughout the text.)
3
J Chmelík et al., op. cit., p. 12.
4
Ibid., p. 12.
5
Ibid., p. 41.
6
Ibid., p. 43.
7
Ibid., p. 43.
8
Ibid., p. 47.
9
A Brzek et al., Průvodce sexualitou člověka, Státní pedagogické
nakladatelství, Prague, 1993, pp. 35-36.
10
Uzel, op. cit., p. 26.
11
Ibid., p. 80.
12
Ibid., p. 189.
13
Ibid., p. 103.
14
Ibid., p. 104.
15
Ibid., p. 104.
16
Ibid., p. 166.
17
Ibid., p. 189.
18
Ibid., p. 11.
19
Ibid., p. 141.
20
Ibid., p. 151.
21
Ibid., p. 151.
22
Ibid., p. 21.
23
Ibid., p. 21.
Kateřina Lišková
207
______________________________________________________________
24
Ibid., p. 21.
Ibid., p. 21.
26
Brzek, op. cit., p. 6.
27
Chmelík et al., op. cit., p. 45.
28
Ibid., p. 48.
29
A Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Women’s Press,
London, 1982. A Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, Lawrence Hill Books,
New York, 1988.
30
CA MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987. See also CA
MacKinnon, Only Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1993.
31
S Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Bantam Book,
New York, 1975.
32
L Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, William
Morrow & Co., New York, 1980.
33
D Russell, ‘Pornography and Violence: What Does the New Research
Say’, in L Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography,
William Morrow & Co., New York, 1980, pp. 218-238. D Russell (ed.),
Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, Teachers College
Press, New York, 1993.
34
H MacRae, ‘Morality, Censorship, and Discrimination: Reframing the
Pornography Debate in Germany and Europe’, Social Politics, vol. 10, 2003,
pp. 314-345.
35
S Baer, ‘Pornography and Sexual Harassment in the EU’, in RA Elman
(ed.), Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist Challenge,
Berghahn Books, Providence, 1996, pp. 51-66.
36
C Itzin, ‘Pornography, Harm, and Human Rights: The UK in the European
Context’, in RA Elman (ed.), Sexual Politics and the European Union: The
New Feminist Challenge, Berghahn Books, Providence, 1996, pp. 67-82.
37
See MacKinnon’s underlying argument throughout Feminism Unmodified;
op. cit.
38
K Barry, Female Sexual Slavery, New York University Press, New York,
1979.
39
Chmelík et al., op. cit., p. 50.
40
City Court of Brno, Czech Republic, July 2006; quoted in K Mahdalová,
‘Zpráva o dobrém znásilnění špatné ženy’, Respekt, vol. 29, 2006, p. 5
41
S Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Harper & Row,
New York, 1978.
42
M Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1978.
25
208
Strange Bedfellows
______________________________________________________________
43
C Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982.
44
45
Ibid., p. 146.
46
This forms the underlying argument of Brownmiller’s Against Our Will,
op. cit.
47
48
R Morgan, Going Too Far, Vintage Books, New York, 1978.
49
This forms Barry’s bottom-line assertion in Female Sexual Slavery, op. cit.
50
A Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in A
Snitow, C Stansell and S Thompson (eds.), Powers of Desire: The Politics of
Sexuality, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983, pp. 177-205.
51
Throughout Pornography, Dworkin contends that, historically, female
sexuality has been represented as filthy, lower, and servicing men. Since,
according to Dworkin, pornography structures social reality and merges with
it, depictions of female sexuality in pornography are real; see Dworkin, op.
cit.
52
53
Chmelík et al., op. cit., pp. 41-48.
54
Bibliography
Baer, S, ‘Pornography and Sexual Harassment in the EU’, in RA Elman (ed.),
Sexual Politics and the European Union: The New Feminist
Challenge, Berghahn Books, Providence, 1996, pp. 51-66.
Barry, K, Female Sexual Slavery, New York University Press, New York,
1979.
Brownmiller, S, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, Bantam Book,
New York, 1975.
Brzek, A et al., Průvodce sexualitou člověka, Státní pedagogické
nakladatelství, Prague, 1993.
Chmelík, J. et al., Mravnost, pornografie a mravnostní kriminalita, Portál,
Prague, 2003.
Daly, M, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Beacon Press,
Boston, 1978.
Dworkin, A, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Women’s Press,
London, 1982.
Dworkin, A, Letters from a War Zone, Lawrence Hill Books, New York,
1988.
Fausto-Sterling, A, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and
Men, Basic Books, New York, 1992.
Kateřina Lišková
209
______________________________________________________________
Gilligan, C, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1982.
Griffin, S, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, Harper & Row, New
York, 1978.
Itzin, C, ‘Pornography, Harm, and Human Rights: The UK in the European
Context’, in RA Elman (ed.), Sexual Politics and the European
Union: The New Feminist Challenge, Berghahn Books, Providence,
1996, pp. 67-82.
Lederer, L (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, William
Morrow & Co., New York, 1980.
MacKinnon, CA, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.
MacKinnon, CA, Only Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1993.
MacRae, H, ‘Morality, Censorship, and Discrimination: Reframing the
Pornography Debate in Germany and Europe’, Social Politics, vol.
10, 2003, pp. 314-345.
Mahdalová, K ´Zpráva o dobrém znásilnění špatné ženy’, Respekt, vol. 29,
2006, p. 5.
Morgan, R, Going Too Far, Vintage Books, New York, 1978.
Rich, A, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, in A Snitow,
C Stansell, and S Thompson (eds.), Powers of Desire: The Politics
of Sexuality, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1983, pp. 177-205.
Russell, D, ‘Pornography and Violence: What Does the New Research Say’,
in L Lederer (ed.), Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography,
William Morrow & Co., New York, 1980, 218-238.
Russell, DEH (ed.), Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography,
Teachers College Press, New York, 1993.
Uzel, R, Pornografie aneb Provokující nahota, Ikar, Prague, 2004.
Weeks, J, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern
Sexualities, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & New York, 1985.
PART V
Intimate Encounters in Cyberspace
When to Make It Public or Private:
Contextualising Sexuality in Online Sex Chat
Chrystie Myketiak
Abstract: This paper focuses on the heterogeneity of online sexual
discussions within a specific synchronous chat forum. Meanings and
purposes of internet chat forum participants’ sexual discussions extend
beyond the purely sexual. Far from there being uniformity in participants’
online sex talk and expression, there are differences in its types, purposes,
forms, and uses. This research analyses the conversations within an online
chat forum and finds that cyberspace does not prove to be a realm where
“anything goes” or where “public” and “private” distinctions cease to exist.
Cybersex and sex talk occur in contexts specific to group norms and mores
and are socially policed by other members. Participants make use of the
available technology, and its complex privacy settings, to modify and
mediate their sexual conversations. The informal group mediation of sexual
expression in the forum demonstrates the possibilities for a socially
sequestered topic, such as sexual expression, to be socially policed in ways
that promote it as a powerful tool in establishing group membership,
demonstrating affection, and developing personal (non-sexual) relationships
among group members.
Keywords: computer mediated communication, cybersex, online sexual
communication, sex, sexuality, social mores, social norms
1.
Introduction
Sex is a multi-billion dollar industry that thrives online. The word
“sex” itself consistently ranks as the most searched for term on the internet.1
Despite the prevalence and popularity of sex online, only a minority of
people admit that they spend any of their online time having sexual
conversations, engaging in cybersex, viewing pornography, reading erotica or
engaging in any other online sexual activities. This paper is not only about
cybersex. However, to most, even internet sexuality researchers, to write and
talk about the study of online sexual conversations appears to be narrowly
defined as nothing more than cybersex. Although it is, perhaps, the most
titillating of all types of online sexual conversations, and certainly composes
a bulk of online sexual communication, it is only one type of sex
conversation.
Online sexual activity has been defined as the use of the internet in
any form (text, audio, graphic) in ways “that involve sexuality whether for
the purposes of recreation, entertainment, exploration, support, education,
commerce, efforts to attain and secure romantic partners, and so on.”2 In
214
When to Make It Public or Private
______________________________________________________________
other words, generally online sex communication is seen to be a textual
representation of sex typically taking place between two or more people. The
purpose of this textual representation and communication is to sexually
arouse one or more parties. The allure of this format, as opposed to typing the
same words out in either a diary or narrative form, is the participation of the
other/s. The involvement of others is seen as adding additional elements to
the text. Thus cybersex can be seen as sex communication for the hope and
sake of sexual stimulation and gratification.
It is somewhat surprising, given the multitude of ways that sex can
be expressed and explored online, that cybersex and internet pornography
tend to define online sexual content. Sexual conversations offline, as well as
online, can take a variety of forms. Just as people can engage in cybersex,
they can have an aurally represented version of sex. More often, sex is
discussed in ways in which sexual stimulation and gratification play little or
no role. This aspect of online communication regarding sex and sexuality is
often neglected, both from the definitions and research on sex
communication. For example, sex discussions can range from the
instructional and informational, the confessional to the flirtatious and teasing,
the abstract and general to the personal. With each of these forms there exists
a different type and goal of sexual communication.
Virtually all research on internet sexual communication consists of
research on cybersex within chatrooms, forums, and groups based upon
shared sexual interests, practices, or identities. For example, there has been
research into the conversations of online groups for the gay male subcultures
of chubs, bears and muscle as well as research into BDSM (which, roughly,
refers to bondage discipline, dominant submissive, sadist masochist)
communities.3 It is not surprising that online groups brought together for
shared sexual interests or practices discuss sex and sexuality. This is what
makes the study of sexual conversations in a forum that is not formed on the
basis of shared sexual practices or identity interesting: sex was never a part of
the formal agenda, and yet sexual conversations are immensely prevalent.
Most internet sexuality researchers reference Alvin Cooper’s “triple
A engine” of the internet that make it such a popular venue for the sexual:
access, affordability, and anonymity.4 The internet, by being widely
accessible for relatively little cost and seemingly anonymous in the ways in
which it is accessed, is a preferable site to seek out sexual materials. While
some online sexual materials are available for purchase (and the market for
sex related goods composes a significant portion of all online sales), there is
a large amount of material available free to anyone with an internet
connection. In particular, for women and those who have non-normative
sexual interests or practices, the internet may be a safer place for sexual
expression and experimentation. In addition, there are fewer consequences
for online sexual expression that challenges norms and mores surrounding
Chrystie Myketiak
215
______________________________________________________________
the sexual. For this reason, it is no surprise that sexual material is prevalent
online and that every day millions of people access sexually related materials
from home or work. William Fisher and Azy Barak refer to a Canadian study
in which approximately 30% of Canadian adults access internet pornography
once a month.5 Similarly, Jennifer Schneider states that one-quarter of
internet users report visiting internet sex sites at least once a month.6 Given
the ways in which sexuality has been seen as a taboo or sequestered topic,
significantly more people may access online sexual materials but do not
disclose doing so. However, even these figures illustrate the great interest in
online sexuality.
2.
Walford
My research studies online sex conversations within a specific chat
forum referred to as Walford.7 Unlike most other research in the field, this
chat forum is neither sexually based nor themed. In fact, the community
guidelines state that sexual conversations violate the rules: in practice, this
rule is not maintained. Walford was developed in the early 1990s as a MUD
for “talking”.8 Like other early MUDs such as TinyMUD and UglyMUD,
Walford is set up to represent the geographical space of an offline
community. Each member is assigned a personal “room” and the description
they provide for their room appears on the screen of all those who visit.
Participants can travel from their room to places including the town pub, post
office and street.
In addition to its complicated virtual geography, Walford provides a
variety of conversational modes and methods. Participants can be in a private
room and still talk to all those currently logged onto the site or only to those
on their “friends list.” Alternatively, they can invite someone into their
particular location and talk “locally” to that individual exclusively, or single
out any individual or several individuals currently logged on, who are in
different areas of the forum for conversation. Participants often engage
simultaneously in multiple conversations with various participants, as well as
holding simultaneous but different conversations with some of the same
people. They can talk, tell, whisper and emote messages. All of this is made
possible through the communication commands in Walford and, because it is
a MUD, participants are not limited by the software and are able to program
new ways of communicating with each other.
With the participants’ knowledge, years of conversations in Walford
were logged and recorded using the programming language XML. In order to
analyse an immense corpus of more than five million conversation turns, I
use a research approach I refer to as “corpus ethnography.” This approach
combines qualitative and quantitative research methods to study the
interaction in Walford. I discovered that there was a great deal of sexual
communication in Walford; my research focuses on how participants discuss
216
______________________________________________________________
sex and the narratives that surround sexual conversations in a forum that is
not sexually based or themed.
Sexuality is one of a number of areas of human life that have been
deemed “private” or sequestered. Other socially sequestered topics include
criminality, sickness, death, mental illness and nature.9 Of those none is so
widespread on the internet as sexuality. It was immediately evident that
although Walford was not technically a sexual space, sexuality and sex talk
play a primary role in the participants’ conversations. For example, it is
neither common, nor generally accepted social practice offline (except in
specific social environments) to greet friends and acquaintances by spanking
them. However, in Walford this behaviour is accepted and relatively
common.
3.
Walford and Gender Presentation
Early researchers of dynamics in cyberspace conversations and
groups, typically those studying MUDs or those hypothesising about cyber
communication without researching it in any particular context, argued in
support of Sherry Turkle that cyberspace affords people new opportunities to
manipulate or play with gender presentation than those previously
conceivable by most people.10 Cyberspace was heralded as a place where
“anything goes” and where people could choose their identities based on
whim or fantasy without having to negotiate around many of the visual and
aural cues that mark gender identity offline. What these early researchers
failed to consider is the investment that people place in their online
communication. For example, many Walford participants meet offline and
many were offline friends before interacting together in the forum. As a
result of this, there is not a great deal of gender, or other, identity
manipulation: people already know if you are a man or a woman.
In contrast to believing that the internet and online communication
accords greater freedom in how people can present themselves, my findings
from Walford support Erving Goffman’s almost fifty year old research on
self presentations. Central to his thesis on presentation of self is that for
performances or interaction sustained over time there is the expectation that
“faces and lines” are consistent and that inconsistency becomes
unmanageable over time.11 While people may seek out others online who
have similar interests or identities, there is the expectation that in photos and
offline, people match their online representations and presentations. As I
suggested earlier, many Walford participants have met offline. There are
clusters of participants in specific areas of America, Canada, the U.K., and
Europe, and these clusters regularly meet. Participants also meet occasionally
with participants from other geographical locations. Beyond offline meetups, participants who do not interact with each other offline use other ways to
add to text-based online communication. All Walford participants can have a
Chrystie Myketiak
217
______________________________________________________________
photo album hosted on the site and many take advantage of this while others
often post links to photographs of themselves. In addition, others
communicate on the site while simultaneously using an external site to
“webcam” with each other. Incidentally, there are a number of current and
former offline partnerships between members. All of these indicate that
participants have a relatively high level of familiarity with each other and
investment in Walford.
4.
Walford and Sex Talk
The familiarity of members in the forum and the lack of offline
social boundaries mediating their discussions lead to a multitude of ways in
which sex is discussed within a single social organism. Within the forum sex
talk can be used as a method of greeting others, such as the earlier mentioned
spanking or snogging. Sex talk can also be used as a time-filler during
conversation lags. An example of this is when participants use an automatic
command to simulate snogging or shagging in a randomly selected style for a
randomly generated number of seconds. Occasionally discussion about sex is
used to push boundaries of acceptability in the name of humour. For example
participants joke about the pornography stashes of other members or make
jokes about bestiality. At times sex talk is used in the forum to mediate the
heteronormative, as in the case of responding to jokes concerning male
heterosexuality, or of virtual/ textual gay bashing by beating the other to
death for daring to jokingly flirt; there is sex talk gossip regarding the sex
lives of other Walford participants; relationship support in terms of
discussing the details of one’s own sex life (this usually occurs in the forum
in one-on-one mixed sex conversations); cybersex; discussions of personal
habits and proclivities; and online flirting, of course.
The ways in which participants talk about these topics are the result
of group codes. When they choose the socially “wrong” way to discuss sex,
their transgressions are noted and remarked upon by other members.
Consistently talking inappropriately, according to the group norms, in the
forum, which tends not to mean a topic too outlandish but one not discussed
in the expected setting, usually sets the individual up for ostracism from other
members of the group and as an object of both gossip and derision. For
example, members that talk in the “town pub” and “unfiltered friends lists”
about their love lives are avoided or shut down by other members.
Online sex is often between members who are also offline couples.
Rather than occurring using the “direct” one-on-one command, I have found
that more often it occurs using a private “local” setting. This means that the
participants go to the same virtual room to engage in sex. Yet, to discuss
sexual relationships they use the “direct” command. Both commands do the
same thing, yet the different purposes for each are socially ascribed.
218
______________________________________________________________
The most extreme examples regarding social policing in the corpus
relate to male sexuality. Heterosexuality is stringently policed, and members
support a self-described “nice guy” image that relies upon a fiercely
heterosexual and sometimes sexist presentation. As such the language and
actions of the men is more restricted than those of the women members. As
well as instances of the preservation of male heterosexuality, as mentioned
earlier, men’s language and virtual behaviours are more closely monitored
than those of women. For example, earlier I stated that that participants often
greet their entire friends list or everyone in the same public location as
themselves with spanking, kissing, shagging or licking; in practice, this is an
action that the women, in particular, engage in without violating group
mores. Men tend to greet the same lists by typing the more traditional, and
the offline socially expected, greeting of saying “hello.” Occasionally, they
will make gender-specific greetings, such as kissing or hugging the women
and shaking the hands of the men. The social policing of heteronormative
masculinity underlies much of their communication.
5.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is not surprising that sexuality holds greater
currency than only the sexual. Foucault’s writing on sexuality was explicit in
stating that the development of a discourse around sexuality contributed to its
development into “the secret” that underlies many cultural and social aspects,
while at the same time forbidding open discussion on the topic (outside of a
clinical setting).12 This forum contradicts Foucault’s point to a certain extent,
as there is no secret to sexuality: sexuality is one of the topical keys for
understanding how the group interacts. Parallel to this finding is the
prevalence of sexual conversations and communication in a non-sexually
based forum. For example, over one three day period, quantitative analysis
showed that the word “sex” was uttered approximately once every 250 words
(1/301 direct, 1/257 direct same room, 1/213 local). Excusing the issue of
context and looking purely at the terms, if one then counted the instances of
other sexual words, the frequency of explicitly sexual dialogue would appear
even more shocking. In addition, the use of sexual communication as a way
of demonstrating the expectations among and for group members was an
important finding, as this contrasts assumptions that those engaging in online
communication also take risks relating to sex and/or gender
presentation/gendered risks. This research shows that while the opportunity
for greater risk-taking and increased transgressions exists, when it is acted
upon in settings outside of where it might be expected (such as in forums
dedicated to sexual issues, interests, or proclivities), the group expresses
disdain and disapproval. Thus, the lack of traditional and entrenched social
expectations does not stop the development of expectations, norms, and
mores from being developed within that particular setting.
Chrystie Myketiak
219
______________________________________________________________
Through studying the contexts, purposes, and meanings of online
sex communication in the forum Walford, it is evident that although in some
ways members’ conversations challenge social expectations for public
conduct, they also tend to reconfirm dominant cultural ideals. Furthermore,
while the online realm may be a more forgiving environment in some ways,
the methods of social policing amongst group members are often quite overt.
The consequences for failing to follow the social norms and mores may not
always lead to the same consequences as doing so offline, but there are
consequences nonetheless. It appears that sex, or as least talking about it, is
about much more than just sex.
Notes
1
M Griffiths, ‘Excessive Internet Use: Implications for Sexual Behavior’,
CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol. 3, April 2000, pp. 537-552, p. 541.
2
A Cooper, ‘Online Sexual Activity in the New Millennium’, Contemporary
Sexuality, vol. 38, March 2004, pp. i-vii, p. i.
3
JE Campbell, Getting it Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and
Embodied Identity, Harrington Park Press, London, 2004. K McKenna and J
Bargh, ‘Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity Demarginalization
through Virtual Group Participation’, Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, vol. 75, no. 3, 1998, pp. 681-694.
4
A Cooper ‘Sexuality and the Internet: Surfing into the New Millennium,
Cyberpsychology & Behavior, vol. 1, no. 1, 1998, pp. 181-187, pp.181-182.
5
W Fisher and A Barak, ‘Internet Pornography: A Social Psychological
Perspective on Internet Sexuality’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 4,
2001, pp. 312-323, p. 314.
6
J Schneider, ‘A Qualitative Study of Cybersex Participants: Gender
Differences, Recovery Issues and Implications for Therapists’, Sexual
Addiction and Compulsivity, vol. 7, 2000, pp. 249-278, p. 250.
7
It is necessary for me to make a brief statement regarding the ethics of
researching this chat site. Participants understood that the forum was being
hosted (though not tied to or directed by) the Department of Computer
Science at Queen Mary, University of London, and that members of the
department could use the forum for research. It does not appear that the
participants’ conversations were altered by the knowledge that the forum
could be used for research purposes, and on occasion participants joked about
the forum being used in this way. Perhaps participants were unconcerned
because many of them spend a great deal of time on the forum and have
invested personal interest with other members.
220
______________________________________________________________
8
Originally the acronym MUD referred to a Multi User Dungeon from the
role-playing computer game Dungeons and Dragons. More recently many
have generalised the acronym to refer to Multi User Domains.
9
For a more detailed description of socially sequestered areas of human life,
see A Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991, p. 144-180.
10
S Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1995.
11
E Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, New
York, 1959.
12
M Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1,
Penguin Books, New York, 1998, p. 35.
Bibliography
Campbell, JE, Getting it Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality and
Embodied Identity, Harrington Park Press, London, 2004.
Cooper, A, ‘Online Sexual Activity in the New Millennium’, Contemporary
Sexuality, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. i-vii.
Cooper, A, ‘Sexuality and the Internet: Surfing into the New Millennium’,
Cyberpsychology & Behavior, vol. 1, no. 1, 1998, pp. 181-187.
Fisher, W, and A Barak, ‘Internet Pornography: A Social Psychological
Perspective on Internet Sexuality’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38,
no. 4, 2001, pp. 312-323.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol. 1, Robert
Hurley (trans.), Penguin Books, New York, 1998.
Giddens, A, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1991.
Goffman, E, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Penguin Books, New
York, 1959.
Griffiths, M, ‘Excessive Internet Use: Implications for Sexual Behavior’,
CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol. 3, no. 4, 2000, pp. 537-552.
McKenna, K, and J Bargh, ‘Coming Out in the Age of the Internet: Identity
Demarginalization through Virtual Group Participation’, Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 75, no. 3, 1998, pp. 681694.
Schneider, J, ‘A Qualitative Study of Cybersex Participants: Gender
Differences, Recovery Issues and Implications for Therapists’,
Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, vol. 7, 2000, pp. 249-278.
Turkle, S, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Simon and
Schuster, New York, 1995.
.
Why Cybersex? An Experimental Study of Putative
Motivations for Engaging in Online Sex
Abstract: Cybersex is narrowly defined as talking about sexual activities
through instant messaging, with the purpose of pursuing and/or giving sexual
pleasure. Psychologists and social theorists have suggested several putative
reasons for engaging in cybersex, and two (non-exclusive) directions have
emerged: (1) cybersex is a commodity pursued easily and anonymously, and
isolated from other realms of the self; (2) cybersex is deeply rooted in
Western culture, a useful space for unfolding fantasies and exploring one’s
self, especially in communities where non-typical sexual behaviour is
rejected. Romanian gays, largely rejected by society, are exactly in the
situation described by the second direction. Therefore, they should prefer
warmer relationships based on the accelerated development of trust through
Internet chat sessions. This study assumes that the underlying motivation is
reflected in cybersex participants’ partner preferences. To assess these
motives, we have repeatedly posted cybersex-seeking messages on a
Romanian gay chat website. Half of the messages contained cues to senders’
identities and have been proved to grant a warm personalised communication,
while the other half were completely anonymous. We asked ourselves
whether there would be significantly more responses to either of the two
types of messages. Implications of the results for the two theoretical
directions are discussed.1
Key words: computer mediated communication, cybersex, homosexuality,
online sexual activities, Romania
1.
Introduction
“Lots of hypotheses - only a little data” - that is how Yitzchak Binik
sums up the research on Internet sexuality in a 2001 editorial.2 A present-day
analysis may find the same problem, since the phenomenon has not been
incorporated yet by any major social theory, and many facts might still
remain unexplored.3 More precisely, there is no unified terminology in the
field; the numerous theories are based on little evidence, and researchers have
used few methods to study Internet sexuality.
As for the terminology, one might designate the whole of Internet
sexuality by the term cybersex, used in a broad sense.4 Other authors name it
“online sexual activity” and reserve the term cybersex for “two or more
people engaging in sexual talk while online for the purpose of sexual
pleasure.”5 One might either restrict the definition to an “activity through rich
description,”6 or leave room for the use of some other means, e.g. a web
222
Why Cybersex?
______________________________________________________________
camera. However, in this study, the term will be used to designate a sexual
activity carried out in an Internet chat room, with no other specification.
Several questions have been asked about cybersex, e.g. whether it is
harmful, or whether it is possible to cheat on one’s partner by engaging in
such activity.7 But probably the most intriguing question is: why is it so
successful? While cybersex might look similar to phonesex, the latter never
really “took off” in the same way.8 Although cybersex may be viewed by
some as something rare or pathological, 30% of men and 34% of women in
an online survey admitted engaging in such activity.9 It is thus obvious that a
specific theory or model of cybersex is needed.
In an extensive review, approximately fifteen putative explanations
are listed as to why people engage in cybersex.10 For practical purposes these
explanations may be grouped into two categories: the first emphasises the
negative aspects of cybersex and considers it a form of pure, commercial sex;
the second outlines the positive side of online sex, as it involves
communication and exploration.
The first theoretical direction is mainly represented by the late Alvin
Cooper, father of the Triple-A-Engine, which states that cybersex is so
appealing because it is anonymous, affordable, and accessible. It seems
appropriate to treat cybersex as a new, more complex avatar of anonymous
sex, since it has all the advantages that once made gay bathhouses so
appealing: protection, wide opportunities and a comfortable physical
setting.11 However, Cooper emphasises such shortcomings of cybersex as
time consumption, infidelity issues, exposure of minors, and psychiatric
issues.12 As for the latter, 17% of the Internet users might have problems
related to online sexual activities.13 Some of Cooper’s work has been
criticised precisely for its negative bias and for neglecting the so-called
Triple-C-Engine, i.e. communication, collaboration and communities.14
The second direction compares texts created by online sexual
discourse to romantic novels and suggests that cybersex might be a new form
of courtly love. Others may invoke the Lacanian view that sexuality is
essentially connected with language. It has also been mentioned that sexualminority people living in isolated or conservative communities might find a
refuge in online sexuality.15 Katelyn McKenna and colleagues argue that
cybersex can help self-acceptance and the expression of the true self - i.e. a
form of identity that is initially hidden from others. More precisely, if
someone hides a certain aspect of his or her identity from family and friends,
but expresses it online, that feature becomes more relevant for defining
oneself than it has been previously.16
Evidence has been found supporting both directions. On the one
hand, men who engage in cybersex have twice as many offline sexual
partners as men who do not, which makes it probable that a high sexual
interest accounts for these activities rather than social isolation.17 On the
223
______________________________________________________________
other hand, 20% of participants in an online survey stated that cybersex has
helped them feel better about themselves, and 12% have mentioned the
expansion of the self as a motive.18 However, participants could also have
given socially-desirable answers, and this type of motivation needs more
investigation.
The Romanian gay community might be an ideal example for the
isolated and rejected people described by McKenna.19 In Romania, sexual
relationships among consenting same-sex adults were only completely
decriminalised in 2001.20 As for the mass-media, they have been interested
only in gay rights in Romania and not homosexuality in general. However,
they tend to be more tolerant towards the latter.21 Throughout the 1990s,
Romanian newspapers have treated gay issues with sarcasm and with an often
trivial humour.22
Several surveys have attempted to assess Romanian public opinion
on gay people. Researchers have used the focus-group method to learn about
Romanian young people’s opinions on several topics; when the issue of
rejecting minorities came up, gays and lesbians were spontaneously
mentioned in 14 of the 18 groups. In the same study, 21% of the participants
argued that gays and lesbians should not be allowed to live in Romania.23 The
attitude of other age groups might be even more unsympathetic, given that
61% of the general population avoid any contact with gay people. While
other types of discrimination are not uncommon in Romania, it is the Roma
people alone who face a stronger rejection.24
Unfortunately, little if any information is available on what LGBT
people themselves think about their status. However, it is not surprising that
about 38% of gay men hide their sexual orientation even from their closest
friends.25
If the explanation given by McKenna and colleagues is viable, it
should be the modal motivation of Romanian gays engaging in cybersex,
since they face intense rejection from their communities. Thus, they should
not seek pure, reified sex, but a fairly warm, intimate interaction. It has been
proved that cues to identity enhance the personal dimension of online
communication: personal details make chatting warmer, more personal, even
if only a photograph or some biographical information is given.26 Thus, a
person who seeks warmer interactions should be more interested in an online
partner who offers such details. More precisely, if Romanian gays engaging
in cybersex are interested in more than recreational sex, they should prefer
partners who offer details about themselves. The main hypothesis of this
study is that Romanian gay people will respond more intensely to messages
offering personal details.
224
Why Cybersex?
______________________________________________________________
2.
Method
To test this study’s hypotheses, two messages have been elaborated:
D (detailed) invites to cybersex and states that the poster of the message can
offer a photograph of himself; S (simple) gives no details, but only invites
others to cybersex. The messages have been used in a Romanian chat room
and thus written in Romanian. The messages used in this study are as
follows: the S message is “cyber cineva ?” (“cyber anyone?”); the D message
is “cyber? am poza” (“cyber? I have a picture”). Note that they both had the
same number of characters, so that none of them was more visible because of
its length.
The procedure consists of the experimenter entering a Romanian gay
chat room using the mIRC™ software with two different nicknames. He
posted message S using one nickname and message D using the other. Both S
and D were posted three times each, in a random order and at random
intervals. However, the same message was not posted before 5 minutes had
elapsed, and each such session lasted 20 to 30 minutes.27 The experimenter
recorded the number of private messages received from other chatters within
five minutes after posting a certain message. The whole procedure was
repeated five times between 27 September and 2 October 2006, recording
two numbers for each session: the total number of responses received to S
messages and the total number of responses received to D messages.
As for the ethical concerns, an mIRC™ channel is undoubtedly a
public space, since everyone can see the message one has posted. In such a
situation, the observer does not need consent to conduct his research and he
does not have to declare his identity or debrief.28 To protect participants, no
record of nicknames or message content has been made; neither did the
experimenter communicate with them in any way. Not answering messages
from another user is usual in such settings, and there is no reason to think that
it could be disturbing in any way.29
3.
Results
As mentioned before, two numbers were recorded for each session:
the number of responses received to S and to D, respectively. These numbers
were considered pairs of scores (see Fig. 1). An exact test for dependent
samples was performed, resulting in a value of p = 0.031. The difference was
thus significant.
It should be noted that the five sessions included in the analysis
were those retained after eliminating the data affected by floor effect. More
precisely, those sessions during which either S or D messages received no
response (four sessions) have been excluded.
225
______________________________________________________________
7
6
Number of responses
6
5
5
4
4
3
3
4
4
4
Simple
Details
3
2
2
2
1
0
1
2
3
4
5
Session
Figure 1. Results for the five sessions. Detailed messages always produced
more responses than simple ones. The number of responses is shown near
each node. E.g., during the third session, there were 2 responses to the simple
message and 4 to the detailed one.
4.
Discussion
In the introduction, two approaches to cybersex were presented: one
views it as commercial sex, the other emphasises its relational potential.
Since personal details make Internet communication warmer, it is expected
that people who seek closer relationships on the Internet will be more
interested in partners who provide information about themselves. This should
be the case with Romanian gays, who face especial discrimination and social
isolation.
The initial hypothesis of the study was confirmed: Romanian gay
people are more interested in cybersex partners who provide details about
themselves. The conclusion can be drawn that their motivation for engaging
in cybersex derived more from their rejection by society than from a desire
for recreational sex.
However, these findings do not mean that the second theoretical
direction described in the introduction is the theory of cybersex. First, it was
tested in a specific population, i.e. Romanian men pursuing cybersex with
other men. Second, the experiment only assessed the modal motivation, while
there is a great variability in individuals’ motives.30
As far as the author knows, this is the first experimental study in this
field. Until now, questionnaires and interviews have been applied, focusing
on volunteers. However, such samples have been proved to have a higher
226
Why Cybersex?
______________________________________________________________
than average interest in Internet sexuality.31 “Experimental death” (i.e.
subjects leaving the study before completing it) may also produce a
significant bias.32
The present study also has several limitations. First, virtually
nothing is known about participants. One may be sure that they all speak
Romanian and/or live in Romania. However, their sexual orientation is
uncertain; although the channel in question was explicitly reserved for gay
people, a previous survey has found that 11% of self-identified heterosexual
men have sex with other men on the Internet.33 Nevertheless, had this
produced a significant bias, the results of the present study would have been
non-significant. Second, the experimenter only promised cues to identity,
without actually offering any. This bias too could have rendered our results
non-significant. Third, it is possible that some participants contacted the
experimenter for other reasons than reading our announcements; this
phenomenon was partially controlled by only taking into account the
responses received within 5 minutes after posting each message.
The field of Internet sexuality is still novel and one might expect a
significant change in both theories and evidence in the near future. However,
the fact that the warmth of communication is not indifferent to cybersex
participants is interesting in itself and promises fruitful reinterpretation by
future theorists.
Notes
1
The writer would like to thank Alina S. Rusu, Marius I. Benţa and Oana C.
Mereuţă (Babes-Bolyai University) for their thoughtful suggestions on this
paper.
2
YM Binik, ‘Sexuality and the Internet: Lots of Hyp(otheses) - Only a Little
Data’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, November 2001, pp. 281-282.
