I was on Facebook today when I came across the following meme:
“What do you do? I’m a Firefighter. What do you make?” “WHAT DO I MAKE?? I make holding your hand seem like the biggest thing in the world when I am cutting you out of a car. I can make 5 minutes seem like a lifetime when I go into a burning house to save your family. I make those annoying sirens seem like angels when you need them. I can make your children breathe when they stop. I can help you survive a heart attack. I make myself get out of bed at 3am to risk my life to save people I’ve never met. Today I might make the ultimate sacrifice to save your life. I make a difference!”
One. Small. Problem. This meme is plagiarism and lifts work from one of my professional/artistic colleagues, Taylor Mali. I appreciate the sentiment of the meme and don’t mean to diminish the contribution of any firefighters but I loathe plagiarism. Check out Taylor’s poem, written YEARS before the firefighter meme started: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU
Yeah! to firefighters! Yeah! to teachers! BOO! to plagiarists! Give Mali credit for his work, asshole.
End of an era, at least for me. -
Both of my books go out of print on June 30th. If you want to buy one, this month is your last chance.
Banning Bachelorette Parties at The Abbey -
Check out the above link for the story. The Abbey’s decision has incited a thought-provoking debate. Some believe that the policy is fair, others suggest that it’s counter-productive. After I posted this link on my Facebook, one of my straight female friends questioned Cooley’s move, claiming, “What will banning bachelorette Parties in WeHo accomplish? I just don’t understand excluding people to further an agenda of equality. Period.” I thought my admittedly long-winded response was worth reposting here:
The Abbey’s policy is not necessarily about specific, measurable political ends. It’s symbolic, a move to get some of the heterosexual people who have largely co-opted/poached the space to recognize the irony in their choice of location/celebration. Worse, many of these women come to the bar and treat gay men like we’re exhibits in a zoo. Their lack of self- and cultural-reflexivity is truly abhorrent.
I do not believe these women are the ones voting against marriage equality. My argument is about their lack of cultural reflexivity, how this particular sort of celebration perhaps unwittingly spits in the face of the very people they objectify (i.e., the gay zoo) when they take over gay bars, puke on our sidewalks, push gay men out of the way as they stumble to bathrooms, burn cigarette holes in our shirts, and spill drinks on our clothes. It’s hard to have an abstract, philosophical debate about this if you haven’t been to The Abbey or even to West Hollywood on, say, Halloween. There’s a lot more going on here than just attitudes about marriage equality.
If women were not allowed to vote in this country. I would not expect male voter registration to take place at the women’s auxiliary or a NOW convention, especially if women were in the midst of an epic battle to secure suffrage. You may not understand or appreciate the centrality of gay bars within the gay community. Straight bars to heterosexual people are not analogous to gay bars for LGBTQ people. The WORLD is your straight bar. Gay bars are, for many (if not most) LGBTQ people, one safe sanctuary, a place were they can congregate, to escape, to come together. There’s something ritualistic, even spiritual, about that coming together. The Abbey’s policy aims to honor the sacredness of gay space.
One need only look at the Civil Rights Movement to understand the complexities and importance of the symbolic, silence, exclusion, etc. The symbolic tends to be the very thing that incites cultural reflexivity. It’s telling that many of these women don’t see the paradox in celebrating nuptials in a place designed for people who are denied that right. In the same way that boycotts, sit-ins, and the like are modes of consciousness raising, so too is this policy.
I’d have no problem with bachelorette parties at The Abbey if marriage equality was federally recognized. FTR, I don’t attend the marriages of my straight friends and won’t until I have that right. I’m not okay with bemoaning inequity while taking advantage of and flaunting privileged access to the very institution one suggests he or she takes issue with. You can’t have your (wedding) cake, and eat it, too.
I first learned about queer theory in my second semester of an MA program. I took a class titled Queer Theory and Performance. The week before class started, my lung spontaneously collapsed, forcing me to miss the first day. Despite my initial absence, I dove into the material. It’s not easy learning the complexities of queer theory, let alone the intricacies of poststructuralism. But I was immediately attracted to queer performance theory and utterly invested in course readings and discussions. I quickly became “that guy,” the neophyte who asked too many questions, the one at whom everyone rolled their eyes and avoided at break.
At midterm, we submitted our final project proposals. Many of the arguments in my paper challenged some of the foundational tenets of queer epistemology. I wanted to consider how an overarching label like “queer” might erase other salient and intersectional aspects of identity, like gender and race. This argument is now a common critique of queer theory. At the time, though, I was too ineloquent and inexperienced to frame and articulate my criticism. The instructor, Jill Dolan, failed me on the assignment and suggested that I talk to her during office hours.
I will never forget sitting on the cold linoleum outside of her office door and waiting for her to finish a phone conversation. She finally waved at me, indicating I could enter the room. I dumped my nervous body into an uncomfortable chair and greeted her.
“Ragan,” she said with little hint of emotion, “I think you should drop the class. Your contributions are a distraction, and I think you’re an essentialist.”
I had never been asked to drop a class before, let alone a course to which I was so devoted. Heartbroken and embarrassed, I withdrew from the queer theory seminar the following day. Despite dropping, I read the entire course reader and fell in love with queer theory.
