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CHAPTER THREE
ROSEANNE : DOMESTIC GODDESS AS HETEROSOCIAL HEROINE?
Given the extent to which gay men and straight women do bond and affiliate
through a diverse range of cultural discourses despite the resistance any such
relation must encounter, because of the extent to which both gay male identities
and heterosexual women’s identities are circumscribed through homosocial
mechanisms, it would seem that these relationships may illuminate both the
faultlines within the homosocial matrix and important structural negotiations of
homosocial entrapment. I refer to these negotiations as heterosocial relationships.
We have already seen some of the blockages such relationships need to negotiate
in the writing of the ‘theoretical fag-hags’ in Attitude.
There have been some other striking representations of heterosocial affiliation
recently. The Hollywood films My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Object of My Affection
have respectively been significant star vehicles for Julia Roberts and Jennifer
Aniston (the latter still struggling to establish herself as a big screen star beyond
her enormous popularity in the US sitcom Friends). Each film represents
heterosexual romance as inherently problematic for its central, female, character.
For both women intense, but confused relationships with gay men are seen as the
space through which the intolerable paradoxes of heterosexuality can be resolved.
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When marriage eludes (and fails) Julia Roberts’ character in My Best Friend’s Wedding
all she has left is her dashing gay male side kick, played with career-redefining
bravura by Rupert Everett. The Object of My Affection represents Aniston’s character
falling in love with a gay male stranger who gives her unsolicited support in the
face of straight male beastliness. Both films almost seem to take it as axiomatic that
heterosexual men are to a greater or lesser degree unworkable for women, and
that they will inevitably have greater emotional, intellectual, and sexual synergy
with gay men. Both films, however, are relatively incoherent in their attempts to
make sense of the repercussions for wider social and sexual relations that such a
synergy may precipitate. The Opposite of Sex is less reverential about relations
between fags and hags, relishing in the wickedness of the Christina Ricci character,
and asks trickier questions before capitulating into a cosy resolution. Similar
heterosocially intriguing representations have been offered in the US sitcom Will
and Grace and the UK sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, both of which depict domestic
‘romances’ of fag and hag co-habitation. Roseanne predates all of these
heterosocially promising texts. However, I have chosen to focus on it here, because
as I shall go on to show, it offers representations not only from the point of view
of a heterosexual woman, but understood to be a product of that woman’s
perspective. More interesting still, unlike My Best Friend’s Wedding or The Object of My
Affection, Roseanne situates heterosocial bonds in wider contexts of heterosexual
marriage, domestic nuclearity and patriarchal networks, and over a relatively long
narrative period.
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Straight women and gay men are positioned in radically different, if symmetrical,
spaces within matrices of power. Women are generally disempowered in relation to
gender identities organised through capitalist patriarchies, being subject to men’s
superior power in relation to the family, economic systems, and institutions of the
state. Gay men are generally understood to be disempowered in relation to sexual
identities organised through patriarchal heterosexuality, and are therefore
acknowledged to be economically and institutionally powerful as men, and socially
and institutionally oppressed as perverts. Theories of homosociality have provided
us with an alternative framework for conceptualising gay men’s oppression and
the proximity of such experiences to those of women within systems of gender
power. As I have suggested, conceptualising gay men as sexual outlaws and
transgressive perverts may re-empower us erotically, but underestimates both the
extent to which our identities express negotiations of gender, and how far our
oppression is the result not just of sexual marginalisation, but of organisational
functionality within homosocial patriarchy. In other words, the homosocial narrative
portrays gay men as perverse in such unpleasant and unspeakable ways that our
very connotation forecloses the possibility of male-male bonds becoming so
infatuated as to displace the erotic subjection and control of women. To put it
another way, gay men’s sexual perversion is functionally reproduced within gender
systems. Furthermore, the adherence to political and cultural agendas which see
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gay men as only erotic or perverse subjects makes it hard to fashion relationships
across the structures in which our identities operate.
Subcultural affiliation and strength may be the precondition of any enlightened or
grounded cultural or political activity by gay men, but queerness figures variously
and in many places within structures of power: to remain located and active in gay
subculture alone not only forecloses the complexity of our identities and
experiences, but leaves us potentially complicit with regimes of power other than
the heterosexual. Metropolitan gay subculture may express our erotic
marginalisation and resultant political and cultural empowerment, but many of us
in that enclave are middle-class, or white, or able-bodied, or men, or antibody
negative, many of us don’t have children, many of us are well paid and
institutionally or corporately powerful. Certainly the conceptualisation of gay
subculture as the shared experience of sexual perversity privileges gay male
experience, and at the very least compromises strategic visions of lesbian and gay
male affiliation.1 So, the complexity of our identities as gay men - internally, and in
terms of how gayness is manifested across a terrain of other contexts, necessitates
our constant mediation between micro and macro subcultural engagement.
Heterosexual women may make ‘positive’ or refreshing representations of gay men,
as gay men may make similarly helpful representations of women. But what kind
of manoeuvres are involved in staking a powerful and empowering claim to your
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own representation, from a position of oppression, and offering helpful
representations of other identities implicated in the systems of that oppression?
This is the question we pose by attempting to assess the opportunity for
heterosocial bonding in work authored by women, or by gay men. How can gay
men make a claim for self-authority without instating themselves within homosocial
regimes which subject women? How can straight women manifest privilege
without invoking their heterosexuality in such a way as to re-demonise and
disempower queers? This chapter considers dissident affiliations made from a
position of heterosexual womanhood; the next one assess similar affiliations made
by a gay man.
An illuminating illustration of this problematic dynamic appears in the form of the
American sitcom Roseanne, which was first aired on ABC in 1988. The series enjoyed
enormous popularity in America: the season which ended in the later part of 1995
generated the fourth highest advertising rates on the ABC network, after the Super
Bowl, the Academy Awards and Home Improvement.2 The popularity of the show,
along with Roseanne’s own transgressive behaviour, has made her a darling of the
tabloid and sensationalist press, such as The National Enquirer. However, latterly
Roseanne and Roseanne became popular and celebrated with self-consciously
credible and intellectually precocious audiences. In Britain Roseanne was scheduled
on Channel Four in the context of late night ‘quality’ situation comedies and upmarket alternative cabaret. In the press, Roseanne was celebrated as a serious and
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troubled artist: the watershed moment being a substantial and gritty piece by John
Lahr in The New Yorker, but earlier profiles in Vanity Fair and then in Spin gave
Roseanne middle-class intellectual credibility.3 This graduation from being
interesting because of the vicissitudes of her personal life, to being considered a
serious artist can be attributed to a perception of Roseanne as a political vehicle for
social commentary:
...in these puritanical, politically correct times, nothing is more
welcome than a voice that pierces dull notions of what should be
with barbs of what is. Roseanne has made history by tackling
everything from marital ennui, to ‘maternal ambivalence,’ to
poverty, menstruation, homophobia, and mental illness in a
medium that once reflected only the most sanitized versions of
American family life.4
If there is one issue for which Roseanne has been vilified by her critics and adored
by her fans it is the representation of homosexuality in her series. In February 1996,
in a special issue on the up-coming Presidential primaries, America’s Out magazine
put Roseanne on the cover with the caption: ‘Primary Special: Dole, Clinton & the
rest: Their positions on our issues. Our choice? ROSEANNE FOR PREZ! For Gay Marriage,
Lesbian Kisses & Real-World Feminism’.5 The same magazine named her an
honorary gay person the year before,6 whilst she was named Person of the year in
January 1995 by The Advocate, for whom Peter Galvin writes:
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Gays and lesbians have been waiting a long time for someone like
Roseanne to come along. Blasting stereotypes, flouting
convention, transcending ignorance, the star’s landmark sitcom,
Roseanne, is that rare network television program that dares to
treat homosexuality as nonchalantly and inconsequentially as
heterosexuality...She is a rare person who, perhaps because of her
own differences with the mainstream, identifies with the struggles
of gays and lesbians completely.7
This sentiment is shared by Tim Allis of Out, when he says:
[Roseanne’s] gay characters were eye-opening - not because they
were played as heroes, but because they were just as cranky and
dysfunctional as everybody else in the manners-free Conner
household.8
It is clear that Roseanne is perceived by these voices of American gay subculture as
enacting a bonding with them through the representation she makes of gay
characters in Roseanne. Roseanne herself confirms the affiliation: in Out magazine,
Sue Carswell notes that Roseanne has promised that before Roseanne is finished for
good, one of the series’ co-stars, ‘a character we never would have presumed to be
queer, will be revealed as gay or lesbian’; Roseanne is quoted as saying, ‘It’s a real
shocker, and I’m doing it for all you kids out there.’9 It is clear that Roseanne is
understood to make a feminist appropriation of the domestic sitcom; it is also clear
that the show is understood within the queer subculture to be making helpful
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lesbian and gay representations. What I want to do here is to assess the extent to
which Roseanne successfully enables the opportunity for heterosocial bonding, and
determine the terms in which such a relationship negotiates larger structures of
homosociality.
Roseanne and Political Credibility
It isn’t difficult to see why gay men might love Roseanne; aside from the explicit
visibility and humour Roseanne has offered in its representation of homosexuality,
there are many features of the star’s public persona that resonate with gay male
subcultural practices around female star icons. The very cradle of Roseanne’s
popularity, her eponymous sitcom, turns many conventional understandings about
representing family life on its head. Even though the Conner family appears
structurally normative and nuclear: mum, dad, three children living together, sister
and mother living in extended familial proximity, they are firmly placed in the
working-class: specifically the Conners are what the series flags self-referentially as
‘white trash’.10 Becky, the eldest child, is married, and for the penultimate season
lived at home with her husband; Darlene is at college by the time of the strong
queer presence in the programme, but her boyfriend David lives with Roseanne
and Dan, rather than with his abusive mother, who Roseanne Conner accused of
‘giving respectable white trash a bad name’. This family is also meaningful in
dramatic terms as conflicted and dysfunctional, not especially or pathologically, but
routinely and necessarily. This dysfunction is normalised in two ways: it is either
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located in the structures in which family life exists, or is attributable to the
rebellious disposition of particular characters. Most often, both strategies co-exist;
for example, the character of Jackie, Roseanne Conner’s sister, is portrayed as
somewhat hysterical and as promiscuous and unable to commit herself to long
term relationships. These character attributes are rendered endearingly as
transgressive but confused and eccentric, and as the behaviours of a woman
damaged by an abusive father and by badly behaved boyfriends: crucially each is
presented as the attempt to heal, to improve herself and make herself more selfsufficient and less dependent on the affirmation of abusive men. The progression
of these narratives necessarily involves the representation of conflict, and it is in
this that Roseanne really achieves its distinctiveness. Its comedy arises out of the
dead-pan ironic engagement of the characters with a series of conflicts not rooted
in trivial domestic misunderstandings and sight-gags, but in economic pressures,
gender disputes, power struggles and other naturalistic oppressive conditions. As
John Lahr puts it:
Roseanne’s neurotic TV family was the first one to put America in
contact with something resembling real life in the working-class
world - a place where children are difficult, parents have real
emotional and financial problems, and there’s a discrepancy
between what American society promises and what it delivers.11
The question of Roseanne’s authorship of Roseanne is complex, but it is an
important one if we are to make a claim for the programme’s heterosocial value on
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the basis of Roseanne Barr/Pentland/Arnold/Thomas’s manipulation of her
feminism, her heterosexuality and her commitment to queer affiliation.
In her autobiography, My Lives, Roseanne details her move from stand-up comic to
being cast in her own show through a multitude of struggles with ABC, the
television network which commissioned it, and Carsey-Werner the production
company which owned Matt Williams’ original concept, and which produced the
original series.12 By the time of the 1995 season Roseanne was produced by
Roseanne’s own company, Full Moon & High Tide, with a contract for four more
seasons with the network, and she has been executive producer of the show for
the last four years, two of them jointly with her ex-husband, Tom Arnold. Lahr’s
substantial and considered portrait of the star pays considerable attention to the
power struggles Roseanne has won to wrest control of Roseanne from CarseyWerner, Matt Williams and the writing teams originally in place. Firing people is one
of the principle constituents of Roseanne mythology, and like the speculations that
Roseanne doesn’t write the series (and her furious refusal of these claims), such
material is principally valuable in the extent to which audiences find that
mythology meaningful. Lahr’s comment, after much prevarication, is:
In any case, the argument about creative ownership of the show is
academic: Roseanne owns the mill and the charisma. And she
treats the writers as extensions of herself.13
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Whatever the complex and mediated reality of Roseanne’s authorship, and of her
circumscription in the context of American network television, she seems to be able
to muster enough performative authority to make her claims for ownership
convincing. A celebratory interview in Entertainment Weekly opens: ‘You’ve got to
understand the ground rules: Roseanne is Roseanne’s show, and Roseanne rules’ the
piece continues, ‘By the way, do you understand that Roseanne calls the shots? Just
in case you don’t, she says something like this: ‘There’s no room for anybody but
me anywhere in the f---in’ world.’’14
Whatever the intricacies and constantly shifting conditions of the corporate
environment, this bombastic, no-nonsense, and brazenly powerful Roseanne is the
one which sells magazines and propels Roseanne to such high ratings success. Given
the popularity of Roseanne, and the attendantly high advertising revenue it
generates, Roseanne herself occupies a relatively powerful position within the
complex of media corporations in which she works. From this position of
complicity, of being embedded in powerful structures, Roseanne is perceived as
being resistant and challenging. Peter Galvin suggests that:
although her vision of a ‘politic of humanity’ as she calls it, has
sometimes been clouded by the ever-present - and occasionally
self-created - media sensationalism surrounding her personal life,
her commitment to exposing hypocrisy and fostering tolerance
has never wavered.15
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Roseanne herself makes characteristically modest claims for her politics:
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Roseanne has
made greater strides for
including homosexuality as a part of life that any other show on
television.
ROSEANNE: We’re the
only ones, too.
EW: Well, now
we see it on other sitcoms.
ROSEANNE: But
they all do it badly. And I know, because I’m a
homosexual! I just like the message of humanity for everybody. I
know everything on Roseanne’s revolutionary. And I know that
people aren’t gonna get half of it for 50 years.
EW: Can
you get in trouble for anything anymore?
ROSEANNE: Oh, they
let me do everythin’ now and it’s no fun. I’m
pretty bored. I’ve covered all the bases.16
Clearly one of the ‘bases’ covered by Roseanne is homosexuality: that is one of the
major ‘issues’ that the series is associated with.
One of the things that makes Roseanne’s treatment of political issues distinctive is
that at its best the show does not seem to shy away from implicating its principal,
and highly identifiable, characters in unflattering or ideologically damning ways.
Perhaps the most powerful example of this is an episode from the 1994 season
which Roseanne herself has called ‘the best show we’ve ever done.’17 The storyline
concerns Roseanne and Dan Conner’s son DJ not wanting to kiss Geena, a girl in
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the school play, because she is black. From here the plot progresses to Roseanne
Conner accusing her husband of fostering racism in her children, to Dan seeking
exoneration from his black friend, Chuck, who then challenges Dan’s assumptions,
to Roseanne being confronted by DJ’s teacher as a racist parent, to finally being
confronted by the girl’s father, Mr. Williams. This final scene of the narrative is
characteristic and representative of the treatment given to the whole episode. In it
Roseanne Conner and her sister Jackie are cashing up a busy late night shift at the
diner they jointly own. A black man appears at the door asking to be admitted.
Roseanne refuses, turning the sign on the door to indicate that they are closed.
After the man slams his hands against the door and storms off, Roseanne and
Jackie agree that the incident was ‘scary’, and when he appears at the door again,
Jackie reacts by shoving the cash draw back into the till, and the women panic until
the man identifies himself as Geena Williams’ father. Roseanne lets him in, asking
him why he didn’t just tell her who he was. Mr. Williams replies by asking her if she
needs to know who all her customers are before she lets them into her restaurant.
Roseanne defends herself by suggesting that for two women working late at night,
safety is a priority. Jackie intercedes, attempting to placate the situation, but she
inflames it further with anxious liberalism, by suggesting that Roseanne didn’t
refuse him entry because he is ‘African-American’, but because he’s a man.
Roseanne follows through with one of the show’s standard comic lines about how
she hates all men equally: the line receives the only laugh of the scene from the
studio audience, and from the soundtrack it is clear that it’s an anxious, relieved
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sound, rather than the fulsome and ecstatic response usually audibly forthcoming
in response to one of Roseanne’s trademark deadpan statements. Roseanne Conner
then makes the conflict explicit: she says that late at night, with their safety at
stake, women alone must act on their instincts to protect themselves. Williams
replies that he guesses that her son inherited Roseanne’s instincts, before angrily
leaving the restaurant. There is a moment of awkward stillness in the women,
before Jackie attempts to comfort Roseanne: she suggests that Williams
overreacted, and that most people would have behaved exactly as Roseanne had.
As Jackie walks off, the tension behind her, Roseanne contemplates her sister’s
words and says, ‘Well isn’t that great?’, her delivery uncomfortable, and her tone
ironic. The credits then roll over an unrelated and unreservedly comic scene in
which neither Roseanne nor Dan are present.
What stands out about the scene with Mr. Williams is not only its specificity and the
explicit nature of its conflict, but the direction and delivery, which for a comedy
show is unflinchingly dramatic and disquieting, stretching its generic conventions
seemingly beyond breaking until comedy is restored and there is a delivery from
the tension in the over-credit sequence, which is particularly funny, but also
innocuous. Mick Bowes offers an indication of the distinctiveness of this lack of
resolution:
the most characteristic feature of the ‘classic’ situation comedy is
narrative closure. In other words, each story is resolved within the
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30 minutes of the programme. In addition this closure is generally
circular - it returns the characters to the positions they occupied at
the start, thus allowing the next week’s programme to start afresh.
This circular narrative closure allows little room for progression...18
Leaving the principal and eponymous character of Roseanne compromised and
morally unsure about her behaviour at the end of the narrative is a fairly powerful
statement. The fact that this disquiet arises out of a recognition that Roseanne’s
behaviour is typical, that she clearly thinks she reacted in a racist manner, and that
most people - that is, most of us - would have reacted in the same way, leaves the
challenge, the culpability, not only with Roseanne Conner herself, but with a white
audience generally. The impression given by the episode is that racism is a subtle
and pervasive part of attitudinal responses, even concerned and anxious ones, and
that this is a serious issue worthy of sober reflection. At the end of the narrative,
completion is withheld and our principal sources of identification remain
uncomfortable and implicated, their unwitting and self-identified racism refusing a
cosy restabilising of domestic and ideological harmony and furthermore left to
pervade and inform future narratives and our perception of our favourite
characters. The narrative processing of the ‘issue’ of racism, and the presence in the
ensemble of the black characters of Chuck, Geena and Mr. Williams, do not function
to illustrate the further coolness and daring of the Conner household: they are not
reassuringly integrated into the deadpan dissent that we gleefully anticipate from
Roseanne and her family. In this narrative race functions precisely to fracture the
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angrily comic, and often cosily including, experience of oppression we share with
the Conners by identifying them as white, culpable and sufficiently institutionally
interior to actually be in a position to oppress others who might be more excluded
than they are.
Roseanne and Homosociality: The Queer Challenge
It isn’t difficult to see why such an ironic, conflictual and woman-centred
representation of family life as Roseanne usually offers might be popular with a
constituency whose identities are constantly being reproduced in homophobic
culture as antithetical to the concerns of the family, even though we are all
products and members of families in complex symbolic and emotional
relationships. Roseanne herself has very publicly spoken out about her own abuse
by her parents and how this produced self-loathing behaviour in relation to her
body image; again there are resonances here for identities historically associated
with images of sickness and physical deformity.19 Principally, however, it seems that
it is the mythology around her control and power as a woman that has the most
allure for Roseanne’s queer constituency, and an indication of the extent of the
belief in this mythology is the unquestioning way in which lesbian and gay
journalists unmediatedly attribute the apparent gay-friendliness of Roseanne to its
star. Out magazine has called this authority from a woman like Roseanne ‘real world
feminism’.20 Roseanne herself has suggested that she dislikes the label ‘feminist’
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and prefers the title ‘killer bitch’, and she has been called, quite fabulously, a
‘Goddess of Retribution’.21 This ambiguity in relation to questions of feminism is
complex: on the one hand in interviews and public statements Roseanne enacts a
scathing, class-based attack on academic feminism and on so-called feminist
Hollywood actresses like Meryl Streep and Jodie Foster, on the other hand she
employs male writers on Roseanne because women have apparently learned how to
ventriloquise men too effectively and are less able to produce empowering
dialogue for women than men are.22 Yet whatever the vicissitudes of Roseanne’s
strategic performance of her feminism, her vocalised commitment to some kind of
pro-women politics appears unequivocal: ‘Everything I do is from a commitment to
feminism.’23 It would seem then that there are abundant conditions here for the
proliferation of heterosocial bonding: a powerfully situated and politicised
heterosexual woman directly courting queer constituencies both in her affirmative
personal statements, and in the public work that she is understood to author,
where she offers gay representation apparently unfettered by the ‘unreal’ demands
of positive images and politically correct liberalisation. How effective a basis for
heterosocial bonding are the queer representations Roseanne makes?
There are two long running queer characters resident in the repertory company of
Roseanne, these are Nancy, Roseanne Conner’s friend and co-owner of the diner, and
Leon, her old boss and now another co-owner of the diner, with whom she has
shared a long-running and often hilarious enmity. One key element in both
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characterisations that has been celebrated by the American lesbian and gay press is
that they are ‘just as cranky and dysfunctional as everybody else in the mannersfree Conner household.’24 The most famous and controversial ‘queer’ episode of
Roseanne follows our eponymous heroine and her sister Jackie on a night out with
Nancy and her girlfriend Sharon to a gay bar in the nearby town of Elgin. The
principal tension that organises the narrative of the episode lies in the disparity
between how ‘cool’ Roseanne Conner thinks she is and how cool she is perceived
to be by Nancy and Leon.
The episode opens in the diner, and Roseanne and Jackie are moaning to Nancy
that she hasn’t yet introduced them to her new girlfriend, and they suggest that
Nancy is uncomfortable with their heterosexuality; Roseanne Conner says:
...because you’ve never been able to accept our alternate lifestyle. It
isn’t a choice you know!
Before the discussion can continue, the door opens and Nancy’s girlfriend Sharon
comes in. She is played by the actress and model Mariel Hemmingway. Nancy has
not always been a lesbian in Roseanne and was previously married to Arnie Thomas,
a friend of Dan’s, played by Tom Arnold, Roseanne’s real life husband at the time,
and co-executive producer of the programme. As Sharon sits down at the counter,
Roseanne asks Nancy why it is that when she dates men they look like Arnie, and
when she dates women they look like Sharon. The studio audience pick up the joke
and respond uproariously, acknowledging Mariel Hemmingway’s beauty and the
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bitchy reference to Roseanne’s actual husband. The effect is complex: at an
ideological level the joke seems to reference the stereotypical notion that lesbians
are mannish women, and therefore ‘unattractive’ in heterosexual terms, and
subverts this idea with a mutual recognition of Mariel Hemmingway’s credentials
as a typically heterosexualised blond beauty and the fact that she’s playing a
lesbian role. At an intra-textual level Roseanne’s dry witticism inserts the figure of
her own husband, and Nancy’s fictional ex-husband, into the representational
frame in a direct comparison with Nancy’s current lesbian lover. Arnie/Tom loses
the contest on looks, but then we would expect him to: men are not supposed to
justify their occupation of cultural space on the basis of their appearance - Arnie
was not judged in his worthiness as Nancy’s husband on the basis of his beauty.
The humour is sharp and incisive, but its effect is to render the spectacle of Sharon,
and the lesbianism she represents, as little more than an object for visual
consumption. Clearly this has multiple effects, depending on the audience
constituency we are considering. Roseanne’s deft acknowledgement that lesbians
aren’t supposed to be attractive in conventional feminine terms, and then its
transgression of this expectation with the fetishised display of Sharon shows how
lesbians can be just as beautifully feminine as straight women, women like Mariel
Hemmingway.25 Queer constituencies familiar with lesbian diversity and with the
alluring glamour of lipstick lesbian femmes might well appreciate such a stalling of
homophobic stereotyping. Yet the display of a familiar, heterosexual icon of
feminine beauty, along with the narrative label of ‘lesbian’ has the effect of
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neutralising the cultural impact of lesbianism on ideologies of gender, collapsing
the difference between straight and queer women, even in the most banal physical
and visual ways, and confirming that both can be equally understood as displaying
the markers of heterosexual femininity for men. Nancy was introduced as a lesbian
on Roseanne in a similar fashion when she brought her first girlfriend, Marla, to the
diner and literally presented her to Roseanne and Jackie, and of course, to the
audience. Marla was played by Morgan Fairchild, another iconic manifestation of
blond, big-haired, glamorous heterosexual beauty. Part of the effect is to render
Nancy’s lesbianism as meaningful and rational for a straight audience: of course
she would rather choose to sleep with women when they are as attractive as Mariel
Hemmingway - wouldn’t you? Lesbianism thus becomes an issue of desire, and the
difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality a matter of a simple choice
between desiring women or desiring men. Within this framework, manifestations
of homophobia are a function of the toleration of erotic difference, rather than an
integral part of the constitution of heterosexuality and men’s authority within it.
After Roseanne’s acknowledgement of Sharon’s looks, the two women bond, and
Sharon invites Roseanne and her sister to come dancing with her and Nancy. Nancy
appears uncomfortable with this idea, as does Jackie when she realises that they’ll
be going to a gay bar. At this point Leon comes into the restaurant from the
kitchen, and acknowledges Sharon and Nancy by saying, ‘Hiya fellas.’ Again there is
ambiguity here: Roseanne is clearly displaying an awareness of queer subcultural
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codes, and Leon’s line is camply deadpanned in such a way as to suggest an
immediate sisterly solidarity between him and Sharon and Nancy, that excludes
Roseanne and Jackie, instating a recognition of their shared cultural difference.
Referring to the women, whatever the status of their performance of femininity,
ironically as ‘fellas’ recognises their lesbianism from a fellow position of gender
dissent. Yet at the same time, for an audience not conversant with queer
subcultural vernacular, putting these words into the mouth of the gay male
character scapegoats him as enunciating the mannish lesbian stereotype: an
archetypal heterosexual construction in itself, and an insult only meaningful as
such within a heterosexual context. In this reading, queerness homophobically
victimises itself, leaving the tolerant and comfortable straight folks unassailably
‘cool’. To decisively conclude which meaning the text prefers is difficult, and I think
that it would be a little mean-spirited to suggest that it is the latter reading, in
which the gay male character is the bearer of the homophobia, that Roseanne
ultimately favours; its intentions are ideologically honourable. Nevertheless the
script does embody the ambiguity, unwittingly privileging heterosexuality. The
scene ends with Leon approaching Roseanne and telling her that the evening in
prospect should prove to be quite entertaining. When she asks why, he replies that
‘a gay bar is like a size twelve dress: you just won’t fit in.’ The treatment of
homosexuality here suggests a sincere attempt not only to represent, but speak to,
a queer subcultural constituency: it is unclear, however, what kind of
homosexuality is being spoken in the name of Roseanne’s daring and political
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sophistication, let alone how queer constituencies are to interpret such ambiguity
in the context of the mainstream, mass appeal of a top rated network sitcom.
The next scene opens at home with David, Darlene’s boyfriend and the Conner’s
unofficially adopted son, and his brother Mark, who is Becky’s husband, sat
together on the sofa, sparring as to which is the more successfully masculine. There
is a complex history of interactions that informs this sibling rivalry. The character of
Darlene Conner, played by Sara Gilbert, is a tomboy, and has been widely
subculturally interpreted as a lesbian: she’s never been interested in boys that
much, she went through a long period of depression during which her tastes and
demeanour became quite gothic. For years she was only seen to wear black, she’s
always been politically outspoken and independent, she’s a militant vegetarian and
once staged an action outside the family’s loose meat restaurant, she’s interested in
science fiction and writes comic books with her boyfriend. One of the main ways in
which Darlene’s relationship with David has been comically meaningful
throughout its history on Roseanne has been in how it transgresses our traditional
expectations of the representation of power relations in heterosexual teenage
romance. As an expression of Roseanne’s pro-feminism, Darlene has always been
shown to be the more powerful and less dependent one in the relationship, whilst
David has been shown to be passive, emotional and artistic. On the other hand,
Darlene’s sister Becky has always been shown to be much more traditionally
feminine and girlie, always being interested in boys, mortally depressed if she
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didn’t have a boyfriend, and eventually so committed to her relationship with Mark
that she dropped out of school and a successful academic career to elope with him
at the age of seventeen. Mark has been similarly shown to be suspicious of any
emotional expression, and as Roseanne once remarked of him, he has a ‘dangerous,
sexual thing going on.’ For Dan and Roseanne, Mark has always been a threat to
their daughter’s sexuality, whilst David has been so lacking in sexual threat that he
can be moved into the house to live with Darlene when they are both still sixteen.
We could say that the relationship between Darlene and David is a feminist
representation in that it shows that women needn’t remain embedded in
subordinated positions in relation to men in heterosexual relationships. To some
extent, in Darlene and David, Roseanne is taking the patriarchal stereotype of the
shrewish wife and hen-pecked husband so beloved of much television situation
comedy and turning it inside-out by showing that women needn’t be stridently
and unsympathetically represented as scapegoats to be empowered, and men in
relationships with empowered women needn’t be continuously and impotently
chafing against the shackles of shrewishness. In relation to Darlene and Mrs.
Conner David is a sympathetically drawn and viable characterisation: adorably
malleable, expressive and funny, unthreatening and sensitive about women’s
issues without being condescending. It is in relation to the male characters in
Roseanne that David’s characterisation becomes more problematic. In an earlier
episode Mark has referred to David as an ‘art femme’. In the present scene with
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David and Mark sat on the couch, Mark grunts derisively and accuses his brother of
being ‘pathetic’ because Darlene bosses him around and he does her laundry:
rather than exchanging his girlfriend homosocially for masculine credibility, David
is, quite literally, serving her. David makes a lame denial of the accusation of
castration, but within the framework Mark embodies, a framework authorised and
validated by the dominance of homosocial structures and the absent but towering
masculinity of their symbolic father, Dan Conner, he cannot answer the insult
because it is true: David is an inadequate male in homosocial terms. The interaction
reproduces the homosocial matrix so completely and authentically that the
character of David has little option but to attempt to regain ground within it: the
narrative cohesion of Roseanne demands that David’s heterosexuality remain
textually plausible.
Mark’s wife Becky has taken a job at a local restaurant, and her uniform consists of
an extremely brief cropped top and a miniscule pair of hot pants, with the
restaurant’s name, Bunz, stitched across the buttocks. Becky comes home from
work, in her uniform, just after Mark has conjured the inadequacy of David’s
homosocial credentials. After she’s greeted her husband and gone upstairs to
change, David apes Mark’s derisive grunt and says that he wouldn’t let his wife go
out dressed in the Bunz uniform, because ‘it gives other guys ideas’. Mark sneers in
reply and with a knowing leer tells David that he can keep Becky satisfied. The
remark at once conjurs Mark’s sexual potency, and challenges David’s: a man who
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cannot ‘satisfy’ his woman cannot guarantee that she is his to display and
exchange. David shifts uncomfortably and defensively replies that he can keep
Darlene satisfied. At that moment Darlene passes through the room angrily
shouting at David for not having used fabric softener in her washing. Here
Roseanne is itself exchanging Darlene and her washing in a confirmation of the
homosocial network, using her dissatisfaction with David (and he can’t even do her
laundry, let alone keep her happy sexually) in the same way as it uses Becky’s
lasciviously displayed rump: to validate the masculinity of Mark, and feminise
David.
Because of his modestly political refusal to exchange women, or actively display his
masculine credentials, David signifies queerly in relation to both Mark and Dan - it
could be argued that David functions as the third queer regular on Roseanne in
spite, or indeed, because, of his relationship with Darlene, and his relative inability
to function homosocially within it. Other episodes of Roseanne have addressed
Dan’s discomfort at David’s overt displays of emotion: in one memorable example
when Darlene had broken up with him, David bursts into tears at regular intervals,
whilst Dan blunders around, bereft of any homosocial script with which to conduct
his interaction with his adopted son. The effect is to illuminate how far outside Mr.
Conner’s ambit of masculinity David is. Another Roseanne dealt with the problem of
DJ getting bullied at school and his inability to fight off his attackers; Dan is unable
to teach the thirteen year old to fight, who, to his father’s exasperation, chooses to
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cry or curl up on the floor in a ball when confronted. DJ eventually overcomes this
‘problem’ by beating up David, an elder but more ineffectual foe, much to the
amusement of Mark, and the embarrassment of Dan, to say nothing of David’s
humiliation. What seems crucial about this episode is that all the male characters,
even the thirteen year old DJ find common ground which isolates and ‘queers’
David: even a child can function within homosocial bonds more successfully than
David.
We might suggest that if Roseanne was more fully committed to being pro-queer
David’s lack of masculine credentials wouldn’t end up isolating and punishing him
within the narrative framework, but Roseanne Conner’s heterosexuality enforces a
relationship between David and her husband. Ultimately the need to situate David
heterosexually (that is, within the homosocial matrix that Dan emanates)
compromises Roseanne’s heterosocial potential by making him the repository of
homosocial anxiety the show so carefully shields and transfers away from its selfconsciously out and labelled queer characters. We may conclude that here Roseanne
is effectively collusive with a metropolitan liberal circulation of homosexuality; this
issue will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, in relation to Pedro
Almodóvar. Homosexuality circulates through the text in such a way as to reassure
the participants and the audience how cool and trendy they are: homosexuality is
continually conjured in enlightened and frank ways, but continually re-framed
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within structures of heterosexuality and homosociality that representationally
reproduce the conditions of our oppression and powerlessness.
This scene of David’s homosocial humiliation within the infamous ‘lesbian kiss’
episode of Roseanne reaches its climax when Dean Bates arrives at the door. David
lets him in, announcing to both the audience and his brother Mark, that Dean, who
is a jock-type football player, once dated Becky. In an aside between the brothers,
David tells Mark that Dean is much better looking: his purpose is to threaten Mark
by conjuring Dean’s apparently superior homosocial credentials, but the strategy
backfires, and Mark replies, ‘Why don’t you go and give him a big kiss?’ Here David
becomes the corporeal embodiment of the double bind inherent within the
homosocial system: ‘For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible,
carefully blurred, always-already-crossed line from being ‘interested in men.’’26
David’s already disempowered position enables Mark to exert definitional leverage
upon his brother’s remarks, drawing on a commonly understood rhetoric of
homosexual panic to effortlessly repel David’s homosocial challenge and re-write it
as an erotic interest. The scenario may be humorous, but the effects are
unfortunate in the light of Roseanne’s apparent queer friendliness. Even if we were
to reject the notion of David’s nominal queerness, the effect of his homosocial
exclusion is to constitute a powerfully interior and cohesive masculinity within the
textual confines of Roseanne, a masculinity signifying sufficiently aggressively - and
hegemonically - as to be able to exert definitional control upon gender behaviour.
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David’s failure and Mark’s success at deploying their masculinity are brought into
visibility by the text through the connotation of a demonised and inexplicitly
unpleasant homosexual outside that is meaningful only in the extent to which
Roseanne upholds a homophobic consensus. David may remain nominally
understood within the text as a heterosexual characterisation, but his
indeterminate performance of this in relation to other men is used to luridly
constitute a homosocial system of homophobia which goes spectacularly
unchallenged by the show’s non-homosocially powerful female figures, such as
Darlene or Roseanne Conner herself.
Indeed, as the scene with Mark, David and Dean Bates continues, we see that
Darlene’s autonomous feminism can actually function to collude in David’s
homophobic exclusion. It transpires that Dean has arrived at the house to give
Darlene a lift back to school: this prompts an argument because Becky resents
Darlene using her old boyfriends to get rides. Mark challenges Becky, asking her
why she cares if she’s now married to him, and Becky flounces out of the room.
Dean is loading the car, and David gloats to Darlene about Mark’s jealousy. Darlene
is at the door, about to leave, and she agrees with David, but says: ‘Yeah, Becky’s
not the one who’s going to have to think of some way to pay Dean back for the
ride. See ya, David.’ Here Darlene’s refusal to cosset David’s masculinity seems to be
less about her need for autonomy, than it is about her collusion with David’s
homosocial abjection: not only can he not trade on his relationship with Darlene to
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inflate his masculine credibility in public exchanges with men, but in private,
Darlene refuses to indulge his insecurities and indeed exploits them under the
gaze of the audience so that the scene may end with a laugh.
The next scene opens at Lips, the gay bar in Elgin, with the arrival of Roseanne and
her entourage. Several comic exchanges illuminate Roseanne’s progressive intent,
and its ease around a queer subcultural environment. Jackie is still uncomfortable
about being in a gay space, she tells Roseanne that she is uneasy about people
thinking that she’s gay: Roseanne replies that she can think that they are gay right
back at them. Jackie is pregnant, and loudly proclaims, ‘Anybody can see that I’m
conventional.’ A little later, Jackie spots the woman who delivers her mail standing at
the bar. The woman comes over, and Roseanne embraces her sister as if they were
lovers, she says: ‘Now, now, you don’t have to hide our love.’ The woman is pleased
to see Jackie and tells her that she had a feeling about her being a lesbian. As the
woman walks off, Jackie is thrown into confused panic and she asks, ‘Why, what did
I do?’ Later at the bar Roseanne flirts with the woman serving drinks: she
introduces herself, and tells the woman that she is the father of Jackie’s baby. Jackie
angrily shrugs off Roseanne’s show of affection, calling her ‘psychotic’ and reacting
incredulously to her sister’s flirtation with the woman behind the bar. Roseanne
tells her that she is doing what she would do in any bar: scoring free drinks. Here it
seems that the joke is on Jackie and her lack of coolness in the queer environment:
she is comically scapegoated to illustrate Roseanne’s comparative ease and
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familiarity. This is enjoyable stuff for a queer constituency, making the uptight
heterosexual woman alienated and unattractive in the clenched anxiety of her
behaviour, normalising the queer space through her amusing but abnormal
reaction.
The action then moves ahead a little: Roseanne, Nancy and Sharon have been
dancing, Roseanne and Sharon take a break and sit at a table together, and
Roseanne says, ‘Can you believe that Nancy doesn’t think I’m cool enough for this
place?’ Sharon confirms that Roseanne has disproved the slur by teaching forty
people to dance the monkey. Both women agree that they should hang out more
often, and Roseanne suggests that next time they should leave the ‘wives’ at home,
gesturing towards where Jackie is sat at the bar. Sharon’s body language and tone
inflect her reply with a collusive sexual intimacy as she says, ‘you read my mind.’
Roseanne blanks the assumed collusion, registering some confusion that ruptures
her normal dead-pan stubbornness, the only reply she manages is ‘Huh?’ As we are
registering the confusion on Roseanne’s face, the back of Sharon’s head moves into
the shot, and we get a brief glimpse of Roseanne’s widening eyes before Sharon
closes up and we assume that she kisses Roseanne. As Sharon pulls away from the
kiss she hugs Roseanne, whose face we can now see over Sharon’s shoulder.
Roseanne wipes her mouth on Sharon’s sleeve, her face twisted into an expression
of distaste.
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It is interesting to note the account Out magazine offers of this ‘lesbian kiss’:
mainstream America - for a single moment in time - watched a
woman kiss another woman without flinching. The press made it
sensational; Roseanne made it ordinary.27
It would be quite difficult to speculate on the cause of the disparity in accounts
here, but whatever the strategic reason for Carswell’s emphatic applause of the kiss,
her interpretation is extraordinary. Pedantically speaking Carswell is correct,
Roseanne does not flinch away from the kiss we may assume is forthcoming from
Sharon, although it’s more of a connotation of a kiss that the real thing, given that
we only see the back of Sharon’s head moving in front of Roseanne’s, inclining
slightly and resting there for a second or two. Roseanne may not flinch, but wiping
your mouth on somebody’s sleeve with your face screwed up is a fairly substantial
expression of at least ambiguity, if not out and out loathing. What seems clear is
that this display of distaste is only representationally meaningful, and certainly
only comic, in the context of a heterosexual gaze. Roseanne’s disgust at the
homosexual act she has just been involved in is collusively displayed for the
edification of a straight audience: sure, Mariel Hemmingway might be great to look
at, but kissing her makes you into a dyke, and we all know how distasteful that is.
Roseanne refers to this episode as the ‘homophobia show’:
I think homophobia is something everybody has, and on that
night Roseanne Conner dealt with her own homophobia. I don’t
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see it as the big lesbian kiss show, but lesbians do, and I give them
that.28
Implicating the character of Roseanne Conner in homophobic attitudes and
behaviour, as Roseanne implicated her in racism, as we saw earlier, would be a
significant piece of political commentary by the programme, even an instance of
heterosocial affiliation. Clearly we can read the representation Roseanne makes of
Roseanne’s reaction to Sharon’s connotated kiss in this way, in that it displays her
culpability. However, notwithstanding the distinct ways in which race and sexuality
are differently mobilised within structures of power, we could also argue that
Roseanne deals with the two issues quite differently, according the racism
substantially more seriousness.
As we saw earlier in the episode of Roseanne where DJ refused to kiss a girl because
she was black, Roseanne and Dan Conner’s culpability was represented so
unsettlingly as to invite a rupture in the expected generic conventions of the
programme. Roseanne’s racism was not displayed for the comic edification of the
audience, but to challenge us about our own potential complicity with systems of
racism. If Roseanne Conner’s reaction to the ‘lesbian kiss’ is homophobic, then that
homophobia is upheld by the programme itself, as the opportunity for an
audience to identify with her discomfort, and share relieved laughter that the kiss,
and the lesbianism it represents, was not enjoyed. For it seems clear that
Roseanne’s distasteful reaction, displaying homophobia, does not invite a
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challenge to dominant attitudes ventriloquizing liberalism; it does not invite us to
distance ourselves from her politically unacceptable reaction: rather it panders to it,
inviting voyeuristic collusion. You can gaze upon daring and weird queerness, and
share disgust with it at the same time. The studio audience’s reaction to this scene,
embedded in the text on the soundtrack, expresses shocked titillation at the
extraordinariness of the kiss, which is greeted with a loud chorus of ‘oohs’, whilst
Roseanne’s mouth-wiping and grimace, signs of her robust heterosexuality, and of
her homophobia - which the programme is of course supposed to be apparently
condemning, are marked with increasingly raucous and enthusiastic applause and
laughter.
The next day, post-queer trauma, Roseanne offers her sister, and subsequently
Nancy, a number of accounts of her unease. At the diner, we know that something
is amiss because Roseanne is cleaning: Jackie tells her that it’s a shame that Sharon
didn’t ‘slip her the tongue’, because they might have been able to get the place up
to code. Roseanne describes the kiss as the kind that Dan used to give her before
they were married: this makes Dan look unromantic, but in as much as these kinds
of expression are the realm of women, such a remark actually reminds us of the
status of Dan’s masculinity. At first Roseanne denies that she is bothered because
she has been kissed by a woman. She tells Jackie that she is upset for Nancy: she
feels that Nancy will jealously regard the kiss as adulterous. When Nancy arrives at
work, it transpires that she already knows about the kiss and has expressed
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reservations to Sharon about her having done it: she anticipated that Roseanne
would ‘freak out.’ Roseanne denies this, but Nancy speculates that Roseanne
actually enjoyed the kiss and notes that sexuality ‘isn’t all black and white.’
Roseanne replies that she knows all about the grey area, and isn’t bothered by
some tiny percentage of her gayness. Nancy is now angry: she tells Roseanne that
she is a hypocrite and that this is exactly why she was uncomfortable about taking
her to a gay bar in the first place. Roseanne replies:
R: Oh yeah? A hypocrite doesn’t go to a gay bar and teach forty
gay people how to do the monkey!
N: Oh, and we’re supposed to admire you because you went to a
gay bar? I’m supposed to think you’re cool because you have gay
friends?
R: I don’t care if you think I’m cool at all, because I know that I’m
cool, baby. I’m probably the coolest chick you’ve ever met, and for
your information I have friends that are way gayer than you!
Before the argument can continue, the narrative side-steps to a brief scene
between Dan and DJ, which makes an interesting reflection on the ideological
struggle underway at the diner. DJ asks his father whether it is wrong for his
mother to go dancing with other women. Dan’s answer is delivered as a litany, he
says, ‘No, and anybody who tells you otherwise is wrong.’ DJ then asks Dan if he
dances with other men: at first Dan stays within his self-consciously insincere
liberalism and says that he does, immediately retracting: ‘no, never, ever, not once.’
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DJ says that he is glad, because he doesn’t want to dance with men either. As his
son walks away, Dan heaves a sigh of relief, saying ‘hallelujah.’ This scene is played
straightforwardly comically, the laughter arising out of Dan’s well meaning (but
unfelt) attempt at liberal parenting. This humour is a function of an assumed
consensus about maintaining a successful liberal ventriloquism of progressiveness
whilst keeping homosexuality an abject: remaining clear that a son with
homosexual tendencies or curiosity is a bad thing. Such humour seems to be
saying that despite Roseanne’s high queer content, audiences can be assured that
their normative heterosexual world-view will remain intact. Given that this scene
breaks another, larger one, which is debating the limits of heterosexual
progressiveness in challenging ways, the interlude’s effect on potential
heterosocial spectatorship is pretty depressing, using the humour to once again
delineate included and excluded audience constituencies.
Back at the diner Roseanne is still cleaning, so we know her anxieties are
unresolved. Jackie attempts to placate her, ‘It’s not so bad that the kiss freaked you
out, you’re just not as cool as you thought you were.’ But Roseanne isn’t ready to
concede yet: she incinerates her sister, reminding her of how totally uncool she was
at the bar. Roseanne now suggests that she’s upset because Dan will be jealous,
but her delivery of the proposition is becoming less convincing. She reminds Jackie
of how threatened Dan got in high school when another boy kissed her, and how
Dan beat him up. Jackie remembers, and asks Roseanne if she thinks Dan will beat
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up Sharon, because Dan will feel threatened by her. Jackie’s tone here is
incredulous, whilst Roseanne’s confirmation betrays the implausibility of her fear.
Again, the studio audience is having a good time with this: it seems preposterous
that Sharon would have sufficient homosocial credibility to threaten Dan in this
way. As we’ve seen, Sharon is so scopically heterosexual and alluring that she can’t
even elicit the threat conjured by the mannish butch dyke. Jackie finishes her
account of Roseanne’s fear by suggesting that she will end up sleeping with
Sharon. Unseen by the sisters, Nancy has come into the kitchen. Roseanne is the
goddess of retribution: ‘Of course not! I am NOT GAY!’ At this, they turn to Nancy as
she slams out of the kitchen. Roseanne follows her,
R: I just don’t like people calling me things that I’m not, like a
hypocrite, or gay, you know, because I’m not. I wouldn’t like
anybody to call me an astronaut because it’s fine to be an
astronaut, but I’m not an astronaut. I’m not going to admit I was
wrong or anything, but I just don’t wanna fight with you anymore,
so, I was wrong.
N: Thank you.
R: I’m still pretty cool, you know, for a forty year old mother of
three who lives in Lanford, Illinois. I like that Snoopy Dog Dog.
Despite the indeterminacy of Roseanne’s apology (what is she actually apologising
for? is she admitting her homophobia?) Nancy reassures Roseanne that she doesn’t
have to be cool to be her friend. She says that she feels sick every time she pictures
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Roseanne and Dan in bed together, and Roseanne says that she does too. Here,
once again, the idea of Dan and the masculinity he represents, is used to frame the
discussion. The friends are acknowledging Dan’s place within Roseanne’s
heterosexuality, recognising that she is his to homosocially exchange. Indeed,
Roseanne itself is exchanging her in the name of Dan’s masculine credibility at this
point. It doesn’t really matter that he is portrayed unflatteringly: notwithstanding
how secure and invested we know the Conner’s marriage to be, his absence is
structuring, and women don’t necessarily have to like men to be subject to them in
homosocial exchange, nor do men have to please women sexually to acquire them
as homosocial currency.
‘I Now Pronounce You Men’: Queer Marriage and the Domestic Goddess
The other significant episode of Roseanne infamous for its homosexual content
portrays Leon’s gay wedding. As the show opens a man is leaving the diner and
complaining to Roseanne about the food; he’s quite insulting. He leaves a cheque
for the bill and no tip. There in another man sat at the counter. He sympathises
with Roseanne and tells her how he used to work in a restaurant, and that she
shouldn’t have to put up with such bad behaviour. The second man, who we learn
is called Scott, asks for the phone, and uses the details printed on the cheque to
ring the man’s wife. He pretends to be the desk clerk at the Come and Go motel in
Elgin and tells the woman that he has some underwear that she must have left the
last time she stayed.29 The man’s wife obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking
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about, and he says, ‘Oh, you’re not a busty twenty year old blonde? Woops, my
mistake.’ Roseanne is thrilled to have found another queen of retribution, and the
incident bonds them in its delicious maliciousness, as it bonds the audience to this
stranger:
R: Wow! He stiffs me for a tip and you destroy his marriage - that’s
awesome.
S: I thought that you’d enjoy that. You look like you’ve ruined a
few lives in your day.
R: I think I should tell you I’m a married woman. But I’m not a
fanatic about it.
The nature of this bond, its shared currency, is the punishment of an abusive
heterosexual man by invoking a stereotypical homosocial narrative against him.
The errant customer’s identity as a heterosexual man is constituted through a
system that constantly exchanges women, the blonder, bustier and younger they
are the more rigorous the heterosexuality and the more distance he’s able to open
up between himself and the queer abject. The nature of the bond here is all the
more profound for its indexical relationship to the homosocial debility of
Roseanne as a middle-aged brunette who may be busty, but who is also militantly
fat, and of Scott as a gay man. We could describe their relationship as heterosocial.
It transpires that Scott is in town to meet up with the person who he is about to
marry, the person who jilted him at the altar five years ago. Roseanne is defensive
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on behalf of her new heterosocial partner, she asks: ‘What kind of a horrible bitch
would dump you?’ at the exact moment the door opens and Leon walks in.
Roseanne is incredulous that her new buddy could be marrying the subject of her
long-term enmity: ‘even in a small town like this one he is at the very bottom of the
homosexual heap.’ But Leon has the opportunity to return the blow. It transpires
that the couple are having trouble putting their wedding together. Scott suggests
that they ask Roseanne, and Leon replies, ‘No, no, no, no. No. Roseanne is not to be
trusted with anything that involves cake...I’ve always dreamed of a ceremony that
would culminate in a hog-fry.’ But of course, the last line is Roseanne’s: ‘I’ve always
thought of you as the middle-aged, obnoxious gay son that I’ve never had.’ Under
pressure from Scott, Leon finally agrees to let Roseanne plan the ceremony.
The scene is now set at the Conner home, and time has passed. David and Jackie
are helping plan the wedding. Roseanne rings to check the seating plan, and David
tells her (to much studio laughter) that it’s fine: ‘Boy, girl. Boy, boy. Boy, boy. Boy,
boy. And boy.’ Having fetishised this marker of the occasion’s strangeness, we
move on to Jackie, who is checking a brochure of strippers: she doesn’t know
whether to choose Rod, Lance or Shaft. She calls to Dan to help her choose a
stripper and he comes running, only to back off uncomfortably (to much applause)
when he sees the brochure: ‘Those aren’t strippers, they’re guys.’ In Dan’s
experience it is only women who are prepared to consent to offering a display of
their bodies for shared male consumption. He asks Jackie if Roseanne is planning
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Leon’s stag party as well, and she tells him that the strippers are for the wedding.
Dan thinks that Roseanne is going over the top, and Jackie agrees, but neither will
tell her.
Having got some idea of the occasion in prospect, we now move on in time and to
the Lanford Women’s Club, where Leon arrives to meet Roseanne. She takes him
into the hall, which is decorated in a gaudy mix of pink garlands, large inverted
pink triangles bearing the logo ‘Gay Love - Gay Power’, statues of Adonis and of
David adorned with pink ribbon, portraits of Streisand, Bowie, Dietrich and others,
topless beefcake hunks in bow ties, and two drag performers, one impersonating
Judy Garland, the other Liza Minnelli. Leon is somewhat perplexed:
L: What is all this?
R: It’s a gay wedding.
L: This isn’t a wedding, it’s a circus. You have somehow managed
to take every gay stereotype and just roll them up into one
gigantic offensive, Roseanne-iacal bunch of wrong!
R: Relax, nobody gets the wedding they really want...
L: It’s off.
R: What do you mean?
L: I said the wedding is off.
R: Well of course it’s a little off, it’s two guys, for god’s sakes!
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One of the principle virtues of the treatment of the gay wedding in this episode is
that it is complex and raises a number of issues.
Whether or not gay people should be getting married is a vexed question for
lesbians and gay men themselves as much as it is for legislators, right-wing
religious activists, good liberals, and other moral commentators. Fundamentally all
groups see the question in the same way; they are trying to assert some idea about
what queer people in our cultures are for. Are we merely the victims of ignorance,
blighted by an accident of difference which needs greater understanding, equality
and tolerance from those who would seek to oppress us because they do not really
know that we are the same as them, underneath it all? Or, are we already known by
those who would oppress us as fundamental and structuring threats to the fabric
of their identities and power? Are we, or can we, or should we, be good citizens?
We have seen how this question is put by Leo Bersani:
Should a homosexual be a good citizen? It would be difficult to
imagine a less gay-affirmative question at a time when gay men
and lesbians have been strenuously trying to persuade straight
society that they can be good parents, good soldiers, good
priests.30
We are all too familiar with how these issues are debated by heterosexual power
groups: even the apparently super-liberal, gay friendly President Clinton told The
Advocate that he doesn’t believe that gay people should be allowed to marry.31
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More significantly, lesbian and gay writers and activists have themselves expressed
a wide range of investments in this question. The much-feted Andrew Sullivan, exeditor of The New Republic achieves perhaps the most considered and gay (male)
affirmative example of assimilationism in his Virtually Normal; yet however
considered there remains a chronic naiveté at the heart of his position:
[marriage] would also be an unqualified social good for
homosexuals. It provides role models for young gay people, who,
after the exhilaration of coming out, can easily lapse into shortterm relationships...32
Here the enemy scapegoated to bring about gay inclusion seems to be
promiscuity, but however parochial, at least Sullivan is under no illusions about his
position:
Gay marriage is not a radical step; it is a profoundly humanizing,
traditionalizing step. It is the first step in any resolution of the
homosexual question - more important than any other institution,
since it is the most central institution to the nature of the problem,
which is to say, the emotional and sexual bond between one
human being and another... It is ultimately the only reform that
truly matters.33
Such insistent pomposity is precisely a danger inherent within a politics that is
insufficiently heterosocial: with the exception of his antibody status, Sullivan
speaks from the relatively privileged position I spoke of earlier; in particular his
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whiteness and maleness, to say nothing of his corporate authority, education and
money at best make his words hegemonic in their very ignorance, and at worst
traitorous in their solipsism.
In the form of their work as much as in its content, the Homocult collective exhibit
a radical difference from the liberal mewlings of Andrew Sullivan. Homocult’s work
takes the form of graphics, posters, graffiti, flyers and collages in mixed media, that
have been collected in a book, but which are more generally to be found in urban
spaces: the group was founded in Manchester. One montage says: ‘Shame: Rich
Gays play Dead, their language in conserving, stagnating, lingering, death.’ Another
reproduces an image from an advertisement for a national dating agency with the
caption ‘You must marry. Issued by Dept. of Social Order, in conjunction with
Hetrolife Plc.’34 For Homocult being a homosexual is not about becoming a good
citizen; their ‘ultimate plan’ is ‘the destruction of the ‘moral’ state.’ The homosexual
politics of the Stonewall Group in Britain, and the queer politics of Outrage are an
anathema: ‘Now the stonewall group formed from our blood police our language,
needs and lives. Outrage is a cosy sham. You can only be outraged by what
surprises you. It’s no surprise to common queers that there is no justice for us. We
are not outraged, we are defiant.’35
Roseanne’s treatment of Leon and Scott’s gay wedding could potentially tap into
this range of ideas that diverse and complex communities of gays and lesbians
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produce, side-stepping a problematic unification of queer cultures and making a
more radical presentation as a result. Roseanne’s camply overdetermined notion of
what constitutes a gay wedding can be understood in several different ways. As a
heterosexual character her delivery of the wedding and her unrepentant insistence
upon Leon going through with it, can be read as an abusive appropriation of gay
culture for the edification of Roseanne Conner’s much-invested ‘coolness’, and for
the voyeuristic consumption of Roseanne’s audience. Here, her statement that ‘Well
of course it’s a little off, it’s two guys, for god’s sakes!’ becomes the invocation of a
gap between the strangeness of gay matrimony and the normality and dignity of
heterosexual union. Gays can get married, but such ceremonies are a bit of camp
fun, not profound and meaningful occasions. However, Roseanne’s production of
the gay wedding could also be seen as a parodic inversion of exactly such
profundity, using the dissident place queerness inhabits within the mythologies of
marriage to critique its conventions. Why should queers mimic ceremonies of
commitment sanctioned by a hostile state, when we have a distinct culture of our
own from which to draw ritualistic meanings? In this reading, Roseanne’s
suggestion of how ‘off’ the ceremony is becomes a recognition of the futility of
Leon’s aspiration for the public sanction of his partnership, and a reminder to him
of the difference of his queer identity. Yet even within this ‘positive’ reading of
Roseanne’s gay wedding, one which gives her the benefit of queer doubt, Roseanne
Conner is the arbiter of essential dissident queerness, a heterosexual woman who
teaches overly liberal gay men how to regain their lost transgressive perversity.
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The narrative continues after the passing of time. The wedding is now imminent,
and Roseanne has locked Leon in the bathroom so that he cannot escape. Leon’s
mother arrives, presenting an opportunity for more bitching. Roseanne’s opening
line seems to shore up the idea of her queer iconicity, as she references The Wizard
of Oz: ‘How wonderful it is that you were able to get that house off of you before
the wedding!’ Whilst the retort of Leon’s mother introduces another way of
decoding Roseanne’s wedding vision: ‘Look at this place. Have you ever seen such a
horrific display of blue collar tastelessness?’ As Leon’s mother flounces off, leaving
her class critique unpursued, Dan finally plucks up the courage to intervene in the
unfolding queer debacle:
D: Honey I think you should tone down the wedding like he
wanted.
R: No! This is my wedding, and he is lucky I cast him in it.
D: Roseanne, I know you wanted this wedding to be a certain way,
but if you don’t do something, there isn’t going to be a wedding,
it’s going to be all your fault, and you know who’s going to suffer?
Me.
Here the balance seems to be shifting back towards Roseanne’s oppressive
appropriation of queerness and her heterosexually privileged authority: it’s her
wedding, and we know that weddings are all about bridal desires: here it is
Roseanne who is the bride, even though she’s not getting married, she is the
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heterosexual princess at the centre of the occasion. Once again Dan is deferring to
Roseanne’s control in the manner that we expect and love, but his massively
masculine, working-class presence, and our intra-textual familiarity with his utter
lack of deference to anybody else, both infers Roseanne’s relation to his
masculinity and re-locates her within a heterosexual matrix that is often quite
normative.
