The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy - Softcover

Eng, David L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822347326 ISBN 13: 9780822347323

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2010

Synopsis

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism”—the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

About this title

About the Author

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.

From the Back Cover

"Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng's "The Feeling of Kinship" looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the 'liberal' place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom."--Lauren Berlant, author of "The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Feeling of Kinship

QUEER LIBERALISM AND THE RACIALIZATION OF INTIMACYBy DAVID L. ENG

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4732-3

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................................ix1 The Law of Kinship Lawrence v. Texas and the Emergence of Queer Liberalism.........................................232 The Structure of Kinship The Art of Waiting in The Book of Salt and Happy Together.................................583 The Language of Kinship Transnational Adoption and Two Mothers in First Person Plural..............................934 The Prospect of Kinship Transnational Adoption and Racial Reparation (WITH SHINHEE HAN, PH.D.).....................1385 The Feeling of Kinship Affect and Language in History and Memory...................................................166Notes.................................................................................................................199Bibliography..........................................................................................................225Index.................................................................................................................239

Chapter One

The Law of Kinship

LAWRENCE V. TEXAS AND THE EMERGENCE OF QUEER LIBERALISM

Since then I have wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of femininity on my banner, and I will continue to do so as far as consideration of my environment allows, whatever other people who are ignorant of the supernatural reasons may think of me. I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. -DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Trans-Atlantic slave and trans-Pacific coolie migrations to the New World constituted not only the material but also the philosophical foundation for liberal humanism to think the universality of human freedom and progress. This historical legacy continues to haunt the disavowed racial ground of our contemporary U.S. political moment. Our putatively color-blind age is replete with assumptions that freedom is made universal through liberal political enfranchisement and the rights of citizenship, and through the globalization of capitalism and the proliferation of "free" markets. Indeed, under the neoliberal mandates of the "ownership" society, political and economic rights-citizenship and property-are increasingly conflated. As Aihwa Ong observes, neoliberal rationality is marked by the "infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics," with political and social problems insistently recast as non-ideological issues in need of technical, economic response.

Such a narrow discourse of human emancipation underwrites what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as "a history of the vanishing present," making it exceedingly difficult to imagine alternative knowledges, political possibilities, and social communities-especially in a post-9/11 world order. Today, ideals of a unified and ascendant U.S. national culture on the global stage are mobilized to distinguish a freedom-loving and civilized U.S. nation-state against its freedom-hating and uncivilized Muslim other. This genealogy of freedom simultaneously underwrites the contemporary emergence of what I describe as "queer liberalism." Queer liberalism marks a particular confluence of political and economic conditions that form the basis of liberal inclusion, rights, and recognitions for particular gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects willing and able to comply with its normative mandates.

In this chapter, I explore queer liberalism's law of kinship by examining the landmark June 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down as unconstitutional a Texas statute banning same-sex sodomy while reversing the infamous 1986 Supreme Court ruling Bowers v. Hardwick. Here, the Court had earlier affirmed the constitutionality of a Georgia statute under which Michael Hardwick had been convicted for engaging in sodomy with a consenting adult male in the privacy of his Atlanta home. In Bowers, the majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, formulated its judicial task in the following, and as many have noted disingenuous, terms: whether the U.S. Constitution "confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy." In reversing Bowers, the majority opinion in Lawrence, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, reformulated the legal problem not merely as a question of same-sex sodomy, but as a question of the fundamental right to privacy and intimacy. Stating that the Court failed "to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake" in Bowers, Lawrence reinterpreted the problem to consider whether one could be criminalized for loving someone of the same sex: "The question before the Court is the validity of a Texas statute making it a crime for two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct."

