Final Post: Summation and Explanation

For my final post I'd like to identify what I meant in my last post by excess. I had a couple comments inquiring if I could be a little more in depth and I think it is worthwhile because it is a great summation of what I take from the course.

To make it simple, let's look at excess, which is just the term I have chose to use for this idea, in terms of what we have come to know throughout this course as "perversion," especially in the Foucaultian, repressive sense. In the notion of perversion we have to take into account that which is the negation of perversion, hence "normal." In a heteronormative society (i.e. ours), anything deviating from strict, reproductive heterosexual monogamy legally qualified as marriage is not the expected behavior (norm) and thus is "perverse."

Excess is the theoretical distance from this normative behavior, and the assimilation of excess comes to have a normalizing effect on recognition. Norms are literally expanded to absorb the accepted excess. This usually results in a sliding scale, as the extremity of any excess is not usually fully acknowledged. A great example of this is the social and cultural revolution that was sparked in 1970-80s London through the punk scene created by the band The Sex Pistols. The band's frayed, unwholesome, noisy and unrefined aesthetic was a challenge to classical etiquette and established a growth in an extremely conservative society that established a renewed form of acceptance.

Now combine this excess with the ideas of the theorists we have read, espeically Butler's poststructural intersubjectivity. The difference in excess reveals the ability to assimilate it. For instance, in that couples (heterosexual) are meant to reproduce in order to supply the labor force, a heterosexual marriage that does not yield children (by choice) would be perverse. This is a very small stretch from the normative behavior and thus was not very difficult to gain normal status. Now look at the example i gave in the last post of the Kiss-in protests. This is a public display of (tame) sexual intimacy between two members of the same sex. The level of excess, or distance from the norm, is much greater here, hence the problems in assimilation.

As one final point, and the penultimate notion, is the teleology (or end goal) behind any display of excess. If it were the goal of kiss-in protests to make other people uncomfortable as some sort of humorous display, it would have little legitimacy and little chance of becoming normalized. However, as the goal behind it is to force a sort of desensitization towards the hegemony (read heteronormativity) it becomes a plea for recognition that has been forced to excess. The goal being (presumably) that if people are forced to encounter the private lives of people who identify as queer then an acceptance can be established. Perhaps that acceptance will never mean specific individuals feeling comfortable with the action of two men kissing, but somewhere in the gradient of the normalizing shift toward the excess a legal barrier can be reached that allows for equality.

In this sense, there is a moral prerogative behind normalizing excesses that embody the recognition of non-destructive ways of life. Obviously, there is never going to be a normalizing shift towards people who feel that they just need to kill people for fun now and then. However, it does hold that with growth of tolerance over time and allowance for acceptance, normalizing shifts can be accomplished (e.g. same sex marriage) to allow for what Butler calls a livable life.

Butler and Fantasy; Video Clip for Monday

I found the readings from chapter one of Undoing Gender especially interesting in an abstract sense in her discussions of fantasy. To Butler, fantasy seems almost necessary to reality in that it is a mechanism (a discursive mechanism, if you will) that establishes boundaries through one of my favorite motifs in literature: excess.

The concept of excess in fantasy versus reality becomes important as far as the evolution of acceptance. The more extreme of an excess the more extreme the normalizing shift will be, granted that some form of acceptance, whether socially, legally, culturally etc., can be garnered. This makes the kiss-in protest movement especially prescient because it is an excess in terms of public displays of gay relationships. The important thing in establishing the fantasy that excess reveals as a possibility for reality or truth is the teleology. The end goal of any form of excess should be considered and I think this consideration relates to the assimilation of excess against normality.

Another example of this is in the video clip that we have for Monday. The clip is from the HBO show Hung and involves contrasting the reactions of people at a high school reunion with those of the main character and that of the character in contention. The problem centers around the 'excessive' demonstration made by a transgender character (played also by a transgender actress) in an attempt to either deceive or assimilate into a former public community. The questions that I would propose to think about before watching this next week would be: would this count as an example of excess? If so, what is the goal of this excess? And then just any opinions that one might have towards the intentions, action and consequences of this scene.