Roseanne then goes to the bathroom to persuade Leon to take part in her
wedding. She tells him that she has toned down the gay kitsch, but he still wants
to leave, not because she’s turned his wedding into a ‘circus’: but because he is
having second thoughts about marrying Scott. Any potential liberal guilt that may
be amassing due to the impending fiasco now passes back to Leon: she’s not
domineering, he’s just flaky and unreliable. Roseanne bullies Leon, telling him that
he can’t leave Scott at the altar again, that Scott is that best thing that’s ever
happened to him. Leon agrees, but he’s scared of the commitment and the
permanence. Leon suggests a whole range of stupid reasons why he cannot marry,
giving Roseanne the opportunity to occupy a position of rationality and
knowledge with increasing belligerence. Finally Leon says:
L: Okay, then how about this, ready? What if I’m not really gay?
R: You couldn’t be any gayer if your name was Gay Gayerson.
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L: Oh yeah? Well you just think about it, young lady. I hate to shop,
I am absolutely insensitive, I detest Barbra Streisand, and for god’s
sake, I’m a Republican.
R: But do you like having sex with men?
L: Well, I...
R: GAY!!
Here the loud, accusative naming of gayness, within the context of Roseanne’s selfconsciously gay-affirmative liberalism, transgresses our conventional expectations
about screaming ‘Gay!’ at somebody. Queers are used to being named, abused and
taunted by heterosexuals with the words with which we may identify ourselves.
Here Leon’s homosexual self-doubt conveniently vacates the space of queer
articulacy, allowing the ultra ‘cool’ Roseanne to become the bearer, arbiter,
originator, of confident, assertive and positive queer identification. Leon’s
deficiency in expressing the markers of gayness that Roseanne posits (shopping,
Streisand, sensitivity, liberalism), only makes Roseanne herself even more
successfully queer: she can speak it, and she can do it, as we are supposed to
deduce from her decoration of the wedding. Furthermore, it seems as though it is
Roseanne’s insistence on being in control, of knowing and determining Leon’s
doubts about the marriage that goads him into more and more outrageous retorts
in order to gain some self-determination: leads him, eventually, to renounce his
sexuality in the hope that she will leave him alone. His final retort challenges her
expression of his sexual orientation. He says, ‘Oh yeah?’ and then grabs her and
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kisses her passionately on the mouth. He pulls back and shakes his head in a
suggestion of revulsion, and strides for the door: ‘I’m gay. Let’s do it.’ It would seem
that there are dual causes of dismay for queer audiences here.
Any vestiges of identification we are supposed to have left with the self-confessed
right-wing, insensitive, Streisand loathing (this confession is of course the absolute
worst) Leon are scoured away by the script when it has him kiss Roseanne: using
homosocial sexual objectification of women to regain his homosexuality is a pretty
unsympathetic act, not only in its sexism but in its lack of queer pride - it
humiliates him as a gay man, even more than his preceding renunciation. On a
another level, the kiss, like that between Roseanne and Sharon, is supposed to elicit
revulsion out of fascination and progressive ‘cool’; queerness here is once again
the plaything of heterosexual voyeurism, and Roseanne is the unassailably
heterosexual location for audience identification. Once again she gets a brief taste
of the strange fruit (at least from the right gender this time) whilst the narrative
meaning of the kiss depends upon her heterosexuality, and their strangeness. For
Leon’s ‘test’ of his gayness, as much as for Sharon’s desire of Roseanne, the fixed
point from which resolution springs, is Roseanne’s heterosexuality: her normativity
proving Leon’s homosexuality, and displaying Sharon’s kinky lesbianism. Neither of
these interactions, as the epicentre of Roseanne’s queer narratives, troubles
heterosexuality or problematises normative gender roles as the source of
homophobia. The wedding ceremony itself follows, conducted by an inept
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preacher who adds comic relief by twisting up his words. There are a few moments
of apparently genuine celebration of queer partnership:
Scott: I love you in a way that is mystical and eternal and illegal in
twenty states.
Leon: That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.
However, the overall tone is patronising. The inept preacher is from Leon’s home
town and was brought to conduct the ceremony especially. The fact that he was
chosen by Leon himself makes him partly responsible for the ceremony’s comic
illegitimacy, especially as the preacher’s shortcomings mean that Scott and Leon
have to make up and say their own vows.
Preacher: Do you, Leon, take this Scott to be your awfully rabid
husband?
Again this indication of the gay couple’s distance outside conventional
heterosexual matrimony has dual meanings: either their impromptu vows are a
transgressive reinscription of patriarchal matrimony, or they are an indication of
the couple’s lack of normality or recognition by state or religion.
Preacher: I now pronounce you man and...er...I now pronounce you
men.
The preacher’s indeterminacy about how to address the couple highlights the
inadequacy and heterosexism of ‘traditional’ notions of marriage and the language
used around sexual partnership; however, it also re-highlights the couple’s
strangeness, especially as the preacher’s function is precisely to recognise and
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authenticate the occasion, not to belittle it. As the newlyweds kiss, the camera
quickly pans away to Dan and Roseanne. Dan is shifting in his seat, looking but not
looking, mesmerised and shocked by the kiss:
Dan: And there’s the kiss. I was wondering if they were going to do
it, and they’re doing it. Look at them going at it.
Roseanne: They are not ‘going at it’ Dan, it just happens to be two
people of the same sex kissing, and there’s nothing wrong with
that.
At this moment, out of nowhere, Mariel Hemmingway (Sharon) appears over
Roseanne’s shoulder and says hello. Roseanne returns the greeting, with just a little
too much enthusiasm, and the episode ends on a close up of her fixed and ever so
slightly too wide grin. Sharon’s appearance, and the jog that it provides to our
memories of Roseanne’s discomfort with her own ‘lesbian’ kiss neatly dampens the
ardour of her liberal superiority in relation to Dan, and the moment is very funny,
providing us with a very satisfying and rare occasion of Roseanne’s silenced defeat.
But of course, the cost of that humour is that both the wedding kiss of Leon and
Scott, and the ‘lesbian’ kiss of Roseanne and Sharon from the preceding season, are
displayed for voyeuristic heterosexual consumption: indeed given the rapidity with
which the direction moves us from Leon and Scott’s kiss (seen only from the back
of Leon’s head, of course) to Dan’s reaction to it, we may conclude that the very
point of the kiss is not its display of gay love, but its garnering of disgusted
heterosexual titillation. Rather than circulating through Roseanne as a cultural
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threat, something that contextualises and denaturalises masculinity and the
heterosexual power with which it dominates women, homosexuality becomes but
an effect of a liberal world view ventriloquising progressiveness, based on diversity
and inclusion, but always under the terms of existing power relations. Certain
issues and identities can be run through this world view in a challenging way, as
the confrontation with Mr. Williams challenged Roseanne’s racism. But in that
episode, as with the current one, difference is not allowed to articulate for itself,
but only as a testing and enlightening reflection of the oppressive term in each
binary. Homosexuality is liberally enshrined, and direct expressions of homophobia
are not allowed to be directed at gays and lesbians themselves. It is only in relation
to the quasi-queerness of David that Roseanne even begins to dare to examine the
place of homosexual panic in the constitution of homosocial systems. Such
questions are however kept at some distance from actually identified gay
characters, who all circulate through the woman-centred ambit of Roseanne herself.
But as we have seen, even here, Roseanne’s heterosexuality remains the structuring
condition of queer representation. Queerness signifies, often blatantly, but always
as the opportunity for progressive, ‘cool’ assimilation rather as the occasion for a
challenge to heterosexual authority, Roseanne’s included. Specific and distinct
cultural expressions of homosexuality are ultimately seen as in no way
incompatible with ‘cool’ heterosexuality. Indeed such expressions are displayed for
the edification of cool heterosexuals, both in political terms - by flattering the
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liberal ego, and in voyeuristic terms - by always framing queerness as kinky and
strange. Queerness rarely appears strange and weird to queers themselves.
Mary-Come-Lately or Gay Goddess?
What makes these limitations in the scope of Roseanne’s queerness so marked, is the
extent to which the show invites lesbian and gay subcultural investment: and as
we have seen from American publications, this is certainly forthcoming. However, it
could be argued that the disparity between the tenor of the treatment accorded
the ‘issues’ of racism and sexuality in Roseanne is due neither to the distinct and
radically different nature of the questions themselves, nor to some ideological
shortcoming on the part of the producers, but occurs because Roseanne is drawing
performatively on a camp register that is characteristic of much queer cultural
negotiation. This register, an attitude of mise en scene, timing, tone and irony, as
well as the more substantial qualities of script and direction, can in itself be
appealing to queer audiences as it elicits a way of reading well versed through a
canon of appropriated camp classics. This is a quality of the material not
highlighted in mandarin, formalised discourses of textual analysis, and I am aware
of the need to do justice to the multiple and ironic layers through which Roseanne
pitches its treatment of homosexual life. Features of the sitcom would make it
highly valuable as a cultural resource for gay men regardless of its specific gay
content, as most films and television in the subcultural queer canon attest.36 As I
have tried to indicate, Roseanne’s scenes of dialogue have a distinctive performative
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quality that at its most successful manages to convey the weight and substance of
experiences the show dramatises, yet at the same time inhibiting earnest,
unengaged and complacently liberal empathy. Characters frequently get upset,
angry, violent, but Roseanne frames such emotional outbursts within a structuring
representational mode of dead-pan, almost dispassionate irony that scours away
any latent limp humanism our generic expectations may enshrine. The formal
ideological terms through which Roseanne makes queer representations are thus in
constant negotiation with the show’s performative vernacular, which constantly
frustrates suspension of disbelief, peeling away layers of textual authority. It is this
quality of Roseanne which registers with queer audiences, the duality enforcing a
recognition of the artfulness, the constructed nature of the text and what it
represents; alas it seems that this reflexivity begets continuing queer identification
even as the ideological investments of the show betray and trample on such
investment.
The ideological intent which drives the narrative and specular organisation of the
‘lesbian’ kiss episode of Roseanne does seem to be genuinely based in an
appreciation of the need to question the political authority, cultural uniformity and
complacency of heterosexual society; this appreciation would appear to be derived
from an allegiance and familiarity with queer subcultures. There are a sufficient
number of in-jokes and subcultural references throughout the episode which
suggest the presence of an ‘authentic’ queer subcultural voice within the dialogue
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that is intended to be recognised as such. These interventions have been
interpreted by publications that speak from queer subculture, and by Roseanne
herself, as having heterosocial effects; that is, that they enact bonding between
women and queerness. Yet the failure of these affiliations lies in their inability to
diegetically transcend homosocial ideological systems: this is something made all
too apparent in the later gay wedding episode. It is these homosocial systems
which in their dominance maintain the breaches between women and queerness:
homosocial control produces the dissident need for a bonding that will enable us
to re-envisage gender relations, to reconfigure patriarchal gender roles.
Heterosocial interventions attempt to elude the homosocial functionality conferred
upon homosexual and female identities within male homosocial structures.
Heterosocial work requires a reflexive awareness of the complex matrix of power
relations that maintain difference and sometimes enmity between diverse marginal
identities: that must be the fundamental basis of any affiliation conducted on the
grounds of that difference. We must see the conditions which shape the
experiences of our potential allies and be able to perceive our complicity with
systems that enforce their oppression, as we see their complicity in ours.
It is very striking that after the initial exuberant burst of heterosocial activity
between Roseanne and Scott at the beginning of the gay wedding show, there is
no further interaction between them at all. Given the terms of their bonding this
isn’t surprising: it would be difficult to sustain such a relationship in the light of the
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insistence with which the Roseanne character later maintains her control and
superiority over gay men. This is to say nothing of the difficulty the producers of
the show would have in reconciling the anti-homosocial nature of Roseanne and
Scott’s continuing interactions with Roseanne’s heterosexuality and her
relationship with Dan. What would the show do with Dan whilst his wife and Scott
heterosocially challenged male bonding and power? We know that it is okay for
Roseanne to disempower Dan, indeed this is a central component of Roseanne’s
distinctiveness. We are familiar with her fabulously bombastic rantings and we
know that this does not castrate Dan or make him impotent in the overall
representation of his character. There are always spaces in Roseanne for Dan to
interact in manly homosocial terms with other men, often recognising his wife’s
substantial material authority in the process and trading that for masculine
credibility with others: on the roof fixing tiles with Mark, playing poker with his
buddies, down at the bike shop with Mark, at the municipal garage where he’s the
boss, or down at the Lobo bar with Fred. However, it would be a completely
different proposition for Dan to be disempowered by an affiliation between Scott,
a gay man, and his colluding wife. Such a direct challenge would be much more
damaging to symbolic male power than Roseanne’s ‘domestic goddess’ alone precisely because her domestic goddess requires him to come home every night
and demand his dinner on the table so that she can refuse him and they can then
have a power struggle. Roseanne is carefully manipulated so as to preclude the
writers having to find a way of reconciling the heterosocial queerness of Scott or
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Leon, with the progressive and queer-positive intent of the show, whilst retaining
sufficient unchallenged throbbing virility in Dan Conner. Dan’s homosocial
credibility is maintained in that he never has to be positioned directly in the
heterosocial discourses of his wife and her faggot associates and friends, a
positioning that would either compromise him (and the show itself) politically, or
would sacrifice some of the homosocial power he accrues through his relationships
with Fred, Mark and others, and which is measured by his symbolic distance from
David, the ‘art-femme’.37 In close proximity and in discourse with the queer cohort,
how could Dan maintain difference without recourse to direct homophobia? It is
much easier for him to become homosocially energised in relation to David, at the
‘art-femme’s’ expense, because David is not labelled as gay, and thus any
repression of him will not open up Roseanne’s apparently progressive agenda to
liberal criticism.
There are two occasions in which Dan must face the queer challenge alone. One
occurs when Nancy and Marla have come over on Christmas Eve. The rest of the
Conner family is stranded in snow at the diner. The lesbian couple take the
opportunity to kiss under the mistletoe: Dan’s response is to pretend that it is not
happening so that he doesn’t have to engage it, and he looks away. Later on in the
episode, whilst he is basting the turkey, he and Nancy talk about her having
children. He suggests that she might have ruined her chances of being a mother
now that she is a lesbian, but Nancy says that she and Marla are planning to have
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kids. Dan asks her to explain how she could do that, ‘without being at all specific’.
At that moment they both look at the turkey baster, he hands it to her and runs off.
In another episode Leon is playing poker with Dan and his buddies. In the course
of some routine homosocial exchange of ‘babe’ stories, it becomes apparent that
Dan is not aware that Leon is gay. Leon comes out, and it is the rest of the poker
players who engage with this: one says that he knows a gay man in Chicago, called
Bill, who Leon might know. Dan’s intervention is to finally shut them all up so that
they can play cards.
In both instances the interactions measure Dan’s distance from queerness (he
doesn’t even express any voyeuristic interest in Nancy and Marla) without him
having to produce himself in such a way as to accommodate and relate to that
queerness. It is always going to be fine to have Roseanne queening and bitching
and feuding around with gay men or with lesbians, because representationally
Roseanne’s femininity will always be more natural, credible and consequently more
authoritative (however bombastic and militantly fat, she’s a wife, a mother, and
she’s a woman) than Leon or Scott’s ‘unnatural’ refusal of masculinity, or Nancy’s
refusal of heterosexuality and men, because that refusal constitutes a negation of
the very site through which she may accrue social authority. In one argument
between Roseanne and Leon in an episode about their partnership at the diner,
she tells him that no ‘Mary-come-lately’ is going to stand in her way. Such remarks
are as near as the show gets to out and out homophobia, and here it is rendered
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safe as it comes in the context of a bitch-fest. Nevertheless, whenever the character
of Roseanne Conner raises the stakes to a direct stand-off about who is the best
‘Mary’, Leon will always become the somewhat pathetic Mary-wannabe, whilst
Roseanne, with her marriage to Dan behind her, will be the authentic Mary.
Roseanne’s authority is dependent on the symbolism she accrues by virtue of her
blue-collar, white-trash, physically indomitable husband. Bringing her heterosocial
affiliations with gay men into too close a proximity to her marriage, would
challenge and erode her authority precisely by destabilising the homosocial
mythology of her masculine husband.
Extra-diegetically, as a personality, a media image, Roseanne herself is obviously
something of a gay icon, for the reasons I discussed above, and in the context of
corporate timidity and greed her political statements about a range of issues,
including those that relate to lesbians and gay men, are welcome and diverting. At
its best Roseanne is an extraordinary piece of television, deriving a witheringly
dead-pan comedy from synthesising a laissez-faire cynicism with a bombastically
passionate enactment of woman-centred authority which is intoxicating in itself,
especially to a queer audience, for the reasons I’ve discussed. If publications such as
Out and The Advocate can utilise Roseanne strategically to effect heterosocial and
queer advantages, re-fashioning its representations to find material that provides
subcultural sustenance, or material with which to worry dominant faultlines, then
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this is obviously very exciting. However, I am not sure that Roseanne’s literal
deployment of queerness in itself can sustain the weight of such desires.
Given the nature of the show, it is inevitable that all the principle narratives, and
experiences Roseanne dramatises ultimately become functions of its eponymous
heroine’s perspective. This dramatic solipsism is one of Roseanne’s strengths, given
that it makes the show so powerfully woman-centred, and can be used effectively
to solicit powerful ideological critiques when that dramatic epicentre is
destabilised, as in the confrontation with Mr. Williams. However, in relation to
Roseanne’s handling of lesbian and gay issues this solipsism is something of a
problem. We have seen how the nominally heterosexual, but queerly signifying
character of David is used not only to empower women in the shape of Darlene by
portraying them in supportive and authoritative relations with men, but to
reinstate a homosocially grounded masculinity in which he is failing, and the other
men are colluding. Roseanne’s knowledge of queerness stalls at those moments
when it would be challenging to heterosexuality, or incompatible with the
particular character and determination of Roseanne’s transgression as ‘killer
bitch’/feminist. Roseanne has said:
Men who are anything like women are devalued in this society.
There’s a pecking order in male culture, and at the very bottom, if
they’re included at all, are women.38
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This neatly encapsulates the heterosocial enigma Roseanne poses. The recognition
that the shape of another kind of oppression may be similar to your own, indeed
may be a function of your oppression, seems an encouragingly heterosocial
understanding. Yet at the very moment of this awareness, we see that this
heterosocial knowledge is twisted though the axis of its empathy so that it
repositions Roseanne herself as inversely privileged: she becomes even more
oppressed. This privilege is naturalised, rendering Roseanne’s own heterosexuality
ideologically cloaked because her rendering of it lines up with heterosexist
hegemonies, and because it does not interrupt the homosocial narrative along the
axis of its homophobia. The Domestic Goddess, the Goddess of Retribution, Divine
tamer of Faggottry, she is our (flawed) champion of the progressive in the arena of
homosociality.
1In Lesbian Studies: Setting An Agenda (London & New York: Routledge, 1995) Tamsin
Wilton makes the following assessment of Simon Watney's argument in his Policing
Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media: ‘Gay men ... who see gay male sex in a
homophobic culture as intrinsically radical, and for whom the assertive and defiant
expression of sexuality has developed as the backbone of the collective cultural
struggle to survive AIDS, have denounced a monolithic 'feminism' as lifethreatening in its erotophobia and prudery.’ (p.102).
2Celia Farber, 'Don't Tread on Me', Spin, May 1996, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 40.
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3John Lahr, 'Dealing with Roseanne', The New Yorker, July 17 1995; Kevin Sessums,
'Really Roseanne', Vanity Fair, February 1994; Celia Farber, 'Don't Tread on Me', Spin,
May 1996, vol. 12, no. 2.
4Farber, 'Don't Tread on Me', p.41.
5Out, no.29, February 1996.
6Out, no.24, July/August 1995.
7Peter Galvin, 'Her life as a woman', The Advocate, January 24, 1995, p. 52, emphasis in
original.
8Tim Allis, 'The Faces of Straight America', Out, no.24, July/August 1995, p.70.
9Sue Carswell, 'Roseanne for Queen of the Universe', Out, no.29, February 1996,
p.114. In the 1997 season, during which Roseanne has dramatised the difficulties
faced by the Conner family now that they are multi-millionaires, Roseanne's screen
mother, Bev Harris, has admitted that whilst her dead husband was having sex with
her she would fantasise about the photographs in her illicitly consumed copies of
Playboy.
10It should be noted however, that Roseanne's identification of the Conner family's
class identity has been subject to considerable change, even disengenuousness,
throughout its run. By the time of the 1995 season Roseanne runs her own
business, and is no longer quite so oppressively positioned as she once was. See
Janet Lee, 'Subversive Sitcoms: Roseanne as Inspiration for Feminist Resistance',
61
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Women's Studies, vol.21, 1992; and Kathleen K. Rowe, 'Roseanne: Unruly Woman as
Domestic Goddess', in Horace Newcomb (ed.) Television: The Critical View (Oxford
University Press, 1994). Furthermore, at the beginning of the 1996/97 season the
Conners win the Illinois State lottery, and become multi-millionaires, which at the
least represents an abandonment of the show's realism, if not its commitment to
working-class politics. This shift in the fortunes of the Conners does not appear to
have been popular. In the UK Channel Four moved Roseanne, in the middle of its
season run, from its prime time position in the schedule on Friday nights at ten-oclock to a late-night mid-week slot, on Wednesdays at eleven-thirty.
11Lahr, 'Dealing with Roseanne', p.51.
12Roseanne Arnold, Roseanne: My Lives (London: Century, 1994) p.91-95, pp.107-110,
pp.111-130.
13Lahr, 'Dealing with Roseanne', p.54.
14Lisa Schwarzbaum, 'All the Rage', Entertainment Weekly, April 21 1995, no. 271, p.24.
15Galvin, 'Her life as a woman', p.52.
16Schwarzbaum, 'All the Rage', p. 24.
17ibid.
18Mick Bowes, 'Only When I Laugh', in Andrew Goodwin & Garry Whannel (eds)
Understanding Television (New York & London: Routledge 1990) p.129.
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19For Roseanne's body image see, amongst others, Sessums, 'Really Roseanne',
Vanity Fair, February 1994. For considerations of the connections between
homosexuality and sickness and deformity, see Simon Watney, 'Sex, Diversity and
Disease' in his Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Stuart Marshall, 'Picturing Deviancy' in Tessa
Boffin & Sunil Gupta (eds), Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (London:
Rivers Oram Press, 1990); and Paula A. Treichler, 'AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical
Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification' in Douglas Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988), amongst others.
20Carswell, 'Roseanne for Queen of the Universe' front cover.
21On ‘killer bitch’ see Galvin, 'Her life as a woman' p.54; for ‘Goddess of retribution’
see Janet Lee, 'Subversive Sitcoms: Roseanne as Inspiration for Feminist Resistance',
Women's Studies, vol.21, 1992.
22For Roseanne's attack on Streep and Foster see Lahr, 'Dealing with Roseanne'
p.58; for attack on feminism see Lahr, ibid. p.47; for employing men writers not
women, see Sessums, 'Really Roseanne' p.46.
23Schwarzbaum, 'All the Rage' p.26.
24Allis, 'The Faces of Straight America', p.70.
25It doesn't seem irrelevant that Mariel Hemmingway famously played the object
of Woody Allen's lolita complex in his film Manhattan in 1979.
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26Sedgwick, Between Men, p.89.
27Carswell, 'Roseanne for Queen of the Universe' p.114; my emphasis.
28ibid.
29Roseanne's sharper eyed viewers may note that Elgin is the home of Lips, the gay
bar: funny how Elgin seems to be the proximate, but not too proximate scene of
diverse nefarious activities...
30Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1995)
p.113.
31The Advocate, 16 July 1996.
32Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (London:
Picador, 1995) p.183.
33ibid. p.185.
34Homocult, Queer With Class: The First Book of Homocult (Manchester: MS ED (The
Talking Lesbian), 1992).
35ibid. (Note that Homocult's publication does not contain page numbers.)
36I am thinking here of those texts, many of which are listed in Paul Rouen, High
Camp: A Gay Guide to Cult Films, Vol.1 (San Francisco: Leyland, 1994) a representative
selection of which have made it into mandarin criticism in the works of Richard
Dyer, Paula Graham, Alex Doty, Andy Medhurst, Michael Bronski, Andrea Weiss and
others. See Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press,
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
1986) (especially pp. 141-194); Dyer, Only Entertainment (New York & London:
Routledge, 1992) (especially pp.65-98, 135-148, 159-172); Dyer, The Matter of Images:
Essays on Representations (London & New York: Routledge, 1993) (especially pp.52-72,
19-51); Dyer, Brief Encounter (London: BFI, 1993); Graham, 'Girl's Camp: The Politics of
Parody', in Tamsin Wilton (ed.) Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image
(London & New York: Routledge, 1995); Graham, 'Looking Lesbian: Amazons and
Aliens in Science Fiction Cinema' in Hamer & Budge (eds) The Good, The Bad and the
Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance with Lesbianism (London: Pandora, 1994); Doty,
Making Things Perfectly Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
Medhurst, 'Victim: Text as Context', Screen Summer 1994; Medhurst, 'One Queen and
His Screen', in Healey & Mason (eds) Stonewall 25: The Making of the Lesbian and Gay
Community in Britain (London: Virago, 1994); Medhurst, 'That Special Thrill: Brief
Encounter, homosexuality and authorship', Screen Summer 1991; Bronski, Culture
Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984) (especially pp.92109); Andrea Weiss, 'A Queer Feeling When I Look at You', in Gledhill (ed.) Stardom:
Industry of Desire (London: Routledge, 1991); Weiss, Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film
(London: Penguin, 1993).
37A small, but noteworthy detail: in the spoof black and white fifties episode of
Roseanne, the character of David is transposed into the French exchange student
Davide who minces around in an artist's smock and rakishly tilted beret. Even the
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most heterosocially incompetent shouldn't have much of a problem decoding that
iconography.
38Galvin, 'Her life as a woman', p.54.
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CONCLUSION
Fag Hag : A Cautionary Tale ?
Ever since this world began,
There is nothing sadder than,
A one-fag fag hag
Looking for the fag that got away.1
Robert Rodi is a gay writer who has published a series of novels that with varying
degrees of hilarity and cynicism expose and celebrate key archetypal figures in
metropolitan gay subculture: Fag Hag, Closet Case, Drag Queen and Kept Boy.2 Fag Hag
narrativises a relationship between the generously proportioned Natalie Stathis,
and a poetically beautiful gay man, Peter Leland. Natalie and Peter spend their
weekends trawling the gay bars of Chicago, Natalie tagging along whilst Peter
looks for Mr. Right:
she beamed a smile that pleaded, ‘Notice me!’ She pressed herself,
all hundred and seventy-odd pounds, through crowds of taut,
muscular young men and, through sheer flamboyance, attracted
the attention of a few of them. And as she talked to them, using
every ounce of feminine wile and wit at her disposal, they laughed
in delight and flattered her and sometimes even kissed her, but
never, never, once, not even for a moment, did they stop looking
over her shoulder for something better.3
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Each time Peter embarks on a new relationship, Natalie loses her consort, but is
prevailed upon to counsel her friend through the tribulations of his romantic
liaison. In the course of giving this support she uses her considerable insight and
guile to disrupt Peter’s path to true love so that he may return to her side. Natalie
faces her greatest challenge when Peter meets Lloyd Hood and falls in love with
this gun shop owning gay survivalist. Peter deserts his sidekick, realigning his
behaviour and tastes with those of his new lover, whose house he moves into. As
the novel progresses, and moves into realms of blacker and blacker comedy,
Natalie resorts to more extreme tactics to attempt to dismay Peter’s infatuation.
When planting a bug on the lovers’ headboard fails to reveal any friction that she
may profitably exploit, Natalie attempts to instil in Peter a gun phobia by
disguising herself, breaking into the house and holding her erstwhile consort at
gunpoint with a weapon purchased from Lloyd’s emporium. Finally, when this
tactic fails, because Lloyd is prepared to sacrifice his business for his lover, Natalie
kidnaps Peter, and intends to keep him in her basement (which she has converted
into a luxurious prison cell) until he confirms his undying love for her: this does
not happen. Eventually Lloyd rescues Peter, by which time Natalie has sunk to such
depths of madness that she retires to a sanatorium, to be released in the novel’s
epilogue, cured of her fag haggery and independently spirited.
Taken at face value this product of and for gay subculture seems to offer a dismal
reflection of the contemporary state of relationships between women and gay
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men. Fag Hag would appear to punish women for maintaining an intimacy with
gay men which those men rely on and take for granted. Whilst Peter is rewarded
with his prince charming and the promise of living happily ever after, Natalie’s
obsession leads to mental instability and estrangement from those few people
with whom she shared any intimacy. Thus, a presumptive reading of Fag Hag may
suggest, with some credibility, that an imputed gay male readership would identify
against Natalie, the fag hag, delighting in her descent into ruthlessness and
madness as signs of her failure to assimilate herself into gay subculture, or as
punishments for not being a gay man. There is sufficient material in the novel to
support this reading. Consumed as a product of gay subculture, but read without a
familiarity with the filters of irony that are a prevailing condition of queer reading
strategies, Fag Hag would seem to uphold and valorise gay male misogyny.
However, Fag Hag seems to reflect the faultline conditions in which relations
between women and gay men are conducted, and as a result throws up
incoherences which open up more interesting possibilities. This presumptive
reading cannot account for the way in which the novel’s authorial interest is a
function of Natalie’s point of view: the narrative is constituted not only by
following her actions, but the emotional resonances this narrative induces are
empathic reflections of her experience. When Peter moves in with Lloyd, we are
invited to associate with Natalie’s loneliness and sense of betrayal and futility, and
not with Peter’s smug fulfilment. The integrity of the first, hostile, reading of Fag
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Hag rests on the potential implausibility of a gay male novelist encouraging a
largely gay male readership to identify with a heterosexual woman in her battle
against a gay man. This identification with Natalie by gay male readers would seem
especially unlikely as her struggle could be interpreted as one whose aim is the
annihilation of his very gayness: her apparent aim is to replace Peter’s male lovers
with herself, and form a heterosexual coupling with him. However, that counteridentification becomes more probable in the extent to which Peter is held up as the
lofty, unattainable apex of gay male desirability and in so far as he manages to
achieve marital pair-bonding with Lloyd in the most unselfconsciously smug
fashion possible, and with a right-wing man at that, whose very essence is
antithetical to the concept of gay subculture. At a disastrous dinner party during
which Natalie attempts to expose tendencies in Lloyd that will be unattractive to
Peter, a tactic which fails because Peter has so thoroughly sublimated his own
interests to Lloyd’s, the survivalist explains his lack of interest in subcultural or
communal affiliations; he tells her:
I’m a man, Natalie; I’m capable, I’m intelligent, I’m strong, I’ve got
my wits. There’s no reason I should want to depend on anyone but
myself. (p.101)
Not only does this self-satisfied coupledom eschew any sense of communality, but
in his monogamy Peter has rejected the gay spaces of Chicago’s scene (as well as
Natalie’s heterosocial relations) for the company of Natalie’s prejudiced brother
Calvin, who responded with shock when she told him his gun merchant was gay:
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‘Goddam! That’s what I thought! I can’t believe that guy’s a fag.’
‘He’s a homosexual, Cal,’ she said, ‘But he’s definitely not a fag.
Trust me, there’s a difference.’ (p.114)
If this novel’s gay men do not provide any critique of smug middle-class
monogamy and the heterosexual values it underwrites, Fag Hag’s fag hags exhibit
little reticence about mounting such a critique. As Jennifer, Natalie’s boss and
confidant tells Calvin’s pregnant wife, Vera: ‘Bad case of sperm poisoning you’ve
got there.’ (p.290)
From a subcultural perspective, we might acknowledge the faultline nature of Fag
Hag’s representations, and see in it a challenge to the kinds of knowledge and
experience that comprise the background noise of gay environments that I referred
to in the discussion of Jarman’s familiarity with the codes, if not the purpose, of
female identification (chapter four). As Natalie acknowledges, the label ‘fag hag’ is
applied to women ‘derisively’ (p.96). Yet as the narrative progresses Rodi draws out
a tension between this derided fag hag and the kinds of icons of femininity
beloved of gay male identification. Natalie questions the extent of her
manifestation of what gay men understand in their labelling of fag hags: ‘A silly
indulgence, of no importance - not beneath notice, but not much above it, either?’
(p.96). Towards the end of the novel, after she has held up Peter at gunpoint in a
Ninja Turtle mask, her van has broken down and the police are on the way, Natalie
needs an urgent ride home to avoid discovery. She climbs into a van full of late
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adolescent young men who are hysterically policing each other homosocially. The
boys pressure one particularly fey comrade, ‘Fredo, into taking Natalie into the back
of the van and having sex with her. Natalie’s familiarity with gay affectation
enables her to immediately realise that ‘Fredo is gay and deeply confused. Natalie
saves him from humiliation, using her maturity to protect him from the authority
of homosocial intimacy. She pretends to have sex with the youth, hyperbolising his
virility; then she tells him:
these guys are clowns. You don’t need them. You’re perfect the
way you are, and when you figure out what that is, don’t be afraid
to be it. Okay? (p.195)
This is an affectionate, valorising portrayal of Natalie’s heterosocial commitment to
bonding with gay men that does not rest on her denial of homosexuality in men,
or in her attempts at ‘conversion’, but which is empowering and enabling of the
young man’s homosexuality and protective of it in relation to his ventriloquism of
opportunistic homosociality.
If Natalie is a heterosocial heroine, it is not merely for her care of fawn-like babyqueens:
She peered into her future and tried to see herself in a week, a
month, a year; but there was nothing but darkness, no matter how
far she projected.
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She licked and swallowed the blood from her hand. Fuck the
future; darkness was just fine with her. (p.266)
This kind of delicious malevolence specifically appeals to gay men as it constitutes
a perverse rejection of the kind of rational subjectivity men are institutionally
organised as personifying, and gay men are punished for queering:
He was going to have a fight on his hands. He’d have to scrape her
flesh and blood off that basement door before he opened it. And
God help him is she got him first.
It was petty, it was demeaning, it was evil. It was what she
wanted more than anything. (p.276)
Not withstanding Natalie Stathis’s textual womanhood, we have seen that this kind
of irrational rejection of homosocial subjectivity is not a strategy that is very
effective for women; they are already denied access to rational social authority.
Glorifying in enacting demeaning and petty behaviour as acts of dissent is a
familiar gay male negotiation of homosocial legislative ideology. It is the
oppressive proximity of male subjectivity which circumscribes gay men, so that our
queerness may function as a policing mechanism. In order for our presence to be
sufficiently disquieting, it is necessary that gay men should share a degree of male
power: heterosocial gender dissent perverts that subjectivity by flirting with the
abjection, the lack of subjectivity, experienced by women in male homosocial
culture. Similar flirtatious affectations of femininity do not activate dissent for
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women because such performances constitute their necessary negotiation of male
power in heterosexuality in order to gain vicarious privilege.
Given the nature of Natalie Stathis’s homosocial dissent, and her patronage of
baby-fags, it seems unlikely that a preferred reading of Fag Hag would encourage
gay male hostility towards her. She protects gay men from an apparent sense of
altruism (she has nothing to gain by saving ‘Fredo) and she activates the same kind
of ‘bitch diva’ dissent gay men valorise. Yet if we are encouraged to empathise and
identify with Natalie, can we claim a consistent project for the novel which would
reconcile its mode of address and its narrative, which tells of a straight woman’s
attempts to convert a gay man and ruin his homosexual relationships, with its
intended audience and the identification it elicits from that audience? Does this
project serve prejudicial, heterosexist purposes and ask us to become complicit
with them? On the contrary, it would seem that Fag Hag attempts to enact a critique
of how gay male culture exploits women, at the same time as engendering gay
male empathy with that exploitation, so that we may be able to take some
responsibility.
Despite her apparently evangelical heterosexuality, Natalie Stathis does not exhibit
any collusion with male homosocial interests. Quite the reverse. We have seen how
she attempts to protect ‘Fredo from the more vicious effects of homosocial ridicule.
There are no heterosexual men with whom she shares any degree of intimacy, let
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alone through whom she may acquire social privilege, or gain cultural capital
enough to exert homosocial leverage upon Peter’s homosexuality. Indeed, until
Peter pair-bonds with Lloyd, his and Natalie’s relationship is specifically constituted
as resistant to heterosexual norms and values. The nature of Natalie’s desire for
Peter is complex and contradictory. This desire is certainly not to settle down and
reproduce conventionally sponsored marital monogamy in order to accrue
authoritative credibility: it is Peter and Lloyd who do that, their normativity
emphasised by their socialising with the dreadful Calvin and Vera. Natalie
acknowledges that her desire for Peter does not follow prescribed fantasies of
heterosexual romance:
The last movie she’d watched was An Officer and a Gentleman ... she
tried to replay it with Peter and herself in the starring roles, but
gave that up at once; it was silly and embarrassing. Such
flourishing, grand passion would certainly never be part of their
relationship. (p.76)
Indeed her desire for Peter, whilst recognising and valorising his erotic appeal, is
manifested largely as a turn away from heterosexual men. Natalie asks herself why
she pursues Peter:
Was it because a beautiful, exciting, funny gay man who doesn’t
want to sleep with you is better than a dull, plain, predictable
straight guy who does? As far as Natalie was concerned, that was
more or less the case ... virtually all the slow inconsiderate
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heterosexual men she ever met had paunches and bad table
manners and loved to wear disfiguring clothing bearing the
hideous logos of inane sports franchises. (p.76)
It would seem, then, that Natalie’s evangelical zeal in her pursuit of Peter could not
be described as heterosexual, in that the relationship her desire generates does not
uphold male power by reproducing homosocial narratives. Natalie’s desire for Peter
certainly enshrines a considerable degree of smugness about the glory of male
homosexuality: she is afterall a function of Rodi’s gay male imaginary. Whilst
Natalie is portrayed as unrealistically admiring of gay men, as Fag Hag’s readership
we are not necessarily encouraged to align ourselves with this unremittingly
positive perspective on gay male behaviour. If Natalie’s attempts to bond with
Peter are resistant of homosocial narratives, then Peter’s treatment of Natalie
exhibits his commodification of her in line with the extent of his male power and
the access this gives him to social legitimacy, confirmed by Calvin and Vera’s
acceptance of him and Lloyd.
The title Fag Hag is provocative precisely because it promises the recirculation of a
derisory representation of women from a gay male perspective. We have seen how
useful the presumption of gay misogyny is for those male interests which retain
considerable structural power: heterosocial affiliations between gay men and
women constantly negotiate that hostile intrusion. Yet despite being published by
such a large concern as Penguin (admittedly under the more marginal imprint of
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Plume), Fag Hag manifests a specific, focused, level of subcultural address. The
publication of Rodi’s novels by Penguin may indeed indicate the profitability of a
constituency which benefits from a material proximity to male power. Despite
these factors, which may lead us to expect that Rodi’s novel would deliver merely a
gleeful recirculation of bitchy stereotypes and lazy misogyny, Fag Hag actually
offers a witty and incisive commentary on gay men’s relationships with women.
Peter’s desertion and commodification of Natalie is constantly framed as callous,
smug, and a turn not only away from his friend, but from a more exuberant
expression of his sexuality. (When Natalie breaks into the lovers’ house in disguise
and holds Peter at gunpoint, he has been living with Lloyd for some months.
Before she makes her presence known she observes her object of desire as he
watches five minutes of that gay institution, The Golden Girls. It is with his own
authorial voice that Rodi notes that Peter watches the show ‘without laughing’
(p.187), which is a fairly considerable indictment of his current lifestyle.) Such
betrayals are not handled by Rodi with the same kind of delight with which he
details Natalie’s scheming to break up Peter’s relationships, nor his enthusiasm for
her descent into ever more extreme behaviour in order to punish Peter’s desertion.
It would seem, then, that we could make a reading of Fag Hag which would suggest
that it challenges the commodification of women in gay culture, but more than
that, which invites gay male readers to speculate on the dissident potential of
bonds with women, a potential often disregarded and betrayed by our
assimilationist ventriloquism of marital (homosocial), heterosexual relationships.
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Fag Hag’s deliciously malevolent didacticism offers an opportunity to draw
together many of the themes that this book has addressed, which is why I have
introduced it here in the conclusion. The initial intentions of this work were
involved with questioning the nature and purpose of gay male culture’s interest in
women: Fag Hag makes an investment in relationships with women - which we may
now understand as heterosocial bonds - by drawing out the value of such
relationships from our familiarity with the subcultural commodification and
exchange of women. Fag Hag quite literally aligns such commodification with
powerful homosocial interests, in Peter and Lloyd’s socialising with Calvin and Vera,
in such a way as to enable us to see the assimilationism of our continuing
disregard for women and the potential heterosocial affiliations we may make with
them.
Clearly, producing such proximate and familiar representations of the
commodification of women by gay men is risky: representing the kinds of
knowledge which are sponsored or upheld by powerful, hegemonic interests is a
precarious dissident strategy; Fag Hag is, as a result, uneven, with a narrative which
is sometimes unclear about its authorial investments. Whilst we may see that the
novel licenses a degree of heterosocial commentary, it does also allow an
endorsement of conventional gay mores. There are occasions when Rodi slips into
a more spiteful narration of Natalie’s descent into filth and madness which ridicules
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her. Nevertheless, there are considerable opportunities for us to draw out the
similarities in the effects of homosocial exchange, and gay male exchange. In
Peter’s desire for romantic fulfilment in a relationship with a man, and in his
deprecated indifference to his relationship with Natalie, Fag Hag challenges gay
men to reconcile the competing and often contradictory elements of our political,
emotional and cultural investments. Fags and hags can be queer sisters.
Fags, Hags and Gender Dissent
In the first chapter’s analysis of A Streetcar Named Desire and the critical culture
which has shaped our context for reading that play, we were able to see how
closely aligned the interests of women and of gay men can be. Unpicking
inversionist knowledge allows us to see how much ideological work goes into
concealing the functional place homosexuality has in the reproduction of gender
systems that uphold patriarchy and capital through homosocial male bonds. Yet
not only in spite of inversionist accounts, but because of their investment in our
gender dysphoria, Streetcar offers cultural resistance by insisting on our ability to
comment on gender systems, and offers political dissent by denaturalising gender
roles as effects of homosocial work. This denaturalisation, along with the
conditions of homosexual representation in America in 1947, which necessitated
Williams’s closetedness, enables an extraordinarily powerful indictment of
heterosexual women’s powerlessness, at the same time as portraying the
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seductiveness and circumscribed privilege of femininity. Streetcar is striking in that
it offers a gritty, pro-feminist materialist critique of heterosexuality, and a
screaming exaltation of the performative guile of Blanche’s femininity, and
manages to hold both kinds of representation in a compelling oxymoronic
flourish. The second chapter offered a detailed examination of the narratives and
conditioned phobias that constitute male homosocial bonds. These bonds work to
maintain the security of male interests, and to enable a structure of knowledge
with which to stabilise men’s ownership of capital and the racial and class
distinctiveness of successive generations. Men’s authority is constituted in
homosocial narratives as power over women, in both quantitative and functional
terms: men have more power than women, and directly control women by making
notions of womanhood functions of masculinity. I have argued that understanding
our homosexuality purely as a non-reproductive sexual pleasure, cruelly legislated
against by an intolerant or ignorant state apparatus, is an inadequate structure of
knowledge, and will not allow us to gain access to the kinds of dissidence we can
see in Williams’s work. We must be able to exploit our position in gender systems:
homosexuality, constituted by homosocial doctrine as a threateningly proximate
abjection, acts to adjudicate male bonds. This chapter suggested that many of the
problems inherent in the conflicts between these sexual politics and politics of
sexuality, are attributable to the shape of homosocial mechanisms, which work to
seduce marginal interests into assimilation. I went on to elaborate heterosocial
bonds as a precarious, but promising arrangement by which gay men and women
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
could bond and in the process of that bonding enact dissent against homosocial
systems. Chapters three and four drew together the knowledge accumulated
through the first two by examining in detail texts which seem to make the
heterosocial move described in chapter two, and which were read to privilege
gender as the opportunity for gay male dissent, in line with the knowledges about
that category opened up by Streetcar. Fag Hag cautions us to be more considerate
about an affiliation that Roseanne, slash fiction, Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown and Streetcar show us has considerable dissident potential.
Despite the claims I have made about the ways in which gender ambiguity, gender
dissent and cross-gender identification are implicated in a whole range of gay selfidentifications, I am aware that currently such notions, which we might typify as
modes of gender dysphoria, are associated with transsexualism or more recent
transgendered positions, and not with homosexuality. However, in as far as
transgenderism seems to represent a radical engagement with the kinds of
damage and punishment experienced by those who cannot reconcile their identity
with the expectations of a hostile gender system, then perhaps we could see
homosexuality and transgender as alternative responses to similar conditions. (An
alternative to both would be a conformist, or assimilationist (as opposed to radical)
engagement with the kinds of damage and punishment afflicted by normative
gender systems: we may describe this engagement as heterosexuality.) Of course,
there are transsexuals who experience their dysphoria as a biological mistake, and
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seek reassignment therapy as a way of fulfilling a biologically authentic,
naturalised gender role to correct that mistake.4 However, there also seems to be an
ever more confident transgender movement which disputes the binary notion of
gender that is naturalised in heterosexuality.5 One expression of this recognition is
the double inversion undertaken by some transsexuals, not only of their gender,
but of their orientation, so that a queerness may persist in the chosen gender
alignment. Such a secondary inversion would indicate both the effectiveness of
queer self-identification as a disruption of gender normativity, and also the extent
to which transgender positions are themselves a function of dissident discourses
produced historically in gay subculture by a range of differently identifying
lesbians, gays, cross-dressers, drag queens, butches and femmes.
However, despite the similarities between homosexual and transgender dissent,
there remain considerable difficulties in alliances between the two movements.
Many lesbians and gays see the gender dysphoria of transsexualism as a
homophobic reproduction of natural gender categories, whereby same-sex desire
can only be tolerated through an inversion of gender that heterosexualises that
desire.6 There have also been a number of disputes between butch lesbians and
female to male transsexuals over questions of gender dysphoria and political
space. Aware of the need to protect newly emerging cultural spaces and political
articulations, some FTMs have been highly critical of the assertions by butch
lesbians of their concurrent female embodiment and gender dysphoria, which is
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seen as an appropriation of transgender discourse.7 Such disputes in part arise
because of the impoverished conditions within gay and lesbian culture for
discussing the gendered implications of lesbian and gay identities (butch and
femme, male and female), and this is a major problem for our culture, as I have been
arguing throughout. However, it is clearly problematic to suggest that lesbian
identities, which have always negotiated gender transgressions are now
appropriating transgendered discourse. The two movements share a heritage.
It is clear that not all formations of identity will promise effective political dissent.
Many gay and lesbian formations unfortunately remain hostile not only to the
notion of gender dysphoric transsexualism, but to gender dysphoria as a condition
of homosexuality. Emphasising sex-based versions of homosexuality, where our
only difference from straight normativity lies in our sexual practice, seems to have
become a dominant mode of gay civil rights discourse, where we ask for lower
ages of consent, or the opportunity to become open members of the armed forces,
or for the opportunity to have our relationships administered by state institutions,
on the basis of achieving equality with heterosexuals. What does gender dissent,
with its unsettling connotations of pathological third sex identities, have to offer
such lesbians and gay men, whose political project is to seek equality within
existing social formations?
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Heterosocial bonds are clearly going to be of little use to those gay men whose
social and economic security naturalises their performance of masculinity. For these
kinds of gay men their material access to power balances out their cultural
disadvantage as abject functions of homosocial knowledge to such an extent that
they may effectively understand themselves as ‘good citizens’. It seems unlikely
that we would expect an involvement in the messy, distressing and disruptive
business of radicalism when the inducements not to are so powerful and
pleasurable.
We can see the effects of this kind of understanding in the assimilationist politics
of Andrew Sullivan, discussed in chapter three. He displays what appears to be a
naive surprise that gay men continue to be denied the same kinds of civil rights
accorded to their heterosexual brethren, and sees gay marriage, gay military and
equal ages of consent as our rights as otherwise institutionally privileged subjects.
Such articulation necessarily identifies us with the kinds of oppressive and
powerful systems which continue to diminish the life opportunities of other
marginal groups. Is this really the kind of complicity that we want? For these kinds
of gay men there is no advantage in understanding their queerness as anything
other than an erotic disposition, oppressed as a function of ignorance and
squeamishness, but hedonistically exalted in the libidinous eroticism of gay
subculture to such an extent that it closes the gap between their exclusion as
homosexuals and their otherwise respectable masculine citizenship. We can see a
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more thoughtful and contorted version of this kind of thinking in Mark Simpson’s
work, which we looked at in chapter two. Here the naturalisation of the desirability
of gay masculinity is so complete as to stretch out into an appreciation of
heterosexual manhood as a misguided representation of queerness itself.
Here, and in Leo Bersani’s Homos, the ironic phallic doubling gay clone culture
often celebrated, which played on the tension between an acknowledgement of
our constitution as dickless faggots and our unmediated sexual obsession with the
penis (we’ve got one, and he’s got one too...), loses its transgressive flourish and
becomes an assimilationist hankering for the elusive homosocial subjectivity
sexual indifference promises. The security of that subjectivity is elusive for
heterosexual men, never mind queers, as we have seen. Patriarchal regimes
precisely gain their vehemence from the anxiety homosocial narratives produce in
potential male subjects, which necessitates the constant display of their exchange
of women and a suppression of homosexuality. However pleasurable, privileged
and materially secure such negotiations of prejudice are, they will never challenge
the very power base that is the source of that prejudice. As we have seen, the
disgust and oppression produced by heterosexual cultures about homosexual
eroticism are functions of the place queerness has in ideologies of gender, rather
than being due to inadequate levels of awareness or patronage. The
circumscription of their libidinous activities experienced by assimilationist, affluent,
white, middle-class, well educated, professional gay men who can pass as
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masculine, is caused by the functional effects this legislation produces in
heterosexual male subjects who must repress the queer threat and its proximity to
them. Such an awareness may comfortably elude privileged gay men because their
very performance of gender is a denial of those signs which indicate the presence
of demonised faggottry. Double incomes, double dicks, no kids and access to
metropolitan facilities can feel like good citizenship despite legislative difficulties.
These men aren’t fags, just as women who relish the privileges of marriage and the
humiliations of male objectification aren’t hags. There is no advantage for
assimilated gay men in making heterosocial bonds with women, or enabling some
other form of gender dissent, unless that heterosocial affiliation enables a
commodified exchange, as it seems to do in Pedro Almodóvar’s public consort with
female or transsexual members of his repertory company. In order to activate their
dissident potential heterosocial bonds necessitate a rejection of male homosocial
affectations of authority, and an empathic affiliation with the realm of the
commodified: an active identification with women, against (gay) men’s gender
privileges.
Despite the fact that it merely confirms our awareness of how hegemonies
function, it is ironic that the most materially and socially prosperous manifestations
of homosexuality are those which are furthest from an appreciation of the
institutional source of our oppression. These libidinous negotiations of prejudice
are not only assimilationist, they actually naturalise performances of masculinity
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and the male power that such performances broker. They are unlikely to facilitate
an understanding of what constitutes the intolerable in homosexuality, and thus
they are self-defeating. The more subtle ways of displaying masculinity gay men
find, the more we may attempt to ‘queer’ dominant performances of masculinity,
the more we effect a proximity between queerness and masculinity, then the more
we underpin homosocial power by bringing the threat of queerness closer to
homosocial subjects whose naturalised masculinity is a function of homosexual
panic and the ruthless commodification of women. Aspiring towards masculine
power, authority and legitimacy, maintaining an identification of desire to be and
to have masculinity, reproduces the structure of homosociality, a structure which
enforces the castigation of homosexual eroticism as a function of its
commodification of women. That aspiration not only undermines the dissident
potential of homosexuality in its assimilationism, but invigorates the very system
which is the source of our disempowerment, and collaborates in the continuing
powerlessness and exchange of women. Such concerns may not be consonant with
attempts to flourish as respectable, materially prosperous citizens: there is a
profound challenge in attempting to implicate our more successful and
incorporated gay men in political engagements and social responsibilities that
undermine their levels of comfort and assimilationism.
If hags and fags are ‘sisters’, then we are indeed queer ones. The sistership we have
the potential to share by virtue of our mutual oppression within hetero-patriarchal
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regimes, is ‘queered’ as a function of the way our identities are circumscribed by
the homosocial narratives that uphold those regimes. Yet if that queering of our
homosocial potential is an obstacle to bonds between women and gay men, it also
marks the dissident potential of an affiliation that by definition threatens the
integrity of male homosocial subjectivity, by eclipsing the power of that
subjectivity through the very axis of its structural integrity. Homosociality exists as
that which is circumscribed by homosexual panic and exploitation of women. As
heterosocial relationships make considerable demands upon both women and gay
men who participate in them in order that their dissident effectiveness may sustain,
they also often work, as we have seen, to threaten each member of the bond under
the most vulnerable term of their identity. Heterosexual women acquire social
credibility precisely through their naturalised connection to heterosexual male
authority: that is, the kinds of behaviour they enact in order to preserve their
heterosexual privilege are understood as natural expressions of their womanhood.
There would seem to be little value for women who wish to sustain their
heterosexual privilege in denaturalising that which is the very opportunity for
gaining access to rational cultural credibility. The effect, in relationships which
strive for heterosociality, of this reluctance to denaturalise femininity and gender
role-playing, is to ‘queer’ gay men’s unnatural, often feminised gender
performances. Gay men who female identify, are thus often cast, in heterosocial
relationships, as unnatural women, inferior and subject to disenfranchisement by
the ‘proper’ feminine performances of straight women. Similarly, if gay men do not
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accede their male authority in heterosocial bonds with women, by enacting that
disempowering identification with the commodified realm of the feminine, then
they risk entering into those heterosocial relationships on the same terms in which
women experience conventional homosocial relationships with men, where there
must take up deferential roles as functions of sexual indifference. We can see the
effects of the former tendency in Roseanne’s Leon, the Mary-come-lately; and we can
see the effects of the latter tendency in Pedro Almodóvar’s public consort and
exchange of women who are subject to the director for their livelihood. As we have
seen, despite Roseanne Conner’s heterosexuality, Roseanne offers considerable
heterosocial potential, as does Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; our
successes, however, will always be hard won, and plagued by assimilationist
tendencies which draw us back towards patterns which are sponsored by
dominant authorities.
We may suggest that the success of heterosocial relationships with straight women
may for gay men be related to their investment in queer sistership with lesbians.
For it is through relationships with lesbians that gay men really have the
opportunity to challenge their own gender power. Relationships with straight
women are often fraught because the terrain upon which those connections are
made is always mediated - that is, it is not a queer one, not one in which
heterosexuality as a given, natural phenomena is problematised. Furthermore,
some relationships between gay men and straight women promote the notion of
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gay men’s sensitivity which offers respite for women from straight men (such as
those represented in My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Object of My Affection). Such
relationships implicate gay men in a homophobic collusion with straight women’s
repression of the political and cultural challenge lesbianism offers to heterosexual
privilege and objectification.8 Gay men’s relationships with lesbians are conducted
under the mutual acknowledgement of queerness, such that the gender
performance of each is equally and celebratedly unnatural. Relationships between
gay men and straight women seem to be perpetually negotiating the structuring
absence of straight men, and this locks us, as we have seen, into a perpetual
dialectic with homosocial triads which produce a mutually alienating asymmetry.
Each agency of disempowerment remains active in relation to the other: queerness
remains perverse in relation to heterosexual women, who remain sexually
indifferent in relation to (gay) maleness. It seems very difficult to engage a public
affiliation with the ‘otherness’ across the triadic structure of homosociality without
re-presenting that ‘otherness’. As we have seen, in Roseanne, queers still seem to be
the playthings of natural folks, and in Fag Hag the withdrawal of gay men’s
attention leads to madness, however ironically it may be presented.
Queer sistership with lesbians may liberate gay men from the homosocial trap. On
the one hand a mutual recognition of queerness prevents any pathologisation of
performances which are unnatural, as it also prevents gay men from assuming the
stance of the oppressed martyr on the liberally inverted hierarchy of oppression. In
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heterosocial relations with women, both sets of identities are jostling for small
residual faultlines within homosocial systems: it is because of this that relations
between women and gay men are often adversarial, even when those relations are
striving for heterosociality, as we saw with the ‘theoretical fag hags’ of Attitude.
Shared queer culture with lesbians makes it very difficult for anyone to lay cultural
claim to the essential ‘truth’ of identity. Although some lesbian feminism does
challenge expressions of gay male female identification, that challenge is framed,
as we have seen, in the context of a denaturalisation of male power and
heterosexuality. In relation to this kind of political culture gay men’s empathic
alignment with the female realm of the commodified will not threaten the basis of
lesbians’ social privilege, as it often does in relation to straight women.
Furthermore, in bonds with lesbians gay men will be able to more fully escape a
reactionary entrapment by homosociality, and be able to more deeply challenge
the foundations of their male gender roles. Lesbianism is woman-centred, and is
organised as a resistance of those structures which impel women to act in the
interests of men. In heterosocial relationships with lesbians, gay men will be
challenged where they are strong and often culpable, that is as subjects who often
ventriloquise patriarchal values. The mutual acknowledgement of the
inauthenticity and contingency of gender performance would seem to be a
precondition of heterosocial bonds with lesbians: we’re all queers, and nobody can
pretend that that they’re a real girl (or boy): other than our same-sex desire, that is
what we share.
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The advances available to gay men through civil rights activism are achievable, and
nearly won. Whilst we must remain vigilant against the growth of the ultra-right,
and maintain our presence as lobbyists and politicians at local, national and
international levels, we must also remember that we’re queer and that this is
something tremendous, that we have our own cultures, and that assimilation is
cultural death. Our frequent political insistence on our tolerability has serious
implications that undermine our own alliances of sistership, communality, support,
resistance and excessive glamour which define us as gay men. We must remain
able to conceive of our identities not only as functions of sex and desire, of privacy,
domesticity and commodification, but of gender dissent, subcultural affiliation and
the identification with fellow fags, hags and sisters.
We must remember how alluring it is to be fags, queens, screaming sisters, to be
effeminate, to be fabulous, intolerable, emotional, hysterical, unreasonable, to be
bitch goddesses, twisted divas, mincing Marys, and stop pretending to be real.
There is a place for making advances in our civil rights, but we mustn’t allow
ourselves to be fooled into thinking that this means that becoming good citizens is
worth aspiring to, or possible. It isn’t.
1
Robert Rodi, Fag Hag (London & New York: Penguin, 1992) p.95.
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2
Robert Rodi, Closet Case (London & New York: Penguin, 1993); Drag Queen (London &
New York: Penguin, 1995); Kept Boy (New York: Dutton, 1996).
3
Rodi, Fag Hag, p.1.
4
See, for example, Caroline Cossey, My Story, (Winchester: Faber, 1992).
5
See, for example, Zachary I. Nataf, Lesbians Talk Transgender (London: Scarlet, 1996)
and Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (London & New
York: Routledge, 1994).
