Gay Shame + DVD

Halperin, David; Traub, Valerie

ISBN 10: 0226314383 ISBN 13: 9780226314389

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2010

Synopsis

Ever since the 1969 Stonewall Riots, 'gay pride' has been the rallying cry of the gay rights movement and the political force behind the emergence of the field of gay and lesbian studies. But has something been lost, forgotten, or buried beneath the drive to transform homosexuality from a perversion to a proud social identity? Have the political requirements of gay pride repressed discussion of the more uncomfortable or undignified aspects of homosexuality? "Gay Shame" seeks to lift this unofficial ban on the investigation of homosexuality and shame by presenting critical work from the most vibrant frontier in contemporary queer studies.An esteemed list of contributors tackles a range of issues - questions of emotion, disreputable sexual histories, dissident gender identities, and embarrassing figures and moments in gay history - as they explore the possibility of reclaiming shame as a new, even productive, way to examine lesbian and gay culture. Accompanied by a collection of films, performance, and archival imagery on DVD, "Gay Shame" constitutes nothing less than a major redefinition and revitalization of the field.

About this title

About the Author

David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan and the author of How to Do the History of Homosexuality, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Valerie Traub is professor of English and women's studies at the University of Michigan and the author of The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

GAY SHAME

By DAVID M. HALPERIN VALERIE TRAUB

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-31438-9

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................ixBeyond Gay Pride David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub..........................................................................3Why Gay Shame Now? David M. Halperin..........................................................................................41Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James's The Art of the Novel Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick......................49Mario Montez, For Shame Douglas Crimp.........................................................................................63White-on-White: The Overbearing Whiteness of Warhol Being Taro Nettleton......................................................76Boricua Gazing: An Interview with Frances Negrn-Muntaner Rita Gonzalez.......................................................88Shame on Me Elisabeth Ladenson................................................................................................103On the Uses of Shame and Gifts of a Bloodmobile: Musings from a Musical Queer Apprenticeship Nadine Hubbs.....................111Shame on Me, or The Naked Truth about Me and Marlene Dietrich David Caron.....................................................117Teaching Shame Ellis Hanson...................................................................................................132Shameful Fantasies: Cross-Gender Queer Sex in Lesbian Erotic Fiction Amalia Ziv...............................................165Excluding Shame Leo Bersani...................................................................................................176Shameful Sites: Locating Queerness and Disability Robert McRuer...............................................................181Slipping Abby Wilkerson.......................................................................................................188Where Is the Truth in Painting Today? Dylan Scholinski........................................................................192Tough Terry Galloway..........................................................................................................196Sex, Shame, and Disability Identity: With Reference to Mark O'Brien Tobin Siebers.............................................201The Shame of Queer History/Queer Histories of Shame Helmut Puff...............................................................219The Shame of Gay Pride in Early AIDS Activism Deborah B. Gould................................................................221Emotional Rescue Heather K. Love..............................................................................................256The Trouble with Shame George Chauncey........................................................................................277Pleasures and Dangers of Shame Michael Warner.................................................................................283Shamefully Gay: Documents from the Labadie Collection Julie Herrada and Tim Retzloff..........................................297How Might We Create a Collectivity That We Would Want to Belong To? Barry D. Adam.............................................301Scandalous Acts: The Politics of Shame among Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes Don Kulick and Charles Klein......................312"Plunge Into Your Shame" Neil Bartlett........................................................................................339Gay Shame and the Politics of Identity Jennifer Moon..........................................................................357A Little Humility Gayle Rubin.................................................................................................369Enactivism: The Movie Dennis Allen, Jaime Hovey, and Judith Roof..............................................................374On the DVD.....................................................................................................................383List of Contributors...........................................................................................................391

Chapter One

[DAVID M. HALPERIN AND VALERIE TRAUB] Beyond Gay Pride

Ever since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the era of gay liberation they inaugurated, "gay pride" has been the rallying cry of a broad social movement for sexual freedom. It has also been the driving political force behind the emergence of the interdisciplinary fields of lesbian and gay studies and, more recently, queer theory. Liberation, legitimacy, dignity, acceptance, and assimilation, as well as the right to be different: the goals of gay pride require nothing less than the complete destigmatization of homosexuality, which means the elimination of both the personal and the social shame attached to same-sex eroticism. Since 1969 the lesbian and gay movement has made remarkable global progress toward its goals, leading to such once undreamt-of achievements as the visible integration of queer folk into mainstream popular culture and the formal, public recognition of same-sex partnerships. At the same time, gay pride has generated considerable dissatisfactions of its own among some of the very people it has aimed, or claimed, to benefit. Despite everything it has accomplished, and perhaps because of everything it has accomplished, the gay pride movement has given rise to a surprising array of discontents.

