We read work by Charles Morris III, Chris Castiglia, and Chris Reed this term about queer memory: all three authors brought up the incessant cultural attacks on gay and queer collective memory. Morris, in his discussion of rhetorical responses to claims that Lincoln was gay, outlines the “mnemonocide” influeced by homosexual panic of historians. Castiglia and Reed, in discussing the memory work of Will and Grace mention the virulent attacks on gay memory, including the prevention of education on queer history in school, the objections to designations of gay neighborhoods, the ways mainstream presses stress generational differences among gays, the focus in mainstream press on martyrs like Harvey Milk (at the expense of other aspects of gay history), and calls for breaks from the past. Castiglia especially explores this call for a break from the past in his discussion of how queers remember the 70s, explaining how collective memories influence our sexual consciousness and how “willed amnesia” toward the past might be harmful for creating new ways of relating to each other.

My students, who have little knowledge of queer history (this isn’t a history course, though at times I wish I had included more historical work to build up a deeper, complex shared history), were disturbed by the attacks on gay history. One of them expressed that “our history is broken.” And then we had the wonderful question in class: What can we do? We had a fairly good conversation for the rest of class about different things that students here at Penn State could do, and about what larger culture could do.

As we discussed, I couldn’t remember the exact year that Matthew Shepherd was murdered. I didn’t really think it mattered in the moment, but a student looked it up on his cell phone, which I applaud. But then a student made the observation: with the Internet, where we can look everything up in a second, do we need to discuss history? Can’t we just look it up?

I was disturbed by this reduction of history and memory work to mere information and facts, and I countered that memory is used and deployed and shared, not just information. Memory is about the stories we share to build collective identities, collective potentials and futures, and a shared sense of selves. This might be possible in Internet forums, but not if we view history as just information.

The other situation came a week or two later, as we discussed Michael Warner’s work and his explanation of the attack by NYC zoning laws, health codes, mainstream gays, and others who want to clean up public spaces, making sex publics harder to access through isolating themselves from each other, making the harder to find, and closing places down. This makes not only information about sex harder to find, but also has the added effect of destroying other public venues: when queers go somewhere for sex or information about sex, eventually a quantitative change leads to a qualitative change: other people come to the public place as well, and a vibrant public with many different types of people can share a space and interact with each other.

A few of my students were disturbed by this but quickly expressed gay Internet hope: If I can get porn, learn about sex, and find sex toys online, do we really need these sex publics in physical spaces? Which misses the point that Warner makes that this is not just about sex, but about queer world building.

Clearly, if you know me, I’m a huge fan of the Internet, but I’m concerned about how it is viewed and used at this point: language like “information technologies,” the “information superhighway,” etc. have the effect of making the Internet a sort of place where information is retrieved, not where people congregate to create worlds. I am doubtful that the Internet offers the type of forum that allows for the type of memory work and queer world building that public more physical spaces might, though I do believe those potentials exist in some ways online. Mostly, I’m concerned about a larger issue: the reduction of culture, memory, and shared experiences to information and information access. We don’t have to know because we can find out; History is information, not shared experience; My sexual interests are private and can be explored through a screen, rather than worthy of being explored and shared in public spaces.

Not that this is a “gay” problem, but rather speaks to larger cultural logics. My concern here in this post is particularly about queer culture building and queer memory work, but could easily be expanded to incorporate a larger concern I am developing about our “culture” as a whole: the reduction of lived and shared experiences to information and information retrieval.

Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave? is largely a project to put Focault’s injunction to look for new ways of relating to each other, psychoanalytical thought, and aesthetics in conversation with each other. Because it is a collection of essays, lectures, and interviews, it gets a tad repetitive at times, but this repetition is also helpful in that it approaches the same questions from a variety of ways. Ultimately, Bersani’s writing addresses “our most urgent project now: redefining modes of relationally and community, the very notion of sociality” (172).



“Is the Rectum a Grave?” is foundation for queer theory, and is largely a response to representation of HIV/AIDS in popular discourses. Bersani argues that popular media doesn’t teach a lot about HIV/AIDS, but can teach us a lot about heterosexual anxieties about HIV/AIDS, homosexuals, and families. This media is geared toward heterosexuals, and helps to make “the family mean in a certain way” (9). Bersani also outlines how discourses about AIDS equate promiscuity with infection (18) and portrays gays as killers (17). He logically argues that the claims of MacKinnon and Dworkin are right in a way: pornography can be realism and denigrating toward women. The ultimate logic of their argument, however, is “the criminalization of sex itself until it has been reinvented” (20), and he actually sees MacKinnon and Dworkin as sharing assumptions with Foucault, Weeks, and others: that sex needs to be redefined. His problem with Dworkin and MacKinnon is their pastoralization of sex: they ignore “the inestimable value of sex as—at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving” (22). Bersani argues for the value of powerlessness in sex: the “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (24). We need to reinvent the body, and Bersani argues that gay men (and everyone) should not be modeling sex off of patriarchal, heterosexual pastoral sex: the value of sexuality itself is to demean the seriousness of efforts to redeem it” (29). He concludes that “The self is a practical convenience; promoted to these status of an ethical ideal, it is a section for violence” (30).



