Wednesday, June 29, 2011

On Gay Marriage

A blog about same-sex marriage was in the queue, but given the recent developments in New York it’s suddenly extra timely . . . so here it is now ahead of schedule.

I find that the straight people I know are way more excited about gay marriage than the people I know who might actually enter into one. Maybe it’s just the very queer lot I hang out with, and maybe I should just speak for myself: I am decidedly ambivalent about same-sex marriage.

“It must be admitted from the outset that there is something unfashionable, and perhaps untimely, about any questioning of marriage as a goal in gay politics.” After all, “at this point the only public arguing against gay marriage, it seems, are those homophobic dinosaurs,” the usual, selective-Leviticus-reading suspects, so “why join them?”

Michael Warner wrote this in 1999 (on pages 119-120 of his “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage"), but it’s still quite true. Robert McRuer points out in Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability that, “according to the liberal consensus,” gay marriage “is not only ‘progressive’ but unequivocally a Good thing” (p. 79).

Despite the current gay marriage cheer fest, however, there are ways in which it’s not such “a Good thing.” After all, as Warner notes, “there were cogent reasons that the gay movement for decades refused to take the path on which it is now hell-bent,” and it’s not like these have gone away (p. 123). Warner lists a dozen reasons, but here are my two:

One, battling this one issue out in legislatures and courts is absolutely the wrong thing to be expending the entirety of activist energy and funding on. Achieving same-sex marriage seems to be eclipsing activism around AIDS and healthcare and repealing laws that criminalize consensual sex. These latter are far more important things than helping white, middle class people access the white, middle class privilege of property ownership and other financial benefits.

As McRuer points out, “most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry” (p. 82-3).

This sort of privilege tunnel vision didn’t have to happen. “The mere posing of the issue was a jolt. It made the heterosexuality of marriage visible, to many people, for the first time. It drew attention to the exclusions entailed by marriage, through provisions for inheritance, wrongful death actions, tax rates, and the like” (Warner p. 122).

That is, the discussion about gay marriage had great potential to really interrogate what this institution ought to mean, but ultimately the way it has gone down it “fails to challenge the bundling of privileges that have no necessary connection one to another, or to marriage; indeed, if successful, it will leave that bundling further entrenched in law” (Warner p. 143).

The fact is that the way we attach immigration benefits and health care access and all kinds of miscellaneous financial benefits to this institution has exactly nothing to do with whether people love each other and have a commitment, and this would have been a great time to hash out what we want marriage to be, but we didn’t.

Instead, the cry has been: We just want to be able to have the same private (but state-ratified) contract as anybody else, why must the state intervene to prevent us? Or, put differently: This heteronormative institution is great! It works! Let us in!

This, of course, begins to get at the second reason I’m not ready to board the Gay Marriage Express. I’m really not comfortable with perpetuating the state legitimation of relationships.

Among those dozen reasons Warner lists for not pursuing gay marriage are two that are relevant here: “queer thought both before and after Stonewall centered on the need to resist state regulation of sexuality”; “it especially resisted the notion that the state should be allowed to grant legitimacy to some kinds of consensual sex but not others or to confer respectability on some people’s sexuality but not others’” (123).

Contrary to these positions, pursuing gay marriage insists that it is exactly the state’s job to regulate and legitimate and make respectable people’s sexuality. The argument is that without state recognition couples are subject to deprivation, such that that recognition must be extended if there is to be equal protection under the law—and never you mind the fact that formal equality rarely translates into substantive equality unless you are those white, middle class, resource-having folks.

But here’s the problem: “squeezing gay couples into the legal sorting machine will only confirm the relevance of spousal status and leave unmarried queers”—or unmarried people in any other category—“looking more deviant before a legal system that can claim broader legitimacy” because it is inclusive of more and more people (Warner 143).

That is, “even though people think that marriage gives them validation, legitimacy, and recognition, they somehow think that it does so without invalidating, delegitimating, or stigmatizing other relations, needs, and desires” (Warner 133)—which clearly isn’t true.

Same-sex marriage perpetuates the privilege of a very narrow set of relationship configurations as legitimate and as having access to resources. That’s a problem. Also, by increasing the legitimacy of that position, it means that not participating is deviance by choice rather than normativity being denied to you.

However, there’s a flip side to this, which is among the some reasons I’m not ready to totally condemn same-sex marriage. If gay marriage is legal, refusal, on one hand, makes you deviant, but on the other it now means something, politically, to not get married. The same argument looks different when you look at it from this direction.