In conferring on gays and lesbians the Constitutional right to "intimate sexual conduct" as couples ("two persons"), and by describing this right to privacy "as an integral part of human freedom," the majority opinion in Lawrence constituted gay and lesbian political recognition, enfranchisement, and inclusion among "We the People" as a privileged relationship between freedom and intimacy, domesticity and couple-dom. Under the banner of freedom and progress, queer liberalism thus becomes linked to a politics of good citizenship, the conjugal marital couple, and the heteronormative family. In this context, we need to ask how a constitutive violence of forgetting resides at the heart of queer liberalism's legal victory, its (re)inhabiting of conventional structures of family and kinship. Doctrinally Lawrence appears in the pages of Constitutional Law textbooks as a watershed decision concerning rights to liberty and privacy for gays and lesbians. I would suggest, however, that repressed legacies of race and property constitute the core narrative of queer freedom and progress underwriting this legal decision. While race is not the doctrinal issue in Lawrence, I contend that it should be central to our thinking about the case politically and socially, and subsequently to our thinking about the historical emergence of queer liberalism. Indeed, as I argue in this chapter and this book, a long history of racialized intimacy subtends liberal narratives of freedom and progress, which require a more comprehensive analysis of the intersections of race and sexuality in U.S. law and society.

Chapter one offers an intersectional analysis of the Lawrence decision. Lawrence's legal victory might be something, in Spivak's words, that we "cannot not want." Indeed, in our conservative times, it is something we cannot afford not to want. Needless to say, the decriminalization of same-sex sodomy in U.S. law is an event of tremendous political significance. Nevertheless, it is crucial to explore the historical conditions of possibility as well as the social costs and limits of this latest episode in the story of human freedom and progress.

This chapter is divided into several sections. I begin with a historical elaboration of the emergence of queer liberalism onto the U.S. political stage. Departing from John D'Emilio's well-known analysis of "Capitalism and Gay Identity," I examine the logic of late capitalism and gay identity as a function of a contemporary U.S.-led political economy of neo-liberal globalization and governmentality. Next, I follow with a detailed analysis of the Lawrence ruling in order to delineate how queer liberalism's freedom and progress is predicated on the systematic dissociation of race from (homo)sexuality as coeval phenomena. This dissociation marks the emergence of gays and lesbians from what Dipesh Chakrabarty has described as the "imaginary waiting room of history." However, this "coming out" into history and into the liberal polity, as it were, requires not only the domestication of gay and lesbian intimacy but also, and equally important, its differential distribution as a racialized property right-what I am describing here as the "racialization of intimacy." I conclude the chapter with a meditation on the psychic structure of queer liberalism. Analyzing Freud's 1911 "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," I explore the mental gymnastics of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), the distinguished albeit psychotic German judge who served as chief justice of the Saxony Supreme Court of Appeals before a series of mental breakdowns left him permanently incapacitated and confined to a mental asylum. Understanding the "supernatural reasons," as Schreber puts it in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, compelling his transformation from "a demented human being in male habitus" to a "spirited woman," promises to provide insight on the psychic demands and limits of queer liberalism. Even more, it promises to shed light on queer liberalism's current renaturalization of Oedipal norms, long under duress through evolving forms of family and kinship.

Queer Liberalism, or Late Capitalism and Gay Identity

The contemporary emergence of queer liberalism marks an unsettling, though perhaps not entirely unexpected, attempt to reconcile the radical political aspirations of queer theory's subjectless critique with the liberal demands of gay and lesbian U.S. citizen-subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law. Our current moment is marked by a particular coming together of economic and political spheres that form the basis for liberal inclusion: the merging of an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle (emerging post-Stonewall and ascendant during the 1980s and 90s) with recent juridical protections for gay and lesbian rights to privacy and intimacy established by the Lawrence ruling; the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state of Massachusetts during the same year; and the California and Connecticut State Supreme Courts' recent decision to do the same.

In his well-known 1983 essay "Capitalism and Gay Identity," John D'Emilio argues that gay identity first emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century through the ascent of wage labor in industrializing cities and the independent sexual lifestyle this wage labor afforded. The creation of urban zones of gay life was facilitated by the movement of individuals away from agrarian-based family units and actualized through the severing of family and kinship bonds-a severing later mirrored, even embraced, in the politics of gay liberation and "coming out." As the material bases for the family as an independent unit of production eroded in the face of an ever-expanding, wage labor-based capitalist "free" market system, the ideological and emotional weight of family and family values, as well as the divisions between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of family, intensified. D'Emilio observes that, through this historical expansion of the emotional bases for kinship relations, family took on increasing significance as an "affective unit," a social institution meant to produce "emotional satisfaction and happiness." Sanctified as the source of love, affection, and emotional security, family became defined against the heartlessness of a capitalist system that was, in fact, the material source for its ideological evolution.

