Blog

This is the forty-fourth post in a series that I call, “Recovered Writing.” I am going through my personal archive of undergraduate and graduate school writing, recovering those essays I consider interesting but that I am unlikely to revise for traditional publication, and posting those essays as-is on my blog in the hope of engaging others with these ideas that played a formative role in my development as a scholar and teacher. Because this and the other essays in the Recovered Writing series are posted as-is and edited only for web-readability, I hope that readers will accept them for what they are–undergraduate and graduate school essays conveying varying degrees of argumentation, rigor, idea development, and research. Furthermore, I dislike the idea of these essays languishing in a digital tomb, so I offer them here to excite your curiosity and encourage your conversation.

This is the sixth of seven posts of material from Professor Kevin Floyd’s Queer Studies seminar at Kent State University. Most of these Recovered Writing posts are from summaries that we wrote during the semester on readings. Most of these were densely theoretical works, but we could not expend more than one page on these summaries–no more and no less–exactly one page. This was an incredibly useful exercise to get to the heart of an argument, study its supporting evidence, and identify its strengths and weaknesses. These summaries encouraged us to take a rigorous approach to understand arguments, express those arguments cogently, and adopt the jargon, terminology, and language utilized by the argument’s writer.

Jason W. Ellis

Professor Kevin Floyd

Queer Studies

15 April 2008

Summary of Elizabeth Freeman’s “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations”

Freeman argues that “waves” or “generations” overlap, borrow, and are potentially incomplete when their supposed time has “passed.”  Instead of gaps between, there are interconnections between the present and past as evidenced by what she calls “temporal drag.”  Her opening example about her student illustrates a temporary crossing (think diachronic) that she calls “temporal drag,” which is a pull exerted by “lesbian” on “queer” that brings it back to a bodily politics.  Drawing on Judith Butler’s work, she points out the progressive repetition with difference in lesbianism along with the Derridean citation precedents.  Freeman argues that drag presents a valuable challenge to progress, and she holds onto the generational approach to political work and identities for the time being.  The Shulie (1997) remake illustrates how it, along with Shulamith Firestone, are part of a “feminist genealogy” that is more paradigmatic than linear (730).  It problematically remixes a visual present with a 2WF/1960s audio past.  Additionally, the video can be considered drag, in the sense of camp, not because of the obvious inverting nature of camp, but because it “[resuscitates]…obsolete cultural text” (732).  The short film connects to the shift in Butler’s work from reiteration to “allegorization,” because the film resurrects “past failures” that figure into a future narrative (732).  Allegory, like ritual, carries meaning through signs over time.  Furthermore, normative gender identities are “symbolic” of “temporal moments” and “experiences of gendered selfhood” (733).  These identities are transportable through time, but carry specific meanings and importance that may be anachronistic.  Queer performativity, as allegory, relies on “collective melancholia,” or a personally held, but collectively shared set of queer experiences, which Freeman calls an “embodied temporal map, a political archive for a contingent form of personhood” (734).  The 1997 Shulie is an interpretation of Firestone in 1967 that reflects on the supposed failure of 2WF politics while offering hope through her Riot Grrrl resemblance.  The anachronistic mise-en-scénes in Shulie (1997) disconnect it from documentary and authority, yet supports an archival past.  Also, it draws connections between her and feminist artists that followed her.  The 1997 film, unlike the original, reveals that gender doesn’t overcome the generation gap, yet evokes a sense of political cohesion between Subrin and Shulie.  Subrin does not fetishize that which came before.  She remembers, challenges, and inverts then and now.  Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) builds a relationship between feminism and history through Marxism.  Also, she encourages people to think in terms of radical and conservative versions of the politics that travel under the sign of feminism, “rather than in terms of the cyclical history of feminist generational gaps” (740).  Firestone, like Subrin, connects the radical past to her present in order to reveal the threats to radical feminism during 2WF.  The multiplicity of Firestone in the film and in reality points to the temporal fluidity or interconnectedness Freeman is arguing.  One part of that multiplicity is the signifier of the young girl, which appears in queer/feminist cultural works.  The girl sign points to the past as well as to potential in the future.  Also, it reflects Firestone’s project in The Dialectic of Sex that “radical feminism [is] incomplete unless it includes the political and sexual liberation” (741-742).  However, Subrin’s younger Shulie character is “not a child” or “a sexual icon” (742).  Her unidentified status is the vector Subrin employs for illustrating the present feminist/queer movement without the “post” modifier.  Shulie’s responses point to a future based on “experiences that discourse has not yet caught up with, rather than…a legacy passed on between generations” (742).  It’s important for evolutionary or transformative movements to recognize the temporal pull of that which precedes it.