I’m not the only one to notice this. As RichardKimNYC tweeted (which came to me through an indeterminate chain of retweets): "Yay! Now my decision to never ever get married is a choice reflecting my belief in marriage's banality. #NYM"

Or, also, Warner: “introducing the mere possibility of marriage would vastly broaden the meaning of gay couples’ refusal to marry. In fact, it would make gays’ rejection of marriage a more significant possibility than it is now, by making it a free act” (157-8). I think that this is compelling. Not compelling enough that this should be all we work toward, but compelling enough not to condemn the attempt altogether.

And then there’s the fourth reason. Though I don’t think trying to secure the rights was the best thing, and though other people are excluded, I’m not sure whether that means I should forego the rights on principle. Hospital visitation or social security or health insurance would be pretty nice. Everybody should have them, but given how they’re apportioned right now should I turn my back on them in a gesture that nobody will even be able to see?

In the end, I’m not going to rush out and get married (or civil unioned). I’m not going to march for it or throw money at it. But if it came down to it and I needed the resources state recognition provides, I think I’d do it. I’d feel a little guilty, but I’d do it.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

So, You like Girls: Dianna Agron, Meet Adrienne Rich

So there I am, minding my own business the Sunday before last, when the Internet goes crazy. Or, rather, one of the corners of the Internet that I keep an eye on went crazy.

I’ll admit it: I have a Google alert set for Dianna Agron. It’s what I do these days when I like an actor (which others, I’ll never tell!). So when the actor in question—who’s female and heretofore evidently heterosexual (Achele shippers notwithstanding. Also, check out Urban Dictionary’s Acheleography definition; it’s hilarious!)—wore a “Likes Girls” t-shirt to perform a Glee Live show in Toronto (photo here at her tumblr), my inbox became a popular destination—15 news stories in the first 24 hours, then 16 more over the next 3 days (many thanks are due to threaded emails that it didn’t actually fill).

There were questions: Did Glee's Dianna Agron come out as bisexual with a tshirt? and dry factual headlines: Glee's Dianna Agron “Likes Girls” T Shirt in Toronto and (not-so) subtle digs at fans: Dianna Agron Wears “Likes Girls” T-Shirt, Gleeks Freak Out.

And there was squee. Oh dear God was there squee. Some of my favorites from the tumblr tag “dianna agron come out riot”:

angelsfallenknight: I AM DYING. JEEEEESUS. CAPS LOCK WON’T GO OFF. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! ‘I LIKE GIRLS’ AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

chikaru: so dianna agron likes women in other news water is wet, pope is catholic etc

Then, about 12 hours after the first alerts had come through, the tone shifted. The second set of headlines included: Dianna Agron explains 'likes girls' t-shirt worn during live show and Dianna Agron Talks About Gay Issues. Basically, these stories said: “Ha ha, just kidding, she doesn’t have the gay. No worries!”

Along with this batch came Agron’s own essay, published at her tumblr, which is what the walking back of the gay speculation was drawing on—as far as I know, she hasn’t given any interviews on it yet. The piece was sort of a “gay pride month is really important because clearly it’s still not that awesome to be gay, so I’m going to stand up for gay rights” statement.

And honestly I still can’t decide how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s like, “Well, that’s easy for you to say. You get to go back to having heterosexual privilege when you take the shirt off.” But on the other hand, she is putting herself on the line in some sense, because she is choosing to stand with (and temporarily as) a category that’s socially devalued. And putting herself—her career, perhaps—“at risk” in that limited sense is certainly better than no sense at all.

But what really stood out to me about her essay was the logic by which she counted herself among those who like girls:

I love my family, my friends, my co-workers…and they all consist of girls AND boys. I do tell them that I love them. Yesterday, during our second show, Instead of wearing my usual shirt during “Born This Way” I decided to wear one that said “Likes Girls”. It should actually have read, “Loves Girls”, because I do. The women in my life give me things that the men in my life can’t. And vice-versa. No, I am not a lesbian, yet if I were, I hope that the people in my life could embrace it whole-heartedly. And let me tell you, I can easily spill (quite comfortably) what I admire, respect and think is beautiful about any of the women in my life. Piece of cake!

Last night, I wanted to do something to show my respect and love for the GLBT community. Support that people could actually see. Which is why I decided to change my shirt for the show.

Reading this, I had a total sense of déjà vu. I’d read this before:

I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support [ . . .].

The above quote is from Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (from the version in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, p.239), and the resemblance is sort of uncanny.

There’s the same move to relate loving and supporting women with having same-sex sex—deliberate and political on Rich’s part, not entirely elaborated on Agron’s.

At the same time, both authors also insist that they aren’t identical. Agron says “I love girls. Just not for fucking.” Rich distinguishes between the above “lesbian continuum” and “lesbian existence,” which she defines as “both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence”—meaning that this is where we get literal, actual lesbians (p. 239).

