Author: EO

The phrase “burden of scarcity” refers to the fact that a lack of representation of a group of people results in the expectations of the depictions that do exist of a group never quite being met. This is most often true because of sheer fact that diversity cannot be expressed in the number of texts or images that currently represents a group, ultimately causing misrepresentation. I definitely the burden of scarcity is still an issue because the majority of content, whether it belongs to the category of literature, television, art, or any other medium, is still being produced by white, cisgender, heterosexual creators.
For me, the issue of not being satisfied by representations that do exist is especially relevant to Asian American representation. While more and more Asian Americans continue to be cast in movies and television shows, it’s frustrating to continually see Asian Americans take the same roles as sidekicks or scientists. What I find to be necessary to the conversation of representation is not only casting Asian Americans in more diverse roles but also encouraging and supporting Asian Americans to write and direct these narratives themselves in order to create the fullest portrayals of the people who lead similar lives.

Reference:

Grover, Jan Z. “Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs.” Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs. Ed. Tessa Boffin, Ed. Jean Fraser. Ontario: Pandora Press, 1991. 184-190. Print.

In “Equality, Inc,” Lisa Duggan outlines how equality has come become devoid of its originally radical intentions of overthrowing an unjust system and instead has aligned with providing access to existing broken institutions. An example of this is the gay and lesbian elite’s “gay tunnel vision,” which focuses only on so-called gay issues, such as marriage equality, leaving issues of other queers, including those of poverty and homelessness, in the dark. Duggan names the Human Rights Campaign as an organization that has been compliant with the politics of neoliberalism in its “top-down corporate planning process” (Duggan 46) and notes how the HRC has taken on the same functions as wealthy lobbying groups as its method of establishing political change.

The conception of “conventional gays” who cast out the ideologies of “extreme leftist queers” as too radical also relies on the assumption that equality can trickle down from the most privileged class (usually white gay men) to a less privileged class. By even producing the term “conventional gays,” any other group of queers is pitted against those who represent the norm or rather those who are white and economically privileged. The definition of equality that Duggan’s chapter concludes with is limited in the nature of the areas it covers and in the people who can be considered as equals.

Reference:

Duggan, Lisa. “Equality, Inc.” The Twilight of Equality?, edited by Lisa Duggan, Beacon Press: 2004, pp. 43-66.

When reflecting on the flaws of the legal protection of transgender people, Spade uses Alan Freeman’s term, “perpetrator perspective,” which seeks to address the lack of consideration for systems of oppression when the perpetrator is identified as an individual. While discrimination law bans inequality on the basis of identity, it prevents the factor of acknowledging if that identity has been subject to historical exclusion. Spade gives the example of the dismantling of affirmative action and desegregation programs, which were gutted because of the threat of “inequality” they posed to white people despite their goal of providing equal access to those who are marginalized.

As a result of its singular focus on the perpetrator as an individual, hate crime law possesses similar weaknesses. Spade notes that hate crime laws neither deter perpetrators from committing crimes of hate nor ensure the safety of the people they are intended to protect. Hate crime law has no actual effect on whether or not someone will commit a crime of this nature because it does not attempt to confront the perpetrator’s bias. Spade also asks the question “what does it mean to use criminal punishment—enhancing laws to purportedly address violence against these groups?” (Spade 45-46). The nature of hate crime law is solely punitive and targets groups of people who these laws are supposed to protect.

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

This week’s readings present the antisocial thesis in queer theory as a renunciation of redemptive and futuristic thought. In Judith Halberstam’s position statement, they note that Lee Edelman argues that the antisocial thesis’ embrace of negativity and antisociality is natural because queerness is structurally antisocial due the inability to reproduce that is associated with homosexual sex. Halberstam describes this antisocial thesis as  “be[ing] willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up…” (The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory 824). The premise of refusing to work and speak in ways that are polite or are connected to a greater system that operates under the capitalist regime of production is especially interesting because of the meaning/activist stance that emerges from what some might identify as passivity at first glance. Another intriguing premise is Leo Bersani’s theorization of the antisocial thesis’ exploitation of the threat of homosexuality as a political tool. This involves the confrontation of homophobia as a destructive force and can be used to interrogate the social.

Just as queerness is seen as non-normative, sexual and romantic fantasy also often falls into the category of what is taboo. Rodriguez writes about fantasy rather than sexual practice because even benign fantasies—”love, marriage, and domestic bliss (whether hetero or homo)” (Rodriguez 342)—are subject to the systems of racialized power difference. Rodriguez feels it is necessary to point out that race dynamics inform how play out in both queer and heterosexual and “perverted” or standard fantasies. While Edelman and Bersani seem to locate their theorizations in the vacuum of whiteness, Rodriguez attempts to enter consider race and its implications in her work.

References:

In this scene from the film But I’m A Cheerleader,  the homosexual residents of a conversion therapy program are instructed to roleplay sexual acts with each other in boy-girl partnerships.  The parents of the gay and lesbian characters in But I’m A Cheerleader are swept up in the sex panic of their children being abnormal or diseased and elect to send them away to be treated. I chose to discuss this image because it seems to privilege one type of sexual panic over another. When present for the purpose of de-gaying characters, re-enactments of heterosexual sex are justifiable, but because a relationship (devoid of explicit content) between a lesbian couple unfolds  throughout the film, the movie was originally given an NC-17 rating and was directed to tone down its sexual content in order to receive an R rating like many other films with queer content (Rated R for Ridiculous).

