Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick--Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2001)

Building on the work of Foucault, J.L. Austin, and Silvan Tomkins, Sedgwick covers a broad range of topics in this collection of essays, though they all loosely center around the notion of affect and how it is informed by scholarship on queer theory and performativity.  Noting that much of queer theory has used Austin’s work on performativity to discuss gender, Sedgwick proposes “a new class of periperformative utterances who complex efficacy depends on their tangency to, as well as their difference from, the explicit performances” (5).  What’s useful to my work is some of this affect discussion: for example, when Sedgwick says, “Attending to psychology and materiality at the level of affect and texture is also to enter a conceptual realm that is not shaped by lack nor by commonsensical dualities of subject versus object or of means versus ends” (21), how does this relate to the concept of intersubjective space?  Further, some of her discussion of shame may be relevant, such as her quote from Michael Franz Basch:  “The shame-humiliation response, when it appears, represents the failure or absence of the smile of contact, a reaction to the loss of feedback from others, indicating social isolation and signaling the need for that condition” (36). She goes on to say herself that shame makes a “double movement…toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality” (37).  I think this may relate to intersubjective space, too, and how ugliness functions there.

Her discussion of the periperformative and how it relates specifically to marriage is also useful to me, as I think the marriage economy is going to be at least part of my work.  Pages 71-71 in particular she discusses the interpellative nature of weddings—not only for those getting married, but for the witnesses as well, and the compulsory heterosexuality which these ceremonies work to enforce.  In addition to my idea that ugliness marks those who should not be reproducing, who should not be rewarded with marriage, it’s interesting to consider what effect their proximity to the marriage economy in general—are they an Eris-like threat to order?

Michael Warner--The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999)

Warner’s book is particularly notable to read from the vantage point of 2012, after DOMA has been repealed, marriage equality has been achieved in some states, and the President has expressed his own support for marriage equality.  In his larger analysis of the push for marriage equality for same-sex couples, Warner argues that “this strategy is a mistake and that it represents a widespread loss of vision in the movement” (vii).  His primary focus is on the lack of sexual autonomy allowed in America: “because sex is an occasion for losing control, for merging one’s consciousness with the lower orders of animal desire and sensation, for raw confrontations of power and demand, it fills people with aversion and shame” (2).

Warner describes those who do not fit into accepted paradigms of sexual norms as being “rendered inarticulate” (3), and that the “politics of shame” leads to the “unthinkability of…desire” (7), an observation which echoes Butler’s discussion of those with unintelligible identities.  Warner is quite critical of movements in support of gay marriage, which Warner sees as not only selling out the queer community, but undermining its own position by ignoring its history and trying to assimilate into the straight community: “Instead of broadening its campaign against sexual stigma beyond sexual orientation, as I think it should, it has increasingly narrowed its scope to those issues of sexual orientation that have least to do with sex” (25).  Throughout this work, Warner evokes that of Erving Goffman’s work on stigma (which I plan to read soon), drawing parallels between the difference between shame and stigma and that between sin and identity—stigma being a physical mark, while sin is more ephemeral (perverse acts versus perversion) (28-29).

Warner gives extended consideration to the very idea of marriage, how it elevates certain relationships above others, bestowing privileges upon some and not others.  It also provides regulation over sex, as many who have argued for gay marriage (Andrew Sullivan draws quite  a bit of Warner’s ire) have made the case that legalizing gay marriage will lead to more monogamy among gay people, taming the gay community.  Warner does not villainize those who support gay marriage, however, noting that the “tendency to reproduce the hierarchy of shame, I believe, results from the structuring conditions of gay and lesbian politics, and not from the bad intentions of the people who devote their lives to activism within the movement” (49).  For my own project, I’m really starting to think about not only the idea of intelligibility in general (which I think is an important concept), but the question (and stakes) of the marriage economy, and who is eligible for it.  Ugly women are marked—stigmatized—as uneligible for marriage (Lily Daw first comes to mind).  In the same way that Warner argues the queer community should question the very foundations of marriage itself, rather than try to assimilate into it—such as those who pursue marriage for health benefits, childcare, and other current marks of privilege—and perhaps continue to pose a threat to the system, rather than try to assimilate into it.  Warner also echoes Joyce Carol Oates’s them to me in his discussion of marriage and the benefits of privilege, especially as he quotes Claudia Card: “Yet if marrying became an option that would legitimate behavior otherwise illegitimate and make available to us social securities that will not doubt become even more important to us as we age, we and many others like us might be pushed into marriage.  Marrying under such conditions is not a totally free choice” (107)[1] .  I think I’d like think more about ugliness as being a mark of unintelligibility—perhaps appearance as articulation?  Beauty as a necessary component of interpellation?

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[1] Quoting “Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood,” Hypatia 11.3 (Summer 1996): 1-23, p. 7.