Recognition and Language: Gender isn't Dead

Judith Butler's Undoing Gender  goes a long way towards finally making some step towards building a form of praxis in the relation between genders that different texts engaging queer theory we've read thus far have fallen short of. Butler's Gender Trouble begins an attempt to unpack the notions of gender and in what way gender is created, however, this text doesn't do much to engage physically or practically how these representations of desire occur. In readings for another class, I came across another reading that helps to recognize this even further. Reading Butler's notions of desire constituting gender, and gender constituting categories, and categories ensconcing norms along with Axel Honneth's identity-recognition theory establishes a firm ground on which a platform of social reform in the name of queer theory can actually be enacted.

Butler states that to exist outside of the norm of discourse is to have an unlivable life. She talks about discourse's capability to reduce humanity in a person in a couple different ways. First, we get the notion that certain terms can withhold recognition for someone by terming them something that is normatively viewed as less than human. An example of this to me would be to say that, normatively, men should be attracted to women. Therefore, to use a term for a man who isn't attracted to women ("gay") is to reduce their recognition as a person. Conversely, recognition can be deprived through a negation in terms of identity. In the same example, one might say that the man attracted to other men isn't "straight," and is therefore not normative, which makes him (as Butler puts it) sub-human. This puts these terms within the realm of an established category, rather than allowing them to constitute one. This discourse presumes a superstructure of category that fallaciously embraces the norms of a single category as being category-transcendent.

To Butler, undoing recognition makes life unlivable. As she describes it, people often strive towards a certain gender, a certain category, because of a desire towards what that entails. It is an act of self-acceptance, an claim towards the right to acceptance by others within that category and also a claim towards recognition as belonging to said category or gender by people outside of it. The problem then, is a problem of categories. There is simply no discourse available currently (in that there are people being forced to compromise and live unlivable lives marked by shame and pathology) that allows for recognition of appropriate categories. This is essential, because it is Butler's claim towards gender, in my approximation, that normative discourse shouldn't be privileged as a transcendent property. It is only within an accepted category, an accepted gender, that norms should be appropriate. To enforce norms and the discourse of terming those norms on a different category implies a claim towards superiority that is both pernicious and ideological.

With this established, it becomes important for me to see how this recognition is built in the first place. Now that it isn't being withheld, where the hell does it come from? This can be answered chiefly by the identity-recognition theory of a German critical social theorist named Axel Honneth. Honneth's theory developed from part of the tradition of philosophy, which he learned from his mentor Habermas, known as the liguistic turn. Abbreviated extremely, this progression goes like this: Ancient Greek philosophy of "the good," Medieval philosophy and the religious view of God's will, then Descartes's subjective turn (Cogito ergo sum) which puts man not god as the primary source of metaphysics. The linguistic turn is the embrace of language and social practices as rationality and the source of ontology. This theory is sort of the end of metaphysics. Honneth takes the idea that language as a social practice is the most important view of society and adds to it. I look at it this way, and this is how it connects to Butler: language is created by a society,  one is (in modernity) born in to that language. Expression through this language to another subject allows for acceptance of another subject, and reciprocally reveals the self as subject, too.

Foucault, Derrida and most post-structuralists here say that this means language constricts the subject, thus taking away agency (autonomy) in the same way that Freud might have said that subjects lose autonomy when they are being driven to action by unconscious libidinal forces. In reading Honneth's theory and now Butler's, I finally have proof for what I'd thought for a long time, which is that Derrida and Foucault's idea that there is no agency any more is (and pardon my strong expression) fucking ridiculous. Here's why: for Butler, stating that one has a desire towards claiming a gender (a category) is a means of expressing a self-direction and a self-awareness (autonomy). In addition this is supported by Honneth's corollary to the linguistic determination of identity. People need other people to recognize them as subjects to be a subject. This is done through communication. However, languages (besides Latin for example) are NOT dead, and are constantly evolving, implying a means of expression and communication that is available only through relations with other subjects, which allows language to differentiate and expand to be able to express experiences. This leaves us not with the Cartesian subjectivism, but with a necessary intersubjectivism. Agency is created and expressed only in conjunction with and mediated through social relations. The living language allows for living thought which can discursively expand to encompass new meanings. Specifically new meanings of categories and normativity. That post just got a lot longer than I intended, my bad.