Over a decade later, I am now a tenured professor and look back at the ordeal with a bit more perspective. I have taught college students for over a decade, learned to mentor overly eager and sometimes inarticulate graduate students (which is not to say that all or even most are “inarticulate”), and published several essays in which queer theory takes center stage. This experience doesn’t make me less upset with the aforementioned instructor, it makes me more upset and confused. Ten years later and I still feel the sting of the teacher’s judgment, queer moralism, and lack of care.
My love affair with queer theory grew throughout doctoral study. Queer perspectives seemed totally consistent with my anti-establishment, gender ambiguous, and pro-sex sentimentalities. Like a good little queer, I questioned heteronormativity, celebrated difference, and challenged taken-for-granted logics that sustain sex/gender systems. I also became friends with a number of queer-identified people. We all parroted the same or at least very similar lines about marriage, gender, race, and sexuality.
I became disenchanted with queer theory in my last year of doctoral study. More and more, I saw queer friends policing other people’s normative desire. Two queer feminists, for instance, told a woman in our cohort that she wasn’t a “real” feminist because she was married to a man and her husband was in the military. Even the slightest divergence from queer theory’s script resulted in condemnation and sometimes alienation. Queer moralizing—especially the sort I witnessed in graduate school—made me skeptical of queer theory.
I’ve been reading Lynne Huffer’s book Mad for Foucault, wherein Huffer more eloquently and in part addresses the paradoxical blow of queer moralism, an inverted list of behavioral expectations that shape queer identity politics, even as queer theorists claim to disavow and deconstruct identity. Huffer writes:
“I will not open a moral interrogation into those behavior rules—including the odd proposition that there will be no behavioral rules—that would generalize for everyone—or at least for all queers—whether or not we should be monogamous, multipartnered, celibate, single, soldered to another in a holy place, a sex club, cyberspace, or a brothel, for life or ten minutes, with one or with many, or none of the above. If I’ve learned anything from Foucault, it’s that ‘anything goes’ forms of sexual freedom often put forward as queer eschatology are simply the inverted reflections of Enlightenment autonomy. So I’m not arguing, as some have in response to old-fashioned normalizing moralisms—be they of the family values, feminist, or gay sex panic variety—that barebacking or orgies or public sex or erotic vomiting or sex-positive feminisms or late-night schedules in and of themselves will subvert those moralisms: ‘every assassination of painting is still a painting.’”
Queer moralism is a form of what my friend Dusty Goltz might describe as “critical tragedy,” or a “deployment of critical theory to enact a coherent and totalizing judgment of personal voice that forefronts one absence or axis of critique. Critical tragedy is the misuse of critical theories to wholly dismiss an account as wrong, privileged, or unreflexive, thus appropriating/erasing one story to forefront another—that of the critic.”
I, for instance, don’t buy the queer assault on marriage. It’s not that I don’t understand or appreciate queer critiques of the institution, although it would certainly be convenient for some queer critics to moralize their own position by suggesting I just don’t “get it.” I have given careful consideration to arguments for and against marriage equality. Religious conservatives, queer radicals, and social progressives, among others, have constructed compelling claims about the issue and I have taken their words to heart.
I am pro-marriage equality. I want to get married. I identify as queer and gay. I believe that everyone should have the right to marry, just as everyone should have the right to be single. I don’t believe people should be financially penalized or rewarded for either choice. I do not believe that marriage equality is exclusively or even primarily a gay white man’s issue. I believe that marriage equality is both a symbolic measure of acceptance and at the center of a human rights grid. None of the abovementioned positions are mutually exclusive but moralizing—whether conservative or queer—makes each claim appear to be oppositional.
On a more concrete level, I teach and study human communication. I am an ethnographer. I study communication behaviors of discrete communities. Gays, lesbians, bisexual men and women, transgendered people, and queers have distinct communication practices. I believe that these behaviors are IN PART socially constructed. When I identify as “queer,” I engage in a critical tragedy, forsaking one culturally sedimented identity (i.e., gay) for a newer one (i.e., queer), trading one assimilation for another. I acknowledge the particularities of my penis and hormones and question the ways in which symbolization affords me certain privileges, just as it takes others away. But here’s where I REALLY think I’ll ruffle some feathers: I prefer the anti-marriage equality moralizing of the religious Right to the anti-marriage equality moralizing of many queers, because at least conservatives acknowledge that they are, in fact, moralizing.
[video]
Foucault’s ideas anchor a bulk of my autoethnographic research. Some may find this union—between Foucault’s poststructuralism and personal narrative— contradictory. Scholars have noted the various ways in which Foucault resisted confession and shied away from autobiographical speech acts (see Butler’s Gender Trouble). Lynne Huffer grounds Foucault’s suspicion of autobiography in poststructural thought, arguing that, “Given Foucault’s lifelong effort to undo the moi—to interrogate the humanist illusion of an unsplit, self-identical, coherent ‘I’—his discomfort with [personal narrative] makes sense” (23).
