Imaginary Wandering

A couple of weeks back, Michael Arthur wrote an appreciation of Wandering Son by Shimura Takako, recently translated by Matt Thorn for Fantagraphics. Michael said:

That makes Wandering Son a most compelling fantasy, one in which the gentle-hearted are protected by their friends and youths hold the key to wisdom and self-knowledge in the form of a headband Would that every profoundly different kid were granted the same freedom and gentleness by society that pushes them in conflicting directions. Even this first volume, which focuses on the most flexible time in a kid’s life, is keenly aware of the unfairness of this system, which looms over a sissy or a tomboy like a distant god’s arbitrary cruelty. Wandering Son chooses for the most part to dwell on the possibility of choice, of self-knowledge and the love of a friend who knows your secret.

Having now read the book myself, I think that’s basically right: Wandering Son is a very gentle story. If anything, Michael overemphasizes the possibility of cruelty in the narrative. There is no bullying in this first volume, either physical or mental. No one expresses real outrage at the idea of queerness or cross-dressing. Nitori’s parents are a comforting, distant presence; his sister a typical sit-com older sister, spunky and sometimes cranky, but ultimately spporting. Nitori’s friends not only accept his dress-up impulses, but actively encourage them. Chiba seems positively titillated, and pushes girl’s clothes on him; Takatsuki is a soul mate, who wants to switch genders herself. The art, too, is insistently light; violence (a bicycle wreck, a brief fight) are pushed off panel; what remains is grade schoolers rendered in clear lines against often empty backgrounds, circular giant-eyed faces flecked with appealing blush marks staring limpidly as their noses disappear into their own radiant neoteny.

If I sound a little sardonic there at the end…well, what can I say. I am not categorically opposed to tweeness; Donovan is one of my favorite performers and I have a place in my heart for Cardcaptor Sakura. But even by those standards, Wandering Son’s preciousness can feel oppressive. Everyone is just so nice; so unwaveringly adorable. And that adorableness is tied ineluctably to the cross-dressing. Nitori’s fascination with girls’ clothes and Takako’s fascination with boys’ clothes serve as a metonymy for trans desires — a metonymy which is thoroughly externalized and fetishized. Their desires are certainly validated, but there’s a queasy sense in which they’re validated in the context of, and through, their cuteness. Queerness is swaddled in kawaii, lovingly packaged for a saccharine rush. It starts to feel ingratiating to the point of condescension.

Of course, the point of pop culture is, in a lot of ways, to be ingratiating. Superman caters to little boys’ gratuitous fantasies of power; Twilight caters to tween girls’ gratuitous fantasies of safety and romance. Wandering Son caters to the queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, fulfilling the dreams of a marginalized group has a political charge that’s certainly significantly braver and more needed than reassuring the privileged of their own wonderfulness a la Clark and Bella. But though I can appreciate what Takako is doing politically, aesthetically I much prefer something like Moto Hagio’s “Hanshin: Half-God,” with its much less comforting insights into children, gender, friendship, and desire.
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Not to end on a sour note…I did appreciate the skill with which Takako uses the comics medium to fulfill her remit. I was particularly struck by images like this:

So is that a boy or a girl?

Presumably, the question is a tip off. And, indeed, it’s Nitori dressed in girl’s clothes. But the genius of it is that if you didn’t know the character, there would be no way to tell. Drawing a cartoon boy in girl’s clothes is no different than drawing a cartoon girl in girl’s clothes. The image is the same.

I’ve been reading a little bit of Lacan, and in his essay on the mirror stage he argues (to the extent I can figure out what he’s talking about) for the primacy of the image as self. That is, the child, for Lacan, sees itself in the mirror, and is overjoyed; it misidentifies the beautiful thing is sees as its being. This misidentification echoes, or anticipates, the later creation, through language and social connections, of the ego, which is also a misidentification of the self.

The point is that Takako seems to be channeling some of that magic, that joy, that Lacan attributes to the child looking in the mirror. Nitori is that image of a girl. If that’s what he looks like, that’s what she is. The imaginary can trump the social. Which is an empowering message, even if I wish it weren’t maybe quite so demure or noseless.

55 thoughts on “Imaginary Wandering

  1. I never dreamed I’d be typing these words, but I like what you’ve been doing with Lacan lately. Really interesting and, I think, appropriate approach to comics.

  2. “I never dreamed I’d be typing these words”

    Hmmm…dreams…words…very Lacanian!

    I’m kind of misreading poor Lacan here a bit; I don’t think he’s say the imaginary trumps the social (symbolic) exactly — more like both are misreadings of self…but he sets himself up for that sort of misinterpretation by being so incomprehensible, so I don’t feel too bad about it….

  3. Yes, and frankly I’d rather read somebody else writing about Lacan’s ideas (even if it’s just an interesting misinterpretation!) than go direct to the horse’s mouth, as it were. He’s a fun theorist to toy around with, though, because there’s so much room for interpretation. I quite liked your Lacanian superhero reading as well; it was suitably critical without disavowing (ugh, Lacan again) the genuine space for identification that genre provides.

  4. I’d highly recommend Jane Gallop’s book “Reading Lacan.” She’s very smart and accessible, and refreshingly frank about how frustrating Lacan is to deal with.

    Glad you liked that comixology essay. I’m never sure anyone’s reading those….

  5. “Wandering Son caters to the queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance.”

    I don’t think this was made for queer audience at all. Otakus have a fetish for gender bender, ignoring social implications is catering to the fetishistic straight audience. Japan loves queerness but they don’t like to remember that they’re real people, an asocial representation allowed the straight audience’s vision to not being challenged.

    The majority of Wandering son’s readers don’t care about the social implications, they just care about cuteness.

  6. I think that’s maybe a little harsh. Takako seems to have spent a lot of her career focusing on LGBT issues…I mean, are you sure she doesn’t identify as queer?

    I agree that there are aspects of it which definitely seem fetishized for a larger audience…but I don’t think that precludes a genuine desire to reach queer youth and the LGBT community as well. I mean, Michael Arthur, who loves it, is gay, I’ve seen other queer people express affection for it…. I see where you’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s quite so cut and dry.

  7. Pingback: Waiting for news « MangaBlog

  8. I think you’re right! But I’m almost certain Shimura Takako is using the cuteness self-consciously. Later in the story, Shuu’s fantasies are pointed out as being naive and immature.
    Teachers almost break the fourth wall remarking something like “hey, this class sure does a lot of gender-bender plays.” There’s hardly a bully who doesn’t eventually try on a frock himself. There’s definitely an element of winking wish-fulfillment in the story.

    The anime adaptation is excellent and is available in the US. I encourage you to stick with it!

  9. I’m pretty committed to getting the rest of the series, and the rest of Fantagraphics manga line in general. It’s definitely something I want to support.

    And…I don’t hate it at all. I’m interested to see the more self-conscious bits too….

  10. Noah, please stop writing queer theory. Where did you get this idea about a communal queer “fantasy of acceptance”? Do you think queer = Dan Savage?

  11. Hey Caroline. I don’t think I said anything about “communal.” I’m aware that it’s not the only queer fantasy on offer, and that not all queer people find it appealing. It does exist, though, and some queer people find it appealing, and I think Wandering Son is pretty clearly catering to them.

    It’s a bit late to ask me to stop writing queer theory. Barn doors, cows, etc.