6
7
See Nataf, Lesbians Talk Transgender, pp.33-47.
For an account of these debates see Judith Halberstam and C. Jacob Hale,
‘Butch/FTM Border Wars: A Note on Collaboration’, Judith Halberstam, ‘Transgender
Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum’ and C. Jacob Hale,
‘Consuming the Living, Dis(re)membering the Dead in the Butch/Ftm Borderlands’
all in GLQ, vol. 4 no. 2, 1998.
8
In a Kilroy discussion programme, aired 9/6/97 on BBC1, on fag-hags and their
desire of gay men, a common theme was the intolerability of conventional
heterosexuality for women, yet there was no discussion of the possibility of lesbian
alternatives. Such an absence was seemingly a function of female homosocial
homophobia, and gay men's vanity in their attractiveness to women.
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FAGS, HAGS AND
QUEER SISTERS
Gender Dissent a nd Hetero s ocial Bond s in Gay Culture
Stephen Maddi son
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With love and thanks
to the women who brought
me up to be a Nice Boy:
Mary Gibbs, Lil Worrall, Lottie Charlton,
Doreen Maddison Betty Chilcott,
and Patricia Maddison.
And to AH, who’s a very Nice Boy.
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ACKNOWLE DGE ME NTS
I came into academia because I understood it to be a place where I could explore
what it meant to be gay, and the investments I have made in this piece of writing
have been so important because they have been about trying to understand how
my identity works. Of course, academia is not a free place for thinking about the
world in deep and meaningful ways, it’s a highly regulated institution where you
have to learn to be resilient if you want to write about anything that has any
emotional value whatsoever: in academia intellectual endeavour is surplus labour.
Indulging in the luxury of intellectual exploration has entailed the negotiation of a
number of governing institutional frameworks, from funding applications and the
professional induction process of PHd examination, succumbing to the competitive
frenzy of job interviews where a monograph accrues added status, to the
mechanical league tabling of my department’s RAE profile.
In the process of all these negotiations (oh, and in the intellectual pursuit too) I’ve
notched up a considerable number of favours in the last seven years, and there are
many people who I want to thank.
I’m grateful for the financial support I received from the British Academy, who
awarded me a three year studentship, without which I could never have taken this
seriously. I’m also grateful for the financial support I’ve been given by my dad, Phil
Maddison, and my mum, Pat Maddison, and by Andrew Hutton.
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The following people helped me on my way. They read drafts, bits of drafts,
scribbles on envelopes, they gave me places to stay, they gave me references, they
inspired me, or gave me confidence, or got me going. Love and thanks to: Helen
Barlow, Jonathan Dollimore, Alex Doty, Richard Dyer, Nicky Harper, Val Hill, Kate
Lacey, Vincent Quinn, Linda Rozmovits, Corinne Shirman-Sarti, Jane Valentine, Sue
Wiseman and Alicia Wood.
Thanks to staff and students I’ve worked with in the department of Cultural Studies
at the University of East London and at Sussex University who’ve taught me much
more than seven years of reading could have. Special thanks to the Information
Services Department at Sussex University Library who provided a service way in
excess of what budgetary realities may lead us to expect. Thanks to Bette Bourne
who graciously read bits of Belle Reprieve to me over the phone before it was
published, and whom I was too shy to thank properly at the time (there’s a
seriously bona Queen for you).
Spectacular, sequin-encrusted thanks to Alan Sinfield who has offered tremendous
support, institutional back up and vigorous intellectual stimulation. Big sloppy
ones for you, sweetie. Thanks to Andy Medhurst who reminded me that being a
Queen is the highest form of life we can aspire to. Thanks to my fierce sister, Nick
Dearden. Thanks to Ben Gove, with whom I shared every hand-wringing detail of
this. Thanks to Paula Graham, whose emotional and intellectual judgement I always
trust implicitly. Thanks to my mum, Patricia Maddison, a queer icon if ever there
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was one, and my dad, Phil Maddison, who’ve both supported me throughout.
Lastly, big hugs and kisses to Andrew Hutton, who makes me feel like l’ve come
home.
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CONTENTS
PREFACE & ACKNOWLEDGE ME NTS
INTRODUCTION
Fags, Female Icons and Stonewall
Fags, Hags, and Queer Sistership
CHAPTER ONE - FROM PATHOLOGY TO GE NDER DISS ENT: TEN NESSE E
WI L LIA MS’S A STREETCAR NAME D DES IRE
Part One: Pervers i o n o r Great American (Queer) Art ?
Inversion: Maurice and Unrequited Desire
Coming Out: Stonewall and Gay Politics
A Streetcar Named Desire: A Gay Play?
From Gender to Libido (and back again?)
PART TWO: A PLAY WITH GE NDER?
Stanley Kowalski: Polack, Stud, Husband
Miss DuBois: Queer Defiance?
CHAPTER TWO - H ETEROSOCIAL TEN DE N CIES
A Case of Sexuality or Gender? Feminism and Queer Theory
Homosocial Regimes, Male Power and Not Getting Fucked
Pulp Fiction: Fucking Butch
Homosocial Dissent, Female Bonding
Mapping Heterosocial Bonds
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Straight Talking: Get Some Attitude
Slash Fantasies / Heterosocial Bonds
CHAPTER THREE - ROSEANNE: DOME STI C GODDESS AS FAG H EROINE?
Roseanne and Political Credibility
Roseanne and Homosociality: The Queer Challenge
‘I Now Pronounce You Men’: Queer Marriage and the Domestic Goddess
Mary-Come-Lately or Gay Goddess?
CHAPTER FOUR - PEDRO AL MODÓVAR AND WOME N ON THE VERGE OF A
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN : THE HETEROSOCIAL SPECTATOR AND MI SOGYNY
A Case of Public or Private?
Liberal Titillation and the Regime of the Couple
Queer Opportunities
Women on the Verge of Queer Sistership?
The Woman’s Film as Gay Film?
Edward II: Queer Homosociality?
Hysteria and Heterosocial Dissent
CONCLUS ION
Fag Hag: A Cautionary Tale?
Fags, Hags and Gender Dissent
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INTRODUCTI ON
FAGS, FEMALE ICONS AND STONEWALL
Friday, June 28, 1969. 1:45am. There was a full moon. Judy
Garland had been buried that afternoon. And the queers on
Christopher Street had had enough.1
The riots that took place outside the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich
Village in June and July 1969 have become understood as the key moment in
the emergence of contemporary gay politics. The obstinance and militancy of
the Stonewall’s mainly black, Hispanic, and drag clientele on those nights has
become appreciated by disparate constituencies of queers as an homogenising
moment in which a liberationary attitude was birthed. Throughout the
intervening thirty years the Stonewall riots have become a queer myth to be
drawn upon and recirculated at times when we are in need of empowerment.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the uprising, which came at a time of
emergency, during an epidemic when our numbers are continuing to be
decimated, and during a period when Western democratic and economic
systems seemed to be sliding ever further to the right, was appropriately
marked then, with considerable levels of gay and lesbian Pride, expressed not
only in commemorative marches and demonstrations, but with scholarly and
experiential commentary, and, in keeping with the character of modern gay
urban life, a volume of merchandising, produced, distributed and bought by
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gay people. The level of investment made in celebrations of Stonewall may be
variously understood as the expression of an ever more diverse, sophisticated
and confident subculture in touch with its history, or as the commodified,
sanitised and nostalgic reminiscences of a modern political movement which
has failed to maintain the militancy so briefly expressed in a couple of civic
disturbances twenty-five years earlier. Whatever the meaning ascribed to
Stonewall, its importance as an identifiable moment of authentic queer activism
remains indisputable.
A particularly marvellous elaboration of the Stonewall narrative comes in an
eponymously titled film, directed by Nigel Finch and adapted as fiction by Rikki
Beadle-Blair from Martin Duberman’s historical-experiential account, and was
released in 1996.2 Stonewall opens with a close up shot of an Hispanic drag
queen applying her lipstick. It cuts to a documentary montage that displays
original footage of Greenwich Village queer3 life in the late sixties, interspersed
with sound bites from people present on the scene at this time. One of these
participants, with the status of an ‘eye-witness’, says ‘I think [the riot] had to do
with Judy Garland’s death’. This documentary sequence serves to set an
historical context for the narrative, but it is very short: we quickly return to the
now fully lip-sticked drag queen, who we later learn is called La Miranda. Her
head fills the screen, as she tells us:
See, there’s as many Stonewall stories as there’s gay queens in
New York: and that’s a shit load of stories, baby. Everywhere
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you go in Manhattan or America, or the entire damn world,
you’re gonna hear some new legend. Well, this is my legend,
honey. Okay? My Stonewall legend.
The film cuts to the fictionalised interior of the Stonewall Inn where three drag
queens are lip-synching to the camera, and we understand that the narrative is
now structured as a function of La Miranda’s perspective on Stonewall. La
Miranda’s legend follows the experiences of three participants in the riots: La
Miranda herself, Matty Dean, the new boy in town with whom the drag queen is
in love, but for whose affections she must compete with the assimilationist and
respectable Ethan; and Bostonia, a matriarchal black drag queen who is kept by
Vinnie, a closeted gangster who runs the Stonewall Inn. We follow our
protagonists through their brutalisation by the New York police, who raid the
Inn, and by the Government, who call La Miranda to the draft, and by the
Ordinances on Fire Island which circumscribe what Ethan promises Matty Dean
will be ‘heaven on Earth’. We also follow the diverse attempts of these
characters to make sense of this brutalisation - physical, cultural and emotional
- and their differing attempts to survive and to formulate political resistance.
Matty Dean is the outsider through whose eyes these political expressions are
tested. The Homophile movement, of which Ethan is a part, stages a ludicrously
understated, silent and respectable protest in Philadelphia, whilst the drag
queens offer a magical, reverent and celebratory initiation of a new young
sister.
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It is clear that this complex, fabulous film favours the flagrancy of the drag
queens, whose lip-synched, highly choreographed performances of songs by
sixties girl groups, such as the Shangri-Las, work as a kind of camp chorus that
frames the events of the narrative. These segments underpin queer ownership
of the narrative which Stonewall unfolds: the outlandish precision of the
miming and choreography, and the perfectly balanced tension in these
performances between dead-pan camp and sequinned excess, which disrupt
and segment the narrative progression, ensure that the film never slips into a
ventriloquism of documentary authoritarianism. As a consequence, the
rendering of these lives that are ruthlessly mediated by powerful and hostile
agencies is always more than a mere elaboration of oppression. The appalling
difficulties of queer life are represented without effacing the bravura and
distinctiveness of queer culture and resistance.
The script reinforces this celebration of the way in which the drag queens relish
their queer expression in the face of authoritarian intervention. When the police
first raid the Stonewall, its patrons accept a posture of grudging acquiescence,
removing jewellery and keeping their heads down. La Miranda refuses an order
to go to the washroom to remove her makeup and has her face pushed into the
filthy water in a tub on the bar used for cleaning glasses. But she takes control
of this humiliation: after the cops have released her, she shoves her own head
back into the water, holding it there whilst her tormentors look on in disbelief.
Finally, La Miranda flings her head back out of the water, tossing back the locks
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of her coiffure. Then she returns to her seat and takes out her lipstick for a
touch up, as the cops move in for further brutality. The queen behind the bar
addresses her sister:
PRINCESS ERNESTINE: La
Miranda girl, why do you always put
yourself through this?
LA MIRANDA: Why, Princess
Ernestine? Just for the sheer,
irresistible god-damn glamour of it all.
Much later, La Miranda has confessed to Matty Dean, who is now her lover, that
she fears the doctors she has been sent to for assessment by the draft officers,
as she once underwent aversion therapy. Matty Dean steps in and impersonates
his lover for the interview, wearing her Afro wig and loud makeup:
M ATTY DEAN (AS LA MIRANDA): Oh doctor, how fifties you be! Me, I’m
living in the other state, between maleness and femaleness.
DOCTOR: Which
is?
M ATTY DEAN: Fabulousness!
The need for such fabulousness is great. After a fascinating exchange between
Bostonia and her lover Vinnie, who wants the drag queen to have a sex-change
operation so that they may acquire respectability, Vinnie seems to accept his
non-normative desires and identity. He rushes to Bostonia’s apartment the
night of Judy Garland’s death to comfort his lover, who is bereft. Vinnie insists
they go out for ice cream, and the couple end up in an up-market restaurant.
When they are asked to leave, Vinnie throws over the table and Bostonia flings
money for the bill on the floor. Later, after some tender, revealing moments
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between the lovers in bed, seemingly still unable to tell Bostonia that he loves
him, Vinnie shoots himself, having scrawled the words in lipstick on a mirror.
Meanwhile, Matty Dean has returned to La Miranda, having temporarily
deserted her for Ethan’s respectability, seeming to understand the limitation of
assimilation.
The night of the riot leads our protagonists to the Stonewall, emotionally
bruised by personal traumas caused by having to negotiate illegality and
cultural and social oppression. Before we join them, dancing through their
sorrows, the film interrupts their narrative with some documentary footage of
Judy’s funeral. As we re-join the Stonewall’s queers, our perception of their
trauma is heightened by this reference, the knowledge of which is sustained as
‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart’ is playing on the jukebox as the police
make their fateful raid. The queens move into a more discretionary mode as the
cops barge in, but Bostonia restrains one sister from removing Judy’s song from
the juke box. Later it is Bostonia who first strikes out against an officer, igniting
the repressed fury which leads to the mass uprising.
None of the major accounts of the Stonewall riots and the emergence of Gay
Liberation in their aftermath directly attribute the uprising to queer grief at the
death of Judy Garland, but it is striking that most, like Michael Bronski’s, make
an association between them:
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Judy Garland is at the pinnacle of the gay male pantheon of
idolized women ... By the time of her death she had become so
much of a gay institution that many New York City gay bars
draped themselves with black crepe in mourning. More than
22,000 people paid their respects at the funeral home. Some
attribute the Stonewall Riots to the distress gay people felt at
Judy’s death.4
Bronski makes no explicit judgement about an implied causal relationship
between Garland’s death and Stonewall, but it is clear that for him the telling of
the riots requires an account of Judy’s funeral and her importance for gay men.
It isn’t going to make much sense politically or historically to reduce the
complex circumstances which fuelled the uprising to an event which, of itself, is
not related to years of brutal oppression; although we may convincingly argue
that Judy’s life, work and death are clearly granted a symbolic relationship to
that oppression. Her death was hardly necessary as the justification of civil
disobedience. Finch’s film works the idea of Garland’s death into a tapestry of
other pains and humiliations so as to give our political struggles dignity, but
also to insist on our cultural specificity. The emotional context Stonewall offers
for the riots, refracted through the idea of Judy, remains quintessentially queer:
it’s a device which substantiates queer culture and eludes any crude
reductionism to mandarin discursiveness. Of course La Miranda was standing
up for her rights when she re-applied her lipstick, of course the rioting drag
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queens, performing their high-kicks in the face of police batons and riot shields,
were defending their rights, but much more than that, these acts of dissent are
queer acts: they are never just political. Moreover, one of the most satisfying
elements of Stonewall is the way in which it genders male homosexuality so
fabulously. These aren’t just men sexually into other men, or men in frocks:
they’re great, gorgeous pouting Queens.
Here then, we can see that this epochal event in the history of homosexual
people is associated in a functional, if not causal way, to the death of a woman,
and the grief her passing elicited in men who adored her. Yet what about the
meaning of this symbolic relationship between the reality of being a
homosexual man and the veneration of Judy Garland? Why should a culture
apparently founded on same-sex desire be so interested in forming an adoring
relationship across sex difference?5 Dennis Altman notes the symmetry in the
synchronism of Garland’s funeral and the riots, which the Stonewall film so
perfectly capitalises upon:
It was amidst the exuberance that followed the riots - they
began, almost too perfectly symbolic a coincidence, the day
Judy Garland, favorite of so many ‘queens’, was buried - that
the New York Gay Liberation Front was founded.6
In the impressive documentary series Over the Rainbow/The Question of
Equality, produced in America by the Testing the Limits Collective, and screened
in the UK by Channel Four in 1995, veteran activist Karla Jay notes that:
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I do remember that Judy Garland died, and Judy Garland of
course was a great icon, particularly of gay men, so a lot of
people thought that there was a lot of added tension because
people were upset because Judy Garland had died. Personally I
think it was a coincidence.
Altman and Jay are understandably circumspect about emphasising the Garland
connection: they wish to stress the historical decisiveness of the uprisings, and
the repellent conditions endured by homosexual people which caused them.
The effect of this circumspection, however, is to dismiss the importance of Judy
as a taste preference, at the same time as it is clearly necessary that both bring
Garland’s funeral into the discussion. Bronski goes much further than these
understandings of Judy and similar iconic women stars as mere taste for
queens:
Gay men responded emotionally to films and to the men in
films through identification with women stars. In film semiotics,
women are the vehicle of emotion and sexual passion ... There
are hosts of female actors, singers and personalities with whom
gay men have strongly identified. Some have been practically
deified: Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand.7
Here there are two possible explanations for this association gay men have with
women film stars: that they are the vehicle through which gay audiences could
understand and organise their desire of male film stars, and that women stars
embodied emotion and sexual passion. Both sound fairly plausible: straight
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women and gay men do share a common sexual interest in men, and women’s
desire is ascribed cultural legitimation and widespread representation, so
desiring men through an identification with similar desires in women would
not only give gay men a much wider range of places to locate culturally, but
would also provide a potentially greater diversity of narratives with which to
make sense of that desire. Yet what about women being the ‘vehicle of emotion
and sexual passion’ for gay men? Is this level of emotional identification a
necessary requirement for desiring men? If this is the case, might we not deduce
that gay men’s interest in women as the ‘vehicle of emotion and sexual passion’
is merely a function of our interest in men and not in women at all? Or is the
expression of passion and emotion an end in itself for gay men, and therefore
an imperative of our interest in women and what they stand for in and of
themselves? If so, why should homosexually oriented men have any more of an
investment in emotions and passion than heterosexual men, who after all, do
produce passion in their desire for women? Is all that we share with women our
common sexual desire for men? If female stardom is a personal taste, why is it
one shared by so many queens, and why is this taste represented as being so
emblematic, constitutive even, of queer identities and history?
In 1980, in a volume written by members of London’s Gay Left Collective,
Richard Dyer and Derek Cohen offered terms that widened this understanding
of gay men’s interest in women. Their chapter is divided into two sections,
‘Traditional Gay Male Culture’ and ‘Radical Gay Culture’, with the former being
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mainly the work of Dyer, the latter mainly the work of Cohen. It is in Dyer’s
section, which questions the association between high cultural taste and
homosexual expression, that we find a much more discursive and analytical
treatment of gay men’s apparent interest in women. He says:
But the rightness of being cultured and hence queer, or viceversa, went further into an area I still have not disentangled.
Somehow to me cultural sensitivity was ‘feminine’; and being
queer was not being a man - that was why the two went
together.8
Here there is a suggestion that the association gay men make with women, at a
level of investment we may see in the ubiquity of Judy Garland’s presence in
narratives of Stonewall, arises out of something much more fundamental than a
subculturally derived, shared taste amongst gay men. Whilst for Bronski an
identification with women by queers is the opportunity for experiencing sexual
and romantic desire of men, for Dyer there is here a much more profound
proposal of queerness and its association with women as a gender refusal, ‘not
being a man’. Dyer goes on to say:
It is clear that, as I experienced it then, the equation of artistic
queerness with femininity downgraded both femininity and
men. I negate myself by identifying with women (hence
refusing my biological sex), and then put myself down by
internalising the definition of female qualities as inferior ...9
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There are complex historical factors at work here: Dyer is referring to attitudes
to which he was subject at a point before he became active in gay and women’s
politics; yet his self-directed criticism also bears the marks of Gay Liberation
anti-sexist politics of the late seventies, whose stance on camp is noted by
Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty:
In its ‘closeted’, less overtly political forms, camp has frequently
been denigrated and maligned as self-oppressive and
misogynistic ever since the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 made
gay culture more publicly visible on the evening of Judy
Garland’s funeral.10
Yet it is too easy to reproduce presumptive cultural narratives:
... Yet, with the women’s and gay movements, it became
possible to turn these values on their heads while preserving
that art-gayness-femininity link.11
For Dyer, it is the proximity of Gay Liberation politics and feminist politics that
enables a questioning ownership of gay tastes and practices in which we can
see the formulation of gender dissent. This questioning is also characteristic of
Dyer’s assessment of camp, in an article first published in Playguy, where he
talks about the gay practice of calling men ‘she’:
Calling gay men ‘she’ means I don’t think of them, or myself, as
straight men (with all that that implies). But given the actual
situation of women in society, and given that however hard I
try, there’s still plenty of male chauvinism about me, there is
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something rather suspect about this habit ... I’d rather gay men
identified with straight women than with straight men.12
Later, in Heavenly Bodies published in 1986, Dyer used a variety of first-hand
accounts of gay admiration for Judy Garland to set up a complex analysis of
how she signified as star, and how queer reading set up a series of empathies
through which she was accessible as ordinary, and yet sufficiently stellar and
beleaguered to symbolise both the frustration of queerness, and its resilience.13
Dyer makes a persuasive and influential insistence upon the social and cultural
contingence of gay adoration of Judy.
Despite the prevarications in Stonewall narratives, which minimise the
constitutive effects of Garland’s funeral upon the birth of Gay Liberation, Judy’s
very ubiquity within these accounts, if only to be dismissed in favour of more
weighty considerations, offers us a very substantial marker of the importance of
relationships between gay men and women. But what kind of relationship is
this? Why has the adoration of strident, emotionally resilient, privileged,
tenacious and plucky women become so powerfully understood as a cultural
expression of men who sexually desire other men? What does this tell us about
gay men? What is homosexuality when it is the practice of an identification with
women? Dyer’s work, and that of Michael Bronski, enables us to situate such
questions in a context cleared of pathological debris, where we may draw upon
a whole range of negotiations which validate gay practice. Elsewhere however,
we may not find that much lucid discussion of gay men’s identification with
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women that advances on this pioneering work and begins to answer the kinds
of question I offer here. This is not to say that much of the work which has been
done on this kind of queer iconography is not valuable: for example, during the
early 1990s there was considerable, often highly politicised, discussion by gay
men on both sides of the Atlantic about the suitability of that Ambitious
Blonde, Madonna, as a representative of our identificatory practices in relation
to women.14 Rather than address the issue of gay men’s relationships with
women, both iconic and fictional, and with real people, many critics and
academics have engaged with the complex question of camp, which we may
understand as a performance mode for handling hostile cultural conditions,
and which often involves some level of female identification.15 Others have
approached the notion of gay male effeminacy or drag performances as a
strategic homosexual expression.16 Both of these approaches gain further
discussion in later chapters: they clearly inform a territory that seems to be
constituted by gay men’s expressions of gender refusal, gender indeterminacy
and gender de-naturalisation. Yet we still lack analysis which systematically
maps the conditions through which relationships between gay men and
women are meaningful, and relates the formation of such relationships to
questions about the nature of gender, and the nature of homosexuality itself.
As Alex Doty has noted, ‘clearly, we need more popular and academic mass
culture work that carefully considers feminine gay and other gendered queer
reception practices.’17 This book attempts to address this need.
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FAGS, HAGS AND QUEER SI STERSHIP
The title of this book is provocative on several counts. The reference to
sistership appropriates a designation of familial relationships between women,
and applies it to relationships conducted by gay men, and in the process
exhibits an exercise of power, which is a function of my maleness and
intellectual privilege. Similarly, the use of the word fag may upset those gay
men who feel that we should always refer to ourselves in respectable or
dignified terms. Bollocks to that: as I make clear in this book, our desire for
respectability is an assimilationist trap, and I reject it. I’m not a decent
homosexual, I’m a flaming fag.
The use of the word hag is more problematic, particularly in the context of fag,
and it is not my intention to be insulting towards those women who associate
themselves with gay men, far from it. However, in aligning themselves with gay
culture, or with feminism, women reject particularly dominant, respectable
notions of femininity and femaleness; effectively they are undertaking acts of
gender dissent. This is the context in which Mary Daly refers to women as Hags
in her Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, as women contesting
patriarchal ideas of womanhood, who create Hag-ography or Hag-ology, and
this seems to me to be an appropriate use of the word in this context; I will go
on to argue that women who bond with gay men do so as a form of political
resistance.18 I am not unaware that my use of the term hag here will solicit
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(Radical) feminist dismay. Marginal and oppositional positions across a
spectrum of identities and experiences are compelled to jostle for cultural space:
different kinds of identities, invoking gender, class and ethnic categories all
inhabit similar and overlapping spaces. All of our articulations necessarily
invoke the identities and positions of others. We have a responsibility to allow
such jostling to challenge our own complicity with the oppressions of others:
that is one of the key projects of this book, to examine the ways in which the
oppression of women and the oppression of gay men are structurally linked.
However, I am never going to be able to articulate myself in a way which will
ventriloquise any form of feminism, and I don’t want to try. I want to use
feminism not to gain the approval of feminist critics, but to assess the ways in
which my own practices (and those of other gay men) can be contextualised
and understood through the knowledge they produce. My intention in this
book is to engage as incisively as possible with the gender politics of both
women and men.
Yet this book is about (largely male) gay culture, and terms such as hag and fag
have had meaning in this context, and I want to associate my discussions here
with those kinds of subcultural discourse, not to necessarily condone them, but
to address them. The call to sistership has been an important affirmation in
many feminist strategies, as I will go on to discuss in the second chapter; again,
this use of the idea of Sistership and queerness is not without precedent or
relevance in gay subculture. As we have seen, Richard Dyer has suggested that
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the process by which gay men designate each other as ‘she’ is about expressing
an identification against straight men and with straight women. Amongst the
collegial and formal acknowledgements in Alex Doty’s Making Things Perfectly
Queer lies one which calls upon the honorary sistership of those two little girls
from Littlerock and thanks a friend (queer sister?) who’s ‘the Lorelei to my
Dorothy.’19
In his passionate and politically fierce eulogy to Vito Russo, ‘Right On,
Girlfriend!’, Douglas Crimp picks up many of the issues raised by speakers such
as Larry Kramer, Arnie Kantrowitz and David Dinkins at Russo’s memorial service
in 1990 and uses them as the opportunity to assess strategies of activism used
by gay people during the AIDS emergency.20 Crimp reports that Kramer used the
memorial as an opportunity to affirm Vito Russo’s commitment to AIDS activism
by lambasting the decision by AmFAR to hold a benefit screening of the
recently released film Silence of the Lambs, on the grounds of its representation
of the mass-murderer, Jame Gumb as a ‘gay man’. Crimp’s essay covers a
number of issues germane to Kramer’s criticism and related to the
contemporary context of AIDS activism, but he concludes with an incisive
consideration of the differing, and contesting, responses lesbians and gay men
have had to Silence of the Lambs and its star, the lesbian icon Jodie Foster.
Crimp’s deliberations return to the cultural context of the memorial service, and
several times he marks Vito Russo’s ‘unashamed worship of Judy Garland’. Crimp
does not specify the identity of the girlfriend he salutes in the title of his piece:
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by their name, gender or sexual orientation. We may deduce that Crimp’s
‘girlfriend’ is Russo, the adored film critic who ‘pointed his finger at queers only
to tell us how much he loved us and to praise our courage.’21 The girlfriend
certainly isn’t Jodie Foster, nor even Larry Kramer or Mayor Dinkins, but ‘she’
might be Judy Garland:
...Vito’s was a feistier kind of dignity, not Jodie’s idea of dignity
but Judy’s, a survivor’s dignity. If we really want to honor Vito’s
memory - as a film scholar and movie buff, as a queer, an
activist, and a friend - we shouldn’t forget that he loved Judy,
and that his identification with her made him queer, not her.22
In the kinds of relationships constituted in the use of ‘she’ by gay men referring
to each other, and in Doty’s fantasy of he and his friend as the Marilyn Monroe
and Jane Russell characters from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as well as in Crimp’s
designation of Vito Russo as his girlfriend (and/or of Judy Garland as Vito
Russo’s girlfriend), femininity or womanliness is used as a marker of affiliations
which resist heterosexualised manhood. It is my project here to investigate the
kinds of representation made by gay men who would reject identifications with
straight men. These kinds of representations would seem to call upon a kind of
bonding which I initially refer to as queer sistership, in the spirit of gay men’s
long-standing affirmations of solidarity with one another expressed through
feminine designations; in the second chapter I theorise such acts of sistership as
heterosocial bonding, a term I introduce to signify how queer sistership resists
male homosocial subjectivity. In as far as this designation of sistership is
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controversial, this is intentional: these investigations will attempt to be as
candid and as self-reflexive as possible about the effects of gay male bonding
with women. This enquiry is not conducted through an analysis of sociological
relationships between groups of gay audiences and specific star images, but it
attempts to uncover some of the structural conditions that shape these
relationships by assessing the kinds of knowledge reproduced through specific
texts, and the kinds of contests enacted over the meanings of those texts.
The methodological tool used in this investigation is cultural materialism,
whereby texts, in the form of literature, television and film, but also reviews,
interviews and other cultural artefacts, are themselves seen as instances of
cultural reproduction. Textual material offers relatively tangible opportunities
for making an assessment of the conditions through which knowledge is being
reproduced. Cultural materialism assumes that no text can adequately account
for the culture which it represents: that is, its representation of that culture will
not be coherent, and will not be able to contain all the possibilities it necessarily
brings into play. As the social order reproduces itself it cannot but throw up
contradiction and conflict. It is the job of culture to produce knowledge with
which to handle that level of complication: more reactionary artefacts may strive
to explain away contradiction and abrasive conditions, smoothing away
incoherence to attain plausibility; whilst more radical and oppositional interests
may attempt to maximise the effect of incoherence and contradiction. It is very
important to assess the conditions for interpretation by analysing not only
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texts themselves, but the debates they attract, and the criticism with which their
meaning is managed. Systems of knowledge in which we make sense of our
lives abound with what have been called faultlines, that are a product of
abrasion between often competing locations of authority.23
This is not a book about star icons, nor is it a history of divas, dames, bitches,
martyrs, sirens, victims, bombshells, nymphettes, goddesses, tramps, vamps and
tarts beatified by gay men. Rather, what I want to do is to try and understand
the nature of gay men’s interest in women, and demonstrate the importance of
gender in understanding gay identities. I’m not after a big, totalising history,
but a more detailed, intimate account of relations and structures. These
concerns are pursued through four chapters, each of which works to historically
and politically situate its arguments. The first chapter uses the contests enacted
by disparate constituencies over the meanings of Tennessee Williams’s play A
Streetcar Named Desire to look at the models available for understanding gay
men’s representation of women. ‘From Pathology to Gender Dissent’ tracks a
number of different reading strategies that have been deployed by hostile
dominant critics, feminist critics, queer avant-garde performers, gay academics
and gay subcultural audiences in their investments in Streetcar. The chapter
concludes with a new reading which attempts to exploit gay understandings of
the relationship between Williams and his character of Blanche DuBois, by
associating them with a de-naturalisation of male power, that facilitates an
incisive critique of heterosexuality and an alignment with the interests of
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women. The second chapter takes up the questions about male power and the
structure of heterosexuality from the first and maps out some of the conceptual
and political struggles which have organised our understanding of feminist
politics and gay politics. It attempts to understand in detail the structural
relationship between straight men, women and gay men by undertaking a
detailed consideration of male homosocial narratives and the functionality
within them of women and queerness. This chapter uncovers heterosocial
tendencies which may offer a model for understanding relationships between
women and gay men. The latter half of the book then attempts to apply this
model to representations which seem deliberately to make this affiliation as
described in ‘Heterosocial Tendencies’. Chapter three notes the extent to which
straight women attempt to form alliances with gay men, and looks in detail at
the representations made of lesbians and gays in the American situation
comedy Roseanne, which has a considerable queer address. The analysis of
Roseanne processes the extent to which heterosocial dissent is a function of
faultlines within narratives of male homosociality. The fourth and final chapter
looks at the work of gay director and writer Pedro Almodóvar in order to judge
the extent to which gay male representations of women are able to overcome
homosocial narratives (and the inducements these make to gay men to
assimilate themselves within patriarchal interests) and make promising and
useful heterosocial affiliations.
28
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1
Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South
End Press, 1984), p.2.
2
Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1994).
3
Throughout this work I have tried to be historically accurate about the use of
terminology with which people attracted to their own sex, and people who
publicly identify as such, have labelled themselves, and have been labelled by
powerful social institutions, such as the psychiatric profession. The term
‘homosexual’ has carried with it connotations of the pathologisation by those
medical professions that have used it, and has as a result, been used with some
caution by gay men and lesbians themselves; however, the term is also useful
for references that cover disparate historical moments and political alignments:
in these instances I have used it. ‘Gay’ refers to those formations of identity
which arose out of the Gay Liberation Movement that emerged as the
subcultural organisation of anger unleashed in the Stonewall riots of 1969.
‘Queer’ refers either to generally disparaging notions of homosexuality before
Stonewall (although, like ‘Faggot’ and ‘Queen’, ‘Queer’ also has a celebratory
context for pre-Stonewall homosexuals), or to particular political formations of
homosexuality made since the early 1990s. Each of these contexts will be
elaborated upon in the relevant chapters.
4
ibid, p.103.
5
It is clearly important to note some definitions upon which I am resting these
discussions, and the ones that follow. I take sex and sex difference to refer to
29
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the physical and physiological distinctions between different sorts of people
that we refer to as men and women. Sexual orientation is the choice of sexual
partner, not necessarily a function of sex and gender, but often understood as
such. I understand gender to be the manifestation of a role which negotiates
the differential access to cultural and social power ascribed to sex difference,
usually organised in terms of heterosexual formations of femininity and
masculinity, and not necessarily related to sexual orientation, but often
understood as such. In as far as each of these terms arises out of a culture which
is not inert, then obviously each becomes dependent on the other. Once you
shift one term, cultural knowledge - all the knowing that we have - shifts or
inverts all the others. I take it as axiomatic that gender is an ideological
formation arising out of a contest between powerful narratives that naturalise a
hetero-patriarchal relationship between sex, orientation and gender, and
resistant, oppositional and dissident arrangements which disrupt, displace and
interrogate this naturalisation. Particular enactments of gender roles are not the
exclusive purview of either biological physical sex, or of any sexual orientation,
although powerful ideological formations would make such as understanding
precarious and necessarily an act of dissent against hetero-patriarchal
naturalisation.
6
Dennis Altman, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation (New York: Avon, 1971),
p.118.
7
Bronski, Culture Clash, p.95.
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
8
Richard Dyer & Derek Cohen, 'The Politics of Gay Culture', in Gay Left Collective
(eds), Homosexuality: Power and Politics (London: Alison & Busby, 1980), p.178.
9
ibid.
10
Corey K. Creekmur & Alexander Doty, 'Introduction', in Creekmur & Doty (eds),
Out in Culture: Lesbian, Gay and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp.3-4. Note again how discussion of the
Stonewall riots necessitates, for queer commentators, the ubiquitous
commentary about Garland's funeral.
11
Dyer & Cohen, 'The Politics of Gay Culture', p.178.
12
Richard Dyer, 'It's being so camp as keeps us going', reprinted in Dyer, Only
Entertainment (London & New York: Routledge, 1992), p.136.
13
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1986), pp.141-194.
14
See Lisa Frank & Paul Smith (eds), Madonnarama: Essays on Sex and Popular
Culture (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993) and Michael Musto, 'Immaculate
Connection', reprinted in Creekmur & Doty (eds), Out in Culture, pp.427-436. My
own MA dissertation written in 1991 and titled ‘Queer Icons: Women, Stardom
and Gay Subculture’ attempted to investigate gay men's investment in star
iconography by situating Madonna in the context of the adoration of earlier
icons like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe.
15
As indicative, see Andy Medhurst 'Pitching Camp', City Limits, May 10-17 1990;
Medhurst, 'Batman, Deviance and Camp', in Roberta E. Pearson & William
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Uricchio (eds), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero
and his Media (New York: Routledge, 1991); Medhurst, 'Camp', in Medhurst &
Sally Munt (eds) Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction (London:
Cassell, 1997); Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud
to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.307-325; Alexander Doty, Making
Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.1-16; Jack Babuscio, 'Camp and the Gay Sensibility', in
Richard Dyer (ed.) Gays and Film (London: BFI, 1977); Andrew Britton, 'For
Interpretation: Notes Against Camp', Gay Left, 7, pp.11-14.
16
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer
Moment (London: Cassell, 1994); Roger Baker, Drag: A History of Female
Impersonators in the Performing Arts (London: Cassell, 1994); Kris Kirk & Ed
Heath, Men in Frocks (London: Gay Men's Press, 1984); Marjorie Garber, Vested
Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).
17
18
Alexander Doty, Making Things perfectly Queer, p.7.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1978, pp.14-17.
19
ibid, p.x.
20
Douglas Crimp, 'Right On, Girlfriend!', in Michael Warner (ed.) Fear of a Queer
Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993).
21
ibid, p.309.
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22
ibid, p.318.
23
Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident
Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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CHAPTER ONE
FROM PATHOLOGY TO GENDER DISSENT: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’S A
STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
In December of 1996 a new production of A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the
Haymarket Theatre in London. It was directed by Sir Peter Hall, a pillar of the
English theatre, and it starred the noted, Oscar-winning American film actress
Jessica Lange in the role of Blanche DuBois. Big guns for a play first performed in
1947. Yet as critics of the Haymarket production indicated with varying degrees of
hyperbole, Streetcar ‘is one of the great American plays of the century,’1 even ‘one
the great plays of the century,’2 ‘a masterpiece’3 and Blanche ‘possibly the greatest
part created for a woman in the modern American theatre,’4 ‘one of the supreme
roles of drama.’5 Streetcar is a work for which critics, directors, actors, theorists, and
filmmakers maintain a tenacious interest that seems to be continuing up to the
fag-end of the millennium. Indeed Tennessee Williams himself seems to remain a
figure through whom considerable cultural capital can be exchanged. In 1992 the
prestigious University of Minnesota Press published David Savran’s study of
masculinity in the plays of Williams and Arthur Miller, whilst in 1993 a new
collection of essays Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was
published, as well as a new coffee table biography of Williams, by Ronald Hayman.6
Another biography concentrating on the writer’s early life, Tom: The Unknown
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Tennessee Williams appeared in 1995.7 In the Summer of 1994 London’s National
Theatre staged a highly prestigious and sumptuous revival of Sweet Bird of Youth,
and he remains a consistently produced playwright. The cinematic adaptations of
Williams’s plays continue to be shown on television from time to time, and in early
1997 the BBC broadcast a season of them to mark the West End production of
Streetcar.
Yet if Williams remains a figure that elicits notions of artistic greatness, worthy of
revivals and national acclaim fourteen years after his death, he also remains
implicitly understood as a homosexual, with an emblematic fixation on his women
characters. The National’s opulent production of Sweet Bird of Youth was the
occasion for the resuscitation in the British broadsheet press of a discourse about
the particular significance of Williams’s female characterisations, a discourse which
reappeared in critical appraisals of the Haymarket’s Streetcar. In 1994 The
Independent, which ran a full page feature headlined, ‘Tennessee Williams and His
Women’, suggested that:
Williams’s women, more than those of any other 20th-century
dramatist, only truly exist in performance. That they are merely
feminised men has been disproved time and again.8
That such disproving needs to be stated, again, might indicate that The Independent
was uncertain how conclusive the denial has been. There’s also considerable slight
of hand here: the allusion to ‘feminised men’ feigns an indeterminacy about the
2
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ideological narrative in question, which actually suggests that Blanche, Maggie, the
Princess and company specifically represent the playwright himself. In her From
Reverence to Rape Molly Haskell offers a more incisive and ingenuous account of The
Independent’s apparently disproved notion:
In the case of Tennessee Williams’ women, there is little confusion.
His hothouse, hot-blooded ‘earth mothers’ and drag queens Blanche DuBois, Serafina, Maggie, and Alexandra Del Lago - are as
unmistakably a product of the fifties as they are of his own
baroquely transvestised homosexual fantasies.9
This suggestion that Williams’s notable female characters were dragged up
versions of himself seems tenacious, even when it is being denied or supplanted.
For Alistair Macaulay, ‘Blanche’s displays of femininity are so self-dramatising, and
her confusions about masculinity are so emphatic, that her role - as it is written - is
very nearly that of a drag-queen, albeit highly poignant. Just how much selfprojection was there for Williams in creating her?’10 Writing about Streetcar at the
Haymarket in 1997 it seems clear that John Gross wants to acknowledge the denial,
even as he finds it difficult not to recirculate and invest in the ‘disproved’ notion:
Even if [Williams] hadn’t acknowledged as much, there would be
no prizes for guessing how closely he identified with [Blanche]. It
would be too cut and dried to speak of a homosexual subtext she is emphatically a woman, not a man in disguise - but the story
of her ill-fated early marriage to a young ‘degenerate’ (her sister’s
3
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word for him) strongly signals the presence of transposed
homosexual feelings.11
The Observer’s Michael Coveney refuses even to acknowledge the sell-by date of the
proposition in which he invests, that Sweet Bird’s Princess ‘can be viewed as a
metaphoric version of Williams himself on a bad day’.12
These critical responses offer particularly clear examples of what David Savran has
called the ‘virtual ubiquity’ of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s notion of the ‘Albertine
strategy’, which refers to Proust’s Albert-made-Albertine transposition, and
describes the transvestism of the authorial position.13 This transaction exemplifies a
preponderant strain of knowledge through which homosexuality is socially
understood, but which has not just sustained for mainstream critics: it has also
become an enduring part of gay men’s pleasures in plays like Streetcar. Blanche
DuBois, Alexandra del Lago, Maggie the Cat and Amanda Wingfield have inspired
and thrilled generations of homosexual men, like Mike Silverstein, who wrote his
‘An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams’ in 1971: ‘You were among the first to teach
me that women are my sisters, fellow-victims. Blanche DuBois, Hannah Jelkes,
above all the Gnadiges Fraulein ... these were the first sisters I had encountered’.14
But it’s not just sistership that gay men have found in works like Streetcar. The
iconography of brutish, irresistible machismo that is crystallised in the character of
Stanley Kowalski and refracted through those of Chance Wayne, Brick and the rest,
has provided a defining imagery for contemporary homosexual culture, as Derek
4
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Jarman has noted: ‘The modern Queer was invented by Tennessee Williams. Brando
in blue jeans, sneakers, white T-shirt and leather jacket. When you saw that, you
knew they were available.’15 If A Streetcar Named Desire can be understood as
presenting women as the opportunity for gay sistership and identification, then it
may also be understood as presenting men as the opportunity for gay desire.
It would seem then, that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is an ideal
vehicle with which to look at how dominant, that is heterosexual, groups and
marginal, homosexual groups, have handled competing notions about the nature
of gay identity and its relationship to identifications with women. Not only has the
play elicited critical responses of an extraordinary tenacity and passion, but was
written before the emergence of Gay Liberation: the considerable attention it has
generated spans key historical shifts in the nature of gay identity. This gives us the
opportunity to draw out the kinds of knowledge implicated in the contests
enacted over the meanings of the play.
5
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PART ONE
STREETCAR : PERVERSION OR GRE A T AMERICAN (QUE ER)
ART ?
The ways in which mainstream America theatre criticism, and indeed the US cultural
establishment generally, has handled Tennessee Williams show us that he has been
a source of considerable anxiety. On the one hand his works were showered with
acclaim and awards: when A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway in 1947 it
won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1952 Elia
Kazan’s film version won the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was first performed in 1955 and eventually ran for six hundred and ninety-four
performances, winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Critics’ Circle and Donaldson
Awards. In the West the emergence of Cold-War ideology in the early 1950s insisted
on the moral, spiritual and cultural superiority of the American way of life over
communism. Williams’s success, both at home and abroad, which we may in part
attribute to a degree of controversy about the sauciness of his depiction of
heterosexual relations, made it necessary for him to be embraced as emblematic of
that American superiority. Yet by the 1960s, critics such as Howard Taubman and
Stanley Kauffman began to question the way in which understandings of American
culture were being handled by Williams; they also challenged the work of Edward
6
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Albee and William Inge, homosexual dramatists who were also hugely popular and
successful. In 1963, a couple of months after the Broadway debut of Albee’s Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taubman wrote a piece for the New York Times in which he
claimed to want to help the people of America recover their ‘lost innocence’. He
entreated them to:
Look out for the baneful female who is a libel on womanhood.
Look out for the hideous wife who makes a horror of the marriage
relationship.
Be suspicious of the compulsive slut ... who represents a total
disenchantment with the possibility of a fulfilled relationship
between man and woman.16
By the 1970s, Stanley Kauffman was more explicit:
we have all had much more than enough of the materials so often
presented by the three writers in question [Williams, Albee, Inge]:
the viciousness towards women, the lurid violence that seems a
sublimation of social hatreds, the transvestite sexual exhibitionism
that has the same sneering exploitation of its audience that every
club stripper has behind her smile.17
I think Kauffman’s comments about female sex workers make it fairly clear that the
‘three writers in question’ aren’t perhaps the only ones harbouring a sublimated
viciousness towards women. In a deft move of patriarchal recuperation (his
presumptive ‘we’), homosexuals are positioned as pathologically bitter in the same
7
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moment at which women are reinstated into the protective and parochial fold - as
long as they don’t compromise the duplicity upon which male authority
reproduces itself (hence the alleged ‘sneering exploitation’ of the sex worker). But
Kauffman is rattled by these writers: his recuperation of patriarchal effects into gay
male misogyny is but a thin veil for his discomfort - the fluidity and integrity of his
authority is straining at this point, and requires a violent reinstatement
(‘viciousness’, ‘lurid violence’, ‘hatreds’, ‘sneering’) which betrays his anxiety.
Molly Haskell’s work in From Reverence to Rape showed how homosexual
representations of women may facilitate patriarchal purposes in their negotiation
of repression and in their desire to express erotic excess. Very quickly her feminist
analysis of Williams’s female characterisations was re-appropriated however, by
criticism with a dominant project. An example of such an appropriation is offered
by Stephen S. Stanton in his collection of critical essays published in 1977.18
Haskell’s thesis proposed a feminist analysis of filmic representation: it was
precisely this kind of work that gave strength and encouragement to similarly
critical discourses enacted by lesbians and gay men, and yet only three years after
From Reverence, Haskell’s repudiation of Williams’s women as lustful cyphers of
homosexual histrionics and her reticence about acknowledging them as
representations of a de-naturalised heterosexuality makes a recuperative
assimilation of her work for homophobic purposes disconcertingly smooth.
Whereas the tone of Haskell’s analysis is invigoratingly pejorative, Stanton’s
8
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introduction strikes an oily balance between outright bigotry and hegemonic
liberalism. In a volume hysterically concerned with rescuing Williams’s canonical
stature from the twin nemeses of diminishing ‘artistic’ quality and homosexual vice,
it is clear from the opening paragraph which poses the gravest challenge for
Stanton’s project. The increasing openness with which Williams represented himself
in interviews through the early seventies, culminating in the highly explicit Memoirs
of 1975, is attributed by Stanton not to the political and social shifts engendered
by several years of Gay Liberation agitation but to the playwright’s personal
‘confession’, prompted not by political consciousness or an alignment with
liberationary activity, but by ‘courage’ that was permitted by a ‘new tolerance’ in
the media.19 Such terms deftly disempower Williams’s agency as a flourishing ‘gay’
man whilst they veil Stanton’s recuperative intentions in liberal condescension,
secured by the smug insistence upon his distance from earlier critics, who with
considerably more ingenuousness dismissed Williams’s work as what has been
described as a ‘Fetid swamp’.20 Stanton magnanimously acknowledges Williams’s
‘shortcomings’ which, if they are to become great drama must ‘be better distanced
and universalized’. He considers Stanley Edgar Hyman’s notion of the Albertine
strategy to be ‘perceptive’ because it enables this universalisation:
[Tennessee Williams’s] plays are frequently transvestite since they
substitute women for men in the sexual relationships; and the
best
of
them
succeed in transforming
homosexual
into
9
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heterosexual relationships ... in drawing on his private experience,
he has universalized it.21
This circuit of incorporative recuperation is secured with reference to an instance of
Williams’s own attempt to incorporate: ‘A true faggot does not like my women. I do
not have a faggot, a homosexual, a gay audience. I write for an audience.’ Here,
Williams’s strategic retreat, itself a function of the homophobic terms under which
the playwright had to negotiate the public reception of his work (if not his own
homophobia), isolates the ‘gay’ audience from the universal fold to which Stanton
welcomes Williams - as long as he is really writing about universal heterosexuals
and vilifying faggots.
The difficulty which Taubman and Kauffman were attempting to bludgeon, and
which Stanton was attempting unctuously to connive away resides in Williams’s
homosexuality being so proximate to understandings of him as a great American
playwright. Cold War ideology rested on policing the virility of the imperialist
nation state, that is, on upholding the naturalised integrity of the heterosexual
patriarchal subject. The rise of psychoanalysis as popular discourse through the
1950s in America all too clearly manifested homosexuality as tangible and
unsettling to the internal confidence of that subjectivity. As Alan Sinfield has
shown, Freud’s reference to the notion of bisexual latency ‘meant that anyone
might be subject to deep-set homosexual inclinations. This was convenient for
witchhunters’.22 The idea of latency provided ample opportunity for the
10
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exploitation of anxiety in potential subjects, for it implied that the unspeakable
homosexual urge may possibly reside deep in the subconscious of even the most
manly American: certainly the more anxious that subject the more he would attract
an aura of paranoia and guilt. Yet, as Sinfield suggests, ‘latency was too good; once
you started looking, no one was exempt’23 and this could explain the gradual turn
from an opportunistic celebration of Williams as a great American artist to a
systematic demonisation of him that Taubman and Kauffman exemplify. It became
necessary to turn the anxiety from the threat within to the threat without; hence
Kauffman’s instructive guidelines: ‘look out for the baneful female’ for she is a sign
of homosexuality, of un-Americanism. For US cold-war ideology this ‘baneful
female’, the woman with sexuality, personality, presence is not only unacceptable
as the bearer, enabler, of American manliness, she is in fact not even a woman, but
a product of a warped homosexual imaginary. For it is also clear that whilst the
preoccupation of Kauffman and Taubman with the women characters in the plays
of Williams and his colleagues is an index of their Freudian understanding of the
homosexuality of these playwrights, it also represents an unease about the
ideological relationship between naturalised heterosexual gender roles and
homosexuality. Freudian notions of inversion, appropriated from the work of the
earliest radical homosexual writers and assimilated within Freud’s system of sexual
aberrations, provided a way for hostile critics to make Streetcar about
homosexuality - allowed them to render it perverse - which rescued them from the
difficulty offered by Williams’s problematising representation of heterosexuality.
11
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The abhorrence that is present in Streetcar for Taubman and his chums is not
actually a product of Williams’s homosexuality, but is rather revealed by its denaturalising effect upon systems of gender. The playwright’s sexuality enables an
uncomfortably incisive critique of heterosexuality. This idea will be developed
throughout this chapter and consolidated in a reading of the play which closes it.
Inversion: Maurice and Unrequited Desire
Stanley Kauffman, Molly Haskell, and Stephen Stanton, would seem to want to
situate Williams’s own identifications as being uncomplicatedly through Blanche as
a desirer of Stanley.24 It is important to be highly sceptical of such accounts, not
only because they pathologise homosexuality, or render it as an eternal state of
victimisation, but because they uphold homosexuality as an abnormal reflection of
heterosexuality whose function it is to normalise gender roles. Williams’s Memoirs
make it clear that he liked to dominate men, not the other way round, and whilst
this doesn’t provide conclusive evidence of the nature of his identificatory or
fantasy practices, it certainly enables us to problematise accounts of homosexual
desire that position gay men as necessarily locked into a masochistic erotic
relationship with an ultra-masculine stud.25 The undercurrents in such accounts
suggest a cultural, rather than particularly homosexual, fascination with the
authority and legitimacy of the butch male as the appropriate, proper male as
sexual subject, in relation to which feminine subjects (be they homosexual male or
heterosexual female) must simper in passive admiration. In the logic of their
12
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paranoia these critics subscribe to a prevailing psychoanalytic construction of
homosexuality as an inversion of physical and psychic sex identity: Williams’s
female characters express his morbid (and un-American) homosexuality which is a
pathological inversion of normal masculinity and femininity. However, the
pathological and heterosexist notion of inversion made popular through
psychoanalytic discourse in the 1950s was itself an appropriation of models of
inversion or of a third sex which emerged in the nineteenth century and were
separately proposed by the likes of Krafft-Ebing, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Havelock
Ellis, who were attempting to make sense of their desires.26
Inversion was initially proposed by early homosexual writers as a way of
naturalising what had been perceived first as sinful, and then later, perverse
behaviour. Ironically the later appropriation of inversion, or third-sex, theories by
Freud provided a whole new clinical, and later institutional, context for the
legitimation of the idea of homosexuality as perversion. The concept of inversion is
predicated on a ‘natural’, biological division of the species along gender lines, and
the idea subsequently circulated culturally as an expression of the need to suggest
the inevitability of campy stereotypes for gay men and butch stereotypes for
lesbians, and then explain that stereotype as scientific (medical) fact.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, began to write about what he called the
third sex in an attempt to intervene in the juridical regulation of ‘unnatural
13
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fornication’ in the 1860s. Ulrichs’ notion of the third sex, or Uranism, was based on
a dichotomy of body and soul in which a mis-match has taken place in the first
three months of foetal development; the same period in which the medical
profession was asserting that physical hermaphrodism became manifested: indeed,
inversion was called a ‘hermaphrodisy of the mind’. The foetus is then left with the
body of one sex, and the soul of the other; however, Ulrichs had little conception
of how this mis-match would constitute the characteristics of a third sex: the only
area in which the concept really appeared to interest him was that of the reversal
of normal sexual preference.27
A crucial aspect of Ulrichs’ contention was that sexual relations between Uranians
and what we would now call heterosexual youths (‘Dionians’) should be decriminalised because he believed that most Uranians desired sexual relations with
heterosexuals:
‘Is a Uranian sexually attracted to a Uranian? A little or not at all.’
They were as little attracted to each other as they were to women,
for whom they felt abhorrence in sexual matters. The Uranian’s
object of desire was a person who was male in body and soul, that
is, a Dionian. Ulrichs recast the dichotomy of female and male
desire into a theory of the Uranian lover and his Dionian
beloved.28
14
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Ulrichs’ conceptualisation of homosexuality as a third sex became the prevailing
structure of knowledge on the subject for much of the next century. As George
Chauncey has noted, the end of the nineteenth century was a crucial period in the
emergence of understandings of homosexuality as the characterisation of certain
identifiable individuals rather than as a form of sinful behaviour in which anyone
might engage.29 Repudiated or moderated, Ulrichs’ notion predominantly
organised the discourse on homosexuality until the rise of social problem
discourses in the 1950s and 60s.30 Indeed, one of my contentions is that Ulrichs’
propositions, and the idea of inversion, continue to be deeply implicated in
ideological work in relation to sexuality, and specifically so in the consideration of
Tennessee Williams’s relationship to women as a sex, and femininity as a sign of
gender.
We can perhaps see the force of Ulrichs’ work in E. M. Forster’s posthumously
published homosexual (Uranian?) novel Maurice which translates many of Ulrichs’
preoccupations into an English class context; and which, although not published
until 1971, remains an important indicator of the prevailing knowledges of the time
it was written - a mere thirty years after Krafft-Ebing’s initial scientific consideration
of Ulrichs’ work, and fourteen years after Ulrichs’ own later writings.31 We could
perhaps suggest that Maurice was the first important novel in English literature to
assemble a ‘modern’ male homosexual identity; The Well of Loneliness occupying a
similar place in relation to lesbianism. It is, of course, lamentable that Forster’s
15
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novel wasn’t published earlier (especially after the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960), its latency is a depressing but
compelling missed opportunity: the possibilities for mobilisation and cultural shift
might have been diverse and substantial. Nevertheless, even though the novel
didn’t have the opportunity to circulate as The Well did, it remains an important
indication of the thinking prevalent at the moment of its conception, and since
1970 it has circulated widely and visibly. It remains an important instance of an
attempt to assemble a matrix of homosexual identities at a notably early point. I
want to suggest the strength of the influence that Ulrichs’ understanding of
abnormal sexual object choice, as a confusion of sex and gender, had at the turn of
the century, in order to then demonstrate how subsequent negotiations of this
model were remorselessly caught up in its concerns.
Maurice was famously inspired by a visit to the socialist writer and self-proclaimed
Uranian Edward Carpenter (who was heavily influenced by Ulrichs), and his
comrade and lover, George Merrill, who touched Forster’s bum, sending a sensation
‘straight through the small of my back and into my ideas’.32 Written at a time
during which the very possibility of homosexual desire as a discursive notion was
still in its infancy, Maurice necessarily exhibits the incoherences that are held within
the models of homosexuality Forster was mobilising, and which are displaced
across other models disputed and incorporated into those which he favoured. John
Fletcher offers a reading of the complex intersections the novel exhibits around
16
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divergent Platonic models of manly love which are themselves inconclusive.33
Fletcher asserts that Forster’s imperative happy ending is a vision of sexual
sameness, a ‘virile doubling’, possible only because of two crucial textual absences:
Maurice is notable for the absence of a theory of inversion, of
intermediacy or of cross-gendering such as marks the writings of
many of Forster’s homosexual contemporaries, e.g. Proust,
Radclyffe Hall and especially Edward Carpenter. Also noticeable is
its sexual inexplicitness, the absence of the theme of sodomy so
crucial to Forster’s other suppressed homosexual fictions which
turn on the act of sodomy as the symbolic act of male inversion
through which a range of other differences - barbarian/Christian,
missionary/native, officer/half caste, milkman/baronet - are played
out.34
I would suggest, however, that this is not strictly the case. Forster’s text is haunted
by inversionist structures, and consequently by an ideological imperative Ulrichs’
exemplified in his manifestos of Uranism, and which he reproduced so eloquently
(albeit with the most transgressive of motives) which gestures towards a gendering
of difference across desire.
Present amongst the counter-currents of Greek ideals in the romance between
Maurice and Clive is the spectre of class difference, which carries with it a
connotation of gender, paradoxically in a reverse formation to that which Uranism
17
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enacts. Homosexuality, most noticeably of the effete, dandy variety, was associated
with the leisure classes: they had the material means to enact an aesthetic - an
identity, and they had the money with which to procure working class men.35
Consequently a cultural association of effeminacy, which we could suggest was
locked into place by the Wilde trials, was enacted around upper-class identity.36 In
tracking the construction of the desires at play in Forster’s plot and character
system we find a substantial incoherence which pivots around the class-,
intellectual-, and thus, gendered identity of the protagonists. Clive is upper class
and a literary intellectual during his relationship with Maurice at Cambridge,
although he is noticeably, necessarily, not a dandy. He is a figure in whom the text
invests considerable anxiety: he mustn’t be a dandy in order to suggest a mutual
manliness in his relationship with Maurice, but he must be enough of a literary
intellectual to be familiar with the Platonic dialogues. Further there is Risley, in
whose literary intellectual circle Clive is implicated, and who is a powerful
background figure in the Cambridge part of the novel. Risley represents a
classically effete leisure class dandy; a figure situated perversely in relation to the
heroic manliness of our protagonists. It is in the measure of Clive and Maurice’s
difference from Risley at Cambridge that we gain an orientation as to the sexual
character of the principals: Risley is the known quantity, the foppish, sissy dandy
(‘They sat down, and Risley turned with a titter to Maurice and said, ‘I simply can’t
think of a reply to that’; in each of his sentences he accented one word violently.’37 )
in relation to whom Maurice appears as a rough, rugger playing man, and for
18
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whom we are led to believe Risley has a sexual desire: ‘[Maurice] had not spoken
before, and his voice, which was low but very gruff, made Risley shiver’ (p.33), and
furthermore an attraction which is conceived through a collapse back into Uranism
- Risley of the aesthetic sensibility (feminine soul?) and male body desiring the
gruff Maurice, who at this point is nominally Dionian, partially by virtue of the fact
that he is the object of the leisure-class effete homosexual’s desire, and therefore
he must be ‘masculine’.