3
K Daneback, personal email correspondence with the author regarding
Daneback’s paper ‘An Internet Study of Cybersex Participants’ (see note 4
below), 18 September 2006.
4
AG Philaretou, ‘Sexuality and the Internet’ [Review of DD Waskul (ed.),
Net.SeXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet], Journal of Sex
Research, vol. 42, May 2005, pp. 177-179.
5
K Daneback, A Cooper, and SA Mansson, ‘An Internet Study of Cybersex
Participants’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, vol. 34, 2005, pp. 321-328, p.
325.
6
MW Ross and MR Kauth, ‘Men Who Have Sex with Men on the Internet:
Emerging Clinical Issues and Their Management’, in A Cooper (ed.), Sex and
the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians, Brenner-Routledge, New York,
2000; quoted in MW Ross, ‘Typing, Being, and Doing: Sexuality and the
227
______________________________________________________________
Internet’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 42, November 2005, pp. 342-352, p.
342.
7
KYA McKenna, AS Green, and PK Smith, ‘Demarginalizing the Sexual
Self’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 3, November 2001, pp. 302-311.
8
Ross, op. cit., p. 343.
9
Daneback et al., op. cit., p. 323.
10
Ross, op. cit., pp. 342-352.
11
MS Weinberg and CJ Williams, ‘Gay Baths and the Social Organisation of
Impersonal Sex’, Social Problems, vol. 23, no. 2, 1975, pp. 124-136, p.124.
12
13
TM Timm, ‘Sex on the Internet: The New Frontier of Addiction’ [review
of Al Cooper (ed.), Cybersex: the Dark Side of the Force], Journal of Sex
Research, vol. 38, no. 4, 2001, pp. 345-346, p. 345.
14
M McFarlane and R Kachur, ‘From the Keyboard to the Couch: Issues for
Clinicians in the Age of the Internet’ [review of Al Cooper (ed.), Sex and the
Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians], Journal of Sex Research, vol. 40, May
2003, p. 223.
15
Ross, op. cit., p. 344.
16
McKenna et al., op. cit., pp. 303-304.
17
18
McKenna et al., op. cit., p. 305 and p. 308
19
Ibid.
20
‘Gay Rights in Romania’, Wikipedia, 2006, viewed on 6 October 2006,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_rights_in_Romania>.
21
Ibid.
22
A Creţeanu and A Coman, ‘Homosexuality in the Written Media in
Romania’, 1998, viewed on 30 September 2007,
<http://accept.ong.ro/presaeng.html#presa>.
23
Gallup Organization Romania and British Council Romania, Tânăr în
România, 2004, viewed on 6 October 2006, <http://www.gallup.ro/>.
24
S Spineanu-Dobrotă, Homosexualitatea între normal şi patologic, Tritonic,
Bucharest, 2005, p. 206.
25
Ibid., pp. 168-169.
26
M Tanis and T Postmes, ‘Two Faces of Anonymity: Paradoxical Effects of
Cues to Identity in CMC’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 23, no. 2,
March 2007, pp. 955-970.
27
The 5-minutes time limit has been chosen arbitrarily to standardise the
experiment. This option relies on the author’s personal experience with chat
rooms.
228
Why Cybersex?
______________________________________________________________
28
YM Binik, K Mah, and S Kiesler, ‘Ethical Issues in Conducting Sex
Research on the Internet’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 36, February 1999,
pp. 82-90.
29
McKenna et al., op. cit., p. 308.
30
Ibid.
31
A Cooper, C Scherer, and RM Mathy, ‘Overcoming Methodological
Concerns in the Investigation of Online Sexual Activities’, CyberPsychology
and Behaviour, vol. 4, no. 4, August 2001, pp. 437-447.
32
MW Ross et al., ‘Characteristics of Men and Women Who Complete or
Exit from an On-Line Internet Sexuality Questionnaire: A Study of
Instrument Dropout Biases’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 40, 2003, pp. 396402, p.396.
33
MW Ross et al., ‘Characteristics of Men Who Have Sex With Men on the
Internet but Identify as Heterosexual, Compared with Heterosexually
Identified Men Who Have Sex with Women’, CyberPsychology and
Behaviour, vol. 8, no. 2, April 2005, pp. 133-139.
Bibliography
Binik, YM, ‘Sexuality and the Internet: Lots of Hyp(otheses) - Only a Little
Data’ Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, November 2001, pp. 281282.
Binik, YM., K Mah, and S Kiesler, ‘Ethical Issues in Conducting Sex
Research on the Internet’. Journal of Sex Research, vol. 36,
February 1999, pp. 82-90.
Cooper, A, C Scherer, and RM Mathy, ‘Overcoming Methodological
Concerns in the Investigation of Online Sexual Activities’,
CyberPsychology and Behaviour, vol. 4, no. 4, August 2001, pp.
437-447.
Creţeanu, A, and A Coman, ‘Homosexuality in the Written Media in
Romania’,
1998,
viewed
on
30
September
2007,
<http://accept.ong.ro/presaeng.html#presa>.
Daneback, K, personal email correspondence with the author, 18 September
2006.
Daneback, K, A Cooper, and SA Mansson, ‘An Internet Study of Cybersex
Participants’, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, vol. 34, 2005, pp. 321328.
Gallup Organization Romania and British Council Romania, Tânăr în
România,
2004,
viewed
on
6
October
2006,
<http://www.gallup.ro/>.
‘Gay Rights in Romania’, Wikipedia, 2006, viewed on 6 October 2006,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_rights_in_Romania>.
229
______________________________________________________________
McFarlane, M, and R Kachur, ‘From the Keyboard to the Couch: Issues for
Clinicians in the Age of the Internet’ [review of Al Cooper (ed.), Sex
and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians], Journal of Sex
Research, vol. 40, May 2003, p. 223.
McKenna, KYA, AS Green, and PK Smith, ‘Demarginalizing the Sexual
Self’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 3, November 2001, pp.
302-311.
Philaretou, AG, ‘Sexuality and the Internet’ [Review of DD Waskul (ed.),
Net.SeXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the Internet],
Journal of Sex Research, vol. 42, May 2005, pp. 177-179.
Ross, MW, ‘Typing, Being, and Doing: Sexuality and the Internet’, Journal
of Sex Research, vol. 42, November 2005, pp. 342-352.
Ross, MW, K Daneback, SA Mansson, R Tikkanen, and A Cooper,
‘Characteristics of Men and Women Who Complete or Exit from an
On-Line Internet Sexuality Questionnaire: A Study of Instrument
Dropout Bias’, Journal of Sex Research, vol. 40, 2003, pp. 396-402.
Ross, M, and MR Kauth, ‘Men Who Have Sex with Men on the Internet:
Emerging Clinical Issues and Their Management’, in A Cooper
(ed.), Sex and the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians, BrennerRoutledge, New York, pp. 47-69.
Ross, MW, SA Mansson, K Daneback, and R Tikkanen, ‘Characteristics of
Men Who Have Sex With Men on the Internet but Identify as
Heterosexual, Compared with Heterosexually Identified Men Who
Have Sex with Women’, Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, vol. 8,
no. 2, April 2005, pp. 133-139.
Spineanu-Dobrotă, S, Homosexualitatea între normal şi patologic, Tritonic,
Bucharest, 2005.
Tanis, M, and T Postmes, ‘Two Faces of Anonymity: Paradoxical Effects of
Cues to Identity in CMC’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 23,
no. 2, March 2007, pp. 955-970.
Timm, TM, ‘Sex on the Internet: The New Frontier of Addiction’ [review of
Al Cooper (ed.), Cybersex: the Dark Side of the Force], Journal of
Sex Research, vol. 38, no. 4, 2001, pp. 345-346.
Weinberg, MS, and CJ Williams, ‘Gay Baths and the Social Organisation of
Impersonal Sex’, Social Problems, vol. 23, no. 2, 1975, pp. 124-136.
PART VI
Performative Erotics
Rural-Queer:
Representations within the “Hillbilly” Trope
Jan Roddy
Abstract: A brief overview of popular culture representations of the hillbilly
sets the context for photographic and video pieces that the author creates in
an attempt to offer a more complex and subtle image of sexuality and gender
within rural, southern U.S. hill culture. Class and regional signifiers are
inextricably linked with gender and sexual expression and related power
relations identified.
Key Words: hillbilly, queer, Ozark, photograph, rural, sexuality, visual
representation
1.
Introduction:
Rural-Queer: these two words used in conjunction identify a
territory of otherness where individual and collective identity based on class,
gender, sexuality, race, geographic region, and relationship to modernity are
contested or at least complicated. My research has been focused mostly on
the hillbilly, or southern highland woods dweller of the U.S. My aim is to
give a brief introduction to the more sexualised elements within these tropes
as context for my photo-text and video works.
I use the term queer in multiple and overlapping ways. In the
analysis of cultural imagery, it is meant to highlight the popular definition of
gender and sexual deviance within the hegemony of heteronormativity. I
expand this usage with the addition of class and regional signifiers imbedded
in the hillbilly stereotype that increases the dangerous outsider status of the
group. When discussing the narratives in my own image and text pieces, I
adopt the reclamation of the word queer as a socio-political term, indicating
resistance and self-proclaimed identity.
Hillbilly, hick, yokel, bumpkin, rube, plebe, redneck, cracker, have
various connotations nationally and regionally but share a position as outside
by virtue of class and rural isolation or resistance to dominant urban values.
By the time these phrases were coined, they indicated both nostalgia for and
ridicule of human throwbacks to a time without an industrial division of
labour, who exist outside of, or in resistance to, the market economy and
modernity. Through tropes in literature, film, and television texts they also
often embody middle and upper class fantasies of a people closer to nature,
of a base physicality outside of social and sexual constraints.1
In these representations the “shiftless hillbilly” and related rural
males exist outside of the constraints of the civilising forces of middle-class
234
Rural-Queer
______________________________________________________________
values and capitalism. By their association with the mythic frontiersman and
the cowboy they possess virility, but left unbridled, can turn dangerous at any
moment, often exposing homosexual, incestuous, or even bestial desire.2
Another side of rural masculinity portrayed is the affable, lazy, fool.
The middle class perspective in these images critiques those unwilling or
unable to raise their standard of living on account of their laziness. Evidenced
as well is class envy of the other’s time to indulge in unproductive leisure, an
envy that includes sexual fantasies of earthy pleasures in bucolic settings.
Representations of the female hillbilly or rural inhabitant are
primarily divided into two categories. The first is the often-naive country girl
or farmer’s daughter, who, like her male counterpart, is seen as closer to
nature, the farmyard, and animals than to her urban cousins but is always
willing to entertain them with her charms. As such, she embodies a base
physicality and unrestrained sexuality. As punishment for her loose morals
she almost inevitably ends up as the pregnant unmarried or beleaguered
married woman, old before her time.3
Just as plentiful is the second category, in which the female hillbilly
is gender ambiguous or decidedly masculine. She is often pipe or cigarette
smoking, toughened, and by necessity used to heavy physical labour that her
male counterpart eschews. Like historic representations of gender ambiguous
lesbians in the Western world, she is alternately portrayed as hideously
irrelevant or dangerous within the context of patriarchal prescribed genderroles and power relations.
Many of these identical characteristics can be found in the now
famous image of U.S. Army Private Lynndie England of the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal. She is no simple scapegoat, as it is clear that she has
participated in the torture and humiliation of Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib
prison. However her widely distributed image and attendant captions of
“mannish” or “hillbilly torturer” depict the aberrant female that has been used
to deflect accountability away from powerful male leaders in the U.S.
government and armed forces, who have institutionalised torture as a military
practice and weapon in their proverbial “war on terror.”4
In all cases of hillbilly representation the rural characters’ whiteness
is essential, both in their relationship to people of colour and to other
Caucasians. White trash or trailer trash connotes white people who have not
lived up to the privilege their race entitles them to, or who alternately resist
the attendant civilising constraints of ascendant classes in white supremacist
society. They have counterparts in sexualised or perversely gendered
stereotypes of people of colour, but are conversely represented as the most
bigoted of white people. The real and represented relationship of these two
groups is an important topic, but beyond the intended scope of this paper.
The land itself as stage is essential for these characters. In the case
of the U.S. hillbilly, the mountain regions they inhabit evoke a long recorded
Jan Roddy
235
______________________________________________________________
fear and fascination with wilder places untamed by agrarian or market
economy society. It is the sheer isolation from the services and controlling
structures of civilisation that creates both allure and trepidation.5 The
collision of the urban and the rural instigates the drama in most all of these
mythologies. Whether in comic films, television series, or literary versions, it
is the attempts of city slickers to get the best of country bumpkins and the
round of miscommunications based on cultural difference that constitute the
joke. Sexuality within these country settings is based on heteronormative
characters including variations of the child-like but coy farmers daughter,
harmlessly strapping young male with a juvenile intellect, and bedraggled
farmwife. Just as plentiful is the horror version, where unsuspecting
suburbanites or upper crust college students take a wrong turn or are lured
too far into the backwoods by their fascination and desire for adventure sexual and otherwise - that rural places seem to afford urban dwellers.
In this context I refer to three of my own text/image pieces that
attempt to at least complicate these mythologies. I reclaim some of these
attributes, while reconstructing a more complicated version of white, rural,
working class, sexual identity. These pieces are culled from a larger, ongoing project consisting of vignettes of place, people, and events in the
Southern hill Ozark region of the U.S., where my family has been rooted for
generations. The subjects are defined as much by a common subsistence
farming or white rural poor and working class, as, although perhaps more
subtly, their queerness.
Conservative religion, whether Christianity, Islam or Judaism, tends
to be a more dominant social force in rural than urban areas and in debates
about, and repression of, unapologetic queer culture. My work attempts to
subvert this force by drawing connections between religious experience and
queer sensual expression, or positing redemption in intergenerational
connections forged through queer identification and resistance, all in
relationship to the land.
The narrative in the video What Price? alludes to issues of class and
social control within capitalism and the prison industrial complex that has
become a mainstay in many economically depressed rural areas in the U.S.
The reality of the supreme surveillance of the body and the practice of rape
as a form of class control evidence the blending of violent hyper-masculinity
and homoerotic desire expressed in male prison culture. The photo/text piece
The Edge juxtaposes young adult characters living a generation apart but
linked by family ties, their experience of Bible-Belt homophobia and rural
isolation leading to potential suicide. Tragedy is not meant to be final in this
piece. Redemption is found in affinities of defiant queerness between
different generations. Called Down reclaims some of the attributes of hillbilly
types, while reconstructing a more realistic version of white, rural, working
class, female sexual identity in formation.
236
Rural-Queer
______________________________________________________________
Myths of regional homogeneity and rugged individualism are
explored via text and image through the interpretation of events that
simultaneously expose and resist social patterns of homophobia, classism,
racism, and religious bigotry. I draw on regional oral tradition and personal
and family lore, as I wrestle with these complexities and explore connections
between the politics of queerness and U.S. rural culture.
Following are three short pieces, reproduced here as selected
examples of stills and transcriptions from the audio.
2.
What Price? - Video and Voice
Video Still 1
Between the thick cement walls he calls me Ma’am with such
tenderness, that I’m taken aback; I empty my purse onto the conveyor belt
and hold up my arms. His hands halting and apologising move dutifully up
and down the length of my body and I wonder if he’s a miner’s or farmer’s
boy.
An all night Quick Mart went up in town for the late night shift to
grab coffee, Little Debbie cakes and gas beneath florescent lights, as they
drive miles of two lane roads to get here. Unrelenting searchlights drag the
passing minutes in their sway, glinting sparks off razor wire. It’s the
unnatural glow of a place that never sleeps; an island of light stabbing night
woods and fields dimming stars in the country sky. The store cashier asks
what brings me to town at this hour, knowing perfectly well. A foul thickness
saturates the air, every breath and conversation, covering the ground like
Jan Roddy
237
______________________________________________________________
dew. He wants to know what part I am playing in the perverse theatre that
occasions this town every month or so nowadays, ever since the politicians
realised what wins elections.
I float alone in a sea of plastic chairs in the visitors’ area where he
and I had talked last week through plate glass. Two local preachers in cheap
black suits circle around like buzzards. Their offers of prayerful comfort echo
thinly off slick, hard walls and scrubbed linoleum. A night matron arrives to
lead me through miles of windowless halls, automatic gates and doors
slamming with stomach seizing force. Crossing through a steep walled
courtyard with a tiny patch of open sky, I swallow air desperately, believing I
might suffocate before the night is over. All the regulars are well rehearsed
for this midnight performance, directing the rest of us to our appointed spots.
You can hide all sorts of things in the backwoods. The soul of small
towns sold for the price of a few jobs with benefits as family farms become
impossible and factories move over the border to pay poorer folks even less.
Distant cousins, aunts and uncles are on both sides of the bars, some needing
the only job for 90 miles that pays a decent wage, the others, who but God
knows for sure, except that they didn’t have enough money for a lawyer who
had the time or inclination to give a damn. They’re none the same after
spending time here, because everyone knows and never says what goes on.
What men do, or have other men do, to keep everyone in their place.
Packed three across in a pickup, his brother, mother and I drive
down the dark roads looking for an open Dairy Queen to pass this terrible
time. I shake my head trying to throw off visions of his shaved forearms and
a waiting gurney in the curtained, glass bubble stage, flanked by miniature
banks of stadium seats, and order a chocolate shake I know I can’t drink. It
rains, then stops, while I think that I understand both nothing and all too
much.
238
Rural-Queer
______________________________________________________________
3.
Called - Text Read over Changing Still Images
Still Photo 2
Still Photo3
I have gone down to the altar during the call. I have spoken in
Tongues. I have felt the sweet surrender, falling willingly backward into
Jan Roddy
239
______________________________________________________________
murmuring streams. Baptised in what they call Tablerock Lake, for now,
while men’s dams stand and where the White River waits for a while on its
way to Arkansas.
I skinny-dipped in those same waters with boy and girlfriends on
clandestine escapes, out after hours from the bible college where we were
counted in our beds each night. Homemade moonshine burning hot in my
throat, drunk straight from plastic milk gallon jugs. A not quite ancient rite
that joined us to ancestor hillbillies and steaming back-wood stills.
Long faced, willowy girls led me to hidden rope bridges and
underground rivers whose whispering siren’s moan lured us into a skin-felt
faith in our own yearnings. We were called down into splits in Ozark
bedrock, fissures that open and close into caves, which wind endlessly,
secretly under Missouri. We groped after each other in that musky, pressing
deep dark that is more surrounding than anything I think I will ever know
before death’s warm blanket falls.
4.
The Edge - Text Read over Changing Still Images
Still Photo 4
240
Rural-Queer
______________________________________________________________
Still Photo 5
I was pulled to the edge of Baird Mountain that they sliced part
away to build the dam. Rocks slipping under foot dared my half-belief that I
could fly or wouldn’t mind falling.
How fast can you drive that old car down crooked two lane
blacktops before temptation takes you? I heard that you skated these same
rocky ledges before you got tired and fell asleep to the rumbling of that 57
Chevy truck engine, so far back the Narrows that it took days for another car
to find you. Did you dream of pretty soldier boys you had held like I yearned
after graceful girls in that dangerous twilight?
The quiet that rolls over any conversation where your name
surfaces, tells me that I am right. I knew you even when I was in my mama’s
belly, the weeks she locked herself away and cried after you. Past her
blowing skirts that summer afternoon the funeral wreath on bare dirt, brother
stamped on white ribbon flapping in the hot wind. Buddie Lee, lanky,
handsome, with the easy slouch of country boys.
I hate the shame you had to bear, but am grateful you made the
sacrifice so I did not have to. The burnt offering that ignorant, fearful folk
demanded. There weren’t nearly enough ways to grow to be a man, or a
woman for that matter, in this hill country. There still aren’t. Dyed in the
wool stubborn persistence is the blessing and curse of this place.
Jan Roddy
241
______________________________________________________________
Notes
1
A Harkins, Hillbilly, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004, p. 53.
2 JW Williamson, Hillbillyland, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, 1995, pp. 2-6.
3
Harkins, op. cit., p. 54.
4
C Mason, ‘The Hillbilly Defense: Culturally Mediating US Terror at Home
and Abroad’, National Women’s Study Association Journal, vol. 17, no. 3,
Fall 2005, pp. 48-50.
5
Williamson, op. cit., p. 18-19.
Bibliography
Harkins, A, Hillbilly, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004.
Mason, C, ‘The Hillbilly Defense: Culturally Mediating US Terror at Home
and Abroad’, National Women’s Study Association Journal, vol. 17,
no. 3, Fall 2005, pp. 48-50.
Williamson, JW, Hillbillyland, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, 1995.
Sudden Clarity Could Kill!
A Hypotheticpoetic for Voice and Cello
Shalmalee Palekar
Abstract: In this theory / fiction / performance, I will examine my “raced,”
lesbian, academic, creative body as a site of both “otherness” and
empowerment. By inhabiting the subject position(s) of a diasporic Indian
lesbian academic in Australia, do I necessarily operate from multiple
liminalities? In what ways do I negotiate with whiteness? Attempting a fluid
movement between “authenticity” and dreams, between split selves and
fragmented subjectivities, between playfulness and polemic, my writing /
performance will interrogate boundaries of the gendered body, sexuality,
“race,” and professionalism. I will explore what representations make it
possible for the voices of “Indian women” to not be completely anchored to a
space that is dictated only by white Western and Indian dominant discourses.
Ultimately, I aim to develop a longer multimedia performance piece that
examines the embodied production of knowledge, and writes sexuality as
participating in multicultural community networks. What follows is a
beginning…
Key words creative, diaspora, Indian, lesbian, postcolonial, sexuality,
whiteness
A hypotheticpoetic must remain only on the edge of her
consciousness.
IndianAcademicLesbian. She is writing to create herself. She is
writing for her life. She is writing so she exists. She writes
longhand/hours/lines. She cannot write the questions. She can write only
because the questions exist. She writes to make her selves spin. She writes to
express her unease. She writes because she holds all the hope in the world.
The hybrid subject is a split and a mobile subject, located in “third
space:” an “in-between space” that disrupts binary oppositions between
“self” and “other.”
LesbianIndianAcademic. There are days when she reels from the
snowy keyboard, the glaring monitor. This is ridiculous, she thinks, why
would she cry because she can do what she wants to do? This is the
unanswerable question of her life.
244
______________________________________________________________
… travelling into “third space” may open the way to
conceptualising an inter-national culture, based not on exoticising
multiculturalism, but on the inscription and articulation of hybridity…
AcademicIndianLesbian. The boat always sailed on rocky waters. In
her waking dreams the boat always sailed on rocky waters. She sailed on
rocky waters everyday. The turbulence of the waters rocked her to sleep.
To that end we should, you say, Uncle Bhabha - remember that it is
the “inter” - the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between
space - that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.1
But my dear Uncle Bhabha, in Oz - splitting sunlight into a million
shards no longer earns a living, and the cutting edge is trying to slice
through my jugular!
Academic. She would wake every morning and feel deep dis-ease.
She would open her eyes, there was dis-ease lying on top of her. Its eyeballs
pressing into hers.
But aren’t you ( )? Ideas chase her. They are hungry for her flesh.
She runs from Sydney to Krakow. She blasts from Earth to Pluto. Words grin
and wait for her to touch down. One night she asks them what they want.
They crawl in her ears. On her eyes. Up her nose.
But what about the “hype of hybridity?”2 Am I authentically hybrid
enough? Who decides?
In Oz. There are so many layers. This is why hats have a neverending significance in her life. Like those whitehot, still days when you sit
with gin and tonic and a book. With each turn of the page, another hat is
placed on your head. A recognition is barely made and it
slips
away
immediately.
In Oz. My friend Paul says: “You two are disgustingly in love. I bet
you read Derrida to each other in bed!” I say: “Tut, Paul! Have you learnt
nothing? Like all lesbians, we gently comb each other’s tresses in
shimmering soft focus while k.d. lang swells on the soundtrack…”
Shalmalee says: “take your ‘authenticity’ and shove it. The author
still engages in a political act by inhabiting the subject position(s) of a
diasporic, Indian, lesbian.”
Shalmalee Palekar
245
______________________________________________________________
Where do you like it best? Butterflies frolicked in the air around her.
She was surrounded by a snowfall of butterflies. Butterflies frolicked around
her creating a blizzard. She didn’t have the heart to pin them down.
An immigrant lesbian of colour can be marginalised, not only in a
white, heterosexual, patriarchal paradigm - “where all sexualities, all
bodies, and all ‘others’ are bonded to an ideal/ideological hierarchy”3 Where do you like it best? She is terrified if she speaks this, if she
defines what is in today, she will lose it forever.
… but also by the perpetuation…
Where do you like it best? Sudden clarity could kill! Incoming
weapons of mass instruction! All hands negotiate! Repeat: all hands
negotiate!
… of racist ideologies within Anglo lesbian communities… and
aren’t you… oh, you’re… but we thought… but aren’t you…
But aren’t you( )? The repetition is circular. (She wonders at your
irritation.) The meanings refuse to appear except as ellipses. It is the scraps of
paper she cherishes the most. As they rustle in their hiding places throughout
the house, she feels the warmth of their love.
This being all she has to write with, she begins.
Says Shalmalee: “I am looking at you and I have something to say.”
Do not cast your eye on this exquisite branch.
It springs from a poison tree.
It will suck the venom out of the ground
And spread it in your veins
And you will blossom
With glittering poison flowers,
But bear no fruit.4
Says Shalmalee: “I am such a coward, I whimper and cover my arse-hole,
wanting to hold the shit in.”
Dreamscape 1
In the silence between us the lines come back. Running through my
head like little voices that whisper me to sleep. I am alone in this moment. He
246
______________________________________________________________
is half out the window, poised to leap, before he looks down at the drop and
backs away. Shakes his head with fear and disgust before he screams that he
will stay for my sake. I remember him long enough to thank him politely. We
nod at each other and he makes me some tea. I breathe in the mist and breathe
out the cold. I tiptoe to my room and curl up beside my lover. I cry because it
is expected.
Dreamscape 2
I remember wanting to be a poet. I read the lines of a hundred
skeletons day after day, pretending that they had understood me when I
declaimed my lack of inspiration. I remember wanting to be an academic. I
spent days with my stillbirths, tending to them carefully, holding their cold
blue lips to my swollen breast and willing them to bite … waiting for
something beyond the rigour mortis of small limbs. I wrote about death and
deceit, about desire and domesticity, I wrote about being unable to write. So
terribly postmodern, darling, the skeletons mocked. Eventually, they didn’t
speak to me anymore.
Dreamscape 3
I was at Woolworths yesterday and saw a woman checking the price
on a loaf of bread. She turned to me and we smiled. She talked to me and
understood my thoughts. She knew that I felt I couldn’t write conference
papers anymore, hated picking up the phone to call someone who would want
to talk to me, feared the sound of my heart beating away so steadily in my
chest. She nods at me and offers me the bread. I am confused and hesitate.
She chooses another loaf of bread with her delicate, pale fingers, and leaves. I
wonder what this bread will do. Will it cure me? Am
I
sick?
Says Shalmalee: “The more words I use, the more absurd this
becomes. Longing for a pure space of marginalism beyond the culturalpolitical, are we? hmm?”
So she decided, instead, to discourage her wildest passions, suck out
all her desire, and … Write an Australian Research Council Grant
Application!
AUDIENCE WHISTLES, APPLAUDS
Thank you, thank you! What am I doing at the moment? Oh just
trying to ARC my finished application, and to this end will make a
Blanket Statement
Shalmalee Palekar
247
______________________________________________________________
Boredom smothers her, a blanket
Smelling of musty sex and
Long-dried laughter
Struggling to breathe through the heavy wool
She becomes inert as the air itself
Her purpose, now only a stain On one plaid corner
Of her faded mind Too vague for concrete shapes
Even monsters won’t live there
Anymore
---------------------------------------------SO SHE SUBMITS THE GRANT APPLICATION,
SECURE IN THE BELIEF THAT HER EXAMINATION
OF HETERONORMATIVITY FUNCTIONING AS NEOCOLONIALISM IN THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORIC
CONTEXT
WILL
DEFINITELY
SAFEGUARD
AUSTRALIA.
Cut! Cut! The camera loves you, baby, but you’re acting - react
instead, it’ll be much more authentic!
TAKE 2: SHE SLEEPS THE SLEEP OF INNOCENTS,
BECAUSE
ACADEMIC
KNOWLEDGE
IS
APOLITICAL, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION, RACISM
IS A MULTICULTURAL CONSPIRACY, FREE
SPEECH SKIPS TRIPPINGLY THROUGH LUSH
MEADOWS, RACISM IS SO NINETIES, BABY! AND
SOME APPLICATIONS ARE ALWAYS MORE EQUAL
THAN OTHERS.
AUDIENCE APPLAUDS WILDLY, STAND UP AND TAKE A BOW.
Now gather round, girls and boys, LETS HAVE FUN! Today we’re
going to listen to Wollongong Stories:
hot breath on cheek close too close i look up to see raw face in my
face slab of redmeat where you from mumbai blank stare india stuffing
irritation back into my belly india oh theres lots of you people around these
days wow but you dont look indian you know i mean forced smile starts to
freeze on my mouth god not now dont say it i mean really you could pass for
248
______________________________________________________________
(
) what with your accent and all i mean you dont sound indian you
know i turn away biting my irritation hard not letting it go stay calm stay
calm hot breath hovers on cheek
close too close where you from mumbai blank stare india oh india
deep sigh the poverty in these third world countries is appalling all those poor
beggars but so spiritual you people i watched clive james you know heat and
dust and illiteracy not like that overhere you must feel lucky to be overhere
not really no i say blandness oils my words they slide out smoothly you know
that indian girl i hear overhere not very friendly is she
face in my face where you from india oh india really love curries
myself the hotter the better sodoyouhaveaboyfriend the words run to gether
dont connect at all not really no i say blank stare no bland better butter to oil
youre not one of those god not now dont say it feminazi dykes are youhaha
redtip tongue flickers obscenely across lips thick hand on my breast raw slab
of meat stinging septic from restraining bites my anger roars dont touch dont
DONT TOUCH ME BASTARD fuck fuckyou manhatinglezzoCUNT … GO
BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM
i wait for the car blood rushing my veins my watch weighs down
wrist wrench to pick up that clenched fist is not mine i wait for the car a
bottle of coke beckons sinister glinting i walk towards it those trembling legs
are not mine the bottle gleams glare in the sun too red too red i cut my throat
and choke on coke i wait for the car a woman smiles at me i contort my face
into grin bitter vomit rises filling my mouth those twisted lips are not mine i
wait for the car the world blares colour it scorches my skin hot ash trickles
down those seared eyes are not mine red on red on red on red i pluck my eyes
and stab them dead i wait for the car my knees give way i sink into tar my
black black heart flops out of my throat my rotted innards slime out after it is
not they are not mine not mine
i wait for the car
i wait for
i wait
PAUSE
Says Shalmalee: “I am NOT one to argue fiercely, to FORCIBLY
draw your attention”
But while we’re here, let’s talk about the role of the public
intellectual today, especially with regard to challenging white,
heteronormative, institutionalised hegemony. In moments of doubt and
Shalmalee Palekar
249
______________________________________________________________
despair, I feel it is auspicious to talk about such things before we sleep. For
then no harm could befall us.
in perfect dreams
the blackened body spirals,
breaking crimson over
the bleached bone
of sand
in perfect dreams
crimson stairs we cannot
climb
spiral only to nonexistent rooms
lights on. action! Be still. stay calm.
begin the descent into tears
but do not dare drown
Living in the hyphenated Land of “Non”: non-Anglo, non-citizen,
non-heterosexual - always demanding an authentic hybridity of me (yes, my
brave, waxen face has melted but I remember) - doesn’t mean I’m faithful as
a fucking crutch, snuggling happily into your stale armpit! Heart pounds
furiously - what are the parameters of this discursive debate? One thing I do
know - the silence cannot take over –
Says Shalmalee: “More doom and gloom, doom and gloom? Get a
grip, arse-hole - your shit will inevitably ooze out, and who’ll wipe it up
tomorrow?”
“For me, the question ‘Who will speak?’ is less crucial than ‘Who
will listen?’ ‘I will speak for myself as a Third World person’ is an important
position for political mobilisation today. But the real demand is that when I
speak from that position, I should be listened to seriously, not with that kind
of benevolent imperialism...”5 Right, Aunty Spivak?
Aunty? Auuunnnntyyy!! Hmm. Looks like Aunty Spivak’s not
responding. But… wait a minute! Is that… yes, it is! It’s Aunties Ganorkar
and Palekar! And they have something to say about fearlessness:
that song,
the one i didn’t want to sing,
appeared out of nowhere
250
______________________________________________________________
and caressed my skin like
a delicate mist,
and drenched me like
moonbeams on a Purnima night
and splashed underfoot like
monsoon puddles.
i stepped carefully, I crept softly,
but the song,
the one i didn’t want to sing,
rose up like a tide
and sloshed around in my belly,
and vibrated in my throat
and resonated in my head,
then the song became moonlight
and the song became rain
and the song sang me
and i laughed
and i laughed without fear.6
Says Shalmalee: “What more can I say? I’m listening. Are you?”
Notes
1
H Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 38.
K Mitchell, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 15, no. 5, 1997, pp. 533–553, p.
533.
3
T de Lauretis, ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’, in H
Abelove et al. (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Routledge, New
York & London, 1993, pp. 141-158, p. 144.
4
My translation of Prabha Ganorkar’s Marathi poem, ‘Poison Tree’, from the
collection P Ganorkar, Vyatheeth, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1975, p. 23.
5
G Spivak, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, in S During (ed.), The Cultural
Studies Reader, Routledge, London & New York, 1993, pp. 193-202, p. 197.
6
My translation of Prabha Ganorkar’s unpublished poem, ‘That Song’, used
with the poet’s kind permission.
2
Bibliography
Bhabha, H (ed.), The Location of Culture, Routledge, London, 1994.
De Lauretis, T, ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’, in H
Abelove et al. (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader,
Routledge, New York & London, 1993, pp. 141-158.