  12. It’s just that you’re doing this thing that I feel like I see a lot of academics doing—I’ll refrain from judging whether or not it has anything to do with many of these academics not themselves being queer—where you are trying to apply queer theory as this abstract exercise where you pick out things that you like from the miasma of pop culture and apply the label “queer” to them, which is kind of a meaningless exercise when the object you are discussing probably doesn’t have anything to do with actual living queer people’s lived experiences. This sometimes leads to critical statements which are diametrically opposed to reality, like saying that the heterosexual male, father, sexual aggressor / rapist / murderer, and fictional character Leland Palmer is “queer” because he likes show tunes. I’m not familiar with the manga that you’re discussing, but even though I can’t be sure that it is applicable in this specific case I think that Oscar’s skepticism is a general good rule of thumb: “I don’t think this was made for queer audience … ignoring social implications is catering to the fetishistic straight audience.” Media that depicts queer people does not necessarily and, in the mainstream, almost always doesn’t come out of an engagement with the reality of queer people’s lived experiences, and a representation queer person is definitely not the same thing as a living queer person and cannot critically be treated as one. That’s why I’m skeptical of so-called “queer” criticism of pop culture as a whole.

  13. Ah, I see. I said “queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance.” I really didn’t intend that to mean everyone in the queer community has fantasies of acceptance, or even that everyone who is queer thinks of themselves as part of a single community. My apologies if that was unclear.

  14. The thing about Leland isn’t saying “he is gay because he listens to show tunes.” I mean, he’s not gay, (a) because he’s straight in the show, and (b) because he’s not a real person, so he can’t *really* be anything. The point rather is that gayness is a pretty central idea in our culture, and it’s used in various ways throughout that culture. In Twin Peaks I think queerness and campiness are used to talk about double lives and corruption. It pretty clearly does *not* have to do with actual queer people living their actual lives …except insofar as tropes affect people’s actual lives. Which they do, to some extent.

    For Leland…a *lot* of murderer/sexual aggressor figures in film especially are portrayed as queer or deliberately gender divergent in one way or another (Norman Bates in Psycho is perhaps the prototypical example.) It’s totally reasonable to find that repugnant…but pointing out that it happens in films isn’t the same thing as saying, “gay people are actually murderers.”

    As far as Wandering Son…I’ll asked you what I asked Oscar. Are you sure the author isn’t queer? I’m really not sure she isn’t. I know she’s famous for her LGBT themed work in Japan. I know that many people who have worked in that vein (like Moto Hagio) do seem to identify queer. Furthermore, I know that there are a number of gay people (like Michael) who find her work compelling.

    “Media that depicts queer people does not necessarily and, in the mainstream, almost always doesn’t come out of an engagement with the reality of queer people’s lived experiences, and a representation queer person is definitely not the same thing as a living queer person and cannot critically be treated as one.”

    But…that’s totally an insight that most practitioners of queer theory would agree with. And my post talks about my discomfort with the way that the queer characters don’t seem to be actual queer characters but are instead packaged for broader consumption…an insight, again, which is really directly from reading queer theory, if it’s from anywhere.

    I mean…what queer theory are you thinking of that you haven’t liked? I really like Foucault; I really like Eve Sedgwick, I really like Julia Serrano…I’ve read less of and am less fond of Judith Butler. I like Sharon Marcus. I like Heather Love. All those people identified or identify as queer, I’m pretty sure….

  15. I was thinking more of other blogs or contemporary writers who I’m hesitant to name because I don’t want anyone to pay any attention to them. Many of them make the same identification that you are making of queerness with camp or kitsch, and, by extension, spectacle and fakeness. “A pell-mell diffusion of erotic simulacra in every guise, of transsexual kitsch in all its glory.” That’s Baudrillard making the same association. His view is extremely problematic because he says that transsexuals are the actors who perpetuate capitalist spectacle, little walking simulacra, like human Times Squares, which is a strange thing to say given the violence that transgender people face in their day to day lives because their existence is an exception to the binary structure ingrained in our society—their lives are very far from exemplifying the dominant values of our society as Baudrillard seems to think. Although since he clearly is unable to think of them as anything more than lifeless objects that are sliced up and rearranged with scalpels, I’m not surprised that he would think that. Janice Raymond would agree with him. Another problem with this argument is that it gives brain dead “critics” of pop culture more ammunition to argue that Lady Gaga is queer because she wears giant hats. Anything to avoid talking about actual, living queer people.

    I agree with you that it is worthwhile to draw critical attention to how transgendered characters are portrayed as murderers when they appear in the media. Silence of the Lambs and CSI are examples. I disagree with saying that Norman Bates qualifies as a representation of a queer person just because of his ridiculous split personality and because he wears a wig. But anyways, although I agree that criticism is worth making, it seems to me that that isn’t at all what you were doing in the Leland Palmer post, since the association you were drawing between queerness and the character, who is a murderer, is one that very few people are likely to make. In other words, it seems like you were trying to argue why the murderer character is queer, rather than why it is problematic that queer characters are murderers. Rack up one more point for the other team.

  16. Lady Gaga is avowedly bi, and identifies queer. You can like her or not (my feelings are mixed) and whether her queerness has wider relevance is arguable, but I think saying she’s not an actual queer person (which is what you’re implying?) is not true.

    Here’s me on Lady Gaga’s last album. I fear you’ll hate it, but it seemed cowardly not to include the link.

    In the Twin Peaks post, it certainly wasn’t my intention to say that gay people are murderers; I mean, I really, really don’t think it’s true that gay people are any more likely to be murderers than anyone else. I think Twin Peaks is really campy in a lot of ways (I don’t think that’s a supercontroversial thing to say?) and camp is generally identified with queerness. I think too that Lynch is working off of the queer patriarch/murderer trope to work with other tropes about queerness. And he does explicitly make Leland the victim of a male-male sexual assault….

    My point in that essay was to question the way that Twin Peaks privileges an idea of “the real” as something concealed and then revealed. I think Lynch creates that idea in part through linking it to ideas of the closet and queerness.

    One of the things I like a lot about Eve Sedgwick is that she argues that ideas about queerness are really central to heterosexual identity. So the hypermasculine uberpatriarch rapist/killer is really always based around a binary with a non-hypermasculine self. Ubermasculinity is dependent on queerness…which is why there is this trope of Norman Bates being a cross-dresser, or Jason being his mother, or on and on.

    Not that that is *true* — but it’s a trope. It’s a way that queerness gets talked about and thought about. I think Lynch is working with that…which is something I find problematic in Twin Peaks (though I love Twin Peaks.)

    I can certainly see your point about wanting to remind folks like me that there are real, living queer people, and that you need to think abou them when having these conversations. At the same time…if you’re talking about art, you’re not talking about real, living queer people, but about representations of them and ideas about them. Queerness *is* often associated with spectacle and camp and fakeness. I agree with you that there are real problems with that (I talk about that some here, using Julia Serano). From what you’re saying, Baudrillard seems to be in a more Judith Butler gender as performance mode, which isn’t really where I’m coming from.

    I do agree that there are connections between capitalist ideologies and liberal ideologies about individual freedom and equality, like the feminist movement and the gay rights movement. Capitalism is about breaking down traditional hierarchies, and that includes hierarchies based on gender and gender orientation. It’s complicated too, of course, because women’s bodies (and queer bodies too) are commodified and fetishized under capitalism, so there’s an impulse to treat people as things…but there’s also an impulse to treat people as consumers, which is egalitarian (or at least bases discrimination only on money.)

    Anyway, the point of all that for me is not that trans people are capitalist billboards (at least, not any more than cis people), but rather that knee-jerk dismissal of capitalism and modernity is fairly problematic, since capitalism and liberal modernity, whatever their many many many problems, do create this place in which marginalized groups (jews, gays, whoever) tend over time to be treated with some dignity (or at least, with the same lack of dignity as everybody gets treated under capitalism and modernity.)