Rich, then, would argue that Agron is actually sort of a lesbian, sex-free love of women notwithstanding, since she’s on the lesbian continuum. Indeed, Rich wanted to “consider the possibility that all women [ . . . ] exist on a lesbian continuum,” because this would let us “see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not” (p. 240).

What Rich wanted to do in the essay, as the title suggests, was figure heterosexuality not as a “natural” disposition—either for all women, in which case lesbians are unnatural, or for most women, which makes lesbians natural (whatever that means) but unusual—but something that had to be imposed to make women identify with men’s interests rather than their own (which has its own set of problematic assumptions—I’ll get there).

She questioned “why species survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other,” contending that, however related they seem to us now, there was nothing inevitable about this outcome (p. 232).

Ultimately, through proposing this continuum, Rich wanted to help women “feel the depth and breadth of woman identification and woman bonding that has run like a continuous though stifled theme through the heterosexual experience,” with the goal being “that this would become increasingly a politically activating impulse, not simply a validation of personal lives” (p. 227).

That is, it isn’t just to get women to come together and identify as or with lesbians for a round of kumbayah, but to further feminist action. That part remains unrealized in Agron’s rendition, and that possibility is a danger Rich herself realized about the term.

Rich wrote an addendum to “Compulsory Heterosexuality” the following year--when it was to be anthologized in Powers of Desire, in order to respond to some queries from the editors of that volume--in which she addressed this issue: “My own problem with the phrase is that it can be, is, used by women who have not yet begun to examine the privileges and solipsisms of heterosexuality, as a safe way to describe their felt connections with women, without having to share in the risks and threats of lesbian existence” (249).

This definitely gets at what makes me uncomfortable about Agron’s statement. She can be edgy and wear a “Likes Girls” shirt as a way to proclaim her love for the women in her life because she has enough privilege--as heterosexual, but also as white, as normatively gendered, as meeting standards of attractiveness, as wealthy, and as a celebrity--to insulate her from what that would entail were she someone else.

Rich wanted to make it “less possible to read, write, or teach from a perspective of unexamined heterocentricity” (p. 228), but 30 years down the line being unexamined is clearly still possible. Certainly, Agron’s post did not succeed at really examining her own positionality, since the larger argument is grounded in a presumption that straight people ought to be nicer to those poor queers.

I’m sure she doesn’t realize it, but this relies on an assumption of heterosexual superiority. They are apparently in a position to tolerate us because we are the lesser objects of tolerance in the equation (see Wendy Brown’s 2006 book Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire).

This isn’t to pick on Agron. These are things I think about because it’s my job. These are ways of seeing I am trained in. Her job and her training are something else. She did ok. She really did. For a young person (though, I have to remind myself, not as much younger than me as it feels like) whose fame has led to her opinion—about anything—being news, she’s doing pretty well.

But it is to temper the praise she’s getting for being SO progressive. Seriously, you’re going to ask “Is Dianna Agron more supportive of LGBT rights than the rest of the “Glee” cast?” on account of one blog post? And this blog post? She’s not some kind of new gay patron saint.

I’m also not trying to hold up Rich as the true homosaint. I will be the first to tell you that there are a number of problems with her piece—I was, literally, when we read this in my Queer Theory class a couple years ago. Rich wants to open the arms of lesbian feminism to heterosexual women and express that, though heterosexuals get more privilege, it’s the structure of the system that makes that so and not necessarily heterosexual woman going around acting to oppress, which is great.

But, like many a second-wave feminist, Rich doesn’t get that men aren’t the enemy. They benefit from the unequal distribution of power, sure, but they don’t completely control it. In fact, men can be allies to change things—just like Rich argues that heterosexual women can.

Rich seems to mistake the situation as one in which men are running the system in a smoky room somewhere, trying to trick women into heterosexually identifying with men’s interests rather than their own true female/lesbian continuum interests. This is ridiculous for a number of reasons, not least because women don’t inherently care about the same things.

Indeed, the assumption that all women share interests simply by virtue of their membership in the category demonstrates that at that point Rich did not understand her own race or class privilege all that well—I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she does now. She makes offhand references to the importance of race and class, but they aren’t a substitute for a thorough and integrated understanding of how gender and sexuality are racialized.

In the end, what's interesting about both Agron's essay and Rich's is that they both want to trouble or push the boundaries of categories but end up reinforcing them instead.