"Queering" the Children's Book (What a Bizarre Title)

Like mentioned, I had a hard time with this assignment for a few reasons. The first being that it is hard to make slight modifications that radically alter gender symbols, because they are just so thick and common. Second, because I had a direct need to keep the story making sense, if not always with the picture at least in the framework, as well as my idea that I still wanted it to read as a children's book. Third, because I wanted to support a child-like view of queerness that didn't in some way trivialize some aspect, or worse broach from lewd to stereotypical or pernicious.

First, the masculine vs. feminine encoding is almost inexorable in children's books. In that, and I think this can be pretty easily agreed with, children's books tend to encompass quite a lot more didacticism than more mature literature, there are many forced and normalized renditions of behavior and representation. Example, it would have been almost impossible to go through without utterly changing the entire picture on every page to remove distinctly "masculine" and "feminine" characteristics, especially from Mama and Papa Bear (recall, I had a Bearenstein bears book, titled Papa's Day Surprise). Papa is first shown, in his overalls, flannel shirt and boots with an axe, hacking down a tree. His shirt is even unbuttoned slightly down the front as if to indicate some display of chest hair. Which I have to believe is a joke, because it is a fur-covered BEAR. Mama on the other hand wears a polka dotted dress, matching bonnet, and is shown only in the garden and in the kitchen initially. The children are adorned in pink and blue respectively. This creates difficulties.

My second problem stems directly from the first. I could have changed every single picture so Mama had pants and the son wore a dress, but I wanted to take a more subtle attempt at subverting the fragility of these stereotypes. They proved iron-clad for quite a while. In an attempt to use all the material the book gave me, I finally chose to take the Papa's Day surprise in a much more literal way. Even in doing so, there were plenty of pages where I still couldn't alter anything worth doing. I chose, instead of making Mama bears dress into pants, to let "Mama" keep wearing a dress. But make "Mama" a man. Making Mama and Papa a homosexual couple with adopted children seemed a break though, but it still presented difficulties.

It was regardless, even in leaving most text the way it was as a representation of the ease of seeing a homosexual couple in the same situations as a heterosexual one, I had to hold back my incredibly dark sense of humor at times. Then there was the way I should have the kids react. I tried to take the opposite reaction in them than that of Samuel Delaney's daughter did, in his account. Through the lens of children as less jaded and culturally encrypted I wanted to reinforce the similarities that should be able to be seen in the situation, regardless of gender roles and sexuality of the parents.

Therefore, in regards to Delaney, I essentially tried to set up a view of acceptance in gender roles that is as closely related to the current discourse originally available in the book as possible. In showing the similarities in situation, discussion, dialogue, attitude and acceptance, I tried to establish a discursive expansion and the simplicity with which it can be enacted.

Dirty Pretty Things and the start of The Left Hand of Darkness

In examining these two texts together, one issue stands out in comparative relevancy: embodiment. It is central to both texts, and informs nearly all of the decisions and attitudes of the characters. With Dirty Pretty Things's take on the sale of the body, and more importantly to me, some sort of distancing of body and "self" we see an estranging of embodiment, which can also be seen in the alien race of "Gethenians" The Left Hand of Darkness, with their fluid metamorphoses in sexuality.

Dirty Pretty Things is a British film, concerned primarily with the (very British) notion of post-colonialism. That is to say, how the former colonizer and empire treats "subjects" of the former empire in their relation as members of "new" (most independent former British colonies are hardly recent phenomena, however, it is clearly still a very pertinent issue in that culture) or foreign societies. First off I noted the abasement that Okwe elucidates to the illicit organ donor at the climax of the film. He describes the invisible status afforded immigrants (of any status) to London and how persecution is the immediate response to breaching that invisibility compromise. He relates the horrible conditions they live in and the terrible work that they endure. This invisibility bodily manifests throughout the film by showing lack of privacy and the habitation of tiny, cramped spaces. The most interesting thing I found was the contradiction that desperation put on the body. In that I am still considering that the mind and body are not split (Cartesian Dualism deal again; none of that please), the idea that one would sacrifice body for identity is intriguing and tragic. The sale of a kidney for a fake passport hardly seems an easy sacrifice or something that should be necessary to attain a livable life.

On the other hand is the social mentality created by an entirely different concept of embodiment. The beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness has me wondering at the connection between the anti-progressive, laconic pace of the people of Karhide. In that they have no sexual notions or desires except for a few days at a time out of a 26-day cycle, the Gethenians have a radically different structured society. I have to think, how would advertising (to us in our world/society) be different if sexual desire was not a prevalent mental condition?