Shalmalee Palekar
251
______________________________________________________________
Ganorkar, P, Vyatheeth, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1975.
Mitchell, K, ‘Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity’, in Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 15. no. 5, 1997, pp. 533–
553.
Spivak, G, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, in S During (ed.), The Cultural
Studies Reader, Routledge, London & New York, 1993, pp. 193202.
slave, unchained
Luisa Orza
Abstract: This paper uses erotic fiction to explore the themes of erotic
servitude, power and pleasure. It is the story of a woman entering into a
Master-slave relationship (as a slave) for the first time and discovering a side
of her sexuality that is daunting, exciting, and frighteningly powerful to her.
The story traces the journey of the slave’s self-discovery and challenges
Western cultural taboos and norms around pleasure, fidelity, trust, identity,
and control. The tension of the writing is maintained in the questions of
where the power lies in the relationship between Master and slave. It is
deliberately ambiguous and mocking throughout the story, juxtaposing the
slave’s submission with her ultimate sense of growth, self-definition, and
self-determination, which emerge as the story develops.
Key words: BDSM (bondage and discipline; dominance and submission;
sadism and masochism), erotic servitude, master, obedience, punishment,
pleasure, slave, submission, trust
1.
Learning the Slave Arts
Unknowingly, a slave lay dormant inside me, until my One Master
came to wake her. And as One took possession of me, so I gradually began to
inhabit her, until she and I were one.
One was a good master. He did not teach me but helped me to learn
the art of the slave, presenting me one by one with the four essential
elements: availability, humility, obedience, and surrender. These areas cannot
be learnt chronologically one at a time, but must happen and evolve
concurrently. There is much intertwining of disciplines in slavehood, and it is
often impossible to move forward in one discipline without having reached a
certain standard in another. One allowed me to find my own limits, before
pushing me onto the next stage with a series of tests and requirements that he
knew I would be able to achieve. Of course, I was motivated to achieve them
by the punishments I knew I would receive if I did not. And I was sometimes
motivated to rebel against his requirements by the same punishments. That I
should come to fear and desire the same things is not difficult to explain. I
feared causing displeasure in my Master, and I desired anything that pleased
him. That his pleasure and his displeasure might bring about the same
outcome was irrelevant.
My lessons began before I knew they had begun. I wanted One and
he me, and he would take me whenever and wherever he wanted to. If I
objected to the location, a small punishment would be inflicted. For example,
travelling on a commuter-packed train, One once put his hand up my shirt,
254
slave, unchained
______________________________________________________________
and began to fondle my breast. I tried to withdraw, not wanting to be seen by
other passengers. One pinched my nipple hard, staring at me with flinty eyes.
I read the choice he presented me with: I could either draw more attention to
myself by pulling away and crying out in pain, or I could yield to his
pleasure. I yielded. His hand grew soft again, and tender, so that I longed for
it to continue its journey. As soon as he became aware of my longing, he
withdrew the hand, leaving me wanting and prepared for a greater degree of
exposure.
I quickly learnt that One required my body to be available to him at
all times. This meant that it also needed to be accessible. It was no good to be
wearing swathes of clothing that One could not easily discard or enter in a
moment of wanting to possess me. I learnt that tops should be openable,
bottoms liftable, unwrappable, at least rippable. I may choose to wear jeans
or less easily removable items of clothing. However, I wore them on the
understanding that, should he happen to want me - or any part of me however briefly, while wearing such items, and his access be impeded, I
would bear the consequences. In this event, some or all of the following
might take place:
First, I should immediately offer my mouth for penetration if other
orifices were inaccessible due to clothing. Second, I should accept that the
offending articles of clothing may be torn off or roughly removed and
possibly ruined in the process, including in public places. And third, I may be
tied to the bed or another piece of furniture, where my clothes would be cut
from my body, and where I would remain, naked, until such a time as One
saw fit to graciously untie me.
A further matter of accessibility pertained to my readiness to be
penetrated by One at all times. It was therefore my responsibility to ensure
that I was almost constantly aroused and responsive to his urges. This was
made easier by the other conditions regarding accessibility, as I found that the
clothes and other conditions I will go onto describe often caused me to
become aroused without any word or gesture from One. In addition, as I
became more skilled in the slave arts, the notion of being able to please my
Master was enough to ensure that my body responded appropriately and with
speed to the slightest perception on my part that he might be ready to take
me.
The requirement that I should be constantly available also meant
that I needed to be in One’s physical presence at all times. If One should
want me when we were not in the same physical space, it was understood that
a punishment may be incurred. My One Master was kind on occasions when
the absence had been perpetrated by himself. Normally, this would simply
result in my being teased a little - tied to a table top, for example, and left
there for some time, that I might experience some of the abandonment which
he had previously suffered. However, should the absence have been effected
Luisa Orza
255
______________________________________________________________
by my decision to be elsewhere, be it for work, social or any other reasons,
then the punishment would certainly involve use of the cane, and might be
repeated at intervals over a period of time corresponding to my absence. In
the event of my absence being caused by my Master, if, for example, he sent
me out to run an errand, and then found that he wanted to access my body
before I came back, the consequences would be less severe: a mouth-fucking,
perhaps, with my arms tied above my head, or use of the nipple clamps for a
short time while he took possession of me.
2.
Humility and Obedience
The disciplines of humility and obedience were harder to learn.
Before I became One’s slave, I was proud and arrogant. It took time for me to
become proud of being his slave, and thereby to embrace humility, casting
off my former haughtiness. Yet, when this happened, I stood straighter, held
my head higher, and knew myself to be more beautiful and desired than I had
ever done before. I would often resist One’s demands despite wanting to
please him. I would frequently look him in the eye without permission; I
rarely remembered to call him Master or to thank him for the gifts he
bestowed on me - for each spank from his hand, stroke of his whip or cane
was given with love, and I ought to have been more grateful. Each time he
placed the clamps on my nipples, or commanded me to drink his piss, he
allowed me the opportunity to prove myself worthy of him, to surrender to
his will and to enter a state of bliss, yet my obedience was often accompanied
with a scowl.
The first time he whipped me, I even cried, but One was forgiving.
After requesting me to arouse myself, he tied me to a post in the centre of the
room, hands cuffed around the rough wood, feet tied a little more loosely,
breasts splayed to sit poking out on either side of the post. He stepped back
and watched me for a long time before he moved. Approaching me, he picked
up his red riding crop, and walked around me several times. Finally he
stopped. He stroked my breasts with the flap of the crop, letting the leather
rest on my nipples, flicking them gently until they grew hard. He ran the
leather over my arse cheeks, between them, and gently stroked me until I
began to ache, and the leather flap glistened. He spanked me, interchanging
hard slaps with gentle caresses, until I didn’t know what to expect next. “I’m
going to whip you now,” he whispered, “one on the sole of each foot, two on
each arse cheek. But because you’ve been so good, you can choose the order
in which I administer the strokes.” My arse was burning hot and stinging
from the spanking. I raised my right foot.
One moved with deliberate, agonising slowness. He circled me,
touching my mouth, nipples, cunt. Making them keen towards him. He knelt
in front of my arse, caressing the burning cheeks and kissing them. The
lingering stinging from his palms was replaced in an instant by a sensation so
256
slave, unchained
______________________________________________________________
exhilaratingly light and fine that I would have offered myself for a thousand
more spanks. He took my foot in his hand. Kneeling, he lifted it to his mouth
and kissed the sole, reverently. He pushed his tongue in between each of the
toes, making me cry out. My belly felt swollen and gluttonous with longing.
Finally my One Master stood, and without further warning brought
the crop down on the ball of my foot with a thwack, and I felt a pain like
nothing I’d ever experienced shoot through me. I bit back the tears tipping
my head back to prevent them from falling. I tried immediately to put my
foot down so that I could raise the other one to his service. I found that I
could not stand. There was silence between us, and eventually he came round
the post to see my face, and the tears leapt from my eyes with a will of their
own. I looked at the ground. I did not dare meet his eyes.
“Precious angel,” said One, kissing the tears away. “My beautiful
slave,” he whispered. He held me for a long time before administering the
second stroke. With each stroke of the crop, I felt an indignation and shock
that left me stranded and afraid, and in between each one, my Master
comforted and healed me with such skill and tenderness that I invited the
next, only to be offended again at the pain. After the final stroke, he released
my hands and feet, and took me upstairs to bed, where he praised me. I was
his obedient girl. He would look after me and fuck me for ever. He stroked
and kissed the bruises left by the crop, and slowly spread me out on the bed,
entered me, and fucked me till I came, as if it were my pleasure and not his
that counted.
I made a lot of mistakes. Once I cleaned the house, wearing an old
pair of jeans, a tee-shirt, my hair tied back in a rough pony tail. One came
home sooner than I expected. I wasn’t ready for him. “What’s this?” He
wanted to know, pulling at the jeans, pulling them down to my knees. He
dragged me, stumbling, out into the hall, where the front door stood open. In
his urgency to possess me, he had not closed it. He took the tee-shirt in both
his hands at the neck and ripped it open. It gaped, flapping open to expose
one of my breasts. His hands moved to my pants. With both hands he ripped
them open too, and discarded them in disgust. “God,” he cried, “how many
layers are there to get through?”
“I’m sorry, I was cleaning, I –”
“I’m sorry what?” He demanded, pinching my nipple.
“Master! I’m sorry Master” - I was gasping with pain, humiliation.
“How should I punish you?” He asked.
I laughed nervously. “I don’t know, Master,” I said. “Maybe a spank
or two?”
“Insolent slave,” he whispered. “Kneel.”
He let me suck him, holding my hands up above my head in one of
his, while he pulled my hair loose with the other. Then he pulled me away,
Luisa Orza
257
______________________________________________________________
bent me over the stairs in front of the open door, and said, “you get two
hundred for your disobedience. Don’t forget to count.”
The next time I did the cleaning, I wore nothing but a silk camisole,
ardently hoping that One would come home and find me, want me while I
was at it. I was bitterly disappointed when he didn’t, and so ready for him,
that I went up to the bedroom to relieve my aching. I was afraid that the act
would anger him, so I got out the clamps and placed them on myself, a quick
intake of breath at each nipple. I concentrated on the pain and overcame it. I
was close to orgasm when One came into the room. He observed the clamps
approvingly. “Good girl,” he said, and leaned over me, licking the tip of each
nipple in turn. The pain doubled but I basked in his praise. He leant closer to
my face and whispered softly, “who gave you permission to masturbate?” In
a movement, he bound my hands to the bedstead with a tie he always kept
there. He hooked the clamp chain between my teeth, pulling my nipples
almost out from their roots, and unzipped himself into me. “What am I going
to do with you?” He asked quietly, then kissed my mouth, pushing the chain
deeper into it, intensifying the pain on my nipples. I came hard, begging him
to take the clamps off. He released me, and ordered me to dress, flinging the
camisole and a wrap-around skirt at me. I asked where we were going. One
gave me his flinty stare and I looked at the floor. “That’s better,” he said.
He took me to a piercing parlour. He told me that as I had used the
nipple clamps without his permission, he was going to give me a permanent
reminder of my offence. In a back room he pulled the camisole down to
reveal my left breast, held the nipple in a different kind of clamp, and pushed
a needle through it. I sat in disbelief and stared at him, the pain coming
second to my utter indignation. He pulled the needle out, took a box from his
pocket, and inserted a piece of silver jewellery into the hole that he had made.
Then he pushed me back on the couch, thumbed a drop of blood off my
breast, and held the offended, blessed nipple in his mouth gently licking and
sucking the pain away. He put his hand up my skirt, and I felt him find my
cunt, surprised that it still yielded to him so independently. He fucked me on
the couch, holding my nipple in his mouth. “Oh my beautiful, beautiful
slave,” he moaned.
3.
Surrender
By now, I was permanently accessible, humble, obedient. I wrote
my slave diary daily, listing my imperfections, my mistakes, and jotting
down the punishment they deserved. Each Wednesday I read from the book,
so that One might punish me, according to my suggestions, and often more
harshly. I logged each one, and endured them without complaint. The
physical aspects of my slavehood were well rehearsed by this time, and I
welcomed the feel of the cane on my arse, the soft leather of the flogger on
my breasts and sides. Yet there were still barriers to my complete surrender,
258
slave, unchained
______________________________________________________________
and most of these resided within my rebellious, possessive mind: lack of
trust, emotional dependence, jealousy, and other forms of weakness. And I
often floundered. I questioned One’s authority; I tried to negotiate;
complained that things weren’t fair. Occasionally I made a bare-faced refusal
to carry out One’s requirements.
One told me to write down the rules of our relationship. He then
went through them, adding several, tightening the conditions, designing more
testing lessons. One of the first rules that One added to my list was that I
should wear a collar at all times. In certain circumstances, the collar could be
substituted for a velvet choker, to save others from feelings of
uncomfortableness or embarrassment. Every few weeks we revised the list,
and with each revision a new chain or shackle was added. Bracelets and
anklets, to each of which a lead, chain, or bind could be attached, and often
One would use them, either in punishment, play, or simply as part of my
training. At each sign of rebellion, the rules were re-written and made more
stringent, and another chain was added: a belly chain; thumb-rings that could
be padlocked together; a knotted rope harness. The rules, he said, were there
to guide me. I should learn how to use them. I didn’t always understand him.
Now, One tested me with a different kind of punishment: if I failed
him in my duties, instead of spanking me, he would leave the house, and be
gone for up to three days. If I doubted him, he might leave me to count - to a
hundred million if necessary - or he might deny me food, or use of the
bathroom, or sleep, until he deemed that I had come to my senses. The
punishments sound cruel, but they taught me a valuable lesson: that it wasn’t
my place to decide whether One was right or wrong. All I had to do was
accept his word. And when I did, when I stopped struggling, the ropes and
chains ceased to cut into my flesh, and became easier to carry. My frown was
smoothed away, and my voice laughed easily again.
Sometimes my Master would send me to another Master for a period
of a few days, or even a week. The first time this happened, I felt betrayed,
rejected, and hopeless. I knelt before the Other Master angrily with gritted
teeth; I carried out his commands sullenly, and I felt guilty for any intimacy
that occurred or developed between me and the Other Master. But worse still
was the rage of jealousy I would feel towards the slave whom my Master
would take home with him in my stead. All the time I spent with the Other,
my mind would be filled with the fiery imaginings of what One was doing to
the other slave. My jealousy, like a crazed horse kicking and biting at the
door of its stable, was poised to be unleashed on my happiness and safety. I
wanted, above all, to hide it from One, but whenever I was returned to him,
after a sojourn away, my Master saw it, and was affronted by its persistence.
Yet try as I might, I could not find the answer to the problem.
One took me to serve a Mistress of his acquaintance. Her slave and I
passed in the exchange, and I felt the suffocating blow of the jealous beast
Luisa Orza
259
______________________________________________________________
kicking at the walls of my chest. One and the Mistress exchanged a look. The
other slave, a well-presented young woman, remained poised and demure,
and went to One apparently eager to please him, and not regretting for a
moment her absence from her Mistress’s side.
This Mistress was the hardest of all those I had had to serve, and she
had arranged a demanding training schedule that tested my physical
endurance, intellectual agility, and psychological robustness. In between
working for her, pleasing her with my body, amusing her with my wit, and
being disciplined for my innumerable mistakes, there was barely any time for
dwelling on what was happening in my Master’s house. But at night, or in
rare periods of rest, I would again be tortured with anxiety. One night my
temporary Mistress came to me, clearly annoyed that my restlessness was
keeping her awake. But she showed me a rare kindness.
“You may ask me one question,” she said.
I told her that I wanted to overcome the jealousy that was making
me suffer intolerably.
“Learn your rules,” was her brief answer. I thanked her, barely
hiding my disappointment.
The next evening she requested me to recite the rules. I could only
remember a fraction of them, and for each of those I had forgotten, I received
a stroke of the cane. That night I rehearsed them into the night. The same
procedure was repeated the following evening, and the one after that. I never
managed to remember more than half the rules. Night after night I repeated
them to myself, muttering them over and over until I fell asleep with them on
my lips, and dreamt of crowds of slaves chorusing them while their Masters
and Mistresses stood by, waiting for them to slip up. I held them in every
available space in my mind, finding deposit boxes for each and every one.
On the final day of my visit, the Mistress took me to a part of the
house I had not been in before. It comprised a small dark room, one wall of
which was covered by a curtain. The walls, floor and ceiling had hooks,
which my temporary Mistress chained me to, and I was quite unable to move.
On drawing back the curtain, she revealed a glass window, looking onto a
banqueting hall. I gathered that I was invisible to the banqueters, but able to
watch their proceedings from above.
One entered the room with the Mistress’s slave. He sat among the
other guests, while she served dinner. The sight of her accepting food and
commands from my Master; watching him tease and make love to her, undid
me. I watched in horror, and felt my horse stamping around in its stable,
gathering fear, tossing and snorting and kicking in fury. I stood in front of it,
and it pawed the ground, head high, eyes mean and narrow, ears flat against
its head. Without thinking, I began rehearsing the rules, aloud, speaking them
to the horse in an attempt to calm it down. I stepped slowly towards it, but it
reared up, legs flailing wildly above my head, and I desperately wanted to
260
slave, unchained
______________________________________________________________
protect myself from that rain of hooves but my arms were tied, and I couldn’t
move them. I gripped the chains that held me, and continued to recite the
rules, pitching each one at it, in defiance of its strength and anger. The horse
continued to crash around its stable, threatened to fall against me and crush
me, but I had no other defence than the rules. I had to trust them. I delivered
each one, urging the horse to hear and understand them, to learn finally that
One’s commitment to me was stronger and more powerful than any other
combination of his actions. And as I finally realised this myself, the door of
the stable swung open, and the horse flew out, its main and tail leaping like
ribbons in the wind until, a graceful silhouette, it stopped to graze quietly at
the top of a hill.
I opened my eyes. One stood in front of me, and released each of the
chains. They fell to the floor in a pool of silver around me. I felt like I would
lift off the ground and float away. I dug my toes down to remain steady, and
felt One’s arms holding me tightly, keeping me down.
One took out the papers on which the hundred-or-so rules of our
relationship were written, and tore them up. “There is only one rule now,” he
said. “You are my slave, and I am your Master.”
Each morning, before it gets light, I rise. I go down to the sea in my
bare feet. I stand on the beach and let my toes curl around the cold stones.
Sometimes I feel too light, without the chains, and I dig my toes down into
the beach for steadiness.
I turn to face the east, head raised, shoulders back. “Come up, sun,”
I command.
And it does.
PART VII
Sexuality in Aesthetic Spaces
Perverting Performances of Collecting and Exhibiting:
A Study of Two U.S. Sex Museums
Jennifer Tyburczy
Abstract: This paper explores performances of collecting and exhibiting
sexual artefacts at two contemporary museums in the United States. These
museums are the Museum of Sex (New York) and the World Erotic Art
Museum (Miami Beach). The application of performance studies to the
collection and display practices that occur in these spaces encourages a transdisciplinary analysis that includes historical research, theoretical enquiry,
personal observations and interactions with sexual artefacts, and interviews
with various populations in contemporary sex museums. A performance
studies framework also invites an approach to the collection and exhibition of
erotic materials as processual practices affected and expressive of historically
contingent cultural and social norms. This paper looks at select collection and
exhibition practices at two U.S. sex museums in order to trace where
collectors, visitors, and curators deviate or conform to historical precedents
of erotic object circulation. “Perverting” and “haunting” function as poetic
and methodological concepts, which aim at sensually and erotically engaging
the deviating or conforming dynamics of the performances and spaces I
encounter.
Keywords: collecting, exhibiting, haunting, L’Origine Du Monde, museum,
Museum of Sex, performance, perverting, sex, World Erotic Art Museum.
A note on the move from presentation to page: This paper requires a body,
my body, at least in the mind’s eye. A white queer female academic, I also
perform as Jacques Lacan, Miss Naomi Wilzig, and the laughter of straight,
white men.
1.
Act I: Lacan’s Vulva
The year is 1957. Imagine you’re an elite white gentleman visiting
the summer home of the famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This is La
Prévôté, purchased by Lacan and his wife Sylvia Bataille after World War II
and situated in Guitrancourt, near Mantes-la-Jolie. You’re led into a studiolibrary, Lacan’s atelier, where books and art objects decorate the walls and
shelves. In a corner of the room, sits a peculiar surrealist landscape painted
upon a wooden panel. Lacan fingers a mechanism, and somewhat
mysteriously, the panel slides away.
264
Perverting Performances of Collecting and Exhibiting
_____________________________________________________________
“Come closer gentlemen,” he may have begun to this small group of
well-dressed colleagues and close acquaintances staring silently at the
painting before them.
“I have acquired a most excellent example of what I’m discussing in
my lectures these days. I trust you will keep your word and mention none of
this to anyone, not even my wife over dinner. You may already be familiar
with the piece painted by Gustave Courbet in 1866 for Khalil Bey, the
Turkish diplomat. Well, it’s passed through many hands since, and though
you may laugh at the mechanism which I’ve had made to conceal it, believe
me, she’s seen more reclusive days … L’Origine du Monde … Take it in.
“You may notice the redness of the nipples and around the vulva
suggesting that the woman has just been penetrated. You may notice the
crumpled nightshirt exposing her breasts, suggesting that she is now asleep,
her body becoming even more vulnerable to the seducer? the aggressor? the
lover? the painter? the spectator? Does it excite you? Does it terrify you? Of
what does it remind you?”
Lacan’s scene of unveiling The Origin of the World, as well as my
partially fabricated rendition of it, represents only one pause in the painting’s
history of being collected and displayed before an audience. I’ve chosen to
highlight this moment to playfully and performatively suggest how practices
and histories of collecting and exhibiting impact artefacts and the bodies
represented in these artefacts. As erotic or sexual objects historically and
currently circulate alongside rhetorics of fear, secrecy, shame, and elitism,1 I
argue that studying and restaging their circulation histories in the present
exposes and re-imagines how certain bodies have been invited or coerced to
perform in these environments of display.
In drawing attention to the human action involved in how objects are
inherited, acquired, exhibited, organised, and catalogued, I approach
collecting and exhibiting as performances. Collecting and exhibiting
materials are everyday practices that propel objects and ideas through space
and time; they are also highly constructed practices haunted by cultural,
social, and political prerogatives that govern and organise vertical hierarchies
of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In Ghostly Matters, renegade sociologist
Avery Gordon speaks of the pedagogical uses of recognising and
communicating with ghosts: “To study social life one must confront the
ghostly aspects of it. This confrontation requires (or produces) a fundamental
change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of
production.”2 Employing performance as both an object and alternative
critical method of study simultaneously renders tacit dominant hegemonies
explicit and creates tactical disjunctures that playfully depart from historical
contexts of desire. In recognising and restaging how objects are historically
haunted, the meaning of the artefact, that is how it socially resonates with its
Jennifer Tyburczy
265
______________________________________________________________
spectators and what kinds of environments it inspires, is queered, or as I am
arguing in this essay, perverted.
Perverting historical performances of collection and exhibition
refers neither to corruption nor pathology, but to everyday sexual
destabilisations, turns, or curves in normative human performances of
framing and sharing sexual artefacts. For the rest of this essay, I will explore
select ethnographic and observational moments with people and exhibits at
two U.S. museums that collect and display sexual artefacts. Insofar as these
spaces de-privatise, re-caption and re-spatialise sex and sexual artefacts for
communal audiences, “sex museums,” as I refer to them, offer sites for
exploring what happens to bodies when sexual artefacts emerge from private
collections to public, communal exhibitions. How sex museums transform
ghostly hauntings into readable display spaces and whether these spaces
pervert and/or continue past performances of collecting and exhibiting
sexualised bodies will be my primary focus.
2.
Act II: Museums and Miss Naomi Wilzig
She enters an antique shop in Paris with a sign hung around her neck
that reads, “Je cherche de l’art erotique.” In the past, she would have to ask
clerks for their erotic art holdings; few put sexual artefacts in plain view of
their customers for fear of offending them. Instead they climbed wooden
ladders, grasped behind tall cabinets, or disappeared into back rooms to
reveal their covert collections.
“He told me I had to ask for it,” says seventy-one-year-old Miss
Naomi Wilzig, relating some advice given to her by an English-speaking art
dealer in The Seattle Times. And Wilzig doesn’t speak French. For fourteen
years, she travelled the Americas and Europe asking for erotic art and, when
linguistically necessary, emblazoning her body with her quest. Wilzig now
personally owns a 4,000-piece collection and in 2005 financed the opening of
the World Erotic Art Museum (WEAM) in Miami Beach, Florida.
“She’s really a maverick,” said Laura Henkel, professor of erotic art
at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. “I’ve been hearing
about her for years, because there are very few women who have a private
collection as extensive as hers, and even less who are willing to show it.”3
While Henkel and various online newspaper and blog accounts express
fascination with her collection and exhibition adventures,4 none of them
investigate what a seventy-one-year-old Jewish grandmother and banker’s
widow, who travels around the world for the purpose of collecting erotica is
actually transgressing against.
Working through the lens of performance and how Wilzig’s body,
particularly her gendered body, perverts the continuities of a male-driven
history of collecting and exhibiting sexual artefacts is, I argue, where the
transgressive disjuncture occurs. Focusing on Wilzig’s gendered interruption
266
_____________________________________________________________
fosters a feminist critique of human performances and environments rather
than a reading of the misogynistic and/or the subversive aspects embedded in
a text or object. In a sense then, studying the story of “Miss Naomi,” as her
staff refers to her, perverts not only a tradition of viewing women as trite
erotic stimulants but also recalibrates theory to consider both what’s inside
and outside the frame.
What’s outside the frame is an exhibition history of utilising the
female body as the creative catalyst or the frame itself, but rarely as the
framer. In her article, “Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on
Museums,” Gaby Porter laments the lack of museum space dedicated to
exploring women’s history. She seeks a remedy that goes beyond mere
insertion of women’s historical thematics, noting that:
I began to understand that the differences between the
histories of men and women as represented in the museum
lay at much deeper levels. I recognized that the whole
structure of museum - abstract knowledge and organization
as well as concrete manifestations of buildings, exhibitions
an collections - was built upon categories and boundaries
which embodied assumptions about men and women,
masculine and feminine.5
The historical relationship between women and sexual artefacts further
exacerbates any discussion of gender equality in the museum world. In The
Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick traces our human interactions with what
came to be called “pornography” in the nineteenth century to the unearthing
of sexual artefacts at Pompeii around 1745. Kendrick’s “secret museum”
functions like a private club, in which books, artefacts, and other sexual
materials are covertly catalogued and sparingly circulated or displayed only
to those individuals above corruption, namely white, elite males. In The
Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant theorises the
concept of “infantile citizenship,” in which women and children are lumped
together as hyper-vulnerable bodies in need of state protection from erotic
and pornographic materials.6 Berlant suggests that the concept of a secret
museum is alive and well.
In certain ways, Wilzig bravely stares down the history of the
“secret museum” concept, and not only in terms of its gender script. The
public display of her publicly amassed erotic art collection continues to
evoke shock, awe, repulsion, and ambivalence, especially when her critics
and fans consider her orthodox Jewish background. Even for Wilzig it was
her Jewishness, not necessarily her gender, which caused her the most fear as
she contemplated opening the museum:
Jennifer Tyburczy
267
______________________________________________________________
Tyburczy: So you said you were nervous about your rabbi
finding out?
Wilzig: …He always said, “why are you (I would always
say I was in Florida) - why are you going to Florida so
much? What are you doing in Florida that you can’t do
here?” He asked me so many times that one day I said to
him, I said “Rabbi, do you want to know the real truth why
I’m in Florida?” He says, “Yes, of course.” I said, “I do
something that is unusual for a woman to do.” He looks up
at me. I said, “I do something that’s more unusual for an
orthodox [Jewish] woman to do.” ‘Cause our temple even
had segregated seating between the men and the women, it
was such a religious organisation. “I do something that
even an Orthodox woman doesn’t do.” [To which the rabbi
replies] “Yes, what?” I said, “I have become the country’s
leading authority on erotic art.”… He looks up at me and
he says, “You’re a smart woman. I always knew you’d do
something important.” That lifted a stone from my chest
and from my heart and from then on, there was no stopping
me.7
While Wilzig clearly cracks the mould in many areas of erotic object
circulation, her application of World Erotic Art to her museum also
influences how her collection will resonate with visiting publics. Wilzig and
her staff have done very little to historicise the diverse materials in WEAM;
and the ways in which these materials are arranged, with non-Western
artefacts, for example, labelled as “ethnographic,” continues histories of
displaying these artefacts as primarily anthropological in value or second-tier
to the high art aesthetic historically associated with Western artistic
traditions. While the museum world at large and the specific genre of the sex
museum enterprise may still be driven by male desire, claiming Wilzig as a
female renegade is complicated by her assignation of artistic merit to
traditionally taxonomised artefacts.
3.
Act III: Sexed Spaces Revisited
The Museum of Sex (MoSEX) is a veritable haunted house. Located
in what was once known as the Tenderloin District, a place of teeming sexual
commerce, the building was originally a brothel called The Reform Club.8
From Anthony Comstock’s “vice squad” raids in the 1890s to Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani’s anti-porn zoning laws in the 1990s, the area is now a
gentrified, commercialised hub just a smidge off the beaten track of tourists
arriving from Penn Station or passing their New York vacation in the vicinity
of Times Square. The existence and success of MoSEX may be paradoxically
268
_____________________________________________________________
attributed both to the demand for more publicly sexualised spaces in a
“cleaned-up” New York directed by family values politicos and to the closure
of adult cinemas, porn shops, brothels, strip joints, and bathhouses that had
formerly inhabited the Midtown Manhattan area. A for-profit business that
cannot solicit donations as tax-deductible or seek aid from charitable
foundations and government cultural programs, MoSEX encountered the
strange conundrum of being haunted by and replacing these other sexual
locales, when the New York State Board of Regents refused to accredit it as a
museum, allegedly saying that their name made a mockery of the institution.9
MoSEX’s exhibit “Stags, Smokers & Blue Movies: The Origins of
the American Pornographic Film” self-reflexively plays with this haunting
presence/absence. Not unlike Lacan’s private studio unveiling of The Origin,
the curatorial team re-staged atmospheric elements of the smoke-filled, semipublic spaces where men once gathered to watch then illicit material.
[Boisterous masculine laughter interrupts the scene, followed by
whistling, clapping, and other unanimous ejaculations.10] You hear this
exhibit before you see it. Recorded laughter and chants reminiscent of
sporting events pipe through the walls. So prompted, I combed the hazy, blue
room for the group of men who must have thought something was
hysterically funny. I soon realised I was part of the exhibit; my femininegendered performance became necessary for shifting and retaining the
affective atmosphere of this once clandestine scene. The films were projected
down onto large, white blocks in two columns, separated by an eye-level
partition where one could read printed information on the technology, the
spaces, and the bodies included in these early pornographic films. The
positioning of the partition was strategic: I could enjoy my pornographic
consumption without looking into the eyes of another person; I could be
aroused or discomfited and hide it at the same time. In one of the small
booths lining the left side of the exhibit, interviews with performers,
spectators, and producers described the dynamic between bodies, spaces, and
erotic energy. The hullabaloo, apparently, was a defence mechanism, a way
of laughing off one’s “boner.” Anyone who showed too much arousal was a
dangerous participant; the creation of a homoerotic scenario seemed the
greatest fear.
On the one hand, MoSEX’s “Stag” exhibit reanimates a historically
dated atmosphere of rebellious male consumption of pornography; on the
other hand, it mimics that scene, interrupting this history by inviting diverse
museum publics into a new communal history of stag consumption. The way
the exhibit’s mechanics sensually disengage live bodies ironically plays on
the suppression of desire in past stag showings and the predicament of all sex
museums: you can look, but dare you noticeably get aroused? But while
certain scenographic elements create a disjuncture or a perversion in the
Jennifer Tyburczy
269
______________________________________________________________
male-orchestrated history of collecting, exhibiting, and consuming stag porn,
one ghost gets short shrift, and it’s definitely a queer one.
Rendering queer erotic subjectivities publicly visible is not always
politically or socially advantageous; nevertheless, the haunting/absence of the
queer body and the easily missed mention of homoerotic fear as part of the
affective energy of the stag exhibit signals a convenient omission that
inevitably limits reception potentials, particularly for queer-identified
visitors. One visitor I spoke to called MoSEX, a “museum for straight
people.” Another lamented the lack of attention given to alternative
sexualities, like kink and leathersex. Another visitor, a photographer working
on the intersection of disability and sexuality, argued that transgendered
people were only portrayed as stage performers, rather than discussed in light
of their everyday performances. A staff member admitted that the space
dedicated to queer representation was “definitely coming up short.”11
Definitely, MoSEX represents a sexual space caught between
innovation and tradition, as it tries to wiggle its way through the competitive
(and conservative) museum market with the pay stubs of its visitors (fifteen
dollar price tags often immediately thrown away to “hide the evidence”) as
the primary revenue. How political and social performances outside the
museum inform what MoSEX’s curators and staff confidently exhibit and
highlight for their audiences (or even who they project those audiences to be)
both perverts and conforms to what is currently and historically regarded as
decorous sexual consumption in public. Certainly MoSEX need not be all
things to all people, but in a cleaned up New York, the effects of which most
severely impact queer sexual spaces, and with a sizeable queer visitor
demographic, the worthy project of revealing the tacit hegemony of straight
male sexuality would also benefit from embracing the sensual texture of
homoeroticism in a museum.
4.