Other ideas/quotes:



“An important function of art might be redefined as anticommunitarian, against (to the extent that this is possible) institutional assimilations of particular works” (34).



Value of homes: “Our implicit and involuntary message might be that we aren’t sure of how we want to be social, and that we therefore invite straights to redefine with us the notions of community and sociality” (38).



On shame: “we will never participate in the invention of what Foucault called ‘new relational models’ if we merely assert the dignity of a self we have been told to be ashamed of” (69).



Teaching: “it’s a sustained time and space where you do nothing but see who a group of people are going to connect” (200).



“Pedagogy and friendship are modes of extensibility less glamorous than public sex (a current queer favorite) but perhaps more worthy of exploration. . . . To redefine friendship would be a political move” (201).



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I guess the most recent episode was “First Kiss,” “Never Been Kissed,” where Kurt (the gay character) gets bullied by someone who turns out to be a struggling with his own homosexuality. Greteman has a wonderful discussion about the rather conservative approach of the show: the gay boy as the victim whose first kiss has to come through a violent encounter, and the bully as a closeted gay guy. From Greteman:

We could not see Kurt have his first kiss be the ideal, romanticized first kiss because that would not have made him sufficiently the victim. It would have made the gay scene of intimacy as romantic and legitimate as the scenes of straight intimacy we saw between all the “straight” couples. And this is just unacceptable it seems. Instead, we can only imagine the gay male as victim as we most often see Kurt OR as we saw him in the first season as the “predator” trying to turn his straight crushes gay. Now, Kurt’s presence on TV is significant. He is a significant representation to see on TV as GLBT students are present and visible in high schools more and more in contemporary society. And do face a constant barrage of harassment and bullying, often left unaddressed by teachers and administrators. This was seen poignantly when Kurt confronted Mr. Shue.

. . .

My disappointment is that the “gay” youth seemingly can only operate as victims. They are never successful, always haunted by bullying and violence against their body. And, to a certain extent this violence is an important constitutive element of being a “gay” subject. But, I think investigating and thinking about ways to read this violence is important.

I’ve been meaning to post my thoughts on the recent “It Gets Better” campaign and the anti-bullying discourse that has been circulating over the last few months. Hopefully, I will find more time and energy for that. But at the moment, what I would say, is, in rhetorical terms, we lack inventional topoi to imagine arguments and representation differently. There are the same standard talking points: the young gay boy is a victim, the bully may be (probably is) a repressed homosexual, the problem is psychological (don’t be mean!). Cindy Patton, in Fatal Advice, explores how sex ed taught straight youth that HIV was a gay problem, and that gay men were to be felt sorry for while straight people were immune to the disease. I think the anti-bullying discourse seems to be working the same way: feel sorry for the young gay boys, feel better about yourself for feeling sorry for them, and vilify the bully rather than addressing the system.

Richard Kim wrote a wonderful piece in the Nation recently about imagining things differently:

So when faced with something so painful and complicated as gay teen suicide, it’s easier to go down the familiar path, to invoke the wrath of law and order, to create scapegoats out of child bullies who ape the denials and anxieties of adults, to blame it on technology or to pare down homophobia into a social menace called “anti-gay bullying” and then confine it to the borders of the schoolyard.

It’s tougher, more uncertain work creating a world that loves queer kids, that wants them to live and thrive.

Amen. One last approach: American Pragmatist Josiah Royce Philip Hallie has written about how kindness can be the ultimate means of cruelty. For slaves, having a kind master conveys that they know how to do kind things, but refuse to do the ultimate kindness: end slavery. With sexism, kind acts like flowers and opening doors for women show women that sexist men can be nice, but still refuse to fight sexism. And the same is true of anti-bullying campaigns: it teaches to be nice and to feel sorry for, rather to act to change how privilege and heterosexism can be changed.

• The radical notion that men and women are equal.

• The radical notion that a man and a woman might have a non-romantic, non-sexual friendship and might want to live together.

• The radical notion that a straight man and a straight woman might be in a relationship and want to live together.

• The radical notion that college students are adults and should have more options in whom they live with and how they live.

• The radical notion that a transgender person might feel more comfortable living with someone of a sex or gender different from how the university identifies that person as.

Pretty radical. As with most LGBT initiatives, this one appears to benefit straight people even more than queer people. I’ll resist the urge to speculate why Shrivell might have a problem with a policy that benefits straight people so much (but it might be related to why he spends to so much time on a young gay man’s facebook page).

On PHB, Pam Spaulding asks, “In what universe is the sexual orientation of any judge relevant to ANY case?” A justified question. Of course, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how a judge interprets the constitution, evidence, law, and case precedent.

