YA fiction often has a complicated relationship with gay content. On the one hand, writers for young readers are often leery about presenting homosexuality. J.K. Rowling, for example, has famously said that Dumbledore was gay — but that revelation came at a Q&A with fans, not in the books themselves.
But while gay characters tend to be closeted or simply absent in YA, the gay experience is oddly and insistently prevalent. YA is, for obvious reasons, often focused on the process of growing up; it tends to be structured around the division between adults and children. And one of the main ways that the division between adult and child is explored, or dramatized, is by making more or less explicit parallels with the division between straight and gay.
In Harry Potter, for example, Harry’s move from childish oppression to magical power and fulfillment is accomplished through the discovery of a secret subculture living hidden in plain sight, recognizing one other through secret signs and rituals. In Twilight, similarly, the world of the vampires and werewolves is a metaphor for the passage to adulthood. But it’s also a queer closet which contains both pale, effeminate Edward’s refusal to have sex with Bella and hyper-masculine werewolf Jacob stripping his clothes off in front of Bella’s father. Even in the Hunger Games, the Capitol’s Roman wrongness is visible mostly through the effeminate styles and carriage of its inhabitants. Katniss’ too-quick adulthood in the games is also a too-quick introduction to decadence, partially defined (as decadence often is) through gay tropes.
The point here is not that these series are “really” gay. Rather, as critic Eve Sedgwick argued, the point is that the queer/straight division has huge cultural power and weight. YA books tend to be about marginalization, about identity formation, about the way that you can occupy one social category one day and another the next without feeling or even looking any different. With such themes, YA authors almost can’t help using queer tropes, or being used by them.
In this context, it’s interesting to look at an actual honest-to-God, openly queer YA novel. Nora Olsen’s Swans & Klons is set in a future where a plague has killed all the men. Women form pair bonds with each other, but reproduction is handled by the ruling doctors, who supervise the cloning of a few hundred established genotypes (or Jeepie Types.) Some of these clones are humans, who spend devote theirs lives to art or science or intellectual pursuits. Others are Klons, genetically manipulated to be a docile, strong, loyal servant class.
The novel focuses on two girls — Rubric and her girlfriend (schatzie) Salmon Jo. They’re both about to move out of the children’s dorms and onto their apprenticeships. They are, in other words, on the cusp of adulthood, with all its queer secrets.
There are a lot of those secrets. Virtually everything you first learn about the plague and men and Klons turns out to be a lie. (Spoilers coming up, if you care about that sort of thing.)
It turns out that the Klon are not genetically different from humans after all. They aren’t engineered to be happy servants. They just have a different tag put on their toes when they come out of the vats. They don’t lack human “intelligence and emotional development”. The “humans” are simply taught to think they do. Moreover, Klons are, again, drawn from the same genetically identical Jeepy Types as everyone else. There are Klons who look exactly like Rubric, who think in much the same way Rubric thinks, who have the same genetic aptitude for aesthetics that Rubric has. But Rubric gets to spend her life making art, while the Klons that look just like her toil in factories or clean up filth.
The drama in Olsen’s book, then, doesn’t come from elaborating differences, or even from bridging differences, as it does in Harry Potter, or Twilight, or The Hunger Games. Rather, the plot is propelled by the realization that differences, and for that matter similarities, are arbitrary. They’re not magic truths we understand when we become adults, but categories we impose. They may determine us, but we’re also responsible for them. To be an adult, or a child, or queer, or straight, isn’t as important as how we live in those categories, and, even more, how we make others live in them.