Coda: Desiring the Ghost
If queerness exists as a suppressed feeling in the collecting and
exhibiting practices of some sex museum projects, then other bodies or
embodied erotics serve as supporting actors, only to be erased when the time
comes for textual or verbal exegesis. Beginning this essay with Courbet’s
L’Origine du Monde and discussing Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, its conceptual
rationale inspired by critical race theorists and wordsmiths like
novelist/analyst Toni Morrison and legal scholar Patricia Williams, inevitably
reminds me of another Courbet painting, his 1855 L’Atelier. The artist’s
studio depicted in the painting nearly doubles my earlier depiction of Lacan’s
atelier: a room, mostly filled with other male artists and spectators with
Courbet as the centerpiece, surrounded by a white dog, a small child, and a
white naked woman. Shifting the gaze to the far right of this triumvirate,
Charles Baudelaire hunches over a book, and behind him, the barest traces of
270
_____________________________________________________________
what seems like an erased figure, revealed in an x-ray cleaning to be Jeanne
Duval, Baudelaire’s “black” lover. In “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of
Manet’s Olympia,” Jennifer DeVere Brody uses the removal of Duval’s body
from the scene of creative inspiration to support her larger argument on the
overall neglect of black female figures within art historical criticism, read
here as revelatory of sexual politics: “Presumably, most viewers, past and
present, do not desire the black woman, if they see her at all.”12 Brody’s
application of Duval’s erasure returns me to Lacan’s atelier, my mimicry of
that fabricated scene, and the importance of considering the intersection of
desire, pleasure, and power in the circulation of erotic artefacts. The
marginalisation of non-white bodies in histories of erotic object circulation
practically demands the application of haunting and performance to access
these archives.
Applying Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling,” Gordon
argues that
haunting describes a practical consciousness that “is always
more than a handling of fixed forms or units.” Haunting
describes just those “experiences to which the fixed forms
do not speak at all, which…they do not recognize.”13
Histories of the erotic oftentimes elude concrete solidification into words or
objects, dealing more in the realm of memory, atmosphere, affect, and
embodied knowledge. Sex may be the subject matter, and erotica the content
of the sex museum enterprise, but haunting most certainly is the conduit and
creative avenue through which sexual history can be unearthed, re-enacted,
and responsibly recaptured with a difference.
Notes
1
For examples, see W Kendrick, The Secret Museum: Pornography in
Modern Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1987; L Berlant,
The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and
Citizenship, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 1997; M
Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer
Life, Free Press, New York, 1999; and L Duggan and ND Hunter, Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, Routledge, New York, 1995. Also, see
S Gilman, ‘Black Bodies/White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female
Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature’, Critical
Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, Autumn 1985, pp. 204-242, and JD Brody, Impossible
Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, Duke University
Press, Durham, 1998, for a more in-depth consideration of how race and
Jennifer Tyburczy
271
______________________________________________________________
gender, particularly for black women, intersect to complicate and promote the
circulation of sexual hierarchies. For a consideration of how contemporary
sexual politics continue to be haunted by past racial/sexual constructions see
PH Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender, and the New
Racism, Routledge, New York, 2004.
2
AF Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2001, p. 7.
3
C Woods, ‘Florida grandmother opens erotic-art museum’, The Seattle
Times, 15 October 2005, viewed on 5 November 2006,
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002564010_erotic17.ht
ml>.
4
MagicCityBlogger, ‘Peep Show’, Miami: See it Like a Native, 21 March
<http://miamiandthebeaches.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_miamiandthebeaches
_archive.html>; A du Bois-Ivy, ‘You’re Sexy, Miss Naomi’, “The” Mrs.
Astor, 15 October 2005, viewed on 2 September 2006,
<http://themrsastor.blogspot.com/2005/10/youre-sexy-miss-naomi.html>;
‘Summer Happenings ’06’, Miami News Times, July 2006, viewed on 20
October 2006, <http://www.miaminewtimes.com/php/miasummer/july.htm>;
I Ambrosia, ‘Miss Naomi Wilzig - Erotic Artist’, Metroblogging Miami, 12
October
2006,
viewed
on
17
October
2006,
<http://miami.metblogs.com/archives/2006/10/miss_naomi_zilw.phtml>.
5
G Porter, ‘Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums’,
in BM Carbondell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts,
Blackwell, Malden, Massachusetts, 2004, pp. 104-116, p. 105.
6
L Berlant, ‘The Theory of Infantile Citizenship’, in Berlant, op. cit., pp. 2554.
7
Naomi Wilzig, Personal Interview, 14 November 2006.
8
I am very grateful to my colleague, Theresa Smalec, also a PhD candidate
in Performance Studies (at New York University) and a past volunteer at the
Museum of Sex, for sharing with me the history of the area and the building
in which MoSEX is located.
9
See comments made by Senior Curator, Grady Turner, and MoSEX owner,
Daniel Gluck, versus Tom Dunne on Board of Regents, who claimed MoSEX
eventually and mysteriously withdrew their application from the Board of
Regents: J D’Angelo, ‘Sex in the City: Nation’s First Sex Museum Opens in
New York’, Fox News.com, 27 September 2002, viewed on 20 August 2006,
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,64189,00.html>; and FM Winship,
‘Sex Museum has a rough first year’, United Press International, 28 October,
2003, viewed on 20 July 2006,
<http://www.aegis.com/news/upi/2003/UP031008.html>.
272
_____________________________________________________________
10
During the presentation of this paper, I played a recording of myself and
three gay male friends who replaced the straight or performing straight men
aurally present in the historical scene of the MoSEX exhibit. We vocally
performed “straightness” and “masculinity,” stylising our performance from a
recording of the soundtrack that played in the MoSEX exhibit; this
soundtrack, in turn, was stylised from the memory of straight male
performances of consuming stag porn in the early and mid-twentieth century.
11
Visitor and MoSEX staff, Personal Interviews, September 2006.
12
JD Brody, ‘Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia’, Theatre
Journal, vol. 53, no.1, March 2001, pp. 95-118, p. 35.
13
R Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1977, p. 130; quoted in AF Gordon, op. cit., p. 200.
Bibliography
Ambrosia, I, ‘Miss Naomi Wilzig - Erotic Artist’, Metroblogging Miami, 12
October
2006,
viewed
on
17
October
2006,
<http://miami.metblogs.com/archives/2006/10/miss_naomi_zilw.pht
ml>.
Berlant, L, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina,
1997.
du Bois-Ivy, A, ‘You’re Sexy, Miss Naomi’, “The” Mrs. Astor, 15 October
2005,
viewed
on
2
September
2006,
<http://themrsastor.blogspot.com/2005/10/youre-sexy-missnaomi.html>.
Brody, JD, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian
Culture, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998.
Brody, JD, ‘Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia’, Theatre
Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, March 2001, pp. 95-118.
Collins, PH, Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender, and the New
Racism, Routledge, New York, 2004.
D’Angelo, J, ‘Sex in the City: Nation’s First Sex Museum Opens in New
York,’ Fox News.com, 27 September 2002, viewed on 20 August
2006, <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,64189,00.html>.
Duggan, L, and ND Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture,
Routledge, New York, 1995.
Gilman, S, ‘Black Bodies/White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female
Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and
Literature’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, Autumn 1985, pp. 204242.
Jennifer Tyburczy
273
______________________________________________________________
Gordon, AF, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2001.
Kendrick, W, The Secret Museum, University of California Press, Berkeley,
1987.
MagicCityBlogger, ‘Peep Show’, Miami: See it Like a Native, 21 March
<http://miamiandthebeaches.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_miamiandth
ebeaches_archive.html>.
Porter, G, ‘Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums’,
in BM Carbondell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts,
Blackwell Publishing, Malden, Massachusetts 2004, pp. 104-116.
‘Summer Happenings ’06’, Miami News Times, July 2006, viewed on 20
October 2006,
<http://www.miaminewtimes.com/php/miasummer/july.htm>.
Warner, M, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer
Life, Free Press, New York, 1999.
Williams, R, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1977.
Winship, FM, ‘Sex Museum has a rough first year’, United Press
International, 28 October, 2003, viewed on 20 July 2006,
<http://www.aegis.com/news/upi/2003/UP031008.html>.
Woods, C, ‘Florida grandmother opens erotic-art museum’, The Seattle
Times, 15 October 2005, viewed on 5 November 2006,
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002564010_er
otic17.html>.
.
Polite Eroticism and Sexual Ambiguity:
The Curious Case of Dora Gordine (1895-1991)
Jonathan Black
Abstract: This essay grows from my research on Dora Gordine, a major
twentieth century British sculptor, as Research Fellow based at Dorich
House, the home she had built for herself in 1936 and where she lived until
her death in 1991. The House is now a museum devoted to her sculpture,
owned by Kingston University, London. Born into a prosperous middle-class
Anglophone German-Jewish family in Latvia, Gordine grew up in Estonia,
then still a part of the Russian Empire. She was able to remain in Estonia
after World War I and with an Estonian passport moved to Paris in the mid
1920s. There she first came to public attention with the exhibition of socalled “exotic” portrait heads such as The Chinese Philosopher (1925) and
Guadeloupe Negress (1926-1927). From the outset, however, commentators
on such works found it extremely difficult to assess how they fitted into the
existing paradigm of the racially “exotic” as eroticised and therefore
compliantly available. Indeed, one British critic concluded that much of the
“unnerving oddness” of her work lay in its singularly elusive and “polite
eroticism.”
Key Words: British sculpture, Dorich House, the Exotic, gender roles, Dora
Gordine, Neo-Classicism, Paris, sexual ambiguity, World War II.
1.
Introduction: Fluid Identities
Dora Gordine and her second husband, the Honourable Richard
Hare (1907-1966), whom she married in November 1936, can be situated as
one among a number of “unconventional” couples in the British cultural
world between the two world wars. They were unusual in the sense of being
part of happy, apparently normative, heterosexual marriages when both were
probably essentially homosexual in preference.1 One thinks of Harold
Nicholson and Vita Sackville West, or Elsie de Wolfe (ca.1865-1950) and Sir
Charles Mendl (1871-1958); de Wolfe, intriguingly, was one of Gordine’s
first and most important patrons in Paris in the late 1920s.2 There are also
other even more difficult to classify relationships: Virginia and Leonard
Woolf, the former seemingly inclined to lesbianism, the latter principally
heterosexual in inclination; Dora Carrington’s obsession with the resolutely
homosexual Lytton Strachey, who in turn was in love with Carrington’s
estranged husband Ralph Partridge; and Gordine’s friend, the explorer and
travel writer Freya Stark (1883-1993), capable of intense heterosexual
“crushes” and yet married to a homosexual, Stuart Perowne. (The marriage
was not a success and they separated after a torturous five years together.3)
276
Polite Eroticism and Sexual Ambiguity
______________________________________________________________
Such relationships would tend to suggest that sexual boundaries and
categorisations during the period from the 1920s to the 1940s, especially
among British aristocratic circles and the upper-middle class, involved in
cultural activities and the arts, were far more contingent, unstable, and fluid
than is commonly imagined.4
Gordine’s own fluid sexual preference may well have been shaped
by the particular historical and economic circumstances in which she grew up
and reached adulthood. In an era of immense political upheaval and
revolution, which led to the death of her beloved father, the question of
whom one could trust, whom one could look to for support, protection, and
validation, was of paramount importance. Her identity, post-1918, became all
the more fragmented as a result of the legacy of war on the Eastern Front.
She had been born in 1895 in Latvia, part of a Russian Empire that no longer
existed. She spent her formative teenage years in Tallinn, Estonia - capital of
another former province within that Empire which had only enjoyed formal
independence since 1920. Her class and religious position was also rather
ambiguous. She had been born into a comfortable, bourgeois, professional,
assimilated Russo-Jewish family. Her father Mark (also known as Morduch)
was a Russian businessman while her mother, Emma Esther, was Latvian;
both were Jewish, though the former was not observant.5 However, at some
point during the civil wars that rent Latvia, Estonia, and Russia between 1918
and 1921, Mark Gordin was killed or died from a seizure before he could be
executed by the Bolsheviks, and the family lost much of its money and
property.6
Throughout her life Gordine strenuously denied being Jewish. When
she first arrived in Paris in 1924 she was Estonian. Four years later,
publicising her first solo show in London, she claimed repeatedly to be
Russian, while giving the distinct impression that her landowning aristocratic
family had been murdered during the Revolution.7 In fact she knew full-well
that her mother, one elder sister, and one elder brother were still alive and
living in Tallinn, while another elder brother had settled in London where he
had taken British citizenship. Gordine became a British citizen in September
1930, when she married a Dr George Garlick (1886-1958) of the Malay
Medical Service, who was some nine years her senior. She had no children
from either of her two marriages. When pressed to explain why this was the
case, Gordine replied that she did not lack “normal” maternal instincts but
considered her sculptures to be her “children,” while also hinting that her
second husband Richard, as a stereotypical absent-minded English academic,
required particular attention to avoid him neglecting his health and
appearance.8
Jonathan Black
277
______________________________________________________________
2
Les Années Folles and the Anxious Thirties
A. Deceit
Image 1: Deceit, 1924
bronze, 23.2 x 15.2 x 13.1 cm
(Collection: Dorich House Museum,© Kingston University)
One of Gordine’s earliest known pieces, this bronze suggests she
took a decidedly cynical view of normative femininity. The physiognomy
and physique of the figure strongly suggests that this is a self-portrait.
Gordine presents herself as languorously predatory - a combination of Art
Nouveau femme fatale, New Testament Salomé with the head of John the
Baptist, and sensuous Delacroix/Ingres Odalisque. Yet there is a very modern
bite in Gordine’s work, acknowledging that she is prepared to assume any
guise, don any mask, to achieve her goals. Her dreamy smile of self-satisfied
contentment is positively post-coital. The power she has exercised over her
male victim, propped negligently on a fleshy thigh, is reminiscent of that
wielded to such deadly effect by the heroines of August Strindberg (18491912), Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), and Frank Wedekind (1864-1918).
278
______________________________________________________________
B. The Chinese Philosopher
Image 2: The Chinese Philosopher, 1926
bronze, 46.7 x 22.3 x 22 cm
(Collection: Dorich House Museum, © Kingston University)
Jonathan Black
279
______________________________________________________________
This portrait head first brought Gordine critical acclaim, when it was
exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris during May-June 1926. The sitter
was one Chia-Chu Chang (1902-1985), born in a small town near Shanghai.
During the spring of 1926 he and Gordine exchanged highly affectionate
letters, he signing his with the playful pseudonym “Zung Zung.” In the early
1920s, Chang had been sent to the United States to learn English and had
studied firstly at Clark College, Worcester, Massachusetts, and then at
Columbia University, New York. In 1925 he decided to return to China with
one of his four sisters, via the Trans-Siberian Express. A friendship between
a Chinese male and a white Western woman, even in Paris in the twenties,
would have been perceived as deeply shocking and most deplorable. The
popularity of Sax Rohmer’s novels, featuring the sinister Chinese criminal
mastermind Fu Manchu, would suggest that the British public imagined that
the Chinese minority in their midst eagerly sought to kidnap such feckless
women, ply them with opium, and indulge in lucrative white slavery.9
C. Headhunter/Dyak, 1930-1932, bronze, 129.9 x 47.6 x 41.4 cm (Collection:
Dorich House Museum)
This figure was first exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in July 1933
as Male Torso, then at the Royal Academy, London, as Dyak in May 1938.
Dyaks are concentrated in Sarawak and Brunei. In Sarawak the largest group
is the Iban, who live along the coast, followed by the Melanaus Land Dyaks
in the south, and the Kayans, Kenyahs, and Kelabits of the eastern highlands.
The critic and poet of the decadent 1890s Arthur Symons (18651945) was far from being alone in finding the work somewhat unnerving and
confrontational:
It is magnificently masculine and there is an intense
simplicity and that intensity of life which seems to exist in
every limb. She has given him neither head nor feet. What
she gives [him] is the body of a primitive animal, ready to
seize his prey like a wild beast, virile and capable of any
violent action. And you feel the solidity of that immense
weight, what force and reality, what sudden arrested life
[is] in those long arms and furiously clenched hands. When
one has all these qualities, then the sculpture becomes
neither ancient nor modern but a great force of sculpture,
neither of today nor of tomorrow.10
Symons and Gordine first met in July 1933, and he took an instant
liking to her. After she moved permanently to England from Singapore in
1935 and following her marriage to the Hon. Richard Hare (1907-1966) in
November 1936, they remained very close. She certainly thought very highly
280
______________________________________________________________
of his opinions on art, and he was arguably in love with her, becoming all the
more dependent on her friendship after the death of his own wife in 1936.
There is just a hint of their relationship becoming sexualised during the late
1930s. However, Gordine was very adept at conducting flirtatious friendships
with influential men in the British cultural world, men who were
considerably older than herself (even given her elastic approach to a birth
date); i.e. Director of Christies, Sir Alec Martin (1884-1971); former Slade
Professor Fred Brown (1851-1941); former Director of the Wallace
Collection, D. S. MacColl (1859-1948); President of the Royal Institute of
British Architects, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959); art dealer and
celebrated connoisseur George Eumorfopoulos (1863-1939) whom she
referred to fondly as “Eumo” - these five all sat for portrait heads between
1936 and 1938 - as well as the Director of what was then the Tate Gallery of
British Art, James Bolivar Manson (1879-1945), and the recently retired
Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Sir Sydney
Cockerell (1867-1962).11
D. Iran/Goddess of Health, 1930-1932, bronze, 169 x 50 x 40 cm
(Collection: Dorich House Museum).
This bronze was first exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in July
1933 as Iran. Gordine was probably the model; the face certainly resembles a
surprisingly un-idealised self-portrait. In July 1933 Arthur Symons wrote of
Iran that it boldly depicted
a ferocious and savage woman, utterly cruel and formidable
in every feature. She is ugly, savage and barbaric; she
overflows with animal life and there is something almost
stupendous in her concentration, as she is, into an attitude
which might terrify the senses … she reminds me of a
woman in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “She was savage
and wild-eyed and magnificent. And in the hush that had
fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the
immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and
mysterious life seemed to look at her as though it had been
looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate
soul.”12
During the late 1930s and early 1940s Gordine produced a series of
male portrait heads, whose sitters were either homosexuals such as the art
historian John Pope Hennessy (1913-1994), modelled 1938-1939; aristocratic
gossip columnist Charles Chichester; the Marquess of Donegall (1903-1975),
modelled 1937-1938, who twice contracted a marriage blanc;13 travel writer
Robert Byron (1905-1941), modelled 1939; and poet/character actor Sir
Jonathan Black
281
______________________________________________________________
Campbell Mitchell-Cotts (1902-1964), modelled 1939-1940; or else bisexuals
such as the celebrated playwright, actor, and director Emlyn Williams (19051987), modelled 1939.
At the same time she also enjoyed some intense friendships with
strong, forthright, and self-confident women in their late thirties/early forties,
who had made a name for themselves in professions that were widely
regarded as male preserves, such as the intrepid explorer and travel writer
Freya Stark (1893-1993); popular novelist Ethel Sedgwick (1895-1989);
sculptor Hazel Armour (1894-1985); interior designer Elizabeth Denby
(1893-1965); painter Sine Mackinnon (1901-1996); and, from a slightly older
generation, the famous actress Edith Evans (1888-1976), who sat to Gordine
for a remarkable nude full-length portrait in 1937-1938.
282
______________________________________________________________
F. Standing Female Nude (Dame Edith Evans)
Standing Female Nude (Dame Edith Evans) c.1937-1938
bronze 84.5 x 19 x 16.2 cm
Jonathan Black
283
______________________________________________________________
Evans had married a fellow-actor George Booth in 1925, but he died
ten years later from a brain tumour while Evans was on stage in New York.
In November 1935 Evans’s grief was further compounded when her mother
died. She worried about being alone and growing old - she was now fortyseven. In October 1936 she met Alec Guinness and Michael Redgrave in a
new production of The Country Wife. During the period when she was sitting
to Gordine, she fell in love with Redgrave, who was twenty years younger
and recently married to Rachel Kempson with a child. Much to Evans’s
amazement her “five minute love” for Redgrave was passionately
reciprocated, and “she became as one obsessed and, according to close
friends, could think and talk of nothing else.”14 Enjoying a passionate affair
with Redgrave, “[t]he enduring loneliness of her life, a loneliness that was for
the most part self-imposed, had been lifted for a short while.”15
In October 1938 Evans told the journalist Hannen Swaffer:
Posing in the nude was the most amazing experience I have
ever been through … It has made a completely new woman
of me [and] taken away all my inhibitions … It was far
better than being psycho-analysed. It gave me a completely
new idea of myself. It gave me a tremendous selfconfidence and made me see myself in a completely new
light … The experience was a bit frightening, at first, but I
now feel a far happier being.16
By the time the nude figure went on display, the affair with Redgrave had
fizzled out, although they remained close friends. Evans did indeed strike
those close to her as much happier in herself; she had always been intensely
self-conscious about her physiognomy and body shape.17 Post World War II
she found fame as a character actress in films, e.g. in her inimitable turn as
Lady Bracknell in the 1952 production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of
Being Earnest.
3.
Liberation? The Second World War
With the outbreak of the World War II Gordine had to seek new
sitters and to a great extent narrow her artistic horizons, given that it was now
extremely difficult to have work cast, with bronze use strictly rationed and
with the foundries devoted to war production. Early in 1943 she produced a
striking charcoal portrait of ace Soviet sniper and “Heroine of the Soviet
Union” Lyudmilla Pavlichenko (1916-1974) [Private Collection on loan to
Dorich House Museum], who between August 1941 and June 1942 reputedly
killed 309 “fascist invaders.”18 In November 1942 Pavlichenko was lionised
by Eleanor Roosevelt in the United States and then toured arms factories in
284
______________________________________________________________
the southeast of England.19 The sitting was probably arranged by Gordine’s
husband Richard who, by then, was Deputy Director of the Anglo-Soviet
Relations Division of the Ministry of Information - he had been one of its
first members when it was established in October 1941. One wonders how
this commission sat with Gordine’s conscience, given her well advertised
aversion to the Bolsheviks and her claim that they had murdered her father
circa 1920 during the closing stages of the Russian Civil War.20 She hinted to
her close friend, Sir Sydney Cockerell, that she had not found drawing this
“most uncouth Russian Amazon” an enjoyable experience.21
Jonathan Black
285
______________________________________________________________
A. Above Cloud
Image 4: Above Cloud, 1944-1945
bronze, 76 x 33.5 x 18.1cm
286
______________________________________________________________
This figure was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1945
and then at the Leicester Galleries in October of the same year. The model
was a RAF fighter pilot, probably a Flight Lieutenant Eric Keown, who flew
a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain and was a night-fighter pilot by 19441945. Gordine apparently met him in the National Gallery at an exhibition of
official war art, looking at a pastel portrait of himself by Eric Kennington that
was on display. There is also a suggestion from one of Gordine’s models at
the time, one Phyllis Strange, who was in her early twenties and serving in
the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (known as the WAAF), that the sitter was
her boyfriend at the time.22 It was unusual for Gordine to be so interested in a
handsome young man at this time, though she did like to befriend men who
had been exposed to and survived danger. During the war she seemed more
keen to cultivate intense friendships with young, English, upper middle-class
women, who were in uniform with the WAAF, the Auxiliary Territorial
Service (ATS), or the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS),23 and, in many cases,
living far away from home for the first time, no doubt experiencing their first
hetero- and homosexual passions.24 Gordine generally did not take to the
boyfriends of her favourite female models on the grounds that the men were
not worthy of their love; male attentions warped the development of young
women blossoming as they embraced responsible and demanding roles driving ambulances, lorries and fire engines, operating searchlights, barrage
balloons, and radar sets - and Gordine frequently aired her belief that the men
were unlikely to survive the war anyway.
The fate of the model for this figure is unclear. Interviewed nearly
half a century later, Phyllis Strange recalled that she had lost two of her
fighter pilot boyfriends during the war: one in 1942 and the other only weeks
before the war in Europe ended. It is chastening to add that she thought in
1995 that it was virtually impossible to truly communicate to someone who
had not been there what living through the war was like. She was of the
opinion that there was far less promiscuity among her fellow WAAFs, aged
between nineteen and twenty-five, than is commonly supposed, as they were
terrified of getting pregnant. Yet they were also far more emotionally
unbuttoned and sexually experimental than the films of the time would
suggest.25 Sexual experimentation and passion - both hetero- and homosexual
- of the sort described by Joan Wyndham in her hilarious wartime diaries,26
and in the painfully emotionally repressed world evoked by Noël Coward’s
script for David Lean’s Brief Encounter, released in 1945, co-existed side-byside without the participants experiencing any pronounced feelings of
paradox.27
Perhaps an analogy can be drawn between the graceful proportions
of this male body and the famously streamlined elegance of the machine he
flew. Gordine has transformed her fighter pilot into a serene angel looking
down upon the earth - both his playground and hunting ground - which does
Jonathan Black
287
______________________________________________________________
rather suggest that he is dead. She is interested purely in the body, not the
uniform and all the equipment with which a pilot was festooned in his
cockpit - helmet, goggles, radio transmitter, “Mae West” life-preserver
parachute, etc. Gordine may have been inspired to create a figure such as
Above Cloud by contact with the former Commander-in-Chief of RAF
Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, Air Marshal Sir Hugh
“Stuffy” Dowding (1882-1970). According to Gordine, speaking with a
friend in 1978, during the Second World War, Dowding “used to come [to
Dorich House] and gaze at [the] bust of [the] Chinaman [Chinese
Philosopher] because it rested him and gave him inspiration [and] a sense of
peace.”28
B. Laugh of the Moon, c.1944-1945, bronze, 22.5 x 45.5 x 12.6 cm
(Collection: Dorich House Museum).
This bronze figurine was first exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in
October 1945. The sitter was most probably one of a number of pre-war
debutantes known to Gordine, such as Elizabeth Goold-Adams, Phyllis
Strange, and Joan McFadyen. All three were serving either in the WAAF or
in the ATS at the time. Gordine appears to have met them during 1943/1944
via her husband who, as previously noted, occupied a senior position within
one of the most important divisions of the Ministry of Information. The title
is derived from one of the more erotic and risqué Tales of the Thousand and
One Nights translated in 1933 by Gordine’s close friend, the British Museum
Orientalist Arthur Waley (1889-1966). Towards the end of dinner parties at
Dorich House in the 1940s it became something of a tradition for Richard
Hare to read out some of the more overtly erotic, if not pornographic Tales to
entertain, amuse, and titillate the guests, who enjoyed making a show of
being far more shocked that they really were.29 While the body belongs to
Elizabeth or Phyllis or Joan and is of a type that certainly appealed to
Gordine’s hero, the French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944), the
physiognomy belongs to a Buddhist temple carvings of the type she knew
well from visits to Borobudhur in central Java and Angkor Wat in northwestern Cambodia during the five years she lived in Singapore. It is
interesting that Gordine depicts her debutante sitters nude and not wearing
their uniforms, which indicates the distance they had travelled from the
traditionally circumscribed patterns of life that had so narrowed the horizons
for women of their age and class before the war.30
Gordine’s friend, the arts journalist Mary Sorrell, later wrote of
Laugh of the Moon that in this piece:
the model and sculptor are sharing their fun, each rejoicing
in the unaffected and ingenious posture. The girl’s
interfluent masses, vivid and generous, record the lilt of her
288
______________________________________________________________
body, whilst the twist of her head counterbalances the
rebellious legs.31
Innocence is thus savoured with just a hint of polite rebellion within the
context of unimpeachably respectable, classically-informed figurative
sculpture - their wartime service in uniform at least had provided Gordine’s
debutante models with the opportunity to sit disrobed for her, something
which would have been absolutely impossible before September 1939. And
yet, behind the eminently proper façade of Gordine’s career and work, there
dwells the suppressed transgressive, forbidden longings and stifled desires
sacrificed to attain and maintain the respectable social status she craved.32
Notes
1
Richard’s elder brother, William, 5th Earl of Listowel (1906-1997), in his
unpublished memoirs, maintained that he assumed for many years that
Richard was “latently homosexual in orientation.” Archives, Dorich House
Museum, Kingston University.
2
A David, ‘Spectacles de Paris’, Bravo: Le Magazine Moderne, January
1933, p. 32
3
See J Fletcher-Geniesse, Freya Stark: Passionate Nomad, Chatto &
Windus, London, 1999, pp. 326-347.
4
See A de Courcy, Debs At War 1939-1945: How Wartime Changed Their
Lives, Phoenix, London, 2006, pp. 182-206.
5
Gordin Papers, Tallinn Municipal Archives, Tallinn, Estonia.
6
This was the story Gordine told her close friend Sir Sydney Cockerell in
October 1939. S Cockerell, Diaries, entry for 23 October 1939, Add 52677,
Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, British Library, London.
7
See RR Tatlock, ‘At The Galleries’, The Tatler, 17 October 1928.
8
Gordine interviewed in the Surrey Comet, 12 February 1955, p. 5.
9
Rohmer was the pen-name of Englishman Arthur Sarsfield Ward (18831959) who published ten novels featuring Fu Manchu between 1913 and
1939; see C. van Ash, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer, T.
Stacey, London, 1972.
10
A Symons, ‘Sculpture: Dora Gordine at the Leicester Galleries’, The
Spectator, 14 July 1933, p. 45.
11
J Black, ‘A Genius for the Exotic: Dora Gordine, Imperialism and the
Racial Type in Portraiture’, in S MacDougall and R Dickson (eds.),
Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine, Ben Uri Gallery,
London, 2006, pp. 33-41, pp. 33-34.
12
Symons, op. cit., p. 46.
Jonathan Black
289
______________________________________________________________
13
In 1945, Gordine’s friend and model Elizabeth Goold-Adams described
Chichester as a “well-known pansy.” E Goold-Adams, Diary, entry for 30
June 1945, Archives, Dorich House Museum, Kingston University.
14
B Forbes, Ned’s Girl: The Life of Edith Evans, Mandarin, London, 1991, p.
185.
15
Ibid. p. 187
16
H Swaffer, ‘Edith Evans Has Lost Her Inhibitions’, Daily Herald, 27
October 1938, p. 5.
17
Forbes, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
18
Unsigned article in The Times, 7 November 1942, p. 2.
19
Unsigned article in The Times, 25 November 1942, p. 6.
20
Cockerell Diaries, op. cit., entry for 23 October 1939.
21
Gordine to Sir Sydney Cockerell, 27 December 1942, Cockerell Papers,
Add 52718, British Library, London.
22
P Strange, interviewed by B Martin, July 1995, Archives, Dorich House
23
By 1943 just over half a million British women, aged between nineteen and
thirty, were serving with the ATS, the WAAF, and the Women’s Royal
Naval Service (WRNS). See J Gardiner, Wartime. Britain 1939-1945,
Review, London, 2005, p. 510.
24
de Courcy, op. cit., pp. 182-198.
25
Ibid., pp. 165-166 and pp. 183-184.
26
See J Wyndham, Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary, Virago Press, London,
2001, and Love is Blue: A Wartime Diary, Flamingo Press, London, 1987.
27
A Aldgate and J Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930
to the Present, I.B. Tauris, London, 1999, pp. 88-90.
28
P Woodard, Diaries, entry for 19 February 1978, Archives, Dorich House
29
E Main, née Goold-Adams, Diaries, entry for 11 January 1945, Archives,
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University.
30
De Courcy, op. cit., pp. 277-288, and Gardiner, op. cit., pp. 685-686.
31
M Sorrell, ‘Dora Gordine’, Apollo, May 1949, p. 115.
32
Numerous honours did, eventually, come Gordine’s way: in 1949 she was
elected a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors; in 1953 she was
made a Fellow of the Society of Portrait Sculptors and four years later was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce. Gordine did not remarry after Richard’s death
in September 1966 from a heart attack.
290
______________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Aldgate, A, and J Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to
the Present, I.B. Tauris, London, 1999.
Van Ash, C, Master of Villainy: A Biography of Sax Rohmer, T. Stacey,
London, 1972.
Black, J, ‘A Genius for the Exotic: Dora Gordine, Imperialism and the Racial
Type in Portraiture’, in S MacDougall and R Dickson (eds.),
Embracing the Exotic: Jacob Epstein and Dora Gordine, Ben Uri
Gallery, London, 2006, pp. 33-41.
de Courcy, A, Debs At War 1939-1945: How Wartime Changed Their Lives,
Phoenix, London, 2006.
David, A, ‘Spectacles de Paris’, Bravo: Le Magazine Moderne, January
1933, p. 32.
Davies, JA, ‘Emlyn Williams’, in CS Nicholls (ed.), The Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, pp.
479-481.
Fletcher-Genisse, J, Freya Stark: Passionate Nomad, Chatto & Windus,
London, 1999.
Forbes, B, Ned’s Girl: The Life of Edith Evans, Mandarin, London, 1991.
Gardiner, J, Wartime. Britain 1939-1945, Review, London, 2005.
Sorrell, M, ‘Dora Gordine’, Apollo, May 1949, p. 115.
Swaffer, H, ‘Edith Evans Has Lost Her Inhibitions’, Daily Herald, 27
October 1938, p. 5.
Symons, A, ‘Dora Gordine at the Leicester Galleries’, The Spectator, 14 July
1933, pp. 45-46.
Wyndham, J, Love is Blue: A Wartime Diary, Flamingo Press, London, 1987.
Wyndham, J, Love Lessons: A Wartime Diary, Virago Press, London, 2001.
Taste, Sexuality, and Performance:
Staging Same-Sex Desire in Eighteenth-Century France
Daniel Smith
Abstract: This paper explores the concept of taste as applied to
representations of same-sex desire in three obscene plays written during the
eighteenth century in France: La Comtesse d’Olonne (1738), L’Ombre de
Deschauffours (1739), and Les Plaisirs du cloître (1773). I argue that all
three plays depict same-sex desire as a matter of taste, thus suggesting a form
of sexual preference that predates the invention of the homosexual in medical
discourse of the late nineteenth century. In these plays, the taste for particular
genital acts is posited as performative, changeable, and tied to other aspects
of identity. Combining physical and aesthetic aspects, taste is a useful
category for examining the polyvalence of sexual identities in the eighteenth
century.
Key Words: Deschauffours, drama, eighteenth-century, France, Grandval,
libertine, performance, sexuality, taste, theatre.
1.