Leaving university, Clive also leaves the leisure class and becomes, quite literally,
landed gentry, a responsible lord and estate owner. Maurice is distinctly middle
class at Cambridge and beyond, thus during his affair with Clive the arrangements
suggest a seduction of the Dionian Maurice by the effete, inverted Clive, whose
strategy of seduction is itself literary (‘I knew you read the Symposium in the vac’
p.56). As I have suggested, however, this inversionist structure must be unstable,
given the diverse deployments of Platonic ideals Forster enacts, Clive’s ultimate
refusal of physical love (‘‘I? It’s appalling you should attribute such thoughts to me,’
pursued Clive. Had he corrupted an inferior’s intellect?’38 ), and our knowledge as
readers of Maurice’s troubled feelings. Nevertheless, amongst the diverse notions
implicated in Forster’s schema, inversion, and its attendant gender structure, are to
be found, latently and crucially festering. Upon Maurice’s consensual progress into
the relationship with Clive his status as Dionian ‘other’ must dissipate - the
mutuality of their desire produces sameness, and their love cannot be sustained.
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Although, with Greek heroism and unlikely forwardness, it is Scudder who initiates
the sex with Maurice, their relationship, before the transcendent retreat to the
Greenwood, is characterised by the fear and exploitation that is a function of their
class identities.
Again, alongside the Greek ideals, the organisation of the homosexual relationship
is shot through with gendered notions of Uranism-Dionism. Forster doggedly
attempts to neutralise this tendency, but his vision of manly sameness is
destabilised by a rupture along the lines of class difference in which the desire is
constituted. There is a suggestion in John Fletcher’s analysis that Forster’s
imperative was the writing of a narrative in which his own paradoxical absence
from the happy ending could be conceptually, or at least fantasmatically,
reinstated. As Carpenter’s ideal of Greek and manly comradeship is shot through
with implicitly (although suppressed) gendered class difference, and posits a desire
which is compromised by similarity, and enflamed by difference (‘my ideal of love is
a powerful, strongly built man ... preferably of the working class ... Anything
effeminate in a man ... repels me very decisively’39 ), so we could say the same of the
desire that he inspired in Forster,
I want to love a strong, young man of the lower classes and be
loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket...40
and which is represented in Maurice:
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‘This too has gone wrong’ began flitting through his brain...He was
back in the smoking-room at home with Clive, who said, ‘I don’t
love you any more; I’m sorry,’ and he felt that his life would
revolve in cycles of a year, always to the same eclipse. [...] They
must live outside class. (p.208)
What the text does not, cannot, acknowledge, is the position which the writer holds
in the structures of Uranian desire that are being consciously disavowed in all this
manly Greek love, which can adequately be used to handle Platonic friendship (the
kind to which Clive is referring in his last meeting with Maurice when he says ‘But
surely - the sole excuse for any relationship between men is that it remain purely
platonic.’ p.213) but cannot do the job when the text requires something a little
more carnal. In order to participate successfully in the consummation of virile
sameness, Forster (and arguably Carpenter as well41 ) must disavow his own upper
middle class literary effete intellectualism, in the process suppressing the Uranian
inversion that constantly informs and structures the desire he represents in Maurice,
and mitigates against the happy ending. The retreat into the Greenwood cannot
sustain the weight of the desire for transcendence that the conflicting currents of
identity in which Forster is bound up in the novel require.
Crucially for the plausibility of his manly and symmetrical lovers, Forster is unable
successfully to supplant Ulrichs’ Uranian model with a Greek one - partially because
of the instability of the notion of manly Greek egalitarianism, and partially because
21
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of the anxiety Forster had about the identity he perceived himself to inhabit in the
Uranian model, which for him, we may now suggest, necessitated its suppression.
We
might
suggest
that
Forster’s
anxiety
is
one
precipitated
by
the
acknowledgement of a disjunction, particularly troubling in homosexual
arrangements, between identification and desire. Because he identifies himself as
not being what he values and exalts as a sexual being, the desired, the ‘strong
young man of the lower classes’, the implicitly masculine Dionian figure, he
exhibits a need to re-locate his identification away from the Uranian model in
which his desire is constituted, and closer to that which is the desired, desirable: the
masculine Dionian. The urgency with which Maurice seeks to secure its symmetrical
‘virile doubling’, is an index of the degree to which Forster found himself
enmeshed in a structure which gendered his desire, and which his class and value
system rendered him unable to be empowered by. Classified by his own desires
and tastes as a feminine man, a Uranian, Forster was locked into a continually
unrequited search for a plausible Dionian identification. It is for its exemplification
of this quite particular difficulty in the negotiation of homosexual desires to be
and to have that Maurice is useful.
Over half a century later, this inversionist model is still being used to enmesh
homosexual writers, with, it seems, little more opportunity allowed for the
possibilities of subverting or contesting a system still entrenched in Uranian
22
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principles. Whilst Williams states in the Memoirs that he wasn’t attracted to camp
men,42 there is no reason to believe that he had a masochistic orientation towards
Stanley (or Brando for that matter) as a ‘real’ (heterosexual) man. Such latently
inversionist accounts elide the power relations within and across homosexual
desires and identities, merely positing gay desire as a unitary position, reflexive of
a self-loathing desire for the unattainable ‘real’ man (Dionian): unattainable as both
an ego ideal or sexual partner. Inversionism cannot conceptualise a man’s ‘active’
masculine desire for a ‘passive’ feminine male partner; nor, for that matter, a sissy’s
desire for another sissy. Homosexual men must be locked into a struggle
simultaneously to find both acceptable points of identification in the available
systems which offer only the abjection of effeminacy, and to find the possibility of
imagining a requitable object of desire when the cultural imperative offers only the
endless unrequitability of ‘real’ heterosexual (Dionian) men. We can see the mirror
of this formulation in Radclyffe Hall’s melodramatic The Well of Loneliness, which was
first published in 1928. Amongst its many strategies, it offers the immutability of
inversion as God-given, and inverts are represented as inevitably suffering - but
with the worthiness, even holiness, of martyrs: Hall’s protagonist is named after the
first Christian martyr, is born on the eve of the Redeemer who saved by suffering
and the novel is suffused with religious motifs and language.43 The novel posits
lesbianism as inversion, and has little trouble conceptualising the desires of its
butch protagonist, Stephen Gordon, but collapses under the strain of attempting
to position the desire of her femme partners, Angela or Mary, who behave all
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wrong: Stephen desires them because she is a woman with the consciousness of a
man, and thus they have to be femme-acting; yet if they behave in a ‘feminine’ way,
how can their desire for Stephen be explained by the inversion of a male
consciousness in a woman’s body? They can either be femme-acting or desire a
woman, but within an inversionist account, they can’t be both.
This is of course one of the contradictions through which the heterosexual
hegemony proceeds, which allows for multiple accounts of the identities which is
its project to contain - inversion theories portray gay men as all limp-wristed
Uranian femmes in pursuit of a Dionian real man (lesbians as masculine butches
inevitably unrequited in their desire of feminine women), whilst disease models
portray gay men and lesbians as infectious, predatory figures, sin models absolve
the desire but damn the sexual practice and so on. These models are activated by
culturally-situated needs to police the boundaries of gender. Whilst each specific
discourse may prove to be disabling within its own frame, the diversity of accounts
that must proliferate, in order to attempt to contain all threatening possibilities,
produces faultlines in the cultural landscape.44 It is at the point of rupture, when
these discourses or stories collide, that ideological work is most anxiously and
viciously undertaken to secure the hegemony and (re)contain the contradictions:
these moments are opportunities for mobilisation and dissidence. Dominant
authority does not necessarily collapse under the weight of these contradictions,
but they are potential breaking points, at which new formations are possible, as
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the terms of cultural reproduction are contested and negotiated. Thus it is not
sufficient merely to comment upon the difficulties that ensue when we attempt to
make sense of our practices and validate our identifications or desires; we need to
be sensitive to the complexity of the power structures in which we are positioned
and in which we are jostling. If the rise of psychoanalysis as popular discourse in
America gave the narrative of inversion an authoritative invigoration in the 1950s
and 60s, then the growing cultural confidence and political activism of homosexual
subcultures enabled a dissident assault upon such hetero-patriarchal knowledge.
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Coming Out: Stonewall and Gay Politics
As we have seen, Gay politics emerged in the liberationary aftermath of the
Stonewall riots of June 1969 in Greenwich Village in New York. The riots acted as a
catalyst for the burgeoning political awareness and anger amongst homosexuals
which was engendered by a climate of heightened social unrest that characterised
1960s radical politics in America. The political character of the Gay Liberation Front,
which emerged within a month of the Stonewall riots, could be said to be largely
influenced by the strategies and rhetoric of the black power, feminist, student and
anti-Vietnam war movements that shaped the face of a dissident politics in the
States during the 1960s. A similar movement emerged in Britain, influenced by the
ardour of American post-Stonewall militism, but distinct in its negotiation of the
crucial 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which instated containing and liberally tolerant
notions of public and private, and opened but a small window of legal
acceptability for certain male homosexual practices in private.
One of the characterising principles of Gay Liberation was the development of a
politics of coming out, which sought to contest the reorganisation of dominant
regulation that had occurred in Britain with the premise of liberal toleration of
homosexual behaviour in private. Similarly, in America, an uneasy combination of
post-1950s hysteria about manliness, homosexuality and Communism, alongside
the veneration of citizenship in the ideology of the Constitution brought about a
state in which homosexuality could be tolerated, but only in private. Coming out of
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the closet was a crucial Gay Liberation strategy, and involved reversing the terms of
the public silence on sexual orientation and of coming together in unity. The effect
of mounting a politics around ‘coming out’, as Eve Sedgwick has pointed out,
however, is to reverse the process through which the containment is effected,
rendering ‘closetedness’ itself as a ‘performance initiated as such by the speech act
of a silence’.45
The boundaries of the normal, of heterosexuality, are policed by the continuing
connotation of homosexuality as an abjection; but this connotation is an open
secret, which naturalises the ‘normal’ by continually conjuring, but not speaking,
homosexuality. Instating the notion of the closet as a site of contestation, out of
which one can emerge, and through the invocation of which normality is secured,
was one of the ways in which the particular politics of Gay liberation came into
intelligibility. Crucial to the movement was the assertion of an identity politics,
similar to that of the women’s movement, whereby what had been perceived as
personal, possibly pathologised behaviour, became a political, positively affirmed
identity; slogans used by the movement included ‘Gay is good’ and ‘Gay is proud’.
This mobilisation also entailed the celebration of cultural forms that were
considered to be intrinsically gay and rejecting of ‘straight’ norms and values.
These forms eventually included drag, cruising, promiscuity, anonymous and public
sex, camp, aestheticism and theatricality, sadomasochism, pornography, body
building and body worship and a whole range of other practices problematically
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melded into an identifiable ‘gay sensibility’.46 However, there was a tendency for
the new liberationists to dismiss earlier political interventions, such as the
Homophile Movement when, as John D’Emilio has pointed out, it seems apparent
their work was a precursor to that of Gay Liberation, and in part enabled its
existence.47 Thus, although we could say that there were distinct and fundamental
discontinuities between the pre- and post-Stonewall eras, we need to emphasise
the particular character and tenor of the Gay Liberation rhetoric and activity, rather
than ascribe the earlier Homophile period to conservatism and the later
Liberationism to radicalism. It is also important not to subtend a neat model of
history which attributes the degree of political progression in direct proportion to
the passing of time and the emergence of new and distinct movements. Although
post-Stonewall activity within the Gay Liberation movement did represent a break
with the terms of the earlier Homophile movement, Gay Liberation did not become
the only rhetoric in circulation, even after Stonewall: homosexual women and men
continued to mobilise around political material that enabled them to manoeuvre
and gain some leverage or respite in the precise conditions in which they were
embedded. We could now suggest that these could be intelligible as an
intersection of geographical and spatial concerns (urban, rural, metropolitan,
national) with issues of class, age, ethnicity, education, affluence, marital and
parental status, all of which, amongst others, function as the determining
conditions for access to dissident, intellectual and sub-cultural materials. An
analogue of this trajectory of negotiating political and cultural models can be
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found in an analysis of the contests over the emergence of Queer politics in the
1990s which sought to critique what was represented as liberal and comfortable
Gay politics; yet Queer activism precisely mobilised the same kinds of political
rhetoric and direct action used by Liberationists twenty years earlier. The key to
Queer was that it attempted to sell radicalism and dissent to a newer generation
who had to own their own involvements.48
An important part of the negotiations that entail cultural change and progress is
the claiming of texts as indicative of particular moments or movements. This
claiming means involves a negotiation between existing reading positions and the
newer position elaborated by the text that necessarily produces absences or loose
ends: those parts of the text that are suppressed or glossed over, the characteristics
which strain against the older position from the newer. Gay liberation partly came
into intelligibility through the claiming of writers and other cultural producers as
gay. Not only did this legitimise the liberation project, but the action of claiming
itself was axiomatic, in that it brought the chosen subject out of the closet, and
brought them into a process of positive affirmation and collectivity. This activity
has been incalculably important in the development of gay identity as a positivity,
as a way of conceptualising a positive space in which to produce and imagine a life
in which same-sex desire is possible. In one of the collections of writings from the
National Lesbian and Gay Survey, ‘Andrew’ writes of the moment at which he came
out. 49 Taking part in a community play, a fellow cast member overhears him talking
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about the film Torch Song Trilogy and asks him if he’s gay. It seems to be the
collective acknowledgement of Torch Song Trilogy as a ‘gay’ film and as something
valued within that collectivity that enables ‘Andrew’ to identify himself. The
knowledges through which Torch Song is here secured as a gay text are context
specific, and rely on the apparently positive image the film suggests of a New York
drag queen’s homosexual lifestyle, and the relative rarity of such imagery. Yet this
action is also historically specific: the particular importance of Torch Song is
embedded in the cultural domain in which ‘gay’ circulates at the moment of which
‘Andrew’ is speaking, and we may presume is secured by an elaboration of its
positive elements (dramatisation of a coming-out narrative in which the gay man is
autonomous and dignified, depiction of harmonious and humorous domestic
arrangements, the opportunity for shared anger and politicisation in Alan’s murder,
and so on) and a suppression or glossing over of its less positive elements (the
awkward and pejorative representation of anonymous or promiscuous sex, the
primacy of normative, possibly heterosexualised domestic values, the fact that the
women have to lose out for the gays to triumph, so that Arnold may be the best
woman). Similarly when ‘Simon’ comes out to his father by extending his gayness
back through history, he must suppress Oscar Wilde’s marriage and children,
Auden’s resistance and Tchaikovsky’s suicide to elaborate the notions of collectivity
and positivity that define that gayness:
I said, ‘What do Proust and Auden, Oscar Wilde, Somerset
Maugham, Alexander the Great and Tchaikovsky, Michelangelo,
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Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Housman, John Gielgud and Marc
Almond have in common?’ He stared at me. ‘Add me to the list,’ I
said.50
Identifying the moments of suppression or of glossing that enable the elaboration
of a cultural position is an important way of being able to track cultural projects
historically. But any cultural criticism must remain aware of not only the theoretical
stakes involved, but the emotional ones as well. To vilify ‘Andrew’ in his alignment
with Torch Song would be to perpetrate a vast and heinous injustice: Torch Song
Trilogy is a titanic edifice of fabulousness. However, the circumstances that
precipitate our identifications need to be identified in order that we can assess the
scope our cultural negotiations have for dissidence or social change.
A Streetcar Named Desire : A Gay Play?
For those critics who have aligned themselves with the Gay Liberation project and
who have engaged with Tennessee Williams, that engagement has been structured
by the pathologising accounts instated by Taubman and company in the 1960s. In
keeping with the defining notions of gay politics, writers such as John Clum have
attempted to displace the inversionist readings of Streetcar, Sweet Bird of Youth and
others, with a reading that judges Williams’s work by gay criteria; that is, as
negotiations of the closet. Alas this project is grounded on a precarious terrain:
whatever the enthusiasm with which gay critics may wish to claim Williams, or
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recognise his works as emblematic expressions of the knowledges and practices of
gay culture, they remain products of a pre-liberation time.
Thus we can see that for gay theatrical critic John Clum, the principal concern in the
work of Tennessee Williams is the extent of his closetedness: this is a marker of the
degree to which he is useful to the agendas of Gay Liberation in speaking openly
about homosexuality. Clum writes that the playwright ‘was much more successful
at dramatizing the closet than at presenting a coherent, affirming view of
gayness.’51 For Clum, the closet is an intrinsically problematic realm that it is the
project of Gay Liberation to dissipate; yet his model of the closet itself perhaps
bears an unfortunate resemblance to a psychoanalytically constituted concept of
latency operative in American nationalistic paranoia: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,
though without a living homosexual character or overt gay theme, depicts in a codified
fashion a paradigmatic homosexual experience.’52 Even apparently radical critical
manoeuvres do not necessarily escape the entrapment of dominant and
heterosexist
ideologies.
So,
Streetcar
may
not
realise
any
homosexual
representation or characterisation, but holds an inherent, and latent, form of
homosexuality. For Clum, as for other gay critics, the homosexual-ness of
characters like Blanche DuBois is an effect of the operations of the closet and not
of a psychoanalytically ascribed pathology of inversion.53 The knowing, fallaciously
feminine disposition of Blanche then becomes a cloaking of the playwright’s
homosexual expression, hidden ‘within the actions of a heterosexual female
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character’ and this is a function of historical conditions (rather than psychic ones)
which censored the open representation of coherent homosexuality (p.150).
In both the earlier article published in 1989 and also in his book, Acting Gay: Male
Homosexuality in Modern Drama, first published in 1992, Clum elucidates Williams’s
dramatisation of the closet in lengthy discussions of how the theatricality of
Blanche constructs a series of gay codes that identify her as ‘the quintessential gay
character in American closet drama’.54 This theatricality is played off against an
eroticisation of the male characters, such as Stanley Kowalski, which makes them
the objects of the gaze, and Clum notes that ‘straight men could fantasize about
the sexual attractiveness and power these male characters had.’ This is true,
although it is a feature of male sexuality that is not limited to homosexual
representations. As Eve Sedgwick famously posits in Between Men and Craig Owens
discusses in ‘Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism’, the maleness of men, which is to be
consumed by men through the male gaze, is a central component of the
reproduction
of masculinity.55
The constant presence of the threat of
homosexuality functions to police the precarious identificatory relationships that
men are encouraged to form with idealised forms of masculinity. Thus the
suggestion that the eroticisation of Stanley alone signals Streetcar as a gay, but
closeted, text is a little premature. Clum’s suggestion of Streetcar’s representation of
a ‘paradigmatic homosexual experience’ seems an equivalent concept to that of
‘gay sensibility’, in that it calls on the recognition of certain subcultural practices as
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defining a homogenous gay identity. Of the characteristics I noted earlier that in
part seem to constitute this sensibility, Williams’s work, and A Streetcar Named Desire
in particular, exemplify cruising and promiscuity (in Blanche’s behaviour with
wagon loads of soldiers in Laurel), camp, theatricality and aestheticism (Blanche
again, as well as the theatrical and dramatic nature of Streetcar as a cultural form in
itself), and eroticism of the male body and body building (Stanley, with his shirt off,
torn, wet or in the process of being taken off). For Clum this archetypal gay
construction is Williams’s defence from the homophobia to which the playwright
feared he would succumb:
[Blanche] knows about paper moons and cardboard skies and
paper lanterns, but she also knows that performance is both her
allure and her protection. And William’s [sic] protection of his
homosexual subtext is achieved by hiding it within the actions of
a heterosexual female character. (p.150)
Clum is a little more indulgent of Williams in his later book than he is the article,
but his criticism is a little barren in that he does not anticipate particular audiences
for Williams’s work. He says:
The works of William Inge and Tennessee Williams are closet
dramas in their evasions, silences, and invisibilites [sic] and in
heterosexist language with which they surround their homosexual
characters. They are also plays about the closet itself and about
the terrors of being uncloseted. (p.173)
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Part of the problem here is an insufficiently cultural approach to both the terms
and conditions that were organising Williams’ own ability to conceptualise his
sexuality, and to the reading skills and subcultural strategies that typified gay
liberation activity. Proceeding from the understanding that Williams was not
writing explicit gay drama, Clum deduces that he must be writing closet gay drama
because this is a notion consistent with Clum’s own politics. In reading Williams
this way, he has to be selective in his account of, for example A Streetcar Named
Desire, in order to produce the coherence of his ‘closet drama’ approach. Clum does
not discuss the role of Stella or Mitch in the closet economy of the play: if Blanche
operates as a gay man, and Stanley is an object for the gay male gaze, how can this
account handle the positions of Mitch, who is a heterosexual man and who desires
Blanche, and Stella who is a heterosexual woman married to Stanley? As I shall be
discussing shortly, Mitch’s masculinity is not unmediated itself - through a certain
passivity and connotations of Freudian homosexuality - and Stella is represented
as a desiring, sexual woman. These factors at the very least trouble Clum’s reading:
within his own logic the audience for Blanche’s theatricality needs to be masculine,
in order not to rupture the ironic authority of her performance, and if it is the men
in whom Williams is apparently constructing the drama’s eroticism, then how come
Stella, as a non-theatrical woman is shown to be actively sexual - what happens to
the matrix of gender and sexual representation that Clum describes in this
instance?
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Further, in vilifying Williams for not making less closeted dramas, Clum is
anticipating Williams as a mainstream playwright and a subcultural one
simultaneously. Here the radical critique of Williams’s heterosexism is collapsing
back into liberal notions of sameness and equivalence. Clum’s frustration with
Williams is that he doesn’t treat his gay characters, who admittedly don’t fare well
(they are dead, subtextual or self-oppressed) in the same way as his straight
characters. Clum’s assumption is that all Williams had to do was open the doors of
his creative closet and liberation would flow through his pen and on to the
American stage. This is the limitation of gay liberation perspectives, which
insufficiently conceptualise the extent of the threat of homosexuality, and the
degree to which it is already being conjured by dominant ideological discourses.
Clum does acknowledge the brutal forces that make it difficult to be open, but he
does not conceive that these forces are not just merely producing silence
precipitated by the closet. In as far as the difficulty in openness is constituted by
the active production of sexual categories, rather than the mere suppression of
disclosure, Clum is unforthcoming. His model only adequately accounts for
enforced silence as the mechanism through which homosexuality is circumscribed.
The particular terms in which Clum mobilises the closet as an analytical tool have a
tendency to be ahistorical and essentialising: given that the notion of the closet
and the ideology of disclosure and secrecy that it discursively proposes came into
being with gay liberation of the early 1970s, and has been brought into question
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by recent queer initiatives, it seems curious to extend that tool back into a
consideration of texts written before 1970, in order to bring Williams to account in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, first performed in 1955, Clum
says:
Cat ... contains Williams’ most interesting attempt at measuring his
characters’ troubled relationships against the potential of an
abiding love between two men, an attempt that is mitigated by
Williams’ inability, or disinclination, to forge a positive language
for the homosexual love the play tries to affirm. (p.156)
Here the Williams that Clum conjurs is a figure wilfully trenchant in his closetry
(note the ‘disinclination’). Clum does note the bind the playwright is caught in: on
the one hand the troubled relationships are his ‘most interesting attempt’, yet they
are ‘mitigated’ by his own personal whim or failing in not forging positive
language. The rhetoric of positivity is one of gay liberationism. Clum’s failure is in
the way in which he situates the playwright outside the structures of knowledge
that are manifested in the play - if the play is apparently negative about
homosexual love, then this must be determined by Williams himself. A little earlier
in his consideration of Cat, Clum notes that the motif of arrested development
characterises Brick’s homosexual feelings. This is a Freudian notion in which samesex desire is emblematic of an insufficiently matured development out of infantile
polymorphous perversity. Yet despite having identified this as knowledge
structuring the depiction of homosexual desire in the play, Clum situates Williams
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outside the cultural forces which made such knowledge the abiding terms for
conceptualising homosexuality in 1950s America, and blames him for not conjuring
a more ‘positive’ representation.
A more imaginative attempt to locate Williams in relation to gay male culture
comes in Neil Bartlett’s production Night After Night. Vince, the barman addresses
the audience:
I fancied a change and I did go and see a more dramatic piece. I
don’t know if any of you saw it, it was that Streetcar with Miss
Leigh. Streetcar Named Desire, what a fabulous title. Oh, and she was
fabulous in it, I thought, although I know some people thought
otherwise...56
In the preface to his work Bartlett lists A Streetcar Named Desire amongst the sources
used to form a popular image of the gay man at the time in which the production
is set, 1958. Bartlett seems to be situating Vince through Streetcar in two ways:
firstly as a tragedy queen preoccupied with the idea of suicide as the represented
fate of homosexuals (‘...the kindness of strangers is all very well, thankyou, but Miss
Leigh’s husband in Streetcar Named Desire, what happened to him? ... Well, he killed
himself didn’t he?’) whom Vince can’t even name as homosexual; and secondly as
identifying Vivien Leigh’s portrayal of Blanche DuBois as ‘fabulous’ and
‘marvellous’ (twice). It is telling that Leigh-as-Blanche is more memorable to Vince
than Stanley, that apparently archetypal object of queer desire (note Jarman’s
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lechery towards Stanley, noted earlier...). As a point of identification it is clear that
Blanche is preferable to her dead husband (‘I didn’t find that very uplifting,
actually’), but not quite so apparent why Blanche would be preferable to Stanley. In
this characterisation of Vince as an archetypally mincing bar queen it seems to be
more important in securing the historical and cultural authenticity that he
identifies with Leigh-as-Blanche, that he desires to be like her, than he sexually
desire Stanley, and not just as a safer subject position from which to desire than
the husband (Vince does not articulate any sexual desire from the position of ‘Miss
Leigh’), but as a textual position that is ‘marvellous’ and ‘fabulous’. In other words,
given the range of possible responses that a gay man might be expected to
produce in relation to Streetcar, Bartlett elects to represent one in which his
character chooses not to identify with the only ‘homosexual’ in the play, and does
not represent a desire of Stanley, but who does find a meaningful and affirmative
identification in Leigh-as-Blanche. Of the four subject positions available to Bartlett
in order to signify Vince’s homosexuality (Allan, Stanley, Mitch and Blanche), he
chooses the identification with a woman. Blanche is not merely a position of
identification because she desires men, but because she is a woman, a ‘fabulous’
and ‘marvellous’ subject position rather than an abject who is identifiable only as a
function of the presence of somebody else in the room (‘By coming suddenly into
a room that I thought was empty...’57 ). In so far as the identity of Blanche’s husband
is ‘visible’, that visibility is only conceivable as a connotation, as is Vince’s own
homosexuality. Vince does not come out as homosexual, cannot, and he is not
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named as such: ‘people like me do meet at parties ... but they have come to terms
with the, you know, situation.’ In Bartlett’s judgement, what can be made explicit by
this homosexual man in 1958 is his identification with the starring actress, but
more than that, this is the identification that will make Vince meaningful to a
largely subcultural audience in the late 1990s.
From Gender to Libido (and back again?)
As we saw earlier, one significant problem homosexual writers like Forster exhibit
in their attempts to negotiate around inversionism is that they enact a suppression
of any connotation of effeminacy or female identification. In Forster’s case this
necessitates his own absence from the transcendent ascent into the Greenwood.
This suppression represents a preponderant strain of post-liberation gay cultural
activity. It was partly in an attempt to shift the security of the effeminate
construction consolidated by Freudianism that the macho clone image became a
predominant one in many urban contexts in which gay liberation flourished. This
strategy is less popular currently, but it was successful in installing a different
notion of homosexual men, one in which they could be masculine. However, clone
culture was less successful in shifting that part of the inversionist construction
which imagines homosexual men locked into an endless desire of the dionian
ideal, the ‘real’ man. Indeed, in some ways clone culture re-secured this structure,
and made it even more difficult to envisage the effeminate homosexual as an
object of desire - largely because it mobilised contest around disputing the idea
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that homosexual men couldn’t be masculine, rather than around a challenge to the
idea that masculinity should be the central quality to aspire towards or desire.
Gregg Blachford argues that the masculinisation of American and British gay
subcultures in the late 1970s did not preclude the idolisation of masculinity before
this time, but that ‘for the first time homosexuals themselves moved away from the
previous stereotype of ‘swish and sweaters’ towards a new masculine style which
has become the dominant mode of expression in the subculture’.58 In other words,
in the seventies gay men learned how to identify as masculine as well as to desire
the masculine.
Yet whilst this clone culture may have become a predominant manifestation of
urban gay life for a while, it would clearly be a mistake to suggest that it was the
only operative mode of homosexual expression, even as it continues to maintain.
But as Blachford suggests we may be able to characterise this movement as
instating a libidinous notion of gay identity that no longer acknowledged the
implicit relation between homosexuality and gender dissent or dysphoria. This
relation was established by the early exponents of the third sex model:
homosexuality was not merely an existing sex with an alternative sexual object
choice, but constituted a different gender all together. As we have seen,
subsequently this conception of homosexuality as an alternative gender became
understood as an inversion of sex and gender which produced the proposition of
male homosexuality as a pathological manifestation of femininity. Gay politics and
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cultural activity has been strenuously engaged with this complicated and often
repellent set of knowledges, and our subcultural negotiations are not consistent.
Whilst the rise of macho clone expressions has replaced the apparent fixation of
the invert upon the unattainable heterosexual dionian ideal with a more
acceptable, requitable homosexual object of desire, gay culture continues to
proliferate a remnancy of the gender structure inversionism implicated us within.
Gay culture no longer depends for its erotic satisfaction upon the willingness or
corruptibility of ‘trade’, but has proliferated diverse expressions of the gendering of
that relation: the cult of Jeff Stryker and other impenetrable porn icons, active and
passive fantasies advertised on phonelines, the gendering of personal ads in the
gay press around maturity/youth, active/passive, top/bottom, master/servant,
occidental/oriental,
black/white,
trade/queen,
hirsute/smooth,
dominant/submissive, daddy/son, employer/houseboy.
This reproduction of the primacy of masculinity, both as an image with which to
identify (to be), and as a body to desire (to have), is a process we might describe as
embodying the notion that hegemonies of oppression operate through
rearticulation. In this instance, the oppressive and dominant structure of
masculinity is rearticulated by a marginal group as something pleasurable,
empowering, desirable. In the moments of rearticulation the structure becomes
stronger as the power of its ideological centrality is reinforced, not by those who
necessarily profit from it, but in this instance by those who inhabit an identity
continually invoked in order to police the homosocial continuum. In Bodies that
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Matter, Judith Butler suggests that this rearticulation is a performative act, a
participation in the process by which dominant ideology is secured hegemonically,
by conjuring the possibility of dissent and contest.59 This is a development beyond
her performative thesis in Gender Trouble, which was widely interpreted as
suggesting that gender is a performance, and that performances which parody
dominant gender constructions fragment their power.60
One of the reasons why Gender Trouble proved to be so popular, especially with gay
male writers and activists, was that it was interpreted as promising an intrinsic
subversiveness to subcultural practices that lesbian feminism had traditionally
been critical of, such as gender-bending and drag, transsexualism, sadomasochism
and sexual role play. Sheila Jeffreys comments on what she considers to be the
dilemma facing the stars of ‘lesbianandgay’ theory:
How, for instance, is the phenomenon of drag to be made not just
acceptable but even seen as revolutionary in lesbianandgay
theory when it has stuck in the craw of feminist theory ever since
lesbians dissented from gay liberation? It is to be accomplished by
a return to gender, and invention of a harmless version of gender
as an idea which lesbians and gay men can endlessly play with
and be revolutionary at the same time.61
Jeffreys decries what she sees in Gender Trouble and lesbianandgay theory generally
as the elaboration of gender as merely a series of drag effects in which power
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becomes little more than a discursive metaphor. She argues that feminist lesbians
have fostered these theories as a way of building authority and success in an
academic environment where gay male sexuality has accrued a revolutionary chic
that Jeffreys suggests amounts to a reinvestment in liberal and individualistic
ideals.62 The trajectory of lesbianandgay or queer politics in Britain would certainly
bear out Jeffreys’ arguments about the erosion of gender as a vital and urgent
category of concern.63 However, Jeffreys’ dismissal as politically compromising
practices such as lesbian butch and femme role-playing, sadomasochism and drag
produces an analysis dangerously simplistic in its failure either to imagine the
seductiveness and pleasure of such practices and their expedience in given cultural
conditions, or the complex ideological contests through which such practices
become the site of subcultural formation, resistance and dissidence. As Butler
suggests in Gender Trouble:
gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematise
‘the natural’ in parodic contexts that bring into relief the
performative construction of an original and true sex.64
There is clearly a problem with some of the ways in which ideas derived from
Gender Trouble circulated culturally, which gave rise to an assumption that in our
gender performances we might shrug off troublesome power relations as easily as
one might strap on a dildo, apply a bit of lippy or slip on a frock.65 Lesbian feminist
writers have questioned Butler’s investment in gay male cultural activity,
suggesting that in making gay performances equivalent to queer ones, she erases
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the distinction between gay and lesbian, and subsumes lesbian women into gay
men.66
In Belle Reprieve, a queer adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire by Split Britches and
Bloolips, the roles of Blanche, played by the drag performer Bette Bourne, and
Stanley, played by lesbian performance artist Peggy Shaw, exhibit both the kind of
queer performativity that Butler suggests is a dissident intervention into the
process of hegemonic rearticulation, and the terms under which this dissidence is
both troubling to the natural effect of heterosexuality, and necessarily caught up
in the force of dominant rearticulation. When Stanley and Blanche emerge from
boxes on stage at the beginning of the play and confront each other, Blanche must
assure Stanley of ‘her’ credentials: before they can ‘get on with the scenes of brutal
humiliation and sexual passion’ - Stanley must find her ‘motive’ in the trunk from
which she emerged. As ‘he’ searches the trunk he asks, ‘what are little girls made
of?’ whilst Blanche frames the terms under which we are to view identity in the
play:
BLANCHE: I assure you that is who I am. My namesake is a role
played by that incandescent star, Vivien Leigh, and although
the resemblance is not immediately striking I have been told we
have the same shoulders.
STANLEY: (Looking at passport photo) Then who’s this here?
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BLANCHE: The information in that document is a convention
which allows me to pass in the world without let or hindrance.
If you’ll just notice the message inside the front cover, the
Queen of England herself not only requests this but requires
it.67
Bette as Blanche here self-consciously asserts her right not only to re-interpret the
iconic performance of the role by Vivien Leigh, but to perform Blanche’s gender as
any other performer would: this is the convention, the stage, that enables him to
‘pass’ as a woman character. Belle Reprieve exhibits the subcultural knowledge of
which it is a product, reflecting as it does the significance Streetcar and Williams
have in gay culture. A few lines later Stanley retorts,
Look, have you any idea how many people we have come in here
saying they’re Blanche DuBois, clutching tiny handbags and
fainting in the foyer? I’m afraid I’ll have to subject this case to the
closest possible scrutiny before I allow any of you to pass any
further. (p.9)
Here in the licensed space of the alternative stage, Peggy as Stanley performs with
the authority of male power, identifying the gay practice that inscribes the
iconography of Blanche’s dainty Southern Belle femininity. Those gay male
performers who come ‘in here’, into the subcultural space, who clutch tiny
handbags and faint, are deploying femininity. Later, Stella, the woman-as-feminine
performer in Belle Reprieve, rearticulates the natural values of that femininity, and
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how she learned their characteristics from her (queer?) sister, waiting for her to
come home from Woolworth’s, observing her mannerisms and affectations,
admiring her entrance down the staircase to receive her ‘gentlemen callers’. The
irony in this performance space is that (Lois as) Stella’s admission comes but a few
lines after we’ve heard her role model in the bath:
BLANCHE: One day I’ll probably just dissolve in the bath. They’ll
come looking for me, but there’ll be nothing left. ‘Drag Queen
Dissolves in Bathtub,’ that’ll be the headline. (p.13)
In an alternative, avant-garde political theatrical convention, to an audience
subculturally conversant with the Brechtian levels of irony employed in these
exchanges, and aware that they are being invited to participate in disrupting the
rearticulation of ‘natural’, conventional gender structures, Belle Reprieve re-inscribes
Williams’s play with a sense of artifice which validates queer subcultural gender
play, and troubles the categories of normality in which all our knowledges are
necessarily located. Yet it is interesting to note that the play coheres much more
successfully around its presentation of Bette as Blanche and Peggy as Stanley than
it does around that of Lois Weaver as Stella and Paul Shaw as Mitch. The
underlying identities that validate these performances are congruent with
dominant models of homosexuality: Peggy playing a butch dyke being Stanley, a
man renowned as an icon of machismo, and Bette playing a drag queen being
Blanche, the archetype of the fey Southern Belle, are both instances, performances,
of the inversionist conceptualisation of homosexuality. Peggy performs Stanley so
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that she can desire the feminine Stella, and Bette performs Blanche so that she can
be subjugated by Stanley. Lois’ femme lesbian interpretation of Stella desiring
Peggy as Stanley, and Paul’s fey straight interpretation of Mitch desiring Blanche
are much less satisfying: Lois can signify as lesbian or as feminine, but the potential
to convincingly unite both terms, one conjuring the natural, one standing for
perversity, is limited.
However, the constitution of the theatrical space is not consistent: the play shifts
genres from avant-garde fairy-tale through political didacticism, realism and back
again. One crucial point of shifting is when Blanche is about to be attacked and
raped by Stanley. Bette has been flouncing around, rebelling against the group’s
avant-garde pretensions: ‘she’ aspires towards an authenticity that will validate her
gender performance as Blanche, she wants to be in a ‘real’ play, one that her
mother can come and see her in:
STELLA: You think you can play it?
BLANCHE: I have the shoulders. (p.34)
Yet as they progress into realism and return to Williams’s Streetcar where Blanche’s
fate is sealed by the narrative and by her gender identity, Bette again steps out of
the convention, rupturing the narrative, the rearticulation of patriarchal values, by
reinvoking the specific performative context in which ‘she’ is embedded. ‘She’
foregrounds the avant-garde and the subcultural domain in which they are
performing, and fragments the convention of the suspension of disbelief, inviting
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‘her’ subcultural audience to see her as a gay man performing femininity, but not
wanting to be treated like a woman, not wanting to be raped and humiliated:
STANLEY: Drop the stiletto!
BLANCHE: You think I’m crazy or something?
STANLEY: If you want to be in this play you’ve got to drop the
stiletto.
BLANCHE: If you want to be in this play you’ve got to make me!
STANLEY: If you want to play a woman, the woman in this play
gets raped and she goes crazy in the end.
BLANCHE: I don’t want to get raped and go crazy, I just wanted to
wear a nice frock, and look at the shit they’ve given me! (p.35)
In rendering his ‘womanliness’ as unnatural, the gay Bette enables us to catch a
glimpse of the gender order being reinstated, but it is a glimpse that momentarily
shatters the invisibility of the structure, catching its moment of rearticulation, a
moment when the hegemony is being re-secured. In restoring his masculinity Bette
takes control of his destiny once again, his performance of apparently authentic
feminine representation, of subjugation, is over. Similarly, if Peggy as Stanley truly
wishes to perform as a man, to be masculine, then she necessarily adopts a
position of dominance in relation to identities positioned as feminine in the space.
Here the performances constitute power relations: to perform is to cloak oneself
with the trappings of a culturally produced identity, it is to situate oneself in
relation to other performers, other identities. To perform gender is to perform, to
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reproduce, power relations: as Hilary Harris notes: ‘Sexuality may be about fucking,
but getting fucked is still about gender, even if ‘only’ metaphorically.’68
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PART TWO
STREETCAR : A PLAY WIT H GE N DE R ?
A Streetcar Named Desire dramatises the arrival of a middle-aged Southern Belle,
Blanche DuBois, in licentious New Orleans, and her intrusion into the libidinous
domesticity of her younger sister Stella, and her husband, Stanley Kowalski, a
working-class second generation Polish immigrant. The DuBois plantation, Belle
Reve, and the aristocratic status it represents, has been lost to the indulgent ‘epic
fornications’ of Blanche and Stella’s male relatives, and Blanche arrives unmarried
and homeless. Despite her aristocratic bearing, which infuriates Stanley, it is
apparent that Blanche is traumatised. However, she strikes up a romantic
relationship with one of Kowalski’s friends, Harold Mitchell, who lives with his
mother, which promises to abate both her material precariousness and her
emotional vulnerability. Mitch appears enchanted by Blanche’s bearing and grace,
his affection growing in proportion to the frustration and violence of Stella’s
husband, who is being deprived of his raucous sex life and domestic nuclearity by
Blanche’s continuing presence: this becomes more evident when we learn that
Stella is about to have a baby. Stanley discovers that Blanche was sacked from her
position as a teacher of English for seducing a seventeen year old pupil, and that
her reputation for sexual excess at the Hotel Flamingo got her hounded out of her
home town of Laurel. At the dramatic climax of the play on the night of Blanche’s
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birthday Stanley becomes violent and confronts Blanche with his knowledge of her
history; he gives her a bus ticket back to Laurel. Whilst they wait for Mitch’s arrival,
it transpires that Stanley has told his friend about Blanche’s past and he no longer
wants her. When Stella challenges Stanley about his behaviour he hits her again
and she goes into labour. Whilst her sister and brother-in-law are at the hospital,
Blanche gets drunk and parades around in a swirl of satin and romantic fantasies.
Stanley returns and the two fight; as Blanche continues to resist him, Stanley rapes
her. The play ends after Stella has returned home with her new baby, refusing to
believe Blanche’s accusation of her husband. Blanche retreats into delusions of
former romantic gentility and is taken off to a mental institution.
Part of the task of an agile and dissident reader, one who wishes to formulate an
interpretation which is culturally challenging, is to pose questions suggested by
the ideological and narrative arrangements of a text that conventional wisdom and
dominant productions and criticism have not posed or answered. One key
incoherence around which the dominant formations at work in A Streetcar Named
Desire destabilise, arises out of the question that if Stanley just wants Blanche out
of the house so that he and Stella can keep those ‘pretty lights going’, which is
how he justifies his actions to Stella, then why does he sabotage her chances of
marrying Mitch (which would certainly get her out of the house), and why does he
rape her? Why does he need to subject her to such behaviour? What destabilising
‘queerness’ does she represent that must be dominated physically and medically
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removed (she is taken away at the end by a doctor) from the apparently
threatening proximity to his identity and his homosocial matrix?
Within those accounts of Streetcar which position Stanley as the object of Williams’s
own masochistic homosexual desire it is axiomatic that the Kowalski conjured is
indefatigably brutish and powerful, an unassailable potency. Ronald Hayman
speaks of the way Williams apparently endowed his male characters ‘with the same
qualities that had excited him in men he had known’, Mark Lilly feels that the
playwright made it plain how far his male characters were his own homoerotic
icons, whilst Christopher Bigsby is positively salivating as he suggests that Stanley
‘dominates existence and as such in a way commands Williams’s respect, even if he
represents a brutalism which frightens’.69 It is my intention here to develop a
reading of Streetcar which attempts to address Stanley’s need to annihilate Blanche,
and which also invests in the constructive notion of gay men’s identification with
her. As part of this project it is important to look much more closely at the
apparently robust masculinity with which Tennessee Williams imbued Stanley
Kowalski.
Stanley Kowalski: Polack, Stud, Husband
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In his biography of Williams, Donald Spoto recounts an erotic fascination the
future playwright had for a man he worked with at International Shoe in 1934. He
was dark and burly, and for that period became Tom’s (Williams only became
known as Tennessee after the publication of his first story in 1939) closest
companion. He was called Stanley Kowalski:
It is perhaps hard to know how much of his character and
personality are represented by the character with that name in A
Streetcar Named Desire, but the attraction to him by Blanche DuBois
is certainly something that the playwright himself first knew.70
Such precise biographical knowledge lends a greater credibility to suggestions
about Williams’ erotic fascination with the character of Stanley in the play,
although this is a proposition about which we must remain suspicious; what it
suggests however, is that Stanley seems to be invested with a particularly
significant sexual character. Throughout the unfolding drama Stanley is
constructed as being aggressively, animalistically sexual; this is not merely a
reflection of the cross-currents of desire and gender that the play sets up: those
cross-currents are themselves articulated through a construction of ethnic and
racial difference. The notions of racial difference in Streetcar intersect with preexisting and re-circulating knowledges about the history of slavery and racism in
the American South and the powerful myths that enable these oppressions to
become plausible.
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The heady, licentious and lyrical atmosphere that the play establishes in the
opening stage direction calls upon an exoticism invested in New Orleans, which in
this dramatic context, ‘is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and
easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.’71 The racial identity that is
being particularly called upon here, it seems, is a ‘soulful’ Afro-American one; we
may note the ‘redolences of bananas and coffee’ in the warm air, with their exotic
connotations of the Caribbean, matched by the ‘infatuated fluency of brown
fingers’ (p.115) who add their own redolences of blues piano to the already heady
atmosphere. The steamy, sensual mise en scene in which the play creates a space of
passion and violence is to a large extent a function of ethnic exoticism, secured
through an elaboration of the racial difference of New Orleans’ apparent blackness.
So, what the text identifies as a cultural image, an ethnic stereotype, is specified
through the elaboration of racial difference - an apparent biological difference in
physiology. As Sander Gilman points out, ‘the association of the black with
concupiscence reaches back into the Middle Ages.’72 We might suggest, then, that
the quality of licentiousness that Streetcar invests in New Orleans is secured
through this evocation of a racial stereotype.
Lionel Kelly has pointed out that
[Stanley] is presented as an ethnic intruder in a site in which two
prevalent other ethnicities, the southern white and the southern
black, prevail. Both of these he seeks to subordinate, the one
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through an appeal to a legality that surmounts ethnic specificity,
the other through a braggart appropriation of their modes of
social being.73
There is clearly a danger in making Stanley’s Polishness equivalent to the blackness
with which the idea of New Orleans’ licentiousness is secured, and in the process
rendering invisible the particular ethnic location he occupies. However, there is a
slippage in Streetcar around Stanley, that is symptomatic of the contradictory racial
and ethnic messages the play produces and the complex historical context of the
play’s setting. New Orleans is understood to have a particular ethnic identity as a
place, secured through its mix of black and white, a place where normal boundaries
are obscured, where the principal cultural conflict is not between black and white.
As a Southern city New Orleans was on the losing side in the Civil War, and so
conjurs an air of loss, and of the conflict between old aristocratic, colonialist values
and those of the ascendant new America. It is in this milieu that Stanley makes his
claim as a citizen of ‘the greatest country on earth’: claims his right to participate in
the American dream, predicated on the promise of inclusion and immigrancy.
However, Streetcar positions Stanley unevenly: it manifests a space coded as black
and points towards Stanley’s occupation of it, and yet simultaneously and
contradictorily positions him as a Polish immigrant. Even before Kowalski appears
on stage an effect of his difference from Anglo-Saxon whiteness is produced; Stella
makes a point of telling her sister that Stanley is Polish, and Blanche suggests that
this is like being Irish, ‘Only not so – highbrow?’ and they laugh together (p.124).
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Here Stanley’s ethnic difference and inferiority is secured at the same moment as
Blanche and Stella’s superiority and sameness: they laugh ‘in the same way’. This
exchange helps to secure the sisters’ social superiority: they represent the old (and
lost) money of the aristocratic Southern white family. Later we can see that this
difference is secured through a conflation of primal sexual passion and bestiality.
When it becomes apparent that Belle Reve is lost, Blanche’s defensiveness leads her
to suggest that Stella was in bed with her ‘Polack’ whilst Blanche struggled alone
(p.127). And later still Blanche’s view of Stanley seems directly shaped by Victorian
racial taxonomy:
BLANCHE: There’s something downright - bestial - about
him!...There’s even something - sub-human - something not
quite to the stage of humanity yet! Yes, something - ape-like
about him, like one of those pictures I’ve seen in anthropological studies!... Don’t - don’t hang back with the
brutes! (p.163)
It is difficult not to conflate the racial work the play is undertaking here with the
kinds of knowledge about black sexuality produced in Victorian racial taxonomies Blanche even refers to anthropological studies.. Sander Gilman notes how such
work ‘commented on the lascivious, ape-like sexual appetite of the black’.74 This
view of Blanche’s, that Stanley is an animalistic sexual beast, a primal figure, seems
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to be endorsed by the text in the famous stage description which heralds his
entrance into the play:
Animal joy in his being is implicit in all his movements and
attitudes everything that is his ... bears his emblem of the gaudy
seed-bearer. (p.128)
Not only is Stanley an animal sexual figure metaphorically, even iconically, but by
the end of the play he is also a rapist. In her now classic book Women, Race and Class,
Angela Davis explores the force of the myth of the black male rapist, which imbues
black men with a predatory sexual drive, particularly in relation to white women.
She argues that the content of this myth is in direct opposition to the reality
endured under slavery where ‘the right claimed by slave owners and their agents
over the bodies of female slaves was a direct expression of their presumed
property rights over Black people as a whole.’75 Following the end of slavery, the
myth of the black male rapist was used to control and terrorise the black
populations of the South. Lynchings, justified with reference to the apparent
insatiability and animality of black sexuality, were used to parochially protect white
women, and strike fear into black ex-slaves. Given the particular kinds of imagery
Streetcar is calling up, and its setting in the South, it’s difficult not to read the play
as buying into this kind of mythicisation. Sweet Bird of Youth, written twelve years
after Streetcar, similarly points to a space circumscribed by white myths of racial
difference but situates the young, beautiful and white Chance Wayne there instead
of the anticipated black male sexual aggressor. Chance has returned to the small
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Southern town where years earlier he venereally infected his childhood sweetheart,
Heavenly, daughter of Boss Finley, the town’s patriarch. At the end of the play,
Chance will be castrated for defiling her, in the name of Boss Finley’s appeal to
keep the South segregated: his daughter Heavenly is no longer convincing as a
‘shining example [..] of white Southern youth - in danger’ from ‘them that want to
adulterate the pure white blood of the South.’76
Yet in Streetcar, this conflation of Stanley with blackness is not consistent
throughout the play. Whilst it continues to position him as an outsider, the speech
in which Stanley makes a claim for his identity as an American citizen, reaffirms
both his Polish ethnicity and his belief in the American dream:
STANLEY: I am not a Polack. People from Poland are Poles, not
Polacks. But what I am is a one hundred per cent American, born
and raised in the greatest country on earth and proud as hell of
it, so don’t ever call me a Polack. (p.197)
This celebration of the aspirational potential America offers is related to Stanley’s
working class identity: here his ethnicity is functioning in a way that signifies
Eastern-European second generation immigrancy rather than associations of
blackness and post-slavery racist rhetoric. However, this elaboration does
reproduce both his primal sexuality, and his class difference from Stella and
Blanche: he reminds his wife how common she thought he was when they first
met, as she showed him pictures of Belle Reve, ‘the place with the columns’. Stanley
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taunts Stella with her own desire for his common sensuality: he pulled her down
off the columns, and she loved it, ‘having them coloured lights going!’ And he’s
explicit about what has ruptured this libidinous domestic harmony: it’s the
intrusion of Blanche, with her airs, likening Stanley to an ‘ape’ (p.198).
So, at points the play relies on a construction of Stanley’s sexuality through
ethnicity somewhat distant from white supremacist notions of blackness and
bestiality, in as far as that (Polish) ethnicity denotes working class immigrancy and
the ascendant industrialisation of the new America. It is this distance from
‘blackness’ and the idea of him being working class that facilitates the possibility of
an eroticisation of Stanley by Stella (or Blanche), which would otherwise have been
unthinkable, given the fears of miscegenation we would expect old family
aristocratic Southerners like Stella and Blanche to have: it is worth noting that they
are a fallen, white trash version of the identity occupied by Boss Finley in Sweet Bird
of Youth; he would no doubt see their poverty as what happens when you don’t
police your daughters rigorously enough. Yet part of the play’s appeal is the way in
which it represents Stella’s active desire and the possibility of her pleasure in
Stanley’s sexuality, indeed this was one of the elements that was perceived to be
most shocking when it first opened.
The racial and ethnic implications of Stanley’s character in Streetcar are deeply
embedded in the play’s context and in its principal dramatic tensions. The iconic
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stature of Stanley’s masculinity, and its contestant position in relation to Blanche’s
Southern Belle femininity, her status as white goddess, are to a large degree
manifested through, and secured by a rhetoric of racial difference, reproduced
through myths originated to secure the plausibility of white supremacy. However,
this racial difference is not positioned in the text as a unified discourse, and there is
a contradictory relationship between the notions of blackness and animalistic
sexuality, and Stanley’s (Polish) ethnicity, which jostle in the text. This ethnicity has
a different cultural trajectory to that of the discourse of racial difference: it is
positioned in such a way as to be aspirational to the values of the American nation
(‘born and raised in the greatest country on earth’) and although it still occupies a
subordinate position, this is a function of class, as well as ethnicity. The effect of
this complexity of ideological imperatives is to render Stanley’s masculinity as
simultaneously dangerous and exotically sexual, but objectifiable: by Blanche as
part of their contest over authority, by Stella as his social superior and wife, and by
a potential audience (or Williams himself) as an object of sexual beauty. This last
position of spectatorship, enabled by Stanley’s ideological manifestation, is
particularly important when put into the context of a performance of Streetcar. This
play is notorious for its displays of male physicality: Stanley appears constantly to
be undressing, dressing down and coming on stage in wet clothes. As Jarman
notes, Marlon Brando as Kowalski secured a performative context for that character
that is largely intelligible as a visual sign of sex;77 indeed this was one of the
features of Williams’s work that was considered to be particularly shocking, and at
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least for Howard Taubman, such a scopophilic presentation of the male was an
indication of the homosexuality of the playwright.78 Both the power of the
spectacle and the complex cultural knowledges he inscribes coalesce to offset
Stanley’s authority as an apparently unassailably masculine and authoritative
figure. This modulates the possible meanings we may make from Blanche’s
presence in Stanley’s life, and makes the notion of Blanche as a threat to his
position and authority, one which requires substantial repression by him, more
plausible. This is central to my interpretation of the play.
Miss DuBois: Queer Defiance?
If the prevailing account of Stanley we inherit from those of Williams’s critics who
buy into Freudianism highlights his unassailability, then their accounts of Blanche
foreground her neurotic, vaporous powerlessness. One key problem identified by
several critics of the Haymarket production of Streetcar was that Jessica Lange was
too strong for the role. Charles Spencer wrote:
Lange proudly proclaims in her programme note that she has
‘built her distinguished career portraying strong and independent
women’, which sounds like the worst kind of preparation for
Blanche, who is weak to the point of disintegration and famously
dependent on ‘the kindness of strangers’.79
Michael Billington agreed:
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But, although Lange works hard at the role, I still find it hard to
believe in her as the delicate creature of Williams’s imagination.80
Both critics exhibit considerable investment in the fragility of Blanche, an
interpretation of her which they make Williams responsible for inscribing (rather
than, say, their homosocial expectations of women), and which they resent Jessica
Lange with her presumptious programme notes and strong independence, for
disrupting. Hence, it is her performance that is inauthentic, rather than their
reading.
Christopher Bigsby has offered an account of Stanley’s attempted destruction of
Blanche, which attempts to explain why he wouldn’t rather just settle for her
marriage and removal from his household. Bigsby has suggested that Stanley’s
sabotage of Blanche’s relationship with Mitch repays her attempts to ruin his
marriage, ‘for she has indeed set herself to undermine a relationship whose honest
and open physicality repels her.’81 He could be referring to Stanley’s violence
towards his wife, which is both honestly and openly physical, but his intention is to
naturalise the heterosexuality of the Kowalskis by reflecting it against Blanche’s
apparently duplicitous prudery. This neurotic Blanche, too genteel for sex, too
delicate for reality, too hysterical to survive, is authenticated by the most famous
and widely disseminated production of Streetcar. Vivien Leigh’s portrayal in Elia
Kazan’s film of 1951 is all tremulous voice, downcast glances and widely frightened
eyes: her affectations do not seem earthbound. Often it appears that those who
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have commented on Williams’s play, are in fact referencing Leigh’s performance in
Kazan’s film. Similarly, Jessica Lange’s performance in the CBS television film of
1995 is so preciously, insistently neurotic that it seems perfectly sensible to violate
her and cart her off to a lunatic asylum just to shut her up. Both readings of
Blanche have her flee towards fanciful excesses of madness in order to be able to
reconcile those elements of the play which doggedly oppose the plausible
rendering of her as simply victimised.
For all its ubiquity and prestige, and potent iconography, Kazan’s film remains,
necessarily, a partial reading of A Streetcar Named Desire, which fails to make sense
of Blanche’s character or of the enmity between her and Stanley. Vivien Leigh’s frail,
almost translucently white Blanche hardly seems capable of drawing breath, let
alone seducing wagon loads of soldiers, disposing of an aristocratic estate or of
threatening Stanley to the point where the ferocity of their enmity can no longer
be restrained. The English actress Sheila Gish, who played Blanche, has said that
she always thought that they made Blanche ‘tiresome’ in Kazan’s film, even though
she is ‘the greatest single part ever written for an actress’ because ‘they took all of
[her spirit] away.’ She goes on:
So come the second half of the film, you really like Stanley a lot.
You sit there thinking, ‘Go on, get her out of there.’82
Both the 1951 and 1995 filmed versions retain Stanley’s line from scene eight where
he is justifying Blanche’s exposure and expulsion to Stella. He says, ‘Don’t forget all
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that I took off her’: yet as he is played by Brando and by Alec Baldwin, Stanley takes
little more than a squirt of jasmine perfume and some carping off her. What is it
that she has she done to him? Afterall, how bad can it be when she’s supposed to
be so delicate and weak? Lange’s performance crystallises those frustrating
elements of Blanche’s characterisation, as I have suggested, in such a way as to
make the necessity of her expulsion from Stanley’s domestic territory clear. But can
such annoyance bear the dramatic and conceptual responsibility for the vicious
and destructive response it garners, even accounting for an assumption about the
ethical naturalisation of man’s authority in his own home?
