Author: BL

In an article on lesbian photography, Jan Zita Grover analyses the positions taken by women and society in viewing lesbian sexual imagery in relation to a “burden of scarcity” (Grover 187).  With this Grover explains that within the mainstream culture of today’s world, lesbian women can be seen as being represented as either sexual deviants or rendered completely invisible within society.  They are represented as being outside of the stereotypes of our patriarchal society. In being outside of this narrow and familiar box of heterosexual stereotypes, Grover suggest that the scarce images that explore lesbian desire have an extra and heavy burden of expectation placed upon them. Grover states, “So few representations, so many expectations how can any image can possibly satisfy the yearning that it is born into?” (Grover 187).  Lesbians within imagery are often “un-represented, under-represented or mis-represented” (Grover 187).

The scarce images of lesbian desire and sexual practices do not represent all of lesbian bodies as they often portray a specific characteristic of a specific group or identity.  The burden of scarcity still exists today.  Images and even people take on the burden of representing a larger group as a whole.

 

Source:

Grover, Jan Zita. “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs.” Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, edited by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser, Pandora Press, 1991, pp. 184–190.

In her work, “Equality, Inc.” Lisa Duggan criticizes the recoding of key terms in the history of gay politics due to support and push for homonormativity—politics that does not contest the dominant heteronormative standards and institutions, such as marriage. She criticizes the recoding of the terms such as “equality”, “freedom” and “right to privacy,” stating, “‘equality’ becomes narrow, formal access to a few conservatizing institutions, ‘freedom’ becomes impunity for bigotry and vast inequalities in commercial life and civil society, the ‘right to privacy’ becomes domestic confinement, and the democratic politics itself become something to be escaped” (Duggan 65-66).  To make such a statement, Duggan draws on the example of “Gay Tunnel Vision” as “gay civil rights groups have adopted neoliberal rhetoric and corporate decision-making models” (Duggan 47).  Gay civil rights organization have become to push for gay marriage and support the “increasingly narrow gay, money elite” (Duggan 47).

A specific organization named by Duggan was the Human Rights Campaign. She also draws upon the words of Cato Institute vice president, David Boaz. Boaz argues that gay marriage is preferable to that of domestic partnership. As a gay libertarian, he does not oppose the institution and administration of marriage as one might imagine.  To construct the recoding of the term “right to privacy” to domestic confinement, Duggan draws on the actions of the Independent Gay Forum in spreading the word about their new gay politics that “offers a dramatically shrunken public sphere and narrow zone of ‘responsible’ domestic privacy” (Duggan 53).

Reference:

Lisa Duggan, “Equality, Inc.,” in The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. pp. 43-66.

 

 

Dean Spade singles out many shortcomings of the anti-discrimination law reform for trans people.  One of these shortcomings is the anti-discrimination laws inability to make an effective change to the exclusion of marginalized groups.  He argues that in the efforts for inclusion in discrimination regime, the campaigns rely heavily on “rhetoric that affirms the legitimacy and fairness of the status quo” (Spade 44). He allows goes on to explain how it is hard to prove discrimination for people who have more complicated relationships to marginality.  For example,  immigrants are particularly difficult to protect against discrimination if they are facing issues of being undocumented, as well as facing discrimination based on race, disability, and gender identity.

One shortcoming in hate crime laws that Dean Spade expresses, is the use of the criminal punishment system as a method to stop transphobia since the “criminal punishment system is the most significant perpetrator of violence against trans people” (Spade 47).  To use the criminal punishment system would thus be backwards and ineffective in battling transphobia.

Citations:

Spade, Dean.  Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law.  Durham & London: Duke University Press. 2015.

From my understanding of the readings, antisocial thesis in queer theory is a thesis that presents queerness and queer people as being deeply conflicted, contradictory and incompatible with normative sociality.  It is a thesis that coincides with Leo Bersani’s definition of sex as “anti-communitarian, self-shattering and anti-identitarian” (PMLA 823). This way of thinking about sex creates a “shift from projects of redemption, reconstruction, restoration, and reclamation and toward what can only be called an antisocial, negative, and anti-relational theory of sexuality” (PMLA 823). Societal imposition has formed a heteronormative narrative surrounding sex and sexual practices which is where queer theory becomes antisocial in nature as sex is centered around pleasure rather than reproduction.

So how do we begin to make sense of our politically incorrect erotic desires? (Rodriguez, 342)

In relation to the “antisocial thesis,” “politically incorrect desires,” as Rodriguez terms, reinforces the negative theory of sexuality and belief that queerness is incompatible with normative sociality as there exists many sexual desires that do not fit into society’s norms and that are considered “unnatural.”  The sexual fantasies that Rodriguez refers to almost always contains a power dynamic, whether that be a racialized one or one centering around gender and hyper-masculinity. These sexual fantasies are largely accepted in society and have become the norm to the point where they are no longer seen as being antisocial or damaging. She seeks to disrupt the narrative and calls into question the very nature, nuance, and connotation of what antisocial means in regards to both queer theory and heteronormative discourse on both sexual practices and fantasies.