Introduction
Since Michel Foucault pointed out the invention of the homosexual
by medical discourse, 1870 has stood as a great dividing point in the history
of sexuality.1 Historians of sexuality who study same-sex sexual practices
and discourses in the period before 1870 risk anachronism if they use the
terms “homosexual” or “queer.” And yet it’s really hard to talk about samesex sexual practices and discourses in the period before 1870 without some
kind of shorthand. David Halperin has argued:
It is possible…to recruit the queerness of past historical
periods not in order to justify one or another partisan model
of gay life in the present but rather to acknowledge,
promote, and support a heterogeneity of queer identities
past and present.2
I am committed to exploring the polyvalence of sexual identities in
eighteenth-century France through the study of theatre, in particular sexually
explicit theatre. While scholars within and outside of theatre and performance
studies have deployed the concept of sexual identity as performance or
performativity, few have considered sexuality as a question of taste.
This paper examines the role of taste in representations of same-sex
desire among men in three eighteenth-century French plays. These obscene
plays were not staged in public theatres. Two were ostensibly composed for
292
Taste, Sexuality, and Performance
______________________________________________________________
théâtres de société, private theatres in the homes of aristocrats and actors; the
other circulated in manuscript form and was probably not performed. I argue
that all three plays depict same-sex desire as a question of taste, thus
suggesting that sexual preference is a matter of aesthetic choice.
In La Comtesse d’Olonne (1738), attributed to Grandval, Père, a
young nobleman is cured of his taste for active sodomy through the
persistence of a very attractive woman. Discussions of his sexual identity are
based on practices, and the question of taste is figured crudely in genital
terms. The second play, L’Ombre de Deschauffours (1739) circulated in
pamphlet form. This closet drama maintains a similar distinction in sexual
identity: characters express an aesthetic preference for the vagina or for the
anus. Finally, Les Plaisirs du cloître (1773) depicts a Jesuit who sodomises
his friend Clitandre. The Jesuit begs pardon for his “Italian taste.” Clitandre
forgives him, claiming that “antiphysical taste” is linked to his identity as a
man of the cloth.
2.
La Comtesse d’Olonne: Taste and Reputation
La Comtesse d’Olonne (The Countesse of Olonne) is based on a
gossipy seventeenth-century text about French aristocrats. The characters are
historical figures, but the play involves much exaggeration for theatrical
effect. After awaking from a dream in which she saw the ghost of her former
lover, the Comtesse d’Olonne, named Argénie here, discusses her interest in
the Comte de Guiche, Bigdore, despite rumors that he is a sodomite. Bigdore,
impotent, is unable to perform sexually in her boudoir. The Comtesse derides
Bigdore for his perceived homosexuality. Later, he returns and satisfies her,
whereupon he delivers a speech in praise of the vagina.3
In discussing Bigdore’s reputation with her friend Gélonide, Argénie
paints Bigdore as fond of anal sex, not only with men, but also with women:
A thousand people told me he did not like the cunt.
On the contrary, I have been told he is a sodomite,
And that, pretending to do it doggie-style,
The clever boy, always speaking of the proper road,
As if he were making a mistake, puts it in its neighbour:
By inclination, he is a jerker of dicks
Gélonide (replies):
Who only seeks the cunt because of politics.4
According to the two women, Bigdore’s taste tends toward sex with men, but
he is pursuing female partners in order to improve his reputation. In spite of
his “inclination” to be a “jerker of dicks,” Bigdore attempts a performance of
normative taste. If successful, such a performance would be politically
advantageous to him in court society.
Daniel Smith
293
______________________________________________________________
Despite these reservations, Argénie calls Bigdore to her boudoir. In
a scene that parodies Pierre Corneille’s play Le Cid, specifically the scene in
which the young Roderigue challenges the older Comte de Gormas, the
Comtesse d’Olonne and the Comte de Guiche issue a series of challenges to
one another. Their erotic combat ends with no victor; Bigdore finds himself
impotent. Argénie chastises him for his inability to perform:
But since destiny has made you for asses,
Why the devil would you dream of making cuckolds?
Learn, learn at last to know yourself.
Leave, or I will have you thrown out the window.5
Her insulting comments suggest that Bigdore’s taste for anal sex constitutes
an unchangeable sexual identity, as proven by his inability to engage in
vaginal sex with her. It is his destiny to prefer the anus to the vagina. More
importantly, this is part of who he is. “Know thyself,” says Argénie. Your
tastes are not normative. Stop trying to act like they are.
After berating his traitorous penis, Bigdore presents himself for a
second chance with Argénie, and this time he is successful. The stage
directions say, “Le Comte de Guiche retourne à la comtesse d'Olonne, et s'en
acquitte à son honneur” - “The Comte de Guiche returns to the Comtesse
d’Olonne, and acquits himself with honour.”6 Basking in the afterglow,
Argénie takes back the insults she had previously heaped on Bigdore and
poses a question: “I recognise, my lord, that I was wrong./ But which do you
like better, cunts or asses?/ Now you have the experience of both.”7
Bigdore’s reply suggests that his prior taste for sodomy was a
youthful error; he attributes his preference for anal sex to his lack of
knowledge of the vagina. “I find a lot of difference between cunts and asses,/
And if until now I have preferred asses,/ My queen, it is because cunts were
unknown to me.”8 The role of taste in defining Bigdore’s sexual identity is
framed quite simply as a choice between two orifices, or a matter of
availability. But La Comtesse d’Olonne also suggests two more complex
implications for the relationship between taste and sexual identity: taste can
be changed, and taste can be performed.
3.
L’Ombre de Deschauffours: A Taste-Based Community?
The second play, L'Ombre de Deschauffours is clearly a play text,
but does not seem to have been intended to be performed. It was apparently
inspired by the 1726 trial and execution of a pimp named Deschauffours.
Though his crimes included kidnapping and murder, the only charge listed at
his execution was sodomy. L’Ombre de Deschauffours (The
Ghost/Soul/Shade of Deschauffours) is a one-act philosophical comedy that
depicts its title character in a classically-inspired hell, replete with references
294
______________________________________________________________
to Pluto and Proserpine. Over the course of seven scenes, Deschauffours
discusses life, death, and sex with his fellow denizens of the underworld,
most of whom were either sodomites or police spies in Paris. The central
topic of discussion is a philosophical argument between “Conistes,” partisans
of the vagina, and “Bougres,” who prefer anal sex with male partners.9
This stimulating debate is raised in the context of a pick-up scene:
the Abbé de Servien, a priest, attempts to persuade two young men named
Belleville and Constantin to join him in his carriage. The abbé’s initial
propositions are somewhat coded. When Constantin expresses his suspicions
about the abbé’s true intent, Belleville reveals that he knows exactly what is
going on and that he is willing to have sex with the abbé. Belleville explains
the economic motivations behind his sexual taste as follows:
Belleville: Let these buggers pay, or let them go where they
will. Do women give their cunts without money? Isn’t that
their merchandise? As for me, I make money by giving one
the prettiest asses to anyone who is willing to pay well.
They lift their skirts, and I lift my shirt.10
Constantin acknowledges the validity of Belleville’s utilitarian proposition,
but states that he would be unable to bring himself to behave in the same way
because of his sexual preference: “Everything has its price. As for me, I
would gladly be of your taste, but I do not have your virtue, I admit, I am
merely a Coniste.”11 Whether or not Constantin’s valorisation of Belleville’s
sexuality represents an ironic stance, Belleville’s reply sets up “Bougres” and
“Conistes” as oppositional categories of sexual identity, and raises the
question of which is better: “Don’t the Bougres and the Conistes both take
pleasure in their love? I don’t know which of the two is correct.”12
Conveniently, Belleville and Constantin run into Deschauffours holding court
among a group of Bougres, so they can ask some actual sodomites for their
opinions on this question.
The answers take for granted that sexual desire is a question of taste.
They go on to delve into speculation about the origins of taste. In discussing
the Maréchal de Rais, executed for sodomy in the fifteenth century, one
character suggests that his preference for anal sex may have been determined
by the size and shape of his penis: “Peut-être était-il mal en V[it], c’est-à-dire
qu’il l’eut long et menu comme les chiens…” - “Perhaps he had a poor cock,
that is to say he had a long and thin one like those of dogs.”13 They lament
that they cannot ask the maréchal about this, because he is Pluto’s chief of
police.
A later discussion suggests that there is no accounting for taste, and
that same-sex desire is a valid, natural inclination. Deschauffours states that
Daniel Smith
295
______________________________________________________________
punishing male prostitutes is useless, because it is impossible to change
people’s tastes:
You are silly, you casuists, to want to reform the taste of
human beings. I who have never liked female prostitutes
[garces] or cunts, does that mean I don’t like male
prostitutes [Bardaches]? Everyone has his own appetite,
one drinks, the other eats. In nature, everyone has his own
inclination.14
Constantin, who has taken on the role of “straight but not narrow,” agrees.
His contribution develops the theme that taste is inexplicable and
uncontrollable:
Why the devil do you want to argue about tastes and
flavours? Inclination has its penchant from the moment of
its birth. How can you want to reform it without having full
authority over it?15
It is impossible to have power over taste. In fact, adds Belleville, taste is
mysterious, whimsical, and utterly fungible:
Don’t we see Conistes of different tastes? One likes to fuck
hard, beautiful breasts, to have the pleasure of feeling such
a lovely prison; another likes to manipulate beautiful
buttocks while fucking a cunt. We have even seen some
who were always Conistes, become Bougres saying that
they were converting, leaving one part of the world to take
up the other.16
Expressing the potential difference in tastes among “Conistes,” or
within what would be considered the normative sexual identity, is a strategy
for legitimising the minority sexual identity. The Abbé de Servien takes a
different tack, building an analogy between tastes for drinking and sexual
tastes:
Don’t drinkers provide an example? When they have drunk
wine for a long time, they switch to brandy, or some other
liquor of a similar nature. Thus, I approve of those who,
finding no taste for fucking a woman, take the part of
becoming Bougres in order to feel more pleasure.17
296
______________________________________________________________
For this group of sodomites and friends in the underworld, the concept of
taste provides an ideal opportunity for arguing against repression of their
sexual practices. Three aspects of taste are important here: firstly, taste is
quotidian, existing among drinkers and within normative sexual practices;
secondly, taste is variable, slippery, changing for no tangible reason; and
thirdly and crucially, taste is value-neutral for these characters.
4.
Les Plaisirs du cloître: Acting in Bad Taste?
In the third play, we see how qualifying adjectives make taste less
effective for liberating sexual identities. Les Plaisirs du cloître (The
Pleasures of the Cloister) dates from approximately 1773. Its author is
known only as MDLCAP.18 Drawing on a long tradition in the libertine
novel, the play depicts the sexual experiences of two young novices in a
convent. The protagonist Sister Agathe experiments with fellow novice
Marton, receives corporal punishment from the Mother Superior for having a
dirty book, and eventually hosts an evening of group sex with Marton, her
lover Clitandre, and Clitandre’s friend, a Jesuit priest. The “Note to Readers”
of this play informs that it had not been produced at the time of its
publication: “This comedy was written for a théâtre de société; the difficulty
of distributing the roles has kept it from being performed up to this point…
[The roles of] Clitandre and the Jesuit required actors of a certain force, and
no one dared to take them on.”19
The question of taste and same-sex desire arises when the Jesuit
sodomises Clitandre, while Clitandre is intimately engaged with Sister
Agathe. The stage direction indicates: “Attaquant Clitandre par derrière.” “Attacking Clitandre from behind.” The Jesuit says:
What! While you are fucking each other,
I should stand by with folded arms?
Excuse my robe, Clitandre
In seeing the roundness and the lively whiteness
Of your pretty posterior,
I could not fend off an Italian taste.
Keep going, don’t worry about it:
If necessary, to catch you, we will redouble the pace.20
The association of sodomy with a foreign other is not unusual in early
modern texts. The English often classified sodomy as a French vice, and
French libertine literature is full of Italians who prefer anal sex. What
interests me here is that “Italian” modifies “taste,” and the Jesuit says that he
could not defend himself from an Italian taste. Thus, while taste remains
powerful and inexplicable, there is a clear negative value judgment on the
Jesuit’s Italian taste.
Daniel Smith
297
______________________________________________________________
Clitandre forgives his friend, using a stronger modifier to express
disapproval of the Jesuit’s sexual taste, though he too admits that this taste is
inevitable.
I excuse in you, father, your antiphysical taste:
It is tied to your Jesuit habit.
But when you could achieve the wishes of the fair sex,
How can you prefer this shameful commerce?21
Clitandre’s qualifiers lead the Jesuit to a defence of his “shameful,”
“antiphysical” taste. His apology draws on classical references, citing samesex couples of the past to legitimise same-sex desire in the present.
This taste is not so ridiculous:
Hylas was the minion of Hercules;
It is said that Socrates burned
For Alcibiades and Phaedon;
Jupiter in love kidnapped Ganymede;
Hyacinth amused the leisure of Apollo;
Caesar caressed Nicomedes;
In the queen of nations,
Every Emperor had his boys,
Greece and Italy have been known in all times
To subscribe to this sweet mania;
Even today, with success,
It reigns among the French.22
Though he initially begged pardon for his sexual taste, the Jesuit now seeks
to legitimise it, not only by citing queer ancestors among the Ancients, but
also by pointing out that this taste “reigns among the French.” Still, the
negative modifiers that have been attached to a taste for one’s own sex here
point out the main weakness of using taste as a tactic for sexual liberation:
depending on who defines taste, it is possible for same-sex desire to be in bad
taste.
5.
Conclusion
These three plays’ use of the category of taste to explicate recurring
desire for the same sex parallels similar usage in libertine novels of the
period, in particular the works of Andréa de Nerciat.23 It also merits
comparison to other eighteenth-century definitions of taste, such as the
articles on “goût” in the Encyclopédie,24 and to contemporary theories of
taste, in particular the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.25 The slippery
category of taste - with its ability to be changed, to be performed, to be both
298
______________________________________________________________
quotidian and mysterious, to be value-neutral or to be qualified in order to
express a judgment - presents a productive site for examining a multiplicity
of sexual identities in eighteenth-century France.
Notes
1
M Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, R Hurley
(trans.), Vintage Books, New York, 1990, p. 43
2
D Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002, p. 16, emphasis in the original.
3
NR Grandval, La Comtesse d’Olonne, in JJ Pauvert (ed.), Théâtre érotique
français au XVIIIe siècle, Terrain Vague, Paris, 1993, pp. 99-109.
4
“Et mille gens m’ont dit qu’il n’aimait pas le con./ Au contraire, on m’a dit
qu’il est de la manchette,/ Et que, faisant semblant de le mettre en levrette,/
Le drôle, en vous parlant toujours de grand chemin,/ Comme s’il se trompait,
enfilait le voisin:/ Par inclination, c’est un branleur de pique./ Gélonide: Et
qui cherche le con par pure politique.” Ibid., pp. 104-105. All translations
from the French are my own.
5
“Mais puisque le destin vous a fait pour les cus,/ Pourquoi, diable! songer à
faire des cocus?/ Apprenez, apprenez enfin à vous connaître./ Sortez, ou je
vous fais jeter par la fenêtre.” Ibid., p. 107.
6
Ibid., p. 108.
7
“Je reconnais, seigneur, qe j’étais dans l’abus./ Or, qu’aimez-vous le mieux
ou des cons ou des cus?/ A présent vous avez de tous deux connaissance.”
Ibid., p. 108.
8
“Je fais des cons aux culs beaucoup de différence,/ Et si jusqu’à présent j’ai
mieux aimé les cus,/ Reine, c’est que les cons ne m’étaient pas connus.”
Ibid., p. 108.
9
Anonymous, L’Ombre de Deschauffours, in P Cardon (ed.), Les Infâmes
sous l’Ancien Régime, Cahiers GKC, Lille, 1994, pp. 105-119.
10
“Que ces Bougres payent, ou qu’ils aillent où ils voudront. Est-ce que les
femmes prêtent leurs Cons sans argent? N’est-ce pas leur marchandise? Et
moi, je fais la mienne de donner un cul des plus beaux qu’il y ait à quiconque
le veut bien payer. Elles lèvent leurs jupes, et moi je lève ma chemise.” Ibid.,
p. 112.
11
“Chaque chose vaut son prix. Pour moi, je serais bien de ton goût, mais je
n’ai pas ton mérite, je l’avoue, je ne suis qu’un Coniste.” Ibid., p. 112.
12
“Les Bougres et les Conistes, n’ont-ils pas leur plaisir dans leur amour? Je
ne sais lesquels des deux ont raison.” Ibid., p. 112.
13
Ibid., p. 113.
14
“Vous êtes drôles, vous autres Casuistes, de vouloir réformer le goût du
genre humain. Moi qui n’ai jamais aimé la garce ni le Con, faut-il pour cela
Daniel Smith
299
______________________________________________________________
que je n’aime point les Bardaches? Chacun a son appétit, l’un boit, l’autre
mange. Dans la nature chacun a son inclination.” Ibid., p. 115.
15
“…Pourquoi diable vouloir disputer des goûts et des couleurs?
L’Inclination a son penchant dans le moment de sa naissance. Comment
vouloir la réformer sans avoir pleine autorité sur elle?” Ibid., p. 115.
16
“Ne voyons-nous pas des Conistes de différents goûts? L’un aimera
fo[utre] des tétons durs et beaux, pour avoir le plaisir de sentir une si aimable
prison; l’autre aimera manier de belles fesses en fou[tant] un C[on]. Nous en
avons vu même avoir été longtemps Conistes, et devenir B[ougres] en disant
qu’ils se convertissaient, quittant une partie du monde pour prendre l’autre.”
Ibid., p. 115.
17
“Les Buveurs ne donnent-ils pas l’exemple? Quand ils ont bien bu du vin
pendant longtemps, il se mette à l’eau-de-vie, ou autre liqueur de pareille
nature. Ainsi, j’approuve ceux qui ne trouvant nul goût à f[outre] une femme
prennent le plaisir de devenir Bou[gres] pour sentir plus de plaisir.” Ibid., p.
115.
18
MDLCAP, Les Plaisirs du cloître, in JJ Pauvert (ed.), Théâtre érotique
19
Ibid., p. 245.
20
“Quoi! Pendant que vous vous baisez,/ Je resterais les bras croisés!/
Pardonne à ma robe, Clitandre;/ En voyant l’embonpoint et la vive blancheur/
De ton joli postérieur,/ D’un goût italien je n’ai pu me défendre./ Poursuis, ne
te dérange pas:/ S’il le faut, pour t’atteindre, on doublera le pas.” Ibid., p.
282.
21
“J’excuse en toi, papa, le goût antiphysique:/ Il tient à ton habit jésuitique./
Mais quand d’un sexe aimable on peut combler les voeux,/ Comment peut-on
chérir ce commerce honteux?” Ibid., p. 282.
22
“Ce goût n’est point si ridicule:/ Hylas fut le mignon d’Hercule;/ Socrate
brûla, nous dit-on,/ Pour Alcibiade et Phédon;/ Jupiter amoureux enleva
Ganymède;/ Hyacinthe amusait les loisirs d’Apollon;/ César caressait
Nicomède;/ Chez la reine des nations,/ Chaque empéreur eut ses gitons,/ On
vit dans tous les temps la Grèce et l’Italie/ Suivre cette douce manie;/
Aujourd’hui même avec succès,/ Elle règne chez les Français.” Ibid., pp. 282283.
23
A de Nerciat, Le Diable au corps, Editions Borderie, Paris, 1980.
24
Voltaire, ‘Goût’, in D Diderot (ed.), Encyclopédie, vol. 7, Panckouke,
Genève, 1772, pp. 758-770.
25
P Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, R
Nice (trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
300
______________________________________________________________
Bibliography
Anonymous, L’Ombre de Deschauffours, in P Cardon (ed.), Les Infâmes sous
l’Ancien Régime. Cahiers GKC, Lille, 1994, pp. 105-119.
Bourdieu, P, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, R Nice
(trans.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, R Hurley
(trans.), Vintage Books, New York, 1990.
Grandval, NR, La Comtesse d’Olonne, in JJ Pauvert (ed.), Théâtre érotique
Halperin, D, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 2003.
MDLCAP, Les Plaisirs du cloître, in JJ Pauvert (ed.), Théâtre érotique
Nerciat, A, Le Diable au corps, Editions Borderie, Paris, 1980.
Voltaire, ‘Goût’, in D Diderot (ed.), Encyclopédie, vol. 7, Panckouke,
Genève, 1772, pp. 758-770.
Part VIII
Sex in Literary Dialogue
Beyond Liminality towards Similarity:
The Representation of Desire in Literature
Shani Rousso
Abstract: How have more permissive attitudes to all sexualities influenced
representations of desire within contemporary literature? This paper will
discuss how formally taboo same-sex liaisons are making the transition into
the socially-accepted and more popular fictional domain,; but will also
examine how the experience of being on or outside the boundaries of heteronormative behaviour might be seen as central to sexual identity. Sarah Waters
and Alan Hollinghurst have recently employed historical contexts to explore
sexualities and changing mores: Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Fingersmith
(2002) are set in the late nineteenth century; and The Line of Beauty (2004)
focuses on the homosexual promiscuity of the 1980s. As well as providing a
previously silent, alternative historical voice, to what extent do the writers
consciously recreate and reclaim the shock value of illicit relationships in
order to heighten and accentuate sexual desire by setting their work within
these frameworks? Following the long overdue embrace of sexual diversity,
might there paradoxically also be, as Jonathan Dollimore suggests in his Sex,
Literature and Censorship (2001), a desire to retain the radical and liminal
position of the transgressive? And yet, regardless of the differences in sexual
identity and orientation, are there nonetheless fundamental similarities in how
sexual desire is experienced and portrayed in fiction?
Keywords: desire, historical context, lesbianism, liminality, performance,
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
1.
Representations of Desire in Historical Fiction
Father shook his head, chewing. “Not at all, Miss
Butler, not at all. Don’t let the beards mislead you. For the
oyster, you see, is what you might call a real queer fish now a he, now a she, as quite takes its fancy. A regular
morphodite, in fact!”
“Is that so?”
Tony tapped his plate. “You’re a bit of an oyster,
then, yourself, Kitty,” he said with a smirk.1
My thesis examines the differences, but more particularly the
similarities, in the representation of desire in literature spanning from the
mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and includes classic texts which
have become synonymous with desire in the collective psyche: for example,
304
Beyond Liminality towards Similarity
______________________________________________________________
Madame Bovary, Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lolita,
but also the works of more contemporary writers, such as Alan Hollinghurst,
Angela Carter, Hanif Kureishi, Marguerite Duras, Michel Houellebecq, and
Sarah Waters. While their work, their backgrounds, their sexualities - that is
to say, their sexual identity, preference, and performance - differ
considerably, might it be possible to draw parallels between their approaches
to the representation of desire? What are the hurdles that any writer
encounters when trying to put into words something as intangible as sexual
desire? And how has contemporary fiction been influenced by increasingly
permissive sexual attitudes?
With these questions in mind, this paper focuses on how and why
the fiction of some contemporary lesbian and homosexual authors, which has
recently been accepted into the mainstream, is set in a historical context: for
example, Sarah Waters’ novels Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and Fingersmith
are set in the late nineteenth century; while Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker
prize-winner The Line of Beauty focuses on the homosexual promiscuity of
the 1980s. Why, when they can write freely about lesbianism and
homosexuality, do they choose to write about it at a time when they would
not have been able to? I’m not suggesting that all writers of fiction of this
kind use historical settings, but asking how it might benefit the writer to do
so, and what it might reveal about his or her sexual identity, and
transgression.
Of course there is no way that one can determine exactly what
inspires the writer, but I would like to suggest some possible, though perhaps
conflicting, motivations for, and/or consequences of, setting the
contemporary novel, which focuses on same-sex desire, in the past. Firstly, to
provide a historical voice to claim a place in the past, which highlights the
sometimes hidden, though ever-present, existence of sexualities outside the
hetero-normative; secondly, to see how the acceptance of this voice indicates
a change in social mores and attitudes to other sexualities; thirdly, to recreate
shock value and a sense of the forbidden; and fourthly, to reiterate difference
and to promote the prominence rather than the invisibility of marginal sexual
identities, thereby retaining their transgressive status.
2.
Sexual Performance
To expand on these threads in more detail, I will use Sarah Waters’
novel Tipping the Velvet - even though it is not necessarily representative of
all marginal sexualities. It is, however, an extremely rich text in literary and
cultural terms, having made the transition from a “marginal” to a mainstream
readership, and even having been adapted for television - a remarkable
achievement considering the degree to which Waters explores and plays with
the fluidity of sexuality. The protagonist, Nan(cy) Astley/King performs
many sexual roles and makes many transitions: she is firstly, an innocent girl
Shani Rousso
305
______________________________________________________________
with a crush on a well-known theatrical male-impersonator; then both a
female overtly cross-dressing as a man to perform as such in Victorian music
halls and a female passing as a “Mary-Anne” on the dark London streets (a
male prostituting sexual favours to other men); then becoming a kept sexual
objet d’art in the elitist circle of the wealthy socialite, Diana; and eventually
finding her place as a liberated lesbian sharing a rather idealistic relationship.
It is interesting to note that Nan’s journey through queerdom moves
from innocence, through sexual awakening and sexual experimentation, to
finally arrive at a more stable and monogamous union, where the sexual act is
a fulfilment of mutual love rather than an act in itself. Though Jonathan
Dollimore and Judith Halberstam, among others, argue that sexuality is not
ahistorical, and that it is always contextual, irrespective of the historical
period in which Waters’ novel is set, the trajectory of sexual experience with or without the queer bits - is probably one familiar to all. What is more,
while Waters makes every effort to reveal the details of queer and lesbian
sex, her emphasis is equally on the strangeness as well as the normality of its
appeal: Nan remarks on her feelings for Kitty, “I must learn to swallow my
queer and inconvenient lusts, and call her sister,”2 and asks her, “How can
you dress like this, before a hall full of strangers, every night, and not feel
queer?”3
As an author, Waters displays her knowledge of recent critical and
postmodern theories, and bridges the gap between the popular and the
academic. She is clearly manipulating the reader, rather playfully, in her use
of association and innuendo; the experience of reading her work is a
conscious process of an extra-diegetic dialogue between the writer and the
reader. She uses the clash between meanings to create a humorous, though
significant, effect: here, “queer” is used by the Victorian characters as a
literal synonym for “strange,” but Waters speaks to the reader through its
contemporary associations which signify sexual orientation. Consequently, a
kind of intimacy is created between the writer and reader through their shared
knowledge of the equivoque; she can almost be seen to be flirting with the
reader, so that the private act of reading itself becomes about sexual desire,
regardless of the sexuality of the writer or reader.
The gap between the meanings, and the complicit knowledge of the
reader, might then indicate an alteration in the general perception of
sexuality. Aside from its comic value, to what extent is the change in
language a reflection of the change in behavioural patterns? And might
language actually be used to facilitate a change of perspective? In The
Repressive Hypothesis, Foucault explains that the homosexual did not exist
prior to his definition within language by his nineteenth century persecutors.
That is not to say that sexual activity between men had not been happening
for thousands of years, but that it had been defined in different terms: sodomy
was considered a forbidden act by which all men might be tempted, but
306
______________________________________________________________
which was nonetheless contrary to the norm, whereas the homosexual
became a complete persona whose whole being was determined by his sexual
preference. “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration: the homosexual
was now a species.”4
If language, or discourse, therefore has power enough to alter
perceptions to create the existence of “new” beings or activities, then
language can be intentionally, as well as coincidentally, manipulated to do so.
Novels such as these can then be seen to be pushing boundaries by wilfully
confusing historical terms and behaviour.
The attraction of using a historical setting could be attributed to a
nostalgia for that particular period. But might it be, more precisely, nostalgia
for the limitations of taboo, and consequent secretive behaviour and the
element of excitement it creates? That is not to suggest that writers are
advocating a return to the contravention of expression of marginal sexualities,
but that, from the position of relative liberalism of the late twentieth/early
twenty-first century, historical frameworks might be employed in order to
recreate a sense of heightened sexual desire for the unobtainable and
forbidden object, and to reconstruct the sexual charge of transgressing social
boundaries.
3.
Textual Performance
Tipping the Velvet is peppered with linguistic images which, though
relatively unthreatening and amusing for the contemporary reader, seem quite
confrontational when set against the backdrop of the supposedly repressed
Victorian sexuality and play on the binaries between private and public,
between what “should” be arousing or repulsive, and between the acceptable
and the forbidden. Waters does not hide or weaken the desires and
experiences of her protagonist, but repeatedly draws the reader’s attention to
the fact that the feelings are strange and unsettling as well as exciting and
arousing; despite performing a variety of sexual roles, Nan is embarrassed by
what she views to be transgressive, but makes no apology for it. Thus, Waters
structures her writing to utilise the shock caused by the Victorian context even perhaps suggests that it is shocking because it is Victorian - but then
softens the blow by allowing the reader to share the uncertainty, and
therefore, possibly also the excitement, curiosity, and arousal.
For example, the meaning of the title of the novel, “tipping the
velvet,” is not revealed until page 416, by which time the reader has been
allowed to form associations and theories of his or her own, and a desire to
have those theories confirmed or disabused has been created. Nan’s
assumption when she hears the phrase is that it relates to something that you
might do in a theatre. The reader therefore vicariously shares her
embarrassment, even shock, when she is told that the term is a euphemism
for cunnilingus: the juxtaposing of mental images - the open showy image of
Shani Rousso
307
______________________________________________________________
velvet curtains in a Victorian theatre and the private sexual act - concocts a
vivid contrast. By using this sumptuous, yet veiled metaphor, Waters is able
to blatantly, yet covertly, display one of the most intimate aspects of female
sexuality on the bookshelves of bookshops and libraries.
This brings us to one of the key contradictions posed by the novel
through the tropes of the theatricality and performance of sexuality: the
dichotomy between the desire to be accepted and pass unnoticed, and the
desire to be visibly different, even shocking or taboo. In Gender Trouble,
Judith Butler writes that gender does not pre-exist its culturally produced
identities.5 This, in effect, means that individual identity might not be about
gender at all, but based on the sexuality one performs. Behaviour, sexual or
otherwise, can be seen as a performance; it is learned and rehearsed until it
becomes natural. I would like to suggest that a further distinction can be
made between performance, which is socially interactive and an assimilated,
naturalised behavioural pattern, and performance that constitutes a practised,
polished act intended to be watched. The latter is performance as spectacle; it
is framed by the stage or screen, with the intention of drawing the gaze of the
spectator (the “gaze” incidentally being another term with which Waters
toys).
In a discussion of films which explore transgender, passing, and
performance, taken from In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam states that
transgenderism is constituted as a paradox made up in
equal parts of visibility and temporality: whenever the
transgender character is seen to be transgendered, then
he/she is both failing to pass and threatening to expose a
rupture between the distinct temporal registers of past,
present and future.6
By setting her novel in and around the Victorian music halls, Waters is not
only placing sexual performance on a stage, but placing it within a historical
framework with which it conflicts, to put it further under scrutiny and make
this rupture even more prominent.
Not only does the identity of the lesbian, homosexual and queer as
transgressive therefore continue to be socially-(re)constructed through
representation, which portrays it as such, but there might actually be a desire
to retain a marginal position because it facilitates a visible prominence for
sexualities which would otherwise be threatened by the invisibility of
assimilation into the dominant group. If myriad sexualities exist, then the
strength of the individual voice is dissipated: if everyone is different,
everyone is the same.
As Dollimore writes in his recent book, Sex Literature and
Censorship, “our desire, in all its perversity, is drawn to the very exclusions
308
______________________________________________________________
which constitute it; no sooner have we ‘made’ ourselves than we desire what
quickly threatens to ‘unmake’ us.”7 Indeed, desire and sexual identity are
never fixed, but always mobile and in transition, and in conflict with social
mores which seem to be fixed. In literature, desire is conveyed more
effectively when there is an obstacle to the object of desire - an obstacle
which is usually socially imposed. The representation of desire, therefore,
often occupies and explores the liminal space between that which is accepted
and that which is outside the norm, so that the very act of transgressing
boundaries and taboos, though perhaps only through fiction, can be arousing.
The denial or deferral of sexual union creates a spatial dimension of distance,
either physically or temporally, and the impetus to overcome the obstacle sets
desire in motion. Without this challenge, there is stasis - and desire ebbs
away.
The Victorian setting of Tipping the Velvet facilitates the excitement
of transgression and the spectacle of sexuality, but also provides a perception
of distance between the reader and the action. As the protagonist’s
uncertainty and shifting desire carries her forward in time, the reader moves
forward in the narrative to the denouement, but a temporal gap between them
remains, mirroring the distance between the subject and its desired object.
The written form might then be not merely a representation of sexual desire,
but also a performance of desire in itself.
Notes
1
S Waters, Tipping the Velvet, Virago, London, 2003, p. 49.
Ibid., p. 78.
3
Ibid., p. 114.
4
M Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, London, 1998, p. 43.
5
J Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
6
J Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives, New York University Press, London, 2005, p. 77.
7
J Dollimore, Sex, Literature and Censorship, Polity Press, Cambridge,
2001, p. 26.
2
Bibliography
Butler, J, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
Dollimore, J, Sex, Literature and Censorship, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001.
Foucault, M, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, R
Hurley (trans.), Penguin, London, 1998.
Shani Rousso
309
______________________________________________________________
Halberstam, J, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives, New York University Press, London, 2005.
Waters, S, Tipping the Velvet, Virago, London, 2003.
Imagining Manhoods: Voyeurism and Masculine Anxieties
in East African Asian Fiction
Godwin Siundu
Abstract: This essay aims to interrogate the various ways in which the
dynamics of gender, sex, and sexuality, singularly and cumulatively, impinge
on wider discourses of racial identities and identifications within the
trajectory of the post-colonial East African polity. Through a reading of two
novels each by celebrated East African writers of Asian extraction, Yusuf
Dawood’s Water Under the Bridge and Return to Paradise and Moyez
Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and No New Land, I argue that men’s anxieties
regarding their sexuality are quite often manifested as concerns for the sexual
patterns of their womenfolk. Subsequently, men’s attempts at regulating the
sexual liaisons of women in actual fact reveal the men’s crisis of sexuality
that cries out for avenues of affirmation.