At the end of scene five, Blanche is alone in the apartment, waiting for Mitch: it’s
Saturday night, Stella and Stanley have gone out with Eunice and Steve from
upstairs. A young man appears: he is collecting for the Evening Star. Blanche greets
him: ‘Well, well! What can I do for you?’
The young man is shy and self-conscious. Blanche doesn’t give him any money, but
gently and purposefully she flirts with him, turning up the heat as she holds him in
her presence. As the boy is leaving, Blanche calls him back, and asks him for a light,
using the opportunity to close the gap between them. She asks him the time as she
draws upon him:
BLANCHE: So late? Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons
in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour - but a little bit
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of Eternity dropped in your hands - and who knows what to do
with it?
(p.173)
It seems quite clear what Blanche would like to do with rainy afternoons in New
Orleans. She’s not content with flirtation, however, and tells him that she wants to
kiss him softly and sweetly, and she does, without waiting for him to accept. But
the reality of her situation is all too clear, and the Blanche of Laurel becomes visible
to us as she dismisses the boy, lamenting that it would be nice to keep him, ‘but
I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children.’ (p.174).
Whatever she may be, this Blanche seems to be neither a prude nor delicate to the
point of weakness or passivity. As the young man from the Evening Star leaves,
Mitch arrives for their date: as effortlessly as she drew the boy to the edge of
seduction, so Blanche now effects appropriate decorum towards the man she
wants, needs, for a husband.
BLANCHE: Looks who’s coming! My Rosenkavalier! Bow to me first!
Now present them. [He does so. She curtsies low.] Ahhh! Merciiii!
(p.174)
This contrast between Blanche’s encounter with the young man and Mitch’s
subsequent entrance, is a deliberate and considerable shift between sexual and
courtship modes that in its abruptness and apparent self-consciousness enables a
denaturalisation of the role Blanche projects for men, which is her negotiation of
(their) power. Blanche is able to express herself freely with the young man because
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she is situated more strongly than he is: she has greater social power than the
youth, whom she clearly intimidates, by virtue of her sex, class, maturity and
sophistication. But in relation to Mitch, from whom she wishes to elicit a proposal
of marriage, her propriety and the condition of her acquiescence to that institution
oblige her to be more circumspect. She must not threaten Mitch, nor give him
cause to take her sexual favours for granted, they are to come later, when
sanctified by his ownership of her in the marriage contract: all her coquetry may
illicit sexual desire, whilst axiomatically maintaining its constraint. Later, when they
have returned from their date, Blanche asserts the roles for both of them, she
reminds them who they are supposed to be; unlike Stanley who conducts his
relationships with women on his terms, Mitch invites Blanche to adjudicate his
behaviour - the discourse of courtship into which they have entered is one in
which she remains confident, as a function of her class experience. When Mitch
attempts to grope her, she effortlessly keeps him at bay, reminding him that just
because Stanley and Stella aren’t home, he shouldn’t forget to behave like a
gentleman. He defers to her, but doesn’t understand the irony in her presentation
of such sexual formality (p.179).
Just in case we haven’t understood the irony of her self-presentation, Williams adds
a stage direction for Blanche to roll her eyes, in the knowledge that Mitch cannot
see her face (p.179). Her performance of feminine propriety admits her artifice to
the audience. When Blanche suggests that Stanley and Stella’s absence is not an
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excuse for Mitch to behave ungentlemanly, it is her assertion of what his
gentlemanly behaviour should be like that he manifests - he, clearly, is supposed to
have no idea how he should behave (‘Huh?’) and she controls the terms of their
interaction. However, as Blanche makes clear, this is dependent on Stanley and
Stella not being home - were they to be, what has been established in this play as
normal heterosexual behaviour would be in evidence - a subordination of women
through violence sublimated as animalistic and magnetic sexuality (this is
represented by Stanley and Stella, and secured as normality by the similar
behaviour of Steve and Eunice upstairs).
If Blanche is weak, flimsy or delicate it is because as an unmarried woman she has
no material access to power, only to the privilege of her ethnic and class
experience. Arriving in New Orleans at the house of her sister on the streetcar
named desire, Blanche is in a desperate situation: she has lost her job, her husband,
her home and the class status it represented. As she tells Stanley, ‘Everything that I
own is in that trunk’, and the trunk is full of faded glamour, romantic memories
(love letters) and superfluous papers that are the only remaining tangible artefact
of the ‘place with the columns’. Whatever its cause, we should feel the seriousness
of Stanley’s enmity towards Blanche, and the threat that he represents to her: she
has nowhere else to go. If Blanche’s relationship with Mitch is tinged with
nervousness, this is not the pathological manifestation of her neuroses, but an
index of her precariousness: she needs a husband.
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Blanche’s vanity always appears related to the presence of a man, as in the scene
when she and Stella return from having supper at Galatoires whilst the men play
poker. Stella realises that the game is still going on, and Blanche’s realisation that
the men are still in the house causes her immediate anxiety: she asks Stella how
she looks, and bids her sister wait until she’s powdered her nose before opening
the door (p.144). Again, this vanity is a function of her anxiety, and not of pure
‘calculation’83 , nor of ‘denial’84 , or indeed of ‘helplessness’.85 Williams makes it very
clear that he intends us to understand Blanche’s self-awareness. Stella asks her
sister why she is so sensitive about her age, and Blanche replies explicitly that it’s
because of her vulnerability, her need to be wanted:
STELLA: Blanche, do you want him?
BLANCHE: I want to rest! I want to breathe quietly again! Yes - I
want Mitch...very badly! Just think! If it happens! I can leave here
and not be anyone’s problem...
(p.171)
It is significant that when Blanche asks Stella if she’s been listening to her fears
about her precarious position, Stella replies ‘I don’t listen to you when you are
being morbid!’ - Stella cannot accept knowledge about this gender structure, and
disavows her position within it by pathologising Blanche’s fears as ‘morbid’ - a
personal paranoia, rather than a structural inequality.
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The brutal reality of Blanche’s situation makes it easy to see why Kauffman and
Taubman find Streetcar’s depiction of relations between men and women so
troublesome. The structure of heterosexuality rests upon maintaining the
ideological integrity of gender performance: the unquestioning acceptance of
knowledge about the essential complementarity of gender roles, which naturalises
the power differential between them. Blanche is such a powerful representation
because her performances of her gender are so openly depicted as functions of her
material insecurity. Blanche’s class experience, and her whiteness, gives the
commodity that is her femininity added value, which it is clear she must utilise: the
precariousness of her position, and the emotional toll this is taking on her, make it
necessary.
Blanche first meets Mitch in scene three when she and Stella have returned from
Gallatoires. Stanley’s Saturday night poker game is still in progress, a paradigm of
homosocial intimacy. When the sisters return, Mitch is in the bathroom, and
emerges into the bedroom after the women have been exiled there: Stanley
whacks his wife’s thigh, to the edification of his confidants, to ensure her
subordination to the homosocial ritual fronted by the poker game. Mitch returns to
the game, but is distracted when Blanche puts on the radio. The other men don’t
mind the women enjoying the music, but this is Stanley’s house, and he reacts to
the competition for his buddies’ attention angrily. He jumps up and turns off the
radio. The stage description here bears notice:
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[He stops short at the sight of BLANCHE in the chair. She returns his
look without flinching.]86
Again, this does not seem to be the behaviour of a woman passively strung up on
the torments of a neurotic disposition. When Blanche continues to prove a
distraction for Mitch, Stanley reacts with what can only be described as jealous
anger: it’s clear that he resents the competition for his friend’s attention. Not only is
Stella increasingly displaying attitudes towards her husband which are a function
of Blanche’s supremacist and class bound view of him, but now Blanche’s
‘enchantment’ is displacing Stanley’s homosocial intimacy with Mitch. As Blanche
waltzes to the music ‘with romantic gestures’ and Mitch delightedly ‘moves in
awkward imitation’ Stanley’s demands for attention become more insistent; finally
he interrupts the alternative bonding ritual enacted by the sisters and Mitch: he
throws the radio out of the window, performing his violent masculinity in an
assertion of his power. Stanley is threatened by the power Blanche has
accumulated through her seduction of Mitch and of Stella, with her southern
upper-class femme behaviour. He must either accept a position of aspirational
subordination (as Mitch has) in relation to Blanche’s privileged space or rebel
against it: his class and ethnic identity (we have seen how his ethnic difference has
been coded at different points as working-class ignorant East European, and as
black Afro-Caribbean) gives him no other option: as a man he cannot acquiesce to
her. He must exert his own working class authority - his physicality, violence and
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brutish sexuality are structurally threatened by virtue of their ethnic coding in
relation to Blanche’s cultured whiteness.
Blanche tells Stella that ‘The only way to live with such a man is to go to bed with
him’, but Blanche’s presence on the other side of the curtains is preventing the
married couple from having sex (or at least the kind of unrestrained, noisy sex they
usually have), and her challenge to Stanley’s ‘animalism’ threatens Stella’s security.
To take Blanche’s view is to end up as insecure as Blanche. Enchanted by the
romantic and genteel space Blanche conjurs to displace the poker game, Stella
reacts disgustedly to Stanley’s violence. Stella attempts to assert herself within her
marriage and home, and is physically overcome: Stanley hits her. He is restrained by
his buddies, lest the violence of his heterosexual passion over reach patriarchal
normality and invite judicial intervention. He is grateful for this, ‘They speak quietly
and lovingly to him and he leans his face on one of their shoulders’ (p.152) and
their homosocial bond is secured: they have entered into ritual competition with
each other in the poker game, and are now mutually supportive of their status as
men, men who control and desire women. Once his violent physicality is restored
to an equilibrium it can then find its conventional outlet in his libido and he calls
Stella to him. As the passion of violence and confrontation passes, to be replaced
by more conventional, safer passions, the material reality of Stella’s position
reasserts itself. As she explains to Blanche the next day ‘there are things that
happen between a man and a woman in the dark - that sort of make everything
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else seem – unimportant’ (p.162), and they need to. Her desire for Stanley needs to
overcome her knowledge of his power over her, and the displays he makes of this
to her, and to his homosocial affiliates: if it doesn’t, there’s nothing to separate her
from the vulnerability and paranoia of her sister. Sublimating her subordination in
eroticism and her physical desire allows her to maintain some material security by
virtue of her relationship with Stanley, a sublimation made all the more necessary
by her pregnancy and its attendant pressures. Clearly there is the juxtaposition
here of the imminent arrival of the final member of the normative family against
the idea of Blanche’s unnatural and disruptive imposition on that family.
Later we see more evidence of how Blanche’s presence and defiance compromise
Stella. In the discussion of astrological signs Blanche is attempting to assert some
influence over the evening with feminine passive-aggression that punishes
Stanley’s uncouth maleness (p. 168), but he retaliates not just with the threat of
knowledge he has about Blanche’s past, but he refuses to kiss Stella in front of her;
by withholding his affections and his sexuality from Stella he is exercising his
primary method of control, for that sexuality and passion always has the
connotation or threat of the violence of which it is a sublimation, and of the
pleasure and fear that is Stella’s experience of it.
When Stella protests about Stanley’s treatment of her sister, judging him for his
uncouth table manners, he reacts violently, hurling his plate to the floor and
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grabbing his wife. He rails against how they’ve both been judging him to be a
vulgar and greasy Polack, and again the use of his name, Mr. Kowalski is invoked as
a sign of his ethnic difference. Stella begins to cry ‘weakly’ (p. 194), but as ever, his
violence comes with eroticism:
STANLEY: Stell, it’s gonna be all right after she goes and after
you’ve had the baby. It’s gonna be all right again between you
and me the way that it was. You remember that way that it was?
Them nights we had together? God, honey, it’s gonna be sweet
when we can make noise in the night the way that we used to and
get the coloured lights going with nobody’s sister behind the
curtains to hear us! (p.195)
And we have little doubt that he is right - it will be better for Stella when Blanche
has gone - the ambiguity of her position won’t be so evident, and they can return
to an eroticisation of the subordination she endures, and which makes the
powerlessness not only tolerable, but exciting. There seems to be a strong
indication here of the idea that the power relations within gender arrangements
are inscribed with sexuality - that sex is the coercive mechanism by which
domination can proceed within a consensual arrangement, almost an imperative of
desire: Stella must endure because she must desire Stanley, and she must have him.
Despite the fact that she proved to be the catalyst for his suicide, Blanche’s
marriage to the homosexual Allan, as well as her structural opposition to Stanley’s
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homosocial authority, offers her as a preferred location for gay identification, as we
have seen. Indeed, her attitude to Allan’s death is so remorseful that she almost
comes to stand in for the tragic notion of homosexuality his death represents. She
tells Mitch of her dead husband with a great poignancy which seems to seal their
intentions: ‘Could it be - you and me, Blanche?’ (p.184). Despite the heterosexual
mannerisms of their relationship, we may choose to read Blanche’s beau as
homosexual. Mitch’s character is not coherent throughout the play, and indeed he
performs different structural functions in relation to the others at different points.
In this he is like Stella: they are both required by the drama to lubricate the
complex power dynamic established between Stanley and Blanche. Mitch is a man,
but one who is not threatened by Blanche’s display of her class experience; he
associates with Stanley (is in fact, his side kick) and operates within a homosocial
matrix with him and yet is at least partially identified in codes that signal a
Freudian model of homosexuality. He lives with, and maintains a touching
affection for his dying mother: the mummy’s boy was a substantial signifier of
homosexuality for popular post-war American Freudian ideology. Unlike Stanley,
Mitch is conscious of the need actively to present and perform an image that
asserts his gender identity. He is self-conscious around Blanche, unsure of his role;
and he is ashamed of the way he perspires (p.178) and aware that he may look
clumsy. He goes on to attempt to play out the animal, physical and sexual role that
the play establishes (around Stanley) as the necessary way in which (heterosexual)
men occupy space, in positions of domination. But he talks about his physique to
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Blanche, rather than simply manifest it; he describes his body rather than having it
eroticised in the stage descriptions, and tells of how he acquired his physique by
going to the gym. Mitch represents safety to Blanche by virtue of his social
position as a man and by the fact that he does not threaten her with this position,
indeed, he acknowledges and enjoys her manifestations of the privileges of her
class experience. The basis of their romantic bonding is their shared experience of
insecurity and loneliness, rather than sexual passion. Mitch needs Blanche to gain
the heterosexual credentials he requires to function within the homosocial
network which Stanley emanates as she needs him to protect her from her
exclusion from, and subjugation to, such networks of power.
Although Blanche talks to Mitch about Stanley hating her, and her finding him
common, power relations and their proximity in physical terms make it impossible
for the tension between them to be even conceptually contained by the idea of a
purely personal enmity; they are both enmeshed in cultural tensions around race
and national identity, class and gender:
BLANCHE: … Of course there is such a thing as the hostility of perhaps in some perverse kind of way he - No! To think of it
makes me...[She makes a gesture of revulsion...]
(p.181)
What she is speaking of is the ‘hostility of’ desire. Stanley desires Blanche, because
in this play sexuality, predicated in terms of power, violence and sublimation,
provides the medium through which gender power is asserted and contested.
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Blanche on p.161 and Stanley on p.196 are both concerned with what goes on
behind the curtains - Blanche can’t bear to sleep with Stanley in such close
proximity, Stanley wants to be able to make as much noise as he wants in sex
without Blanche overhearing - this shows that both are supposed to be sexually
aware of the other, and self-conscious about the physical and conceptual barriers
(symbolised by the flimsiness of the curtain) that separate their desires from reality.
The subtextual desire which organises their interaction is anxiously policed by
them both.
Stanley’s commonness and class identity, his lack of breeding, and refusal to
acknowledge the feminine southern gentility that Blanche produces, not to say
anything of his brutal physicality, make him an obstacle to the security and haven
she sought in coming to her sister’s following her inauspicious departure from
Laurel. Blanche invokes the inequality and rupture around class and ethnicity that
the marriage of Stanley and Stella represents, and she embodies the possibility of a
consolidation of Stella’s class authority - that Stanley becomes more the brutal
Polack for Stella through Blanche’s gaze. Blanche’s education, class position and her
relationship to Stella, along with her performance of femininity, make her a threat
to Stanley, especially as the mechanisms by which he subordinates women are not
available to him - he can’t fuck her into acquiescent adoration, because he’s
married to Stella. Stanley desires Blanche because he wishes to dominate her. If
Blanche does desire Stanley she cannot admit to her desires because that would
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mean an abdication of her autonomy, her authority; we know that Blanche is
libidinous, but her desires are for men who have some degree of powerlessness or
vulnerability in relation to her (the homosexual Allan, lower class soldiers, young
boys from her school, the newspaper boy, Mitch), so we cannot presume that
Stanley’s threatening presence is erotically appealing to her.
Stanley is able to destroy Blanche by virtue of his homosocial power, which she has
threatened on two fronts. Her presence in his home and her intimacy with her
sister, his wife, undermines the cultural credibility of his variously encoded aspirant
working-class identity by refracting it through her aristocratic and colonial
snobbery and gentility. Her relationship with Mitch is specifically constructed as a
distraction from the rigours of homosocial celebration, a romantic, cultured
alternative to crude phallicism. Stanley’s discovery of Blanche’s past provides the
justification of his violent mistreatment of her. If Blanche initially provided Mitch
with the promise of heterosexual credibility, the disclosure of her past betrays his
homosocial affiliations. If Blanche’s chastely enacted decorum constituted
respectability and passivity, the revelation of her promiscuity connotes her as
dangerously knowing, deceitful and masculine: too threatening to give men
homosocial credibility. If a woman has had many men, she may be a cheap object
of exchange, but she’s also been exchanging men herself. There is a strong contrast
between Mitch’s naivety during his dates with Blanche, and his later anger at the
recognition of her apparent duplicity. Homosocially empowered, or impelled, by
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Stanley and his knowledge, Mitch attempts to force himself upon Blanche, in what
appears to be a spineless anticipation of Stanley’s later rape, but typically his
performance of brutishness is no match for Blanche’s privileged poise, and he flees
into the night, unsatisfied. Once she is no longer in control of the truth about her
sexual identity, Blanche’s facade and status as a prospective wife are lost, and she
suffers the plight of sexually active women in a social system that gives men status
for sexual excess, and sends women into asylums for similar behaviour.87 To
maintain the dominance of men in the play, Stanley must withdraw the privileges
through which Blanche negotiates male power. As he tells Stella: he could not let
his best friend ‘get caught’. It is preferable that Mitch remain a mummy’s boy than
marry a woman with sufficient cultural privilege to hoodwink a member of
Stanley’s homosocial network. Stella’s material security and social authority is
dependent on her deference, her submission to Stanley’s male power (she accepts
and forgives his hitting of her, and comes down from Eunice’s - she comes to him), a
selling out of her class and ethnic identity. Blanche refuses to submit, refuses to
use her status and culture to collude with Stanley’s masculine pride, his arrogant
expectation of an acknowledgement of his superiority. As a function of her
material insecurity, Blanche should perform her femininity in such a way as to
show her recognition of Stanley’s power and her need for his benevolent
patronage. As a single woman, she should constantly produce deferral to the
conceptually superior marital arrangements of her sister; instead she incites Stella
to leave her husband. As a woman, Blanche should display her recognition of
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Stanley’s authority as a man; instead she presents his masculinity as a bestial
reflection of her own ‘pure white blood of the South.’88 As a guest in his house,
Blanche should reproduce the grudging deference shown by Stanley’s wife to his
homosocial relationships; instead Blanche creates autonomous spaces of her own
‘enchantment’ that are not only not feminine negotiations of Stanley’s power, but
which actually seduce his homosocial partner into forming ‘adulterous’ bonds with
her.
Blanche has gone out of her way not to enact behaviour which recognises
Stanley’s authority, despite manifesting a debilitating nervousness which betrays
her relative powerlessness in relation to that authority; therefore, just getting her
out of his house may enable Stanley to realise Blanche’s fears of material
deprivation, but will not neutralise her assaults upon his masculinity. Indeed,
marrying Mitch will confirm the success of her determinedly privileged
performances of femininity by awarding her with the material security she needs,
and permanently inscribe her into Stanley’s homosocial network as the wife of his
best buddy. Stanley has not forgotten ‘all that I took off her’ (p.198); when she
meets his gaze, squirts jasmine perfume in his face, incites his wife to leave him,
when she uses her breeding to humiliate him and seduce his buddy into an
engagement, Blanche is committing acts of homosocial defiance. It is not adequate
just to put a woman capable of such dissidence on the street, from where she may
gain the romantic approval of a man less homosocially rigorous than Stanley and
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marry him, attaining the cultural standing available to women who acquiesce to
that institution.
In the 1995 CBS television version of A Streetcar Named Desire Stanley’s rape of
Blanche has little dramatic force. Jessica Lange’s Blanche has fluttered way beyond
the realms of rationality by the time Stanley returns from the hospital: Stanley’s
assault has little impact because this Blanche does not exhibit any remnant of a
gender performance that acknowledges an awareness about material conditions
and power. Baldwin’s Stanley is exuberant with virility about his impending
fatherhood: she’s available, unaware, easily overcome. This Blanche has been so
intrusive, so ineffectual, that one almost welcomes her dramatic demise. This film is
a reactionary appropriation of Streetcar. Williams’s text makes it clear that Blanche is
drunk and emotionally distraught at this point, not mad. This evening has seen her
exposure, rejection by her would-be husband and saviour, attempted rape by that
saviour, and the consumption of considerable amounts of Stanley’s whisky. Her
fantasies of safety, grandeur and Shep Huntleigh are the escapism of a frightened
and drunk woman. The poise and assurance that are functions of her experience,
which we see displayed in her manipulation of Mitch, her seduction of the young
man, and in her earlier resistance of Stanley, Blanche manifests as real struggle
against her attacker. Although the outcome is inevitable as an expression of
Stanley’s gender superiority, the rape of Blanche, Southern White Goddess, in its
evocation of supremacist myth, also secures Stanley’s conceptual inferiority by
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inferring his ‘blackness’. If Blanche does exhibit madness in this play, that madness
comes in the final scene, and then this seems the justified response of a woman
whose reality is being invalidated, rather than some neurotic self-indulgence or
pathological illness. Stella and Eunice collude in a denial of Blanche’s accusation of
Stanley:
STELLA: I couldn’t believe her story and go on living with Stanley.
EUNICE: Don’t ever believe it. Life has got to go on. No matter what
happens, you’ve got to keep on going.
(p.217)
They must sacrifice her to maintain the plausibility of their own relationships with
men, on whom they depend for material security and social privilege. To believe
Blanche is to accept her exclusion from male homosocial power for themselves; for
Blanche, this has led to her dispatch to a mental asylum. As Blanche leaves, Stella
gives in to ‘luxurious sobs’ (p.226), Stanley puts his hand into his wife’s blouse, and
the poker players deal another hand. Howard Taubman would no doubt see this as
a happy resolution of wholesome heterosexuality following the expulsion of the
‘baneful female’. Thankfully, Gore Vidal offers an anecdote that allows us to pervert
such hegemonic nonsense. In Palimpsest, Vidal recounts a meeting between
Williams, his ‘Glorious Bird’, and the actress Claire Bloom, who was about to play
Blanche:
The Bird looked at her suspiciously; then he said, ‘Do you have any
questions about the play?’
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‘Yes.’ Claire pulled herself together. ‘What happens after the final
curtain?’
The Bird sat back in his chair, narrowed his eyes. ‘No actress has
ever asked me that question.’ He shut his eyes; thought. ‘She will
enjoy her time in the bin. She will seduce one or two of the more
comely young doctors. Then she will be let free to open an
attractive boutique in the French Quarter...’
‘She wins?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the Bird. ‘Blanche wins.’89
Vidal goes on to describe Bloom’s performance, strengthened by her conversation
with the Glorious Bird, as being ‘splendid’ and which culminated in Blanche leaving
for the asylum ‘as for a coronation.’
Inversionism has proved a useful strategy for hegemonically containing Williams’s
work. Even though the content of inversionist narratives, through which the
playwright’s pathologisation is effected, are themselves a function of gender, the
effect of that pathologisation is his exclusion from the normative sex-gender
system. This exclusion enables critics like Taubman and Kauffman, as we have seen,
to render the troubling accounts of heterosexuality offered in works like A Streetcar
Named Desire safe: they are not a comment on heterosexuality, but a perverse
vengeance upon it. Thus, Blanche is understood as a twisted refraction of a
freakishly abnormal sensibility, and not a dangerously revealing, ideologically
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exposed portrait of heterosexual femininity. Inversionist knowledge is but one
strand in a tapestry of competing ideological narratives through which we gain an
understanding of our identities. Inversion remains operative in contemporary
accounts of gay culture and identity because we are part of a wider system which
handles differential gender power. If Blanche really is queer, it is not because she
doesn’t signify as a woman: the challenge she poses to Stanley, and his responses
are only intelligible coming from a textual position of ‘womanhood’. Blanche’s
queerness is a function of her troublesome presence, which not only destabilises
normative masculine power, but produces this destabilisation out of a critique of
heterosexuality itself, and women’s place within it, as subjects of male
homosociality. Taubman and Kauffman’s hegemonic narrative of Williams’s
inversion not only perverts the commentary Streetcar enacts in Blanche, but it
conceals the operation of their homosocial masculinity. This homosociality keeps
homosexuality right at the centre of the sex-gender system as a means of
reproducing the natural balance of male power. Blanche DuBois is a heterosocial
heroine, unleashed by Williams as queer dissent upon homosocial subjectivity. I
shall be mapping out the terms of heterosociality in subsequent chapters.
1
John Peter, 'Desire's Cruel Devices', The Sunday Times, 5 January 1997.
2
Alistair Macaulay, 'Neurotic Undercurrents in New Orleans', Financial Times, 2
January 1997.
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3
Charles Spencer, 'This Stately Streetcar Fails to Move', The Daily Telegraph, 1 January
1997.
4
Kate Clanchy, 'Arts Review', The Scotsman, 7 January 1997.
5
Alistair Macaulay, 'Neurotic Undercurrents in New Orleans'.
6
Philip C. Kolin (ed.), Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1993); Ronald Hayman, Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else is an
Audience (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1993).
7
Lyle Leverich, Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams (London: Hodder & Stoughton,
1995).
8
David Benedict, 'Tennessee Williams and His Women', The Independent, June 15 1994,
section 2, p.23.
9
Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, 2nd
Edition, (University of Chicago Press, 1987) p.248.
10
Alistair Macaulay, 'Neurotic Undercurrents in New Orleans'.
11
John Gross, 'A Princess Goes Potty', The Sunday Telegraph, 5 January 1997.
12
Michael Coveney 'A study in blush pink', The Observer Review, June 19, 1994, p.10.
13
David Savran, Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the work of
Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)
p.116.
14
In Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds) Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (New
York: Pyramid, 1974), p.70.
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15
Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, edited by Michael Christie
(London: Vintage, 1993), p.55.
16
Howard Taubman, 'Modern Primer: Helpful Hints To Tell Appearances from Truth',
New York Times, April 28, 1963, section 2, p.1.
17
Stanley Kauffman, Persons of the Drama: Theater Criticism and Comment (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976) quoted in Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984) p.126.
18
Stephen S. Stanton (ed.) Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1977).
19
Stephen S. Stanton 'Introduction' in Stephen S. Stanton (ed.) Tennessee Williams: A
Collection of Critical Essays, p.1.
20
In his essay 'Selected Memories of the Glorious Bird and the Golden Age', Gore
Vidal details the extensive and vitriolic hostility to Williams in the period 1945 to
1961, which predated Stanton's liberal toleration.
21
Stanton, 'Introduction', p.4.
22
Alan Sinfield, 'Un-American Activities', in Sinfield, Cultural Politics - Queer Reading
(London: Routledge, 1994) p.42.
23
ibid.
24
Haskell suggests that ‘it is from the male in them that the women acquire their
hyperactive libidos ... the scenes ... between Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A
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Streetcar Named Desire are powerfully sexual, in the flexing, posturing fascination of
homosexual pornography for a repressed or 'closet' seductee.’ From Reverence, p.248.
25
Tennessee Williams Memoirs (London: W.H. Allen, 1976): ‘so incontinent was my
desire for the boy that I would wake him repeatedly during the night for more
love-making. You see, I had no sense in those days - and nights - of how passion
can wear out even a passive partner... Kip said to me, 'Last night you made me
know what is meant by beautiful pain.' (p.55); Williams tells how the go-go boys in
a bar in New Orleans all have clap in the ass and so you shouldn't penetrate them
(p.75); tells how he ‘screwed’ a gay marine seven times in one night; how he refused
a sailor who wanted to fuck him (p.79); how he doesn't like to be topped (p.97); how
a hustler he met was inexperienced and would not ‘turn over’, but who later said,
‘Mr. Williams, if you'd like to, you can bugger me tonight.’ (p.154).
26
See Gert Hekma, '‘A Female Soul in a Male Body’: Sexual Inversion as Gender
Inversion in Nineteenth Century Sexology', in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third
Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994);
George Chauncey, 'From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the
Changing Conceptualisation of Female Deviance', Salmagundi, 58-59, Fall 1982Winter 1983; and Tim Edwards, Erotics and Politics: Gay Male Sexuality, Masculinity and
Feminism (London & New York: Routledge, 1994) p.19.
27
Hekma, '‘A Female Soul in a Male body’', p.220.
28
ibid, p.221.
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29
Chauncey, 'From Sexual Inversion To Homosexuality', pp.114-46.
30
‘The sexologists and boy-love advocates made the masculine/feminine binary
structure even more necessary and central while, at the same time, doing little to
clarify its confusions’, Sinfield, The Wilde Century, p.118.
31
Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Berucksichtigung der
contraren Sexualempfindung: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie was published in 1886; Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs' 'Vier Briefe' Jahrbuch fur sexuekke Zwischenstufen was published in
1899: see Gert Hekma, '‘A Female Soul in a Male body’', p.542.
32
E. M. Forster 'Terminal Note' to Maurice (London: Penguin 1972) p.217.
33
John Fletcher 'Forster's Maurice and the scapegoating of Clive' in Joseph Bristow
(ed.) Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (London: Routledge,
1992) in which he outlines the confusions and tensions in the Platonic texts
themselves about the ethical and social meanings of sexual and non-sexual
relations between men.
34
Fletcher, 'Forster's Maurice and the scapegoating of Clive', p.90.
35
See Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell 1989): ‘Homosexuality was a further reason for commitment to the lifestyle of the leisure class, where its practice was most possible. There was more
toleration than elsewhere, one might evade difficulties through the deployment of
money or influence, and one was well-placed to gratify and impress lower-class
young men - whole groups of whom, guardsmen for instance, learned how to play
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the scene.’ (p.65) This association of homosexuality with the leisure classes has
subsequently been challenged by Murray Healy in Gay Skins (London: Cassell, 1996).
36
See Sinfield The Wilde Century: ‘At that point [after the trials of 1895], the entire,
vaguely disconcerting nexus of effeminacy, leisure, idleness, immorality, luxury,
insouciance, decadence and aestheticism, which Wilde was perceived, variously, an
instantiating was transformed into a brilliantly precise image’ (p.3).
37
Forster, Maurice, p.33. Further references to Maurice will be given in the text.
38
Forster, Maurice, p.214; this also has the effect of securing the power relation
embedded in their respective class identities - Clive's concern here is meant to be at
least partly parochial.
39
Edward Carpenter, 'Self-Analysis for Havelock Ellis', reprinted in David Fernbach
and Noel Greig (eds) Selected Writings: Volume One: Sex (London: Gay Men's Press
1984) p.290.
40
Francis King, E.M. Forster (London: Thames & Hudson 1978) p.80.
41
See Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (London: Quartet 1977), p.68-70 for an account of Edward
Carpenter's bourgeois background and the romanticised politics he developed of
the working classes.
42
‘[homos] have cast off, I noticed, most of the swish and camp that made them ...
unattractive to me’ Williams, Memoirs, p.50.
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43
See Alison Hennegan, 'Introduction' to Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
(London: Virago 1982) amongst others for detail about this; we could suggest it as
an instance of Foucault's reverse discourse.
44
See Alan Sinfield Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): ‘faultline stories are ... the ones in which the
conditions of plausibility are in dispute ... The task for a political criticism, then, is to
observe how stories negotiate the faultlines that distress the prevailing conditions
of plausibility. [...] No story can contain all the possibilities it brings into play;
coherence is always selection.’ pp.47-51.
45
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Epistemology of the Closet (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991) p.3.
46
See Michael Bronski Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End
Press, 1984) and Jack Babuscio 'Camp and the Gay Sensibility' in Gays and Film ed.
Richard Dyer (London: B.F.I. 1977) for an elaboration of the gay sensibility, and
Joseph Bristow 'Being Gay: Politics, Identity, Pleasure' in New Formations no.9, Winter
1989, for a critique of these notions. Not all of the cultural expressions I note here
were initially acceptable: some, such as pornography and sadomasochism, were
highly controversial within alliances of gay men and/or lesbians. The contestations
over the issues divided many groups within the sexually dissident margins, and led
to the sexual politics/politics of sexuality split that is the context for my discussions
in the next chapter. However, by the time of a pre-queer period, all these forms
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have become understood as expressions of gay culture and identity: often their
problematisation has centralised their importance.
47
John D'Emilio Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority
in the United States 1940-1970 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983) p.240.
48
This notion of the parity between Queer politics and Liberationary politics is
disputed by Greg Bredbeck in 'The New Queer Narrative', Textual Practice, Vol.9, no.3,
1995, pp.477-502, who argues for the distinctiveness of the two movements.
49
National Lesbian and Gay Survey, Proust, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Marc Almond and
me: Writings by gay men on their lives and lifestyles from the archives of the National Lesbian
and Gay Survey (London: Routledge, 1993) p.7.
50
ibid, p.110.
51
John M. Clum, '‘Something Cloudy, Something Clear’: Homophobic Discourse in
Tennessee Williams', in R.R. Butters, J.M. Clum & M. Moon (eds), Displacing
Homophobia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); and Clum, Acting Gay: Male
Homosexuality in Modern Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p.149.
52
Clum, Acting Gay, p.150, my emphasis.
53
For example, Mark Lilly, Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century, London:
Macmillan,
1993,
pp.105-115,
discusses
how
Williams's
homosexuality
is
metaphorically refracted through, amongst others, Laura's lameness in The Glass
Menagerie.
54
Clum, Acting Gay, p.150. Further references to Acting Gay will be given in the text.
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55
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Craig Owens 'Outlaws: Gay Men in
Feminism' in Alice Jardine & Paul Smith (eds), Men in Feminism (New York & London:
Routledge, 1989).
56
Neil Bartlett Night After Night (London: Methuen 1993) p.14.
57
Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (London: Penguin 1959) p.183. There is
an interesting discrepancy between the text of the Penguin edition and that of the
New Directions text The Theatre of Tennessee Williams (1971) which includes the line
‘the boy I had married and the older man who had been his friend for years’ which
is omitted in the former.
58
Gregg Blachford 'Male Dominance and the gay world' in Kenneth Plummer (ed.)
The Making of the Modern Homosexual (London: Hutchinson, 1981) p.187.
59
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York & London:
Routledge, 1993).
60
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York &
London: Routledge, 1990).
61
Sheila Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist Perspective on the Lesbian Sexual
Revolution (London: The Women's Press, 1994) p.97.
62
ibid, p.118.
63
See Maddison 'All Queered Out' Red Pepper no.9, February 1995.
64
Judith Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, p.x.
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65
In his review of a British Conference in 1994, Troublesome Visibilities, which was
advertised as ‘Reviewing Queer Theory and Gender Performance’, and in which he
was a participant, the influential British gay journalist Paul Burston bemoaned the
absence of straight men and suggested that a transsexual spoke as though they
were on The Oprah Winfrey Show; he also pointed out that to lament the absence of a
black male speaker ‘was strangely out of synch with notions of non-fixed
subjectivities’. (Troublesome Visibilities, London 30th April 1994; Burston’s report
appeared in Time Out May 11-18, 1994, p.90).
66
See Hilary Harris, 'Toward a Lesbian Theory of Performance: Refunctioning Gender'
in Lynda Hart & Peggy Phelan (eds), Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993) p.273.
67
Bette Bourne, Peggy Shaw, Paul Shaw, & Lois Weaver, Belle Reprieve. In Gay and
Lesbian Plays Today, ed. Terry Helbing (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), p.8.
Further references to Belle Reprieve will be given in the text.
68
Harris, 'Toward a Lesbian Theory of Performance: Refunctioning Gender', p.261.
69
Ronald Hayman, Tennessee Williams: Everyone Else in an Audience (New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 1993) p.xiii; Mark Lilly, Gay Men's Literature in the
Twentieth Century, p.114; C.W.E. Bigsby A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century
American Drama, Volume Two: Williams, Miller, Albee (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984) p.60.
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70
Donald Spoto The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams (London: The
Bodley Head, 1985), p.44.
71
A Streetcar Named Desire (London: Penguin 1962), p.115. Further references to this
edition of Streetcar will be given in the text.
72
Sander Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an iconography of Female
Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Literature' in James Donald
and Ali Rattansi (eds) 'Race', Culture and Difference (London: Sage, 1992) p.174.
73
Lionel Kelly, 'The White Goddess, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Desire' in Philip C.
Kolin (ed.) Confronting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1993) p.121.
74
Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies', p.176.
75
Angela Davis Women, Race and Class (London: The Women's Press, 1982) p.174.
76
Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth (London: Penguin, 1962) pp.66-67.
77
Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, p.55.
78
One of Taubman's list of signs of unwanted homosexuality in American theatre
was ‘the male character who is young, handsome, remote and lofty in a neutral
way...be on guard for the male character whose proclivities are like a stallions’,
Modern Primer: Helpful Hints To Tell Appearances from Truth'.
79
Charles Spencer, 'This Stately Streetcar Fails to Move', The Daily Telegraph, 1 January
1997.
80
Michael Billington, 'Persistence of a Bleak Vision', The Guardian, 31 December 1996.
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81
Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama, Volume Two, p.60.
82
Sheila Gish, 'Tennessee Williams and his Women', The Independent, 15 June 1994.
83
John Peter, 'Desire's Cruel Devices'.
84
Alistair Macaulay, 'Neurotic Undercurrents in New Orleans'.
85
Michael Billington, 'Persistence of Bleak Vision'.
86
Streetcar, p. 148, my emphasis.
87
For an audience with knowledge of Williams's biography, there is an additional
point of connection here: his sister Rose suffered a similar fate for behaviour that
was related to her alleged lack of sexual modesty; see Williams's Memoirs.
Donald Spoto sheds a different light on this, and suggests that Rose was the victim
of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, and that her mental health problems
were a consequence of bearing the responsibility of silence, having been
disbelieved once by their mother, Miss Edwina. (Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers, p.59,
61) It has been suggested that the scenario which unfolds in Suddenly Last Summer
was inspired by Williams's guilt over Rose's eventual lobotomy. In the play
Catherine will be lobotomised for bearing witness to her cousin Sebastian's
procuring of young boys for sex: it is interesting to reflect that in writing a
narrative purportedly attempting to cathart the predicament of his sister - one that
preoccupied him until his death - he seems to guiltily substitute a sexual identity
symmetrical to his own for the abusive behaviour of his father.
88
The description is Boss Finley's, from Sweet Bird of Youth, p.67.
95
Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
89
Gore Vidal, Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995) pp.155-156.
96
Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
CHAPTER FOUR
PEDRO ALMODÓVAR AND WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS
BREAKDOWN: THE HETEROSOCIAL SPECTATOR AND MISOGYNY
If the critical attention paid to Tennessee Williams is indicative of the meanings
attached to questions of gender identification and homosexuality in a pre‘liberationary’ period, then discussion of Pedro Almodóvar brings a contemporary
perspective to such questions. As we have seen, for mainstream critics Williams’s
particular interest in female characterisation was a pathological and morbid
manifestation of his own inversion. The public rendering of such characterisation
in performances of Williams’s plays was, apparently, a bitter and aggressively
vengeful attempt to soil the sanctity of moral decency in female representation. I
have argued that such hostile readings are a reactionary attempt to recuperate the
unsettlingly de-naturalised representations of gender that Williams makes. Hostile
critics infer that Williams’s work was somehow an attempt to debase everyone else
as he himself was debased. I have suggested that in as far as the playwright’s
compelling characterisations are debased, in that they attempt to fracture the
powerful ideological containments erected around gender roles in post-war
American culture, then Williams’s opponents are correct. Blanche, The Princess and
Maggie the Cat, as well as Stanley Kowalski, Chance and Brick, represent queer
refractions of gender roles that show an awareness of how central gender identity
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is for Williams as a homosexual - and furthermore, how central our homosexuality
is within systems of gender.
In discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s films the issue of his special relationship with
women characters and female actors, and his status as a women’s director, is almost
universally central: it is the abiding tag with which the Spanish writer and director
is understood. Yet as a European art-house or independent filmmaker, the
audience and the critical context in which discussion of his work takes place is
already located in an apparently liberal, progressive and intellectually engaged
context in which gay and lesbian culture is supposed to flourish, and in which the
idea of an iconographic relationship between women and gay men, hags and fags,
is accepted. Discussion of this audience context may provide an interesting
consideration of the possibilities for queer articulation and resistance, and the
limits of liberal chattering-class culture, that is, of middle-class liberalism that
aspires to radicalism. The terms through which Almodóvar circulates are different
to those which were faced by Williams. In many ways it would appear that
Almodóvar’s films are consumed within a cultural context that is politically and
intellectually privileged. If Williams’s work was received with a rabid hostility which
stringently attempted to foreclose the more challenging and marginal aspects of
the plays, then we may expect Almodóvar’s work to receive a somewhat more
enabling reception amongst the audiences of art-house cinema and the readers of
liberal broadsheets. Given the extent to which audiences have been able to
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transcend the ideological containments erected around Williams and still make
resistant meanings, we might expect much more exciting and radical responses
from an audience constituency apparently already predisposed towards an
embracing of gay politics and conversant with the terms of homosexual
representation.
A Case of Public or Private?
As well as being a maker of cultural products, someone who creates tangible
artefacts, Pedro Almodóvar is a star - a personality, a phenomenon; an entity in
himself. That is to say, he is a star for many within that small proportion of the
population who are the metropolitan, liberal, urban, probably graduate,
heterosexual middle-classes who frequent art-house cinema and who in Britain
read The Guardian, or possibly The Observer, maybe even The Independent - the socalled chattering classes, who comprise an intellectual and social/artistic elite in
Britain and in the United States. Almodóvar is also a star for those who occupy a
space where this group overlaps with a section of urban lesbian and gay culture queer ‘culture vultures’: largely students, and graduate professionals in education,
the arts and the caring professions: middle class urbanites, or those who aspire
towards those values. As largely a product of urban, and often metropolitan spaces,
contemporary lesbian and gay culture has a particularly visible investment in the
values of the ‘chattering classes’, witness the particularly high incidence of upward
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
class mobility many lesbians and gay men experience in their gravitation towards
commercial, and cosmopolitan urban environments - at least in values and
aspiration, if not in economic terms.1
If Pedro Almodóvar is a star, then his homosexuality is, of itself, an issue of cultural
interest. In the context of this study the values and meanings attached to the
presence of significant subcultural characters is as important as the negotiations
conducted through textual material. Not only are the terms under which important
figures circulate significant as a kind of filter through which particular
constituencies may decode textual artefacts, but highly visible and successful
lesbian or gay celebrities are subcultural myths, in that they actually structure
iconographies of queerness. As I suggested earlier, Tennessee Williams has a value
in gay culture that far exceeds the literary worth of his substantial body of work: he
is a figure around whom new notions of homosexuality and gender have emerged
and been contested (for instance in the work of Split Britches and Bloolips in Belle
Reprieve); key elements of Williams’s meaning are transmitted and negotiated
through the actual literary work (and its filmic forms as well) but always in a
complex dialectic with an aura of the figure Williams is understood to be - itself a
highly contested issue, as I have demonstrated. As theorists of popular culture,
from Barthes to Richard Dyer, Andrea Weiss and Christine Gledhill have shown,
stardom is a discourse with particular resonances in gay and lesbian culture, with a
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strong and influential history - particularly in relation to film, but also in the
theatre.2
The place of homosexuality in the laissez-faire liberal and intellectual culture
addressed by The Guardian or The Observer is complex and ambivalent. On the one
hand such august British journals secure an impression of their fairness, liberalism
and reasonableness by distancing themselves from the rabbid, hysterical and overt
homophobia of tabloids such as The Sun. On the other hand, Michelangelo
Signorile argues in the Preface to the British edition of his book Queer in America
that:
most of the ‘responsible’ media refuse to reveal public figures’
homosexuality, even when relevant - except, of course, when such
revelations play into their homophobic agenda.3
Signorile’s contention is that all media should report the homosexuality of subjects
if relevant to the content of a story, regardless of the stance those subjects may
have in relation to lesbian and gay politics (p.xv). His model of the closet is that it is
‘a place where gay men and lesbians are forced to live - under penalty of ostracism
and, in some cases, even death - since their earliest realization of their sexuality’
(p.xi), and outing ‘is a refusal by journalists to be complicit with the closet, a refusal
to make special arrangements for the closeted when reporting the news’ (p.xv). This
outing, rather than a punitive act and experience of punishment, should be a
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
liberating experience (p.xv). Signorile accounts for ambiguity around
homosexuality in what he calls the ‘responsible’ or liberal press by suggesting that
journalists writing in such contexts cover up ‘facts about public figures’
homosexuality even when relevant to news stories because journalists are
uncomfortable with homosexuality’, masking this discomfiture as a ‘sympathy for
gays’ ‘right to privacy’’ (p.xiii).
Clearly such reasoning seems plausible, particularly given the disengenuousness
the ‘quality’ press exhibit in relation to the sensationalisation of homosexuality often maintaining the liberal consensus by reporting on tabloid coverage of
sensational stories, thereby situating the responsibility for such scandal with the
downmarket press, whilst continuing to titillate their own readership. However, it
seems that it is in relation to this titillation that Signorile’s model is a little
simplistic: the suggestion that the liberal/quality/responsible press collude with the
closet, and that this is the primary tool through which homosexuality is oppressed
overlooks the fact that the press actually deploy representations of gay and lesbian
culture in order to engender a sense of ethical superiority and an assurance of
liberal toleration, and that the metropolitan liberal middle-class culture addressed
by such newspapers has a voyeuristic fascination that is in part a consequence of
the need to demonstrate and affirm the security of their readership’s liberalism.
This requirement, then, of homosexual content, if only to demonstrate liberal
tolerance, let alone to detail sufficiently explicit material to satisfy the demands of
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
kinky voyeurism, compromises both the rigidity of Signorile’s model, and more
importantly, the idea of straightforward demonisation or suppression of
homosexuality by this liberal/intellectual middle-class culture.
An example of this ambiguity appeared in the Life ‘magazine’ section of the
weekend Observer, in an issue that followed Pride weekend in London in 1995. The
cover depicts a gay male couple embracing, decked out in Indian quasi-religious
drag (in a fashion popularised by Boy George during his dalliance with Krishna
consciousness), replete with nose rings, cropped and dyed hair, and on one of the
pair, a head-dress of lillies and gypsophilia. The banner reads ‘Pride not prejudice Coming out in style’. Inside, the piece transpires to be a fashion spread
highlighting the wild and wacky outfits some people had worn at the Pride festival.
The short text read
At the same time as 100,000 people were camping at Glastonbury,
almost twice that number attended what has become Britain’s
biggest urban festival. Lesbian and Gay Pride, held in Victoria Park
in east London, has grown form a small march in 1971 to the huge
and diverse event it is today.
Pride represents a milestone in a lot of gay people’s lives,
providing many of them with their first opportunity to come out.
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
The festival-goers on these pages demonstrate the wide variety
of unstereotypical style statements currently being made in the
gay community.4
Alongside cropped men in fetish heels or in pink Barbie wear are images of a butch
and femme lesbian couple dragged up for their wedding, a lesbian couple and a
gay couple in military uniforms, a couple in sailor suits, a femme dyke duo, a black
funky-chick, a couple of Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a cropped and goateed
queer boy, and so on. The ambience of voyeuristic titillation is clear in the
represented foreigness of the material, and in the expositionary tone, highlighted
by the mode of address the feature uses - it is not aimed at anybody who might
actually have been one of the two hundred thousand people who attended the
event. Yet such is the anticipated sophistication of The Observer’s readership the
tone of the piece is only mildly offensive, taking a somewhat conspiratorial
attitude which is allied with the subjects of the piece. The effect of the feature is to
highlight the diversity of the Lesbian and Gay Festival (the text even refers to it),
and to point out that the event was twice the size of the annual Glastonbury music
festival, which received substantial television coverage - thus Pride is accorded
some measure of dignity and respect, even superiority to an equivalent (nominally)
heterosexual event, even if it is reduced to the level of being merely about display
and spectacle: a fashion spread. It could also be argued that the iconography of the
principal photography in the feature is somewhat at odds with the up-beat
liberalism of the text, if not with the voyeuristic glimpse it offers the domestic
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chattering classes of a ‘wild’ subculture. Under large pink letters ‘Out and proud’ a
man in a cropped black fluffy jumper and shiny, tight black pvc jeans is shown on
his knees, cropped and dyed head down in his hands, arse pushed into the air, and
one leg slightly raised. On his feet he wears outrageous and enormous black pvc
platform stilettos, decorated with silver studs. A huge black belt with bold silver
details separates his waist from his pale and bare midriff, and the waistband of his
designer underpants is just visible. The effect of the image, in terms of the
provocative posture (the caption reads ‘Dean Stevenson, exhausted after walking in
the Pride march: ‘I did this look to be glamorous.’’) suggests other exhaustions,
whilst the ‘kinkiness’ of the pvc and all the black intersects strongly with the image
of the extraordinary shoes and the raised up arse to provide an image somewhat
at odds with conventional liberal images of Pride - this is an intimate, provocative
image, slightly sanitised by the extremity of the attire and the context of the focus
on fashion. However, given its association with the headline ‘Out and proud’ the
image is structured by the absence of any facial characteristics - no proud gaze
from eyes which meet those of the spectator, no grins of proclamation, just the
protruding arse and provocative iconography. The image is quite distinctly postQueer, not only in terms of the particular aesthetic trappings it deploys - the
clashing of fetish, drag and porn codes, but also because it is appearing in a
national ‘quality’ broadsheet (albeit in the weekend ‘lifestyle’ section) and was
obviously knowingly styled to key into recognisable symbols.
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It should be clear then, that undertaking an analysis of The Observer’s Pride feature
purely on the basis of a closet versus liberation model, such as that expounded by
Signorile, wouldn’t sufficiently account for the functional purposes to which a
liberal/broadsheet press utilises the explicit representation of homosexuality and
the resultant ripples of discontinuity produced across the terrain of liberal
consensus: any representation of homosexuality undertaken by such journals,
Signorile suggests, must accord with ‘their homophobic agenda’ (p.xv). The
Observer’s Pride feature may have an agenda discontinuous with that of many
lesbian and gay Pride participants (but it may not: indeed its agenda may be
congruent with that of some lesbian or gay participants, and some heterosexual
ones) but it certainly isn’t attempting to keep homosexuality in the closet - the text
implicitly ‘outs’ all the subjects photographed, and actually notes the importance
Pride has in terms of being a very public space - a festival no less - in which to come
out. Whatever policing and constraining effects contemporary laissez-faire
liberalism, in the shape of the broadsheet press, has, those effects are
fundamentally dissimilar to the effects operative in the immediate post-Wolfenden
climate in Britain, where there was an assumption of secrecy on the part of lesbians
and gay men and a public consensus about the abject nature of homosexuality
itself.
Liberal Titillation and the Regime of the Couple
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An article published in the America lesbian and gay magazine Out to coincide with
the release of Almodóvar’s film, Kika, noted recent gossip that had been circulating
about the writer/director, which alleged that he had secretly married Bibi Andersen
‘once billed as the tallest transsexual in Europe.’5 A British journalist, Robert
Chalmers, repeated the gossip in The Observer at about the same time.6 In a Late
Show special screened to coincide with the opening of Kika in England, Almodóvar
himself notes that he and Carmen Maura were once almost like an ‘official couple’,
‘like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, without the jewels’. He is referring to a
period in which Maura and the director worked and associated together, through
the making of Pepi, Luci, Bom and other Girls on the Heap (1980), Labyrinth of Passion
(1982), Dark Habits (1983), What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), Matador (1986), and
The Law of Desire (1987) up until their last work together on Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown (1988). During the making of Women the ‘couple’ became
estranged and subsequently Victoria Abril became Almodóvar’s favoured female
actor. What is notable then, about much of the queer and liberal media interest in
Almodóvar, a filmmaker Marsha Kinder has described as having ‘done more that
any other Spaniard to popularize worldwide the image of a liberated outrageous
Spain’7, is the preoccupation with his relationships, his bonds, with women particularly his leading female actors.
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Significantly, this preoccupation sits alongside a tacit acknowledgement of
Almodóvar’s homosexuality. In the Out article Gooch recounts Almodóvar’s
frustration with Tom Hanks’s reported ambivalence about playing a homosexual in
Philadelphia: ‘You don’t have to do anything to play a homosexual. A homosexual is
a human being.’ (p.54), and then goes on to compare the writer/director’s popcartoon appeal with that of other ‘grand European bad boys, models of respected
irrespectability’ such as Elton John, Boy George, Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier
and Gianni Versace, all figures understood by both lesbian and gay, and
cosmopolitan liberal middle class constituencies, to be queer. Robert Chalmers’s
Observer piece contains an instance of Almodóvar’s frustration with being ‘always
‘the gay director Pedro Almodóvar’’ (p.24). In both examples the slippage from
Almodóvar’s bonding with women to his homosexuality is seamless, to the extent
that Chalmers makes clear his frustration with the writer/director’s impatience
about identifying his sexuality. There appears to be an underlying understanding
at work here about the relationship between sexual desire (homosexuality) and
identification (bonding with women) and between public consort with women (the
appearance of heterosexuality) and private sex with men (the reality of
homosexuality). The tenacity of this understanding occupies a special place in
circulations of the queerness of Almodóvar and his work. When the subject of
Maura, or Abril, or the male to female transsexual Bibi Andersen, arises in media
discussion of the writer/director they are invariably positioned as his consort,
despite a consensual assumption about his (homo)sexuality. Indeed this director12
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muse relationship is offered as being emblematic, and constitutive of that
sexuality.
It appears that in the manner in which the subject of Almodóvar is addressed in
gay and lesbian, and mainstream liberal press, the terms of this relationship
between the writer/director’s sexuality and his identification with women are
contested, and that complex tensions are being played out, not only between
sexual orientation and gender identification, but also around the conditions of
liberal public tolerance. As we can see, Almodóvar is a compelling subject for the
analysis of heterosocial affiliations. The ways in which he is are handled by both
the queer and mainstream press suggest a conventional awareness of the cultural
and political significance of gay men’s relationships with women. It is also clear
that the two contexts through which critical discourse about Almodóvar circulates
have radically different agendas, but the ambiguous status of homosexuality in
Almodóvar’s work and pronouncements raises similar problems for both
discourses; problems that are ultimately a function of the liberal-intellectual
contexts both inhabit.
For straight liberal commentators the problem arises out of a need to balance the
funky perversity of films like Kika or Matador or Law of Desire that is sold as a
function of Almodóvar’s homosexuality, with the danger of too fully instating the
writer/director’s work as queer, and thus as potentially troubling. Obviously
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labelling him as queer is important, as we have seen, both for making him kinky
and interesting enough, and for keeping that weirdness at bay, different from
heterosexual normality. Here the more outlandish elements of Almodóvar’s films
can be a function of his perversity; however if he’s made too perverse, too
strangely non-heterosexual then that queerness becomes threatening, and may
begin to speak for itself. The consumption of kinky queer culture within a liberal
context can thus be seen as something of a faultline within hegemonic
arrangements of gender. One key strategy that seems to be used to lessen the
anxiety around the faultline, particularly for apparently liberal males, who of course
must assimilate queerness within their privileged cosmopolitan milieu with some
measure of homosocial panic, is to profile Almodóvar’s association or consort with
women. Here his strangeness is maintained (he’s kinky, and hangs out with women
all the time, and not with other men, as a properly unified homosocial subject
would) but it is a de-sexualised queerness rendered cute and furry because it
emphasises how sensitive and glamorous he is: note the comparisons with a raft of
‘European bad boys’, all fashion designers and pop stars. In an article in The
Guardian, Nigel Floyd suggests that
[Maura and Almodóvar’s] partnership seemed made in heaven,
Maura’s earthy beauty bringing flesh and blood reality to her roles
as a bongo-playing nun in Dark Habits or a transvestite [sic.] in Law
of Desire. Yet, like Diego and Maria in Matador, their partnership
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burned brightest at precisely that moment when they began to
eclipse one another.8
Here, under the sign of divine normality (‘made in heaven’) Floyd suggests that the
director-muse relationship of Almodóvar and Maura is symmetrical to that of a pair
of (albeit perversely) heterosexual lovers. Moreover, her earthly beauty, her body,
realises his mind, his vision. Thus for Floyd, not only are Maura and Almodóvar an
honorary heterosexual couple, but the constitution of their roles within that
menage coincides with traditional hetero-patriarchal understandings of women as
physical and men as cerebral, with women bearing the physical marks of men’s
cognition. Such accounts make queer Almodóvar available for less anxious
consumption by straight, liberal Guardian readers; for, although his world view is
slightly naughty and dangerously daring (transvestites, bongo-playing nuns, lovers
who have a death wish and so on) he can be tolerated, enjoyed even, in Floyd’s
view because his perspective reflects heterosexual arrangements - even aspires
towards them. Afterall, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, with or without the
jewels, were for the time an engagingly daring example of heterosexual
coupledom. Grandiose liberal tolerance is secured through an assimilation of the
gay director Pedro Almodóvar into the diversely cosmopolitan culture covered in
the pages of The Guardian, whilst the values and world view of that urban liberal
milieu are protected from any challenge Almodóvar’s homosexuality may pose,
because, through Floyd’s eyes, that homosexuality merely recreates heterosexual
models after all. Almodóvar’s sexuality is thus rendered only partially visible:
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implicit and connotated, but not represented in and of itself; what is available to
reassure The Guardian’s readers that it really is safe to assimilate the wild and
outrageous director is a succession of couplings which are rendered so as to ape a
publicly hetero-‘sexual’ orientation: Pedro and Bibi, Pedro and Rosy (de Palma),
Pedro and Carmen, Pedro and Victoria. This strategy of assimilation relies on a
residual post-Wolfenden structure in which public and private behaviours are
separated, one begetting a voyeuristic fascination with the other, whilst the public
front confers reassurances about matters of identity: this is one way in which the
liberal slippage towards a reactionary position is effected. Michelangelo Signorile
notes this formation, as we’ve already seen: discomfort around homosexuality is
masked, suppressed, in liberal media by ‘sympathy for gays’ ‘right to privacy.’’9 This
privileging by liberal discourses of public behaviour in matters relating to the
constitution of sexuality attempts to re-secure any public behaviour in which
heterosexuality itself is not actively problematised - thus Almodóvar’s private sexual
object-choice can become secondary to his public and productive association with
women in the minds of The Guardian’s tolerant readers. The laissez-faire voyeuristic
attraction broadsheet analysis has for Almodóvar is insufficiently agile even to
attempt to secure him for a radical context or agenda, even if they were disposed
to do so. Given the dominance of heterosexual arrangements even the complexly
mediated public/private boundaries still operate to privilege public, formalised
structures of sexuality: family, marriage, engagement, courtship, parenting,
romance and so on, and repress abnormal, problematic arrangements - or at least
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express them through the filters of condescension and voyeurism that is liberalism.