Thinking about the combination of the two just leads me to believe even more strongly in the notion of intersubjectivity and the embodiment of perception. The Gethenian model seems to me to show us the way in which social constructions influence the body, but at the same time (discursively!) the body is the means on which society is crafted. (E.g. doorknobs are made to be grasped by fingers. It would be just as easy to have originally had the lever hand, which requires no dexterity.) Add to this the way in which body and the change of the body physically can change social view of someone from the film, and I like to think we have a good model of how bodies shape society, society reflects bodies and then how acceptance of those bodies by society renders the body a social object, to be accepted only by other members of that society. Like Hegel said (hate to bring up Hegel again, but hell, he's right), there is no subject without another subject. Except, you know, in German.

Grosz's Discursive Literature + Notes on My Halloween Experience

In the first chapter of Space, Time, and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz speculates on the meaning that is implied in terming something feminist literature and how exactly it comes to be described as such. Grosz has a series of reasons by which other theorist feminism is identified with literature, but essentially makes the claim that these strictures are often reductive or irrelevant.

Grosz begins by listing some of the means by which a text was judged to be feminist. These are the sexes of the author and the reader, the content of the text an the style in which the text is presented. To Grosz, these perimeters belie and illusory correlation between what she refers to as "women's texts," "feminine texts" and "feminist texts" (Grosz, 11). Grosz problem is that her use of these terms is "purposely being vague," whereas other theorists had previously not made such distinctions (ibid). Logically, there are blatant problems with this. For one, under the assumption that a feminist text MUST relate in someway to a critique of patriarchal hegemony or promote female equality, then it is easy for a text written by a women to engage these issues at all. Even if a female author doesn't promote patriarchy in her work, it can't be automatically designated as anti-patriarchal. In the same mode of thinking, a man my create a text from a female point of view or character which does not promote a critique of male hegemony.

Grosz explains that to assume that the experience of subjugation to a patriarchal society is the only privileged perspective that any female can have is reductive and furthermore fallacious. This creates the illusion of a connection under the term "woman" that Judith Butler elucidates upon. This idea is also limiting to texts, which Grosz denies stating that "every text exceeds its author" (Grosz, 19).

Grosz, through her analysis of Derrida's concept of the signature, then believes in a dialectical relation between, originally, the author and the text, and then between the reader and the text. This signature concept basically seems to imply that in the generation of authenticity that a signature provides, there is created a distinction between others. Thus, in the way I see it, the text is the mediation in a dialectic between the author and reader, whereby both can be the subject. That is to say, the author has a discourse with his authorial "I" as in the narrator or point of view. The reader engages the "I" and therefore creates a semiotic barrier of intentionality (both conscious and unconscious in my opinion) and meaning that encapsulates the text on both "sides."

On a different note, I had a personal experience recently that I thought fit very well with our themes of perversion and gender roles/identities but is also (I think) pretty hilarious. This past Saturday, I went out for Halloween dressed (there's a much longer story behind this choice) as the pop singer Ke$ha (Yes, she does put a dollar sign in her name. Don't ask me why).

This is Kesha:

 

So this was what my costume attempted. The funny part is that I did this basically to make fun of my roommates, all of whom are straight males like me. However, where I think these things are funny, they were all extremely uncomfortable. When each one of them showed up at the party I attempted (successfully every time) to make them think I was actually a girl. They weren't pleased. Again, I thought this was the funniest thing that had happened in months.

To highlight why I am bringing this up, I think it enforces a lot of the issues we've discussed as far as class themes. There is a deep fear (yes, fear) in most males of a man wearing women's clothes. I think the massively adverse reactions they all had (exclamation, expletives, more expletives, etc.) illustrated the strength of the cultural taboos against perversion.

I even had some gender issues going through my head afterward as well. I'm sure most of you noticed Monday that I had nail polish on. It was shocking to me as well, when I woke up Sunday morning. In my mind, every hand gesture, every way I held a cup or did anything looked (for lack of a better term) "girly." The only thought I had was, well I need to get this stuff off. I then decided that that was not me talking, but the fear someone would think that it was weird. Which I took as a challenge. So I kept it on for a few days. After deciding Sunday morning that I needed to do a lot of masculine things to account for cross dressing the previous night, I realized I didn't care at all. So I left the nail polish on, cleaned my house and cooked dinner for all my roommates. I didn't stop laughing all day at how arbitrary and artificial it all was. I can only hope that Butler or Foucault would be proud of my decisions. Or at least amused. That is, if Foucault even knows how to laugh.