It was in this context that we decided, some years ago, to interrogate the continued usefulness of gay pride. We wanted to find out what it would be like to do queer politics and queer studies otherwise. In this case, "otherwise" seemed necessarily to imply some degree of renewed engagement with a category that represents, by definition, the very opposite of "pride," at once its emotional antithesis and its political antagonist: namely, the category of shame. Gay pride has never been able to separate itself entirely from shame, or to transcend shame. Gay pride does not even make sense without some reference to the shame of being gay, and its very successes (to say nothing of its failures) testify to the intensity of its ongoing struggle with shame.

We started, accordingly, to identify topics that the imperative of gay pride had tended to place off-limits to legitimate inquiry, or had simply repressed-shameful topics, that is, or topics gay pride itself might make us ashamed to investigate. And we tried to imagine a queer community founded not only in collective affirmations of pride but also in residual experiences of shame. We wondered if it would ever be possible to create a queer sociality that could take account of those incorrigible, inwardizing impulses that drive sexual pariahs to want to have nothing to do with one another. Originating as they seem to do in the shame of social rejection, those inveterate queer tendencies to disassociation and disidentification offer the greatest resistance to group cohesiveness, coalition building, political alliance, emotional and social support, erotic bonding, mutual appreciation, and queer solidarity. Even from the perspective of a gay pride agenda, it is important to confront those antisocial queer tendencies, because they pose some of the most insurmountable obstacles to the realization of gay pride. And in fact gay pride has never managed entirely to overcome the mutual hostility and self-imposed isolation of the shamed. Perhaps, then, the time has come to consider some alternate strategies for the promotion of queer sociality.

With those aims in mind, we decided to bring together a number of scholars, critics, activists, archivists, writers, performers, journalists, and artists-some of whom turn out to be the same individuals-and we asked them to explore these issues. The result was an international conference that took place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on March 27-29, 2003. We called it Gay Shame. The present volume builds on that conference by grouping together some of the material presented at it and by supplementing that material with other contributions designed to address the conjunction of shame, queerness, identity, and pride.

What are the residual effects of shame on lesbian and gay subjectivity in the era of gay pride? What affirmative uses can be made of shame and related affects, now that not all queers are condemned to live in shame? Are there important, nonhomophobic values related to the experience of shame that gay pride does not or cannot offer us? Can we do things with shame that we cannot do with pride? What are the similarities and differences between gay shame and ethnic shame, or racial shame, or disabled shame? Are there significant divergences between the shame of being a gay man and the shame of being a lesbian? Between the shame of being bisexual or transgendered and the shame of being lesbian or gay? How does the possibility of reclaiming gay shame enable us to create new forms of community as well as new opportunities for inquiry into lesbian-gay-queer history and culture? Is gay shame the new gay pride? Or does the turn to shame represent neither a rejection of pride nor a retooled version of it, but something else?

Those are the broadest questions that we wanted to address. We believe that some answers emerge from the material collected in this volume-despite its great diversity and the conflicting approaches, assessments, and viewpoints contained in it. Even if it turns out that gay shame is not about to displace or replace gay pride-and we are the last people in the world who would want it to do that-we still consider that the issues explored in this volume have the potential to effect a major redefinition and reconceptualization of lesbian- gay- queer studies and politics. In any case, we wish to provide an additional impetus to the radical transformations that are already taking place within some queer communities and that hold out the promise of an affirmative queer future unrestricted by the increasingly exhausted and restrictive ethos of gay pride.

I

As the organizers of the conference and the editors of this volume, we find ourselves in a curious position. For reasons we will explain in a moment, we conceived the conference in such a way as to make the prospect of publishing the proceedings unlikely, if not impossible. The collection we have assembled is therefore not your usual conference publication. Nor was it meant to be. So we need to explain what it is, and why it is the way it is.