  17. I just wanted to add…I hope I’m not coming across as too confrontational. I am always happy to be called on stuff like this; I think it’s really a worthwhile discussion, and appreciate you taking the time and effort to comment.

  18. Not confrontational enough.

    If capitalism coopts queer identities and turn them into commodities, that equals egalitarianism? Token political representation for the privileged equals basic human rights accessible to everyone else? Targetting specific oppressed groups as demographics and pitting them against each other in a race to obtain meaningless class signifiers means that the state no longer is oppressive? Women are a huge growing consumer market. Does that mean that patriarchy no longer exists? Because we have Luna bars and the Oprah channel? This is the same logic that libertarians use to argue that America is post-race (while they’re also advocating police violence against immigrants and black people.)

    Since capitalism treats everyone as a consumer, your worth to the state is tied into your spending power. What if you’re not rich? Marriage rights for the limited, privileged group of gays to whom that petty status symbol has relevance doesn’t mean that homeless queer aren’t exposed to violence on a daily basis. If Dan Savage adopts a fucking baby that won’t suddenly mean that I have legal protection if I’m fired from my job for being trans or assaulted in a public restroom.

    The book you should be reading that has a good critique of your blatantly fucked social analysis is “Homonationalism in Queer Times” by Jasbir K. Puar. Specifically, she identifies the mechanism of ‘sexual exceptionalism’ by which the United States valorizes itself as being superior to Muslim societies, using the same argument about liberalism and the supposed egalitarianism of the market that you are using here.

    “She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship).

    Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These “homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation.”

    Who gives a fuck what Lady Gaga identifies as?

  19. Well, presumably Lady Gaga cares. I kind of care too, honestly. Like I said, I sort of like her (more as a performance artist than a musician, but still.)

    And sorry I’m not sufficiently confrontational! I don’t actually disagree with you that much, is the problem. That book by Puar sounds great, and I think that analysis makes sense. Arguing that acceptance of gays is predicated on Muslim others seems right, and I think is true for women’s rights as well in a lot of ways. Anyway, I really mistrust capitalism, and hate America, and all that stuff. I just think that the equality and freedom offered by liberal modernity, thoroughly compromised as it is, does in fact have some value, and is connected to aspirations that I, at least, find pretty powerful and meaningful. I just think radical programs that don’t acknowledge the good things about the society they want to overthrow are often hampered pragmatically (you need to know your enemy) and risk chucking out babies with bathwater as well.

    I also, as I’ve done before when Anja made a similar argument, want to stick up for gay marriage. I don’t really understand the argument that only privileged gay people want the right to marry. People of all sorts of social classes and all sorts of races get married. Homeless people do too. I don’t think that marriage rights are a solution to all issues of queer oppression at all, and certainly they’re not a solution to poverty or homelessness …but I do think that marriage is a valuable and rewarding institution in a lot of ways, and I think that the ways that it’s problematic (basically patriarchy) are really challenged in a good way by queer people marrying.

    Not only do I enjoy reading Dan Savage (at least sometimes), I quite like Andrew Sullivan, though I disagree with him a lot.

    Just out of curiosity…have you read Wandering Son? Do you hate it? It seems like you’d have to…?

  20. ———————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    I just wanted to add…I hope I’m not coming across as too confrontational. I am always happy to be called on stuff like this…
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    CB says:

    Not confrontational enough.
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    …You rang?

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    If capitalism coopts queer identities and turn them into commodities, that equals egalitarianism?…
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    (But, seriously…)

    It’s a kind of egalitarianism. It’s far from an ideal version, a pretty reductionistic one. But to Big Biz, it’s irrelevant who or what you are, as long as you’re an at least potential “consumer.”

    For instance, execs at the Ford Motor Company were appalled by Henry Ford’s blatant anti-Semitism, expressed in the newspaper he owned, by writing “The International Jew” ( http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/intern_jew.htm ) republishing and promoting the vile “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion.”

    Whatever their personal prejudices, these businessmen knew that associating their cars with anti-Semitism would hardly help sell Fords to Jews…

    —————————
    Oscar says:

    “Wandering Son caters to the queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance.”

    I don’t think this was made for queer audience at all. Otakus have a fetish for gender bender, ignoring social implications is catering to the fetishistic straight audience….
    —————————-

    Fair enough; but, aren’t there at least some gay/transgender/cross-dressing/whatever folk who could enjoy some escapism from harsh realities? Into a world where (in Noah’s words) “There is no bullying…either physical or mental. No one expresses real outrage at the idea of queerness or cross-dressing. Nitori’s parents are a comforting, distant presence; his sister a typical sit-com older sister, spunky and sometimes cranky, but ultimately supporting. Nitori’s friends not only accept his dress-up impulses, but actively encourage them…”?

    In what basic way is this comforting fantasy different from — moving worlds apart from “Wandering Son” — that in the latest detestable “Transformers” movie, where (quoting Noah again) “…Sam Witwicky…[is] in a serious relationship with The Girl…[who] is insanely gorgeous, gainfully employed, and quite wealthy…Sam is average-looking, unemployed…Naturally, The Girl is crazy about Sam. She allows him to live rent free in her palace, props up his ego by getting herself captured (so he can rescue her), and she spends the entire movie reassuring him that he is, indeed, awesome, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary…”?

    With “Rubyfruit Jungle,” surely (as I recall) the fact that Molly Bolt had not the slightest qualms or insecurities whatsoever about her homosexuality — no matter how utterly unrealistically unlike the experiences of gay folk at that time — contributed greatly to its absurd popularity among that group.

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    CB says:

    …Media that depicts queer people does not necessarily and, in the mainstream, almost always doesn’t come out of an engagement with the reality of queer people’s lived experiences, and a representation queer person is definitely not the same thing as a living queer person and cannot critically be treated as one…
    ——————————–

    And why should that be any different from media that depicts straight people? Do you think most mainstream movies/TV “come out of an engagement with the reality of hetero people’s lived experiences”? Or those of blacks?

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    …other blogs or contemporary writers…make the same identification that you are making of queerness with camp or kitsch, and, by extension, spectacle and fakeness.
    ——————————–

    Camp or kitsch are not all there is to queerness, but those are undeniably hugely popular in gay male culture.

    And indeed, the fascination (by straight cross-dressers as well as gay drag queens) with histrionic, exaggerated larger-than-live diva types like Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Barbra Streisand shows a focus not on the complex, modulated reality of womanhood but in a shallowly glamorous, show-bizzy, often tragically self-destructive simulacrum of such.

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    Who gives a fuck what Lady Gaga identifies as?
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    So it’s utterly irrelevant if one of the most famous and commercially successful present-day music figures “is avowedly bi, and identifies queer”?

    I’m old enough to remember when show-biz celebs went to massive lengths to cover up their gayness, in dread of the negative consequences at the box office, damage to their straight image; even, pitifully, dying in the closet.

    How nice it must be to have the blasé “…so what if so-and-so came out? Who cares?” attitude…

  21. “quoting Noah again) “…Sam Witwicky…[is] in a serious relationship with The Girl..”

    Not me! I haven’t seen the movie; you’re quoting Richard Cook’s article.