Post-Wolfenden ‘toleration’ of homosexuality has constituted the notion of the
‘private’ as a means of control through which the alternative is consigned to
invisibility and covert control, and the public realm is normalised - alternatives
appearing as just that: alternatives to normality - wild and daring spectacles always
contextualised within frameworks of propriety. This privileging of public space acts
as a sign system which structures private behaviour and identity: public
participation connotes normality which presumes private obeisance. The liberal
tolerance of the ‘enlightened’ chattering classes moderates this post-Wolfenden
model, in that the public realm does not need to be continually purged of
homosexuality: does not need to be closeted in other words, but the strategy still
has some currency. If queer Almodóvar can be shown to be preoccupied with such
reassuringly normal activities as public consort with women, from within the very
site of his wild and perverse world (afterall, the women he bonds with constitute
the repertory company of actors in his movies, his work), then not only does the
idea of homosexuality not appear threatening, it actually appears to offer an
amusing and novel view of ones own normality. Thus, we can see how this
cosmopolitan liberalism is a ventriloquisation of more authoritative and
reactionary interests; it exhibits a slippage away from a sponsorship of radical
arrangements, towards a reconfirmation of mainstream hetero-patriarchal models.
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From a queer perspective the existence within straight culture of such disparate,
conflicting, positions as those represented by The Sun and The Guardian, for
example, enables further control - making assimilation by lesbians and gay men to
the latter’s powerful, and apparently liberal culture (and clearly bits of it are liberal,
or at least ventriloquise liberalism effectively) attractive over the former’s truculent
reactionism. After all, pandering to the tolerant world of disengaged cosmopolitan
liberalism has its benefits: in Britain the assimilationist Stonewall lobbying group
hosts an annual Equality show. In late 1994 this event was held at the Albert Hall,
where the audience were entertained by the likes of Elton John, Sting, Richard Gere
and Alison Moyet; also in attendance, with his wife, was the newly elected leader of
the Labour party, the ultra-moderate social democrat, Tony Blair. Hobnobbing with
such luminaries feels like validation, even if it is under the terms of liberal humanist
consensus - particularly in contrast to the rabid hate-mongering of tabloids like The
Sun. On the other hand such active foregrounding of queer culture as queer (in this
particular space the labelling is necessary to secure the smug reassurance of
toleration, unlike other appropriations of queer culture into the mainstream, in
which it is unnecessary and inappropriate to identify the origin of the particular
artefacts being plundered) brings the work of someone like Almodóvar into relief
on a wide scale, foregrounding the ever possible threat that through that visibility
he will be associated with challenging meanings - hence the need to attempt to
assert stringent control over the circulation of his work in the very same liberal
broadsheets which valorise him in the first place.
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QUEER OPPORTUNITIES
The recuperation of Almodóvar by liberals strategically highlights his relationships
with women, and so the terms through which we may handle his heterosocial
opportunities are potentially traumatic, and are certainly highly mediated by
heterosexual hostility, however valorising and celebratory such hostility at first
appears. It would seem that there are two substantial difficulties facing those of us
who would wish to disrupt the liberal assimilation of Almodóvar for heterosexual
voyeurism so that we may address the queer and dissident possibilities in his work.
The first of these is the director’s own insistence upon addressing the mainstream,
his desire to be a universally addressed artist, and his consequent reticence about
queer self-identification. Paul Burston, an Almodóvar apologist, notes that the
director himself, ‘has always maintained that he hates ‘obvious homosexual
expressions’, even going as far as to suggest that the homosexual relationship in
Law of Desire could just as easily have been a heterosexual one.’10 As we have seen,
Robert Chalmers’s Observer piece contains an instance of Almodóvar’s frustration
with being ‘always ‘the gay director Pedro Almodóvar’’ (p.24). In an interview in Out
Almodóvar tells Brad Gooch, ‘I could be married in two years, and I don’t want
anyone saying nothing against that. To be gay is not something that determines
my life. It’s a part, but not the most important part.’11 When The Flower of my Secret
was released in England, The Pink Paper ran an article on Almodóvar entitled ‘Pedro’s
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Love of Ladies’ which draws heavily on general understandings that Almodóvar
maintains a special relationship with women in his films. However Mansel
Stimpson, the author of the piece, goes on to express disappointment about
Almodóvar’s attitude to his homosexuality:
In 1994 his comments made it clear that the man who, as writer
and director, brought us such sexually explicit films as Law of Desire
and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! was something of a conservative in his
attitudes towards being gay...What is clear is that he is particularly
apprehensive of the American attitude, which treats sexuality as a
label. He sees the tag of ‘gay artist’ as constricting, and is relieved
that gay sensibility is discussed much less in Spain than in the US
or over here.12
These ambivalences make it difficult for us to be confident that Almodóvar is
actually addressing us as a queer constituency. As we have seen, potential anxiety
about Almodóvar’s sexuality can be allayed by highlighting a reassuring
association with women: therefore our second problem in assimilating Almodóvar
for heterosocial purposes is that when such hegemonic control has been effected,
the meanings attached to the writer/director’s work can be moulded, corrupted,
reworked. We are then faced with not only the prospect that Almodóvar’s
heterosocial expressions will become disseminated as heterosexual expressions
through media that we are encouraged to feel allegiances with, but also with the
prospect of that heterosocial representation becoming understood as misogyny.
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In a promotional brochure produced by the UK. video distributors of Almodóvar’s
movies in the run-up to 1994’s Yuletide season of consumption, Pepi, Luci, Bom and
Other Girls on the Heap is described as telling the story of a ‘group of women living in
a punk-inspired Madrid [who] encounter...the will to forge strong female
friendships.’ The copy goes on:
Many find this kind of female bonding and oppression, portrayed
through a gay man’s sensibility, contradictory in Almodóvar’s films.
His flamboyance and fluctuations between humour and
offensiveness, however, makes the questioning part of the
journey.
Here the disclaimer that Almodóvar’s view of women is the function of a gay man’s
sensibility seems to precisely address the cosmopolitan, liberal audience I have
been locating: knowledge of the writer/director’s sexuality adds kudos to watching
his films, whilst the wacky offensiveness, flamboyance and fluctuations - all codes
for the camply hysterical artistic temperament in line with understandings of both
the Latin disposition and the effeminate homosexual one - invite a voyeuristic
spectacle of satisfyingly grandiose proportions. Almodóvar’s enfant terrible
reputation is something of a bonus for this cosmopolitan audience: rendering a
potentially politically incorrect landscape without the hazards of illiberal complicity.
In the Almodóvarian world women are oppressed by punk lesbians who piss on
them, husbands who smack them around, mentally unstable sex-gods with whom
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they fall in love whilst (literally) in enforced bondage, priests in the name of whose
love they have become ‘women’, porn stars who rape them, and trash TV that offers
up rape as voyeuristic spectacle.
Yet for those who would wish to engage with Almodóvar’s work in a more
ingenuously radical context, rather than the assimilationism of Guardian-culture
faux radicalism, the issue of the filmmaker’s apparent outrageous fluctuations is
crucial: clearly it isn’t satisfactory to sponsor the assimilation of an overt
misogynist. Rose Collis, former film reviewer for Britain’s Gay Times, says of the rape
scene in Kika:
But is Almodóvar merely being ‘misogynist’ - a charge often
levelled against him in the past - or is he daring us to find it funny,
despite its horror...13
Uncharacteristically, British queer journalist Paul Burston makes an acute
assessment of Almodóvar’s predicament when he says:
It is worth noting that the straight male critics so quick to point a
finger at Almodóvar are usually the same straight male critics who
rush to defend the misogynistic pleasures of your average
Hollywood boys’ own adventure. And, of course the sensational
coverage generated by such scenes tends to distract us from the
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fact that Almodóvar’s films are often a celebration of powerful
women.14
The price of liberal assimilation is that homosexual culture risks speaking for that
liberalism and not for itself: as I have suggested, the sponsorship of Almodóvar by
the responsible press may satisfy the conditions of middle class aspirant
intellectual liberalism, but it also offers us the opportunity to exploit such visibility
for more radical ends. Thus it is important to represent these negotiations as a
dialectic: the liberal press have not had a consistently valorising view of Almodóvar;
as his fame has spread, and his enfant terrible reputation has become more
celebrated, it appears that there has been a concurrent need to question the
political and personal appropriateness of the writer/director within the very liberal
space in which he acquired visibility. The excess and schlock melodrama celebrated
in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! were
lamented as absent from High Heels and lambasted as being too excessive, too
politically compromising in Kika. It’s worth noting that film critics, those pundits
who make film their especial concern in more specialised periodicals such as Sight
and Sound in Britain, unfold yet another narrative of Almodóvar’s oeuvre, in which it
is the films before the first truly commercial offering, Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown, which had a ‘fresh and challenging vision’; latterly Almodóvar’s ‘growing
sense of professionalism has resulted in a worrying lack of edge, emotional or
otherwise.’15 Such accounts do suggest an insider’s expert smugness, but lend an
authority to more mainstream, liberal accounts which appear to appropriate the
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terms of this relationship between Almodóvar’s increasing success and popularity
and an inverse sense of his worth. As a particularly fraught and contested feature
of Almodóvar’s work, it is in relation to the faultline representation of women that
later liberal questioning has taken place in order to effect hegemonic exclusion of
the writer/director.
Clearly it seems that the stress heterosexual, mainstream critics (presumably the
audience Almodóvar wants to address for fear of becoming a ‘gay artist’) place on
his relationships with women can also serve more explicitly homophobic purposes
than the ability to consume, safely and voyeuristically his wacky and cute
queerness. As we have seen with Tennessee Williams, critics who speak from a
position of unmediated dominance within hetero-patriarchal systems take
particular relish in bringing attention to the misogyny of gay male heterosocial
activity. As I noted , Stanley Kauffman accuses Williams of ‘viciousness towards
women...lurid violence that seems a sublimation of social hatreds’, which of course
enables Kauffman to have his cake and gleefully eat it: displaying his own
parochial, fatherly concern for possible oppression of the fairer sex at the same
time as manifesting his own unsublimated hatred of the homosocial abject,
particularly when it is attempting heterosocially to circumvent that homosociality.16
This has become something of a standard strategy, and the recuperative patriarchal
impediment at work in Kauffman could surely be seen in Robert Chalmers’s boorish
anxiety when he writes of Almodóvar for The Observer.17 Chalmers’s article, ‘Pedro on
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the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?’ unfolds his own fantasy narrative of
Almodóvar’s oeuvre in which ‘Kika is a return to the early Almodóvar formula of
shock-melodrama, a tired strategy which is bound to produce diminishing returns’
(p.26). This diminishing artistic bite is accompanied, in Chalmers’s fantasy, by the
writer/director’s increasing petulance and impatience. Almodóvar’s apparent
resentment over the interference of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ becomes not only a marker of
his artistic temperament (itself a not very subtle indication of a pejorative
homosexuality), but an opportunity to instate ideological framing around
undifferentiated and suspicious outsiders. Chalmers lumps together non-AngloSaxon Spaniards, denizens of ‘foreign art-house productions’, intellectuals, typified
by Paul Julian Smith and the un-named writer of ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ and badly
behaved gay men (those who compere competitions such as ‘General Erections’
Chalmers cites from Pepi, Luci, Bom and other Girls on the Heap), in a move which reseals an Anglo-Saxon ethnic hegemony. It seems ironic that the exclusion of
Smith’s overly intellectual (read effeminate) discourse of diversity is effected
through the authoritative instatement of Spanish homophobia by quoting The
Guardian’s former Madrid correspondent. Even at the moment at which Chalmers’s
jingoism requires him to suggest that Spanish society is more homophobic than
‘ours’, any murmur of alignment with homosexuality is displaced by the
confidently hegemonic assertion that ‘almost all readers are likely to find some
unfamiliar material in Desire Unlimited’s reading list’. (p.26, my emphasis) Thus an
inside group of unquestioning liberalism is invoked, a reassuringly inclusive
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consensus, unless you happen to be Spanish, or one who is ‘unfamiliar’: these are
the outsiders through whom Chalmers’s cultural superiority becomes stated, and
through whom Almodóvar becomes identified as a kind of Norma Desmond-cumDorian Gray figure, a pitiable parody of itself, an ageing drag-queen whose earlier
excesses and debaucheries are taking their toll, and whose lack of normality (nonAnglo-Saxon, homosexual) is leaving him artistically spent, past the gimmick of
‘shock-melodrama’. In Chalmers’s criminally irony-free fantasy Almodóvar ‘on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ is frustrated and lonely, but petulant, and
consoling himself in attempted normality in the pseudo-marriage with the pseudowoman Bibi Andersen.
Women on the Verge of Queer Sistership?
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) is Almodóvar’s most successful and
famous film. Paul Julian Smith, probably the most widely published ‘expert’ on
Almodóvar is quite emphatic about what I would call the film’s heterosociality:
Almodóvar has been punished by male critics for placing himself
so consistently on the side of the woman (on the side of
sentiment and of spectacle). In spite of its success, Mujeres was
awarded neither the Spanish Goya for best director nor the Oscar
for best foreign-language film: the prizes went to more ‘serious’
(more ‘masculine’) works. While actual women may not thank
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Almodóvar for his overidentification with feminine stereotypes
which they may well wish to challenge, there is cause to welcome
that boundary confusion brought about by his cinematic
narcissism. It suggests an unfixing of identities (both sexual and
national) which can only tend to support that feminism which is
committed to social and psychic change.18
Yet what form does that heterosocial representation take? How would Smith
resolve the tension between his understanding that the film is something
feminism should welcome when women may wish to challenge it? Smith is keen to
identify Almodóvar as a ‘glitch’ in the cinematic system because he is ‘a Spanish
director who has achieved international renown; an openly gay director known for
his love of women’; but can such an ambiguously self-presented homosexual
deliver the boundary confusion that causes the disturbance of critics in the
‘overidentification of a filmmaker with the women in his films.’?19 As we have seen,
many reactionary straight liberal responses to Almodóvar’s work precisely
emphasise his interest in women because this brings his imputed queerness into a
heterosexual frame, displaying his consort with women as a token of his sensitivity
to soften and allow unfettered consumption of his outrageousness. It is clear, then,
that the opportunities for claiming Almodóvar as a queer or heterosocially heroic
figure are fraught and unstable because our responses are filtered through
complex contextual considerations.20 However, it is because Almodóvar’s work lies
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at such a hectic intersection of ideological, political and representational concerns
that his films are so interesting and the stakes so high.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown opens with a voice-over by Pepa (Carmen
Maura) who tells us that she moved to her apartment with Iván when, for her, the
world was falling apart and she wanted to save it, acting like Noah by bringing
couples of animals to live on her terrace. She adds that she was not able to save
the couple she cared about most, her and Iván. The camera pans down a shape of
candy pink material to a mass of tousled brunette locks. We realise that Pepa is
asleep and dreaming, and the shot cuts to a terrace, rendered in dream-like
monochrome. We get our first look at Iván, and he is a function of Pepa’s
subconscious. The first thing he does is use fresh breath spray, he then walks along
a terrace past a succession of diversely exotic women and speaks a number of
melodramatic romantic insincerities (‘I cannot live without you’) to each as he
advances. He is speaking into an elaborate 1950s style microphone, and his voice
sounds fragmented, non-naturalistically mechanised. We are immediately
presented with a number of contrasts: between Pepa, fuschia pink, intimately
voiced, and Iván, dully monochrome, vocally artificial and disembodied; Pepa,
present in the film’s diegetic reality (albeit asleep), Iván a fantasy, a figment of
Pepa’s imagination. As the opening tableau of Pepa’s subconscious gives way to
the film’s narrative these contrasts become a structuring dynamic. Emotionally
Iván’s abandonment and irresponsible cruelty are all too proximate for Pepa,
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leading her to the verge of the title’s breakdown; yet physically Iván is elusive,
insubstantial, even ephemeral, as Pepa’s verging leads her through a farcical series
of near-misses and coincidences through which contact with the caddish Iván
eludes her. Although Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown does not maintain
the first person narrative position of the immediate post-opening credit sequence,
where we share Pepa’s intimate reflections and see her dream directly through her
‘eyes’, the film nevertheless maintains an equivalence between Pepa’s experience
within the narrative, and our own experience as the audience. As Iván is elusive to
Pepa, so he is elusive to us, and we share her frustration at his duplicity and
slipperiness. As Pepa wakes from her dream of Iván he is leaving her a message on
her answering machine; she runs to the telephone, but is too late. We hear his
disembodied voice as she does: the film avoiding a customary cut to Iván leaving
the message at his end of the phone. She rings the studio where they work, but
he’s already left.
Within the narrative of the film, Pepa and Iván are actors. Before Pepa goes to work,
we see her with the doctor, who tells her that she is pregnant. Later, at work, Pepa
is dubbing her voice onto the soundtrack of Johnny Guitar. As we join her, she is the
Spanish voice of Joan Crawford in a scene where Crawford’s Vienna is having a
confrontation with her leading man, played by Sterling Hayden, who has the
Spanish voice of Iván, who has dubbed his lines earlier. Pepa’s performance of
Crawford-as-Vienna runs alongside Crawford’s, and their words of barely
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controlled passion are part of a narrative of desertion and ill treatment at the
hands of Iván-as-Hayden-as-Johnny Guitar. So, to the script of a film rife with
troubled signification (of Crawford’s iconic star quality, of recuperated feminist
resistance, of pathological lesbian desire - all of which have activated considerable
subcultural queer investment) we watch Carmen Maura acting the role of Pepa as
she negotiates the trauma of performing in a film which commentates on the
feminine subjection she’s experiencing in our film as romantic victim in her
relationship with Iván. This deliberate breaking of cinematic naturalism is a
powerful device that Almodóvar has also used in Law of Desire. This device of filmic
refraction has an intensified ironic effect for foreign audiences of Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, particularly English speaking ones, given that Crawford
and Hayden’s drama in Johnny Guitar is enacted in English. As we participate in the
literal translation, through over-dubbing, of a cultural text into a new context, the
original and familiar artefact of Johnny Guitar’s drama becomes especially
contingent, potentially inauthentic, and this adds greater impact to our sense of
Pepa producing a self-conscious, narrativised effect of herself in her role within a
familiar patriarchal drama of male indifference and female suffering. To underline
the effect, Pepa is overcome and faints.
Yet even in the midst of such female suffering, a suffering we masochistically share
in our principal identification with Pepa, Iván remains elusive, disembodied, a
mechanised effect equivalent to the iconic fiction of Crawford or Hayden on the
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screen in the studio Pepa is working in, whilst our heroine is present, corporeal,
passionate. Her femininity, her suffering, the part she plays in response to male
heterosexual infidelity and mistreatment, that is a performance, an act, scripted by
her role as a heterosexual woman. Unlike Iván’s insincerity which brokers his power
and freedom as a man - his refusal to step into the world of emotions and
responsibility, Pepa’s role-playing is a sign of her entrapment. Crucially, it seems
that the representation of Pepa suggests a self-conscious awareness of her
performance, especially in the scene where she is overdubbing Crawford, and her
fainting suggests that it is the strain of maintaining her performance of stoic
powerlessness, in the face of male brutality and refusal to engage emotionally, that
produces female hysteria. Hysteria here is an effect of lack of choice. The selfconsciousness of Pepa’s professional acting allows us to think of her relationship
with Iván as a role where she knows she’s following a script, but manifests
hysterical frustration that she can’t find another one to follow.
This de-naturalisation of Pepa’s performance of the wronged woman shows how
this role is about repressing the effects of mistreatment, maintaining wounded
silence, suffering but not hitting back, retaining passivity because men maintain
power. Ironically this suggestion of the role-playing necessary to sustain women’s
position, allied to the Pepa-centred narrative and scopic organisation of Women on
the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, has the effect of rendering women as more real
than men. Iván is but a mechanised, disembodied refraction, potentially damaging,
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but not present, he displays no self-consciousness, no acknowledgement of roleplaying, he is but the voice of absent authority: there’s nothing behind the role, no
emotional engagement. If hysteria is a sign of the strain of maintaining the role of
powerlessness, then I would suggest that Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
eventually exploits the faultline such hysteria represents, fashioning it into a
gender dissidence which attempts to refuse male control, male rationality.
This sense of women’s realness in contrast to the refracted absence, the empty
signification of Iván, pervades the film. The receptionist at the studio is interfering
and nosy, the pharmacist Pepa goes to for illicit sleeping pills has a lurid pink face
from a cosmetic treatment mask she’s trying, whilst the other women in the
chemist’s shop gossip, commenting rudely on how Pepa doesn’t look as good as
she does on television, Iván’s estranged wife, Lucía, maintains a stolid fury
throughout, telling Pepa to ‘fuck off’. Women are real and colourful, their insults,
judgements and motivations are up front, delivered honestly and unconsciously.
Iván is but a monochromatic mask of honeyed subterfuge, he tells Pepa’s
answering machine ‘I don’t deserve your kindness’ yet he hurts her.
Thus far it does seem that Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown delivers a
conventional patriarchal narrative of relationship breakdown: women emote
passionately, occupying the physical space as ciphers of suffering, whilst
masculinity remains emotionally elusive, never really a part of the breakdown, but
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utterly instrumental, constitutive even, of female behaviour within it. Iván’s
masculinity is but a parody of patriarchal faithlessness as he exchanges Lucía for
Pepa, Pepa for Paulina.
The Woman’s Film as Gay Film?
The key disjunction with which Women initially modulates these conventions is
that it offers us little choice but to identify and valorise the corporeal, hysterical
space Pepa occupies. Not only is Pepa the film’s only significant protagonist, but
events and perspectives are continually skewed to portray her affectionately.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown appears to encourage us to revel in the
masochistic experience of identifying with such hysteria and emotional trauma.
Psychoanalytic film theory, which has represented a powerful, and often residual,
phase in the evolution of cinematic studies, would suggest that the organisation of
the cinematic frame protects an imputed male spectator from castration anxieties
that the narratively subjugated woman embodies; this organisation elicits a sadistic
gaze upon the woman which punishes and controls her. The valorised masochistic
collusion which Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown encourages seems quite
different to such sadistic spectatorship. Here the slipperiness and elusivity of Iván
acts not only to centralise Pepa in the narrative, but actually makes an
identification with a patriarchal representative in the text elusive as well: Iván has
an insubstantial textual presence. In this (as in many formal considerations of
genre and mode) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown offers a striking contrast
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to Pulp Fiction in its scopic organisation and narrative representation of gender. As
we saw earlier, Pulp Fiction offers aspirant patriarchal spectatorship diverse
iconographies of hip masculinity with which to align, and for good measure a
couple of abject queers for the purposes of counter-identification; women are mere
homosocial foils for male display and exchange. In Pulp Fiction the manifestation of
women’s punishment for embodying the threat of castration doesn’t merely reside
in the organisation of a sadistic and controlling gaze, but is narratively and
comically glorified in the punishment of women, such as in the scene where
Vincent administers a terrifying and piercingly phallic injection to Mia’s heart with a
foot long needle.
We could suggest that Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’s sponsorship of
our masochistic identification displaces the sadistic, patriarchal gaze, the object of
which is to control castration anxiety, and replaces it with a queered gaze, one
which aligns our spectatorship with Almodóvar’s heterosocial affiliation with
Maura/Pepa: the actress his publicly acceptable consort, the character his own
creation. This reading of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown would seem to
be compatible with Mary Ann Doane’s notion of the women’s film, a genre with a
lavish history of gay subcultural investment.21 Doane suggests that the woman’s
film attempts to constitute female subjectivity and desire through the sponsorship
of fantasies associated with the feminine: masochism, hysteria, paranoia and
neurosis. Gay male audiences have tended to access the pleasures of the so-called
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woman’s film through the vehicle of star adoration and identification: witness the
cultish veneration of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and others, that
has come to define camp spectatorship. We could argue that historically the loose
and sometimes vague genre of the woman’s film has provided as much pleasure in
resistant subjectivity to gay male audiences as it has to female ones.22 Indeed many
of the characteristics of the woman’s film have been appropriated as substantial
components of gay male gender resistance, although the issue of appropriation is
a complex one. The discursive and subcultural association of gay men with
landmark woman’s films such as Mildred Pierce, Sylvia Scarlet, Now, Voyager, and A Star
is Born could be interpreted as appropriative of what is essentially women’s cultural
space, but this is a troubled, problematic interpretation. Clearly the canon of
women’s films can be significant in many contexts simultaneously, and one needn’t
negate another; nor are there substantial institutionalised power differences
between constituencies of gay men, and of heterosexual women such that either
may have the power to enforce the true reading on the other: both are empowered
and disempowered in different, but often symmetrical ways, as I have been
discussing. An important inducement to the investment gay men have made in
woman’s films is the understanding about the homosexuality of key Hollywood
personnel involved in their production. The homosexuality of George Cukor, the
pre-eminent woman’s director, has been subculturally appreciated for many years:
in Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger recounts how Clark Gable had Cukor fired
from Gone With the Wind because he was homophobic, and Patrick McGilligan’s
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biography, A Double Life recounts the same narrative.23 We do not need to fall back
on an idea of some essential gay sensibility to see the significance of Cukor’s
sexuality to gay men’s investment in his movies. Camp spectatorship and the
parodic, excessive overdetermination it sponsors provides an iconography of
reading traces for queer audiences, destabilising naturalising discourses and
representations with an excess of authenticity, an ironic subversion or an insistence
on surfaces and performativity, artificiality. That mode of reading, whether its
purpose is to find especial messages or meanings, or merely the presence of
another like mind, has been a crucial part of gay subcultural activity through preand post-Stonewall periods back to the turn of the century, and possibly before if
we accept Rictor Norton’s thesis about the mollies (notwithstanding doubts about
the continuity of molly culture).24 As I discussed in the opening sections, our
notions of queerness or homosexuality are constituted and contested through our
interaction with subcultures. In the case of George Cukor and the woman’s films
that came out of post-war Hollywood, it seems fair to say that not only are they the
bearers of gay subcultural investment, but that they display and communicate
reading traces that exhibit an awareness of subcultural activity that is inherent in
the production. Gay men do not have a genetic predisposition to be interested in
women, femininity and glamour (many of us, alas, show little interest in such
trappings) but these are things that our gay subcultural alignments show us have
been important to gay men, and may give us clues as to where we may look for
similar gay men to ourselves in a culture that often necessitates our closetedness
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and discretion. Other gay men in other parts of the subculture, maybe in different
temporal or spatial locations, with access to the means of cultural production, in
filmmaking, art or music, may also lay the foundations of such reading traces as
expressions of their interests and also as signposts to other queers, and friends in
the know. That these markers of camp spectatorship may offer the opportunity for
gender dissent, or heterosocial affiliation by gay men, only makes our political and
historical investment, as well as our reading skills, more acute. Of course, it remains
to be seen whether such queer reading traces fulfil their heterosocial potential
politically, but such activity is neither the expression of our essential empathy with
femininity, nor of our essential proclivity towards pro-feminism or a progressive
gender politics - though it may be.
In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as in Now, Voyager, women’s emotional
excess may be venerated within the fictional world-order that is the cinematic
diegesis and thus offer gay male audiences camp reading traces; but such feminine
hysteria remains meaningful within wider patriarchal culture as a mark of not
having control. It is here that tensions between the reading strategies of gay men,
and of women, may appear, particularly when gay men may precipitate the
celebration of filmic imagery that marks, however sublimely, women’s
powerlessness in heterosexual relations with men. Of course, the most successful of
these films will be those that position such emotional excess as rebellion, as
wilfully and determinedly outside the ambit of homosocial authority. Maria LaPlace
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has made a convincing reading of Now, Voyager which integrates understandings of
Bette Davis as star icon with feminist film criticism and suggests that the film offers
‘a symbolic system in which women can try to make sense of their lives and even
create imaginative spaces for resistance, a system which the film...enters despite
itself.’25 The concession with which LaPlace concludes her account suggests a
degree of selection that makes her reading plausible: this is valuable strategic
practice. Clearly the woman’s film has a vexed history of meanings for women,
regardless of any subcultural activity on the part of gay men. Hollywood
aggressively produced and marketed woman’s pictures to fulfil what was
understood to be a dominant share of cinema audiences, and they have remained
enormously powerful sources of pleasure and pride, but also difficulty, as Jeanine
Basinger encapsulates:
the woman’s film reminds women that they have a biological
function related to their role as women...love is their true job...the
movies prettied up the woman’s biological function as love...Over
and over again the answer to the question of what a woman
should do with herself was wrapped in shiny paper and presented
as love.26
Consuming women in woman’s films as objects for the experience of love, as
bearers of romantic pleasure and romantic pain at the hands of men, may be
relatively unproblematic for gay male spectatorship, which isn’t undermined by
being located so far outside authoritative male homosocial subjectivity. Indeed, as I
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have been arguing, queer heterosocial affiliations precisely strive to achieve this
distance from powerful, masculine homosocial formations and revel in such
romantic and emotional representation. However, the meanings of potential
identification with emotionally flamboyant, excessively feminine women are
different for lesbian and for straight female spectators than they are for gay male
ones. For gay men such representations of women are anti-masculine, they are role
models for acts of dissent against dominant codes of maleness that gay men are
forced to inhabit, and then are punished for inhabiting queerly. Such
identifications attempt to reimagine homosexual identity as something other than
a mechanism for purifying and policing homosocial power structures with which
women are patriarchally exploited and gay men are despised. For straight women,
such representation of valorised hysteria may authenticate their experiences of
heterosexuality and womanhood as subjects of homosocial activity, by offering
sisterly collusion and images of poised transcendence, but ultimately they lock
women into heterosexual suffrage - glamorous, gutsy, but still suffering, still
gaining cultural privilege by virtue of their subjection to men.27 For lesbians, such
material seems to be unsatisfying in that it confirms a feminine and powerless
position women are already forced to inhabit in relation to men. As lesbianism is
precisely about resisting participation in relations with men, and certainly ones
which follow the patriarchal script of heterosexuality, the opportunity to identify
with victimised heterosexual women, however glamorous their suffering, is going
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to be pretty meaningless. As Paula Graham has argued, gay men may be punished
within masculine subjectivity, but lesbians are excluded from it:
femininity is, after all, a relatively privileged category from which
lesbians are excluded, but which is also, for women, a mark of
subordination to masculine authority, and not a form of resistance
to it ... Even ‘excessive’ femininity ... still seems to have considerably
less appeal to lesbian audiences that to gay male audiences.28
So, in the context of gay male culture, I am suggesting that spectacles of female
emotional excess act as reading traces, opportunities that we learn about through
our membership of gay subcultures, for our anti-homosocial identification.
Sometimes these reading traces are a function of gay subcultural investment on
the part of producers or directors, and they can act as a nod and a wink to gay
audiences conversant with the codes of camp spectatorship. However, even though
such identifications may evade complicity with a sadistic patriarchal gaze, the
disparity between gay male, straight female, and lesbian readings of such ecstatic
masochistic identification may disrupt the heterosocial potential of camp
spectatorship; this is not necessarily because such disparity invalidates gay male
practice, but because this difference marks ideological tensions. The adoration of
spectacles of female emotional excess, where that excess is the breaching of
rationality and containment, is an important part of gay male cultural vernacular,
but beyond its value as a subcultural language, a kind of community glue, we need
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to be sensitive to the particular ways in which we line up these identifications with
our homosexuality.
Edward II : Queer Homosociality?
An illustration of these difficulties can be found in the late Derek Jarman’s film
Edward II, which was released in 1991, but got caught up in the excitement about
so-called New Queer Cinema in 1992 with the release of The Hours and Times, Swoon,
The Living End, RSVP, and the new wave of queer activism aimed at Basic Instinct and
Silence of the Lambs.29 Edward II is a very striking film for a number of reasons bound
up with Jarman’s retelling of Marlowe’s drama in the context of Thatcherite Britain,
and the emerging queer politics typified by the newly formed activist group,
Outrage; Jarman himself writes in notes in the published script, that it sets out to
represent a gay love affair by taking ‘a dusty old play and violat[ing] it.’30 This
modernisation of a Renaissance narrative produces a number of incoherences
which would seem to be out of step with Jarman’s apparently radical queerness,
which in Edward II seems very much lined up against the gentry and the
bourgeoisie, both of whom are modelled on Thatcherite archetypes: the yuppie
suited businessman, the handbag-clutching Tory housewife from middle-England,
and the crisply khakied SAS-style soldier. Not the least of these ruptures the film
exhibits is that the site of our heroic queerness is in the heart of the monarchy. The
film makes it clear that the ideology of respectability upheld by state apparatus is
incompatible with queerness, but Edward and Gaveston’s continual anxious
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mediation between gay love and royal duty somewhat overshadows more radical
possibilities of the new queer agenda. Jarman’s own outspoken attitude to his
homosexuality and his HIV status made him something of a hero, certainly for
British queer activists (in September 1991 he was canonised by the Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence), yet Jarman’s work as an artist and filmmaker owes more to
traditions of bohemian high art classicism than it does to street politics.
However, Edward II is particularly compelling in its handling of camp spectatorship,
and for the way in which it positions gay men and straight women in adversarial
relations. As we might expect, the film is visually stunning, with most scenes being
rendered as painterly tableau, the characters vividly displayed in front of minimalist
stone backdrops. Each shot displays iconically precise composition, with skin and
fabrics, blood and water, lit to highlight their form and texture, always displayed
with a sensitivity to the spectacle of detail. By far the most complex and richly
displayed spectacle in Edward II is that of Queen Isabella (Tilda Swinton), Edward’s
wife. In each of her scenes Isabella shimmers, resplendent in a succession of
fabulous outfits that self-consciously reference the formulaic excess of female star
iconography; in an interview where he talks about Edward II in detail, Jarman
himself notes that in one particular scene Isabella looks like Joan Crawford, in
another that she’s a cross between Crawford and Christine Keeler, and in another
that she looks like Evita, ‘the musical, not the politician.’31 What have been called a
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‘Vogue’s gallery of designer dresses’32 evoke the spectacles of Audrey Hepburn and
Eva Peron, amongst others, but it isn’t just the costumes which plug into such a
distinctive visual vernacular, one that has a strong history of gay male
identification: crucially it is Tilda Swinton’s performance, which manages to capture
elements of pastiche and irony but also makes astonishing use of poised stillness
that at different points evokes stunned victimisation and sinister evil.
It clearly isn’t necessary to sift through anecdotal and incidental biographical
material in order to situate Jarman as a gay man, but it may be necessary to engage
in such subcultural enterprise in order to think about Jarman as the kind of gay
man who identifies or aligns himself with women. What becomes clear from
Jarman’s volumes of memoirs, Dancing Ledge, Modern Nature and At Your Own Risk is
that in his own subcultural milieu, he did not have much to do with women at all.33
The journals suggest a membership of, or movement through, an assortment of
artistic cliques, bohemian enclaves and upper and middle class gay subcultures, but
Jarman’s principal interests usually seem to lie in other men, in either sexual or
fraternal terms. Clearly the finished product that is the representation of Isabella in
Edward II is the result of a complex collaboration between the director, his writers,
costume designers, photographers, lighting designers, and of course, and not the
least Tilda Swinton herself. B. Ruby Rich has noted how ‘Tilda Swinton’s brilliance as
an actor - and full co-creator of her role - invests her character with more weight,
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and thus more evil, than anyone else on the screen.’34 I shall return to the issue of
evil shortly. At the risk of being overly speculative though, it doesn’t seem too bold
to suggest that the extent to which Isabella signifies as a camp icon in Edward II is
an indication of the extent to which such imagery plays a part in urban gay male
culture (as understood by Swinton and other workers on the film, as much as by
Jarman), rather than an indication of Jarman’s own female identification or
heterosocial practice. The iconography of the diva or the Hollywood screen siren
saturates gay male culture, and is naturalised in this context, so that it often
functions as a kind of background noise that most men who circulate through
urban gay space will be familiar with, even if such representations do not describe
or elicit their identification. This familiarity with camp female iconography will also
be true for those honorary members of gay subculture - friends, political affiliates,
camp followers both male and female, straight-queer chicks and chaps - all of
whom may fraternise with gay men and lesbians in gay spaces because the party’s
funkier, or as a respite from homosocial chauvinism, or as heterosocial political
dissent.
One of the most striking images near the beginning of Edward II, one notable
amongst many striking images, is of two naked young hustlers who are having sex
in Gaveston’s bed in France as he receives his call home from Edward. The men
themselves represent an iconography of queerness that seems to have become
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representative of the activist group Outrage, and the kind of queer politics it
represented in Britain in the early 1990s. The men are white, young, smooth and
beautiful, their heads are shaved to precision, they are lithe, muscled and
masculine, and they are utterly uninhibited, exhibitionistic even, in their sexual
practice: in many ways they are a gay ideal that we may aspire to. The couple are
also genderless: their matched physicality negating sexual difference, unifying
masculinity in a narcissistic union. Not for these two perfect faggots the easy
iconography of active and passive that is exhibited in Leo Bersani’s reading of Erik
and Riton fucking on the roof in Genet’s Funeral Rites.35 These studs are raunching
around, but their perfectly matched physical type and masculinity, and thrillingly
undifferentiated sex acts deflect any understanding of top or bottom or power
imbalance, let alone camp spectatorship, effeminacy or female identification. This
couple represent one of the ruptures that makes Edward II so fascinating. They are
an ideal of homosexuality that remains unfulfilled by Edward and Gaveston
throughout the film, indeed that they cannot fulfil: the queer hustlers are a product
of queer Britain in the 1990s, whilst Edward and Gaveston are Renaissance
sodomites. Despite their easily identifiable iconographic origins, as possible sites of
identification this couple of nameless hustlers have no culture, they are not shown
having to integrate their subjectivities and sexuality into a social system, they don’t
even display the rank and taste that clothes might afford. They’re just perfect
faggots having a perfect (non)fuck. Their unselfconscious and irony-free eroticism
makes a striking contrast to the troubled coupledom of the king and his working45
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class lover. Edward and Gaveston have vexed conversations riddled with doubt
and anxiety, they share the absurdity of constitutional pomp and they share an
intimate humour as they dance the tango; but they don’t have sex and they don’t
represent the perfect faggottry of the hustlers who form an ideal of queer sexuality
against which we measure Edward and Gaveston. The introduction of the hustlers
and the idealisation of homosexuality they represent so early in the film allows us
to monitor continually the levels of homophobic intervention Edward and
Gaveston must overcome in order that they may fulfil that idealisation. However,
the hustlers also serve to define homosexuality in purely libidinous terms that
efface gender from queerness. This organisation of homosexuality becomes more
sustained as the narrative of the film develops and Isabella comes to increasingly
personify the homophobic obstacles Edward and Gaveston face in becoming
perfect queers, where that perfection is a mutual sameness of masculinity. In the
book of the film, Jarman celebrates this masculinity, staking his particular claim
upon the ‘real’ lovers: ‘Neither Edward nor Gaveston were the limp-wristed lisping
fags so beloved of the tabloids. Edward swam in winter, hedged and ditched the
fields of his house at Langley. Gaveston was the finest horseman of his age.’36
At first it appears that Isabella is deferential and eager towards Edward, craving his
attention, but there can be no sexual satisfaction in their relationship, and
apparently there can be no sisterly solidarity either. Presumably such an affinity
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would compromise Edward’s aspiration to perfect masculine faggottry.
Immediately after Gaveston has returned, to be greeted by his lover with titles and
power, we watch Edward and Isabella in bed, abortively having sex. The crisp
porcelain of Isabella’s complexion remains unblemished by any facial expression as
her overtures are coldly rejected by Edward, who appears impatient and repulsed
by her. In the published script of the film, which contains Jarman’s personal notes,
he comments on this scene:
An unsatisfactory bedroom scene with Tilda and Steven - she
thought it might be misogynist, I thought the audience would
have some sympathy for her, even if she plays it hard.37
A short while later we join Isabella in bed, alone, wracked with jealousy and
frustration, but still looking iconographically sublime of course. The military
Mortimer entices Isabella to his rebellious cause. After her humiliation by Gaveston,
who puts her up against a wall and feints to kiss her, pulling away as the queen in
her frustration kisses back, and finally some abuse from her husband, who calls her
a ‘foul strumpet’ for fawning on him, Isabella induces Mortimer to have Gaveston
killed. Mortimer comes upon the queen as she is shooting a crossbow at a stag
suspended from the ceiling. She’s resplendent in full Eva Peron drag, and
hysterically gleeful at having thrown off her marital obligations. Later, she returns
to the marital bedroom, dripping in strings of effervescent pearls as she brings
news to Edward that Gaveston’s exile is to be repealed, knowing, as we do, that she
has planned with Mortimer for him to be killed upon his return. An exotic and
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passionate encounter in the corridor cements Isabella and Mortimer’s allegiance
and immediately afterwards Mortimer stabs Gaveston at a cocktail party in front of
Isabella and Edward, who then attempts to banish Mortimer from the court.
Thereafter war breaks out between the Thatcherite riot squad of Mortimer’s army
and Edward’s Outrage activists. Whilst war rages in the background, Isabella,
impeccably coiffed, is Eva Peron (the musical) as she addresses the multitude at a
microphone. Jarman remains respectful of Marlowe’s legacy and ultimately aspirant
faggottry is routed, although Edward’s unfortunate demise on the end of a poker
becomes a paranoid fantasy, whilst the king escapes at the end alive. (How very
queer... )
Edward II seems to illustrate some of the problems that arise when we insufficiently
situate homosexuality within the broader field of gender. It seems particularly
unfortunate in a film so bristling with the iconographic majesty of Isabella and
with self-conscious, state of the art queerness (even Outrage themselves are on
hand as Edward’s army), that the interests of women and of gay men can be
represented as so antithetical and as so much a function of patriarchal power
structures. Indeed, despite her aesthetic glorification, it becomes clear that Isabella
herself has little power beyond the symbolic status of her title. Humiliated and
rejected by her husband (and her husband’s lover), she must make herself an object
of exchange, selling her passion and legitimacy to Mortimer, who does have
enough material authority to get her on the throne and secure her position.
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Edward’s homosexuality is only a problem in as much as it leads him to reject
Isabella, thus producing her scorn, and also in that it offers Mortimer the
opportunity to seek power. Otherwise the triangle of Edward, Mortimer and
Isabella forms a perfect homosocial system. The passing of Isabella from one
powerful man to the other marks the conclusion of their struggle for true
patriarchal subjectivity, which is itself marked by ownership of the throne. Edward
possesses monarchical power. Mortimer wants power and uses Isabella to get it.
The object of their struggle, which is national royal power, symbolised by the
throne, is never questioned: queer Edward expects obedience, deference and the
trappings of that power as much as Mortimer or the chorus of Thatcherite earls;
this queerness declines any critique of state power, or any affiliation with political
resistance. The issue at the heart of the film is about who has the biggest balls to
sit in the big chair, not about challenging or resisting complicity with the structures
the chair may represent. Early in the film Edward allows his lover to slouch across
the throne, later Gaveston larks about on it in the nude, whilst Mortimer and
Isabella later occupy it with pomp and appropriate attire. The basis of Edward’s
oppression seems to be a recognition that his masculinity is insufficiently ample to
justify his ownership of the throne: he never does manage to capture the perfectly
unified masculinity of the hustlers, and this brings about a dubious alignment
between the perfect queerness they represent and institutional state power.
Edward’s Outrage army seems to be something of an incoherently incorporated
visual gag, rather than indicative of the film’s embracing of a queer politics which
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challenges state power. Indeed, when Edward realises that he will be impeached if
he does not reject Gaveston, he sacrifices his great gay love for the sake of his
power and the support of the grubby and grasping earls of middle-England.
However, at least Edward mourns his sacrifice: Isabella, on the other hand seems to
become more evil and less sympathetic the further she moves from stunned,
frustrated victimisation towards power and fulfilment. Most chilling, and most
erotic, is her murder of Kent, Edward’s brother, who has helped the rebels for the
sake of the monarchy, but who then challenges Mortimer and Isabella’s legitimacy
as holders of the throne. Isabella is as poised and as perfectly coiffed as ever as she
bends down to kiss her brother-in-law’s neck. As Kent begins to writhe, we realise
that the kiss is too long, too intense; when he starts to struggle and blood pumps
out over his throat and her chin it becomes graphically clear that she has gorged
the life out of him. Isabella finally steps away, her metamorphosis from ‘fawning
strumpet’ through frustrated wife to homosocial token and finally to malicious
vampire is completed. As Ruby Rich suggests, ‘For women, Edward II is a bit
complicated. Since the heroes are men and the main villain is a woman, some critics
have condemned it as misogynist.’38 Edward II may be a misogynist film, but only in
the extent to which it makes Isabella complicit with a ruthless perfidy and lust for
power most usually engendered in men within the state’s constitutional autocracy,
and which even intoxicates the heroically validated but viciously victimised queers.
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Colin MacCabe offers a different interpretation which suggests that Edward II’s
misogyny is an effect not of a blindness to state power structures, but of Jarman’s
sexuality itself:
The film is much more unambiguous in its misogyny that any of
his other work. In that gay male dialectic where identification with
the position of woman is set against rejection of the woman’s
body, Edward II is entirely, and without any textual foundation, on
the side of rejection.39
There is, of course, considerable disengenuousness in these words, and an implicit
naturalisation of the author’s own heterosexuality and consequent innocence of
misogyny. Clearly MacCabe doesn’t have the space or the brief to dissect gay male
relationships with women. However, his argument has the effect of unifying a gay
male relationship with women that is continually balanced between identification
and repulsion. It is offensive to suggest that male homosexuality is an effect of a
physical repulsion for women: this idea has its modern origins in psychoanalytic
and psychiatric practice which until very recently clinically pathologised
homosexuality.40 Clearly many individual gay men are misogynistic, as is much gay
culture. Dominant cultures, formed through constant hegemonic renegotiation, are
pulling towards patriarchal interests; that means that all counter, resistant,
conformist, reactionary and dissident cultures will be formed out of interactions
with aspects of that dominant culture. In other words, our society and the
knowledges it circulates are misogynistic; this should not surprise us. Such glib
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accusations deflect analysis of the functions women may have in gay culture, as
well as dissection of the usefulness knowledges about supposed gay male misogyny
have within homosocial systems. There’s also something disquietingly
homophobic about the assumption that all homosexual men identify with women.
It is a basic assumption of this project that such identifications are valuable, but
MacCabe’s totalising tendency is ill conceived. Not all gay men identify with
women, even though, as I have suggested, gay male culture is saturated with the
iconography of camp spectatorship such that most will be familiar with the
practice. MacCabe’s statement is derived from the continuing prevalence of
inversionist knowledge about homosexuality, which gay activism has rightly
repelled. Third sex accounts of homosexuality work to shore up the authenticity of
heterosexual gender roles, and thus patriarchal power. However, accounts such as
the third sex models are an attempt to make coherence out of complex and
contradictory elements, which arise partly through our own dissident interventions.
I would suggest that inversion theories offer us the opportunity to strike back at
normative ideologies of gender through the very site of our constraint. Points that
require particularly intense policing by dominant authorities are those which elicit
dominant anxiety, and thus contain faultlines we must exploit.
However, I have suggested that Derek Jarman’s homosexuality, as he ruminates
upon it in his biographies, was not meaningful to him in this way; he did not
understand his own queerness as a dissident gender identification, but as a form
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of erotic liberation and bohemian rebelliousness. If the representation of Isabella
exhibits a malicious loathing of womanhood, then this occurs precisely because
Jarman was not interested enough in female identification to elevate her out of
normal patterns of homosocial (misogynist) representation. Aesthetically and
performatively Isabella represents an almost mathematically precise interpretation
of gay male camp iconography, but this imagery is then employed in a narrative
which consolidates and naturalises gay male masculinity to such an extent that it
may exchange that female iconography in order to purchase the possibility of
homosocial agency and power, symbolised by the throne of England.
Hysteria and Heterosocial Dissent
If we are to suggest that the markers of camp spectatorship deployed in Edward II
underwrite homosocial structures, because Isabella’s star iconography and sexually
repressed hysteria enable her homosocial exchange by gay men as much as sexual
objectification would enable her exchange by straight men, then Jarman has
unwittingly offered us a critical apparatus with which to assess the heterosocial
potential in specific arrangements of camp spectatorship or female identification.
This is not to suggest that the iconography of camp spectatorship necessarily aligns
gay men with straight men by enabling them to enter homosocial bonds through
the exchange of women, but Edward II shows us clearly how such forms of
spectatorship have this (politically undesirable) potential. Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown seems to be calling on familiar and identifiable reading traces
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that invite camp spectatorship: female protagonists, marginalisation of men,
validation of emotional excess, flamboyant iconography and kitsch aestheticism.
These reading traces are substantiated with our knowledges about Almodóvar’s
sexuality, regardless of the often unhelpful way in which he may comment upon it.
Furthermore, such inducements are offered in the context of Almodóvar’s
circulation through media apparently affirmative to our subcultural interests,
where we are encouraged to feel politically comfortable. Liberal broadsheet
journalism, as we have seen, may strenuously, but insidiously, attempt to
recuperate Almodóvar’s aura of camp spectatorship and thus dissipate his potential
heterosocial challenges, but such recuperation can never be secure, and in the
context of the agility of gay subcultural reading, and the powerful inducements
offered by Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the film may feasibly retain
substantial dissident capacity.
As we have seen, the early parts of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown offers
us pleasures we associate with the woman’s films of 30s and 40s Hollywood. We are
invited masochistically to align our identifications with Pepa in her self-conscious
manifestation of emotional trauma in the face of her partner’s desertion (Annette
Kuhn notes that woman’s films were often derogatorily known as ‘threehandkerchief movies’41). I have also suggested that the non-naturalistic break in the
diegesis offered by Pepa’s dubbing of Johnny Guitar instates the notion of
contingency within the text of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: its
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narrative is not universal, but specifically derived from the genre of the woman’s
film, as is that of Johnny Guitar, and the native languages of both films are but one
potential point of ethnic or national origin. More importantly, such an instatement
of contingency within Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown highlights the
conditionality of Pepa’s role-playing of the mistreated heterosexual woman. We
come to see her state of hysterical trauma as a cultural response, conditioned in
part by a governing patriarchal narrative represented in Johnny Guitar, where female
dissent and personal authority, to say nothing of the resistance of lesbian identity,
becomes crushingly and cloyingly recuperated. The most perfect moment of Pepa’s
hysteria is when she faints in the studio, ending the session in which she has been
dubbing Crawford’s voice into Spanish. What is striking is that it is during Pepa’s
performance as an actress attempting to represent another woman’s hysteria and
emotional distress, that she is overcome, and not whilst she is ‘herself’ within the
trauma she suffers at Iván’s hands. It would seem that what is unbearable is the
role of powerless heterosexual woman, and not the simple knowledge that some
man doesn’t love you any more. In the film’s press book Carmen Maura comments
on the tight skirts and high heels that she has to wear in Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown:
Of course they’ll be uncomfortable, but I’ll never show it. For
someone like Pepa, high heels are one of the best ways to handle
her suffering. If Pepa didn’t keep up her looks, her spirits would
break down completely.42
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Significantly the ruptural hysterical excess represented by the fainting, the
breakdown in the coherence of Pepa’s subjectivity, is produced by performative
strain (Pepa-as-Crawford-as-Vienna-as-victim) and not by the strain of her illtreatment by Iván. It’s her powerless role Pepa can’t cope with, not the fact that
she’s in pain because a man rejected her. This acts as something of a break from
the conventions of melodrama and the woman’s film, yet continues to maintain
Pepa within an emotional framework we recognise as constitutive of these genres,
which continues to validate, and indeed propagate, women’s (and gay men’s)
feelings.
After Pepa has procured some illicit sleeping tablets from the pink face-masked
pharmacist, she returns home. She moves to the kitchen where we enjoy close up
shots of her making gazpacho - all reds and juice and the violent whizzing of the
liquidiser. She puts all her sleeping tablets into the jug and tells the gazpacho and
us that she is ‘sick of being good’. With this decision and the discordance of the
blender ringing in our ears, Pepa goes into the bedroom and heaves Iván’s suits
out of the wardrobe. The soundtrack swells with the magnificently pompous tango
of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherezade, signifying hypnotic passion. Pepa lights a
cigarette, but then reminds herself that she shouldn’t smoke. So she tosses the
matches and cigarettes onto the bed, primal scene of her relationship with Iván,
where they catch fire. Woman’s passion, igniting in the bed, isn’t rational, but it isn’t
accidental either. The music surges in an intermediate climax. As Pepa walks back to
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the bed, she’s carrying a large plastic tulip of Iván’s, which has a pink bloom on the
end. The erect tulip detumesces crudely and spectacularly in the heat of the flames
and the music, whilst Pepa stands watching the fire, transfixed, until the smoke
starts to choke her. She runs out of the bedroom and returns with the hose from
the terrace, with which she douses the fire. Phallic tulips wilt under the heat of a
woman’s passion, whilst the crude force of ejaculation is not only cold, like water
from a hose, but antithetical to such incendiary passion and to the atmosphere of
drama and spectacle. The flames and the music are irrational, wanton, enveloping;
the water is sensible, necessary and premature: the fire must be extinguished or the
bed and the apartment will be consumed.
Iván’s estranged wife Lucía has recently been released from a mental hospital and
has engaged the feminist lawyer Paulina Morales to sue Iván for the years that she
has lost. It is clear once again that it is Lucía’s position of powerlessness in her
relationship with Iván that has caused her the mental illness for which she now
seeks judicial compensation, and not the necessary emotional trauma of desertion.
At first Pepa’s notion of not being good any more consists of more aggressive
attempts to speak with Iván and hold him accountable, but she fails to track him
down. Conversely, Pepa seems to be finding it very easy to link up with other
people, through a series of Dickensian coincidences which complicate the plot to
the point of farcical confusion: her friend Candela arrives at the flat when she
cannot contact Pepa by phone because Pepa has ripped it out, Marissa arrives with
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her boyfriend Carlos because the real estate agent has sent them, and Lucía arrives
seeking vengeance because she thinks that Pepa is about to go to Stockholm with
Iván. Carlos turns out to be Iván’s son. He fixes the telephone, and his mother,
Lucía, rings the airport to claim that she has planted a bomb on the plane to
Stockholm. Candela is on the run because she gave a home to a Shiite terrorist with
whom she was in love and who has now been captured. She attempts to throw
herself off the balcony. Eventually the police arrive, investigating the bomb threat
telephoned to the airport, but this induces panic in Candela, who thinks that they
have come for her. Temporary calmness occurs when all parties drink Pepa’s spiked
gazpacho which, like Oberon’s love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, induces
even the threatening figures of the police to succumb to Pepa’s spell.
At first it appears that Lucía is squaring up to compete with Pepa for Iván’s
affections. However, this interaction does not proceed as we would expect, with
each measuring up the other’s manifestation of feminine attributes that may
appeal to men. Rather, they bond through a shared experience of powerlessness in
relation to Iván. Pepa and Lucía reflect on how they both know him as a voice,
disembodied, instructive. When Pepa’s confusion and suffering has cleared enough,
she understands the urgency of Candela’s situation and goes to see the feminist
lawyer, Paulina Morales, for her advice. We already know that Iván is going to
Stockholm with someone, and not with Pepa or Lucía. Whilst Pepa waits to see
Paulina she answers the secretary’s phone and recognises Iván’s voice. He hangs
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up, but then she notices a plane ticket to Stockholm on the desk. When Pepa enters
Paulina’s office, the lawyer looks up, recognising her, and says ‘Of all the nerve’; we
now understand that Paulina must be Iván’s new lover. Pepa explains Candela’s
predicament, but Paulina Morales is unsympathetic; her advice is that Candela
should turn herself over to the very authorities she fears, so that they can put her
in jail: afterall, she says, Candela has committed a crime and must pay. Pepa replies
that her friend’s only crime was falling in love and being afraid; she adds that she
herself would have done the same. Paulina is scornful about Candela and Pepa’s
‘lovelorn’ status. Pepa gets very angry and Paulina tells her to leave or she’ll call the
police. Pepa hits the lawyer across the face. As Pepa leaves, Paulina’s secretary asks
if the meeting was helpful: Pepa smiles contentedly and replies that she feels much
better.
In her encounter with Pepa, it becomes clear that Paulina Morales, feminist lawyer,
is allied to the very same male interests of which the other women on the verge of
a nervous breakdown are victims, and which they are in various stages of
overcoming or understanding. Paulina is not tied to the other women through any
experience of emotional trauma, through which she may gain an appreciation of
powerlessness in relation to men; indeed, Paulina is sufficiently distant from such
an understanding that she actually calls upon the authority of men against
another woman. Far from recognising any difficulty in her gender, as a role that
propagates passivity, Paulina precisely gains her power over other women through
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the degree of her naturalised conformity to such subordination. Pepa has been
forced out of Iván’s affections as Paulina has insinuated herself into them. It would
seem that Pepa’s anger, and her deeply satisfying violence when she hits Paulina, is
justified in the face of such gender treachery, all the more authentic as Pepa is
acting not only for herself, but on behalf of other disempowered women, Candela
and Lucía. Paulina is visibly stunned when Pepa hits her, and this shock at our
protagonist’s violence exhibits a fracturing of the lawyer’s naturalised position. This
naturalisation of Paulina’s status acts as a kind of ideological denial through which
she has been able to offset her potential victimisation with the degree of her
favour and success in a male world, which is represented by the legal system in
which she works. The effect of Paulina’s treachery deepens when we realise that
she is Lucía’s lawyer in her suit against Iván, but he is now the lawyer’s lover: no
wonder the case has not been successful.
After Pepa faints at work she begins to move away from the traditional model of
hysteria with which woman’s films traditionally make sense of heterosexuality. The
scene in which she hits the gender traitor, Paulina, marks the climax of this
thematic arc which takes Pepa from the kind of female masochistic icon camp
spectatorship venerates, into a substantially more powerful textual position which
we may describe as exhibiting Almodóvar’s heterosocial bonding with her. In a
sense Paulina Morales helps to facilitate Pepa’s ascension into a more powerful
position. From the moment at which she faints in the dubbing studio Pepa begins
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to move away from manifesting the spectacle of hysterical behaviour we might
expect of a wronged woman. Such spectacles invariably suggest an appropriate
deficit of activity as expected of women within patriarchal gender roles. Pepa’s
transcendence of this passivity is again marked when she tells the gazpacho that
she is sick of being good, and when she hits Paulina this transformation seems to
have come full circle: hysterical women are the ones that get hit across the face,
they don’t do the hitting. Pepa gradually emerges from under the weight of
manifesting the pain of her mistreatment by Iván, which displays her passivity, and
then she proceeds to act for other women. She approaches a lawyer on behalf of
Candela, and she drugs the policemen who potentially threaten her friend. Pepa
manages to overcome the adversarial conditions of her relationship with Lucía, and
the two women find a shared experience of having to display acceptance and love
in the face of Iván’s refracted duplicity in their relationships with him. At the climax
of the film, when Lucía fails to be reconciled to Iván’s treachery by such bonding,
Pepa intercedes in an attempt to stop her from shooting Iván.