Rubric and Salmon Jo, horrified by their discovery, eventually free a Klon and escape from their city across the border into the wilderness. There they find that not all males have died. The Barbarous Ones (as they’ve been labeled) still bear male children, though the genetic plague causes those children to be mentally and physically deformed. Though these males will never, in some sense, become adults, the Barbarous Ones raise them with great affection and love,
Rubric finds the males repulsive; she argues that just as her own society has bought into the delusion that Klons are nonhuman, the Barbarous Ones “have just bought into a mass delusion that Cretinous Males are really glam.” Salmon Jo replies:
“Maybe every place has their own delusion. But I think the one here is better, kinder. You know how before we left home I said I didn’t know what human was? I know now. The Sons taught me what it means to be a human being. Even if they’re sick or not brainy, they’re just as human as us. I think they make you learn more about yourself, and that’s why the Barbarous Ones think they’re such an asset.”
It may seem odd for a lesbian novel to locate humanity paradigmatically in males, or for a Bildungsroman to find its most eloquent moral experience in perpetual childishness. But both choices are, I think, a measure of Olsen’s refusal of easy categories. Perhaps because her queer themes are more acknowledged and controlled, she’s able to tell a YA story that isn’t about growing up to know the truth of difference (“Vampires are real!” Magic is real!”) Instead, Swans & Klons urges its readers to define humaity as broadly and generousy as possible, so that it includes adults, and children, and everyone on the margins.
Hi Noah,
This sounds like a very interesting read. I will take a look as I prepare for my next YAL class.
But, for now, I am struck by a couple things about your review. The first being the way that “queer” stands in for the queering of all categories, except for sexuality. That is, you don’t tell us anything about the nature of these “girlfriends” and the erotics of the novel. Does the novel, by eliminating the possibility of sexual difference, flatten the distinctions between sexualities — mainly by making sexuality (transgressive or otherwise) disappear?
Second, you cover a lot of ground in that final paragraph or two, but seem to pave over it with the book’s affirmations of a boundless humanity. But like you, I am interested in the way this vision of unity comes from an encounter not with men, but with the disabled. The disabled person, unable to even comprehend social roles, becomes the stand-in for a pre-social ideal. The disabled person, unable (as far as I can tell) to conceive himself, becomes a tool for helping others become better people.
This is a lot of skepticism for a book I haven’t yet read, picking on possibly small aspects of a book that seems to be doing a lot to shift/queer our normal ways of narrativizing normality. I’m just trying to figure out the ways that the book perhaps breaks out of expected patterns for YAL itself.
I see a lot in here that looks familiar here (including the cover): a book that says science is bad, nature is better; elitism is bad, acceptance is better; similarity is bad, difference is better; social/class divisions are bad, individualism is better. So for me, small deviations — or not — from this script are interesting (as they clearly are for you as well). I look forward to seeing what the author makes of them.
But do they really say “glam”?
Peter
It sounds like a good book.
The treatment of the disabled reminded me a lot of Stanley Hauerwas’ discussion of the mentally disabled, actually. I don’t think that it’s so much that the disabled are tools to make others better people. Rather, accepting disabled people into the community as humans creates a community in which the notion of humanity and the good make sense.
The book is a YA novel, so there’s not a ton of steamy scenes or anything. Lesbian relationships are just sort of accepted as normal. I’d say that lesbianism is un-queered, almost, it’s treated so matter of factly. On the other hand, the main character has a visceral disgust for the idea of heterosexual genital sex…though other characters don’t share that distaste.
That’d be great if you taught this in a YA class. I think there’s a lot there — much of it kind of surprising (I think the book can be read as at least provisionally pro-life, for example.)
“Swans & Klons urges its readers to define humanity as broadly and generously as possible”
But the last few paragraphs of your review seem to imply that almost all males are cretinous, barbarous, and repulsive. Is that a mistaken impression? It could well be taken as a comment on “real” life.I suppose it’s a perfectly valid viewpoint but hardly broad and generous.
Well…in the future world she’s talking about, males have been afflicted with a disease, so yes, all men in that world are cretinous. I really don’t think she’s suggesting that all men are cretinous in our world…and she’s also arguing that the developmentally disabled are people, who should be treated with human dignity.
So, yeah, I don’t think the book is misandrous, really.