But what matters in a heterosexist society is that “gay” or “homosexual” is painted as the interested party, and that heterosexual is painted as the objective party — or, more accurately, assumed to be objective because it doesn’t have to be “painted” that way. Not that other issues of difference are “the same,” but we can see a similar response when Sotomayor was going through hearings with Congress: her race mattered. Especially when she mentioned that she would have different experiences with which to interpret cases than others, despite the fact that, if I’m remembering accurately, Alito had said something similar about his own experiences: they mattered in his interpretation. But the fundamental difference, in our cultural imagination, is how close to the center, how privileged, someone is. Someone who is not White, or someone who is not straight, must have an interested opinion, an agenda, a bias of some sort. Straight white men are the ones who can be impartial (excepting, of course, the frequent, almost ubiquitous, accusations of “liberal bias” or “conservative bias”).

Bersani’s prologue begins by discussing a danger he sees in much queer theory: the critique of the supposed naturalness of straight, gay, and lesbian identities is much needed, but “they are not necessarily liberating” (4) because they often erase sex (“desexualizing discourses”) and because “the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance” (5). Bersani’s approach, then, is in part a continued critique of the naturalness of sexuality, but also an attempt to find something liberating about non-heterosexuality, as well as continuing to privilege the sexuality of homosexuality.

He posits his anti-social thesis of queer theory: “Perhaps inherent in gay desire is a revolutionary inaptitude for heteroized sociality. THis of course means sociality as we know it, and the most politically disruptive aspect of the homo-ness I will be exploring in gay desire is a redefinition of sociality so radical that it may appear to require a provisional withdrawal from relationality itself” (7).

Chapter 1 explores homophobia, noting that “homophobic America itself appears to have an insatiable appetite for our presence” (11). While acceptance of queers has grown, so has anti-queer activism and homophobia. Bersani believes that part of acceptance is also related to the expectation that queers will all die of AIDS (this was published in 1995): “In fact, no one can stop looking. But we might wonder if AIDS, in addition to transforming gay men into infinitely fascinating taboos, has also made it less dangerous to look. For, our projects and our energies notwithstanding, others may think of themselves as watching us disappear” (21). Homophobia is also a unique type of hatred: racism depends upon the existence of non-whites, but homophobia does not depend on the existence of homosexuals. It is, instead, “entirely a response to an internal possibility” of being homosexual oneself (27). Of course, homosexuality cannot be eradicated, and thus, homophobia, “itself the sign of the ineradicability of homosexuality, [. . .:] must remain” (29).

Chapter 2 involves detailed engagements with Wittig, Butler, Halperin, and Warner, whom Bersani charges, among other things, for desexualizing discourse about queers. Bersani then argues that “unless we define how the sexual specificity of being queer (a specificity perhaps common to the myriad ways of being queer and the myriad conditions in which one is queer) gives queers a special aptitude for making that challenge [to institutions:], we are likely to come up with a remarkably familiar, and merely liberal, version of it [that challenge:]” (72-73). Bersani pushes these theorists for not being radical enough. For Bersani, “There is a more radical possibility: homo-ness itself necessitates a massive redefining of relationality. More fundamental than a resistance to the normalizing methodologies is a potentially revolutionary inaptitude—perhaps inherent in gay desire—for sociality as it is known” (76).

Chapter 3 is a strong critique of discourses about sadomasochism, many of which argue that there is something liberating about S/M because of the ways in which partners switch roles and play with power. But Bersani is more skeptical: “Sometimes it seems that if anything in society is being challenged, it is not the networks of power and authority, but the exclusion of gays from those networks” (85). Bersani argues that S/M doesn’t challenge privilege—it leaves privilege in tact and extends privilege (temporarily), making S/M “profoundly conservative in that its imagination of pleasure is almost entirely defined by the dominant culture to which it thinks of itself as giving ‘a stinging slap in the face’” (87). Sure, S/M plays with power, but it doesn’t critique privilege and authority.

Chapter 4 is where Bersani really outlines his anti-social theory, asking “Should a homosexual be a good citizen?” (113). Through his readings of Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani shows how homo-ness can constitute “a political threat [. . .:] because of the energies it releases, energies made available for the unprecedented projects of human organization” (123). Homo-ness, which involves a “self-shattering” (101), and thus a loss of the self and thus a loss of citizenship (125). Bersani proposes that Gide helps to reimagine relationality in ways that do not involve property, but in order to do this, we need to “imagine a new erotics” (128). Proust, according to Bersani, “point[s:] us in the direction of a community in which relations would no longer be held hostage to demands of intimate knowledge of the other” (151). Even more so, Genet helps us to disentangle erotics from intimacy (165). Ultimately, Bersani’s reading becomes an exhort for revolt that rejects relationally: “without such a rejection, social revolt is doomed to repeat the oppressive conditions the provoked the revolt” (172) because “Revolt allows for new agents to fill the slots of master and slave, but it does not necessarily involve a new imagining of how to structure human relations. Structures of oppression outlive agents of oppression” (174). As Bersani understands oppression, “In a society where oppression is structural, constitutive of sociality itself, only what society throws off—its mistakes or its pariahs—can serve the future” (180).

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