Agron wore a tshirt that was meant (when it was printed) to indicate same-sex attraction to proclaim both her platonic love of the women in her life and her support for those who do have such attractions. That's a blurring of boundaries that had a great deal of potential to make things queer--but she contains it by making an unequivocal statement that "I am not a lesbian." Why not refuse the question altogether as irrelevant? Or, why not refuse the privilege or the position of superior tolerate-er of the tolerated?

Rich wanted to insist that lesbians and heterosexual women had something in common, breaking down the hetero/homo divide, which again had potential to reorient us away from hard binaries to something more complex. However, in recognizing only hetero and homo--and especially in holding on so tightly to male vs. female as precisely an antagonism--she stopped short of the radical intervention her piece could have made to thinking systemically about power, inequality, and change.

Putting these two pieces side-by-side, then, produces an interesting look at how far we've come--and how far we have yet to go.


Wednesday, June 15, 2011

On Anthony Weiner, or: Obvious Pun is Obvious

First off, let me come right out and say it: If the man wants to engage in kinky photo play, sexting, phone sex, or whatever else with other consenting adults, that’s none of anybody’s damn business.

In saying this, I’m not trying to make some sort of distinctly un-queer demand for privacy, but to refuse the way we typically deal with sexual nonnormativity in politics.

Right now, that is, any sort of news about any public official having anything but “heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, noncommercial, in pairs, in a relationship, same generation, in private, no pornography, bodies only, vanilla” sex—what resides in Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle” of “Good, Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality”—results in a scandal and in people, usually from the other party, demanding immediate resignation.

(One exception to the “same generation” one: people are a-ok with trophy wives.)

The knee-jerk response to say people don’t belong in office for engaging in these kinds of sexual practices is a problem. Enjoyment of sexual activity that other people don’t approve of is not indicative of an inability to govern. It’s also not necessarily the case that people who are “in the public eye” should be held to a higher standard than Average Joe or Jane, no matter what the Average Jane on the street interviewed by the LA Times says.

Of course, the fact that Representative Weiner didn’t come out and argue that in the first place doesn’t do him any favors. Nor does his go-to response of making up stories about hacking and Photoshopping, because, though probably effectively mystifying the situation for people over a certain age, he should have taken a stand rather than dodging.

And indeed, it seems like maybe he himself was confused about how the internet works, as somebody points out over at GraphJam. Hey dude, if it’s in electronic form, it can and will travel given an incentive. And you being a politician is all the incentive needed.

Announcing that he’s “seeking treatment” was also lame. Treatment for what? Liking sex? Using new media to facilitate it? So much for the ringing, sex-positive proclamation that nobody should care because it’s not relevant to his job that it’s high time for and which I, for one, would have liked to see.

On the other hand, it’s pretty likely that he has hurt his family with all this, and he’s definitely been dishonest, and those aren’t traits I particularly want to defend in public officials or anyone else.

However, whatever interpersonal strife Mr. Weiner has going on is a family issue that should be dealt with as such—currently, we tend to do that in private, though we could imagine a different way, with some sort of community working together to make it better. Or counseling or churches or whatever floats peoples’ boats.

But not a media circus and being essentially fired from one’s job—not least because if lying was the criteria for resignation, all houses of governance would be empty tomorrow.

Now, I’m not unquestioningly supporting this guy. Far from it. As we have learned from many an incident before this one, politicians (and activists. I’m looking at you, Julian Assange) sometimes abuse their power when it comes to sex.

So Nancy Pelosi was right to initiate an investigation into "whether any official resources were used or any other violation of House rules occurred"

It’s also right to check whether he got women to like him because he was a politician or because he suggested he could use his connections for them or any of those things.

And maybe we should also ask whether the exchanges he had with underage individuals were of a sexual nature, though that’s assuming we ignore the sheer arbitrariness of 17 = illegal sex vs. 18 = legal sex. Seriously, people magically become able to make good decisions when the clock hits midnight on their 18th birthday? (I teach 18, 19, and 20 year olds. They don’t.)

But, in a general sense, this is what we should be concerned about, not that he was having sexytimes with another consenting adult. Looking into these sorts of things is, first, the feminist, sex-positive set of questions to ask. All sex is a-ok as long as nobody gets hurt, so let’s check to be sure there was no coercion or manipulation, because given unequal power that was a possibility.

Second, these kinds of questions about doing it on company time, using company resources, or promising favors are what we would ask in any other job—and therefore totally reasonable.

Third, what might actually be indicative of an inability to govern is using his office as a Representative to facilitate his sex practices. His constituents who questioned his ability to make good decisions are right on in that respect.

So, let’s have that conversation instead.

I did really think I was done with Glee, but then Dianna Agron had to go and wear that "Likes Girls" shirt. Tune in next week for "So, You like Girls: Dianna Agron, Meet Adrienne Rich"