Sources:

Caserio, R. L., Edelman, L., Halberstam, J., Muniz, J. E., & Dean, T. (2011). The antisocial thesis in queer theory. Modern Language Association, 121(3), 819-828.

Rodriguez, J. M. (2011). Queer sociality and other sexual fantasies. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17(2-3), 331-348.

 In focusing on “Less Birth Control More Self-Control” which is the first thing that jumps out, it is implying that women need to control and restrain themselves and their bodies from engaging in sex. This image contains a variety of larger societal implications and relates directly to the concept of “sex panic” as it serves as propaganda for women to prevent themselves from expressing their sexuality. The image also attempts to attack women and accuses them for being killers as it also serves as an anti- abortion and blames their lack of control. This image displaying “sex panic” might have been something imposed by the Church as it is a potential way to implement some sort of control by invoking a sense of shame or guilt in women when it comes to their sexuality.

Asexuality complicates the heteronormative message of this image.  Its focal point is on the what Przybylo would call the “centralization of sex and sexuality in Western contexts” (Pryzbylo, Chapter 21).  Sex, as explained in the text, is “used in the service of building intimacy and creating and maintaining social bonds” (Pryzbylo, Chapter 21).  This image portrays the dominant narrative of Western heterosexuality and that women should only be having sex with men if it is for the purposes of procreation and condemns women having sex simply for pleasure. Asexuality disrupts this pervasive narrative as there is no sexual inclination, hence, self-control is not an issue nor is it even existent when it comes to asexuality.

Sources:

Image, “Less Birth Control More Self-Control.” Life News, www.lifenews.com/2014/01/27/black-media-shills-for-big-abortion-planned-parenthood/.

Ela Przybylo, Introducing Asexuality, Unthinking Sex.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem, “To Live in the Borderlands,” illustrates the conflicting identity of those living in borderlands.  In these regions, there is a great deal of mixing of different cultures, races and political views.  This poem seems to focus on displaying these differences and the interplay of these differences on the borderland people’s identities.  The transitions between English and Spanish is indicative of this interaction of cultures and races. These transitions speak to tell us that the poet and border people have almost this dual sense of identity. They move between languages, cultures and places.  Switching between these two languages also serves to hit home with those that are currently living in the Borderlands. It is indicative of their lives and the interconnection of languages and cultures. Borders are not just physical divides between places as they can exist inside of us. They can be emotional borders, psychological and spiritual borders.  All these borders shape who these people are as individuals and as a society. To survive living in such a place as the “Borderlands,” Anzaldúa suggests that people fight the status quo but that in do so “you must live sin fronteras/ be a crossroads.”   From this last stanza, Anzaldúa is telling her readers to live without borders and be a crossroads.  In other words, you must fight helplessness, adapt to your situation and finally accept your dual identity.

Source:

Gloria Anzaldúa, “To Live In the Borderlands Means You,” in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 194-195.

Alison Reed in her piece, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead,” exposes the ways in which queer studies deploys racialized bodies as “spectacular markers of queerness” (Reed 49).  Reed goes on to write that this “… fetishization of blackness produces its own logics of disavowal, reinforcing hegemonic understandings of race by articulating embodiment in post-racial terms” (Reed 57).  In “articulating embodiment in post-racial terms,” Reed is suggesting that we are reproducing colorblind logics. Therefore, “embodiment in post-racial terms” is the embodiment of race and racialized individuals in a society that chooses to believe that race is no longer an issue.  In separating race and racism, race is thus, in Reed’s opinion, mobilized in colorblind ways to divorce discussions of structural racism from racialized embodiment” (Reed 52).   With this separation, queer theory scholars tend to preserve white supremacy.

Reed continues her argument by stating that, “Whiteness, then, goes unacknowledged and unexamined, while uncritically reproducing multiculturalist logics that mainstream visibility can smooth over ongoing injustices, precisely by exploiting the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” (Reed 57).   From my understanding, Reed is drawing on how the white queer political movement has connected itself to the struggles and oppressions of all queer people, including racial minorities as well. By doing this, it fails to both incorporate and differentiate between the experiences of white queer people and black queer people for example. Whiteness is seen as the normative default in society and acts largely as an invisible category. I don’t think that the injustices white queer people face can be attributed to their race, however, I do think a black queer person faces injustice on the premise of both their sexual identity and their race. Black bodies have historically been hypervisible and hypersexualized as they stood in opposition to their white counterparts and identity politics comes into play as one cannot separate their sexuality from their whiteness as this fosters and reinforces what Reed refers to as white queer politics of injury.