  22. You both make me sick. For you this is just a detached exercise so you can justify the commodity fantasy world you live in and make it sound cool and relevant using appropriated language that you have zero understanding of. Do you have any idea what queer theory means? That its basis is a critique of patriarchy and capitalist exploitation, not the mindless celebration of exploitative commodity culture? The word “queer” refers to oppressed people in the real world, not celebrity shills like Lady Gaga. But you clearly can’t tell the difference between them, since you’re so invested in this received narrative you keep repeating over and over that the commodification and tokenization of identity by consumer culture somehow equals the end of oppression instead of its extension. And you sit there telling me “How nice it must be to have the blasé ‘…so what if so-and-so came out? Who cares?'” What planet do you live on? This society will still murder abjected queer people no matter how many fucking rich gay celebrities you have on television. No matter what groups or identities capitalism absorbs, it will continue to do violence to the people who do not fit into the categories to which it has given privilege, which, counter to your myth of egalitarian progress, will invariably exclude all except a very few. This is why I recommended Jasbir Puar, because she offers a criticism of how the commodification of gay identity gives American society more justification for violence against people of color and non-normative queers.

  23. “The word “queer” refers to oppressed people in the real world, not celebrity shills like Lady Gaga.”

    How do you know what sort of oppression she has or has not faced because of her queerness? And having visible gay people out of the closet has been a focus of gay activism for decades.

    “this received narrative you keep repeating over and over that the commodification and tokenization of identity by consumer culture somehow equals the end of oppression instead of its extension.”

    I don’t think it equals the end of oppression. I think integration is meaningful, though. The civil rights movement mattered, even if it doesn’t mean that black people are equal or that oppression has ceased. I understand that radicals often disagree with the claim that integration matters. I respect where they (and you) are coming from, and I think criticizing the ways integration reifies capitalism is entirely worthwhile. But I just don’t agree that integration is meaningless or malicious in all ways.

  24. Ah yes, the fascinating, complex, many layered subjectivity of that rich white woman, Lady Gaga. Much more interesting than the flat, homogenous non subjectivities of brown people and actual, real life queers- and the boring, tedious, homogenous violence they face daily. Way too boring to even acknowledge, which I notice is really difficult for you-who wants to talk about real oppression when celebrity simulacra are so much less threatening to your unimpeachable sense of privilege and entitlement? Please, continue to educate me on how much better queers’ lives are because Lady Gaga wants to sell me something. The next time someone I know is assaulted it will make me feel so much better to think about the discussing fantasy world you live in. You can do whatever you want, but stop claiming the label “queer” when you do it.

  25. “discussing fantasy world”

    I presume you mean “disgusting.”

    I’m not claiming I’m queer. Lady Gaga identifies as queer. Having people who identify publicly as queer in the public eye could well be helpful to young queer people who are isolated, and whose suicide rates are depressingly high. Some of those queer people are no doubt white and privileged. However, being queer, even if you are rich and white, is itself a marginalized status, and means that in many situations you get treated badly. It’s quite possible that Lady Gaga experienced some of that at some point in her life, because lots of queer people do. I don’t see how denigrating that is helpful.

    Suggesting that having queer people in high profile positions come out may be helpful in no way suggests that it ends oppression of queer people, and of course it doesn’t prevent people from being assaulted. It doesn’t solve the famine in Somalia either. Arguing that something may have some positive effects doesn’t indicate that it’s going to solve everything. It doesn’t even mean that it’s going to be good in every way.

    “so much less threatening to your unimpeachable sense of privilege and entitlement? ”

    Nothing really threatens my sense of privilege or entitlement. I’m an upper-middle class straight white guy in America. I’m extremely privileged; I’m extremely entitled. Nonetheless, in part because of that entitlement, one of the things I don’t feel like I have the right to do is determine that somebody isn’t queer enough when they say they’re queer, whether that’s Lady Gaga or Dan Savage or whoever.

    I’m trying not to match your tone, because I like you and respect you and think your perspective is important. If you want to keep the conversation going, though, you need to stop escalating. I’ll give you another round so you can have the last word, but if we’re still at the same level of animosity, I’m going to close the thread down. Fair warning.

  26. ——————–
    CB says:

    You both make me sick. For you this is just a detached exercise so you can justify…
    ——————–

    Heh, heh! Goes to show; from the perspective of an ultra-enlightened person, there’s no difference at all between us, Noah…

    ———————
    This is why I recommended Jasbir Puar, because she offers a criticism of how the commodification of gay identity gives American society more justification for violence against people of color and non-normative queers.
    ———————-

    Yes, more gay characters in sitcoms = excuses for beating up on blacks and gays.

    (Uh, is there supposed to be a difference between “gays” and “non-normative queers”?)

  27. Lady Gaga on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and how killing brown people is a human right: “Equality is the prime rib of America, but because I’m gay, I don’t get to enjoy the greatest cut of meat my country has to offer.” Close the thread!

  28. Pretty good speech!

    Even if Radical Vegans get outraged over Gaga’s “the greatest cut of meat my country has to offer” line…

    “How carnivore-ist can you get??!!

    ————————-
    CB says:

    Lady Gaga on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and how killing brown people is a human right: “Equality is the prime rib of America, but because I’m gay, I don’t get to enjoy the greatest cut of meat my country has to offer.”
    ————————–

    A typical misreading; it’s equality that’s the human right.

    So you think simply being in the U.S. military = “killing brown people”? That’s all there is to it?

  29. I’m cowardly avoiding the merits of this debate but I wanted to point out that what Caroline observes here

    “It’s just that you’re doing this thing that I feel like I see a lot of academics doing—I’ll refrain from judging whether or not it has anything to do with many of these academics not themselves being queer—where you are trying to apply queer theory as this abstract exercise…”

    was the focus of much brouhaha in academia in the mid-1990s. Teresa de Lauretis (the academic who coined the term “queer theory”) distanced herself from the term because she felt it was being used to prop up the very mainstream concepts she’d coined it to resist.

    But the debates were complex and interesting, if you’re the type who finds that sort of argument interesting. One of the more substantive flashpoints occurred in the Australian Humanities Review in the second half of 1996; see

    http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/jagose.html

    and

    http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-July-1996/altman.html

  30. Interesting links, thanks! In the first, Annamarie Jagose writes:

    ——————-
    Queer theory’s debunking of stable sexes, genders and sexualities develops out of a specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions.
    —————–

    Hunh! What’s being said here — nay, put forth as a powerful “debunking,” in typically pretentious Academese — that science and a simple look at reality hasn’t amply shown?
    Queer Theorists no more came up with the view that identity was fluid than Columbus “discovered” America.

    All developing embryos start out as female; a certain percentage then become male. Human sexual behavior and orientation is, to significant degrees, malleable, influenced with absurd ease by biochemical factors. Straight guys put in prison start having sex with guys — while maintaining they’re straight — and go back to women once they’re out. Really Manly Men, like those ancient Greek warriors, can still like young boys. Submissive, coddled Southern Belles can take over running the plantation when their men-folk are off fighting those Yankees…

    And, what different persons we are, what facets of our self come forward or fall back, when we’re with our mothers, a sibling we’re not particularly close with, at work with the manager’s cold eye upon us, alone appreciating a beautiful sunrise, with a lover…

    Re that biochemical stuff, I’ve been enjoying Poppy Z. Brite’s blog for some years now. Lately, she’s (always really a gay guy inside) been doing:

    ——————-
    July 6th:
    TESTOSTERONE. I had heard about this side effect, but nothing could have really prepared me. Right now, I basically want to stick it in anything with two legs, though as yet I’ve nothing much to stick. I’m becoming a dangerous creature. I’m totally checking out the window girls in the Red Light District. Yesterday I saw my best friend here and spent the whole visit entertaining filthy thoughts about him (and he’s hot, you bet, but our relationship isn’t LIKE THAT). The most not-my-type man in the world can walk by and my thoughts will start screaming, “I bet you have a DICK!!! Whip it out and let’s see what you can do with it! DICK DICK DICK!” Basically, it’s puberty all over again except that this time I know what I’m missing.