While Foucault’s writing pre-dates contemporary understandings of personal narrative and autoethnography, he spends a lot of time interrogating judicial and religious acts of self-disclosure. He is careful to point out how, throughout the ages, confession has been used as an instrument of power. Foucault notes that confessions provide the proof of the truth of disciplinary mechanisms. Through acts of self-disclosure, a blasphemer subjects his or her own tongue to torture (e.g., piercing; see Discipline and Punish, 45). “Since the Middle Ages,” argues Foucault, “Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (History 58). Truth’s fabrication is partially made possible by way of confession and is “thoroughly imbued with relations of power” (History 60), “for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (History 61-62). Foucault describes confession as a “ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation” (History 62). Confession’s promises of purification and redemption are precisely what legitimize discourses of objectification. Subjectivity, for Foucault, is nothing more than subjectivation (Huffer).
Alternately, autoethnographic writing that specifically aims to reveal the productive and repressive functions of identity/subjectivity/subjectivation may, in fact, be commensurable with Foucault’s suspicion of the “personal.” Understanding this claim requires a more precise explanation of Foucault’s notion of personnage. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, he describes how the nineteenth-century homosexual became un personage. Huffer explains that, when interpreting this oft-quoted passage, many US thinkers have wrongly equated French individualism and an American sense of community-based identity. In other words, un personage is more a character we play than a political or personal “reality,” or identity. Huffer contends that, “The personage is not so different from the social types one might find in a medieval morality play or a Renaissance allegory like Bosch’s painting or Brandt’s narrative verses about the Ship of Fools that Foucault invokes at the beginning of Madness” (71).
It is not that Foucault rallies against theorizing the personal as much as he questions how the personal has been used throughout the course of history to repress and produce particular subjects. If personal narrative is used to expose identity’s performativity, or shed light on the discursive network that constrains and enables subjectivity, autobiographical theorizing is both consistent with Foucault’s use of tropes (e.g., the ship of fools) and anecdotes (e.g., daily rituals of people in mental hospitals) and commensurate with his research methods. This claim rings especially true in performance studies scholarship, where scholars tend to reveal the imitative, theatrical aspects of identity, and personal narrative regularly calls attention to specific cultural mechanisms that reproduce the “fictive or metaphorical product of a representational order, like a character in a play or the protagonist of a novel or even the ‘face’ acquired through a rhetorical troping” (Huffer 71).
(Yes, this writing is part of a larger project. More to come.)
“What I want I will never have/I’m on the Pacific Coast Highway/With your gun in my hands/Your whole world is in my hands/Your whole, wide world is in my hands…/Miles and miles of regret/It hasn’t happened and it won’t happen yet/Days and days of perfect sex and bad TV/Oh, I just try to forget/Miles and miles of regret/Pacific Coast Highway/So fast/Pacific Coast Highway/I crashed/Pacific Coast Highway/Anguish/Pacific Coast Highway/You better live/Pacific Coast Highway…” — Courtney Love (Hole), “Pacific Coast Highway”
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/top-gop-pollster-to-gop-reverse-on-gay-issues.html -
Why Gay Marriage is Actually More Conservative than Progressive
Fascinating read, although not unexpected. The conservative co-optation of marriage equality is precisely what queer theorists and activists have anticipated and been rallying against for two decades. I may try to pen an autoethnographic reflection on marriage equality, one that includes evolving LGBTQ takes on the issue and critically interrogates my own pro-marriage sentiment, despite an appreciation of queer theory.
The following policy is going in my future syllabi:
Cell Phone Use Makes You the King/Queen of the Class
Overwhelmingly, communication and education scholars have shown that using cell phone technology in class interferes with learning (Williams, et al., 2011), promotes incivility (Schroeder & Robertson, 2008), is disruptive, and results in increased errors and decreased academic performance (Monk, et al., 2008)
Once class starts, you may not use your cell phone. If I see you using your phone, you will become the “King (or Queen) of the Class.” One space at the front of the room will be reserved for the King/Queen of the class. If I see somebody using a phone in class, I’ll ask him/her to sit in the royal seat and wear the royal crown. For the rest of the period, the King/Queen will regularly be called on to answer questions that I would normally direct to the entire class. After all, people who text during class must already be so comfortable with the material that they have the luxury to disengage in lecture and discussion. They are, in a manner of speaking, the “King” or “Queen” of the class. If the King/Queen fails to correctly answer three questions, he or she will be asked to leave for the rest of the period. Once asked to leave, the student forfeits his or her attendance and quiz credit for the day.
Monk, C. A., Trafton, J. G., & Boehm-Davis, D. A. (2008). The effect of interruption duration and demand on resuming suspended goals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14, 299-313.
Schroeder, J. L., & Robertson, H. (2008). Civility in the college classroom. Association for Psychological Science Observer, 21. Retrieved April 18, 2012 from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2008/november-08/civility-in-the-college-classroom.html
Williams, J. A., Berg, H., Gerber, H., Miller, M., Cox D., Votteler, N., Carwile, D., & McGuire, M. (2011). “I get distracted by their being distracted”: The etiquette of in-class texting. Eastern Educational Journal, 40, 48-66.