Works Cited

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. 1995. Routledge. New York, NY.

Mendes and Cvetkovich: The Trauma of the Suburbs

While American Beauty already shared many of the themes and theories that our course has centered around, however, with the addition of Cvetkovich's theories of trauma, the comparison become even more succinct.

As a means of running down a list of themes involved in the movie, it would be helpful to identify specifically some of these principles. American Beauty is an excellent example of embodiment (in terms of body image, self identity and  mental instability), sexuality (misconceptions, homophobia and repression) and  Freudian melancholia.

To start with, the embodiment, or rather issues of body and subjectivity come across fairly blatantly. Lester's desire to better himself physically is at first driven solely by an exterior source. He overhears Angela talking to Jane about his physique and immediately Lester goes and begins to lift weights. In this way, he comes to embrace his change in disposition in regards to himself. He loses the lethargy that he had felt before. This culminates at the end of the film in which he decides not to sleep with Angela, feeling that it would be a violation, but realized that he is happy with himself afterwards and the changes he has made in his life. The issues of embodiment and perversion therein come up in the mental issues of two characters: Ricky and his mother. Ricky describes having only come to his  self assurance after being caught smoking marijuana and the subsequent military school enrollment and expulsion that left him in a mental institution. The root cause of this, Ricky's overbearing Marine father Frank, is also presumably the cause behind the unexplained problems Ricky's mother has. The two then become to sides of what this mental pressure can do. Ricky's mother is clearly beyond helping, but Ricky is still able to escape the mental crippling.

Sexuality plays an enormous role in this film. It is sexuality that drives Lester to reinvigorate himself. The basis behind Lester's reinvention in body is that of a drive to alleviate his own sexual repression. This is of course directly tied to the character of Angela. She believes that sexual discourses are thus the only means of achieving her own success. However, the most potent views of sexuality come in the forms of repressed homosexuality in Col. Frank Fitz. Frank constantly states his displeasure in seeing or hearing about homosexuals (like the gay couple down the street). He also goads Ricky into stating his own similar disapproval, although the excess of the statement can be taken as an implication that Ricky doesn't in fact believe in his own anti-gay statements. Frank's fear of homosexuality is derived mainly from himself and the thought that he might have "passed it on" to his son. Frank becomes violent with Ricky, expelling him from his house, upon mistakenly believing that Ricky was gay. This can be seen as a form of melancholia in that Frank is now internalizing not only his shame at his own homosexuality but also that of Ricky's. Frank's attempts to come to terms with this lead only to more mistaken identity (in an ridiculousness on Shakespearean levels) as he assumes Lester is gay. Frank's act of self-preservation is thus seen as a direct consequence of his homophobia and is thus a condemnation.

Lester alone accounts for much of the ideas of melancholia in the film, because of the internalization that he is in fact a hopeless loser at the start of the movie. Other examples of the ways in which melancholia is overcome are Jane's internalized self image problems stemming from comparisons with Angela. To the opposite effect, Carolyn's materialism does not end and in fact her melancholia can be said to deepen. She begins with an internalized view that she cannot succeed in her real estate business be she herself cannot project her success well enough, leading to her materialism. However, she doesn't solve this problem in a lasting or healthy way. Instead, she begins to feel that Lester has victimized her in some way, to the point that she had even contemplated killing him.

The final scene of the film, ending in Lester's murder, is a circumspection of what Cvetkovich would call the trauma inherent in the plot. Traumatic experiences occur frequently, from Lester quitting his job and the backlash at home, to the beatings Ricky endures at the hands of his father, the non-diegetic trauma Ricky describes in his institutionalization. And in a way, as is director Sam Mendes's repetitive theme, all of this can be traced back to what (Cvetkovich and Mendes might jointly term) the trauma of the suburbs. Inherent to this is the outsider view that informs so many of the choices and decisions that the characters make. Lester represents the escape from this system, however, his murder can then be seen as the penalty for leaving the system. Yet, the possibility of escape for Ricky and Jane can be seen as hope for escape from this trauma.