This is the forty-third post in a series that I call, “Recovered Writing.” I am going through my personal archive of undergraduate and graduate school writing, recovering those essays I consider interesting but that I am unlikely to revise for traditional publication, and posting those essays as-is on my blog in the hope of engaging others with these ideas that played a formative role in my development as a scholar and teacher. Because this and the other essays in the Recovered Writing series are posted as-is and edited only for web-readability, I hope that readers will accept them for what they are–undergraduate and graduate school essays conveying varying degrees of argumentation, rigor, idea development, and research. Furthermore, I dislike the idea of these essays languishing in a digital tomb, so I offer them here to excite your curiosity and encourage your conversation.

This is the fifth of seven posts of material from Professor Kevin Floyd’s Queer Studies seminar at Kent State University. Most of these Recovered Writing posts are from summaries that we wrote during the semester on readings. Most of these were densely theoretical works, but we could not expend more than one page on these summaries–no more and no less–exactly one page. This was an incredibly useful exercise to get to the heart of an argument, study its supporting evidence, and identify its strengths and weaknesses. These summaries encouraged us to take a rigorous approach to understand arguments, express those arguments cogently, and adopt the jargon, terminology, and language utilized by the argument’s writer.

Jason W. Ellis

Professor Kevin Floyd

Queer Studies

8 April 2008

Summary of Chandan Reddy’s “Asian Diasporas, Neoliberalism, and Family”

Chandan Reddy analyses the confluence of capital and the state in the creation of the figure of the “gay Pakistani immigrant” in this essay.  His interest lies in the crossing of Asian immigrants into the U.S. and their experience, emblematized by Saeed Rahman’s account in the opening quote.  Immigration law is the system that generated the “gay Pakistani immigrant.” This figure challenges a shift in U.S. immigration law that has been reconfigured by neoliberal influences around the constructed idea of the “family.”  Neoliberal economies and policies have shifted focus from serving the individual to promoting capital, which particularly disadvantages diasporic subjects.  Dismantling the U.S. welfare state figures into a distribution of entitlements rather than a redistribution of wealth–capital is advanced rather than labor.  As a result, the poor and immigrants are further disenfranchised by policy under the rubric of security.  In defending the neoliberal American subject, all opponents are labeled/configured as terrorists, which align them in opposition to the catchall words:  “democracy, civil society, and rights” (106).  Gay marriage in the U.S. constitutes a convergence of Foucault’s deployment of alliances and deployment of sexuality, which it centered on the family.  Foucault’s argument that the family extends and consolidates the deployment of alliance links the state and family through law and sex.  Currently, those desiring same-sex marriage, while seeking legitimation, have displaced other queer issues.  The deployment of sexuality in the U.S. is connected to the “nonnational differences…of gender, race, and sexuality” to expand the working classes, and immigration alters those same differences (108).  Using the rhetoric of “family reunification,” the state increases the labor pool while appearing to perform an altruistic function for immigrant noncitizens (109).  Furthermore, the welfare responsibility of incoming immigrants has been shifted from the government to the petitioning families.  The closeting of immigrant persons is not something merely accepted by them, but it arises out of immigration policies and the state’s focus on the family for visa disbursement.  State and federal support of religious welfare organizations over secular ones further an emphasis on heteronormativity.  The end of the traditional welfare state is not a good thing, because it only effects the working and poor, and state involvement in those person’s lives will only take other forms such as within the family and church.  According to Roderick Ferguson, capital seeks any available labor, while the state enforces “a set of racialized gender ideals” (112).  Capital breaks hierarchies while the state enforces/protects heteronormativity along race, gender, and sex lines.  Returning to the gay Pakistani immigrant example, a queer of color critique would not necessarily see the U.S. as protecting gay liberty or this example instituting greater gay visibility in the history of law.  Instead, that critique would show how the gay Pakistani immigrant is formed at the convergence of mandated heteronormativity and the state’s supposed support of sexual freedom.  That figure comes about from the friction between capital and the state.  Furthermore, different gay rights groups may read Rahman’s narrative as a gay Pakistani immigrant in different ways.  Reddy reads the law as an “archive of racialized sexuality,” or a kind of socio-historical archive (115).  The law, as archive, binds historical and social differences including gender, race, and sexuality.  Additionally, the law can be read as a social history of a culture through its development over time. The archive is not passive–it reveals as well as creates subjectivities, and it registers “difference and community” (116).  The author reads the figure of the gay Pakistani immigrant as the “limit of the archive”–the point at which to reverse engineer the archive’s “conditions for existence” (116).