Is the queer (alternative sexuality) community the only community of people who are secretly different and learn to recognize each other by signs and signals? I don’t think that’s exactly true. There’s all kinds of communities of the differently-wired. Artists/goths/punks, drug users, (straight) fetishists, psychology majors, and so on… I mean, those communities can and do overlap, but it’s not like “queer” is the only subculture. I like your observation about how YA often links growing up to discovering a hidden alternative society, though.
She doesn’t need to be a misandrist to write that. She could be reporting on attitudes within some more militant circles of the lesbian subculture who might think that most men are cretinous and barbarous (with the more enlightened feeling that they should still be treated as people). OR just making up a society where females are the more (scientifically) evolved form of humanity (men being the Neanderthals of that age).
Is it really that far from “all heterosexual sex is rape” ideology (I mean some poorly conceived interpretations of Dworkin’s book)?
Suat; the point is that she ends up making acceptance of men a benchmark of humanity. I think she’s playing with radical lesbian ideologies, but ultimately sees them as just another way to marginalize people.
Subdee…I think you’re downplaying the extent to which, say, artists are defined through subcultural difference because of their association with queer communities. (The book Art and Homosexuality by Christopher Reed is pretty amazing on this.) Fetishists of any sort are not going to be exactly straight…and psychology majors aren’t exactly a subculture. Things like geek culture also tend to be defined through tropes around gender that have a lot to do with queerness.
Eve Sedgwick argues that the straight/gay binary is just incredibly important for organizing categories in the last couple hundred years, and I think she’s got a point. I think it is possible to have other secretive subcultures…but I don’t actually think it’s possible to have other secretive subcultures without activating the conceptual binaries of queer identity. Or at least it isn’t at our particular historical moment.
Isn’t that where Marston is coming from? That women represent the better aspect of humanity? So tell me, Mr. WW expert…
Oh, yeah; Marston thinks femininity is better than masculinity, absolutely. He’s pretty open to the idea of men learning to be and/or embracing femininity, though, so it’s still not exactly anti-men, or it doesn’t have to be, anyway. Steve’s portrayed quite positively, for example…not least because he accepts the matriarchy.
That isn’t where Olsen is coming from, though. Her female led society is a dystopia, and the society where the men are accepted and cared for is much more positively viewed. She’s much less interested in masculinity/femininity as essential qualities than Marston is, too…
Oh, I agree they’re related. “Queer” is more ambiguous than gay/straight/bi, anyway. I only bring this is up because I know of/am peripherally in some circles in New Brunswick that have more to do with psychiatric diagnoses than sexuality. Like most of these people are straight, but “queer” (odd, different) in other ways. And there are absolutely signs.
Re the gay interpretation of the Harry Potter books, one piece I read enumerated a batch of them, starting out with noting that Harry — before discovery of the magical world — literally lived in a closet…
Along this “world without men” theme, Philip Wylie’s “The Disappearance” comes to mind:
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…What if all the men disappeared from the world, leaving just the women ? What if the same thing happened to the men, with all the women disappearing from their world. The world seems to split into two alternate realities, one with just men remaining, and the other with just the women. In this novel from 1951,Philip Wylie explores the consequences of an event like that and uses this clever idea to examine the role of gender in society. His characters are well defined and come across as fully developed, not just mouthpieces for him to express his own opinions. He isn’t afraid to look at issues that would have been highly controversial in the early fifties, such as homosexuality and gender discrimination…
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347397.The_Disappearance
From what I recall, Wylie finds homosexuality (gays in both worlds are quick to “seize the moment”) rather disgusting; the women are typical “sheltered” 50s housewives; but there’s much of interest there. Including how much each gender needs the other.
Come to think of it, isn’t much of gay maleness dependent on imitating and delighting in flamboyant female behavior, larger-than-life divas like Garland and Streisand? Aren’t tons of “butch” lesbians likewise dependent on stereotypical maleness to imitate, serve as a role-model?