The conference had a number of subsidiary purposes. Some of them relate to our own institutional situation at the University of Michigan. Others have to do with developments over the past fifteen years within the field of lesbian-gay-queer studies. Yet others have to do with more recent developments in queer politics, performance, and culture. And still others derive from the current disciplinary shape and practice of queer theory itself. All of them have had a share in determining the contents as well as the form of this volume. So let us be explicit about them.

One of our aims was simply to stage a major international event in lesbian-gay-queer studies at the University of Michigan, where we both teach. No public event on such a large scale had ever taken place at the University of Michigan with the university's full sponsorship and support, and no significant conference in the field had been held at the university since 1975. And yet the university could boast an extraordinary concentration of scholars and critics, archivists and staff, students and faculty, administrators and activists engaged in various forms of reflection on sex, gender, sexuality, identity, subjectivity, history, and politics. The University of Michigan has long been a lively site of lesbian-gay-queer intellectual and political life. That much is attested by the thirty-five-year history of the current Office of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Affairs (now called the Spectrum Center), by the long-standing activity of faculty pressure groups, and by the expanding Labadie Collection of social protest documents at the university library, as well as by the creation in 2000 of an LGBT studies minor in the Women's Studies Department, the establishment in 2001 of the Lesbian- Gay-Queer Research Initiative at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the launch in 2006 of a graduate certificate in LGBTQ studies through the Women's Studies Department.

The Midwest can certainly be inhospitable to queers. Robert McRuer's reflections, in this volume, on his experience of returning home to southeastern Michigan convey that all too vividly. But it is also true that the University of Michigan has proven to be remarkably hospitable, especially lately, to queer community organizing and queer scholarship. We wanted to make productive use of its resources and to celebrate the unique opportunities for queer research and interdisciplinary collaboration that the university encourages, supports, and rewards. We also wanted to promote a wider dialogue about the current state of queer politics and queer theory, both among members of the local community in and around Ann Arbor and among different generations of scholars in the fields of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies.

In particular, we wanted to examine the notion of shame, which had been a leitmotif in critical writing within those overlapping fields for more than a decade at the time we began our work on the conference but had never received sustained analytic attention from a large group of researchers gathered together in one place. In 1993, in the first article in the first issue of the first volume of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that queer identity and queer resistance are both rooted in originary experiences of shame. For Sedgwick, therefore, shame provided the conceptual link necessary to understanding the relation between queer identity and queer performativity: "asking good questions about shame and shame/performativity," she concluded, "could get us somewhere with a lot of the recalcitrant knots that tie themselves into the guts of identity politics-yet without delegitimating the felt urgency and power of the notion of 'identity' itself." That was a startling, upsetting, and courageous challenge, especially at a time when more than two decades of gay pride had culminated in the militant, in-your-face defiance of Queer Nation; when the queer movement seemed to be farthest removed from the long, sad, odious, and embarrassing history of gay shame as well as from the snares of identity politics; and when queer theorists and queer activists alike were mounting an assault on gay and lesbian identity as old-fashioned, assimilationist, reactionary, delusional, and phantasmatic, as if the habit of making an identity out of queer sexuality was what lesbians and gay men ought to feel most ashamed of themselves for doing. In that context, Sedgwick asked us to rethink pride, identity, performativity, and queerness in relation to the volatile dynamics, both individual and collective, of shame.

Over the next ten years Sedgwick went on to elaborate her thinking in a series of essays, and her formulations proved to be widely influential as well as highly controversial. She succeeded in putting shame on the agenda of queer studies throughout the latter half of the 1990s without, however, securing for that notion any generally acknowledged solidity, clarity, or coherence. We reprint in this volume, with her kind permission, Sedgwick's latest reformulation of her groundbreaking 1993 GLQ article as she provided it in her 2003 book, Touching Feeling.