This is the forty-second post in a series that I call, “Recovered Writing.” I am going through my personal archive of undergraduate and graduate school writing, recovering those essays I consider interesting but that I am unlikely to revise for traditional publication, and posting those essays as-is on my blog in the hope of engaging others with these ideas that played a formative role in my development as a scholar and teacher. Because this and the other essays in the Recovered Writing series are posted as-is and edited only for web-readability, I hope that readers will accept them for what they are–undergraduate and graduate school essays conveying varying degrees of argumentation, rigor, idea development, and research. Furthermore, I dislike the idea of these essays languishing in a digital tomb, so I offer them here to excite your curiosity and encourage your conversation.

This is the fourth of seven posts of material from Professor Kevin Floyd’s Queer Studies seminar at Kent State University. Most of these Recovered Writing posts are from summaries that we wrote during the semester on readings. Most of these were densely theoretical works, but we could not expend more than one page on these summaries–no more and no less–exactly one page. This was an incredibly useful exercise to get to the heart of an argument, study its supporting evidence, and identify its strengths and weaknesses. These summaries encouraged us to take a rigorous approach to understand arguments, express those arguments cogently, and adopt the jargon, terminology, and language utilized by the argument’s writer.

Jason W. Ellis

Professor Kevin Floyd

Queer Studies

2 March 2008

Summary of Eric Clarke’s “The Citizen’s Sexual Shadow”

Clarke uses Kant’s philosophical promotion of marriage within “sexual commerce” to critique the recent shift in the gay and lesbian community towards the right of marriage as well as question how same-sex sex may fit into a modification of Kant’s philosophy on the sexual citizen.

Clarke works through Kant’s philosophy of non-objectivity as essential to human subjectivity.  The uniquely human objectification of others for sexual pleasure can be dealt with/neutralized through marriage.  For Kant, “sexual inclination…is a necessary animal aspect of humans” (114).  However, it is an aspect that must be challenged through rationalization and moral choices lest one “become less than human” (114).  For Kant, the solution to that is heterosexual marriage.  Within marriage, each person gives his/herself to the other, and thereby reclaims the self.  Therefore, objectification is rendered moot within the realm of heterosexual marriage, which promotes human dignity in a human economy of value totally separate from a baser economy governing the inhuman (e.g., same-sex sex).

Kant’s philosophical system promotes a universal equality within heterosexual marriage.  However, it should be noted that this fits into an Enlightenment metanarrative of heteronormativity ad an idealized Romantic love signified by heterosexual marriage.  Within this promulgation of Enlightenment thinking and the categorization of the human, Kant combines civic values (e.g., citizenship and enfranchisement), and sexual values (e.g., heteronormativity and marriage).

Clarke attacks Kant’s philosophy based on the latter’s grammatical formulation in the subjunctive mood, which for Kant ensures each marriage partner is a sexual object of possession to the other partner as well as property owner in his/her own right of the other, which is integral to Kant’s idea of human subjectivity.  Furthermore, Clarke takes Kant to task over his employment of the categorical imperative, which universalizes a moral law if it ca be conceived by a rational agent as a moral law.

In the concluding “Citizen Slut” section, it’s fascinating how well Kant aligns with the recent rhetoric of gays and lesbians who desire a normalizing right to marriage.  Larry Kramer and Bruce Bower are shown to repeat and reinforce a Kantian view of sexual economies equating same-sex promiscuity and fluid sexuality as negative and that only through same-sex marriage can those persons, as Kramer states, “‘honor ourselves and our relationships and our innate humanness, beyond just our sex’” (qtd. in Clarke 122).

Clarke brings up some significant questions in his conclusion.  He asks, “Can there be a right to sex or a sexual citizen other than through marriage” (123)?  He questions the universality of Kantian moral-civil subjectivity and wonders if relying on communal norms might be a better solution.  Also, how far can/should equality go–“Should equality be abstract and formal, to allow greater autonomy, or more substantive, so as to recognize difference” (123)?  With these questions, he seeks to find a solution beyond Kantian moral philosophy, which is clearly hitched to heteronormativity grounded in the larger project of post-Enlightenment modernity.