As Peter William Evans has noted in his volume on the film in the BFI Modern
Classics series, the closure of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is
ambiguous.43 We have seen how Pepa has overcome the necessary display of her
hysteria, we have seen her intercession on behalf of Candela, and her control of the
potential chaos at her apartment when all the coincidental and farcical elements of
the narrative collide (with the exception of Iván), which becomes complete when
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the policemen succumb to the narcotic effect of the gazpacho. However, Lucía tears
the fabric of this unity and harmony by taking the policemen’s guns and pointing
them at Pepa. The two women are the only remaining conscious figures. Lucía asks
Pepa what it was that she had to tell Iván. Pepa tells her that she has nothing to say
to him now: ‘I just want to forget him and you should do the same.’ Lucía says that
she had forgotten him in the hospital, but then one day she heard his voice on the
television telling a woman that he loved her: she didn’t recognise his face, only his
voice. Lucía behaved as if she was cured and was released from the mental
hospital.
PEPA: If
you’re cured, stop aiming at me.
LUCÍA: But
I’m not cured. I faked it and I fooled them. I can only
forget him by killing him.
Lucía suggests that now Pepa knows, they should drink a toast. The tension
mounts as both women raise glasses of the drugged gazpacho; a series of reverse
shots establish eye contact between the women. Lucía breaks the deadlock by
throwing her gazpacho into Pepa’s face. Whilst Pepa runs to the kitchen in distress
to wash the juice out of her eyes, Lucía escapes with the guns, hijacking the
boyfriend and motorbike of Pepa’s neighbour, Ana. Pepa and Ana follow in the
Mambo cab, and the two women commiserate with each other about their fate at
men’s hands. Ana is jealous of the fact the Lucía is sitting on the bike seat: Pepa
reminds her that Ambite, her boyfriend, is being held at gunpoint. Ana shrugs this
off, he’s unfaithful and she’s going to get some money and buy his motorbike:
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‘With a bike, who needs a man?’ Lucía is enjoying herself enormously, cackling into
the wind as she fires the gun at the pursuing Mambo cab, entreating Ambite to go
faster or she’ll shoot him. Pepa arrives at the airport after Lucía and finds Iván’s exwife putting on her glasses and pulling out a gun ready to shoot her prey. Pepa
pushes a luggage trolley at Lucía, and watches it as it knocks over the potential
assassin, who fires the gun into the air, causing panic. Pepa faints. She revives in
Iván’s arms with Paulina looking on disdainfully, but pushes him away and tells
him to let go. She tells him to instruct Paulina to go away. He dithers, and Pepa
does it herself. The lawyer retreats. Iván may be incapable of action, but he remains
capable of honeyed rhetoric: he tells Pepa that he’s ashamed, and that he’s treated
her so badly. She tells him that all she wanted was to talk to him. He asks her to say
what she needed to say, but it is too late. We know that the withheld information
concerns Pepa’s pregnancy. Pepa admits that at any time before their meeting she
would still have told him, but not any more. She only came to save him from Lucía,
now she wants to go. She turns away and returns to her apartment.
Here at the end of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Pepa’s romantic
restraint is the equal of any heroine of any woman’s film, even that of Bette Davis’s
Charlotte Vale in the sublimely melodramatic Now, Voyager. Yet the meaning of
Pepa’s restraint doesn’t lie in some noble sacrifice, a self-denial for a liberal
morality; her restraint appears to be a heterosocial triumph. Peter William Evans
suggests that ‘our cravings for a happy ending are frustrated’ but his hegemonic
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‘our’ nominates and naturalises an audience looking for patriarchally inscribed
heterosexual romance.44 In as much as Pepa’s reconciliation with Iván would
undermine that resistance fashioned from her hysteria, then the ending of Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown does offer satisfying completion. Yet there remain
some fundamental ambiguities here which may remind us of the difficulty we face
in maintaining consistent textual dissent. Pepa, and indeed Lucía, remain
embedded within narratives of heterosexual romance: given that the narrative
structure of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is organised upon the
premise of Iván’s elusiveness, it would seem appropriate that the conclusion of this
arc would bring the erstwhile lovers face-to-face for some kind of reckoning.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown seems to offer us three different kinds of
resolution with Iván represented by Pepa, Lucía and Paulina.
The lawyer gets her man, and is leaving the scene of the problematic diegesis with
him. Yet her romantic conquest is a hollow one that we aren’t encouraged to
identify with: Paulina Morales is a gender traitor, and worse, hasn’t been on the
verge of a nervous breakdown, has indeed, colluded with those forces which
would bring other women to that verge. We are supposed to find her famous
feminism ironic in the light of her gender treachery, but such humour undermines
gay heterosocial investments in female bonding by belittling women’s activism.
That the lovers are leaving Madrid, glorified heart of Almodóvar’s oeuvre,
underlines her marginalisation. The film’s ending does marginalise Iván within the
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structure of personal affiliations, as our heterosocial expectations demand: Pepa
does dismiss him. However, she has come to the airport to save Iván, and not, as we
may hope, to save Lucía from the consequences of shooting Iván, in what could
have been an act of sisterly bonding between the women. As Lucía is escorted
away, Pepa ignores her, and tells Iván that she came to prevent his assassination.
Here, then, Lucía is but the means to bring Pepa and Iván together so that they
may play out a final scene in their romance. It is Lucía, with her glorious relish of
the motorcycle chase and her vivid, purposeful pursuit of Iván who embodies the
film’s sponsorship of hysteria as rebellion against homosocial vanity and
complacency, but her version of narrative completion is marginalised and carted
off to the mental hospital. Anyway, we could see Lucía’s need to kill Iván as an
indication of her ongoing infatuation from which she hasn’t recovered. Pepa and
Lucía, potentially heterosocially united in homosocial defiance in their bonding
and in their assassination of Iván, end up leaving the airport separately, Lucía
escorted by the police, with her plan thwarted by her potential ally. Iván lives to fly
off with the gender traitor. This conclusion, with its heterosocial disappointments
and emotive good-byes, resuscitates a conventional account of female hysteria as
emotional weakness in the face of abandonment and frustrated romance, which
back-tracks somewhat on the efforts made earlier to identify hysteria as the effect
of maintaining a powerless gender role. Lucía knows that her only freedom comes
not with the knowledge that her love relationship with Iván is over, she already
knows that, but with his death and thus with her release from having to
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continually endure the pain of his choice and power, and her passivity. To that end,
Pepa’s rescue of Iván recuperates Lucía’s audacious dissidence. We may rejoice in
Pepa’s brushing off of Iván’s ludicrous disengenuousness, and that she is able to
maintain restraint, but this is a much weaker, more rational conclusion of her
relationship with Iván than murdering him would have been. The incendiary
passion, brilliantly underscored with Rimsky-Korsakov, that burns Pepa’s bed and
threatens to consume the apartment, which seemed to represent an embracing of
hysteria but also a refusal of passivity, is here extinguished in the rationality of
Pepa’s dignity and restraint. Such an uncompromising resolution of Pepa and
Lucía’s verging breakdown as Iván’s glorified murder would certainly alienate the
mainstream liberal audience Almodóvar seems so concerned to address at the
expense of a more specialised and radical once; clearly this isn’t a risk the
writer/director is willing to take.
In the ending of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown it seems that the
manifold disparate factors which make up the context of the film’s production and
consumption coalesce. Knowledge of Almodóvar’s sexuality and his particular
interest in women lead us through a narrative which does offer many of the
pleasures associated with camp spectatorship, both for audiences of gay male
queens, and for diverse appropriative or heterosocially aligned camp followers. The
narrative perspective would seem to confirm the director’s affiliation with women
by sponsoring Pepa’s perspective, whilst the scopic organisation of the film
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decentres male protagonism, which makes it difficult for an imputed male
spectator to gain sufficient leverage to enter into an exchange of women through
a textual patriarchal representative. However, this is often true of many
melodramas and so-called woman’s films which choose not to address a male
spectator. At its most successful Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown manages
to fuse such woman-centred interests with a continuing acknowledgement of its
appeal to camp spectatorship, thus offering the conditions for heterosocial
bonding.
In the final scene of the film we see Pepa arriving home to the shambles of her
apartment, after she has left the airport. Candela, Carlos, Marissa, the telephone
repairman, and the policemen are all still sleeping, and there is broken glass and
spilled gazpacho all over the floor, the bed is a burnt-out wreck and the telephone
is disembowelled. Marissa is sleeping out on the terrace, while her erstwhile fiancee
is curled up with Candela on the couch. Pepa steps over the mess and notes that
‘the repairman is a doll, but I better save him for Marissa.’ She joins Marissa out on
the terrace as she wakes up. Pepa confides that she’s pregnant and Marissa gives
up her chair. Marissa then confides that she had a dream which has left her no
longer a virgin. The two women are sharing their distaste for virgins as the credits
roll.
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Under the influence of Pepa’s magic potion, the gazpacho (which with its violent
red seems to evoke her passion, and was whizzed together under her spell, ‘I’m sick
of being good’) what emerges at the end of Women is a set of bondings that
transcend the adversarial relations sponsored by homosocial systems. Edward II
shows us that the trappings of camp spectatorship alone do not safeguard gay
men’s relations with women from reproducing these bonds, which work to sustain
patriarchal authority. Similarly the portrayal of Paulina in Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown shows us how the exchange of women within homosocial
arrangements often sets up competitive relations between women themselves for
the limited advantage of male patronage. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
brings Pepa to an epiphanal moment which fractures the normativity of her
breakdown, exposing the powerlessness of her romantic obsession for Iván, which
locks her into suffrage. Such fracturing doesn’t give her power, it can’t: she remains
subject to male power, and in a way we can see the inexorability of her meeting
with Iván at the end of the film as symptomatic of this. Yet there are diverse ways
of inhabiting a position which retains significant structural powerlessness, and
during her combative encounters with Paulina and Lucía, and in her protectiveness
of Candela, Pepa seems to develop a more resistant attitude towards the relations
in which her gender role is manifested.
Our (gay male) pleasure in masochistically identifying with Pepa’s romantic pain
leads us through the same epiphany. Our knowledges about Almodóvar, circulated
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through a liberal press anxious to instate his associations with women, and the
markers of camp spectatorship with which Pepa is represented (the lurid kitsch of
her outfits, her deft handling of phallic tulips, telephones and feminist lawyers)
elicit gay male camp spectatorship. This queer gaze upon Pepa may initially be
manifested through a pleasurably masochistic identification, but such pleasure
does not become recuperatively entrenched. A gay male gaze upon Pepa does not
pin her into a punishing scopic relay where our homosocially induced instability
may be disavowed through her suffering. We could say that this is the
predominant effect of the use of camp spectatorship in Edward II, but for all its
ambiguity, our identification with Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
remains structurally distinct from Jarman’s ambiguous handling of female
representation. In watching Edward II those gay men whose principal textual
investments usually lie in identification with women have a significant problem, in
that the very possibility of plausible queer subjectivity is organised as being
antithetical to the interests of empowered womanhood. Edward and Gaveston’s
security and happiness, their integrity as a plausible couple, falls in direct
proportion to the ascendance of Isabella. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown there is no such split in identificatory positions: plausible antihomosocial subjectivity and camply empowered womanhood are both unified in
Carmen Maura’s character. Pepa’s self-conscious enlightenment about how her
tormented romantic infatuation has normalised her subordinate gender role, leads
to her subsequent empowered activity in the punishment of the gender traitor, the
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bonding with other women and the assistance of fellow victims of male power
(Lucía and Candela). This gender enlightenment and bonding activity express both
her empowered womanhood and her heterosocial alignment at the same time.
Unlike the empowerment sought by Paulina Morales, which must be traded for
desirability in male eyes and sponsorship of male interests (punishment of
Candela), Pepa’s resistance is not a function of her exploitation of the structural
subordination of identities proximate to her own. Indeed the strategies by which
she resists her own subjection to the homosocial narrative complement and
enhance gay male homosocial resistance derived through an identification with
her. We can see a striking contrast not only within different female
characterisations in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but between Pepa’s
complementary heterosocial dissent, her refusal to be homosocially exchanged or
complicit with the homosocial exchange of others, and the more problematic
alignment made by Roseanne’s domestic goddess with homosocial mechanisms. As
we have seen, there seems to be a reluctance in Roseanne to step away from the
privileges heterosexual women may accrue in relation to lesbians or gay men
through their circulation in homosocial systems. The character of Roseanne Conner
assiduously exhibits a refusal to be homosocially exchanged herself, but is willing
to court queer culture as a naturalised homosocial subject so as to trade on
homosexual abjection and perversity in order to accrue trendiness and normativity.
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To date Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown has been Pedro Almodóvar’s most
celebrated work, so much so that it has recently warranted a volume all to itself in
the British Film Institute’s prestigious Film Classics series. The joyous, almost
flippant account it offers of a resistance of homosocial mechanics seems to have
given the writer and director his greatest success yet, as Paul Julian Smith has
noted.45 It is ironic that Almodóvar attains his most substantial, much sought after,
mainstream recognition at the moment at which he is most appreciated
subculturally. As I inferred in the earlier discussions about Almodóvar’s circulation
through liberal press, his subsequent work, whilst it may often offer more acute
reading traces of camp spectatorship (the astonishingly lurid sets, and the towering
transsexualism of Bibi Anderson in Kika, for example, or the fantastically knowing
enactment of diva mannerisms by Femme Letal’s drag act in High Heels) has also
struggled to stabilise effective heterosocial representation. The infamous and
protracted rape scene in Kika offers a familiar staple of gay pornographic fantasy in
a startlingly erotic and farcical form, set up to disquiet our voyeuristic desires by
refracting them through Andrea Scarface’s television programme, but in doing so it
confuses camp flagrancy with manipulative victimisation. Similarly, Almodóvar’s
continuing desire to signify in mainstream contexts, and his personal alignment
with glamorous and famous heterosexual coupledom, has led to some troublingly
homosocial arrogance in his exchange of Carmen Maura as his identified consort
and muse, for Victoria Abril in the first instance, and more recently for Marisa
Paredes. This passing on of favours from one woman to another too closely
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replicates the kinds of treatment women experience within homosocial systems:
having to win and maintain favour with men in order to attain social credibility;
especially as Almodóvar, as an internationally renowned auteur, wields considerable
power in relation to the careers of actresses whom he may, or may not choose to
fete with his adoration. Such reactionary activity suggests that gay men may find it
difficult to sustain heterosocial dissidence in the context of their own continuing
oppression, where the inducements to acquire shreds of homosocial authority are
potent, but destructive to alliances of trust built up through heterosocial activitiy
with heterosexually resistant women (be they lesbian or straight).
Almodóvar’s most recent film, Live Flesh, which has also been his most acclaimed for
some time, seems to further consolidate the homosocial identification the
writer/director has been pursuing. Strikingly for an Almodóvar film, the central
protagonists of Live Flesh are men, a homosocial archetype: police partners. David is
cuckolding his partner Sancho, who is a drunk. During a tense confrontation, it
appears that Victor, who is stalking Elena, shoots David, causing his paralysis and
putting him in a wheechair. Years later, whilst David and Elena are living in a
loveless marriage, it transpires that Sancho shot David as revenge for his
relationship with Carla, Sancho’s wife. Women are the vehicles through which
relations between the men are driven. Elena’s frustration with her marriage to
David (and the film makes unpleasant and inaccurate associations between sexual
impotence and using a wheechair) provides the opportunity for him to seek some
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kind of redemption through a confrontation with Victor, the cause of his disability.
Carla’s frustrated marriage to Sancho pushes her into a relationship with the young
and beautiful Victor, just released from prison where he was incarcerated for
shooting David (a crime that we know he didn’t commit), but this relationship
merely provides the opportunity for a further confrontation between Sancho, the
real cause of David’s disability (and Carla’s husband) and Victor. Victor is not only
the redemptive agent for the women, but is the manifestation of masculine virility
on behalf of the incompetant Sancho and the impotent David. The ironies and
Dickensian coincidences which structure the narrative of Live Flesh are, however, as
near as the film gets to manifesting the kinds of queer motifs of camp
spectatorship that we expect from Almodóvar. Instead the film rests on homosocial
romanticism between men: when David learns that he has been disabled by his
partner, and not by Victor, this offers the opportunity not for revenge, but for the
production of greater intimacy between them. Similarly the film’s climactic
showdown between Sancho and Victor, whilst it enables a resolution of Victor’s
hatred of the man whose crimes he has paid for, is scopically more concerned with
phallic iconography, as Victor’s virile, cuckolding crotch is made equivalent to the
dramatic device of Sancho’s pistol.
As ever, opportunities through which we may exploit faultlines are shifting and
elusive. It is clear that Almodóvar cannot be consistently claimed for his
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heterosocial potential. Nevertheless, identification with Pepa in Women on the Verge
of a Nervous Breakdown not only satisfies many of the desires of camp spectatorship,
but politically aligns gay male investments with the project of empowerment and
resistance of women within heterosexuality. The film exhibits a marked effort to
resist slipping into becoming merely an opportunity for self-indulgent wallowing
in a masochistic consumption of the spectacle of women’s anguish. Almodóvar’s
successes in Women are relatively modest and as we have seen, they subsequently
become elusive in his work, but in the way in which the film enhances a resistance
of homosocial practice by encouraging a coalition of straight female and gay male
interests, he circumvents an antithesis engineered for patriarchal interests, and he
models a pattern for our heterosocial dissent.
1Obviously these issues are complex. Despite the upward class mobility many gay
men and lesbians undergo as a necessary part of their integration into
metropolitan gay subcultures, many lesbians and gay men continue to earn less
than their middle-class heterosexual counterparts, partly because we are more
likely to take jobs in less prestigious and materially rewarding circumstances, but
where it may be easier for us to be queer. See Alan Sinfield, Gay and After (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1998). For an account of how aspiring towards middle-class artistic
values is related to the emergence of gay male identity, see Derek Cohen and
Richard Dyer 'The Politics of Gay Culture' in Homosexuality: Power and Politics, edited
by Gay Left Collective (London: Allison & Busby, 1980); for a consideration of how
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the search for signs of lesbian existence and desire engenders an interest in
literature and the arts, see Alison Hennegan 'On Becoming a Lesbian Reader' in
Susannah Radstone (ed.) Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1988).
2Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972); Richard Dyer, Heavenly
Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986) and Stars (London:
BFI, 1979) and 'It's being so camp as keeps us going' in Only Entertainment (London
& New York: Routledge, 1992). See also: Andrea Weiss, 'A queer feeling when I look
at you: Hollywood stars and lesbian spectatorship in the 1930s' in Stardom: Industry
of Desire edited by Christine Gledhill (London & New York: Routledge, 1991); Quentin
Crisp, How to Go to the Movies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); Alex Doty, Making
Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (London & Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993); Lisa Henderson 'Justify Our Love: Madonna and the Politics
of Queer Sex' in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities,
and Cultural Theory, edited by Cathy Schwichtenberg (Boulder & Oxford: Westview
Press, 1993); Wade Jennings 'The Star as Cult Icon: Judy Garland' in The Cult Film
Experience: Beyond All Reason, edited by J. P. Telotte (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1991).
3Signorile, Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power (London: Abacus,
1994) p.xv.
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4'Out and Proud', photographed by Gavin Evans; fashion by Lucinda Alford and
Karl Plewka, Observer Life, 9 July 1995, pp.38-41.
5Brad Gooch, Out May 1994, p.56.
6Robert Chalmers, 'Pedro on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?' The Observer 5
June 1994, p.24.
7Marsha Kinder, 'Remapping the PostFranco Cinema: An Overview of the Terrain',
Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13, 4.
8Nigel Floyd 'The New Man from La Mancha', The Guardian, 5 December 1991. Note
that Maura's character in The Law of Desire is a post-operative transsexual and not a
transvestite.
9Signorile, Queer in America, p.xiii.
10Paul Burston, 'Genre Bender' in Burston, What are you looking at? Queer Sex, Style and
Cinema (London: Cassell, 1995) p.141.
11Brad Gooch, 'The King of Kink', Out, May 1994, p.57.
12Mansel Stimpson, 'Pedro's Love of Ladies', The Pink Paper, 19 January 1996, p.18.
13Rose Collis, 'Pedro Almodóvar: Putting the Boo back in Taboo', Gay Times 90, July
1994, p.16.
14Paul Burston, 'Through the Keyhole: Interview with Pedro Almodóvar', Attitude,
July 1994, p.66.
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15David Thompson, 'High Heels' review in Sight and Sound, vol.1, no.12, pp.61-62.
16Stanley Kauffman, Persons of the Drama: Theater Criticism and Comment (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976).
17Robert Chalmers, 'Pedro on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?', The Observer, 5
June, 1994.
18Paul Julian Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (London & New
York: Verso, 1994) p.101.
19Smith, ibid, p.100.
20Not the least of these contextual considerations is Almodóvar's nationality. One
significant advantage of Smith's work is his expertise in Hispanic culture, language
and history. Unless I am directly quoting I have chosen to use the English
translations of titles of the films as an indication of the specific and partial context
of my reading, which pretends no particular expertise in Spanish culture. I heed the
admonition Smith gives to ‘foreigners [who] cannot expect Almodóvar to subscribe
to forms of resistance which evolved in response to the triumph of the British and
North American Right in the eighties; and if they are serious about respecting
cultural difference they must pay more attention to a nation whose understanding
... may well be more sophisticated than their own.’ In cultural criticism there is a
considerable tension between a residual investment in authenticity (yet which we
necessarily and strategically re-instate in order to make intelligible concepts such
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as identity: heterosexual, man, British and white; nation) which left wing politics
usually respects in order that the margins of power may speak to identify the
conditions of their lives, and an investment in post-modernism, through which
authenticity has been discredited, which seems to have had the effect of
proliferating everything and specifying nothing. We may suggest that postmodernism is an effect of American (and Anglo) globalisation. It is not my intention
to attempt to represent the authentic Almodóvar – to uncover the true reading of
his work, nor to naturalise the English Anglo-Saxon origins of my own identity.
Almodóvar is an international commodity, as he is an important artefact within
marginalised and often politically progressive queer subcultures. An authentic
Spanish context is not the only one in which Almodóvar may be validly consumed;
indeed we may suggest that the metropolitan system is available in Madrid and
Barcelona, as much as it is in London. It seems to me that the question is about
recognising the potential for power imbalances, and for a blindness to the
partiality and culpability of ones own position.
21Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987).
22A lot of critical work has been done on women's pleasures in the women's film,
see: Jeanine Basinger, How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1994); Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship
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(London & New York: Routledge, 1994); Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship
(London & New York: Routledge, 1993); Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the
Hearth Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: BFI, 1987); see also,
Christine Gledhill, Stardom: Industry of Desire (London & New York: Routledge, 1991).
For commentary on the generic limitation and complexities of the woman's film,
see Mary Ann Doane, 'The Woman's Film' reprinted in Gledhill, (ed.) Home is Where
the Hearth Is, ibid, p.284.
23Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (Paris: JF Pauverte, 1959); Patrick McGilligan,
George Cukor: A Double Life (London: Faber, 1992).
24Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House (London: Gay Men's Press, 1992). For
discussion about the continuity of the molly subculture, see Alan Bray,
Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982); Randolph
Trumbach, 'London's Sodomites: homosexual behaviour and western culture in the
eighteenth century', Journal of Social History, 11, 1977-78; Alan Sinfield, The Wilde
Century: Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (London & New York: Cassell, 1994).
25Maria LaPlace, 'Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film', in Christine Gledhill
(ed.), Home is Where the Hearth Is, p.165.
26Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, pp.17-18.
27It is important to note, however, that most feminist criticism of the woman's films
recuperates them as sites of women's pleasure and importance. Very few, if any,
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feminist film critics locate their pleasures within structures of heterosexuality, and
most emphasise the opportunities of subjectivity that the woman's films offer,
rather than dwelling on analysis of the masochistic pleasures they enshrine.
28Paula Graham, 'Girl's Camp? The Politics of Parody', in Tamsin Wilton (ed.)
Immortal Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (London & New York: Routledge,
1995) p.178.
29For discussion of Edward II in this context, see B. Ruby Rich, 'Homo pomo: The
New Queer Cinema' in Sight and Sound, no.2 vol.2, September 1992, and in Women
and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, Pam Cook & Philip Dodd (eds), (London: Scarlet
Press, 1991).
30Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London: BFI, 1991).
31Mike O'Pray, 'Damning Desire', Sight and Sound, no. 6 vol.1, October 1991, p.10;
Jarman, Queer Edward II, p.124, p.148.
32The Time Out Film Guide, ed. Tom Milne (London: Penguin, 1993) p.205.
33Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (London: Quartet, 1984); Modern Nature: The Journals of
Derek Jarman (London: Vintage, 1992); At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament (London:
Vintage, 1993).
34B. Ruby Rich,'Homo pomo: The New Queer Cinema', p.169.
35See Leo Bersani, Homos.
36Jarman, Queer Edward II, p. 30.
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37ibid, p. 20.
38B. Ruby Rich, 'Homo pomo: The New Queer Cinema', p. 169.
39Colin MacCabe, 'Throne of Blood', Sight and Sound, no. 6 vol. 1, October 1991, p. 12.
40For discussion about homosexuality as hostility and fear of women, see Kenneth
Lewes, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (London & New York: Quartet,
1989) p.67, p. 51.
41Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, 2nd edition (London & New
York: Verso, 1994) p. 209.
42Quote reprinted in Peter William Evans, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
(London: BFI, 1996) p. 70.
43ibid, p.73.
44ibid, p.72.
45Smith, Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar, p.101: ‘There seems little
doubt that Mujeres is Almodóvar's most popular work. It remains at the time of
writing the only Spanish film to have grossed more that one thousand million
pesetas in the domestic market; and it was sold to Spanish television for the
unprecedented sum of two hundred million pesetas. The commercial success of
Mujeres abroad was also exceptional, making Almodóvar the biggest-grossing
foreign-language director in the US for 1989.’
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CHAPTER TWO
HETEROSOCIAL TENDENCIES
A Case of Sexuality or Gender? Feminism and Queer theory
In order to understand more fully the nature of the fascination much gay male
culture has with women, I want to explore the relationship between homosexuality
and gender, and the conditions through which discourses of sex and sexuality
relate to discourses of gender and feminism. Although the rhetoric and ideology of
gay liberation has been deeply indebted to that of the developing women’s
movement during the late sixties and seventies, and indeed, continues to be
influenced by feminist agendas, there is something of a discontinuity between
epistemologies of gender and those of sexuality. This discontinuity is itself played
out in conflicts amongst diversely situated feminists, many of whom have
themselves been influenced by the political and cultural trajectories of gay politics:
this is particularly the case in the area of lesbian feminism, which from the birth of
the contemporary women’s movement has been positioned ambiguously in
relation to heterosexual feminism and gay male politics; of late this ambiguity has
become manifest as tensions between so-called libertarian and radical feminists,
which have become polarised around differing agendas: one which privileges
sexuality and the other which privileges gender.1
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All politics of sexuality, whether they be radical or libertarian, feminist, Foucauldian,
feminist-Foucauldian, queer, essentialist or constructionist privilege some system
of erotic desire and sexual practice and pleasure (whether strategically, historically,
theoretically, biologically or culturally instated) as the terms through which
identities and individuals are controlled and constituted within discourse, or
through which individuals, subcultures and dissident activities may re-constitute or
transgress social organisation. Such a politics of sexuality came into an ascendancy
through the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1970s and 80s and has of late gained
institutional authority through the virtual ubiquity of the work of Foucault, himself
a gay male s/m practitioner. These developments have enriched the field of radical
politics, but have had the effect of throwing feminism into a series of theoretical
deadlocks that have precipitated activist stasis, and enabled the dispersed Queer
politics to become a somewhat aimless prescription of radical individualism and
apolitical pleasure-seeking, because it has not been able to address the tensions of
which it is a product.
Gayle Rubin’s essay ‘Thinking Sex’ has become something of a landmark in the
evolution of these debates, particularly as it has been interpreted as a retraction of
her earlier, and seminal, work, ‘The Traffic in Women’.2 In the later work Rubin
writes: ‘feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can encompass the
social organizations of sexuality.’3 This later position Teresa de Lauretis
characterises as one concerned with a non-gendered notion of sexuality, centred
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around ‘the sensations of the body, the quality of pleasures, and the nature of
impressions.’4 Such work has found expression in debates that cut across earlier
allegiances of gender and sexual preference: in work on pornography,
sadomasochism, perversion, drag, performativity, promiscuity, trans-gender, camp,
role-playing, bisexuality, and gay and lesbian history, so-called libertarian and
radical positions have become entrenched, but all the while foregrounding
sexuality - desire - based analysis.5 There is, as ever, a problem with making
assertions about such culturally-loaded terms. The notion of desire that has arisen
through the ascendancy of a politics of sexuality is one specifically concerned with
desire as pleasure, rather than desire as the means for reproduction; it is a politics
which sees, in other words, pleasure as the point of desire, rather than reproduction
- which is perhaps the governing principle of Freudian accounts of sexuality:
reproduction is the purpose, pleasure the perversion. Multi-gender, diversely
practising, diversely identified constituencies that emerged out of these debates
coalesced for what now appears to be a brief (and highly mythologised) time in the
activist Queer politics of the early 1990s, which emerged, particularly in America, as
the second wave of gay cultural responses to the urgency of the HIV/AIDS
epidemic.6
Even those feminists for whom Foucault is a fruitful, but carefully deployed theorist,
the terms of discussion remain embedded in eroticism and sexual practice,7 or lead
to assertions of the body as but a function of the axes along and through which
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sexuality and sex are theorised: ‘Bodies are understood in relation to the
production, transmission, reception and legitimation of knowledge about sexuality
and sex.’8 This seems somewhat at odds with Caroline Ramazanoglu and Janet
Holland’s assertion of the body as the site of feminism’s struggle to attain some
measure of control for women (from men) - a gender based struggle encompassing
a range of conflicts upon material grounds where women are oppressed, including
(but not encompassing) their sexual desire.9 Feminist theorists such as
Ramazanoglu and Holland, Jana Sawicki, and others10 identify Foucault’s usefulness
in conceiving of power in sophisticated ways that transcend totalising notions of
patriarchy or capital. Foucauldian conceptualisations have facilitated analyses of
how identities and bodies are effects of power, of discourse; but as Sandra Lee
Bartky points out:
Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the
bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if
men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic
institutions of modern life. Where is the account of the disciplinary
practices that engender the ‘docile bodies’ of women, more docile
than the bodies of men? Women, like men, are subject to many of
the disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is blind to
those disciplines which produce a modality of embodiment which
is peculiarly feminine.11
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For all the familiarity, even ubiquity, of such criticism of Foucault, that gender
blindness has nevertheless continued to influence the trajectory of sexual and
gender politics and theory. Domna Stanton’s introduction to the collection
Discourses of Sexuality sets out pretty comprehensively the emergence and evolution
of studies of sexuality, and its relation to feminism, history and literary studies.12 In
a discursive terrain which does not facilitate differentiation of the category of
woman - in order to identify clusters of power through which that category is
experienced as oppressive - gender becomes meaningless, and it is thus
understandable how sexual politics has become sublimated to the politics of
sexuality - of desires, perverse or otherwise. Yet clearly it is insufficient to ascribe the
material oppression of women to the results of their perverseness as women. This is
the epistemological tendency endemic in the drive towards privileging sexuality as
the pre-eminent genealogical frame of reference in work on power, identity and
the body.13 Reinscribing authoritative structures within camp rhetoric, flouting the
category of normality by reversing its terms and celebrating perversity, has very
different effects for gay men than for lesbians or heterosexual women; even for
gay men, such strategies of transgression limit the scope of our potential political
effectiveness. If we want to understand the attraction women and female
identification hold for gay men, categories of knowledge that are limited to
sexuality and desire as eroticism and the concomitant idea of perversity, are
insufficient; what such relationships express are the formation of subcultural
understanding, history and identities through patterns of bonding, association and
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identification that are, of course, structured by the terms of sexual practice (and are
in turn constrained and controlled through them), but are not entirely
circumscribed in terms of that sexual practice alone, whether deviant, celebrated or
perverse.
It is my contention that the extent to which the very plausibility of gay male
identity has become utterly dependent on these diverse politics of sexuality as
eroticism is inhibiting to the continuing dissident potential of those possible gay
male identities. In his recent book, Homos, Leo Bersani assesses the radical
possibilities in gay identity. He asks:
Should a homosexual be a good citizen? It would be difficult to
imagine a less gay-affirmative question at a time when gay men
and lesbians have been strenuously trying to persuade straight
society that they can be good parents, good soldiers, good
priests.14
Bersani cruises through an emerging alternative canon of gay male literary
immoralists in a search for figures to inspire and question gay identity: Gide,
Proust, Genet.15 It is in Genet that Bersani’s search culminates, in a fascinating and
subtle analysis of Nazi erotics, aestheticism, rimming and anal intercourse in the
novel Funeral Rites. The figures in whom Genet symbolises the radical nihilism that
Bersani celebrates in Funeral Rites, a couple who apparently renounce intimacy as
the precondition for an identity between the penetrator and the penetrated,
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uncover ‘a fundamental sameness between them - as if they were relay points in a
single burst of erotic energy toward the world. Relationality here takes place only
within sameness’ (p.170). This is an idea not dissimilar to Sue Ellen Case’s butchfemme lesbian couple who, she argues, inhabit the same subject position. Bersani
offers the symmetricality of gay sex as what Jonathan Dollimore would call a
‘transgressive reinscription’’ of fertility and reproduction, as the German soldier Erik
fucks the young collaborator Riton from behind (crucially not completing the
‘perfect oval of a merely copulative or familial intimacy’ p.165), they come ‘not with
each other but, as it were, to the world, and in so doing they have the strange yet
empowering impression of looking at the night as one looks at the future.’ (p.166)
as, Bersani notes, does Genet’s Hitler, discharging onto his enemies’ territory
millions of young German males, ‘with his stomach striking their backs and his
knees in the hollows of theirs.’ (p.167) For Bersani, the radicalism of Genet’s text is
that in the solipsistic circulation of jouissance through the medium of a Führer,
absolute narcissism ... opens a path onto the world, a world
emptied of relations but where relationality has to be reinvented if
the dangerously overloaded self is to escape the fatally orgasmic
implosions of Hitler’s soldiers. (p.171)
As Bersani acknowledges, this is territory which is politically precarious, at the very
least.16 In terms of the particular concerns under discussion here, it is the vision of
the buggering couple as an undifferentiated sameness, a symbolisation of
potential mutuality, that I am concerned with. This sameness, a very phallic
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sameness, could be said to embody the realm of those very authorities beyond
which transgression seeks to articulate, to imagine. The reinforcement of such
sameness represents the same terms through which the security of gender
hierarchies are maintained. Genet’s transgressive buggers, Erik and Riton, are
exalted through phallic terms (emissions, penetrations, ejaculations) which identify
Erik’s penis, the penetrator, as symbolically central and not the penetrated anus of
Riton: whatever nihilistic reimaginings the couple enable are represented through
Riton’s subjection to Erik’s penetration: it is from this point of masculinism that
‘absolute narcissism’ offers a doubling that will ‘open a path onto the
world...emptied of relations’. However glorified the intercourse, it is still intelligible for Bersani, radical even - in phallic terms; the value of the buggery lies in the
penetrating activity of the penis: the buggered arse is merely a vehicle for the
performance of that penetration.
It seems that the kind of gay man Bersani wishes to constitute, and wishes to
celebrate as transgressive resistance lines up with what Teresa de Lauretis,
borrowing from Irigaray, has described as the hommo-sexual.17 In her authoritative
essay ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’ de Lauretis attempts to
constitute the discursive knots which inhibit the elaboration of lesbian
representation. In order to facilitate this project she takes up Luce Irigaray’s
understanding of sexual difference as a patriarchal formulation. Sexual difference,
she argues, does not describe or constitute gender, but rather inscribes maleness
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and measures womanhood as the distance from that maleness, and as a function
of it. De Lauretis posits hommo-sexuality as the representation made of unified
phallic power by this system of sexual (in)difference. She wants to
remark the conceptual distance between the former term,
homosexuality, by which I mean lesbian (or gay) sexuality, and the
diacritically marked hommo-sexuality, which is the term of sexual
indifference, the term (in fact) of heterosexuality.18
For all Bersani’s resistance of good citizenship, his notion of a political male
homosexuality (‘absolute narcissism’) elides the kinds of understandings of gender
and homosexuality lesbian feminists like de Lauretis offer, and in doing so he
posits that resistance as both masculinist (hommo-sexual) in its phallicism, and
counter-intuitive, oppositional even, to feminist agendas apparently adjacent to
our own. Bersani’s refusal of good citizenship is in principle highly laudable, but
the terms of this refusal collapse the distance de Lauretis opens between hommosexuality and homosexuality: the path to sameness and equivalence is one forged
through an even more intense fixation upon our masculinity, our ability to
penetrate. Queerness is no longer a dissident negotiation of hetero-patriarchal
representational systems, but a virile embracing of them. These kinds of
celebratedly penile, penetrating formulations which Bersani makes are at odds with
the many gay male identities which make the performance of effeminacy the basis
for a refusal of good citizenship, and which make that refusal a gender dissent.
Whilst Bersani’s version of the gay man clearly has strong currency in the
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iconography and practice of much gay male sexuality and identification, that
currency is a function of his figure’s incorporative manifestation of hommosexuality: as the ventriloquism of a powerful, patriarchal formation we should
expect such practices to remain residual and attractive. As a radical sex terrorist
Bersani’s hommo-sexual queer is not only elusive because of his alignment with
the very centres of Western political authority (militarism, phallicism, Fascism) but is
an obstacle to the opportunities gay men have for engaging with political projects,
such as feminism, symmetrical to our own in their diverse attempts to resist good
citizenship.
One of the central problems contemporary feminist theory has returned to is a
post-Foucauldian tendency for models of power and ideology to become so
elaborate as to inhibit the possibility of being able to imagine resistant subject
positions. Sue-Ellen Case cites de Lauretis’s essay ‘The Technology of Gender’ as a
perceptive illumination of the entrapment dilemma. Case suggests that the lesbian
butch-femme couple is a resistant position that eludes entrapment in both
theoretical and practical terms; her principle example being the theatrical work of
Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw in Split Britches, whose collaboration with Bloolips in
Belle Reprieve, was discussed in the previous chapter.
Case argues that the lesbian butch-femme couple inhabit one subject position. Her
intervention, characterised by a kind of performative campy panache, attempts to
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imagine gender roles in lesbian relations as eluding the structural iniquity of
heterosexual ones. Case asserts that lesbian butch-femme is outside ideology, but
however daring such a strategic announcement is, it ultimately re-anticipates the
entrapment it attempts to circumvent. None of us can conceive of ourselves
outside ideology. Indeed, we might suggest that all subject positions are relational;
for example, as depicted in A Streetcar Named Desire, heterosexual femininity is a
function of masculine authority and the need to illicit male desire and to signal an
appropriate passivity so as to gain affirmation and heterosexual privilege. This is
something that de Lauretis’s term sexual (in)difference recognises, that cultural
authorities produce one kind of identity, in relation to which all others are
complementary, supplementary, functional. Yet clearly Case has a point: lesbianism
has a fundamentally ambiguous relationship to phallic patriarchal authority, where
that authority is often symbolically valuable (erotically and emotionally) whilst
remaining structurally absent. As with any other dissident arrangement the
possibilities of breakthrough are momentary, precarious - not all butch-femme
arrangements can be radical in their effect - particularly given the weight of internal
and external homophobia they must bear; that homophobia itself being an
instrument of the patriarchal constitution of gender roles.19
Bersani’s attempts to develop a gay identity that refuses good citizenship fail
because his sense of queerness collapses back into hommo-sexuality. His
opportunity for imagining oppositional gay maleness is already foreclosed by his
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naturalisation of that maleness as a function of a very penile-centred, penetrating
subjectivity. It would seem that we need an alternative model through which to
appreciate gay men’s place within wider systems of gender, and with which we can
find political promise. Despite the potential Bersani reveals for gay male identities
to merely reproduce sexual indifference, gay male gender identifications do seem
to have a potential to align themselves with women against hommo-sexual
authority. Tennessee Williams’s work in A Streetcar Named Desire illuminates that
potential. Yet we lack a model for understanding the conditions through which
such identification may take place, and with which we may judge the effectiveness
of such a relation.
In the critical culture with which Williams’s work has been surrounded we can see
how far gay male interventions rest on a terrain vigorously policed by ideological
mechanisms whose effect is continually to fragment marginal affiliations or
reposition them in order to reproduce already powerful formations. Whilst many
representations effected by gay men are misogynistic, the recuperative way in
which many critics have shielded their patriarchal interests and displaced their own
misogynistic agendas by hurling such accusations at gay material, such as Streetcar,
makes the concept an insufficiently sophisticated tool with which to gain critical
access to the axes of gender (sexual indifference) and sexuality at the same time.
Sue-Ellen Case’s work shows us how crucial it is that we resist slippage into
entrapment, but it also shows us that we cannot escape ideology, however difficult
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it may be to simultaneously come to terms with the complexity and contradiction
of cultural formation, and maintain a commitment to uncovering dissident
potential in the midst of such an imbroglio.
As indicated in the title of this book, I want to introduce the notion of heterosocial
bonding to describe gay male20 gender identification; that heterosociality
constituting a strategic negotiation of hetero-patriarchal male homosociality as
theorised by Eve Sedgwick. In choosing such a term I want to recognise the
structural nature of affiliations made between women and gay men so as to
foreclose purely frivolous understandings of our relations, and to validate the
institutional difficulties such bonds endure, as well as the dissent potential they
hold. The distinction of heterosocial is intended not only to indicate that such
bonds are operative between different sexes, but that for each party they take
place under literally heterogeneous conditions, produced as these bonds are
formed across the opposed axes of sexuality and gender. As I shall discuss in some
detail, male homosocial relationships exist as a function of what de Lauretis calls
sexual indifference, and they serve to uphold the integrity of hommo-sexuality, the
identification with masculinity as sameness, unity, subjectivity. Bonds between
women and gay men not only work to offset the authority of such patriarchal
sameness, but in their very enaction they make negotiations of difference. The
choice of the term heterosocial is important in part because it enables a
differentiation between the role of women in the arrangement of hetero13
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normative male bonds (which are an expression of hommo-sexuality and work to
enforce sexual indifference) and the role of women in gay male female
identifications, the circulation of which may embody hommo-sexual potential, but
which attempt a resistance of the phallic unification of sexual indifference and
which enact dissent upon the inevitability of hommo-sexual maleness. Would it be
fair to say that all men circulate images of women and associate with them in the
same way? Are the purposes of each transaction the same? How are gay male
identities embedded in patriarchal power, and how can we disrupt such relations?
In order to begin to propose the possibility of heterosocial bonding, it is clearly
crucial to first examine in detail the constitution of homosocial bonds, and how
these may relate to notions of gay male identity, ‘hommo-sexuality’, penetration
and sameness.
Homosocial Regimes, Male Power and Not Getting Fucked
In her ground breaking work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, Eve Sedgwick suggests ways of understanding the proximity between
sexual and social desire between men. She offers a model in the form of a
continuum with men loving men at one end and men promoting the interests of
men at the other. In her approach gay men, and the possibility of homosexual
desire, lie at the heart of male patriarchal authority: the proximity of homosexual
desire acting as a constantly invoked abjection from which men must flee at all
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costs. This desire acts as a ‘prohibitive structural obstacle’ that is strenuously
suppressed through the demonisation of faggottry, and the exchange of women:
which is the object of such structures. Sedgwick goes on to assert that,
‘homophobia is a necessary consequence of such patriarchal institutions as
heterosexual marriage.’21 Part of Sedgwick’s breakthrough is her suggestion that
the homophobia of patriarchy does not merely have a regulatory imperative for
homosexual desires, but that it potentially facilitates dominant ‘definitional
leverage over the whole range of male bonds that shape the social constitution.’
(BM p.86) Homophobic anxieties about where particular men may have cause to
position their bonds on the homosocial continuum render them vulnerable and
bind them into structures of patriarchal authority.
Informed by the work of Foucault, and emerging at a point of intersection between
academic feminism and gay politics, Sedgwick’s work suggests terms through
which the structural importance of male homosexuality within patriarchal authority
lies not in the fact of homosexual desire itself, but in the terms through which the
meanings of such desire are embedded in the functioning of gender authority.
Sedgwick’s point is that male heterosexuality is produced through discursive
mechanisms that are inherently paradoxical, in that they express a double bind:
‘For a man to be a man’s man is separated only by an invisible, carefully blurred,
always-already-crossed line from being ‘interested in men.’’ (BM p.89) In other
words, men’s relationships with each other are enacted from within an
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understanding of the proximity of the dangerous realm of same-sex passion - the
negotiations, suppressions and disavowals of that understanding are constitutive
of men’s mannish relations with other mannish men.
Sedgwick’s thesis is useful not only for the conceptualisation of masculinity that it
offers (as has been pointed out, its conceptualisation of a female continuum is
much less satisfying22) but for the strategic importance it credits to gay male
negotiation and intervention, for the confidence with which she is able to suggest
that the material effects of such dominant discursive processes are not inevitable,
but sites of struggle (BM p.90). Sedgwick’s further innovation, of course, was to
show how homophobic structures work to police, and to constitute, the entire
spectrum of male relations, and not merely those of an apparent sexual minority.
Women are instruments of male power, and functional in allaying homosocial
anxiety: the sharing of, or competition for, sexual conquest of women, the sharing
of the action of subordinating, being the glue of homosociality at the same time as
procuring homophobic reassurance that the crossing of the always-already crossed
line has been resisted. In this she rendered new terms to connect anti-homophobia
and feminism - not as a corollary, but as an alliance ‘most fruitful if it is analytic and
unpresuming’ (BM p.20).
This progression has historically been a key intervention. As Craig Owens argues,
work by some second wave heterosexual feminists - such as Elaine Showalter and
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Luce Irigaray, amongst others - before the emergence of contemporary lesbian and
gay theoretical work, has been repositioned and represented to form a trend that
can be interpreted as suggesting that philosophy, fascism and capitalism itself are
driven through homoerotic formations.23 This proposition was clearly a
strategically attractive one, in that it identifies the strength of the bonds through
which men act in the interests of men, to the exclusion of women; however such
suggestions collapse all men’s bonds with each other into structural transactions,
and efface the particularity of homosexual desire or cultural dissent: they cannot
account for the possibility of male same-sex passion, or the production of
homophobia (which would be unnecessary if men acting in the interests of men
was functionally secure) nor can they theorise the importance of exchanging, rather
than merely excluding, women.24 Owens credits Sedgwick with a definitive
insistence against the tendency to assume patriarchal institutions to be hotbeds of
homosexuality; actually they are mechanisms for the production of homophobia.
(p.230) Such mechanisms require the suppression of male same-sex passion
through the material exchange, the exploitation, of women. Owens argues that the
Freudian proposition that homophobia is caused by the repression of
homosexuality elides the active production of homophobia, the fear of
homosexuality which necessitates the control of relations with women as the
mediation of such fear. Sedgwick’s work has also enabled formulations which resist
the post-Freudian tendency to collapse the blame for homophobia into (repressed)
homosexuality.
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Thus we can see that within homosocial structures (heterosexual) women and
homosexual men are instruments that enable the constitution of a powerful,
homogenous male heterosexuality. Power is retained within the structure by
securing bonds of common interest between men, whilst the whole matrix serves
the necessity of economic reproduction through the importance of fatherhood and
heterosexual procreation. Masculine homosociality is then a coercive mechanism
through which men acquire cultural and social power and the patriarchy is
reproduced in the interests of capital. The threat of breaking ranks is managed
through the active production of misogyny, and the requirement of constant
display. In order to participate in dominant power men must continuously represent
their credentials, and more importantly, represent distance between themselves
and the always already present possibility that they will act discontinuously with
their own gender interests, and not display their dominance over women. Just in
case the impediment of dominant faction membership isn’t sufficient motivation,
not continuously displaying power over women, not re-demonstrating the already
implicit understanding of male authority, is continuously conjured as latent
homosexuality.
One can then imagine how the vicissitudes of the closet and the coercive power of
homosociality conspire to make many homosexual men behave in ways that
attempt to display their dominance over women. Retreating from the abjection of
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public homosexuality and aspiring towards the authority of homosociality
necessarily demands the reinforcement of misogyny, for such retreat and
aspiration is never secure, even in apparently heterosexual men, never mind coopted homosexuals: the need for reiteration, for reassurance that can never be
absolute, is the strength of homosocial mechanisms. Men who are not seen to act in
the interests of men are the always ever-present faggot-other, the shadow cast
over all male-male bonding. One of Sedgwick’s strengths is her theoretical
insistence that male heterosexuality is a site of instability, panic and constant
reproduction.
However, before going on to assess the extent to which gay male subcultural
practice may offer the opportunity to resist homosociality by exploiting and
amplifying these instabilities, it seems important to examine more closely the fabric
of institutional fantasy upon which homosocial narratives rest. What is it that
actually constitutes Sedgwick’s ‘always-already crossed line’ - this circumscription of
maleness by a continually conjured abhorrence that is homosexuality? Leo Bersani
famously offers an answer when he conjures ‘the infinitely...seductive and
intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal
ecstasy of being a woman.’25 The always-already crossed line is the blurring of
fantasy scenarios with which male power eroticises itself - in effect seduces itself
into reproducing. Men are encouraged to identify with masculinity - with the ideal
homosocial subject, one to whom the display of attractiveness to women is
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evident, even hyperbolised; a display through which the potential to subordinate
and control women through sexual desire is made apparent. This display, the
characteristics which manifest this display, are a man’s thing for other men - as a
generation of feminist writers have pointed out (unlike femininity, which is for
others). Bersani recognises this:
Unfortunately, the dismissal of penis envy as a male fantasy rather
than a psychological truth about women doesn’t really do
anything to change the assumptions behind that fantasy. For the
idea of penis envy describes how men feel about having one, and,
as long as there are sexual relations between men and women,
this can’t help but be an important fact for women. (p.216)
The gap produced in homosocial formations between the necessity of continually
conjuring and aspiring to the efficacy of masculinity, to the trappings of its power,
and between over-investing in this fantasy, is the gap in which homosexual-asabject becomes deeply functional. The difference, for example, between admiring
another man because of the largeness of his penis (penis envy) which more fully
lives up to the authority of phallicism, and desiring his large penis for yourself so
that you may make a more powerful symbolisation of male power and therefore
more powerfully dominate women, is conceptually slight for homosocially
constituted insiders (straight men) and outsiders (gay man) alike. The ever-present,
ever needing to be repressed erotic-abject of male penetration is a consequence of
the reliance on the notion of men acquiring power through penetrating others,
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and of the need to make an identification with the body image with which that
penetration can be effected. Bersani concludes that the transgressive potential of
gay sexuality is that it makes material this erotic-abject that he calls a ‘selfshattering jouissance’, male penetration. It is this loss of self that men fear, and for
which gay men are punished through an association embedded in phallocentrism.
Yet, as Tania Modleski has pointed out, this transgression, the self-shattering sexual
moment is ‘surprisingly individualistic.’26 As Modleski shows in her reading of Lethal
Weapon, much mainstream male culture flirts with the notion of masochistic release:
in terms of gender power it isn’t much of a transgressive manoeuvre. As part of its
ideological matrix, ‘phallocentrism has, of course, sought continually to instil in
women a sense of the value - for them - of powerlessness and of masochism’
(p.148-149); furthermore, ‘masochism in the guise of powerlessness is ... frequently
the luxury of empowered beings ... social power and sexual humiliation may
coexist quite easily.’ (p.149) What Modleski is suggesting is that homosocial
structures fracture no more easily around the image of a man with his legs in the
air waiting for his self-shattering penetration by another man’s penis, than they do
when faced with a parodic performance of leather motorcycle drag, as Bersani
himself points out (p.207). Bersani’s argument, following a Freudian paradigm,
carries an ahistorical notion of processes and fears - it offers male behaviour and
fantasy as a developmental given, a move that is ultimately inappropriate for the
purposes of my argument here. Nevertheless, Bersani’s contention about the fear
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of anal penetration for men is clearly an insight into a significant point of rupture
and disquiet for homosocial structures. The particular processes through which the
fear of penetration is conjured as a consequence of male homosocial activity, and
managed through the exchange and positioning of others, remains a fertile
ground for the exploitation of faultlines available for subcultural manipulation.
Pulp Fiction : Fucking Butch
This obsessive return to the dangerous possibility of male anal penetration that is
a consequence of clashing dominant fantasies of homosociality remains operative
in contemporary popular culture, and is nowhere more dramatically apparent than
in the massive commercial cult-crossover hit that is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
What is extraordinary about the reception and discussion of this film, aside from a
lemming-like consensus over its apparent brilliance, is the hegemonic way in which
its obsessive return to the motif of male anal penetration has remained
unidentified. This is all the more notable when, as we shall see, these motifs are not
exactly represented half-heartedly.
There are two scenes in Pulp Fiction when the hectic, cartoonish pace of the
breakneck dialogue and grotesque black comic violence becomes fractured. The
first is the flashback scene when Captain Koons (Christopher Walken) visits a small
child, who transpires later to be the boxer, Butch (Bruce Willis). Koons’ lengthy
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monologue deliberately slows the narrative pace, and acts as a disconcerting segue
between two of the four disparate dramas that comprise the film’s construction.
Koons is returning a gold watch to the child, Butch, which belonged to his father
and grand-father. Koons fought in Vietnam with Butch’s father, and was later
imprisoned in the same POW camp with him. Butch’s father held on to the gold
watch, a present from his own father, by keeping it in his anus, despite, Koons tells
the boy, having dysentery. When Butch’s father died he entreated Koons to keep
the watch and after the war to find his son and give it to him. Koons was able to
hang on to the watch himself, and deliver it, despite being held a prisoner of war,
by putting it up his arse. Thus the anus of his father and that of his father’s closest
friend proves to be the medium for a bonding Butch is able to enact with his father
and grandfather through the totem of the watch.
Next we see the narrative purpose of this strange scene, which despite its comic
intentions, appears to be too graphic and unbalancing, too protracted and
contemplative to actually draw laughs. We return to the present: Butch has won a
fight he was paid to lose, and is on the run with his girlfriend, Fabienne. They are in
a motel room, and Butch has just realised that Fabienne did not pack his father’s
gold watch. His fury with her eclipses their earlier romanticism, and he dangerously
decides to return home to retrieve his watch, leaving Fabienne frightened and in
tears. At home Butch encounters his boss’s hitman, Vincent, sat on the toilet with
his trousers round his ankles, and has to kill him in order to escape with the watch.
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Butch is driving back to Fabienne and the motel, when he comes across Marsellus,
the black gangster boss who paid him to throw the fight. Marsellus is crossing the
road and Butch unsuccessfully tries to run him over, crashing the car in the process.
Marsellus, intent on murder, chases Butch into a pawn shop where both are
captured and held hostage at gunpoint by a couple of sadomasochistic gay men.
Marsellus is being raped by the men when Butch, who will be raped next, escapes.
However, in the midst of his escape Butch hesitates, before considering an array of
weapons hung on the wall with which to enact and enforce his return (hammer,
baseball bat and chainsaw). These phallic symbols, conveniently placed for Butch,
belong to the abject queer rapists; as displayed, inactive objects they would seem
to represent the hysterical attempt by the queers to display masculinity:
Butch/Willis, as a real Man is able to activate them, to release them from passive
display. Butch selects a samurai sword, ritualistically displayed on a lacquered
stand, which immediately imbues his return to free Marsellus with intense romantic
symbolism. Such nobility is particularly striking as Butch and the man he has
chosen to liberate (when he could quite easily leave him there: indeed, this would
logically suit the boxer) were but a few moments earlier vigorously intent on killing
each other. Homosocial integrity is restored as Butch wields the sword at one
cowering faggot who is watching the other raping the gangster. As the first man is
cut down, Butch steps aside to allow Marsellus to shoot his rapist between the legs,
turning the faggot’s groin into a bloody pulp, and representing his castrated nonman queerness, and disavowing the rape.
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This bizarre and graphic chain of events is rendered in a much more realistic tone
than the earlier hectic dialogue or trendy violence. (One of the most blackly comic
scenes in the film, which appears to draw substantial laughter from audiences,
shows Vincent the hitman accidentally blowing the back of a man’s head off in a
car, and his subsequent adventures in cleaning up the car and disposing of what is
left of the corpse. This scene is dominated by the charismatic and powerful figure
of Mr. Wolf, the fixer (Harvey Keitel), and by a cameo from Tarantino himself despite its violence and danger then, a scene reassuring enough for the auteur to
dramatise himself in.) The predicament of our anti-hero appears much more serious
and less exhilarating than his earlier adventures. The possibility of being anally
penetrated is so inimical that not only must Butch/Willis himself escape, but the
empathic fear such an act engenders leads him to rescue his ertswhile foe,
embodying an intense romantic symbolism as he does so. The residual power of
the homosocial bond, through which men are attached by a suppression of the
possibility of becoming womanly, becoming queer, becoming penetrated,
overrides Butch’s enmity towards Marsellus - expressed earlier in the very same
scene by his trying to run over the gangster in a car. Getting run over by a car is
better than being buggered. Here the contradictory narratives through which gay
male identities are seen to occupy abjection functionally reinforce one another. On
the one hand the inimical threat that drives the force of the scene depends not
only on the unpleasantness of being raped, being taken against one’s will, but
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being penetrated, as a man, by another man. Submission not only to rape, but to
penetration enforces a relation to queerness - it is to have that negation forced
upon you. Here the notion of homosexuality, of abjection, is secured through the
idea of passivity, womanliness. On the other hand however, the actual queers in
this scene are the rapists, they are the aggressors, upon whom the heterosexual hero
and villain have innocently stumbled in the course of their entertaining and quite
legitimate duel. Here the queer threat is plausible in the same way in which it’s
meaningful when incited by the religious right as a potential aggressive
conversion of the ‘innocence’ of children: as something predatory, conniving, and
lurking in the dark recesses, always ready to entrap. Such is the agility of patriarchal
hegemony that both narratives produce functional effects within homosocial
structures. The distasteful nature of penetration reminds us that identities which
eroticise male penetration are truly queer, truly execrable: the boundary between
heterosexuality and otherness is necessary, real. But this is a real and tangible
threat (so runs the homosocial logic), because those queers who eroticise anal
penetration aren’t just passive, they’re after yours, they want to inflict it on you too,
so you must constantly be on guard, and constantly display that you have a
healthy fear of the penetration: you must re-represent the abject nature of it. Backs
to the wall, boys.
This rescue of a man, whose death would be convenient for Butch, from the
process of becoming abject before his (and the audience’s) very eyes, is a
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passionate, even romantic, act unlike any other in the film, underscored by the use
of the iconographically charged samurai sword as object of the liberation.