    July 23rd:
    I don’t think I’ve cried since I started T[estosterone], but this was the worst I’ve felt since then and the first time I kind of wanted to, just to release some tension. I could feel the pressure of tears behind my eyes, but they wouldn’t come out. I just got really quiet and really grim. Then I went to bed because I didn’t want to think about it anymore and slept for twelve hours.

    Not sure what to make of this. I never really liked crying, and sometimes when I didn’t want to cry but couldn’t help myself, I absolutely hated it. But it can be a hell of a release. If this is one of the tradeoffs I have to make, it’s still well worth the benefits I’ve gained and expect to keep gaining from T, but it’s … just very strange.
    ——————
    http://docbrite.livejournal.com/

    Now, did all of a sudden the Patriarchy take over her brain, with messages of This Is What A Real Man Is Supposed To Act Like — constantly interested in sex, suppressing emotional outbursts that would display “weakness” — suddenly activated, or is it a matter of a hormone at work?

    ——————
    Annamarie Jagose continues:

    Butler understands, as de Lauretis did when initially promoting queer over lesbian and gay, that the conservative effects of identity classifications lie in their ability to naturalise themselves as self-evident descriptive categories.
    ——————-

    Conservatives certainly are into pushing simplistic, limiting versions of what it means to be, say, “male” and “female.” Which, typically, they don’t follow: pursuing “unnatural” sex, with right-wing women in positions of power and influence — Margaret Thatcher, Marabel “The Total Woman” Morgan, Nancy Reagan, Ann Coulter hardly practicing the submissive, stay-at-home position they urged for all other women…

    ——————–
    The discursive proliferation of queer has been enabled in part by the knowledge that identities are fictitious–that is, produced by and productive of material effects but nevertheless arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated.
    ——————–

    Um, “identities are fictitious…arbitrary, contingent and ideologically motivated”? Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater!

    It’s one thing to say that, to a degree, our personalities/behavior/sexual interests are malleable; another, that they’re not real. That, as those facile promoters of the American Dream glibly advise, we can simply wholly “reinvent ourselves” whenever life-circumstances change…

  31. Well I for one, as a long term anime fan, and someone who has recently come to self identify myself as trans gendered.

    Quite enjoyed the anime that was adopted from the aforementioned manga. Yes it is a gentler world that focused on the little pains of being transgendered:

    A girl silently unhappy to discover her breasts are getting larger and boys are finding her “cute”

    A boy (the wandering son in question) being asked what’s he going to do when his voice changes as well as number of other pragmatic and pottentionaly depressing questions he needs to answer as he journeys.

    They spoke quite poignantly to me. despite gap of years.

    I think abstracting this into some intellectual rant about the entire unfair nature of the world is going far beyond any hope of understanding the the author.

  32. Mike – I am busy right now; I shouldn’t be ranting on HU, and Noah will be deeply frustrated with me for making this post, but god fucking damn it.

    I have to work not to flame you every time I read one of your posts, but this is IT. I took a brief break and saw your post and have had it.

    There are two things you need to do right now:

    -You need to stop misgendering Brite. I’m having trouble accessing any part of his blog other than the front page, but if I’m correct from looking at that front page and his Wikipedia article, he is a trans man. A man. Named Billy. Which means that unless he specifically states otherwise, you need to start calling him Billy and using he/him pronouns when referring to him. NOW.

    -You need to STOP using the lives and experiences of trans people to prop up your utterly busted politics. I have been on testosterone, on estrogen, and on neither (my body produces practically none of either hormone on its own). I am to the left of most queer theorists, are as almost all of my trans friends. There is no cognitive dissonance there. Why? Because we have the proper life perspective to question the gender binary and the construction of gendered identities in our society.
    Yes, hormones tend to effect people in various ways, and yes, there are conservative trans people who extrapolate from that to subscribe to biological determinist views of gender and human behavior. They are binarist, privileged assholes, and they are wrong.

    I’m not going to elaborate at length about exactly how they (and you) are wrong, or engage in a debate with you about this – like I said, I’m supposed to be wrapping something up for Noah right now, and I don’t have the emotional energy or motivation to do so anyhow. I’m pretty much just going to let you know that what you’re doing is fucked, you need to stop now and apologize, and frankly? Your shit is a primary reason why I don’t post here as much as I might.

    This post is flamey, but you need to know how angry you just made me.

  33. Anja, maybe after you’ve finished your thing for me (damn it!)…have you read Julia Serrano? She talks about hormone treatment making her more aware of colors, for example, and does use that to suggest that there is a biological reality to gender. She does that in the interest of arguing that trans gender identities are real, not performative (a la Judith Butler)…which makes sense to me. Though she also uses her experiences transitioning to talk about the way gender is inscribed socially (she talks about how one day people just started treating her like a woman, and how disorienting that was, and how aware it made her of the inequalities in the ways men and women are treated.)

    I guess I’m just curious what you’d think of what she’s trying to do. I know you’re not a fan of Butler, but it sounds like you might have arguments with Serrano as well (though she’s certainly not conservative, and I really don’t think her “gender is real” argument means that she believes that there are only two real genders….)

  34. Well, like I said, I’m not really interested in having a gender-theoretical discussion right now. I’ve read a couple of Serrano’s essays and heard her do spoken word in person, but I’m not well-read enough in either Serano or Butler to compare/contrast them. I do think that gender is in large part performative, and something that exists as a social language (which is not to say “fake” or “illusory”); I also think that people aren’t fooling themselves when they say that they feel themselves to have genders. Hormones have some effect on behavior, but they don’t determine gender or dominate gendered behavior or psychology any more than genitals do, or anything else for that matter.

    Serano has said a few things that come off to me as a tad binarist, but I don’t think she’s against non-binary people or anything like that. She reclaims “bisexual” (as opposed to “pansexual” or “queer”), though, and once wrote against people pronouning her with neutral pronouns by default (ie not assuming her gender based on her appearance), both of which bug me. The first because “bi” assumes that two genders is all there is, which excludes me, and the second because it may allow her to be correctly pronouned more often, but at the expense of people like me getting incorrectly pronouned a whole *lot* more often.

    I wouldn’t say I hate J-Buts; she’s just written some heinously offensive things, as have many other interesting and excellent intellectuals at various times. I never let that stop me from reading and enjoying ’em for what they’re worth, though… I’d certainly rather read JuBu than, I don’t know, Camille “Traitor to my gender, you betcha!” Paglia or something.

  35. But yeah, right now I’m just interested in Billy Brite not ever being misgendered on this site or elsewhere, or used as an argumentative cudgel in favor of terrible antifeminist gender politics, ever ever ever again. Ever.

  36. Well, fair enough…though…I mean, Mike has said things I really disagree with in the past, but in this particular argument, I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what he’s said that is so horribly beyond the pale. I understand that getting people’s gender wrong is insulting, and I’m hoping he just apologizes…but he does say that Brite is in fact a gay man, so it doesn’t seem like he’s deliberately denying Brite’s gender. (It’s not clear from the Wikipedia article that he’s forsworn the name “Poppy” for use in some contexts…? Though he may have, I haven’t read his blog.)

    As far as gender fluidity, Mike seems to be close to what you’re saying; that is, that people’s identities can be fluid, but that there is a core of gender reality there which may well be related to biology and hormones. I think he probably thinks biology and hormones are more important than you do (or than I do), but the argument seems one of degree there? And he argues against “simplistic and limiting” conservative views of women….