William Faulkner--The Town (1957)

Part two of the Snopes trilogy, between The Hamlet (1940) and The Mansion (1959).  Chapter Synopsis: Each chapter is narrated from the point of view of one of three characters: Chick Mallison, Gavin Stevens, or V.K. Ratliff.  Like The Hamlet, The Town also focuses on the changing economy of Jefferson, but emphasizes the significance of gender in the flow of the economy, not only in how they effect it differently, but there’s a real Helen of Troy-esque blame on women for motivating men to make poor economic decisions.  In the story of the corsage panic, or Gavin’s pursuit of Linda Snopes, or Eula’s cuckolding of Flem, or Montgomery Ward’s pornography atelier, lust and sex are seen as the motive power of economics.  While women inspire this tragic motive power, they themselves seem doomed, as the suicide of Eula Snopes seems to emphasize to me.

Adrienne Rich--Compulsory Heterosexuality (1976)

“Compulsory Heterosexuality” was named as a “crime against women” by the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in 1976.  Compulsory heterosexuality ignores the question whether, other things being equal, women would choose heterosexual coupling.  Heterosexuality is presumed as a sexual preference of most women, either implicitly or explicitly.  In this essay, Rich first addresses the idea of lesbian existence, which she defines as both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. 

She then discusses what she calls the idea of a “lesbian continuum,” which she defines as a range of woman-identified experience.  In her terminology, the lesbian continuum acknowledges not only a woman who has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman.  Rather, lesbian identity in Rich’s use also refers to forms of primary intensity between and among women, which Rich sees as constituting bonding against male tyranny.  Rich claims that patriarchal definition has separated female friendship and comradeship from the erotic.  Importantly, Rich points out that, contra Freud, our primary relationships are with our mothers; our first primary bonds are with our mothers.  Why, then, does Freud’s family romance put the father at the center of the equation?  It makes more sense to imagine both males and females as having a primary attachment to women.

Rich then explores the ways in which women have resisted male tyranny expressed through compulsory heterosexuality, including refusing to have children, helping other women not have children, refusing to produce a higher standard of living for men, and female antiphallic sexuality.  This is also revealed through what Rich refers to as a female double life, in which women make life endurable for each other.  In contrast to the ways in which lesbianism has been portrayed in pulp fiction, Rich points to literature such as Toni Morrison’s Sula, which portrays a much more sensitive, nuanced female homosocial relationship. 

She then explains the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality leads to a loss of power.  Under this ideology, it is assumed that women are inevitably drawn to men; that women need men as social and economic protectors; that the heterosexual family unit is the basic social unit.  Lesbianism is assumed to be synonymous with man-hatred, despite the unacknowledged fact of the basic misogyny embedded in the culture.

Rich ends the essay by noting that “Should we condemn heterosexuality?” is the wrong question to ask.  Rather, it’s the absence of choice which has remained the unacknowledged reality.  This has led to women not having the power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives.

Lee Smith--Oral History (1983)

Smith’s third novel, it’s an ambitious novel of multiple points of view which interweave to tell the story of the Cantrell family, a story that spans the better part of a century. The Cantrells are a mountain family who inhabit the hills and environs of Hoot Owl Holler. Jennifer, a citified descendant of the Cantrells, arrives to record an "oral history" of her family for a college course, and all the old stories unscroll. But Oral History is finally the story of Dory, a lovely enigmatic woman who the many narrators attempt--through the telling of her story--to understand.  Within the frame story of Jennifer coming to Hoot Owl Holler to meet her relatives as part of an oral history project for a college class, Jennifer is told the family’s story starting with Almarine Cantrell, born in 1876.  Almarine, whose parents were from Ireland, fought for the Union army during the Civil War.  He falls in love (or is bewitched, depending on the storyteller) with the enigmatic Red Emmy, though he is married to Pricey Jane, with whom he will bear Dory, the equally enigmatic center of the family stories. 

Red Emmy is considered a witch by many, and Pricey Jane herself is from a gypsy family, the source of the gold earrings which become a cursed heirloom for her female heirs.  There are other women in the novel who claim or are seen as having various kinds of supernatural powers, from Granny Younger’s healing abilities to Jink Cantrell’s sense of sight.  There is a very strong sense of spirituality to the novel connected to Appalachia, a spirituality which is primarily a female, nature-based, healing one.  The spiritual is linked to the sexual and to music; these form the primary themes of the novel, which are explored through complex layers of narrative which include multiple voices from multiple points in time.  At the heart of the novel is the problem of desire: is it worth it to pursue desire if it has unhappiness built into it?

Even the wind itself has voices in it, which add to the family’s history.  By calling the novel Oral History, and by allowing the story to unfold in such a complex way, Smith calls attention to the very nature of history and stories, foregrounding the unreliability of narrative while she foregrounds the centrality of relationships (specifically, family relationships, but also non-familial ones)—and, ultimately, love—to history.