Furthermore, it is an act only necessary because Butch must recover the totem of
his father, a totem that has acquired its poignancy by being kept in the anus of his
father and his father’s best friend. (It is, of course, also an act which displays Butch’s
recognition that male penetration is an anathema.) Moreover, the possibility of
Butch’s rape, of his abjection, is brought about in the first place by the ineptitude
of Fabienne, which necessitates Butch’s return for the gold watch. This circuit of
homosocial bonding, from Butch through Koons to his father and grandfather, is
secured by the eroticised abjection of anal penetration, by the stupidity and
consequent exclusion of the girlfriend Fabienne, and by the scapegoating of the
black gangster, whose abjection at the hands of the queers is tolerable because
he’s black and because it’s preferable to the spectacle of our white everyman-hero,
Die Hard’s John McLane, spread-eagle over a table being buggered. Representations
of black male sexuality exhibit the same degree of contradiction and conflict
inherent in dominant accounts of homosexuality. Yet the ability of racist
hegemonies to thrive on such contradictions makes such hostile representational
modes difficult to locate; however we could identify several modes, including a
hyper virilisation, a feminising objectification, a suggestion of exotic primitivism
and an infantilising gender indeterminacy as being particularly prevalent.
Marsellus’s rape by the queers in Pulp Fiction neatly dovetails these conditions of
racist representation with homosocial homophobia. The image of the huge black
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gangster bent over the table being buggered by one of the queers secures a
reassuring sense for white male audiences of both his objectification before our
gaze (thereby quelling fears of his excessively active black male sexuality through
the scene of his abjection - feminisation - by a faggot) and, in turn a fixing of the
demonisation of gay men as culpable predators rather than the victims of
homophobic regimes. Marsellus’s exoticism (size, racial identification, mysterious
underworld connotations) neatly trades with his maleness to at once raise the
threat queers pose to manliness, and keep it at a safe distance from an imputed
white male audience.
In Pulp Fiction there is a richness and complexity to the bonds, relationships and
experience of men with and for men that does not exist for the women characters,
of whom there are few, and who exist in solitary narrative circumstances: they
relate to, and facilitate the men, but not each other; nor do the men really relate to
them, but humour and tolerate them. Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) is taken on a
date by Vincent the hit man, under the instructions of Marsellus, her husband and
his boss: their episode leads to a compelling scene in which Mia has overdosed on
Vincent’s heroin and must be resuscitated with a terrifying adrenaline injection into
her heart. Here the film acquires its dramatic frisson because of the authority of the
absent Marsellus and his relationship with Vincent - if she dies the hit man will be
in big trouble: Mia is a the decorative vehicle for a more profound relationship
between the men. The foot-long needle Vincent plunges into Mia’s chest is a
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phallically symbolic violation that punishes her for threatening the relation
between Vincent and Marsellus. Similarly Pulp Fiction’s other women - Jody
(Rosanna Arquette), Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer), and Fabienne (Maria de
Medeiros) do not even co-exist in the same narrative strand, never mind have the
opportunity to enact meaningful bonds with each other: their purpose is to
provide the (hetero)sexual credentials of their men, and facilitate (as Fabienne
does) the opportunity for the men to recover dangerous, usually life-threatening
scenarios, and thus display their masculine credentials for the edification of
homosociality. In recovering his watch, an act necessitated by Fabienne’s
ineptitude, Butch is able to display his credentials to Vincent (he kills him),
Marsellus (he saves him) and - of course - prevent them from being displayed to the
hostile, raping, faggot-others.
In her discussion of the action film Top Gun, Tania Modleski notes Klauss Theweleit’s
discussion of the proximity of violence and sex with women for heterosexual men.
This violence stems from ‘a fear of dissolution through union with a woman’, and
this fear ‘propels man - or, to use Julia Kristeva’s terms, abjects him - into a
homosocial relation with other men.’27 The penetration of woman, that which is to
be penetrated, enables the possibility of other penetrations, penetration of men,
the unthinkable yet always-present possibility, the leverage that constitutes
homosocial relations and renders them interminably unstable. The proximity of
such possibilities must be excised through violence - through masculine display 29
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preferably for the spectatorship of homosocial comrades, and through the
identification and demonisation of others, those who are homosexuals, the
apparently always-penetrated not-men. Similar themes are self-consciously
handled in the stunning film L.A. Confidential, with its fastidiously gendered male
leads (touchingly, one is bookish, bespectacled and feminised, whilst the other is all
Brando poses and snarling butchness). Their powerful romantic affiliation is
cemented through a common disgust for corruption, the pomposity of their moral
purpose, and the homosocial exchange of a hooker who looks like Veronica Lake
(pur-lease!) who is a conduit for their barely repressed passions for each other.
We can thus summarise the deployment of homosocial relations. The bonding of
men requires the constitution of an inside group from which power can be
mobilised. The security of that inside group depends upon the manifestation of
outsider-others. Within patriarchal homosociality women are the principal
outsiders, the oppression of whom is a necessary condition for the succession of
property rights: women are the bearers of children and the opportunity for sexual
pleasure, to be exchanged as symbols of potency and value as currency between
men; they are also the bearers of future generations through which to secure the
ownership of capital, to control in proximate nuclear arrangements, and crucially to
facilitate class and racial reproduction. Homosexual men are conjured as the
treacherous and barren ever present insider-other through whom the exchange of
women breaks down; their existence also blurs the boundaries between who
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exhibits phallic power, and who bears it: they are demonised and represented as
the inimical possibility of male anal phallic penetration.28 Pulp Fiction also shows us
that within such homosocial regimes constructions of black male sexuality operate
as both the inside manifestation of a masculine virility which spills over into excess
and threat when mapped onto the racially charged homosocial commodification of
white women, and thus also operates as outsider-other as well, particularly in the
context of white propagation, and attendant fears of miscegenation and racial
impurity.
Homosocial Dissent, Female Bonding
The terms of possible dissenting and alternative interventions are diverse necessarily so given that not only are functionally marginal identities produced
and discursively controlled in different ways, but in ways which actively precipitate
conflict and disunity within those margins. The key problem in Sedgwick’s work on
homosociality is that she does not ‘take responsibility for enunciating’29 the shape
of female homosocial bonds, thereby effacing lesbianism, which is an effect of her
assertion that there is a greater continuity between women who act in the interests
of women, and women who desire women. This may be the case, and the shape
and effects of a female homosocial continuum would certainly be different from
the male one that Sedgwick theorises. The gap in Sedgwick’s work lies in her failure
to suggest that some heterosexual women may actually act in the interests of men,
that is, act against the interests of other women (politically, sexually, culturally,
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emotionally, psychologically), and thus may functionally require homophobia
against lesbianism to naturalise a radical discontinuity between women who act in
the interests of women and women who desire women. Furthermore, Sedgwick
does not accept the significance of substantial lesbian subcultural and political
activity which has attempted to open up distance between acquiescence to
heterosexual institutions (which have been characterised as precisely not serving
the interests of women) and woman-identified cultural assertions as a political
intervention in order to resist hetero-patriarchy. The very possibility of Sedgwick’s
enunciation, in terms of both content and the existence of the space from which to
speak, is in no small measure the result of lesbian political and academic
intervention. Given the potential that feminist and/or lesbian interventions realise that women may politically organise in ways that disrupt their functional
complicity with male homosocial formations (by refusing and disrupting the
authority of masculine sexuality and corresponding social subordination) - it
doesn’t seem too bold to suggest that there would need to be a corresponding
hegemonic production of a radical discontinuity between the appropriation of
feminine-heterosexual acquiescence and lesbian-other. If lesbianism promises the
refusal of patriarchal control it must be sufficiently reorganised within male
hegemonic narratives in a manner that would turn its potentially appealing radicalrefusal into a homosocially constituted abjection from which women, in order to
properly occupy feminine heterosexuality, must flee and repress, the more to
display reassuring obedience, and of course to benefit from the cultural capital
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feminine passivity accrues. Heterosexual female homophobia - towards lesbians - is
a functional and necessary component of male homosocial formations. As Julia
Penelope points out in her intervention into a debate which found articulacy in
Lesbian Ethics in the late 1980s (and which had probably begun in 1970 at the
Second Congress to Unite Women when twenty women calling themselves
‘Lavender Menace’ - later to become Radicalesbians - interrupted the proceedings
to protest at homophobia within the feminist movement): ‘Lesbians who are
committed to personal and social change must not only rid ourselves of the HS
[heteropatriarchal semantics] dichotomy, but the HP [heteropatriarchal] misogyny
that values femininity as a female attribute.’30
There are antecedents who could have offered Sedgwick the means to broaden the
scope of her homosocial system. It was in order precisely to address the patriarchal
context in which women are actively impelled to act in the interests of men that
radical feminism so powerfully advocated the notion of sisterhood and female
bonding. In Gyn/Ecology Mary Daly resituates the notion of the Great (world) War as
the binary deadlock of patriarchy, in which it is all men, whatever side on which
they fight, who oppose women: ‘The secret bond that binds the warriors together,
energizing them, is the violation of women, acted out physically and constantly replayed on the level of language and of shared fantasies,’ and ‘the male who is not
willing to go forward blindly on the march of massive destruction is a ‘female’ ...
Such fear is also called fear of being ‘effeminate’.’31 Daly’s work draws on a radical
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essentialism through which she blazes against male authority and female
subordination, invoking the possibilities of the discovery of sisterhood as both a
refusal of dependency within male structures, and a subversive reinvisioning of
bonding relationships which differ ‘radically from male comradeship/brotherhood,
which functions to perpetuate the State of War’ (G/E p.369). Daly’s argument feeds
into a second-wave tendency to collapse infatuated and adoring masculine bonds
into homosexual desire. Daly looks at accounts of brotherhood and bonding
written by (heterosexual) men and theorises their tremulous and hysterical
eroticism of brotherhood as equivalent to passionate same-sex desire, a ‘diseased
State of Fraternity’ from which ‘radically Lesbian loving is totally Other’ (G/E p.372).
She quotes from military accounts in which men swoon over the profundity of
their bonding with comrades by simultaneously effacing homosexual desire and
relegating the importance or pleasure of bonds with ‘mere’ women (one account
Daly quotes reads: ‘the communion between men is as profound as any between
lovers. Actually it is more so. It does not demand for its sustenance the reciprocity,
the pledges of affection, the endless reassurances required by the love of men and
women’ G/E p.372.) Daly rightly pours scorn on such accounts, but fails to
differentiate between men acting in the interests of men, and men desiring men,
thereby collapsing homophobia into homosexuality:
Male-defined erotic love involves loss of identity and is inherently
transitory. It involves hierarchies, ranking roles - like the military -
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on the model of S and M. While male erotic love is seen as similar
to comradeship in these respects, it is experienced as weaker in
intensity and depth [compared to the ‘gynaesthetic experience’]
(G/E p.372)
Clearly it is an imperative of Daly’s separatism that she strategically insist upon as
much distance as possible between Lesbian Loving and all structures of
romanticised affiliation constituted by and through men. Historically speaking, the
integrity of radical lesbianism depended upon a rejection of all accommodations of
men precisely so as to enable the conceptualisation of relations between women
that would not reproduce women’s subjugation to hommo-sexual subjectivity.
Indeed, such bonding, ‘The Fire of Female Friendship’, is the political cornerstone of
Daly’s programme as prescribed in Gyn/Ecology.
It is my intention here to theorise forms of gay male subjectivity which are
themselves resistant to homosocial terms of maleness, in which homosexuality is
always an abjection. The force of Daly’s work in the context of my argument here is
to show the importance of an analysis that foregrounds gender as the system
through which masculinity and femininity are meaningful, and which recognises
sexuality as the tool through which the integrity of masculinity and femininity are
policed, producing homophobia as the legislative force of that policing. This is not
merely intellectual preciousness, necessitating ‘trivial’ semantic quibbling in
emphasising one category over another. The degree of investment made by gay
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men - beyond the specificities of same-sex desire and sexual activity - against
mannish cultural concerns and practice, and with women and so-called ‘female’
interests and modes of expression, suggests that intellectual methodologies
formulated in order to understand gay male practice and to anticipate the success
of such interventions which reference only rigidly Foucauldian terms of sexuality
will only be able to anticipate shifts and meanings in the realm of sexual desire,
that is, the erotic - and I would argue that homosexuality is meaningful in terms
way beyond those alone. In order to be able to precipitate advances in gay male
cultural practice - that is, to elicit greater political gains - intellectual inquiry must
engage with the enormous subcultural investment gay men make with women,
that is, with identification, and thus with gender, and attempt to understand what
this means. Not to engage with gender in work that attempts to enquire into gay
male identity is to naturalise gender difference and invite complicity with
homosocial mechanisms; for it is the foregrounding of desire, of heterosexuality,
that demonises homosexuality and reinforces misogyny. Heteropatriarchal
hegemony continually re-secures notions of masculinity and femininity in order to
maintain its control of women through the continuously repetitive invocation of
homosexual abjection.
A characteristic effect of Sedgwick’s theorisation of conditions in which gay male
identities and (heterosexual) women’s identities are produced as functional effects
of heteropatriarchal power, is a tendency towards entrapment. Whilst Sedgwick’s
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breakthrough is in part to illuminate the precariousness of male authority, and to
locate homophobia and sexism as effects of that precariousness, heterosexual male
identities remain central in her model. The activities of either gay men, or
heterosexual women within those male homosocial bonds, are conducted through
a functional association with hetero-male power. The possibility of male
homosexuality lies on one side of the homosocial arrangement, policing the terms
of the bonding - protecting the conditions of intimacy, whilst women lie on the
other side, the currency of exchange with which men effect their transactions with
each other. Straight men remain the central term across and through whom gay
men and heterosexual women would appear to be prevented from associating
with each other. Despite the currency female identification has in gay culture, we
have seen in the previous chapter how a key strategy through which gay men have
negotiated the production of their own sissified abjection remains the aspirational
celebration of masculinity; it is a tendency that characterises Bersani’s particular
refusal of good citizenship. We could suggest then, that the entrapment which is
an effect of Sedgwick’s theorisation of male homosocial relations actually does
record a material condition of gay male marginalisation. Gay male identities are
circumscribed in relation to homosocial masculinity, such that empowerment is
often seen as a function of ventriloquising the terms of that homosociality in a
quasi-denial of queer abjection. Similarly, within heterosexuality not only is female
agency denied, but mutual recognition between women is made conceptually
implausible, beyond the passive contemplation and complaint of generic
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difficulties (domestic or sexual squabbles, and so on): these denials are enforced by
the commodification and objectification of women through relations of male
alliance, something that may explain the oblivious popularity of Pulp Fiction. As I
shall go on to discuss in relation to a significant critic of Sedgwick, the material
effects of the proximity that both gay men and straight women have to the
functioning of male homosociality, and their consequent diversity of resistant
manoeuvres, have often resulted in an endlessly exploited breach in parity
between them. Conflicts of desire, cultural legitimation and political agenda have
produced tensions and discontinuities between gay men and straight women,
particularly in subcultures which have adopted essentialist agendas, or where there
has been a direct conflict of interests caused by the limitation of exploitable
faultline possibilities. These conflicts are particularly crucial in a contemporary
political landscape in which the idea of activist feminism has little credibility, being
continually portrayed as opposing pleasure and choice.
The dangers of such conflicts can be seen in the kind of position elaborated by one
of Sedgwick’s most shrill critics. In ‘The Beast of the Closet’, David Van Leer holds
Sedgwick responsible for the production of categories of the homosexual within
homosociality, in the process of which he argues she underwrites a ‘homophobic
thematics’.32
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The underlying nature of Van Leer’s anger towards Sedgwick becomes clearer in
the dialogue that emerged between the two in the pages of Critical Inquiry in 1989.
He resents the intrusion into the subcultural ghetto of an outsider, a woman
apparently occupying a heterosexual identity. In order to effect this rejection of
Sedgwick, and her attempt to fashion a coalition between gay male politics and
feminism, Van Leer naturalises gender difference, foreclosing the conceptual space
from which feminism speaks, in his desire to effect closer union with heterosexual
men, imputedly because gay men have more in common with heterosexual men
that we do with women. In this we can see the fag-end of clone culture and what
would now appear to be its hysterical need to assert the butchness of homosexual
men, as a resistance to earlier notions of stereotypical effeminacy, which we have
seen in the previous section to be caused by the strength of inversionist models of
homosexuality and the attendant dominance of heteropatriarchal structures. Thus
the conjuring of homosexual men as an abject through which heterosexuality
retains virility is resisted by homosexual men by consigning women to the
otherness of true feminine abjection, and consequently the internal logic of
homosocial structures retains intact - bolstered even - by the very groups that are
its anathema. Van Leer’s hostility is understandable given the urgent political and
material necessity of resisting homosexual pathologisation through feminisation,
yet his strategy precisely reproduces, recirculates the conditions of heterosocial
hegemony by corroborating the function of women as subjugated objects of
exchange.
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Van Leer’s discomfort produces contradictory effects. What is clear from his
arguments is that his project is assimilationist. Van Leer evades naming himself as a
gay man and his precious prevarications over his own queer self-identification
collude with oppressive secrecy mechanisms through the privileging of naturalised
male heterosexuality - his silence about his identity produces an indeterminacy of
identification only valuable through its homophobia. On the one hand Van Leer
wants to sanctify his minority status and exclude Sedgwick (women) from such
domains: ‘unable to speak from within the minority, Sedgwick must perforce speak
from within the majority’ (p.603). On the other hand, he berates her for apparently
attempting to disallow him an alignment with men, ‘real’ men. The effect of both
manoeuvres is to anticipate and re-commodify the very conditions Sedgwick’s
model elaborates: namely that heterosexual, homosocial masculinity identifies real
men, who are kept in place by the production of an execrable second term - unreal, perverse, but necessary - desiring and striving towards that ever-elusive real
manliness that is the very reassurance of the negation of womanliness. As I have
suggested, because masculinity is structurally elusive, and necessarily so in order to
reproduce the conditions of hegemony, such a performance is precarious, and
precisely becomes visible through the distancing of other terms - women, queers.
Mapping Heterosocial Bonds
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In the BFI series Film Classics, Richard Dyer says of Brief Encounter:
A bar in London, popular with well dressed, worked-out gay men,
is called ‘Brief Encounter’; I once suggested meeting my friend
Hugh there, but he said he couldn’t bear it, it was so very ‘Brief
Encounter’, if I knew what that meant, and for some reason I did.
For years I wanted to do a remake of it, starring Jane Fonda as
Laura and Barbra Streisand as the lover...
A few paragraphs later, Dyer tells of how he once watched the film with a group of
Australian and Canadian gay men who were unfamiliar with it, and his mother
who:
I could see...was uncomfortable with my doing Laura’s lines over
Celia Johnson, because it was mocking a lovely film. It was also
mocking, or at any rate pastiching, a woman. Yet, like many gay
men, I ardently identify with women characters in ‘women’s films’, I
prefer the company of women to that of men and I think of myself
as pro-feminist.33
Dyer appears to be professing a form of bonding, an association, an identification
with women, not shared by his friend Hugh, for whom it seems the proximity of up
front gay men and the campy overtones of ‘Brief Encounter’ are uncomfortable
(but does the archly epicene ‘couldn’t bear it’ protest too much?), and not
understood by his mother; we may infer that this is because she is unfamiliar with
the codes of camp in gay male subculture, or because for her such identificatory
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practice is ‘mocking’ or ‘pastiching’ her gender. For the Australian and Canadian gay
men Dyer’s induction of them into the campy British repression that is the
splendour of Brief Encounter is an act of subcultural affiliation undertaken through a
sign of female identification, and in the presence of the mother (Freud’s mummy’s
boys again). The meanings here are located in the shared bonding across and over
the barrier of sexual (in)difference, a barrier naturalised by homosocial structures
and policed by homophobia. I would contend that this subcultural and shared act
of identity formation could be described as heterosocial, in that it addresses the
efficacy of masculine homosocial structures and yet attempts to denaturalise the
sameness secured by homosocial policing of gender normativity and consequent
intra-male allegiances. In the case of Richard Dyer’s friend who will not rendez-vous
at ‘Brief Encounter’ the refusal to identify with the subcultural space is a refusal of
Dyer’s position (whom we already understand to identify with women) stated
through a rejection of the gayness of the bar (which he can’t ‘bear’). Here the
anxiety is precisely one of sameness: Hugh wishes to retain an allegiance with his
gender, wishes to preserve his masculinity - his refusal is a homosocial act - his
allegiance is with the maleness that comes into articulation precisely through a
suppression of the heterosocial identification (identification with feminine spaces
against naturalised heteropatriarchal gender orders) represented in ‘Brief
Encounter’/Brief Encounter, a suppression and rejection of Richard Dyer’s female
identification. As Theweleit and Daly, amongst others, have shown, maleness is
established through the suppression of any bonding (identification) with women 42
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this is what misogyny and homophobia police - women are beneath reason,
(literally) beneath masculinity. The principal identification required for the
maintenance of patriarchy is with other men, with the potency of phallic authority
through the elaboration of homosocial bonds. Appropriate heterosexual
masculinity is achieved in male subjects by an hysterical over-identification with
the promise of phallic authority. The continued repetition and restatement of this
over-identification is necessitated, as we have seen, by the threat of homosexuality
- this is an effect, a purpose of homosocial structures. Thus I would argue that
hysterical anxiety over the display of appropriate manliness (such as not wanting
to associate with inappropriate displays, such as the campiness of Brief Encounter) is
to accede to the power of patriarchal identification - it is to aspire to the sameness
of male identity, a sameness secured through misogyny and homophobia. Clearly
gay men elaborate and enact many forms of dissent, many ways of alleviating and
re-modelling the particular circumstances in which they find themselves; it is not
my purpose to lambast others who are making the best of whatever faultline
conditions they can identify and exploit. However, it is appropriate here to identify
the contingency of the practices under discussion. As in the discussion of David
Van Leer’s rejection of Eve Sedgwick’s heterosocial overtures, it is worth identifying
the allegiances of Richard Dyer’s friend Hugh as being counter-intuitive to the
female identification Dyer himself enacts, and which I am attempting to formulate.
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Heterosocial bonding with women is a reversal of the discourse of homosociality in which appropriate masculinity is achieved through a suppression of women that
a priori instates a faggot-other disavowed through misogyny. In a review of Ronald
Hayman’s biography of Tennessee Williams Andy Medhurst comments on the
identification Richard Dyer describes in his negotiations of Brief Encounter, a
relationship gay men have with many iconic texts:
The complex question of how Williams’ female protagonists are
related to his homosexuality again demands far more
sophisticated and sensitive thinking than Hayman brings to bear.
Referring to Sweet Bird of Youth, Williams claimed in a fine flourish
of camp rhetoric that ‘I was Alexandra del Lago from start to finish’
- and there are many comparable examples in gay male culture:
think of Tony Warren and Elsie Tanner, Pedro Almodóvar and
Carmen Maura, the Richard Dyer/Celia Johnson interface revealed
in the former’s recent book on Brief Encounter, and what happens
to me whenever I watch Meet Me in St Louis (I am Esther Smith from
start to finish).34
Heterosocial bonds between women and gay men needn’t express mutuality;
indeed, given the complexly different conditions through which gay male, and
heterosexual female identities are discursively produced and contested, claims
towards such mutuality would embody a power relation in themselves. Bonds gay
men enact with women often circumvent people, women themselves, in favour of
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iconography, scales of gesture and performance, fragments of dialogue - bitchy
epithets, semiotics of glamour, femininity, divinity even: dislocated and endlessly
refracted representations, objectifications, enacted as a parodic refusal of
homosocial masculine unification, a defiant celebration of the abjection that pivots
around the display of possession, or denial, of masculine (phallic) authority, as
Paula Graham has noted:
traditionally, gay male camp takes the fetishized Hollywood
female star as its focus - not just any female star, but the ‘strong’,
highly sexualized feminine images, the sirens, vamps and femmes
fatales; in other words, what psychoanalytic language would
designate as the fetishized phallic feminine. Camp pleasure - that
most refined and ecstatic sexual pleasure - lies in a fetishistic tease
of presence/absence of phallic control: power and the threat of its
loss. Camp expresses the relation of gay men to male authority,
mediated by a relationship to representations of ‘the feminine’.35
Camp practices structure representational negotiations gay men make with the
feminine, political interventions that have resistant or transgressive effects in terms
of the conditions through which gay male identities are experienced as
problematic. Camp interventions may not necessarily be effective as strategies for
lesbians in the same ways that they are for gay men, as Graham argues:
gay men usually seem to identify with the feminine excess and
parody of authority embodied in the mad-bad-pervert-witch or
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repressed but sexually seething boss-woman. Lesbians, on the
other hand, seem to prefer the cross-dressing Amazon or tart even though she is heterosexualised and defeats a female order to
restore a patriarchal one. This difference is probably due
principally to a characteristic feeling on the part of gay men that
their sexuality is repressed by masculine authority; as against a
characteristic feeling on the part of lesbians that they are excluded
from authoritative action by passive sexualization (as spectacle) for
men.36
This could in part account for a greater symmetricality in heterosocial relations
between gay men and straight women than between gay men and lesbians. Clearly
there is a powerful and ongoing history of identification with lesbians, which may
be structured by equivalences in gender identifications, as I suggested in the
discussion of Sue-Ellen Case’s butch-femme aesthetic. In terms of heterosexual
women, despite their similar subjection to the passive sexualisation of lesbians, in
the way that Graham describes above, there is also a disparity in such experiences.
Clearly most women must experience such specular control as oppressive, but
within heterosexual arrangements straight women at least have the opportunity to
trade such objectification as social capital, attaining a measure of legitimacy and
institutionalisation in the process, unlike lesbians whose identity is precisely
predicated on the resistance of such arrangements, and ostracism from them as a
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consequence. I will go on to map the intricacies of these dynamics in the next
chapter, which considers the American television sitcom, Roseanne.
Whatever the appeal of camp for gay men, however promising the heterosocial
bonding I identify at work in the writings of Dyer and Medhurst, such strategies
aren’t necessarily dominant ones in gay subculture. We have already seen how Leo
Bersani’s notion of gay radicalism is tied into highly masculinised poses, and how
David Van Leer’s rejection of Sedgwick’s attempts at heterosocial affiliation
embody the seduction of male identification for gay men. The celebrated British
gay writer Mark Simpson approaches questions of masculine display that I have
been analysing here. However, rather than accepting that it is a defining condition
of patriarchy that masculine display is performance for other men, as I have done,
Simpson suggests that the male inducement towards narcissistic consumption of
masculinity is a recent popular cultural phenomenon that spells the end of
manliness as we know it. He says:
Men’s bodies are on display everywhere ... Traditional male
heterosexuality, which insists that it is always active, sadistic and
desiring, is now inundated with images of men’s bodies as passive,
masochistic and desired ... Sexual difference no longer calls the
shots, ‘active’ no longer maps onto ‘masculine’, nor ‘passive’ onto
feminine. Traditional heterosexuality cannot survive this reversal,
particularly because it brings masculinity into perilously close
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contact with that which must always be disavowed:
homosexuality.37
Clearly the move Simpson is making here is attractive strategically, particularly if we
ourselves wish to revel in popular culture’s infatuated gaze upon the libidinous
male body - suggesting that masculine display through the advertisement of jeans,
aftershave, football and the like, sets up a homosexual gaze is a cheeky, not to say
camp, whimsy. But of course, in order to effect this manoeuvre, Simpson actually
has to collapse both ends of the male homosocial continuum into one another,
making men acting in the interests of men the same as men desiring other men
erotically; and, more insidiously, once again offering a gay male intervention which
exalts, in its straining voyeurism, the efficacy of the butch hetero-male as the apex
of desire - anybody’s desire, including other butch males. It may be true to say that
traditional heterosexuality cannot survive the current conditions in which the male
body is represented: clearly popular feminist gains and the increasing visibility of
gay male influence over popular cultural tastes have effected changes, but as we
know to our costs, dominant arrangements do not stand still: dissident
interventions are continuously assimilated, neutralised, reversed and ignored in the
rolling repetitions of hegemonic reformation. As Lynne Segal has noted of
Simpson’s hopeful assertions: ‘Sadly, however, sex and gender hierarchies seem to
manage to thrive on their own contradictions.’38 Precisely so: given the instability of
manly masculinity and its necessity to the reproduction of patriarchal conditions,
there are weaknesses, faultlines to be exploited; however, we cannot imagine that
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male authority, like any other dominant formation, is not able to assimilate and
process its own contradictions, and moreover, use our dissenting interventions as
the very means to do so. Of course it is necessary that men consume images of
precisely how irresistible their manliness should be, how else could the patriarchy
attempt to instil in all its male subjects the arrogance of power, an arrogance which
needs must overcome the unmanly shortcomings of those men who may be
variously oppressed and suppressed themselves within structures of economics,
professionalism, race, class, disability, location, education and skill level, effeminacy
and so on?39 The ‘undifferentiated’ gaze upon the passive figure of the hetero-male
body which Simpson identifies, a gaze which ‘might be female or male, hetero or
homo’ (p.4) does not disperse gender difference, it naturalises it by precisely
clarifying the status of the butch hetero-male as the most erotic spectacle of all,
because he embodies power. The imagery Simpson discusses may proffer the
notion of male passivity, but unless you have the material means and sufficient
identificatory authority to conjur a subject position from which to enact your own
activity and thus to enforce his passivity, then all that has been reinforced by that
representation is his ability to be everywhere - to flirt with all subject positions as a
demonstration of his power. What is concerning about Simpson’s contentions is
that they do seem to account for what is currently a dominant strain of affluent,
cosmopolitan gay identity which is, ironically, understood as a kind of liberation:
the liberation of the pink pound, a function of gay men’s economic success.40
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Thus far I have shown the inherent force of homosocial ideological mechanisms,
and the paradoxical instability through which those mechanisms are formed. To
stress this uneven and necessary contradiction is not to suggest that resisting or
supplanting such formations is a straightforward business - on the contrary, being
aware of dominant contradiction in itself gets you nowhere, for we have seen the
terrible power that homosocial formations exert in spite of their intrinsic instability.
Indeed, in so far as any ideological matrix derives its effect from the way in which
its subjects become complicit with its terms (Van Leer, ‘Hugh’, Simpson), the drive
for a resolution of inherent contradiction ensures the need in those subjects for
scapegoats through which unease can be temporarily and violently dissipated.
However, this state of contradiction, if strategically exploited in agile and reflexive
ways, does offer the opportunity for those residing in the functional margins of
dominant ideologies to reformulate in dysfunctional arrangements. I want to
suggest that the understandings produced by particular subcultures of gay men
(those affiliated in similar ways to Richard Dyer and Andy Medhurst, as opposed to
Dyer’s friend Hugh) through bondings and identification with women, produce a
particular set of arrangements that I refer to as heterosocial. Heterosociality rejects
the unification of patriarchal sameness sustained through the manifestation and
abjection of others; rather, the possibility of heterosocial bonds acknowledges the
violence of such sameness and attempts to act discontinuously with the
hegemonic unity of interests expressed in manliness as an instrument of authority.
Rather than suppress bonds with women, displaying domination of them through
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public institutions of romance and courtship and the display of rigorous, penile
male power, gay male female identification opens the possibility of a
denaturalisation of gender difference, an attempt therefore to re-imagine gender
power.
Straight Talking: Get Some Attitude
In Britain in May 1994 a new queer magazine appeared called Attitude which
advertised itself as being ‘aimed primarily but not exclusively at gay men’ which
was ‘really not interested in policing boundaries.’41 Attitude was one of a number of
new queer publications that appeared at the time, and one of only two that
survived, the other being a lesbian ‘lifestyle’ magazine published by the owners of
the long-running Gay Times, yet it appears to have perceptively addressed the gay
male subject as consumer, and has set the standard for gay publications in this
country, much as Out has done in the States.42
In accordance with its insistence on a post-queer integration of groovy
heterosexuality, Attitude has a column called ‘Straight Talking’ in which mainly
female heterosexual journalists enact a commentary on gay male culture. Thus
we’ve had articles on how boring identity politics is because it’s cool to flirt with kd
lang even if you’re a straight woman who enjoys the missionary position and likes
hairy backs;43 we’ve had consideration of media obsessions with reproductivity and
about the relationship between pleasure and masculinity by way of musings on
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spunk;44 how serial monogamy, double incomes and childless heterosexual couples
are making the differences between gay and straight more insignificant;45 and, of
course we’ve had (in the very first issue, no less) the manifesto of a ‘theoretical fag
hag’ on relations between women and gay men.46 Suzanne Moore says: ‘I fail to see
how anyone remotely interested in sexual politics could be anything but a
theoretical fag-hag’; this is because ‘while much in straight culture settles for the
appearance of truth, what gay culture continually questions is the truth of
appearances.’47
One of the reasons why I have suggested that gender is a more illuminating
epistemic category than sexuality in attempting to elaborate heterosocial bonds is
that even though straight women and gay men both desire men, the structural
manifestations of that desire are different. Women’s desire for men, and pleasure
with them, is naturalised, that functionality conferring a degree of cultural
legitimation, whilst gay men’s equivalent erotic desire of men is perverse. Enacting
bonding on the grounds of mutually shared desire alone, then, would require
women to embrace perversion positively, in a reverse discourse, as gay men do; but
this would be compromising for women, who would have to negotiate away the
cultural capital they accrue through their heterosexuality, their ‘normality’. This is
one of the unspoken terms through which gay male and straight female
relationships are structured. Heterosexual women are agents of cultural
reproduction, in terms of parenthood, partnership, citizenship, social and cultural
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presence. Straight women may have to suffer parochial and constrained identities
in the course of responsibility, caring, nurturing, providing, in roles performed for
families, husbands and institutions of the state, but in all of those areas they are
entitled to trade on their cultural capital as women. Occupying lesbian identity, or
attempting to trade on that cultural capital without the licence of male
respectability - self-determining behaviour not enacted for scopofilic consumption
by patriarchy, or as subservience to its material needs - is ruthlessly punished by
the withdrawal of those privileges of cultural capital. As we can note from the
continuingly vicious war waged upon single mothers by politicians and the media,
attempting to assume responsibility for cultural reproduction without male
authority makes women scapegoats of that authority.
Thus, in accounts by straight women of how valuable their bonds with gay men
are, the disavowed term is always the possibility of the writer’s own potential
lesbianism. Not only could this possibly compromise the very authority through
which fag-hags, theoretical or otherwise, trade cultural currency in their
relationships with gay men, it also raises the thorny question of the constitution of
female homosociality through homophobia, or more accurately, lesbophobia. In
what amounts to an incoherent corrective to Suzanne Moore’s celebration of faghaggery, Suzi Feay suggests that there’s a conspiracy of gay male misogyny.48 She
argues that gay male drag parties, and gay male designers have conspired to
produce an unrealistic image of femininity which real women have difficulty living
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up to. Yet this dismay at gay men’s power to make de-naturalised representations
of femininity that apparently compels women to conform, naturalises Feay’s
heterosexuality: her idea of a realistic femininity is a function of homosocial
authority more constraining than any Parisian excesses. There are significant claims
to be made upon gay male misogyny, even within those constituencies of the
subculture which do identify in some way with women, let alone those for whom
assimilationism and masculine identification are productive moves.49 But there is a
danger in making such claims for gay male misogyny from a position of
naturalised heterosexuality which refuses to acknowledge its cultural privilege:
Feay notes, ‘I’ve ... become all too familiar with what seems a widespread horror of
female secretions. Though why a group of people whose sexual lubricant is a
mixture of shit and Vaseline should find a bit of mucus so objectionable is
baffling.’50 Slinging around such bitchiness (however accurate or amusing)
suggests that Feay is more than capable of engaging her cultural capital in order to
re-secure her own naturalisation.
Whilst this may be a reciprocal relationship, it is sustained by the suppression of
the unspeakable term of lesbianism: ‘In fact some of us [straight women] are so
gay-friendly we feel as if we are gay ... men, that is.’ The qualification exclaims the
structuring absence. Such resistance, even though it is conducted in the name of
breaking the barriers down (‘It’s time for rigid sexualities to be dissolved in a
solution of mutual tolerance. No more fear and sneering; no more imprisoning
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definitions.’) precisely reinstates a naturalising boundary between queer and
straight. Feay shreds gay men for camply inferring that all men are queer, or can be
had if pushed, suggesting that ‘underlying all such attitudes is the assumption that
homosexuality is more authentic than straightness’. Such shrill resistance to a
standard camp rhetorical device indicates the underlying struggles over power,
identity and autonomy that must necessarily characterise heterosocial bonds, given
the resistant terms of their constitution. The reciprocal, or uneven exchange within
heterosocial bonding is not based on (and therefore upheld by) sexual domination,
domestic or maternal dependency, or heterosexual imperative, although it might
well be based on an economic exchange, in which gay men trade economic power
for stigma - straight women representing a cultural legitimation.
Indeed, as Suzanne Moore notes of some gay men who are ‘conservative little gits’
because they don’t draw connections between all those who fall short of straight
white male ideals,
believe me it’s these connections that matter, not whether people
enjoy fucking each other with eighteen-inch dildos or not. What
you get up to in bed may make you extremely happy, but please
don’t kid yourself it’s about to change the world.51
Here bonds, affiliations and identifications across what is a homosocial void of
sexual (in)difference, for women and gay men, constitute acts of political growth
and cultural dissent. Within the authority of homosocial domains female and
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homosexual identities are negated. Substantive gains won against these terms are
produced within the faultline cracks in those very mechanisms. These identities
may not only offer women the best advice ‘on the right shade of lipstick’52 or gay
men an appropriation of cultural capital, but point out possibilities for resisting the
security of hierarchical gender authority, and offer profitable strategies for the
acquisition of subjectivity.
Slash Fantasies / Heterosocial Bonds
Yet it is crucial to recognise that dissident opportunities will necessarily cluster
around points of tension within hegemonic formations. A fascinating example of
this comes in the subcultural fan literature known as slash fiction, which
appropriates dominant homosocial pairings from popular television texts and
inscribes them within explicitly homosexual romantic narratives. The genre, which
predominantly works within science fiction, gets its name from stories written in
the seventies about Kirk and Spock from Star Trek, which were designated K/S (Kirk
– slash – Spock). With the advent of easy internet access in the mid and late 1990s,
and the growth in popularity of science fiction television, slash has become a
substantial fan culture. Slash writers appropriate a wide range of pairings and texts,
which include Chakotay/Paris (Star Trek: Voyager), Blake/Avon (Blake’s 7), Picard/Q (Star
Trek: The Next Generation), Bodie/Doyle (The Professionals), Vecchio/Fraser (Due South),
and Mulder/Krycek (The X Files), as well as pairings from Highlander, Hercules: The
Legendary Journeys, The Sentinel, and Stargate SG-1. Henry Jenkins and Constance
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Penley have been foremost amongst those academics who have written about
slash fiction.53 Both approach the genre as one written by heterosexual women
about ostensibly heterosexual male characters who are ‘slashed’ into homoerotic
encounters or relationships which offer ‘insights into female sexual fantasy’.54
However, over the last couple of years there has been a growing body of slash
work written by women, heterosexual and lesbian, which slashes ostensibly
heterosexual female characters, such as Captain Janeway and B’Elanna Torres from
Star Trek: Voyager, and Xena and Gabrielle from Xena: Warrior Princess into lesbian
sexual relationships; whilst a growing number of gay male authors have joined
their female counterparts in slashing male characters.55 The question of who is
appropriating whom when straight women write about apparently ‘gay’
relationships and sexuality in their own terms, and when gay men write in
‘women’s’ slash genres has been debated online as recently as January 1999.56
How is the heterosocial dynamic working in these slash narratives? As fan fiction,
slash narratives already contest the trans-national corporate ownership of texts
and scenarios which acquire particular significance in the emotional imaginary of
audiences. Jenkins refers to such contestation as ‘textual poaching’ in order to
legitimate fan practices and repudiate conventional understandings of fans as
immature, obsessive and culturally unsophisticated. In what ways does this already
resistant space handle affiliations between women and gay men? How do slash
authors situate their fantastical imaginings?
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A particularly prolific slash author is Britta Matthews, who has written a series of
stories which are serialised on her website; they include The Taming of Tom Paris, In
Dreams, Undaunted, Bored in the Delta Quadrant, and Susurrations.57 The Taming of Tom
Paris won three Golden Orgasm awards in 1998: best Voyager story, best corporal
punishment story, and best overall story, on ASCEM (L), a major web newsgroup
devoted to ‘Treksmut’.58 Taming follows a familiar slash narrative. Its logic is derived
from the Star Trek series produced and owned by Paramount, and is situated
aboard the starship Voyager, stranded in the delta quadrant seventy years from
home after an encounter with an omnipotent being. It depicts the burgeoning
sexual relationship between the ship’s first officer, Commander Chakotay, a mature,
big built Native American, and the ship’s helmsman, Tom Paris, a cute, boyish, blond
WASP. Taming is told in the first person voice of Chakotay, through whom
Matthews makes the nature of the attraction between the men clear:
I wanted him to submit to me, totally, unconditionally. But he had to do it
willingly. His surrender to my will had to be complete but he had to make
the decision. When the day came that he offered himself to me, I would
accept with the greatest joy. His submission would be the most precious gift
I would ever receive and I would cherish him forever for giving it to me.59
Two points seem immediately clear. Firstly that the interchange between the two
men is gendered, with the butch Chakotay positioned as a dominant, active
protector of the more feminine, passive Paris. Secondly it is striking that the
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author’s own identification is with the dominant male in his sexual subjugation of
the other. In Paramount’s text Star Trek: Voyager, Tom Paris is portrayed as being a
charming, confident womaniser, whose roguish past and winning smile produce a
striking level of heterosexual charisma, which is utilised in a number of different
episodes of the series. One of the many pleasures of The Taming of Tom Paris is its
depictions of this stud-like character on his back being fucked by his butch, wellhung superior officer, or being bent over Chakotay’s knee begging to be punished.
We could perhaps suggest that here the slash scenario enables Britta Matthews to
locate her own sadistic orientation to cocky, stud-like men, in a way that may
otherwise be difficult to do within conventional heterosexuality. Particularly so
given that the unfolding narrative of the two men’s relationship is rendered in
distinctly romantic terms, with a high emphasis given to the open negotiation of
feelings, rather than to the more pornographic elements. Slash enables Matthews
to circumvent the rather conventional terms of heterosexual romance, and
formulate a cross-gendered identification that facilitates a sexual and social
authority in her alignment with Chakotay that would be much more contorted
were she to identify with a woman, such as B’Elanna Torres in a sadistic
relationship with Paris. Clearly heterosexuality can accommodate female sadism in
relation to male masochism, but inevitably such scenarios are always an inversion
of more predictable arrangements, and thereby they retain the necessity for some
narrative negotiation of the anticipated heterosexual gender roles in order to
facilitate a convincing inversion.
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Chakotay and Paris may be gendered, but we anticipate that both men occupy full
subjectivity; queering the men enables the depiction of gender difference whilst
maintaining the ability to locate both subjects convincingly in such a way that
power play between them doesn’t imply the negation of the identity of either. This
identification with a sadistic male ‘top’ is offset by locating this fantasy through
Chakotay, who despite his size, maturity, ranking and phallic prowess is ethnically
represented as Native American ‘other’. In as much as Star Trek’s liberal universe is
populated with aliens who represent ethnic and racial difference, slash fiction
retains an investment in ethno-centric racial fetishism. Traditionally Kirk/Spock
slash maps ethnic difference onto gender, depicting Spock in terms which connote
exoticism through quasi-mystical, religious trappings that alternately feminise him
in the logic of white racist fantasies of orientalism, and masculinise him as a
function his logic and intellectualism: Spock in his dispassion represents the mind,
Kirk in his vanity represents the body. In Voyager slash, the other most popular top
is Harry Kim, who’s Asian, and whose gender ethnically signifies in similar ways to
Chakotay’s. Chakotay’s ethnicity is heavily fetishised in Paramount’s Voyager: he’s
frequently to be found communing with his spirit guide, or meditating on his
ancestral hereditary, whilst his facial tattoo stands as a constant signifier of ethnic
difference; representationally these acts are made to signify his general sensitivity
and emotional depth and thus feminise him in a way that contrasts with his butch
authority and physical size. Furthermore, Chakotay’s membership of the rebel
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Maquis group who are fighting Federation and Cardassian colonialism, instates his
political and moral righteousness. These elements work to offset Chakotay’s sadism
and dominance in The Taming of Tom Paris, making him a safer, more acceptably
liberal place through which to locate sexual and social power.
We could perhaps suggest then, that slash expresses a heterosocial dynamic in
terms of providing women with the opportunity to appropriate homoeroticism as
the means to enact an empowering identification with a subject position through
which they may exhibit power (such as Chakotay), whilst being able to avoid such
an identification slipping into a ventriloquism of patriarchal dominance. The fact
that Britta Matthews’s object of identification is expressing homosexual desires
positions him ambiguously within homosocial power systems, and yet he remains
a man, with access to the privileges of his gender, and his position as second in
command on the ship, yet still manifesting both cultural integrity (as an ‘oppressed
minority’ ethnically connoting passivity and femininity, and with a heritage richly
commodified within Star Trek culture) and emotional dexterity.
Here homosexuality is functioning as a means of enacting gender dissent for
female slash authors, who are resisting their alignment as feminised objects of
heterosexuality and enacting queer sistership through an identification with male
homosexuality. There are problems with such identifications, however.
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It is telling that Taming, as with the majority of such fiction, locates its idealised
vision of a more egalitarian sexuality in men, and thus simultaneously retains
female heterosexual identification towards men (and it is a common motif in slash
that the homosexual encounter occurs for the first and only time, arising out of
extraordinary circumstances in a narrative in which both participants continue to
manifest heterosexuality) and expresses a homosocial counter-identification with
the notion of lesbianism. Slash often preserves the potential for female
heterosexual specular pleasure in male physicality, whilst inherently rejecting the
possibility of lesbian alternatives, which could potentially exhibit the same range
of metaphors of more egalitarian sexual relations that are exploited in the male
homoeroticism most narratives toy with.
Slash erotisim of gay sex acts tends to follow rather formulaic patterns which detail
the mechanical aspects of, for example, anal sex, whereby narrative time is spent
explaining how the top will use his fingers to relax his partner’s anal musculature,
and introduce lubrication. Such fastidious attention to detail (and it is striking how
relentlessly and repetitively slash authors dwell on such matters) works to
denaturalise gay sex acts in a way that doesn’t occur in gay pornography written
by gay men. Similarly, if slash enables a degree of narrative punishment of ‘straight’
men, like Tom Paris, as the fucking tables are turned on them, then this makes an
unfortunate correlation between ‘passive’ gay sexuality and humiliation, that is out
of step with our expectations of heterosocial affiliation. In practice such
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correlations remain largely subtextual: in The Taming of Tom Paris, Britta Matthews is
careful to introduce a degree of versatility into the sexual and emotional role
playing that takes place between Tom and Chakotay. Indeed, if the relationship
merely ends up replicating the more demeaning connotations of gender
difference, slash would lose its dissident potential for authors like Matthews, when
its very appeal seems to lie in constituting sexual partners both of whom have
access to full subjectivity within gender systems.
Nevertheless, both slash fiction and the ‘theoretical fag-hags’ of Attitude
demonstrate that gender dissent and heterosocial bonds, like any other radical
manoeuvre, hold no guarantee of political breakthrough. Our opportunities for
cultural change or leverage arise out of knowledge, language, relationships and
artefacts appended to potentially oppressive hegemonic regimes of power.
1Sheila Jeffreys is indicative of the radical feminist position: her most recent work,
The Lesbian Heresy: A Feminist perspective on the lesbian sexual revolution (London: The
Women's Press, 1994) is a furious diatribe against Foucauldian feminism and what
she terms 'lesbianandgay' theory. Examples of the so-called libertarian feminists
include such sex radicals as Susie Bright and Pat Califia, but probably also stalwarts
of critical theory, such as Judith Butler.
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2Gayle S. Rubin, 'Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality'
in Carole S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (New York:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) and 'The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex' in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1975).
3Rubin, 'Thinking Sex', p.309.
4Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p.106, cited by
de Lauretis, 'Sexual Difference and Lesbian Representation' (Theatre Journal, 40, 1988)
in discussion of Rubin, 'Thinking Sex' (ibid, p.307).
5Such is the impact of post-Foucauldian theory that even those activists or
theorists who object to the centrality of sexuality and desire based notions of
identity and politics must engage with its agenda; Jeffreys' The Lesbian Heresy is an
example.
6In Britain 'Queer' politics appeared to be very much a function of metropolitan
and artistic subcultural activity in London, principally. The supposed coalescence of
lesbians, gay men, people of colour, bisexuals, heterosexuals, sadomasochists, drag
queens, fetishists, and transsexuals, now appears quite momentary, and although
promising, always seemed dominated by relatively institutionalised journalists and
artists, and those whose identities were already the most culturally validated - men,
white people, the heterosexually privileged; with the occasional exceptions of
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those whose outrageousness was momentarily voyeuristically celebrated in the
quality press or mainstream cosmopolitan culture (I shall return to this celebration
in the forthcoming chapter on Pedro Almodóvar). The trajectory of Queer politics in
America has been similar, but was always founded in different conditions. The
HIV/AIDS emergency has been considerably more acute on the other side of the
Atlantic, lending an urgency to political militancy and coalition we have thankfully
not suffered to the same extent here. And, as I noted in the previous chapter, gay
or queer politics in America have culturally specific expectations that are a function
of the ideological importance of the Constitution: the call to a Queer Nation in the
States has an entirely different resonance than it would here.
7Jana Sawicki, 'Identity Politics and Sexual Freedom: Foucault and Feminism' in
Irene Diamond & Lee Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988); and also in Sawicki, Disciplining
Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New York & London: Routledge, 1991).
8ibid.
9Caroline Ramazanoglu and Janet Holland, 'Women's sexuality and men's
appropriation of desire', in Ramazanoglu (ed.) Up Against Foucault: Explorations of
some tensions between Foucault and feminism (London & New York: Routledge 1993).
10See Ramazanoglu and Holland, 'Women's sexuality and men's appropriation of
desire', p.239, for further discussion of this.
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11Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression (London: Routledge, 1990) p.65.
12Domna C. Stanton, 'Introduction: The Subject of Sexuality' in Stanton (ed.)
Discourses of Sexuality: From Artistotle to AIDS (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1992) pp.1-46.
13An extreme example is Louise J. Kaplan's work, Female Perversions (London:
Penguin, 1993).
14Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1995)
p.113. Further page references will be given in the text.
15One could speculate that the missing figure here is Oscar Wilde, often included
with the others as the epitome of witty transgressive immorality. It would be unfair
to Bersani to condemn him for not considering Wilde, but it is interesting to note
that of all of them, he is probably the least easily recuperable to a masculinist
agenda, given that his trial is identified as the moment at which the notions of
homosexuality and effeminacy first coalesced.
16In his contribution to the volume Constructing Masculinity (eds) Maurice Berger,
Brian Wallis & Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), entitled 'Loving Men',
Bersani notes that: ‘In that tension [between our ‘political alignments’ and our
‘phantasmatic investments’] lies an important moral dimension of our political
engagements. But to be aware of the tension means being aware of both sets of
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determining factors, and perhaps especially of those identifications and erotic
interests it is not always gratifying to acknowledge.’ (p.117).
17Teresa de Lauretis, 'Sexual Difference and Lesbian Representation', reprinted in
Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin (eds) The Lesbian and Gay
Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 1993).
18ibid, p.143.
19In The Persistent Desire: A lesbian femme/butch reader (Boston: Alyson, 1991), Joan
Nestle talks about her own experiences of homophobia from other lesbians
because of her identification as a femme. Elsewhere in the collection, butch
lesbians express similar experiences.
20I am here specifying gay male identification rather than lesbian identification not
because I believe lesbian practice to be tremendously different, or any less
important than that of gay men, but because of the intrinsically different power
relations in the two sets of identifications. It is precisely my intention to assess the
effects of gay male practice on the constitution of gender authority, and gauge the
potential radicalism (or reactionism) in gay male practice. Nor do I wish to gesture
at the existence of specific lesbian practices, whilst pretending I'd rather they went
away. Many studies tokenistically gesture towards difference without ever
attempting to resolve the complexities it raises. At those points at which lesbian
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cultural practice throws gay male practice into relief, confusion or suspicion I
intend to try and maintain a commitment to handling such complexity.
21Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) p.3; subsequent page references will be
given in the text as BM.
22 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Film and the Visible’ in Bad Object Choices (eds), How Do I
Look? Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp.223-264; see also Terry Castle,
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993) pp.67-73.
23Craig Owens 'Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism' in Alice Jardine & Paul Smith (eds)
Men in Feminism (New York & London: Routledge, 1989) p.223.
24Owens' reading of Irigaray could be disputed. The seminal essay 'Sexual
Difference and Lesbian Representation' by Teresa de Lauretis (Theatre Journal 40,
1988; reprinted in Abelove, Barale and Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader, New York & London: Routledge, 1993) takes as its theoretical grist a
distinction de Lauretis precisely identifies in Irigaray's work between
homosexuality and hommo-sexuality. For de Lauretis, this distinction expresses the
paradox of sexual (in)difference, in which lesbian desire is inconceivable within the
terms of sexual difference - a binary with no dialectic, no subject position other
than that of the male, no desire other than that of the male, no sexuality other
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than male sexuality (‘hommo-sexuality’). De Lauretis argues that these are the terms
of heterosexuality, terms through which the possibility of lesbianism is effaced.
Within de Lauretis' deployment of Irigaray, male phallic homosexuality does
become visible (and distinct from male bonding), if only by connotation. She
identifies a paradox between hommo-sexuality and homosexuality, one that we
could name as homosociality, but the implication of her positing of this proximity
is the emergence of a gay male who is disenfranchised from the system of sexual
indifference neither by his hommo-sexuality, his masculinity and maleness, nor by
his narcissistic desire in others (hommes/homos) for that hommo-sexuality. Ironically,
then, we see that the only terms of male homosexuality are masculine ones: it is
perhaps this phallo-centric construction of gay male sexuality that Owens objects
to. It is ironic to note the similarity between what Owens appears to object to in
Irigaray and Showalter's work, and the celebratory nihilistic phallicism Bersani
admires in Genet's considerations of fascism.
25Leo Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?' in Douglas Crimp (ed.), AIDS: Cultural Analysis
Cultural Activism (London & Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988)
p.212.
26Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a 'Postfeminist' Age,
(New York & London: Routledge, 1991) pp.62-63.
27ibid.
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28Other than Leo Bersani, Mario Mieli is one of the few gay male writers to have
candidly and explicitly considered gay male anal eroticism and its relation to male
heterosexual anxiety, in his book, Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay
Critique, (London: Gay Men's Press, 1980) pp.137-145. Mieli's work is a fabulous
melange of a queen's subcultural world view and dense theoretical readings: ‘The
point is, that if you get fucked, if you know what tremendous enjoyment is to be
had from anal intercourse, then you necessarily become different from the 'normal'
run of people with a frigid arse...Of all the aspects of homosexuality, I would say
that the one heterosexual men fear above all is anal intercourse.’ (p. 139).
29The phrase is Sedgwick's own: she uses it in pointing out Marjorie Garber's
effacement of complex negotiations of homo/hetero-sexual oppression and
resistance in cross-dressing; in Eve Sedgwick & Michael Moon, 'Divinity: A Dossier, A
Performance Piece, A Little-Understood Emotion', Sedgwick, Tendencies (New York &
London: Routledge, 1994) p.223.
30Julia Penelope, 'Heteropatriarchal Semantics: Just Two Kinds of People in the
World', Lesbian Ethics 2,2 1986, p.59.
31Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press,
1978) p.357 & p.359; subsequent page references will be given in the text, and
identified as G/E.
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32David Van Leer 'The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the Pathology of
Manhood', Critical Inquiry 15, no.3, Spring 1989, p.605; subsequent page references
will be given in the text, BC.
33Richard Dyer, Brief Encounter (London: BFI, 1993) pp.11-12.
34Andy Medhurst, ‘Karaoke Treatment’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 4, No.4, April 1994, p.32.
35Paula Graham, 'Girl's Camp? The Politics of Parody', in Tamsin Wilton (ed.),
Immortal Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image (London & New York: Routledge,
1995) p.168.
36ibid, p.177.
37Mark Simpson, Male Impersonators: Men Performing Masculinity (London: Cassell,
1994) p.4 (emphasis in original).
38Lynne Segal, Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (London: Virago, 1994) p.199.
39See Allan Hunter, ‘Same Door, Different Closet: A Heterosexual Sissy’s ComingOut Party’ in Sue Wilkinson & Celia Kitzinger (eds), Heterosexuality: A Feminism and
Psychology Reader (London: Sage, 1993) pp.150-169, for a consideration by a
heterosexual man of the disjuncture between dominant faction membership and
the inability to display appropriate manliness.
40
See my ‘Small Towns, Boys and Ivory Towers: A Naked Academic’ in Jan Campbell
& Janet Harbord (eds) Temporalities: Autobiography in a Postmodern Age (Manchester:
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Maddison / Fags, Hags & Queer Sisters
Manchester University Press, 2000) for further discussion of the difficulties
associated with the commodification of gay male identities in urban spaces.
41Editorial, Attitude, no.1, May 1994, p.7.
42For an account of the emergence of these publications, see my 'A Queered Pitch',
Red Pepper, February 1995, p.27.
43Ruth Picardie, 'My date with kd lang', Attitude, no.8, December 1994, p.49.
44Suzanne Moore, 'Merchant semen', Attitude, no.5, September 1994, p.51.
45Angela Lambert, 'Close to you', Attitude, no.12, April 1995, p.51.
46Suzanne Moore, 'You don't have to be gay around here...but it helps', Attitude,
no.1, May 1995, p.61.
47ibid.
48Suzi Feay, 'Will the real miss thing please stand up?', Attitude, no.3, July 1994, p.57.
49See Richard Dyer, 'Is a gay man always a girl's best friend?', Attitude, no.15, July
1995, p.114, for a consideration of gay male misogyny amongst female identifying
constituencies.
50Suzi Feay, 'Will the real miss thing please stand up?', p.57.
51Suzanne Moore, 'You don't have to be gay...', p.61.
52ibid.
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53
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1992); Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America
(London & New York: Verso, 1997).
54
Jenkins, ibid, p. 192.
55
Much of this work in available on the internet. For general archives of slash
fiction of all types see ‘Slash Fiction on the Net’
(http://members.aol.com/ksnicholas/fanfic/slash.html), ‘Slash Revolution
International’ (http://www.frii.com/~xangst/sri/index.html); for fiction by explicitly
gay men and lesbians, as well as straight women, see the Slashkink Archive
(http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/8743/slashkfict.htm); for explicitly lesbian
slash see ‘Obsession’s Homepage Presents: The Xena Warrior Princess Lesbian
Fanfiction Index’ (http://www.obsession14.com/XenaRotica/fanindex.html).
56
See the Slashkink news group (SlashKink@eGroups.com), ‘Is it just me?’ 4/1/99 -
5/1/99 and ‘Are they gay?’ 6/1/99.
57
‘Britta’s Slash Page’ (http://www/tommyhawksfantasyworld.com/britta/).
58
ASCEM (L) is ‘alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated’ (http://come.to/treksmut/).
59
The Taming of Tom Paris, Britta’s Slash Page, ibid.
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