This is the forty-first post in a series that I call, “Recovered Writing.” I am going through my personal archive of undergraduate and graduate school writing, recovering those essays I consider interesting but that I am unlikely to revise for traditional publication, and posting those essays as-is on my blog in the hope of engaging others with these ideas that played a formative role in my development as a scholar and teacher. Because this and the other essays in the Recovered Writing series are posted as-is and edited only for web-readability, I hope that readers will accept them for what they are–undergraduate and graduate school essays conveying varying degrees of argumentation, rigor, idea development, and research. Furthermore, I dislike the idea of these essays languishing in a digital tomb, so I offer them here to excite your curiosity and encourage your conversation.

This is the third of seven posts of material from Professor Kevin Floyd’s Queer Studies seminar at Kent State University. Most of these Recovered Writing posts are from summaries that we wrote during the semester on readings. Most of these were densely theoretical works, but we could not expend more than one page on these summaries–no more and no less–exactly one page. This was an incredibly useful exercise to get to the heart of an argument, study its supporting evidence, and identify its strengths and weaknesses. These summaries encouraged us to take a rigorous approach to understand arguments, express those arguments cogently, and adopt the jargon, terminology, and language utilized by the argument’s writer.

Jason W. Ellis

Professor Kevin Floyd

Queer Studies

26 Feb. 2008

Summary of Eric Clarke’s “Visibility at the Limits of Inclusion”

Clarke performs a Habermasean argument, meaning an analysis of the influence of capitalism on democracy and the interrelationship between the two systems, to explore the way in which visibility politics reinforces capitalistic modes of value production, which in turn promotes a particular “authenticity” for gay and lesbian identities.

He raises questions about the project of visibility politics, which “has demanded more ‘positive’ lesbian and gay” role models/representations/representatives in the public sphere and in the media (29).  What does ‘positive’ mean?  Who decides what is ‘positive’ and what is ‘negative?’  Clarke argues that the recent trend in commercialization and sponsorship of gay and lesbian events such as the Stonewall 25 celebration introduces the process of capitalistic value production.  Instead of gays and lesbians forming community or group identities on the basis of an egalitarian democratic ideology, the confluence of capitalism and commercialism produces a gay and lesbian demographic that’s targeted as a group to be marketed and sold brand name items in the interest of reiterating a ‘lifestyle’ formed not by that group but by the dynamics of marketing and sales.  What’s really troubling about this development is that this capitalistic ‘lifestyle’ group identity for gays and lesbians comes about through capitalism and not through democratic, individual enfranchisement to make choices about belonging to such a group.  Furthermore, this process is disguised as an operation of democratic ideals, and it’s here that Clarke brings in Habermas and Marx into his discussion of value production invisibly supplanting moral enfranchisement.  That is, there is a heteronormative feature to this that enforces or favors ‘normality’ among gays and lesbians who seek or affirm the post-WWII heteronormative ideal of the nuclear family while excluding what Ellen Degeneres terms, “extremes” (qtd. 34).

Clarke relies on examples such as Ellen Degeneres’ double coming out on the ABC TV show, Ellen to reveal how this confluence of capitalism through publicity serves to promote a normalizing effect to gays and lesbians.  Degeneres (implicitly) along with persons such as Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, and Gabriel Rotello call for equal rights through what Clarke describes as, “moral conformity as the very precondition for enfranchisement” (41).

Other effects of the process of devaluation of non-normative identities promoted by the influence of capitalistic forces include the marginalization of radical gay and lesbian groups such as ACT UP (as opposed to the major funding of groups like GLAAD), and the publicity/marketing disconnection from “extreme” gay and lesbian identities that don’t fit into the promoted, normalized heteronormative model of gay and lesbian identity (this even extends to ABC turning down the lesbian vacation and cruise company, Olivia Cruises and Resorts, advertisement during the coming out Ellen show).

In the system/process that Clarke describes, social and political value is equated to economic value, and that economic value is established through capitalistic forces and publicity/marketing choices made by corporations.  Enfranchisement of individuals as citizens takes place through market forces rather than the conventionally understood ideal of egalitarian, democratic enfranchisement.  However, it’s important to note that Marx describes how capitalism stripped marriage of particular traditional functions, thereby opening new possibilities, and it has afforded similar possibilities to “modern homoerotic association” (57).