    I could well be missing something, but maybe you could clarify what the antifeminism is in this instance? Is it suggesting that certain stereotypically male characteristics (higher libido, less likely to cry) may be the result of hormones rather than social factors? It just seems like a fairly limited claim here, and since it’s followed immediately by rejecting conservative social roles…

  37. Hopefully I’m not overstepping my bounds as a random visitor to your fascinating site but I would like to support one aspect of Anja Flower’s challenge.

    I’m new to… reevaluating my gender, but one of the first points of etiquette I learned as I made my tentative steps into the gay.. sorry … LGBT.. sorry LGBTQ… “community” was that accepting a person’s gender as they presented and properly referring to them with the pronouns they identified with.. was… well paramount. Mr. Hunter really needs to make note of that if he wants to have dialogue with that community.

    I am curious as to what makes western theorists sticking to what they know and have been taught all their lives about gender worthy of converting a word derived from ‘binary’ into an epithet and then piling on all sorts of other epithets on top of it? Stating that a number of people (plural) are so willfully wrong that they must be assholes, presumably for disagreeing with a theory of your own, makes me wonder as to the lack of bias or ideology in your own work. Such forceful assertions I really doubt help dialogue either.

  38. Hey JPG. You’re not overstepping any bounds; I appreciate your thoughts.

    You’re Joy from before, yes? If I could ask…could you keep to one name when you’re on the site? It can be confusing to other folks if you show up with more than one, is the only reason. Thanks…and again, thanks for commenting.

  39. I will stick to this name in the future. Later surfing about your website identified a “Joy Delyria” as one of your columnists and I didn’t want to be confused (or presumed to be attempting to be confused) with her. You can address me as ‘Joy’ if you like though. I won’t mind.

  40. ———————
    Anja Flower says:

    …There are two things you need to do right now:

    -You need to stop misgendering Brite. I’m having trouble accessing any part of his blog other than the front page, but if I’m correct from looking at that front page and his Wikipedia article, he is a trans man. A man. Named Billy. Which means that unless he specifically states otherwise, you need to start calling him Billy and using he/him pronouns when referring to him. NOW.
    ———————-

    (Snaps to attention) Jawohl, mein kommandant!

    I actually considered using “Billy” — a pretty recent name change — but, first, knew that virtually no one would know whothehell I was talking about, and second, wasn’t sure how much formal, or how much of a joke, this new name was. (Brite is a BIG Billy Joel fan, as the accompanying post-icons indicate.)

    As for the offending “she’s,” I’ve been reading, er, this person’s works and following their career for about twenty years; old habits die hard. No disrespect was intended, t’was a simple mistake. (I always was annoyed at the sportswriters who, when Cassius Clay converted to Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, still pointedly kept referring to him as Cassius Clay.)

    But, I legally changed my name decades ago, and have no trouble accepting it when family members use my old name. That’s the name they knew me by, that’s who I am in their minds.

    In keeping with my earlier comment that “what different persons we are, what facets of our self come forward or fall back, when we’re with our mothers, a sibling we’re not particularly close with, at work with the manager’s cold eye upon us, alone appreciating a beautiful sunrise, with a lover,” isn’t the usage of different names in keeping with that “shifting identities” bit?

    Isn’t there also a “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” quality to insisting that a transgender person should always be referred to by the gender they currently are/identify with? Isn’t that denying the validity of the identity they once had?

    A dear friend, happily married for many years now, told me she “used to identify as a lesbian.” So if she identifies as hetero now, is it somehow outrageous to say she was not heterosexual during those years when she was making love with women?

    I wrote earlier, “All developing embryos start out as female; a certain percentage then become male. Human sexual behavior and orientation is, to significant degrees, malleable…”; doesn’t insisting on one single identity for a person constitute chopping down their fluid complexity to fit an ideological Procrustean bed?

    (And, I’m supposed to be the Mr. A-type, all-or-nothing gender reactionary here? Spouting “terrible antifeminist gender politics”?)

    Also, note how the article — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_Z._Brite — isn’t titled “Billy”; for a creative/public person, isn’t there the “brand recognition” factor to take into account?

    ———————–
    -You need to STOP using the lives and experiences of trans people to prop up your utterly busted politics.
    ———————–

    So one shouldn’t use reality and real-life examples, when they bolster one’s arguments? I guess we should follow in the path blazed by Fox “News,” and just invent events and distort reality to match the ideological perspective.

    As for my “utterly busted politics,” your image of them is as incorrect as the Right’s view of liberals.

    ———————–
    …Because we have the proper life perspective to question the gender binary and the construction of gendered identities in our society.
    ————————

    Following that attitude, then, any criticism by African-Americans of White society, of women about male oppression, can be dismissed out of hand. Because Caucasians and males can claim “the proper life perspective” to understand and justify why they act like they do. “It’s a white/male thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

    While working at a gay newspaper (a very enjoyable experience, aside from the inadequate pay) I heard a guy say about cunnilingus, “I don’t see how a man could put his mouth on that thing.” (Without getting into “Jerry Springer Show” self-disclosure, I couldn’t disagree more!)

    But, wouldn’t a gay man tend to be limited in his understanding of hetero sexuality? And vice versa? Couldn’t people who never felt they sexually “fit” in any simple category of gender or affectional preference have trouble understanding those for whom it’s a more simple, cut-and-dry situation? Then there are those for whom all sex is a vile, degrading, animalistic endeavor…

    I think we’re all, to a degree, like the blind (excuse me; “seeing-challenged”!) men feeling the elephant. ( http://www.jainworld.com/literature/story25.htm ) Our perspectives are limited; the complex reality is better comprehended by a combination of perspectives.

    ————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    …I really don’t think [Butler’s] “gender is real” argument means that she believes that there are only two real genders….
    —————————

    I certainly don’t think it’s as simple as that. And, moreover, believe that those who aren’t neatly pigeonholed can offer insights that others can benefit from. Such as was the case with some American Indian tribes, where a “man-woman” could explain the ways of men to women, and vice versa…

    —————————
    Two-Spirit People…describes Indigenous North Americans who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many Native Americans and Canadian First Nations indigenous groups. The mixed gender roles encompassed by the term historically included wearing the clothing and performing the work associated with both men and women.

    A direct translation of the Ojibwe term, Niizh manidoowag, “two-spirited” or “two-spirit” is usually used to indicate a person whose body simultaneously houses a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit….

    According to Brian Joseph Gilly, the presence of male two-spirits “was a fundamental institution among most tribal peoples.” Will Roscoe writes that male and female two-spirits have been “documented in over 130 tribes, in every region of North America, among every type of native culture.”…
    —————————
    Much more fascinating info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit

    —————————-
    Anja Flower says:

    …I do think that gender is in large part performative, and something that exists as a social language (which is not to say “fake” or “illusory”); I also think that people aren’t fooling themselves when they say that they feel themselves to have genders. Hormones have some effect on behavior, but they don’t determine gender or dominate gendered behavior or psychology any more than genitals do, or anything else for that matter…
    —————————–

    I agree with all that! I’d give a bit more weight to hormones and brain chemistry than you would, less to gender as “performance,” but I’ve never maintained that “anatomy is totally destiny”…

    (Reading farther down…)

    —————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says [to Anja]:

    …but [Mike] does say that Brite is in fact a gay man, so it doesn’t seem like he’s deliberately denying Brite’s gender.
    ——————————

    Indeed not! I’m wholly supportive, for what it’s worth.

