Thinking About the MLA, Queer Theory, Literary Study

I described this quarter's movement thus far--it's been only one week and had I followed the suggested teaching schedule I would have taught 7 class sessions, instead of 4--to a colleague at another university as akin to being on, and simultaneously racing, a maglev train, and I won't get off it or be able to lower my pace until late March. So my posting may be very intermittent until then. Last year at this time, and just days into the new quarter I was heading to Los Angeles to undertake my responsibilities on a hiring committee that was interviewing people at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association. I spent most of my few days there in a single large room, asking tough questions of very smart and interesting people, and my evenings recuperating, and that's all I'll say about that, other than great hires emerged from the experience. One highlight of the trip, however, was having the opportunity finally to meet and hang out with poet-genius Will Alexander, which was a delight (and when I returned to Los Angeles last spring, I spent an afternoon not far from the UCLA campus with him and Chris Stackhouse), and also with several old friends, among them my former Dark Room Collectivist, writer and scholar Bethany White, and my former co-worker, the multiplatform artist Ella Turenne.  I don't think I had time to attend a single MLA panel or reading, though I did run across many anxious colleagues who appeared to be presenting at or excited about one or the other.

This year, no MLA. I had no reason to go beyond wanting to see, once and for all, the city of Seattle, which I've never set foot in. (Nor have I ever visited Portland, which I want to visit even more after a mini-marathon of the Carrie Brownstein-Fred Armisen zaniness known as Portlandia. The show is so bizarre and hilarious that it probably has planted an irrevocably skewed vision of the city in my head and any time spent there will be a let-down, but nevertheless, I'd love to go there.)  Nevertheless, I did see that, according to Stacey Patton in The Chronicle of Higher Education, at this year's conference the major focus will be a justification of why teaching literature--and by extension, the humanities and cultural studies--matters. As many a major scholar (Judith Halberstam, Rita Felski, etc.) has articulated far better than I, literary studies faculty have for decades now not made a compelling or convincing case, particularly to those outside academe, for studying literature or for the importance of various critical and methodological approaches, which have become caricatures in portrayals by people on the right and even among journalists and non-academics.  This is not to deny that a good many scholars and literary critics have engaged people outside academe and some, like bell hooks or Stephen Greenblatt, to name two, regularly reach audiences outside university and college walls.  But I do sometimes think that important conversations occurring within academe often don't filter out, and that the many valuable aspects of these conversations are not self-evident without some explanation, some guidance, some justification, however rendered, to people outside academe. 

We live in an age and in a society in which "expert" knowledge is viewed with perhaps more skepticism than an any other time over the last 200 years (and I certainly do acknowledge that this is perhaps a bit hyperbolic and that, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out half a decade ago, the US in particular has always possessed a strong anti-intellectual strain, even as it has produced some of the major thinkers, scholars, and creative people to have emerged over the last two centuries). Just saying that scholarly and critical work, especially literary scholarship and criticism, and the teaching of literature, are important, or that it's necessary for professors to pore over a given work, and to teach students how to do so, to do so with them, to guide them in doing so, holds less weight with many outside academe than it once did.  Yet, as I have pointed out more than once to my students and to friends and colleagues, our contemporary political sphere undoubtedly draws a great deal--too much--of its water from the well of a not-very-good work of prose fiction, a novel, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. I would venture that far more people animated by Rand's thought and ideology have read this work or her other creative texts, like the better written but still stilted The Fountainhead than have puzzled through her more overtly economic or philosophical treatises. In fact, these books are among the most effective vessels of and for her ideas; what someone teaching literature can do is explain, perhaps in ways that someone who doesn't do so, is why and how.

One area where this intra-academic knowledge in some ways appears to to have filtered out and yet at others has not is with what is now falls under the broader rubric of queer studies. In the current issue of the Chronicle, both Michael Warner, chair of Yale's English department and a major scholar and critic, and William Germano, dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences at Cooper Union, muse on the end of Duke University's Series Q, an imprint of influential books in queer studies--and lesbian and gay studies before that--and on the current state of the field, which, it has struck me as I have begun teaching what I think is the first course in my current department in LGBTQ literature and theory ("American LGBTQ Literature Since Stonewall"), and here I echo both Warner and Germano, is as germane as ever.  In some ways, the popular discourse about lgbtq issues is much further along than it was when I was an undergraduate in the late mid-to-late 1980s, or when I was in graduate school in the mid-to-late 1990s. But in as much as some of the key insights of many figures of that era have diffused throughout popular discourse, and we are further along politically and socially, I and anyone else who opens her or his eyes on a daily basis can see how certain things still carry over. It is no longer surprising to me how frequently people adhere to binary notions of sexuality; how frequently offensive terms like "tranny" are tossed about, and how transvestitism, transsexualism, and transgenderism pose a quandary for many; how confused many people still are about the differences between sex, sexual orientation, sexual object choice, and so forth; and how the unrepressed, the normative--heteronormativities and now, homonormativities--not only never left, but in some quarters are thriving. Outside of Logo and MTV, turn on the TV, and what do you see? I think the answer to this question is clear enough.

Lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies coming shortly thereafter, unpacked and examined a great deal of what lies at the core of these issues, and for some in the academy, I sometimes think it really may feel as if the matter, the issues, were long settled. (Or maybe that's just my perspective as I listen to people talk about lgbtq issues within academe vs. outside it.) But in fact, it's not even settled in academe itself. I can recall, as I told my class on Wednesday, how a colleague on the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center in the late 1990s spoke enthusiastically of a "post-gay" moment, and many, perhaps most people present, agreed with him. In many senses, particularly in the wake of queer theory and queer studies, we were at a point where we could speak, at least in academic terms, of moving away from the sorts of identitarian-dentificatory-based (i.e., linked to individual psychologies, with  communities arising from these identifications) ways of thinking about the world to approaches that examined larger structures, institutions, the fluidities and mobilities and intersectionalities of self-fashioning and presentation, of performance in the world, in varying contexts, and this was, certainly, exhilarating. But those older approaches were not without their value, because outside the walls of academe, they were and still are in contestation. 

Think about the It Gets Better series of videos and the discourse around this, and how there's little discussion of how other issues, like race and ethnicity, class, gender variance and dissidence, and so forth, factor into how young people not only may be treated but whether or not they'll be able to deal with bullying, homophobic, and heterosexist violence and oppression.  It may get "better" if you are young and white and male-identified and queer and upper-middle-class, and have support networks around you, but if not, then what? That is not to say things are hopeless, but rather that the insights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, and queer studies, especially as they have explored the state of the world with increasingly greater nuance, do offer ways of addressing some of the questions the standard responses in the It Gets Better videos have set forth.

I say all of this to suggest that teaching literature and the insights gained from doing so over the last century have have many purposes, offer many tools, in the world.  One, as the Chronicle article says Stephen Greenblatt suggests, is bringing us towards an understanding of "aesthetic pleasure" and appreciation. Implicit in the idea of the "aesthetic," as not only Clyde Taylor, who wrote a superb critical book some years ago about the European idea of the aesthetic and its multiple, sometimes problematic valences, but going millennia back, Plato and Aristotle themselves would suggest, are questions of the political, the economic, the social and cultural. Literature can help us to better understand these aspects of the world; it never appears in a vacuum and some of the most important things that professors teaching literature do include (but are not limited to) introducing students to works they have not read before; guiding them through and teaching them new ways of reading those works--including ways that they may already be familiar with; helping them understand how those works function in relation to other works, to the times in which they were written, to other periods and times, and to the present moment; exploring the various registers of literary texts, for every work operates on a variety of frequencies, some quite obvious, some quite hidden; and inculcating the multiple potentialities and worths, which should include skepticism of those very values at times, of literature, art and the humanities as human enterprises, of reading and writing, of language and languages themselves, which constitute the primary ways we as human animals, all of us, not just some select few of us, communicate. Of course, as I said, scholars far more distinguished than I have already hashed this out with brio and panache, and are certainly doing so at the MLA right now (or have been doing so). But in case any J's Theater readers wonder what people do in literature classrooms, it's a lot more important and engaging than tossing around gobbledygook. It goes to the very heart of who we are as human beings and creatures in this large and vast world.

Remembering Sedgwick & Ballard + Poem: Adrienne Rich

I will post about the Cuba trip later today, but I wanted to note to recent departures from the world of arts and letters, one I heard about only when I got back (I had almost no net access while away), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and one I read about this morning, J. G. Ballard. Both Sedgwick and Ballard were pathblazers, in very different ways, and global literary studies in the former's case, and fiction and science fiction in the latter's, would look quite different had they not appeared. Both have also been very important to me in many ways, as a creative writer, as a teacher, as a critic, and as someone trying always to think about how we see the world and the multifarious ways it works. Both were quite fearless in their work; for Sedgwick it meant trampling on binaristic assumptions that still grip our public and private discourses when it comes to gender and sexuality and how they function in the world, while for Ballard, it involved writing texts that could be read as pessimistic, anti-humanistic, sexist, and obscene. Not that such criticisms stopped either of them.