Key Words: Asian, bodies, Yusuf Dawood, East African, identity,
patriarchy, race, sex, sexuality, Moyez Vassanji.
1.
Introduction
In this paper, I seek to read the way East African Asians have
confronted the multi-pronged question of group and individual sexuality,
especially related anxieties and how they impinge on notions of ethnic
identities. These identities are comprehended within the prevailing dynamics
of various forms of power, such as economic and political, as well as being
shaped by notions of racial (im)purity that necessarily accompany many
nationalistic enterprises. Overall, I intend to argue that firstly, men’s
anxieties regarding their bodies vis-à-vis those of perceived racial Others are
actually masculine anxieties that intersect with issues of cultural power,
sexual pleasure/repression and threats of emasculation. That this is the case
can be illustrated by drawing on the way in which Asian boys, as shall
become clear in the course of the paper, “supposedly concede the general
smallness of their phallus in comparison with those of the Africans, but in the
next breath revoke this concession by denying the Africans’ phalluses
stretchability as an attribute of manhood.”.1 A subsidiary argument, I
propose, is that by Asian boys “throwing casual glances at each other’s
members,”2 they point to the crisis of bodies whose owners are trapped in a
groove of superiority: their bodies are largely visible by virtue of being a
fairly wealthy minority, yet parts of their bodies remain invisible to
themselves, thereby capturing tensions of sexuality that pit possible
homoerotic desires against mere voyeuristic pleasures frowned upon by their
largely homophobic communities.
312
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
My position is that the concern with expressions of masculinities
projects not just the way in which gender is used to shape group identities,
but is also a way in which identities thus shaped are premised on intragroups’ differential power relations, which essentially add another layer to
the concept of identities. As I hope to demonstrate, some forms of
masculinities are also expressions of sexual-related anxieties that are in many
instances identified by the gaze of those who share same cultural and racial
attributes and therefore belong, as opposed to those perceived as different and
subsequently as not belonging. I will show that the myths woven around
perceived differences in phallic endowments are especially reassuring to the
male members of racial-cultural groups who celebrate attributes of the
imagined commonalities of their phalluses in the knowledge that girls prefer
them to those of the non-members. On a related plane, I also argue that the
material and economic differences that provide one of the sites upon which
masculinities are performed are linkages of interaction between members of
various cultural and racial groups, further problematising the transcendental
nature of identities. Indeed, the fact that people may belong to the same racial
and cultural group but be in different economic groups also works the other
way round, whereby people may belong to different racial and cultural
groups but the same economic class. Whichever way one looks at such a
situation, people appear to belong to different groups depending on the
moment and index of perception. Add gender differences to this, and the
situation becomes yet more complex.
Joan Ostrove and Elizabeth Cole’s reading of race and gender in
psychology concludes that it is difficult to experience a racial identity that is
genderless.3 This conflation of different yet related experiences is termed as
“intersectionality” by Kimberley Crenshaw, whose reading of class
demonstrates the various ways in which “class intersects with race, gender,
and other identities because failure to investigate intersectionality results in
research that ignores intragroup differences.”4 The existence of intragroup
disparities implies that apart from inter-group interactions that are often
contentious, members continue to experience intra-group inequities that
inform their perception of identities at the individual or group level. This is
why, as Ostrove and Cole note, overlooking these intragroup peculiarities
truncates the story of the concerned groups at the same time as it
inadvertently implies support for essentialist theories of group relations,
which have been roundly critiqued for advocating the maintenance of the
social and economic status quo. Awareness of all the dangers of essentialism
becomes a central plank in attempts to forge identities for groups whose pasts
and presences are marked by processes of inclusion and exclusion in
intersecting circles that have access to various resources. In all these
processes, gender as a category of analysis intersects with sexuality and
sexual roles/codes of conduct, so that studies on gender are secondarily of
Godwin Siundu
313
___________________________________________________
sexuality and how it impinges on society members’ interactions,
competitions, and propensities in a complex web of socio-economic, political
and cultural competitions.
Despite this, recent studies in matters concerning gender, especially
in Africa, have tended to place more emphasis on the study of the roles of
women in a wide range of disciplines, with the unstated presumption that
enough literature already exists on men. Indeed Frances Cleaver asserts that
“[m]en appear to be missing from much gender and development policy,”
going on to argue that
[w]hile a growing body of literature theorising men and
masculinities exists, encompassing the fields of gender,
men’s studies, social studies and social policy, much of it
focuses on the experience of men in northern industrialised
countries. With some notable exceptions, the studies of
men in the South are predominantly exotically
ethnographic or historical accounts. There is a dearth of
literature illuminating how concepts of gender relations that
include a focus on men and masculinities might help us in
understanding the lives and livelihoods of contemporary
men and women in developing countries.5
Although Cleaver makes these observations within the context of gender and
development, a closer look at recent literary studies reveals similar gaps in
textual analysis of gender relations. This can partly be explained by the fact
that the entire corpus of postcolonial discourses concerns itself mainly with
describing the whole idea of the Other, which includes hitherto marginal
groups like women. It is indeed arguable that the early (post)colonialist
literature’s portrayal of the formerly colonised spaces in feminine terms
presented opportunities for the study of women and their experiences in these
places at the expense of men, who had been rendered invisible by such
portrayals. Yet, as Hema Chari suggests,
if we accept the premise that colonialism is predominantly
a male project between and of men, then this violative
[colonial] penetration and control that operates as the
predominant trope within which the colonial enterprise is
executed is that of male rape.6
Hence, it becomes important to examine how men in the post-colonial set-up,
partly dealt with in the novels under study, recoup their sense of masculine
314
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
identities that they had been robbed of by colonial structures that subjugated
entire communities.
Elsewhere, I discuss the way in which Asians (and Europeans before
them), generally viewed as immigrants to the region, conceive of Africa as a
land of opportunities - usually described in feminine terms - awaiting to be
exploited.7 Similarly, Africans’ struggle to liberate their land and freedom
often took on gendered terms. Sidney Lemelle and Robin Kelley observe that
[g]iven the close association between nationalism and
masculinity, and the gendered iconography of PanAfricanism - Black men coming to redeem the soil of a
“Mother Country” “raped” by Europe - gender offers
perhaps the freshest and most exciting possibilities of the
study of diasporic political and cultural movements.8
It is with this in mind that I attempt, in this essay, a reading of the
characters’ anxieties concerning manhood, patriarchy and masculinities and
the way an interplay of all these impact on the two authors’ readings of the
realities surrounding group relations in the novels under study. My analysis is
largely guided by the fact that the reconstruction of group relations is
gendered, especially in the novels of Moyez Vassanji. If colonial
emasculation of males was presented through, among other means, images of
the penetration of a feminine, exotic Africa, then the dynamics of nationalism
and neo-colonialism in post-colonial East Africa can also be read in terms of
masculinity that does not refer to singular patterns of control but to practices
of simultaneous male domination of other males and females.
2.
The Quest for Masculine Certainty
Much of the Asian writing in East Africa is situated within the
trajectory of immigrant and other related literature, confronting in varied
degrees the conditions of exile, alienation, subalternity, and corresponding
desires to come to terms with these predicaments and create homes wherever
individuals find themselves. Subsequently, the journey motif is a dominant
stylistic strategy, which involves projecting explorative Asians, especially
mercantile males, who then create families and communities around where
their business ventures are situated. For various reasons, these males are
preoccupied with preserving the purity of their “racial community” by
controlling sexual liaisons that involve its female members, and repressing
the presence of community members with African ancestry among
themselves (many of whom are products of Asian male and African female
conjugation). Hence, the supposed purity of the Asian communities in East
Africa imagined in the fiction of Moyez Vassanji especially depends more on
the extent to which women live out the wishes of their male counterparts and
Godwin Siundu
315
___________________________________________________
their abhorrence of any sexual liaisons with African men. The latent fear of
sexual contamination of the Asian nation dominates the mind of the Asian
male, who finds it necessary to control the body of the Asian female. Policing
the woman’s body has in many ways been used to “preserve” the “purity”
and “integrity” of communities with the potential for inter-cultural/racial
mixing. Where these women “defy” such forms of socio-cultural confinement
- often encoded in norms of “proper” marriage or liaisons - they are seen as
having transcended “racial/cultural spaces”,9 or as subverting what Anne
McClintock has so powerfully identified as “the cult of domesticity.”10 In
such communities, putting the women’s bodies beyond the sexual reach of
men from the “Other” communities not only locates them within definite
social spaces, but also ensures the continued propagation of ideas of
moral/racial superiority of entire groups in environments that portend threats
of contamination.
Yet, as I show in my doctoral thesis, the patriarchal tendency in such
communities to “protect” the woman from the Other’s contamination also
belies deep seated anxieties about the men’s own imagination of what the
Other’s “manhood” is like. This is why, in many novels of Vassanji and some
of Dawood, the Asian male is an anxious male, watching with suspicion the
African male’s interactions with the Asian female, all with the express aim of
ascertaining that whatever sexual activities the Asian female engages in are
with an Asian male, though not necessarily vice versa. As a matter of course,
cultural idioms of (im)purity inscribed by and on the African/Asian phallus in
large measure signal the political dialectics of autochthony and immigrancy,
impure and pure, African and Asian respectively, that have dominated the
East African multicultural polity from the late pre-colonial to post-colonial
times. On the one hand, these capture the immigrants’ attempts to root
themselves in a place without losing their cultural identities, or resisting
possibilities of sexual-cultural hybridisation, and on the other, attempts by the
autochthons to savour the exoticism promised by the phenotypically different
Asian woman. One way in which these same concerns are sustained is that
some women buy into these concerns of resistance and desire.11
3.
Reading Manhood in Moyez Vassanji’s Novels
In Vassanji’s novels, different forms of manhood and masculinity
are constructed around what one would call traditional patriarchy, where
most important societal norms and values are dictated by powerful men, who
decide what other men and women do. Presenting masculinity and manhood
in terms of achievement leads to situations of dominance by certain men,
who exercise their power by having their way, sometimes cruelly so. For
instance, in The Gunny Sack, Musa Shivji, a Sergeant at the National Service
is a former classmate of Salim. When they meet at the training camp later on,
316
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
Musa does not hesitate to remind Salim of their change in status: “[y]ou
know, Juma, out here we are not equals. See these stripes - I am a sergeant.
Soon I’ll have scissors here - a major. You’re a recruit. You are in my
power.”12 Musa as it emerges in the novel, was not good in class work, a
handicap that made him a laughing stock among his peers. From a school
failure to a hawker, Musa celebrates his achievement as a lowly civil servant
by exercising the power and authority that come with it over the young
recruits in the National Service: “I am the master of my world here! For the
first time in my life, people look up to me. I am a leader, I command them, I
can make them laugh and I can make them cry.”13 Unstated in Musa’s
pronouncement is the point that his ability to make other people laugh or cry
makes him more manly than them.
On a more common plane, there is an essential concern with
anxieties of virility and manhood that is projected in the sizes of the phallus,
with Africans supposedly more endowed in this regard. This concern is
condensed in parenthesis in The Gunny Sack:
(After National Service all the Asian boys agreed upon at
least one observation.
“These blacks, bana, they have such long ones,
dangling there like anything -”
“Yes, like a donkey’s or something -”
“And we sitting there with our shrivelled little
peanuts of cocks –”
“Aré, even the cold water wouldn’t make a
difference on their sizes!”
“That’s the point, yar! That’s precisely the point.
These long dangling things don’t have stretchability.
Young’s modulus zero. They are already at their maximum
lengths. While these peanuts, these little jugus grow and
grow like there’s no end. They grow into fighting bananas
and still they want to grow!”
“Girls prefer them, yes?”
Such our insecurities. And later, an observation
from Sona in college: “Indian boys studiously avoiding
each other in the showers, but (I swear!) all the while
throwing casual glances at each other’s members as if to
ask: Hindu or Muslim, Muslim or Hindu?”).14
From the foregoing lengthy excerpt, the anxieties about masculinity also lay
bare the intersection of sexuality with group differences, gender and religious
concerns. By assuring themselves that girls prefer their “little jugus,” the
Asian boys individually seek to redeem their sexual potency and masculinity
Godwin Siundu
317
___________________________________________________
as a way of overcoming the sense of emasculation they feel in the presence of
their African age mates. Collectively, the homosocial bonding among the
Asian boys allows them to fraternise in perpetuation of cultural jingoism that
plays a significant role in sustaining masculine privilege within the
discourses of nationalism. The glances towards the Other’s phallus and the
attendant mythifications are part of the processes of “styles” through which,
as Benita De Robillard asserts in a somewhat different context, “gender and
heterosexuality are performed and imagined particularly through the
operations of fantasy and desire.”15 Such masculine anxieties and their
animation present a perpetuation of the heteronormative order of sexuality
that is subscribed to by the larger community from which the boys come.16
Heteronormativity and the very idea of it form part of the structures of
patriarchy, around which societal conceptions of morality and sexuality are
encoded. The masculine anxieties hinted at by such conversations arise out of
the reciprocal influences and conflations of myth, ideology, fantasy, and
desire in the Althusserian and Lacanian understanding of the interpellative
dynamics of obedience and other psychosocial processes that are sanctioned
by cultures of discipline and conformity to communal expectations.
Furthermore, Asian boys “throwing casual glances at each other’s
members” points to a crisis of sexuality that pits possible homoerotic desire
against mere voyeuristic pleasures that are frowned upon by a homophobic
community. Musa Shivji is one of the characters whose maturity from a boy
into a man is accompanied by castration anxiety, occasioned by what are
viewed as effeminate attributes. His own admission to Salim that “I was big
but a coward […] People would pat my arse,”17 and the humiliating treatment
that he undergoes at the hands of a National Service Policeman (“I won’t tell
you what else I had to do …”18) emphasise the emasculation that he seeks to
reverse by use of physical and sometimes violent power. He views power as a
manly attribute: “when I saw the National Service and TPDF marching … the
power in their arms, their legs … I decided to join, to become a man.”19 This
was after his African helper in hawking got angry with him because of his too
gentle behaviour: “Weh Musa, you fag! Hanisi. What are you?”20
The issue of power as a form of masculinity is also tied to the ability
to provide for family and dependents, where success in material terms
bequeaths corresponding power to the patriarchs; hence the respect demanded
by Haji Lalani in No New Land and Nurmohamed Pipa in The Book of
Secrets.21 This is the kind of respect that Dhanji Govindji in The Gunny Sack
gets initially, before he misappropriates community funds to pursue his runaway half-caste son, Huseni. In The Gunny Sack, material success as markers
of masculine achievement reaches legendary proportions in Amarsi Makan,
whose rise from a village loafer and stowaway to a business magnate proves
inspirational to other Asian young men, not just to improve their well-being,
318
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
but to leave the subcontinent altogether. This becomes such a trend that
successive generations of members define their success or failures in life as
per the benchmarks set by Makan and other patriarchs.
In No New Land, Nurdin suffers humiliation in the fact that his
father before him was able to provide for his family adequately in harsh
circumstances, something that he himself is not capable of. In addition, the
fact that Haji never thought much of Nurdin puts the latter in a position
where he views himself as one who is incapable of making any “manly”
achievement in a community whose tradition valorises patriarchy, even in
cases where the same is enforced through violent means. The relationship
between Nurdin and his father, quite apart from the obvious generational
discrepancy that impacts on their general outlook on issues, captures the
possible ways in which masculine socialisation fails to attain the hidden
objectives. For Nurdin, growing up in a household whose head emphasises
strict moral guidelines and high achievements only sets him up for later
frustration, owing to his failure to attain remarkable levels of satisfaction in
his life. One of Nurdin’s childhood memories is when Haji beats up Nurdin’s
brother to within an inch of his life for making a pass at a neighbouring girl.
The beating, which, on a prima facie basis, is about instilling high moral
values in the young man, is actually used to camouflage the high expectations
that Haji has of his sons, and it paralyses Nurdin’s emotional and romantic
growth. The perceived affront committed by his son is made worse for Haji
by the fact that it is committed with a girl who ranks low in his social
estimation and therefore is incapable of adding value to his son’s social
standing. Haji’s extraordinarily violent reaction to his elder son’s love letter
instils terror in the younger Nurdin’s heart, so much so that he becomes
almost powerless in dealing with women to the point of viewing such acts as
subversive of his father’s teachings.
Later on, Haji’s portrait in Nurdin’s house becomes a constant
reminder of the latter’s failure to provide for his family and therefore live up
to his late father’s expectations. Nurdin is then locked in a battle to reclaim
his masculinity by attempting to do those things that his father would never
approve of, such as contemplating sex with a woman other than his wife,
eating pork, tasting liquor, and visiting peep-shows. It is particularly
significant that Nurdin fantasises about the possibility of sleeping with the
very same woman who, as a girl, had landed his brother in problems back in
Dar-Es-Salaam. All these can be read as Nurdin’s awareness of his
inadequacy as a man, brought about by his sense of entrapment between
memories of his autocratic father and the presence of an overbearing wife.
Yet he tries to address the same handicap by fantasising about actions that he
knows his late father would never approve of. And it does not help Nurdin
that his wife not only refuses any further physical contact with him - which
would be a way for Nurdin to exercise his manhood over her - but also lives
Godwin Siundu
319
___________________________________________________
the very values and beliefs of his late father, thereby denying Nurdin the
chance to forget his earlier predicament and move on with life as a man who
charts his own way. If as a young man Nurdin had his emotional and
romantic growth stunted by his father, as an adult he realises that his father’s
values remain embodied in his own wife, rendering him perpetually
emasculated. As if to buttress her own influence in the home, Zera, Nurdin’s
wife, is very enthusiastic in inviting Missionary to come to Toronto. It is
important that Missionary, who arrives in Toronto as a father figure, wears
Haji’s fez with all its symbolic authority.
In Vassanji’s writing, it is not just Nurdin who suffers this
predicament of emasculation. Although his father died when he was young,
any memories that Salim in The Gunny Sack has of him are interlaced with
strife that arises from Salim’s perceived role in the death of his father. Salim
seems to be fated to get involved one way or the other with his father’s death
and the subsequent rituals meant to honour his memory. First, Salim’s
superstitious mother perceives the boy as having had a hand in the death of
his father earlier on by causing an accident in which four litres of milk is
spilt. Later on when the family buys apples from South Africa, with which it
intends to honour the spirit of the dead man, Salim eats all of them, much to
the annoyance of his mother. The act of eating the apples, described as
“steal[ing] from the dead, whose death you’re [Salim] partly responsible
for,”22 can be seen as a way in which the narrator competes for visibility with
his father. Like Nurdin in No New Land, Salim undergoes a similar
experience where his late father exerts a huge influence over his actions.
Besides, Salim’s father’s portrait occupies a central space in the home long
after his death and is complemented by a miniature ship, SS Nairobi, that
Juma had been given as a souvenir. It comes as no surprise that the continued
growth of Salim coincides with the continued degeneration of his late father’s
portrait in the living room, as well as with the declining power of the
miniature ship to awe the narrator.
4.
The Outsider Within: Yusuf Dawood and Material Masculinity
In Dawood’s novels, manhood and masculinity are similarly
constructed around material achievement and the way those who succeed in
attaining material success influence other people below them. Old man Desai
and his three sons in Water Under the Bridge particularly stand out as
characters that commit their lives to attaining material success.23 Old man
Desai for instance has an influence over his three sons, who defer to his
authority because of the successful business empire that he started. Because
of this, the old man can later on influence the decisions that his sons make
about the business, even after he has retired from active running of the shops
and factory. In the Asian society presented in Water Under the Bridge, the
320
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
manhood that is created around material success and business acumen
sustains the patriarchal set-up, which relegates a majority of the women folk
to domestic spaces and renders them dependent on their male kin for all their
material needs. Thence, although the three elder sons of Desai are married,
not one seems keen to introduce his spouse to his business activities. For
example, Kanti, the eldest son, has managed to keep his wife ignorant of the
extent of his business’s performance:
In the true Indian tradition, the Desai boys never told their
wives about the booming business they conducted, the
enormous profits they made and the amount of cash they
had stacked away. The fact that the wives got whatever
they asked for, within reason, was enough 24
This is a way in which the politics of power and knowledge have influenced
and continue to influence the relationship between gender and culture, further
complicating the dynamics of sexuality.
The Desai family, especially the sons, in Water Under the Bridge
are actually a replica of Masood Khan’s family’s male members in Dawood’s
other novel, Return to Paradise, who are shown as committed to business
beyond Uganda, their country of birth. All the same Masood Khan, like all
other materially successful men in Dawood’s novels, uses his position to
change the course of things.25 When still in Uganda, he uses his immense
wealth to shape the direction his children’s careers take, by inducting them
into business and using his vast experience to make sure they make only
those decisions that would not affect the performance of the family
businesses. When the family, among many other Asian ones, is expelled from
Uganda, Masood still exercises control over his family, owing to the Asian
cultural structures that revere patriarchy and achievement. Suffice it to say
that in both Vassanji’s and Dawood’s novels, the characters are acutely aware
of those influences that arise from cultural heritage and societal structures
and the way these affect their relationships with members of the same and
different groups. In all these instances, materialism arguably offers another
dimension to the phallocentric conceptions of manhood by sidestepping the
latter through the processes of compensation.
Specifically, Asian men influence to a large extent the way in which
their families, and therefore entire communities, hold themselves together
and negotiate their places within the region in the perpetual contests of
individual and communal power. This means that the entire East African
Asian communities in a way look up to their men folk to provide guidance
with regard to matters of group interactions. What is less obvious is that even
in doing this, the men also suffer their own anxieties that more often than not
remain subsumed in their perceived dominance over women and other
Godwin Siundu
321
___________________________________________________
disempowered members of their communities. One of the implications of this
is that Asian men suffer masculine anxiety that partly revolves around
material success so that, in keeping their women at home, they may be
deemed to be conforming to traditional Asian views of the role of men. At
the same time, the women who remain on the domestic front conform to the
traditional feminine role, so that the men who come back in the evening find
welcoming homes. Without this arrangement, what may result is summarised
in the words of Hema Chari: “the anxiety of alienation from home, nation,
and ethnic community in which estrangement is portrayed as the fundamental
condition of the postcolonial, diasporic, globalised ethnic male identity.”26
Notes
1
G Siundu, Multiple Consciousness and the Reconstruction of Home in the
Novels of Yusuf Dawood and Moyez Vassanji, PhD Thesis, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2005, pp. 67-68.
2
M Vassanji, The Gunny Sack, Heinemann, Oxford, 1989, p. 210.
3
J Ostrove and E Cole, ‘Privileging Class: Toward a Critical Psychology of
Social Class in the Context of Education’, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 59,
no. 4, 2003, pp. 677-692, p. 687.
4
Ibid, p. 681.
5
F Cleaver (ed.), Masculinities Matter: Men, Gender and Development, Zed
Books, London, 2002, pp. 1-2.
6
H Chari, ‘Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities: Elaboration of
Postcolonial Masculinity and Homoerotic Desire’, in JC Hawley (ed.),
Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, State University of New York
Press, Albany, 2001, pp. 277-304, p. 279.
7
See Siundu, op. cit.
8
S Lemelle and R Kelley (eds.), Imagining Home: Class, Culture and
Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Verso, London & New York, 1994.
pp. 5-6.
9
See G Siundu, ‘Transcending Racial/Cultural Spaces: The Power of the
Woman in Yusuf Dawood’s The Price of Living and Water Under the
Bridge’, African Identities, vol. 2, no. 2, 2004, pp. 203-213.
10
A McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial
Contest, Routledge, New York, 1995, p. 34.
11
This concern is also seen in Vassanji’s collection of short stories Uhuru
Street, especially the sketches ‘Áli’ and ‘Breaking Loose.’ I share in Dan
Ojwang’s argument that though women do not necessarily benefit from the
patriarchal structures that necessitate policing the woman’s body, they all the
same come out as strong defenders of the notions of “racial purity” that
forbid African male-Asian female sexual liaisons. See, e.g., D Ojwang,
322
Imagining Manhoods
______________________________________________________________
especially the conclusion in The Construction of East African Indian
Identities in M. G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and Uhuru Street, MA Thesis,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1997.
12
Vassanji, op. cit., p. 214.
13
Ibid., p. 215.
14
Ibid., pp. 209-210.
15
B De Robillard, ‘Heterosexual Selfhood in the Contemporary South
African Bridal Magazine’, unpublished paper at the time of citation, 2006, p.
5.
16
I am inclined to agree with Chrys Ingraham’s theorisation of
heteronormativity as a system in which “heterosexuality becomes
institutionalized and is held up as the standard for legitimate and expected
social and sexual relations, bisexuality is less valued and homosexuality is
least valued.” See C Ingram, Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and
the Paradox of Heterosexuality, Routledge, New York & London, 2005, p. 2.
Also helpful is Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s understanding of
heteronormativity as “the institutions, structures of understanding, and
practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent - that is,
organized as sexuality - but also privileged.” See L Berlant and M Warner,
‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, 1998, pp. 547-566, p 565.
17
Vassanji, op cit., p. 215.
18
Ibid., p. 217.
19
Ibid., p. 216, emphasis added.
20
Ibid., p. 215.
21
M Vassanji, No New Land, McLelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1991; M
Vassanji, The Book of Secrets, Picador, London, 1996.
22
Vassanji, The Gunny Sack, op cit., p. 131.
23
YK Dawood, Water Under the Bridge, Longman, Nairobi, 1991.
24
Ibid. p. 115
25
YK Dawood, Return to Paradise, Peak, Nairobi, 2000.
26
Hema Chari, op. cit., p. 284, emphasis added.
Bibliography
Berlant, L, and M Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2,
1998, pp. 547-566.
Chari, H, ‘Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities: Elaboration of
Postcolonial Masculinity and Homoerotic Desire’, in JC Hawley
(ed.), Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections, State
University of New York Press, Albany, 2001, pp. 277-304.
Cleaver, F (ed.), Masculinities Matter: Men, Gender and Development, Zed
Books, London, 2002.
Godwin Siundu
323
___________________________________________________
Dawood, YK, One Life Too Many, Longman, Nairobi, 1987.
Dawood, YK, The Price of Living, Longman, Nairobi, 1983.
Dawood, YK, Return to Paradise, Peak, Nairobi, 2000.
Dawood, YK, Water Under the Bridge, Longman, Nairobi, 1991.
De Robillard, B, ‘Heterosexual Selfhood in the Contemporary South African
Bridal Magazine’, unpublished paper at the time of citation, 2006.
Ingraham, C, Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise, and the Paradox of
Heterosexuality, Routledge, New York & London, 2005.
Kulet, HO, Is It Possible?, Longman, Nairobi, 1971.
Lemelle, SJ, and RDG Kelley (eds.), Imagining Home: Class, Culture and
Nationalism in the African Diaspora, Verso, London & New York,
1994.
McClintock, A, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial
Contest, Routledge, New York, 1995.
Ojwang D, The Construction of East African Indian Identities in M. G.
Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and Uhuru Street, MA Thesis,
Ostrove, JM, and ER Cole, ‘Privileging Class: Toward a Critical Psychology
of Social Class in the Context of Education’, Journal of Social
Issues, vol. 59, no. 4, 2003, pp. 677-692.
Siundu, G, Multiple Consciousness and Reconstruction of Home in the
Novels of Yusuf Dawood and Moyez Vassanji, PhD Thesis,
Siundu, G, ‘Transcending Racial/Cultural Spaces: The Power of the Woman
in Yusuf Dawood’s The Price of Living and Water Under the
Bridge’, African Identities, vol. 2, no. 2, 2004, pp. 203-213.
Vassanji, M, The Gunny Sack, Heinemann, Oxford, 1989.
Vassanji, M, No New Land, McLelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1991.
Vassanji, M, The Book of Secrets, Picador, London, 1996.
The Importance of Being in Charge: Sexual Initiation and
the Discourse of Power in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji
Izabella Kimak
Abstract: Babyji, a novel by a young South Asian American writer, is a
chronicle of the coming-of-age, sexual and otherwise, of a precocious
Brahmin teenager living in Delhi, India, at the beginning of the 1990s. On the
threshold of adulthood, Anamika Sharma, Babyji of the title, finds herself
pondering her sexual identity as she handles three simultaneous same-sex
relationships and is additionally captivated by her best friend’s father and the
class rogue, a lascivious boy of a lower caste. Unable to accept the paradigm
of female subservience, apparently inherent in her society, the protagonist
comes to the conclusion that in order to be independent she needs to assume
the position of the male in her relationships. She disparages the institution of
marriage as oppressive to women (unless, paradoxically, she is the groom
and thus the oppressor) and plans to be professionally as successful as any
man she is familiar with. As her sexual experiences multiply, Anamika’s
anxiety about her sexual identity increases. The purpose of the present paper
is to analyse how, and to what effect, the notions of power are intertwined
with those of sexuality in Dawesar’s bold work.
Key words: Asian American writers, Babyji, coming of age, Abha Dawesar,
identity, lesbian, power, sexuality
1.
Introduction
The overt treatment of sexuality in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji seems
uncharacteristic of literary works featuring young women, the kind of fiction
Linda K. Christian-Smith analyses in her study titled ‘Young Women and
Their Dream Lovers: Sexuality in Adolescent Fiction.’1 Even though
Christian-Smith focuses on a selection of teenage romance novels published
in the United States from the 1950s to 1980s, whereas Dawesar’s novel,
published in 2005, is not specifically targeted at the teenage reading public,
the comparison between the two should not be dismissed as irrelevant as it
offers an interesting starting point for the discussion of sexuality in the latter
work. Unlike the bulk of novels examined by Christian-Smith, Dawesar’s
novel does not portray a female protagonist who is merely a passive recipient
of male passion, resisting the boy’s pressure for sex. Anamika, the main
heroine and the narrator of Babyji, actively seeks out her sexual partners, and
she is frequently the one to initiate sexual contact. She is willing to
experiment, even if it entails disregarding her partners’ objections.
Furthermore, since mainstream adolescent fiction tends to “construct sexual
differences and channel young women’s fantasies and desires towards
326
The Importance of Being in Charge
______________________________________________________________
heterosexuality,” in teen romance novels “boys are presented as the only
legitimate objects of girls’ desire.”2 Dawesar challenges this stereotype,
however, as her protagonist’s sexual partners are exclusively female. Even
so, the girl’s sexuality cannot be pigeonholed as lesbian since, having
experimented with lesbian eroticism, she eventually moves in the direction of
bisexuality. Babyji’s commencement of her multiple homosexual affairs is
facilitated by at least three factors: firstly, her belief in her uniqueness and
desire to differ from her peers; secondly, her resentment against the roles
assigned to women in her society, which she thinks are also to be her lot,
were she to enter a heterosexual relationship; and, thirdly and finally, her
revulsion at what she believes to be men’s typical sexual behaviours.
2.
Homosexual Proclivities Explained
At the outset of the novel Anamika is presented as a student, and
special emphasis is placed on the distinct position she occupies within the
school as the Head Prefect and a wizard at physics. These two features make
her stand out from her schoolmates and make her feel special. The fact that
other students have to obey her commands gives her a sense of authority that
she clearly enjoys. When at one point her school status is endangered, she
grasps the significance that power holds in her life. She points out: “I was so
used to the privilege of my position, the singularity it afforded me in the
school, that I knew I would feel stripped without it. Humiliated, ashamed,
powerless, and indeed naked.”3 What is more, Anamika is an extremely
gifted student, especially good at comprehending complex scientific
concepts, and as such is often singled out by her teachers to tackle more
difficult tasks. When she compares her sexual life to those of her classmates,
Anamika cannot help noticing, “I was experiencing things that I was sure my
friends … had not experienced.… I was suddenly ahead of everyone. More
grown-up.”4 The protagonist does not refrain from showing off her sexual
expertise, impressing her friends with her familiarity with terms such as
“wank.”5
Although it would probably never cross the mind of this self-assured
girl, Anamika is nevertheless a typical teenager in that she questions the
status quo in her community and resents the stifling norms it imposes on its
female members. The sixteen-year-old protagonist observes adult women
around her and is not at all satisfied with the pattern she sees emulated in the
lives of the majority, the pattern which she is certain lies ahead of her as well.
She reacts in a very emotional way to the demands her parents make on her,
which she perceives as conflicting:
My mother is a typical north Indian woman who thinks
women should be chubby and fair…. She would have been
much more proud of me if I’d been lighter skinned, heavier
Izabella Kimak
327
______________________________________________________________
set, and more domestically inclined.… I knew I’d do better
than others and if she really wanted one of those girls I
could always bring one home. Why did my parents want
me to be both this and that? Couldn’t they see it was
impossible for me to invest my first twenty-five years in
excelling in studies and becoming a nuclear physicist if all
I was expected to do for the next fifty was chop vegetables
in the kitchen?6
Anamika expresses her defiant attitude to the roles assigned to women of her
class and social background by behaving like a boy. Whenever she is away
from her school with its rigid dress code, she insists on wearing a “boys’ shirt
and jeans.”7 She rides a bicycle and does not appear concerned that being
exposed to the sun will make her skin darker. She refuses to accept her body
as one of the factors shaping her identity, as a part of who she is. “It was
shallow to think about one’s looks,” she says. “I wanted to be only a soul, an
intelligent mind, a heart that was brimming with passion.… If I dedicated any
time to my own beautification, it would negate my own view of myself as a
mental being.”8 It goes without saying, however, that she pays a lot of
attention to the bodies of other women, including those of her lovers, thereby,
as she puts it, “not show[ing] … them the respect [she] showed [her]self.”9
Anamika’s attraction to her own sex thus seems to stem from her
dislike of the traditional expectations concerning women. She explains: “I
decided I would avenge myself by holding hands and flirting with girls since
Indian society was so holier-than-thou about having boyfriends. I had never
wanted a boyfriend anyway.”10 She feels reluctant to start any heterosexual
relationship because of the repugnance she feels for men’s physicality. When
she imagines one of her lovers having heterosexual intercourse, she visualises
the partner as “an ugly man with a pitted face and filthy hands. Laughing and
taking her against her will. Lifting her sari and invading her. Groaning
sharply and falling asleep.”11 Experiencing sexual harassment on a bus
which, according to the sociologist Jyoti Puri, is an everyday occurrence in
Indian cities somewhat equivocally labelled “eve-teasing,”12 naturally does
not help alter Anamika’s unfavourable view of men and their supposedly
insatiable sexual drives. On the other hand, having female partners offers the
protagonist an opportunity to be someone more powerful than she could
otherwise be on account of her sex. She recollects her thoughts on the issue:
At night I would lie awake, suspending the harsh reality of
being sixteen and a flimsy female with no money to my
name, and imagine that I was the man from [Hindi] movies.