    ——————————
    (It’s not clear from the Wikipedia article that he’s forsworn the name “Poppy” for use in some contexts…? Though he may have, I haven’t read his blog.)
    ——————————

    I’m a daily reader, and don’t recall any formal forswearing…

    ——————————-
    As far as gender fluidity, Mike seems to be close to what you’re saying; that is, that people’s identities can be fluid, but that there is a core of gender reality there which may well be related to biology and hormones. I think he probably thinks biology and hormones are more important than you do (or than I do), but the argument seems one of degree there? And he argues against “simplistic and limiting” conservative views of women….
    ——————————-

    “Yes” to all that!

    ——————————-
    I could well be missing something, but maybe you could clarify what the antifeminism is in this instance? Is it suggesting that certain stereotypically male characteristics (higher libido, less likely to cry) may be the result of hormones rather than social factors? It just seems like a fairly limited claim here, and since it’s followed immediately by rejecting conservative social roles…
    ——————————-

    I wouldn’t say such behavior is “result of hormones rather than social factors,” but that both come into play. I think hormones and other biological factors create a tendency in most people to behave in certain fashions. Which social factors can then ameliorate or exacerbate.

    So, you have a society geared towards exploitation pushing women to be totally nurturing, self-sacrificing; to see Marriage and Motherhood as the highest goals to aspire to. While men are to deny they’re in pain or under stress, to be uncomplaining workers and disposable warriors. Society exaggerating certain tendencies, attacking and suppressing inconvenient complexities. All of which, by a not-so-surprising “coincidence,” ends up benefiting the ruling class.

  41. JPG, that’s really funny…because when I saw your first comment, my initial reaction was — OMG! Joy Delyria is switching gender?! But then of course I realized it was a different person….

    Anyway — if you’re looking around the site for trans/queer discussions of interest….Anja has several lovely posts; I have an interview with queer theorist Sharon Marcus, and there’s an interesting essay about BL by Michael Arthur. JR Brown has an exhaustive post about the history of bishonen in Japan. There’s various other things, but that should be a good start!
    _________

    Mike: “But, wouldn’t a gay man tend to be limited in his understanding of hetero sexuality? And vice versa?”

    One of the reasons I find queer studies so interesting is because I think, sort of contrary to what you’re saying here, that it has a ton of insight into hetero sexuality. I think marginalized groups often understand those who have power better than those who have power understand themselves. So a lot of the best writing on white identity is by black people; almost all the best writing on masculinity is by women, and I think most of the best writing about gender identity, gay or straight or other, is from the queer community.

  42. —————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Mike: “But, wouldn’t a gay man tend to be limited in his understanding of hetero sexuality? And vice versa?”

    One of the reasons I find queer studies so interesting is because I think, sort of contrary to what you’re saying here, that it has a ton of insight into hetero sexuality…
    ——————————

    In the same post I said, “those who aren’t neatly pigeonholed can offer insights that others can benefit from. Such as was the case with some American Indian tribes, where a ‘man-woman’ could explain the ways of men to women, and vice versa,” and bringing up the “blind me and the elephant” story, concluded that “Our perspectives are limited; the complex reality is better comprehended by a combination of perspectives.”

    Yet still, that doesn’t leave out that in some ways those “swinging one way” would tend to not fully understand what turns those in the other camp on.

    ——————————-
    I think marginalized groups often understand those who have power better than those who have power understand themselves.
    ——————————-

    From an outsider perspective, they can see some things more clearly, especially the rationalizations and hypocrisies by which exploitation is justified.

    Yet, they totally miss other things, which lead to absurdities like asserting that all white males are somehow livin’ high on the hog of privilege; that hetero males are all arrogantly full of themselves, strutting about the world like kings, instead of filled with insecurities…

    (I recall one women friend saying to me and another guy, “You men are so lucky! If you see a woman you like, you can just ask her out!” We both scoffed: yeah, it’s such a great deal! You have to do all the effort, put yourself out in utter vulnerability, and likely just get your souls trampled into the dirt in return; end up feeling utterly worthless…)

    “Hey, kids! Comics!” From Tim Kreider:

    http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/kreider6-19-02SexChange.jpg

    In case somebody’s freaking out, thinking the ‘toon is a serious assertion, re that 6/19/2002 cartoon, Kreider wrote:

    —————————–
    I spent the last week in Wisconsin, where I was nursing an old friend through recovery from gender reassignment surgery…

    Let me just say for the record that gender dysphoria is not a slippery slope or a matter of degree. It’s a very rare medical condition and you either have it or you don’t, and if the idea of having your penis filleted and turned outside-in gives you any qualms at all you can go ahead and cross it off your list of things to worry about. However, my experience out there did give me occasion to let’s say reexamine my preconceptions about gender and sexuality. Like when I was obliged to rub moisturizing lotion on my friend’s back after she’d begun to turn into a lizard in an allergic reaction to her painkillers. She reassured me that this would be okay because she was a woman now, but I felt that at this moment my heterosexuality might be hanging by a slender thread. I had to continually beg her not to show me her new breasts, with which she was very pleased. In her hospital bed she peered down the front of her shirt and admitted, “They’re bigger than I thought they would be.” “Is that good?” I asked. She looked up at me and, with a lascivious grin, gave me the double thumbs-up. “There’s some man in you yet,” I told her. Eventually she flashed me in an elevator. I had asked her to save her old testicles for me in a bottle of alcohol so I could exhibit them in a home Gallery of Horrors, but she said she was too embarrassed.

    Manhood is a weirdly narrow and tenuous status in this culture, and if you’re anything other than a date-raping frat boy in a backwards baseball cap or a moustachioed NASCAR fan with an SUV it seems like you’re constantly tiptoeing through a minefield of threats to it. I remember how as a boy anything from sitting the wrong way (legs crossed) to wearing the wrong shoes (fishheads) could call it into question. Although I have no wish to be a woman (too much to learn about fashion and makeup, plus you have to have sex with men), I have at one time or another exhibited all of the first four girly, sissyish, pussified, and/or fagward-leaning tendencies depicted in this cartoon.

    I believe, as I have stated publicly before, that all sports except for croquet and competitive spelling are for stupid people or repressed homosexuals; it is true that I developed an unfortunate addiction to San Pellegrino mineral water in New York this winter; I do wear sunglasses that, according to Jim Fisher, make me “look like a movie star–a female movie star”; and yes, I secretly sort of like “(Do You Believe in) Life After Love,” but only while drunk. The only factual inaccuracy here is that when I confessed my secret affection for that song to Jim Fisher he admitted that he also thought it was great. Shortly after that our bartender let us know, in a friendly way, that Wednesday night was gay night at the bar…
    ————————–
    http://www.thepaincomics.com/

  43. I’d been having trouble getting to Brite’s blog this morning; finally the problem went away…

    (What? Amy Winehouse is dead?)

    Earlier on the July 24th posts, I read:

    ————————
    So after not crying, I went back to bed and slept for most of the day. When I woke up, I found that I no longer gave a shit about the thing that had hurt me, and pretty much felt fine. This is also unlike me, as I’ve always been a world-class brooder and dweller-upon. Or I should say Poppy was a world-class brooder and dweller-upon — maybe Billy isn’t. That would be refreshing.
    ————————

    Note there are two selves, with names to match, mentioned…

    ————————
    I didn’t cry while watching footage of the tragedies in Norway either, though I felt (and feel) terrible about it. This is the kind of thing that has consistently made me tear up since the post-K federal flood. I don’t know. Testosterone is turning out to be very interesting.
    ————————-
    http://docbrite.livejournal.com/

  44. Tim Kreider via Mike Hunter writes:
    “Manhood is a weirdly narrow and tenuous status in this culture, and if you’re anything other than a date-raping frat boy in a backwards baseball cap or a moustachioed NASCAR fan with an SUV it seems like you’re constantly tiptoeing through a minefield of threats to it. I remember how as a boy anything from sitting the wrong way (legs crossed) to wearing the wrong shoes (fishheads) could call it into question.”