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Ng Suat Tong says:
[Nora Olsen] …could be reporting on attitudes within some more militant circles of the lesbian subculture who might think that most men are cretinous and barbarous (with the more enlightened feeling that they should still be treated as people).
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Yes; sounds like Olsen is arguing that you need not like a certain group, can even consider them inferior in some ways (“cretinous and barbarous” indeed fits an awful lot of the world’s males, esp. in the Third World [ironically considered above criticism by P.C. types]). Yet, “they should still be [accepted as and] treated as people.”
Which even the most dim-wittedly chauvinistic male could learn from: “You think women are childishly emotional and unintelligent; but, they should still be treated as people.”
From H. L. Mencken’s 1917 “In Defense of Women”:
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A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow. In this fact, perhaps, lies one of the best proofs of feminine intelligence…The mark of that so-called intuition is simply a sharp and accurate perception of reality…The appearance, in the normal family circle, is a hero, magnifico, a demigod. The substance is a poor mountebank…
A man’s wife…may envy her husband…his masculine liberty of movement and occupation, his impenetrable complacency, his peasant-like delight in petty vices, his capacity for hiding the harsh face of reality behind the cloak of romanticism, his general innocence and childishness. But she never envies him his puerile ego; she never envies him his shoddy and preposterous soul.
This shrewd perception of masculine bombast and make-believe, this acute understanding of man as the eternal tragic comedian, is at the bottom of that compassionate irony which paces under the name of the maternal instinct. A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self delusion. That ironical note is not only daily apparent in real life; it sets the whole tone of feminine fiction. The woman novelist…never takes her heroes quite seriously….I can’t recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.
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Is not this attitude — a gentler version of “most men are cretinous and barbarous” hardly confined to militant lesbians?
And, could Olsen, intentionally or not, be satirically alluding to this?
BTW, what about the lesbians who have no interest in being part of this “lesbian subculture”? One very close friend — the sister I never had — maintained, “I’m not interested in all that queer stuff…”
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Ng Suat Tong says:
OR just making up a society where females are the more (scientifically) evolved form of humanity (men being the Neanderthals of that age).
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Shades of one of Edgar Rice Burrough’s fictional worlds, where the men were primitive brutes, the women beautiful and far more evolutionarily advanced…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I think it is possible to have other secretive subcultures…
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(MILD SARCASM ALERT) Considering that they have existed for thousands of years, you’re on safe ground there…
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…but I don’t actually think it’s possible to have other secretive subcultures without activating the conceptual binaries of queer identity.
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So “queer identity” is the core foundation for all “other secretive subcultures”? Thus, no doubt, sayeth the Queer Theorists. The better to elevate their pet injustice into the central hub ’round which all of human society turns. (“No, it’s racism!” “No, it’s the oppression of women!” “No, it’s ‘ableism’!”)
What about the pre-Christian millennia when homosexual behavior was hardly hidden, but seen as an aspect of sexuality? Where the idea of a “straight/gay binary” would’ve been considered ludicrous? And in which “secretive subcultures” — such as, in Ancient Rome, Christianity — still existed?
And, what are the “conceptual binaries of queer identity”? What makes them unique?
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…Marston thinks femininity is better than masculinity, absolutely. He’s pretty open to the idea of men learning to be and/or embracing femininity, though, so it’s still not exactly anti-men, or it doesn’t have to be, anyway….
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More Mencken, from that earlier-cited tome:
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Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat. Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they show the true fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal a capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth—to that extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of their mothers. “Human creatures,” says W.L. George, borrowing from Weininger, “are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.” Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you aman with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare, if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to down right homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male [are] all muscles and mush. Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs…
It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour—that complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.
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The book’s point about foundational illusions is actually really appropriate to Mike’s concerns about queer theory. To wit, we all interpret the world through reference to a dominant conceptual hub, but certain hubs result in kinder interpretations (and actions) than others.
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