Citation:

Alison Reed, “The Whiter the Bread, the Quicker You’re Dead. Spectacular Absence and Post-Racialized Blackness in (White) Queer Theory.”

Queer Theory, from my understanding, is a method of cultural study that aims to reject traditional views on gender and sexuality as well as understand the construction and implementation of a binary system.  Looking at the world through the lens of queer theory allows individuals to deconstruct the binaries within our society, and reconstruct their own notions of societally imposed categories. It is a perspective that is useful for every individual no matter the field, including the sciences.  In the field of Chemical Engineering, this perspective is useful to have as one will meet a multitude of people from different backgrounds and cultures in the job. Chemical engineering is known as being dominated by white-males and in applying the perspective of queer theory to the relationships and power dynamics within the field, one is able to destruct the pre-existing patriarchy.

 In Cathy Cohen’s piece, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens, draws on the relationship between marriage and white supremacy.  She writes: “… marriage and heterosexuality, as viewed through the lenses of profit and domination, and the ideology of white supremacy, were reconfigured to justify the exploitation and regulation of black bodies” (454). To explain this connection, Cohen uses examples that stem back to colonial times.   Interracial marriage was prohibited and laws were enacted during the seventeenth century to restrict it from happening. The “mixing” of the races caused such anxiety during not only the colonial times, but up until 1967 during the Civil Rights Movement, and arguably still causes a certain level of anxiety in society.  The “interbreeding” or marrying individuals from different “races” was regulated all the way into the nineteenth century as the “one-drop” rule comes to mind when thinking about tactics used to maintain the “pure” and hegemonic white race.  

The laws prohibiting miscegenation were not appealed by the United States Supreme Court until thirteen years after its Brown decision to desegregate schools. Prohibiting interracial marriage, as A. Leon Hibbinbotham, Jr., expresses in his book, The Matter of Color-Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period, is representative of the American legal tradition of preserving the white race.  From this example, the regulating of behavior of people, namely heterosexuals that are/were considered on the outside of heteronormative privilege can be seen.  To marry someone that is of a different race than one’s own was viewed as threatening to a system of white, upper-class and heterosexual domination.

Cohen’s discussion of this relationship between marriage and white supremacy is relevant to her plea for “difficult work of coalition politics” as it is a relationship that marginalizes people across different races, ethnicities and sexes (462). In discussing this relationship, Cohen is “recognizing the link between the ideological, social, political, and economic marginalization” of different groups of people (462).  Coalition politics is difficult work in its attempt to unite marginalized groups towards a shared goal.  

Sources:

Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3 (1997): 437-465.

In discussing the gay liberation movement’s metamorphosis over the last twenty-five years, Hollibaugh’s main point seems to be to expose the movement as one that has come to prioritize “normality” in ways that seem to both deny and jeopardize the very culture which many have fought to support. The gay liberation movement has transformed from a freedom struggle that encompasses all aspects of life to one that is merely shaped into following a preexisting agenda written at the hands of our heterosexual system. As Hollibaugh writes, the “struggle now parodies and duplicates a heterosexual middle-class/upper-class agenda based on re-creating the rights of heterosexuals for gay people.” It has become a movement that seems to aim at fitting gay people into this box of normalcy in order to ultimately be able to say the gay community is unlike any other.

Riki Wilchins, in her book Queer Theory, Gender Theory, claims that, “White American culture tends to be one of the few that splits sexual orientation from gender.” (27) In discussing this distinction, she offers up many examples that demonstrate how it is questionable. Sexual orientation and gender identity are often thought as being distinctly separate but also linked. Wilchins explains that “homosexuality itself is the most profound transgression of the primary rule of gender. Girls sleep with boys, and boys sleep with girls.” (20) Therefore, from a practical standpoint it would be “difficult—if not impossible—for gay activists to pursue the right to their sexual orientation without engaging issues of gender.” (20)

The connection between sexual orientation and gender was expressed to me at a very young age by my peers. I was a complete tom boy growing up. I loved to play sports, shop in the boys’ section of Children Place and follow my father around everywhere he went. I was a heterosexual woman who liked to dress in masculine clothing and to participate in activities that were deemed masculine by society. I never truly received any judgment on my sexual orientation based solely on my fashion habits or extracurricular activities—or at least that I heard of. As I got older, I began to notice that if I were to wear boy’s/men’s clothes on a consistent basis some may question my sexual orientation. Therefore, in order to conform to society and its standards, I began to wear my hair down more and ditched the masculine appeal to display my gender and thus “inherently” my sexual orientation.