    It’s ironic…

    I shared those insecurities and once wrote a long comment about how much stereotypical male behaviour is performed out of a secret fear that a drum head trial is going appear out of nowhere and rip your man-stripes off your sleeve while breaking your man-sword over their knees before marching you off to ignominy while all your friends turn their backs on you.

    Since bringing the conflict between an homophobic upbringing and growing realization that I was transgendered to an end. I simply assumed that fear to be a specific symptom of that conflict.

    I was going to weigh in with it as an argument in favour of mike’s assertion that even those who have interesting things to say are blind to others. Postulating that what I thought was a general rule was actually a more personal one.

    But here Mike states that it is a general rule after all.

    …Perhaps the difference is a matter of Degree to which the non-normative male feels those insecurities.

  45. “Yet, they totally miss other things, which lead to absurdities like asserting that all white males are somehow livin’ high on the hog of privilege”

    See, but I have never read or seen any queer theorist or queer person say anything like that.

    On the contrary, Eve Sedgwick, who’s as much the grandmother of queer theory as anyone, talks at length about how the need to live up to being heterosexual limits heterosexual men, even as it encourages/enables them to participate in structures of patriarchal power. (She’s basically got a more structural/insightful take on the issues Kreider is talking about.)

    The thing that I think people with privilege of various sorts sometimes miss is that just because you are miserable, just because you do not in fact feel empowered, that doesn’t mean that you’re not in a position of power and privilege in relation to someone else. In fact, men feeling oppressed or like they’re not as privileged as other heterosexual men is often the excuse/trigger for misogyny, just as white people feeling like things aren’t going their way can be a trigger for expressions of racism.

    Anyway…many feminists argue that patriarchy is bad for everyone, men as well as women as well as everyone else, and certainly queer theory often suggests that everyone would be better off (gay and straight and other) if queer people were not oppressed.

  46. I hadn’t meant to comment further but since I have… Thank you Noah for those links. I’m sure I’ll find them interesting. After I’m find the whole site from it’s exploration relatively unknown (to modern readers) compatriots of Dickens to current movie reviews through poetry.. all to be very interesting.

  47. I don’t want to speak for Anja, but I thought I would note that yes, Misgendering someone is generally considered completely beyond the pale in LGBT spaces.

    I could expand on what’s generally considered polite/minimum rules of discourse in queer spaces, but I don’t think it’s germane to the main discussion. Just wanted to point out the social norm at work, since Noah asked.

  48. ————————
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    Mike: “Yet, they totally miss other things, which lead to absurdities like asserting that all white males are somehow livin’ high on the hog of privilege”

    See, but I have never read or seen any queer theorist or queer person say anything like that.
    ————————-

    That was in response to your saying:

    ——————————-
    I think marginalized groups often understand those who have power better than those who have power understand themselves.
    ——————————-

    …so I wasn’t referring specifically to “queer theorist[s] or queer person[s]”; but as an example of the limits of understanding of marginalized groups in general.

    Over at https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/05/adrian-palicki-will-not-wear-the-venus-girdle/ , we read:

    ——————————–
    Anja Flower says:

    The overall effect is that of a man coming into a conversation between feminists and wrecking it by waving his privilege everywhere, demanding everyone’s time and attention by constantly derailing the conversation, knocking over the china and getting everyone really angry…
    ———————————

    And at a site linked to in that thread, we read:
    ————————–——
    Whereas whitesplaining is the result of the white experience being “normed,” mansplaining, is the logical result of males possessing the privilege whereby they are largely assumed to be both default human beings and automatically competent at life.
    ———————-———-
    http://fanniesroom.blogspot.com/2010/02/art-of-mansplaining.html

    Dunno if she’s a “queer person” as well as a feminist, but again there’s that “male = privilege” thinking at work…

    Typing “queer theory white male privilege” into Google immediately turned up:

    ———————————
    …The privileges that [Devon] Carbado focuses on are Heterosexual, Male, and White, privilege. He first identifies the highest form of privilege, that of the White heterosexual male…
    ——————————–
    http://ascqueertheory.blogspot.com/2010/09/privilege-devon-carbardo.html

    And…the irony! Queer theory attacked for pushing (gay) male privilege:

    ——————————-
    …by 1994…lesbian scholars have become acutely aware of the hegemony that queer theory threatens to hold over all studies of gender and sexuality in the academy, and have thus launched into full-scale critiques of its totalizing tendencies.

    …Despite its supposedly counter-normative associations, [lesbian feminist scholar Sheila] Jeffreys believes the word “queer” has come to signify white gay male, which renders any project associated with this signifier simply “more of the same,” while masquerading as “new and uniquely liberating”…

    Central to Jeffreys’ critique is that queer theory privileges and indeed naturalizes the masculine in a way that runs counter to the aims and goals of most forms of feminism. The notion of “camp” or “drag,” which Jeffreys sees as one of the key concepts of queer theory, is built on gay male notions of performative femininity, which not only excludes biological women but enshrines the dominant construction of masculine as the binary opposite of feminine…
    ——————————–
    http://amygoodloe.com/papers/lesbian-feminism-and-queer-theory-another-battle-of-the-sexes/

    ——————————–
    Noah Berlatsky says:

    On the contrary, Eve Sedgwick, who’s as much the grandmother of queer theory as anyone, talks at length about how the need to live up to being heterosexual limits heterosexual men, even as it encourages/enables them to participate in structures of patriarchal power…
    ———————————

    Indeed; and some feminists ‘way back when rightly argued about how feminism also served to free men from constricting, often lethal, roles.

  49. But none of those people are saying that white men are all happy, or have all their desires fulfilled, or are all satisfied at all times with their lot in life. They’re saying that by virtue of being white and male and heterosexual you have a lot of privileges and certain kinds of power. Which is true.

    Queer critiques and feminist critiques sometimes aren’t as tuned into class issues as they could be (and marxist’s aren’t always great on gender)…but the point is that saying that white male heterosexuals have privilege is not the same as saying that those people are happy or all-powerful. So when someone says:

    “mansplaining, is the logical result of males possessing the privilege whereby they are largely assumed to be both default human beings and automatically competent at life.”

    The point isn’t that this makes all men happy and powerful. The fact that men are assumed to be automatically competent at life makes many men miserable. But it also helps them get jobs and promotions.

  50. …So now, in order to defend those folks who were blathering on about how being a white hetero male automatically granted all kinds of privilege from having that assertion dismissed as sweeping nonsense, you say “none of those people are saying that white men are all happy, or have all their desires fulfilled, or are all satisfied at all times with their lot in life”?

    That “saying that white male heterosexuals have privilege is not the same as saying that those people are happy or all-powerful”?

    Talk about changing the argument midstream…

  51. I’m not changing the argument, Mike. Being a white heterosexual male does grant you all kinds of privilege. A lot of your arguments seem to assume that if a man is not all-powerful or incredibly happy, he can’t have privilege. But you can have various forms of privilege even if you’re miserable, or even if you’re at the bottom of different kinds of heaps.

  52. All right; I just had to delete a comment (not from anyone who has posted thus far) and I think that’s a good indication that it is in fact time to close the thread. Thanks everyone for commenting; I know it’s a heated topic, and I appreciate everyone not getting too flamey.
    ____

    EDIT: I’ve removed CB’s full name here at her request.

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