It is clear that while capitalism may have been instrumental in creating the conditions for the emergence of gay identity, it did not at the same time establish a laissez-faire attitude toward same-sex relations. If the 1980s and 90s witnessed the emergence of gay and lesbian identity and visibility as a function of the market, as well as the development of a political movement for rights and recognition, especially in response to the AIDS pandemic, it also marked the simultaneous consolidation of right-wing ideologies under the sign of family and family values. From this perspective, (homo)sexual regulation cannot be thought as the antithesis of queer liberalism, freedom, and progress, but must be thought as constituting their very historical conditions of possibility. "Sexual regulation," as Janet Jakobsen suggests, "is such a passion in U.S. politics because sexual regulation is constitutive of (secular) American freedom."

Today, we find ourselves at a remarkable historical juncture regarding queer liberalism and the politics of family and kinship. To come out of the closet still places family and kinship bonds at risk. At the same time, however, gays and lesbians are reinhabiting structures of family and kinship not only in growing numbers but also in increasingly public and visible ways. While in prior decades gays and lesbians sustained a radical critique of family and marriage, today many members of these groups have largely abandoned such critical positions, demanding access to the heteronormative nuclear family and the rights, recognition, and privileges associated with it. Paradoxically, prior historical efforts to defy state oppression and to oppose state regulation of family and marriage have, to a striking extent, given way to the desire for state legitimacy, sanction, and authorization of same-sex marriage. Once considered anathema to family and kinship, homosexuality in our current political moment is being legally and ideologically reconciled to its normative mandates, paving over alternative public worlds and social formations that previous generations of gays and lesbians have made. In this political calculus, the state emerges as the central locus and guarantor through which non-normative sexual identities it once criminalized are now protected, liberated, and reconfigured-in the words of conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan-as "virtually normal."

Seen from this perspective, queer liberalism's appeals to the state mark a significant moment in which the politics of "Queer Nation" and "U.S. citizen" are no longer antithetical, a fact evident in the astonishing August 2004 coming-out statement, scripted with the assistance of the Human Rights Campaign, of the former New Jersey Governor James McGreevy: "My truth is that I am a gay American." As Hannah Arendt defines it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, citizenship is nothing less than "the right to have rights." And from this perspective, queer liberalism's current claims to state-sanctioned rights, recognitions, and privileges implicitly reinforce a normative politics, not just of family and kinship, but of U.S. citizenship. In the process, the state's role as the legitimate arbiter of rights and guarantor of freedom and liberty-even as Constitutional protections are eroded under the U.S. Administration's infinite War on Terror-remains uncontested and is indeed strengthened. If, as Judith Butler observed in 1993, the "I do" of the wedding ceremony is a performative invocation sealing the heterosexual social contract through the disavowal of "You queer," today we witness the historical reordering of this antithetical bind: "I do" and "You queer" no longer need be at odds under the watchful eyes of the law.

Teemu Ruskola points out that it might prove difficult to resist our present interpellation as law-abiding U.S. citizen-subjects, capable of intimacy, no longer Constitutionally criminalizable, worthy of national recognition, and deserving of judicial respect. He cautions, however, that it is equally crucial at this historical juncture to remind ourselves of Giorgio Agamben's insight that "the spaces, the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals' lives within the state order." To be a subject of the law, Butler observes, requires a "passionate attachment" to our subjection. And, as Saidiya Hartman reminds us in the context of slavery and emancipation, "the failures of Reconstruction cannot be recounted solely as a series of legal reversals or troop withdrawals; they also need to be located in the very language of persons, rights, and liberties." The vocabulary of persons, rights, and liberties fully inhabits the politics of queer liberalism today, and it is a language that we need to interrogate with care.

In other words, we need to explore the critical assumptions and limitations of queer liberalism's narratives of freedom and progress. We need to remind ourselves that decriminalization and social belonging are not coterminous, as contentious same-sex marriage debates, with state amendments and initiatives defining marriage as "between one man and one woman," immediately underscore. We need to reflect on the political and economic costs that underwrite the current inscription of queer U.S. citizen-subjects into a national order, the instability of a rights-based discourse that enables political legitimacy while exacerbating evolving relations of capitalist exploitation, racial domination, and gender subordination in a domestic as well as global context. In short, we must reexamine our assumptions concerning queer freedom and progress.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822347326
• ISBN 13: 9780822347323
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 266