I wanted wealth, power, or fame, something that would
328
______________________________________________________________
help me to get the things that the rules of the world did not
permit.13
3.
Anamika’s Lovers and the Question of Power
Anamika’s affair with the older divorcee she names India ensues the
two women’s chance meeting on the school premises. Babyji is enchanted by
India’s independent streak: the older woman divorced her abusive husband
and now earns her living as a freelance copywriter. For Anamika, having sex
with India marks a flagrant breach of the Indian rule of respecting one’s
elders. At the same time it marks her coming-of-age:
My coming of age was distinct and happened in a split
second. I moved both my hands all the way down India’s
back and ran my palms over her cheeks. Then I grabbed
both her buttocks in my hands. I squeezed them. And came
of age. All my life I’d been taught to venerate elders.
Anyone over five years older than oneself was an elder.
Squeezing India’s rear violated every rule of veneration. It
transformed her from an elder into a sexual being, an equal.
It made me an adult.14
Not only does the liaison with India enable the protagonist to experience
physical intimacy with another person, but it also forces her to rethink her
preconceived ideas about life, for India is an unorthodox woman who
believes that to be a complete human being one should experience
everything, including sex, drugs, and alcohol, all three being to a greater or
lesser extent cultural taboos in India.15
The question of power, which is an intrinsic element of every sexual
relationship, is treated most prominently in Anamika’s report of her affair
with her family servant Rani, as the issues of caste and class inevitably come
into play here. The heroine acts more boldly towards Rani than she does
towards India because of her conviction, conscious or unconscious, that the
servant is dependent upon her and her family for survival. Following Rani’s
abuse by her violent husband, the woman is allowed to stay permanently in
Anamika’s house and the two share their room and bed. Although at times
Babyji ponders the injustice of the caste system, she is herself guilty of
exploiting her assumed inferior. Even when she undertakes charitable
initiatives, such as teaching Rani English, her motives are not entirely
selfless, as they also include Anamika’s desire to “erase [Rani’s] background,
her past, and the stigma of consorting with a person of much lower caste.”16
When out of jealousy Rani refuses to make love to Anamika, the teenager
cannot come to terms with being rejected by a servant:
Izabella Kimak
329
______________________________________________________________
Restricted access to Rani was unacceptable. The idea that
she could say no to me was downright inflammatory…. But
I knew that if I shifted back and commanded her as a
servant I could have her…. Then instead of thinking of the
Hindi movie villain, I just did everything that I thought he
would do. Although she didn’t stop me, I felt that some part
of her was resisting me.17
By a curious paradox, Anamika at times acts like the men she despises, and
the above excerpt evinces her awareness of this fact. She may be claiming
that Rani is “her partner, the person with whom [she] let[s] down [her] arms
after battling with the world,”18 yet she does not have any scruples about
resorting to her superior social status to get what she craves for. Moreover,
the fact that Rani refers to Anamika by the nickname of the title is a telltale
sign of the classist/castist character of their interactions. As Abha Dawesar
explained in an interview for Radio Curious, in India the suffix “-ji” is added
to a name or title to express respect for a person older than oneself but, in
fact, it is Rani who is older than Anamika.19
The third of the relationships Anamika handles simultaneously
involves Sheela, her school friend and the class beauty queen. The two girls
are more or less equals, as they belong to the same social class and are of the
same age. Nonetheless, Anamika is definitely the more sexually experienced
of the two, and she takes advantage of the fact to coerce her friend into
engaging in sexual practices that she is clearly reluctant to accept. All the
three liaisons are therefore based on domination, although they vary in terms
of the character and intensity of the power relations involved. Anamika is
least in control in her relationship with India because of the other woman’s
age and experience. That notwithstanding, Anamika attempts to shift the
balance of power in her favour by taking advantage of India’s emotional
attachment to her. As far as Sheela is concerned, since the two girls share the
same socioeconomic background and age bracket, Anamika’s dominance is
instead grounded in her sexual experience, which the other girl lacks. Babyji
balks at regarding Sheela as an equal sexual partner and so, when Sheela
once refuses to consent, Anamika simply rapes her. Similarly, Rani’s lower
caste and financial dependence upon Anamika’s family make her especially
vulnerable to exploitation.
Despite her multiple sexual experiences and her unfaltering
insistence on staying in control, Anamika still remains an insecure teenager,
who faces the need to impose some kind of order on her life. To interpret
what is happening around her, Anamika resorts to the concepts she has learnt
during her physics classes; for instance, she ruminates on Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle and endeavours to apply it to her own life. She infers
that if the world is chaotic, then she is free to do whatever she pleases.
330
______________________________________________________________
Peculiar as it may seem, chaos theory also helps Anamika determine the
number of her sexual partners:
With two affairs one was torn between two simple choices.
There was something very linear about it. I was reading a
popular book on chaos theory which said that three implied
chaos. I wanted chaos because then I could create my own
patterns with it.20
Clearly, for Anamika “creating her own patterns” is synonymous with
staying in charge and setting her life in order.
In the course of the novel the protagonist evolves from a callow
teenager, going from one extreme to the other, to a young woman who has
made informed choices about her future life and career. Interestingly, her
sexual preferences undergo considerable modification as well, which is most
clearly discernible in her ideas concerning marriage. Early on in the novel,
she visualises herself as the head of the household, who earns the living
whilst her spouse, Sheela, takes care of the mundane chores such as cooking
and cleaning. This attitude is typical of her perception of herself as “a little
prince” or, alternately, a “patriarch” desiring “a harem full of women” to
cater to her every need.21 At a later point, however, she renders her imaginary
wedding in quite different terms:
Instead of a groom leading me through seven circles around
a sacred fire, there was a single chalk line. I crossed it three
times. The first time Rani held my hand as I lifted one foot
over the line, then the other. The second time India held my
hand, and the third time Adit [her best friend’s father] held
my hand.22
The most significant change, of course, is Babyji’s acceptance of a man as a
possible sexual partner. What is more, the syntax of the excerpt suggests that
Anamika might be willing to give up a privileged position in a relationship
for the sake of partnership; after all, it is not she who holds her partners’
hands but the other way round.
4.
Conclusion
The gradual process of Anamika’s renegotiation of her sexual
preferences is delineated as coinciding with her reaching the decision to study
in the United States. Having resolved to leave the country where being a
woman equals powerlessness, Babyji seems more willing to embrace
heterosexuality. Apparently, she perceives America as the place of great
personal freedom, where sexual relationships are not informed by the power
Izabella Kimak
331
______________________________________________________________
struggle to the same extent that they are in India. Bearing this fact in mind,
Anamika can enter a heterosexual relationship without any damage to her
status within the framework of power relations. Just as significantly, the
descriptions of homo- and heterosexual contact presented in the novel differ
fundamentally. In her depictions of lesbian sex, Anamika focuses exclusively
on the reactions of her lovers, completely disregarding the sensations she
must be experiencing herself. She is portrayed as providing pleasure for
others without feeling any herself, thereby asserting her dominance and
staying in control of the relationship. On the other hand, when she comes into
occasional physical contact with a man, it is the reactions of her own body
that she explores rather than those of the man.
To sum up, although Babyji is set in India, the novel is by no means
addressed solely to an Indian audience. In the novel the Harvard-educated,
New York based author explores some burning issues currently debated on
university campuses across America, such as the choice of one’s sexual
identity, the anxiety over the dis/empowerment of women, and the problem
of class. Dawesar’s novel, however, is not exempt from failings, especially as
it perpetuates some sexual stereotypes. The author’s deployment of the stock
figure of a mannish lesbian and the presentation of lesbianism as merely a
transient stage in human development characteristic of inchoate sexuality, as
opposed to normative heterosexuality referred to by one of the characters as
“the real stuff,”23 are indicative of the novel’s reliance upon stereotypes.
Nevertheless, the novel deserves credit for taking up issues such as
homoeroticism that are still rarely explored in the literature of the Asian
Indian diaspora.
Notes
1
LK Christian-Smith, ‘Young Women and Their Dream Lovers: Sexuality in
Adolescent Fiction’, in R Weitz (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Bodies:
Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, Oxford University Press, New York,
1998, pp. 100-111.
2
Ibid., p. 101 and p.104.
3
A Dawesar, Babyji, Anchor Books, New York, 2005, p. 314.
4
Ibid., p. 15.
5
Ibid., p. 100.
6
Ibid., p. 32.
7
Ibid., p. 8.
8
Ibid., p. 117.
9
Ibid., p. 117.
10
Ibid., p. 11.
11
Ibid., p. 44.
332
______________________________________________________________
12
J Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender
and Sexuality, Routledge, New York, 1999, p. 75.
13
Dawesar, op. cit., p. 15.
14
Ibid., p. 25.
15
KK Young, ‘Women and Hinduism’, in A Sharma (ed.), Women in Indian
Religions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 3-37, p. 17.
16
17
Ibid., p. 179.
18
Ibid., p. 269.
19
B Vogel, ‘Abha Dawesar: Babyji, A Story of Physics, Sex and Caste
Politics in India’, Radio Curious Interviews, (no date), viewed on 20 March
2006,
<http://www.radiocurious.org/the_interviews_alpha.htm#adawesar22405>.
20
21
Ibid., p. 132 and p. 145.
22
Ibid., p. 198.
23
Ibid., p. 199.
Bibliography
Christian-Smith, LK, ‘Young Women and Their Dream Lovers: Sexuality in
Adolescent Fiction’, in R Weitz (ed.), The Politics of Women’s
Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, Oxford University
Dawesar, A, Babyji, Anchor Books, New York, 2005.
Puri, J, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender
and Sexuality, Routledge, New York, 1999.
Sharma, A (ed.), Women in Indian Religions, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2002.
Vogel, B, ‘Abha Dawesar: Babyji, A Story of Physics, Sex and Caste Politics
in India’, Radio Curious Interviews, (no date), viewed on 20 March
2006,
<http://www.radiocurious.org/the_interviews_alpha.htm#adawesar2
2405>.
Young, KK, ‘Women and Hinduism’, in A Sharma (ed.), Women in Indian
Religions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. 3-37.
Weitz, R (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and
Behavior, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.
The Bishop and the Nightie:
Sexual Dissent in the Fiction of John Broderick
Peter D. T. Guy
Abstract: The basic thrust of my paper concerns an exploration of
homosexual tropes in the early fiction of the Irish author John Broderick. I
hope to bring to attention an author who has been widely overlooked,
unjustly so in my opinion, flesh out some early examples of Irish attitudes to
homosexuality, and then use two novels by Broderick - The Pilgrimage and
The Waking of Willie Ryan - as templates for an evaluation of the treatment
of homosexual themes in Irish writing during the 1960s. My aim is to show
how our reaction to queer tropes has coloured our vision of a hegemonic
sense of “Irishness” and how this theme has developed in the intervening
years since the novels’ initial publication.
Key Words: John Broderick, Catholic writing, censorship, Irish Literature,
Modernism, queer identity
1.
Introduction
John Broderick’s (1924-1989) legacy to Irish literature is not so
much his dedication to the craft, or indeed his craftsmanship, but his role in
the shaping of the modern Irish novel. He despised the hypocrisy of the
provincial bourgeoisie and was one of the first to make a homosexual his
central protagonist. In doing so he faced the wrath of the clergy - we might
think lightly of the eponymous brandishing of the crosier today, but in the
Ireland of the early sixties, it was, if nothing else, an audacious piece of
brinksmanship. Of course, he could afford to be somewhat blasé when facing
down our cultural totems - unlike John McGahern or Francis McManus, he
was not reliant on the state for financial support, as his family owned one of
largest bakeries in the Midlands. Perhaps that was his undoing? After his first
four novels were published to critical acclaim, his work became more
embittered, more insular, but he was never forced to ameliorate the standards
of his work. Rather, he blithely continued on writing bad novels, retreating
further into the literary backwaters until, by the time of his death, he was all
but forgotten.
He did, however, write two works which I would argue are worthy
of re-examination: The Pilgrimage, which was initially censored in Ireland,
and The Waking of Willie Ryan, which, curiously, was not. The former is
hardly noteworthy for being banned. The journalist and broadcaster Breandán
O hEithir once said that “to claim that one was banned in Ireland was rather
like boasting that one had actually been offered sex in a brothel.”1 The
Censorship of Publications Act, set up in 1929, reflected the moral concerns
334
The Bishop and the Nightie
______________________________________________________________
and principals of the leaders of the new Irish (and Catholic) Free State.
Thereafter and throughout Ireland Catholic activists, in particular the
ominous sounding Catholic Truth Society, vetted books, underlining
“indecent passages” and submitting books to the Censorship Board.2
Under pressure to read an increasing number of books, the Board
frequently recommended that the books be banned on the spurious basis of
these passages. It is for this reason that Kate O’ Brien’s The Land of Spices
was banned. A beautiful and deeply spiritual novel, the “indecent” passage in
question was the one that alluded to a homosexual love affair: “she saw
Etienne and her Father, in the embrace of love.”3 This was in keeping with
part 1, section 2 of the Censorship Act, where the definition of an indecent
novel includes being “suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or
unnatural vice or likely in any other way to corrupt or deprave.”4
Homosexuality, which was only decriminalised in 1993, was, as
stated in the Act, an unnatural act, but it was not in itself exclusive to the
checks and cross-checks of the Catholic Church. This extract from a
pamphlet circulated by The Catholic Truth Society in the fifties, entitled Can
I Keep Myself Pure is illustrative of the mindset of our moral majority:
Hence, the pleasure of sex is secondary, a means to an end
and to make it an end in itself, or deliberately to do this, is
a mortal sin…Let a tiger once taste blood and he becomes
mad for more… The poor victim is swept off his feet by
passion, and decides, for the time at any rate, that nothing
matters except this violent spasm of pleasure.5
The act of sexual congress is thus a means to an end, necessary only for the
procreation of children. As homosexuality did not even fulfil this mundane
task, it was doubly damned. The homosexual is therefore not only an
outsider; he is very much a threat to the linearity of the social order. Given
this climate of isolationism and deep rooted suspicion of outside threats to the
social order, Broderick’s decision to embed a homosexual love affair into his
first novel, The Pilgrimage (published in 1960), was an audacious act indeed
and remains one of the more positive reasons for any future re-examination
of his work.
2.
The Pilgrimage
The novel centres around the marriage of the rapacious Julia Glynn
to the local business man Michael Glynn, a closet homosexual who is
bedridden, racked with a severe form of arthritis. He is attended upon by both
his nephew, Doctor Jim, and his manservant, Stephen. Julia has been having
an affair with Jim, who, while treating her with contempt, satisfies her
voracious demands. While she may have designs upon furthering the
Peter D. T. Guy
335
______________________________________________________________
relationship, she begins to receive anonymous letters detailing her sexual
infidelities. Her suspicion falls upon the sinister Stephen, who both attracts
and repels her. From Stephen, she learns that his relationship with Michael
was, in part, sexual. When the local priest suggests a pilgrimage to Lourdes,
it stands as much for a metaphor for the immolation of desire as it does for
any possible remedy for the stricken Michael. The final chapter consists of a
succinct one line passage: “In this way they set off on their pilgrimage, from
which a week later Michael returned completely cured.”6
There are some overlapping themes that I wish to cover in relation
to The Pilgrimage, in particular Broderick’s relationship with the Catholic
Church and his ambiguous portrayal of homosexuality. In regards to his
religious orientation, if Broderick has any immediate literary consanguinity,
it would be in the European tradition and, foremost, the French Catholic
writers. The term in itself is contentious enough. Broderick’s great literary
hero was Francois Mauriac, scrutiniser of the coeurs inquiets and foremost
practitioner of a complex religious plerophory that defies any simple
elucidation.
Broderick’s characters struggle under the austere climate of social
and religious probity. In this novel, homosexuality is seen as a disease that is
to be exorcised; something malevolent that threatens to disrupt the social
order. Throughout his literary career there are scarcely any portrayed
relationships that could be termed “loving.”7 Should their position in society
fall into disrepute, Broderick’s heroes of desire are arbitrarily dismissed from
the narrative. Nevertheless, in particular during his later novels, these
characters, in their departure, attain a grace denied to them by the society that
castigates them for their dégagé attitude - it is a small thing perhaps, for in
Broderick’s novels, conformity and desire are forever at odds with one
another. He offers no compromise to this particular pons asinorum; for
Broderick, as life mirrors art, struggled vainly with a fervently Catholic
outlook and a sexual proclivity that was forever open to boundless
speculation.
He was ever uncomfortable speaking about his sexual leanings:
indeed, it may be possible that the author was, for most of his life anyhow,
wholly asexual. His homosexual leanings were, perhaps, an affront to that
rarefied world his mother created around him, and he struggled under the
constraints. In later life he was a terribly isolated figure, more by choice than
circumstance, his detachment a product of sexual confusion and alcoholic
intemperance, which he could write about but could never, in a personal
capacity, come to terms with or explain away.
While this may strike the reader as almost schizophrenic, it may be
explained away if you accept the following premise: if Broderick, in line with
Church thinking, saw society as being in irredeemable decline, both morally
and culturally, it is natural that he would view sex as something worthless or
336
______________________________________________________________
base. He thus sought affection/authority in Christianity, which manifestly
created physical values for love. The paradox of Broderick is thus the
paradox of the church: espousing love and compassion on one hand, whilst
struggling against the temptations of bodily desire on the other.
For Freud, “the essence of repression lies simply in turning
something away, and keeping it at a distance from the conscious.”8 The
homosexual element in The Pilgrimage, represented by Michael Glynn, the
upstanding local businessman who marries in the hope of concealing his
homosexual leanings, and Stephen, his servant, is a typically (in the
Broderick canon, at least) unhappy relationship. They are miserable figures
indeed, though by all accounts, those engaged in heterosexual relationships
fare no better at times. In one notable passage from The Pilgrimage, Julia
Glynn relates the influence of one Stephen Page-O’Reilly, “a notorious
queer,” on the impressionable Stephen:
But she thought she knew why Stephen had fallen in love
with her. He would always be attracted to the perverse, the
abnormal, the corrupt, because only with them could he
construct the impossibly romantic vision of life which he
cherished.9
Note the proliferation of negative adjectives. Much may be read from these
lines, for if desire/eros destroys, the containment of our desire helps induce
equilibrium back into society. But there is something more working away at
the heart of this novel that transcends such a ritualistic analysis. Is Broderick
in some way trying to explain away his own homosexuality? Society and the
rituals that fasten it together are bound by such lesser men, that much he
makes clear, but the true message of this novel is the way in which the
community acts as watchman to an individual’s morality. The fear of
exposure permeates the novel. It is the community which we fear, not the
eternal damnation of our soul. In that sense it is, perhaps, a plea for a more
sympathetic understanding of such frailties as much as a condemnation of the
society that fosters such a malign attitude towards human sexuality.
In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault persuasively argued that
twentieth century notions of homosexuality are coloured by those Victorian
sexologists who pathologised behaviour which they held up to be deviant or
unnatural. Up to that point, according to Foucault, “the sodomite had been a
temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”10 In Ireland, it
wasn’t Victorian (civil) sensibilities that predisposed our views of
homosexuality, it was clerical denunciation, the sort of canonical codes or
categories of forbidden acts, which defined the perpetrator as no more than a
judicial subject: hence Broderick’s attempts to rationalise homosexuality in
line with his religious beliefs - an impossible task but a worthy effort
Peter D. T. Guy
337
______________________________________________________________
nonetheless. Of course, Broderick wasn’t the first Irish author to refer directly
to a homosexual relationship. Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour had
been published only a few years previously, perhaps her most explicit text up
to that date. (Whereas the same-sex relationship was relegated to a sub-plot in
The Land of Spices, this time lesbian and homosexual love was moved,
literally and metaphorically, to the centre stage.) Elizabeth Bowen, one may
also argue, represented the homoerotic in a clear, direct, and wide-ranging
manner. Then there was Wilde, who was English up to the point of exposure,
when he became castigated as the barbarian other, a product of Celticism’s
(and therefore colonised) inherent effeminateness in contrast to the
(masculine) master text of British (coloniser) literature.
In that context, the final chapter in The Pilgrimage is worthy of
closer scrutiny. It was probably the reason the book was banned in the first
place, under the auspice that someone such as Michael should not be so
arbitrarily cured at the shrine of Lourdes. Of this, Julien Green replies, rather
stoically, “Since when has healing been exclusively available to the just?”11
Of course, before we begin, we have to ask the pertinent question: cured of
what? His arthritis or his homosexuality? Michael’s paralysis is likely a
metaphor for his impotence; his “limbs were too twisted for massage”.12 The
word “twisted” is of particular interest in that it connotes a certain unbalance.
Julia suffers from a similar condition in accordance with her sex, in that “a
woman suffers continuously from the impotence which is exceptional in a
man” as indicated by the critic Janet Dusinberre.13 With her husband’s
paralysis, she is forced to assume the dominant, phallocentric role in the
relationship.
If Michael is cured, what then? Does he reassume his previous role
at the head of the family? The childless marriage may indicate further
impotence against nature’s decree; when the material worth of the family is
devoid of an heir, it will remain threatened with extinction. The conclusion,
in the words of Sean McMahon, “proposes another novel, which is, I think,
unwritable. Impressed as one is by the blow-in-face technique of such an
ending, one still feels cheated. It smells of prestidigitation and is unworthy
and unnecessary.”14 Yet unworthy only in the sense that the closing chapter
does little to erase the narratability, so that we draw our own conclusions
thereafter. The question of Noémi d’Artiailh’s possible renunciation in
Francois Mauriac’s Le Baiser au lépreux is equally équivoque; according to
your conviction, you either choose to believe in the divine or not. As the
Abbot in Brian Moore’s novella Catholics states, “No one can order belief…
it is a gift from God.”15
If stability is to return to the community and restore linearity to the
plot, it is done in much the same way as a magician draws a rabbit from the
hat. What is the trick? The fact that there is none, that the miracle might be
real, is so absurd to a sceptical audience that the final chapter really needs no
338
______________________________________________________________
further explication. It is as damning an indictment of the faithlessness of
modern society as any in the Broderick oeuvre. He says everything he wishes
to say, by saying nothing at all.
3.
The Waking of Willie Ryan
The hypocrisies uncovered by Broderick in The Waking of Willie
Ryan are of particular interest in that they show a society in further decline
juxtaposed against the Church’s reaction, which appears apathetic at best.
The story centres on the named protagonist’s return to his native place. Willie
Ryan has been incarcerated in a mental institution for the past twenty-five
years at the behest of his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan, whom he purportedly
assaulted. More ominously, he was said to have been involved in a
homosexual relationship with one Roger Whittaker, a member of Ireland’s
faded ascendant class. Willie’s return causes consternation amongst his petty
bourgeois relatives, in particular Mary Ryan. In order to save face, Mary
begins an orchestrated campaign to haul Willie back into the bosom of the
church. He goes along with this, up to a point where he takes communion
without first attending confession.
For Willie it is all a sham, a chess game he adroitly plays with the
local Parish Priest, Father Mannix. A pyrrhic victory, he is at peace only
when he learns that Roger, who repudiated him when the scandal broke,
spent the rest of his life seeking exculpation for abandoning him to his fate.
The end of the novel sees the death of Willie and the community’s
hypocritical gestures of grief at his passing. The community, to which Mary
Ryan pays due attention, is seen as a sort of malevolent entity, ready to
pounce upon any transgressor. The punishment for a desire is revelation, as
Julia Glynn notes: “She had committed the ultimate sin: she had been found
out.”16 This suggests that being found out is the sin itself rather than the
punishment for it - that if you keep your transgressions quiet and unobserved,
that’s fine - the real sin is being foolish enough to let them be noticed. That’s
the point at which society/the community has to act.
With revelation comes the ritual of expulsion, which, unless acted
upon quickly, progresses into a drawn-out process of humiliation. Under the
baneful eye of the community, few could stand up against such scrutiny. In
particular, desire is ridiculed, and any attempt to forgo the deep-seated rituals
of the community is met by a stern rebuke.
Broderick may well have been writing of his desires, but he could
never legitimise them. As Patrick Murray states,
His [Broderick’s] world is too much in the hands of
predators, fortune-hunters, and mean-spirited exploiters.
His concentration on unnatural vice is also tedious: almost
every novel has its perverse relationships.17
Peter D. T. Guy
339
______________________________________________________________
Of such perversions, Freud had this to say:
In view of what was now seen to be the wide dissemination
of tendencies to perversion we were driven to the
conclusion that a disposition to perversions is an original
and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and
that normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a
result of organic changes and physical inhibitions occurring
in the course of maturation … among the forces restricting
the direction taken by the sexual instinct we laid emphasis
upon shame, disgust, pity and the structures of morality and
authority erected by society.18
It is a lengthy passage, but one that Freud uses as summary in his Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In the latent phase, disgust stands in
opposition to the libido. This development, while organically determined and
fixed by heredity, does not, of course, wholly restrict the course of the sexual
instinct. Perversions such as morbid scopophilia, which partially emerge
from the pre-Oedipal infant’s instinct to gaze on and compare his genitals
with another’s, is overridden by these physical inhibitions occurring in the
course of maturation, which is to say shame or disgust. While it appears that
Broderick struggled to overcome his disgust at even a conventional sexual
act, conversely, he was never fully capable of abrogating his latent desires
either. The two sit uneasily with one another, accentuating the belief that
whatever inhibitions Broderick faced in his childhood, they were forceful
enough to remain heightened throughout his life, whilst never being wholly
sublimated.
The waking of Willie Ryan, in a literal sense, is a poorly attended
affair and no wonder. Mother and daughter-in-law quibble over the number
of cars attending the funeral, before teaming up to batter Chris Ryan into
matrimonial obedience. Michael Ryan, drunk and in the throes of a maladie
du pays, weeps for the brother he disposed of through connivance. It is a
pathetic scene, worthy of Mauriac, and a justly fitting way to conclude the
novel. The waking of Willie Ryan, in the figurative sense, is the triumph of
Willie Ryan’s victory over the Umwelt; but more appropriately, it should be
phrased the reawakening of Willie Ryan, for Willie’s triumph is his almost
childish/homosexual innocence, which the combined forces of society cannot
purge. The Church, as a representation of the Umwelt, emerges from this
book in a rather deleterious manner, subject to greater denigration than even
that of the ostentatious Ryans.19 The Ryans, as such, are hypocritical; they do
not believe in any other faith than the God of Mammon, whilst the Church, as
epitomised by Father Mannix, is compromised by its austere, deeply
340
______________________________________________________________
unsympathetic treatment of homosexuals and through its essentially
superficial approach to the doctrine of Christ.
Father Mannix essentially stands for all the showy vacuity of the
modern Church. The priest engages in a battle of wills with Willie, of which
Father Mannix is at first confident of victory. The priest relies upon Roger
Dillon’s apparent conversion to convince Willie to return to the flock. Willie,
however, has yet to play his trump card. Roger’s conversion was no more
than a piece of showmanship; he continued on the affair with Willie whilst
attending mass, taking apparent pleasure in misleading the Catholic mob,
which he held in disdain all his life. Father Mannix’s final manoeuvrings
become increasingly desperate. He is shocked by Willie’s admittance that he
is attending the mass arranged ostensibly for the benefit of blessing the new
house, as a sop to Susan, whom he does not wish to upset. Willie remarks,
“I’m sure it’s of no importance to all of them… I haven’t been to Mass for
many years.” When Father Mannix asks whether his conscience is completely
dead, Willie remarks, “Would you want me to be a hypocrite?”20
The answer, of course, is yes. Father Mannix acts on the assumption
that “no Catholic ever gives up his religion except for personal reasons. And
lack of communication is never one of them.”21 Willie, however, is aware
that a lack of communication is the one reason that a Catholic would begin to
doubt. Belief, without conviction, is the simple mouthing of a ritual.
Christian charity and understanding has been replaced by a rigid doctrine that
offers no divergence from its austere conventions. When, after the mass,
Father Mannix learns that Willie accepted the sacrament without confession,
he is incensed, describing Willie as “insane,” “disgusting,” and finally, with a
hoarse shout, condemning him as “evil.”22 Willie’s check-mate, his
revelation, is enough to stop Mannix in his tracks.
Roger never gave up what you like call “vice”. If it’s of any
interest to you now I never wanted it, not with him anyway.
It was he who - how would you put it? - seduced me. Yes,
that’s how you’d put it. I hated it; but I did it because I
loved him.23
As Eamon Maher says of this passage, “What the priest only realises
late in the novel is that his parish is inhabited by people who are completely
apathetic to religion outside the social, utilitarian values it brings with it.”24
Certainly, Willie is not the only one due a reawakening. Father Mannix alone
offers an apologia for his actions, and Willie, though embittered, turns the
other cheek; “he pressed his hot cheek against the glass,” and the two men
appear partially reconciled at the last.25 The Waking of Willie Ryan is akin to
The Pilgrimage in that Willie receives a final grace in the form of a Mrs.
Whittaker, who reveals that her brother, Roger, was distraught that Willie
Peter D. T. Guy
341
______________________________________________________________
would never forgive him for his hypocrisy. When she reveals that she knew
all about their affair, that “some good can come out of evil,” and that because
of this, she was able to help her brother at the last, Willie is finally able to
come to terms with the past.26 If the miracle of Michael Glynn’s
rehabilitation is grounded in a sceptic’s belief, then the reconciliation of
Willie Ryan is more a temporal concordance with the living and the dead.
4.
Conclusion
In closing one might ask, what is Broderick’s legacy, particularly in
relation to a queer Irish sensibility? The collapse of the omnipresent power of
the Catholic Church in Ireland was, in many ways, an aberration. Up to the
early 1990s, ecclesiastic law was very much concomitant with public polity only after the clerical abuse scandals began to be drip fed into the public
domain, was there a turning away, a disassociation from the avowed sins of
the past, lest they taint the feel-good factor of the Celtic Tiger. Irish
homosexual self-awareness grew throughout this later period - as Eibhear
Walsh astutely noted, homosexuality would, only later, be identified as one
of the silenced voices of post-revolutionary Ireland: “The emergent postcolonial nation perceives the sexually different as destabilizing and
enfeebling, and thus the lesbian and gay sensibility is edited out, silenced.”27
The Irish homosexual writer is, however, still caught between the
bind of the freedoms developed in a more secular environment and the
critical and aesthetic formulations that reflect the perspectives of an
established, specifically heterosexual society. In many ways, Irish society
remains innately homophobic - though it is less openly critical, the affirmed
mindset has not changed overmuch. In Broderick’s case, he was the first to
openly confront these taboos with a degree of sympathy and self-awareness
He did not kick down the door; such a proposition would have embarrassed
the man, but in the author we can see the workings of a queer Irish sensibility
emerging, always on the defensive but existent nonetheless, and his plea for a
great human understanding is, in many ways, as tragic as it is illuminating.
Notes
1
B O hEithir, The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics, Poolbeg, Dublin,
1986, p. 41.
2
J Carlson, Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer, Routledge,
London, 1990, p. 9.
3
K O’Brien, The Land of Spices, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1941,
p. 175.
4
Censorship of Publications Act 1929, Stationary Office, Dublin, 1929.
5
O hEithir, op. cit., p. 37.
342
______________________________________________________________
6
J Broderick, The Pilgrimage, Lilliput, Dublin, 2004, p. 191.
P Murray, ‘Athlone’s John Broderick’, Eire-Ireland, vol. 27, no. 4, Winter
1992, pp. 20-39, p. 31.
8
Freud, S, ‘Repression’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 9, J Strachey (ed.), Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1952, pp. 47-96, p. 63.
9
Broderick, op. cit., p. 176.
10
M Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, R Hurley
(trans.), Pantheon, New York, 1976, p. 43.
11
J Green, foreword to Broderick, op. cit., pp. 1-4, p. 2.
12
13
J Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, Routledge,
Basingstoke, 1996, p. 197.
14
S McMahon, ‘Town and Country’, Eire Ireland, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1971,
pp. 120-131, p. 125.
15
B Moore, Catholics, Triad/Panther, London, 1983, p. 90.
16
17
Murray, op. cit., p. 31.
18
S Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 7, J Strachey (ed.),
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1952, pp. 230257 p. 242.
19
MP Gallagher, ‘The Novels of John Broderick’, in P Rafroidi and M
Harmon (eds.), The Irish Novel in Our Times, University of Lille Press, Lille,
1976, pp. 235-243, p. 238.
20
J Broderick, The Waking of Willie Ryan, Panther, London, 1969, p. 126.
21
Ibid., p. 128.
22
Ibid., pp. 156-158.
23
Ibid., p. 158.
24
E Maher, ‘Catholicism in Two Novels by John Broderick’, unpublished
paper, used with permission.
25
Broderick, The Waking of Willie Ryan, op. cit., p. 160.
26
Ibid., pp. 184-185.
27
E Walsh, ‘Oscar’s Mirror’, in P O’Carroll and F Collins (eds.), Lesbian
and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, Cassell,
London, 1995, pp. 130-157, p. 149.
7
Bibliography
Broderick, J, The Pilgrimage, Lilliput, Dublin, 2004.
Broderick, J, The Waking of Willie Ryan, Panther, London, 1969.
Peter D. T. Guy
343
______________________________________________________________
Carlson, J, Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer, Routledge,
London, 1990.
Dusinberre, J, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, Routledge,
Basingstoke, 1996.
Foucault, M, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, R Hurley
(trans.), Pantheon, New York, 1976.
Freud, S, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (24
volumes), J Strachey (ed.), Hogarth Press and the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis, London, 1952.