One of the most potent effects of Sedgwick's inquiries into shame was to permit and legitimate the rediscovery and exploration of earlier monuments of lesbian and gay culture irretrievably compromised, according to the criteria of post-Stonewall gay pride, by their queasy-making saturation in experiences of shame-such as Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness or the writings of Jean Genet. To be sure, the credit for this queer revisionism does not belong to Sedgwick alone. One of the achievements of the antiassimilationist queer culture of the early 1990s was to bring about the rehabilitation of pre-Stonewall queer outlaws-from Leopold and Loeb to Gertrude Stein to Liberace-whose criminality, pathology, sinfulness, flamboyance, brutality, homophobia, or sexual and gender deviance had made them inimical to the ethos of gay pride, repulsive to liberated, self-respecting lesbians and gay men of the post-Stonewall era, and resistant to inclusion within affirmative histories of homosexuality.

What made such figures newly attractive to the queer movement was the scandal they continued to represent to conventional social values, their unfitness for sociality (gay or straight), their inaptitude for "serving the state" (the test Andr Gide applied to the antihero of his 1902 novella, The Immoralist). They had not been bought off by gay pride; they had lived too early to have been tempted to purchase social respectability at the price of conformity and assimilation. Queer culture of the early 1990s was all about the rejection of heteronormativity, the refusal to conform to social norms deemed irreparably heterosexual and heterosexist; it gravitated toward those figures whose mode of homosexual existence was premised on the impossibility of social acceptance and integration, and therefore on the impossibility of gay pride. As Dennis Allen, Jaime Hovey, and Judith Roof note in their commentary on queer activism in this volume, the approach developed in the early 1990s was to insist that queer difference "is irreducible" and therefore that the social and political claims queers make on the rest of the world are not "merely a recognition of gay difference or of the political and personal validity of this difference but, finally, a recognition of the impossibility of sameness itself." By reclaiming these pre-Stonewall queer pariahs, the queer movement marked its rejection of assimilation, along with what it had perceived as the increasingly sanitized, staid, politically vacuous, and generally boring official gay culture of self-affirmation.

As David Caron points out in his own contribution to this volume, "The recent development of scholarly interest in the pre-Stonewall era ... is less a matter of archaeology than a search for viable forms of queerness as alternatives to standardized, and standard-enforcing, gayness." This programmatic reclamation of pre-Stonewall styles of queer cultural resistance is neatly captured by the title Douglas Crimp gives his study of Andy Warhol and early queer underground culture: "Queer before Gay." Crimp forges a direct link between Sedgwick's inquiry into shame and his own attempt to recover queer cultural values from an era before the ascendance of gay pride. He makes the connection clear in an essay called "Mario Montez, For Shame," a reading of Andy Warhol's film Screen Test #2. Because of the way it connects Sedgwick's theoretical discussion of shame with the queer turn against pride, and because of the questions it raises about the utility of a return to notions of shame, Crimp's essay could easily have served as the keynote address for the Gay Shame conference at Michigan-if, that is, he hadn't already just published it in a 2002 festschrift for Sedgwick. We were grateful to Douglas Crimp for allowing us to use his essay instead as a focal point for one of the opening sessions of the conference, and we are grateful to him for permitting us to reprint the essay here.

A third purpose of the Gay Shame conference was to bring the intellectual current in queer studies that had given new prominence to the category of gay shame into direct dialogue with a newer impulse in queer activism that went by that very name: Gay Shame. Crimp himself makes the connection explicit in his essay on Warhol. The impulse to counter gay pride has not been limited to the academy. Celebrations of Gay Shame took place before and after the turn of the third millennium in a number of cities in North America and Europe. Typically, as in Brooklyn, where they are claimed to have originated in 1998, these celebrations were scheduled on the same weekend as Gay Pride, on the days before and after the official parade, and were designed to provide an alternative to it. The point of such celebrations has varied. In San Francisco, Gay Shame Awards ceremonies were held in May 2002 and June 2003: their aim was to call attention to, and to shame, members of the local gay and lesbian communities who had sold out their queer comrades to profit, property values, or electoral popularity. Elsewhere, the point has been not to promote a sense of shame at gay misdeeds, but rather to affirm aspects or practices of homosexuality that seem increasingly marginal to the official celebrations of lesbian and gay identity tailored to the civic and political requirements of gay pride.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226314383
• ISBN 13: 9780226314389
• Binding: Product Bundle
• Number of pages: 395