If the Motion Picture Association of America, like many other institutions, censors on the basis obscenity, asexuality would likely fall into an indeterminable space. On one hand, asexuality is not widely understood or accepted. Asexuality can be interpreted as a deviant sexual behavior in the way that someone who is asexual departs from the sexual standard. But on the other hand, asexuality usually produces no sexually explicit content to be regulated.

References:

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge,1992), 143-172.

Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIaeMTYtHgM

The last few lines of Anzaldúa’s poem suggest that living in the space that she calls “the Borderlands” requires being able to walk freely between the identities that cross or border one another. As the speaker in “To Live in the Borderlands” provides several examples of how identities and languages can cause conflict among one another, they also maintain that it is necessary to allow these elements to converge. By incorporating Spanish into her poem, Anzaldúa demonstrates her ability to fluidly move between cultures and confront what results from these two languages meeting in her poem, fully embodying her statement that living the Borderlands requires one to “be a crossroads.”

The use of Spanish interwoven through English is reminiscent of “Spanglish” and directly addresses people who are bilingual in English and Spanish, effectively cutting off those who do not speak Spanish from fully understanding the poem. Although a monolingual English speaker could look up the meaning of the words, this demands the non-Spanish speaking reader to work to be at the same level of understanding as readers who are bilingual. The use and italicization of the Spanish words in this poem also serve to highlight the weight they hold in the poem. While I was reading this work, I thought of the poem “The Space Between Skin is Called a Wound,” which describes the experience of someone who lives between two cultures but is unable to move between them with the same fluidity that Anzaldúa does because they are not a speaker of two languages.

Reference

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

The “embodiment in post-racial terms” refers to white people claiming a “counterwhiteness” that seeks to disalign itself from white supremacy and label itself as progressive, which may include practices such as having conversations about race without discussing racism (Reed, 57) . As white queers disavow the privilege they have due to their race, they create a parallel between themselves and a “racialized otherness” that they perceive queer people of color to display, which white queers then fetishize (57).

To me, it seems like “the hypervisibility of black bodies for a white queer politics of injury” is most discernible in Green’s example of the 2003 Gay Shame Conference,  at which only one queer conference speaker of color was present (57). While race was absorbed into the conference’s understanding of what is shameful about being gay or lesbian, little to no conversation on race occurred. Because the white queer politics of injury have located identity in the universal nonwhiteness of queerness, those who identify as people of color, especially those who have black and brown bodies, may exist in spaces such as the Gay Shame Conference, but their role is reduced to simply being a visible sign of a questionable diversity, rather than being actively welcomed to speak about their experiences.

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

I would define Queer Theory as a framework that examines the binary of our ideas of homosexuals and heterosexuals and gender and sexuality by identifying how and why power is wielded in and across these categories.

I think Queer Theory serves as a useful additional lense for understanding written narratives for comparative literature majors. In addition to Feminist Theory, Queer Theory supplies a reader with the vocabulary necessary to consider power dynamics, motivation, and other aspects of characterization. When specifically applied to comparing literatures transnationally, Queer Theory serves as a tool that could locate differences and similarities in literary representations of the society the writers of different works live in.

In her article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” Cohen provides the example of the legal barriers against interracial marriage that existed until the late 1960s. Here, the relationship between marriage and white supremacy is queered as the institution of marriage is recognized as a cultural practice grounded in the “preservation of the white race.” To draw a divide between those who are heterosexual and those who are queer dismisses this and other consequences of behavior that is found to be unacceptable by the ruling tradition of white supremacy. With their similarities in mind, queer and heterosexual people alike could potentially come together to form a coalition against the forces that they oppose. One of the difficulties of coalition politics is effectively utilizing intersection ideas and addressing the variance of power held by different persons in these groups.

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

By focusing on presenting itself as palatable (read: normal) to those who made up the heterosexual, mainstream society, the gay liberation movement shifted toward embracing gay rights for nuclear families rather than the deconstructivist goals of sexual liberation. As a result of this shift, many LGBT individuals fell outside the new norms that largely prescribed how to appear as a harmless gay man or lesbian woman. These norms were established by the very movement once characterized by its belief in the radical politics of sexuality and led to even some of the leaders of this movement becoming overlooked. One of the main issues with focusing on gay rights is that it established a hierarchy of those who were deemed “acceptable” and those who are not.

The term transgender defined as “an umbrella term for anyone who crosses gender lines” extends to both those who change aspects of their appearance, such as their clothing or behavior, to cross gender lines and those who are what Wilchins names “visibly queer,” referring to people who publicly display their sexual orientation. Because of the common political problems shared by these two groups of people, Wilchins argues that it makes sense for them to ally themselves with each other.

When people choose to identify solely with the term “queer,” I’ve noticed that there’s an inclination to try to figure out what subcategory within the queerness someone falls under. Much like how we feel the need to find out someone’s gender and feel uncomfortable when we’re unable to discern it, the same often goes for sexuality.

I found the concepts of “Language as the Real” and “The Other and the Binary” to be the most helpful for the basic purposes of discussing sexuality and gender. With Language as the Real, it’s pointed out that language focuses the standard or what is shared, and when this applies to personal matters, there are either no words or no positive words to describe non-normative experiences. Similarly, the reductive nature of locating meaning in difference makes the Other and the Binary and important tool in considering what lies between whatever two options we’re given. I understand Wilchin’s argument that inclusivity in response to binaries is largely unhelpful because we consider only two real genders to exist, but I’m confused by the “terms” within a binary and how each one can hold a different significance.