Fuller, L, et al. (eds.), Irish and Catholic?: Towards an Understanding of
Identity, Columba, Dublin, 2006.
Moore, B, Catholics, Triad/Panther, London, 1983.
O hEithir, B, The Begrudger’s Guide to Irish Politics, Poolbeg, Dublin, 1986.
Rafroidi, P, and M Harmon (eds.), The Irish Novel in Our Times, University
of Lille Press, Lille, 1976.
E Walsh, ‘Oscar’s Mirror’, in P O’Carroll and F Collins (eds.), Lesbian and
Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-First Century, Cassell,
London, 1995, pp. 130-157.
Whitehouse, J, Catholics on Literature, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1997.
The Neo-Victorian Sexsation:
Literary Excursions into the Nineteenth Century Erotic
Marie-Luise Kohlke
Abstract: This paper explores neo-Victorian novelists’ compulsive
fascination with the nineteenth century erotic, the multivalent forms of
literary re-imaginings of sexual history, and the infusion of present-day
socio-political concerns into the literary striptease. The essay proposes a
displacement of libidinous fantasies from the spatial to the temporal axis,
with the Victorian age replacing the Orient as imagined free-zone of desire.
Whether exposing sexual double standards, recuperating repressed histories,
or ironically enacting twentieth/twenty-first century voyeurism, the neoVictorian novel can be relied upon to deliver a sexsational read.
Key words: Margaret Atwood, A. S. Byatt, Michel Faber, J. G. Farrell, John
Fowles, Brian Moore, neo-Victorian novel, Orientalism, sexuality, Sarah
Waters
1.
Introduction: Invitations to Seduction
In Brian Moore’s novel The Great Victorian Collection (1975), the
staid academic Anthony Maloney dreams into life an exhibition of Victorian
rooms and artefacts, including “the parlor of a famous Victorian brothel”
alongside objets d’art and displays from the Great Exhibition of 1851.1
Maloney’s collection can be read as an emblem of neo-Victorian novelists’
obsession with “exhibiting” the underside of nineteenth century propriety and
morality, a sensationalised world of desire and novelty, where any fantasy
might be gratified. When a representative of The New York Times announces
the completion of the collection’s documentation on film, Maloney warns
that he has overlooked a number of “hidden” things:
For one thing, there is the Carrington Collection of
Flagellatory Instruments and Literature, which is concealed
behind a false wall in the Zollverein Indian Room. There is
the Dodson-Hutter Collection of Pedophilic Photographs,
concealed behind false panels in a sideboard carved in oak
in the Renaissance style by Graham and Sidgwood of
London…. There is an artificial phallus concealed in a false
compartment in the statue The Turkish Slave by Henry
Powers. There are a number of wonderful things like this,
which you’ve missed.2
346
The Neo-Victorian Sexsation
______________________________________________________________
Maloney proceeds to reveal what is secret, to expose what is deliberately
obscured from view. His collection constitutes a veritable orgiastic fantasy of
erotic excess, demanding a correction of lingering assumptions of our
forerunners’ sexual repression. Yet it could also be viewed as a Bluebeard’s
chamber - our own age’s heart of the darkness, representing the omnipotent
fantasy of penetrating and mastering the Victorian sexual unknown.
The opening of Michel Faber’s bestselling The Crimson Petal and
the White (2002) renders this desire explicit, enticing the reader to lose
him/herself in the night time underworld of Victorian London in a
metaphorical encounter of time-travelling punter and streetwalker:
you are an alien from another time and place altogether.…
And you did not choose me blindly. Certain expectations
were aroused. Let’s not be coy: you were hoping I would
satisfy all the desires you’re too shy to name, or at least
show you a good time.3
Not surprisingly, Faber opts for a prostitute protagonist, Sugar, who literally
deals in the fulfilment of sexual fantasy, since being forced as a child into the
sex-trade by her own mother. Indeed, our fascination with the Victorian
erotic seems to derive largely from depictions of such practices as child
prostitution and sexual slavery, or of the paradox of unchecked libertinism
and wilfully maintained sexual ignorance. We extract politically incorrect
pleasure from what now appears comic, perverse, or ethically unimaginable
as a focus of desire. We enjoy neo-Victorian fiction in part to feel debased or
outraged, to revel in degradation, reading for defilement. By projecting illicit
and unmentionable desires onto the past, we conveniently reassert our own
supposedly enlightened stance towards sexuality and social progress.
2.
Into the Great Unknown (or, Being Had)
In frequently figuring the great unknown through the sexscape of the
female body, the neo-Victorian novel replicates the methods of the Victorians
themselves. In 1845, for instance, the American gynaecologist Marion Sims
described himself as “a colonizing and conquering hero” for advancing
boldly into unexplored territory: “I saw everything as no man had seen it
before.”4 Not all Victorians, however, shared his excitement of discovery. An
apocryphal story of John Ruskin’s life recounts the disaster of his wedding
night with Effie Gray. So unlike was his wife’s materiality from Ruskin’s
idealised notions of angelic femininity and from the smooth female forms
familiar to him from Greek statuary and paintings that he “suffered a
traumatic shock…when he discovered that Effie had pubic hair.”5 His disgust
appears to have rendered him incapable of consummating their union, leading
to an annulment some six years later.
Marie-Luise Kohlke
347
______________________________________________________________
In The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), J. G. Farrell stages what I take to
be a comical re-enactment of this scene. In a fictional British outpost during
the Indian Mutiny, the fallen Lucy Hughes holds a tea-party for two of her
admirers, George Fleury and Harry Dunstaple, when the participants are
engulfed by a swarm of resonantly named cockchafers. Feeling the flying
black beetles “pullulating beneath her chemise,” Lucy hysterically tears off
her clothes: “Her muslin dress, her petticoats, chemise and underlinen were
all discarded in a trice and there she stood, stark naked but as black and
glistening as an African slave-girl.”6 As Lucy swoons, the men debate the
permissibility of assisting the naked woman, but finally remove the insects,
using the torn-off boards of a conveniently handy Bible to “shave” Lucy.
Her body, both young men were interested to discover, was
remarkably like the statues of young women they had
seen…like, for instance, the Collector’s plaster cast of
Andromeda Exposed to the Monster, though, of course,
without any chains. Indeed, Fleury felt quite like a sculptor
as he worked away and he thought that it must feel
something like this to carve an object of beauty out of the
primeval rock…. The only significant difference between
Lucy and a statue was that Lucy had pubic hair; this caused
them a bit of a surprise at first. It was not something that
had ever occurred to them as possible, likely, or even,
desirable.
“D’you think this is supposed to be here?” asked Harry,
who had spent a moment or two scraping at it ineffectually
with his board. Because the hair, too, was black it was hard
to be sure that it was not simply matted and dried insects.
“That’s odd,” said Fleury, peering at it with interest; he
had never seen anything like it on a statue. “Better leave it,
anyway, for the time being. We can always come back to it
later when we’ve done the rest.”7
Lucy’s figuration as African slave clearly plays to the reader’s titillation,
mediated by her Victorian male observers. The passage invites desire, but
delays erotic gratification - sublimating Fleury’s sexual energy into art - and
then short-circuits desire altogether by the shift to comic parody in the
Ruskinesque episode. Having enticed his present-day audience into the
sexual tableau of the helpless, naked female body at the mercy of male desire,
Farrell checks our delectation, inscribing an insurmountable difference in
sexual sophistication between the Victorians - “them” - and us.
This movement from seduction to erotic disappointment and/or selfconscious farce constitutes a recurrent motif in the neo-Victorian novel. It
348
______________________________________________________________
satirises readers’ over-investment in sex as the hallowed gateway to true,
because uncensored, knowledge of our Victorian predecessors and comments
on our own cultural obsession with sex. As Miriam E. Brustein argues, too
many authors reductively associate “representations of sex - speaking and
performance thereof - with the ‘truth’ about the Victorians” per se, producing
a supposedly “heightened realism” by “uncover[ing] the bodies hidden under
corsets and frock coats,” only to reveal rather less about our forebears and
more about present-day sexual fantasies.8
This raises questions as to whom the laughter often produced by
neo-Victorian sexual fumblings is properly directed at. In a comparable
Ruskinesque scene in The Crimson Petal and the White. Henry Rackham, the
priesthood contemplating brother of Sugar’s lover, reflects on the mysteries
of the female body via “the Magdalens and the classical heroines and the
martyred saints” with “their flesh…on show” at the Royal Academy
exhibitions,9 all the while tortured by the shadowy areas the painters withhold
from view and by secret lust for his reformist friend Emmeline Fox. To test
his commitment to social reform, Henry engages prostitutes in paid
conversation with the aim of converting them from their fallen ways. As
might be expected, his very first encounter ends in disaster:
“Are you…are you hairy?”
She squints in puzzlement. “Hairy, sir?”
“On your body.” He waves his hand vaguely at her
bodice and skirts. “Do you have hair?”
“Hair, sir?” she grins mischievously. “Why, of
course, sir: same as you!” And at once she grabs hold of
her skirts and gathers them up under her bosom, holding
the rucked material with one hand while, with the other,
she pulls down the front of her pantalettes, exposing the
dark pubic triangle.
Loud laughter sounds from elsewhere in the street
as Henry stares for a long instant, shuts his eyes, and turns
his back on her.… Head aflame, he stumbles stiffly down
the street, as if her sex is buried deep in his flesh like a
sword.
“I only wanted an answer!” he yells hoarsely over
his shoulder, as more and more of Church Lane’s elusive
and subterranean voices join in the laughter without even
understanding its cause.10
Though siding with the laughing audience, the amused reader is also
implicated in being laughed at, for Henry assumes the reader’s position as the
alien exploring the Victorian sexscape. His prurient fascination mirrors our
Marie-Luise Kohlke
349
______________________________________________________________
own, for all that we come from what Sugar imagines as “the more
sophisticated and permissive future that’s just around the corner.”11
The neo-Victorian sexsation elicits reader desire only to mock the
possibility of its satisfaction. In John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1969), the gentleman protagonist Charles Smithson’s obsession with
the supposedly fallen, working-class Sarah Woodruff culminates in their
sexual union, but this proves perversely anti-climactic. The still shirt-clad
Charles climbs triumphantly on top of the “passive yet acquiescent” Sarah
and, with a single thrust, “beg[ins] to ejaculate at once” - in “precisely ninety
seconds” the non-event is over.12 Similarly, in A. S. Byatt’s Possession
(1990), as the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte
consummate their secret love affair, their orgasms disappear into a line break
in the text, during the first of “those long strange nights” the reader never
becomes privy to.13 Desire is again frustrated in the eventual union of their
twentieth century counterparts, the academics Roland Michell and Maud
Bailey, whose quest for knowledge about the poets’ lives also ends in sex:
And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and
delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland
finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took
possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against
him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he
heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice
crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and
triumph.14
The discretely couched, self-consciously “outdated” and oblique language
withholds more than it discloses. The reader has been had, not allowed to
participate even vicariously but held “a long way off.” Not a breast, buttock,
clitoris, vagina, or penis in sight.
3.
Politicising Victorian Sex
Neo-Victorian sexual fantasies of possessing the penetrated erotic
Other simultaneously deconstruct that desire, balancing reactionary and
liberationist impulses. In Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith
(2002), the implication of lesbian desire in fraud and criminality inevitably
reinforces outdated stereotypes of lesbianism as linked to deviance. Yet
Waters also employs the neo-Victorian sex trope for a subversive
textual/sexual politics of turning the tables on heteronormativity. In
Fingersmith, she ironically appropriates the male-dominated realm of
pornography, represented by the protagonist Maud Lilly’s tyrannical
collector “uncle.” After his death, Maud achieves economic independence by
writing pornography, a lesbian profiteering from male desires by simulating
350
______________________________________________________________
fantastic sex on paper - presumably mainly heterosexual copulation.
Similarly, in Affinity, Waters stakes a political claim to spiritualism, not only
as a proto-feminist means of Victorian women’s empowerment and advance
into the public sphere, but as a manifest space of lesbian desire also.
Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (1998) demonstrates this historicisation
of lesbianism still more explicitly, tracing the Whitstable fishmonger Nancy
Astley’s picaresque journey of sexual awakening via a series of lovers, from
the repressed music hall male impersonator Kitty Butler, through the rich
exploitative Sapphist Diana Lethaby and her working class maid Zena, to the
socialist philanthropist Florence Banner. Nan’s progression to an open and
equal lesbian relationship figures personal liberation and social progress
through sexual liberation. Nan’s androgynous facility to shift between female
and male roles in her stage career and her stint as a rent boy does more than
enact theories of gender as historically contingent performativity. Waters also
recuperates the ghost of lesbian history left out of the Victorian public record,
apart from negative mentions in medical discourses on sexual perversion and
degeneracy. Representing lesbianism as pervasive from the lower to upper
classes, Waters creates a quasi-genealogy of lesbian desire, giving it flesh,
blood, sex, and cunt, as in Nan’s first encounter with Diana and her dildo:
The more I fingered her the harder she kissed me, and the
hotter I grew between my legs, behind my sheath of
leather.… she gently lowered herself upon me; then
proceeded to rise and sink, rise and sink, with an ever
speedier motion. At first I held her hips, to guide them;
then I returned a hand to her drawers, and let the fingers of
the other creep round her thigh to her buttocks. My mouth I
fastened now on one nipple, now on the other, sometimes
finding the salt of her flesh, sometimes the dampening
cotton of her chemise.15
Wholly of the flesh, lesbian sex is quite literally materialised, arguably
explaining Waters’ graphic and extended sexual representations, compared to
Fowles’ and Byatt’s oblique writings on sex. Yet the reader’s belief in
Waters’ lesbian history is finally achieved not by facts but by the sheer force
of desire that carries its own conviction within it.
Even overtly political uses of the sex trope in neo-Victorian fiction
thus remain questionable as avenues to genuine knowledge of the past, as
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) also makes clear. Dr Simon Jordan, a
burgeoning American psychologist, is employed to assess the mental state of
the real-life murderess Grace Marks, convicted for involvement in the
killings of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper-cum-mistress
Nancy Montgomery, but spared execution on account of her youth. Sixteen
Marie-Luise Kohlke
351
______________________________________________________________
years later, Simon plans “to open her up like an oyster” and break through the
now middle-aged Grace’s apparent amnesia, establishing the true extent of
her culpability and any possible grounds for a pardon.16 Aptly employing an
aphrodisiac for his simile, the doctor’s “chief concern” - like that of Victorian
newspaper readers who avidly followed Grace’s case, of the prison and
asylum visitors who come to gaze upon her with prurient curiosity, and
arguably of the neo-Victorian novel readers also - is whether or not Grace
really was the murder inciting “paramour” of her fellow servant James
McDermott, executed for the crimes.17 Simon stands in for the modern-day
reader, seeking to penetrate and possess Grace as an object of erotic
knowledge.
All the male characters of the novel to some extent engage in what I
earlier called reading for defilement: from the reverend, who urges Grace to
confess her sins, to the man she marries upon her release, who employs her
stories of degradation as sexual foreplay. “[H]is favourite part of the story,”
Grace notes, is “when poor James McDermott was hauling me all around the
house…looking for a bed fit for his wicked purposes.”18 Similarly, Grace
recalls her murdered master’s evident pleasure at “watching my bare ankles
and legs, dirty as they were, and…my backside moving back and forth with
the [floor] scrubbing, like a dog waggling its rump.”19 In the Victorian
imagination, the figure of the maid, her morals inevitably suspect on account
of lowly origins, is constructed as sexually available to the men of the house,
comparable to chattels or prostitutes. So too in Simon’s mind, where Grace’s
servant status in the prison governor’s household evokes childhood memories
of creeping into maids’ attic bedrooms to finger their still warm, discarded
petticoats and stockings. In a sexualised Bluebeard-like dream of a
passageway of locked doors, Simon imagines the hidden maids, “[s]itting on
the edges of their narrow beds, in their white cotton shifts, their hair unbound
and rippling down over their shoulders, their lips parted, their eyes gleaming.
Waiting for him.”20 Atwood resonantly critiques unstable gender and class
hierarchies, which become “eroticized topograph[ies] for transgressive
desire,”21 acting upon which proves punishable, even fatal, for women, while
men do so with impunity. Atwood’s novel represents female sexuality as
conveniently “read” or constructed so as to be most readily exploited.
Accordingly she has her protagonist’s “real” sexual nature and role in the
murders evade both Simon and Grace’s modern would-be readers.
4.
Conclusion: The New Orientalism
What does the neo-Victorian novel’s sexsation finally amount to in
its contradictory celebration of libidinous fantasy, its parody of erotic
fulfilment, and its political impulse to sexually critique and/or liberate the
past? The answer is gestured at via one of the pictures in the murdered
Thomas Kinnear’s bedroom, depicting “a woman without any clothes on, on
352
______________________________________________________________
a sofa, seen from the back and looking over her shoulder, with a sort of
turban on her head and holding a peacock-feather fan,”22 in all likelihood a
print of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s 1814 painting La Grande
Odalisque. One of Thomas’ friends innocuously asks whether he had locked
his mistress “up in a cupboard somewhere with the rest of his Turkish
harem,” and Simon too turns into a metaphorical pasha, playing out his
married landlady and mistress Rachel Humphrey’s fantasy of being
trapped, at the mercy of his will, as in the obscene novels
obtainable at the seedier bookstalls of Paris, with their
moustache-twirling Sultans and cowering slave-girls.
Silvery draperies, chained ankles. Breasts like melons.
Eyes of gazelles. That such configurations are banal does
not rob them of their power.23
Quizzed about Grace’s veracity, her defence lawyer invokes the Thousand
and One Nights, comparing her to Scheherazade, who “has merely been
telling [Simon] what she needs to tell” so as to “keep the Sultan amused.”24
Neo-Victorianism, I want to propose, has become the new
Orientalism, a significant cultural mode of re-imagining sexuality in our
hedonistic, sex-surfeited age. As the spread of interdependent globalised
economies, mass tourism, and new technologies continuously diminish the
unexplored geographical “dark areas” available for reconfiguration into
mirrors of our desires, a displacement occurs from the spatial to the temporal
axis - even more so since “Oriental” religion and communities are now firmly
embedded into heterogeneous, “multi-cultural” Western societies. As Bryan
S. Turner argues, nowadays:
the sense of the strangeness of the outside world is difficult
to sustain since the other has been, as it were, imported into
all societies as a consequence of human mobility, migration
and tourism. Otherness has been domesticated…Islam is
increasingly…part of the “inside” of the Western world.25
Accordingly, writers turn to their own culture to discover or, more accurately,
(re)construct a substitute Other. In an ironic inversion, the Victorian age that
once imagined the Orient as seductive realm of libidinous excess in its
literature, architecture, and arts, itself becomes Western culture’s mysterious
eroticised Other. The Orient, described by Malek Alloula as “the sweet dream
in which the West has been wallowing for more than four centuries,”26 is
replaced by the equally wet dream of the Victorian age.
This substitute Orientalism is signalled by a striking repression or
relegation of Orientalist tropes to the textual unconscious, encoded in “the
Marie-Luise Kohlke
353
______________________________________________________________
very embodiment of the obsession: the harem,” which associates “a political
notion (despotism) with a sensual vision (the possession of women).”27
“Exotic” settings or individuals themselves appear quite rarely, though
logically such a prominent aspect of the nineteenth century imaginary should
feature conspicuously in literary revisions of the period. Instead, the neoVictorian novel replaces the seraglio with nineteenth century brothels and
bedrooms, as in William Rackham’s first visit to a house of pleasure in The
Crimson Petal and the White. Entertained by two girls at once, in a room
where “[f]lattened velvet cushions are strewn on the threadbare Persian
carpet,” William’s “lust becomes almost somnambulistic; he demands ever
greater liberties…and the girls obey like figments of his own sluggish
dream.”28 Similarly, his brother Henry imagines Emmeline Fox as an
odalisque, “splayed supine in a pillowy bower, naked and abandoned,
inviting him to fall upon her,” and the reader’s first glimpse of Sugar is
couched in Oriental sensual promise: “Her eyes alone, even if she were
wrapped up like an Arabian odalisque, with nothing else showing, would be
enough to declare her sex.”29 The Great Victorian Collection evokes Henry
Power’s statue The Turkish Slave; The Siege of Krishnapur poses Lucy as an
African slave-girl; and in The French Lieutenant’s Woman Charles views
Sarah as “proud and submissive, bound and unbound, his slave and his
equal,” while in Tipping the Velvet, Diana Lethaby’s friends attribute
elongated clitorises to Turkish women, supposedly bred so “that they might
pleasure themselves in the seraglio.”30
Figurations of the Orient as a free-zone of libidinal energies are
now, of course, understood as products of imperialist projection rather than
representations of the “real.” As such, for all its promise of a self-conscious
critique of gender, class, and/or race relations and their ideological legacy,
the neo-Victorian sexsation bears risks of inadvertent recidivism and
obfuscation, as in Faber and Waters’ tendency to romanticise prostitution as a
means of self-actualisation through performativity, a calculated
circumvention of “hard work” and appropriated female labour, and a sensible
means of achieving economic independence and the “good life.” Such
figuration articulates a questionable laissez faire policy and twenty-first
century trope of self-liberation through sexual liberation, which threaten to
re-encode femininity first and foremost in terms of sexuality, and thence in
terms of the body and its sexual availability. Such representations are all too
easily co-opted by conservative factions codifying “social problems” (such as
teenage pregnancies, single motherhood, sexually transmitted diseases, date
rape, etc.) in ways that can be readily manipulated for sexual panic and
political profit. This includes the notion that “women are [or should be]
always held responsible for male desire” and its consequences.31
Similarly, the re-imagined Orientalist discourse of liberation from
despotism proves problematic, as it seems increasingly unsustainable for the
354
______________________________________________________________
West to position itself as democratically superior primarily on the basis of its
more enlightened attitudes to sexuality as the basic human right per se.
Perhaps liberationist engagement can only be sustained by not conflating
liberty with sexual liberation, or knowledge with sexual knowledge, but
keeping the two distinct. Otherwise, as Roland complains in Possession,
disparate elements are “all reduced like boiling jam to - human sexuality,”
revealing “this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human
sexuality” as “really powerlessness.”32 Such reductionism extends to
international relations, as in the appropriation of the figure of the Afghan
woman, shrouded in her burqa, to help justify the U.S. led NATO
intervention in Afghanistan, a move that might be compared to the
Victorian’s treatment of the Indian practice of suttee. As Emily Haddad
points out, “[m]uch European condemnation of oriental tyranny arose (and
still does) from moral indignation at the presumed oriental subordination of
women.”33 We need to begin to ask not only what we know about sexuality,
but how we know it, and what “knowledge” derives only from eroticised
fantasies of the Other - and ourselves as the Victorians’ Others - rather than
from actual embodied lived and living practice.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles’ narrator warns of the
dangers of facilely projecting our fantasies of otherness upon the purportedly
sexually repressed Victorians, when “our [own] world spends a vast amount
of its time inviting us to copulate, while our reality is as busy in frustrating
us.”34 Using the Victorians as an excuse to produce and disseminate sexual
discourse, purportedly about “them” but really about our own desires, may
finally rebound upon ourselves, as we become what we imagine:
In a way, by transferring to the public imagination what
they left to the private, we are the more Victorian - in the
derogatory sense of the word - century, since we have, in
destroying so much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura
of the forbidden, destroyed also a great deal of the
pleasure.35
Notes
1
B Moore, The Great Victorian Collection, Paladin Grafton, London, 1988
[first publ. 1975], p. 13.
2
Ibid., pp. 37-38.
3
M Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2003
[first publ. 2002], p. 3.
4
M Sims, quoted in E Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the
Fin de Siècle, Bloomsbury, London, 1991, p. 129; quoted in J King, The
Marie-Luise Kohlke
355
______________________________________________________________
Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Palgrave
Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2005, p. 67.
5
M Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, John Murray, London, 1967, p. 156.
6
JG Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, Orion, London, 1999 [first publ. 1973],
p. 230.
7
Ibid, pp. 231-232, first ellipses in the original; italics in the original.
8
ME Brustein, ‘Alias Grace’, 4 November 2004, viewed on 20 October
2006,
<http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2004/11/ialias_gracei.
html>.
9
Faber, op. cit., p. 315.
10
Ibid., p. 326, first ellipses in the original.
11
Ibid., p. 229.
12
J Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Triad/Granada, Bungay,
Suffolk, 1977 [first publ. 1969], p. 304.
13
AS Byatt, Possession, Vintage, London, 1991 [first publ. 1990], p. 283.
14
Ibid., p. 507.
15
S Waters, Tipping the Velvet, Virago, London, 2002 [first publ. 1998], p.
243.
16
M Atwood, Alias Grace, QPD, London, 1996, p. 133.
17
Ibid., p. 27.
18
Ibid., p. 457.
19
Ibid., p. 275.
20
Ibid., p. 139.
21
SK Stanley, ‘The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 22, no. 3, 2003, pp.
371-386, p. 371.
22
Atwood, op. cit., p. 213.
23
Ibid., p. 252 and p. 365.
24
Ibid., p. 377.
25
BS Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Routledge,
London, 1994, p. 183.
26
M Alloula, The Colonial Harem, M Godzich and W Godzich (trans.),
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987, p. 3.
27
Ibid., p. 3 and p. 95.
28
Faber, op. cit., p. 71 and p. 72.
29
Ibid., p. 263 and p. 26.
30
Fowles, op. cit., p. 301; Waters, op. cit., p. 312.
31
King, op. cit., p. 78.
32
Byatt, op. cit., p. 253.
356
______________________________________________________________
33
EA Haddad, Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenthcentury English and French Poetry, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, p. 25.
34
Fowles, op. cit., p. 233.
35
Ibid., pp. 233-234.
Bibliography
Alloula, M, The Colonial Harem, M Godzich and W Godzich (trans.),
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987.
Byatt, AS, Possession, Vintage, London, 1991 [first publ. 1990].
Brustein, ME, ‘Alias Grace’, 4 November 2004, viewed on 20 October 2006,
<http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2004/11/ialia
s_graci.htm>.
Faber, M, The Crimson Petal and the White, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2003
[first publ. 2002].
Farrell, JG, The Siege of Krishnapur, Orion, London, 1999 [first publ. 1973].
Fowles, J, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Triad/Granada, Bungay, Suffolk,
1977 [first publ. 1969].
Haddad, EA, Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenthcentury English and French Poetry, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002.
King, J, The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction,
Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2005.
Lutyens, M, Millais and the Ruskins, John Murray, London, 1967.
Moore, B, The Great Victorian Collection, Paladin Grafton, London, 1988
[first publ. 1975].
Showalter, E, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle,
Bloomsbury, London, 1991.
Stanley, SK, ‘The Eroticism of Class and the Enigma of Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 22, no. 3,
2003, pp. 371-386.
Turner, BS, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Routledge, London,
1994.
Waters, S, Tipping the Velvet, Virago London, 2002 [first publ. 1998].
Waters, S, Affinity, Virago, London, 2000 [first publ. 1999].
Waters, S, Fingersmith, Virago, London, 2003 [first publ. 2002].
Erzsébet Barát is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Linguistics
at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged, and a
Visiting Professor at the Gender Studies Department, Central European
University, Budapest. Her research interests and publications focus on the
ideological investment of meaning production, mostly in relation to language
use and sexual and gender identity.
Sebastian E. Bartoş is an undergraduate student in the School of Psychology
and Sciences of Education at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania.
Tahseen Béa (Basheer) is currently a Visiting Scholar at Columbia
University, New York. Her scholarly interests include issues of female
sexuality and spirituality, the construction of female subjectivity, and female
desire in a feminist context.
Jonathan Black is currently Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at
Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. He has recently
completed Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer (Philip Wilson, 2008),
co-authored with Brenda Martin, on the extraordinary life and sculpture of
Dora Gordine (1895-1991).
Julie Blanchard has recently completed a Masters in Research at Goldsmiths
College, London, and lectures at University College for the Creative Arts in
Epsom and Southampton Solent University, U.K. Young girls and fashion
will also be the focus of her further PhD study commencing at the University
of Southampton.
Alejandro Cervantes-Carson is Director of Research, InterDisciplinary.Net (Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain). His research and writing are
situated at the intersection of Political Sociology, the Sociology of Intimacy
and Cultural Sociology.
Erin Connell is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Carleton University,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her thesis and research interests focus on sexuality
and the history of sexuality, moral regulation and youth.
Bridget M. Finn is a sex therapist and an independent qualitative sexuality
researcher. She is a practicing psychotherapist, with a PhD in Human
Sexuality and an MS in Health Education, and has advanced clinical training
and experience in sex therapy.
358
______________________________________________________________
Claire Greslé-Favier, PhD (pending), recently completed her dissertation on
pro-abstinence discourses at the Department of English and American
Studies of the University of Dortmund, Germany, where she has also been
teaching for the past three years. Her other research interests include U.S.
feminist history and film studies.
Peter D.T. Guy is a fellow of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies,
Dublin, currently engaged upon a PhD entitled As Mirrors Are Lonely - A
Lacanian Reading of Three Irish Authors.
Benjamin Jacob graduated with a PhD from the University of York, U.K., in
2005. His thesis examined the development of obscene literature in Western
culture from 1750 to 2000, and he is continuing to research this area of study.
Adam Kaasa is currently completing a PhD on the intersection of
architecture, citizenship and nation-building in post-revolution Mexico at the
Cities Programme, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Izabella Kimak is a doctoral student at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University
in Lublin, Poland. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation devoted
to the representations of female sexuality in South Asian American literature.
Marie-Luise Kohlke teaches English Literature at Swansea University,
Wales, and is the Founding Editor of Neo-Victorian Studies. Her research
into the neo-Victorian novel and trauma literature focuses on the intersection
of the historical imagination and cultural discourses on gender, sexuality, and
violence.
Kateřina Lišková is a sociologist teaching on the Gender Studies
programme at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University, in the
Czech Republic, whose research focuses on gender and sexuality. She has
recently received her PhD for her dissertation entitled Feminist AntiPornography Discourse: A Sociological Analysis.
John Master received his PhD in 20th Century United States history from
the University of California, Riverside, in 2006. Currently, he teaches at
UCR and at the University of Redlands (California), where he is Centennial
Historian and Lecturer in History
359
______________________________________________________________
Karen Morgan is a socio-legal researcher in the School of Law at the
University of Bristol, U.K., whose academic interests include exploring the
sociology of sexuality, gendered violence, non-human animal abuse and nonhuman animal rights. She is also working on an inter-disciplinary project
exploring and facilitating academic debate into ethical veganism.
Chrystie Myketiak is a PhD student in Interaction, Media Communication,
supported by the Department of Computer Science and the School of
Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. She
holds a BA (Hons.) in Sociology and Women’s Studies from the University
of Regina, Canada, and an MA in Sociology from Dalhousie University,
Canada.
Jacqui O’Riordan is currently lecturing at the Department of Applied Social
Studies, University College Cork, Ireland. Her areas of interest include
women’s changing roles and identities, constructions of sexuality and gender,
and global development issues, with a particular focus on gendered
livelihood options.
Luisa Orza, is a writer and researcher in sexual and reproductive rights, with
a special interest in power relations, gender, and the dynamics of negotiated
dominance and submission. She holds an MA in Gender and Development
from Sussex University, U.K.
Shalmalee Palekar is a lecturer in the School of English, Media and
Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is
currently researching representations of women’s sexualities in post-1970s
Indian fiction and cinema (“Bollywood”, Regional and “Arthouse”).
Jan Roddy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and
Photography at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. She is a
media artist with ongoing projects exploring Ozark land, people, and culture.
Shani Rousso is currently completing a PhD thesis on representations of
desire in literature at the University of Exeter, U.K. Her work focuses on a
number of different fictional texts, spanning from the mid-nineteenth century
to the present day, which promote a diversity of sexual identities.
Alice Sadoghi has a doctorate in Law and works as a Scientific Assistant at
the Institute for Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure and Criminalistics at the
Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria.
360
______________________________________________________________
Ilana Shiloh is the author of Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the
Road to Nowhere (Peter Lang 2002), and her book Metaphors of Paradox in
Detective Fiction and Film is forthcoming from Peter Lang. She has
published a range of articles on contemporary fiction, film and theatre and is
the Head of the English Language Unit in the College of Management
Academic Division, Rishon Lezion, Israel.
Godwin Siundu holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Language and
Literature Education at the Masinde Muliro University of Science and
Technology, Kenya. He is involved in research on material cultures with a
focus on immigrant communities in Kenya and how these relate to such
cultures in other parts of Africa.
Daniel Smith is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Program in
Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University, U.S.A. His dissertation is
entitled Libertine Theatricality: Contextualizing Obscene Drama in
Eighteenth-Century France.
Yvette Taylor is a Lecturer in the School of Geography, Politics and
Sociology at Newcastle University, U.K. Her publications include Workingclass Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders, published by Palgrave in 2007.
Jennifer Tyburczy is a PhD candidate in the Department of Performance
Studies at Northwestern University, U.S.A. Her academic work examines the
intersection of museums, sex, and performance, and her artistic projects
include resurrections of vintage genres, like vaudeville and burlesque, as well
as adaptations of diverse literatures to performance.
Marek M. Wojtaszek is currently completing his PhD study in the American
Studies and Mass Media Department at the University of Lodz, Poland. His
research accounts for his critical engagement with feminist poststructuralist
philosophies, gender and visual studies, and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s
philosophy.
Asli Zengin is a graduate student and teaching assistant in the Anthropology
Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on
the relations between sexuality, prostitution and the Turkish state.

Probing the Problematics: Sex and Sexuality - Inter

Transcription

Similar documents

SEXtend \seks tend \ - Student Health Center

Media : Metro Ahad Section : Setempat Date

Talking about body science and puberty with your child

T ravellingexhibition

Influence of pornification

Sexy sells: The marketing of girls` sexuality

Both WAVAW and SAS will support whatever decisions you make.

"But I already know all about sex!" Distinguishing Beliefs from

Relationships and Intimacy for Women