In the case of Kosofsky Sedgwick, as is now well known, her first two studies, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Tendencies (1993), the text I have studied most closely, have been foundational in what many scholars, students, artists, critics, and increasingly the broader public may now take for granted, the field of queer studies, and the articulation of much more complex readings of the relationship between gender, sexuality, literary and cultural texts, discourse, performance, and related concepts. With each of these studies, the complexity of her argument, and her openness to a range of possible conceptual and performative axes, expanded. These critical texts, along with her teaching, raft of other publications, and public conversations and advocacy with an wide array of other notable scholars, artists and critics in and around gender, queer and performance studies, liberatory politics and practice/praxis, and critical theory, have remade the critical landscape in many humanities fields, while also helping to change discussions about the role of critics in shaping the public discourse around these topics. Though a self-described straight woman, she was truly emblematic of the complex and beautiful queerness she explicated and explored. Eve Sedgwick befriended and championed the work of the important, late black queer writer Gary Fisher (Gary In Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher [1996]). (I should note that I recall the time I first heard her speak about Fisher, just before the book came out, and took her role in its production and publication quite skeptically, though Robert Reid-Pharr calmed me in the moment, and later I read the book and, after much rumination--because it is still a difficult book for me to take on many levels--and came to appreciate it, Fisher, and her role in bringing it into the world.) She was also a poet in her own right (Fat Art, Thin Art [1994]), which, like the playful essays in Tendencies, offered her another critical mode (why oh why do so few scholars not follow her example in this regard?). She had taught at a number of institutions, including Duke University and most recently the City University of New York's Graduate Center. She was only 58.

J. G. Ballard, a Shanghai native and trained physician, was one of the leading British and English-language experimentalists and of the late 20th century. His works could easily be described as "queer" in a different sense; they are often called science fiction or dystopic fiction, but in a number of them, at the level of narrative, they defy categorization. It's easy to forget, given the popularity of his more mainstream books, such as Empire of the Sun (1984), which later became an acclaimed Steven Spielberg film, which obituaries today have been highlighting, and The Kindness of Women (1991), how utterly strange and singular books like The Crystal World (1966), Crash (1973), which David Cronenberg masterfully turned into a cinematic shocker in 1996, Concrete Island (1974), and my personal favorite, one of the most perverse, draw-dropping, and horrifyingly sublime books in all of English-language literature, The Atrocity Exhibition* (1969) really are. Riding the genre line multiple ways and breaking not only formal boundaries but thematic and content ones as well, Ballard managed to delve perhaps more deeply than many of his fiction-writing peers into the ways in which our endlessly and excessively technologically mediated society was transforming, in a phenomenological sense and at a neuropsychological level, our experiences of the world. As his readers know, an adjective, Ballardian, has been coined to describe essential aspects of his style and dystopian thematics. The proliferation and normalization of paraphilias far beyond concerns about sexuality and pornography, the incessant and life-devouring obsession with mass media and hypercelebrity, the increasing struggle and ecological destruction produced by capitalism's churning engine, the spreading paranoia produced by the creeping global, govenrmental and corporate panoptican, and so much more, can be found in germinal and distilled versions throughout his oeuvre. This body of work influenced a wide range of artists across fields, but especially other fiction writers and many musicians, including groups such as Joy Division, The Normal, the Buggles, Jawbox, Radiohead, and many others. And Ballard did not let up: one of the last novels he wrote that I read, Super-Cannes (2000), refines these interests into what appears to be a straightforward realist narrative that slowly but surely turns bizarre, in quintessential late Ballardian style. He also published nearly two dozen collections of stories, a collection of essays, and an autobiography, and also wrote for film and TV. He was 78.

*As I never tire of telling students, there are different forms of censorship. Apocryphally Ballard experienced one form in the US when publisher Nelson Doubleday decided to glance at Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and was so disturbed--very likely by the references to the late President Kennedy and his widow, and to the extremely graphic short story/chapter whose title included the words "Ronald Reagan" (Ballard was quite a visionary)--that he ordered the entire press run pulped. The entire press run. Jonathan Cape published the volume in the UK, and it later appeared in the US first under a different title, and then under Sylvère Lotringer's Re/Search imprint, with fetching graphic photos. You're forwarned....

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The poem I'm choosing today is by one of my favorite poets, Adrienne Rich, and it's from her "Twenty-One Love Poems," which appeared first as a stand-alone collection in 1976 and then in her volume The Dream of a Common Language (1978). It is worth reading all 21 of these poems, as they economically and incomparably demonstrate poetry's capacity to express desire and love--and in the case of these poems, specifically the love between women. Thinking of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and J. G. Ballard, I am posting Poem VII, "What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"

Love Poem VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionate enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

Copyright © 1988, from Gay & Lesbian Poetry In Our Time, Carl Morse and Joan Larkin, editors, New York, St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved.