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Category Archives: sexuality

On Anthony Weiner, or: Obvious Pun is Obvious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, let’s have that conversation instead.

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

She’s Too Sexy for This Show, Too Sexy for This Show: Policing Lea Michele and the “Think of the Children!” Narrative

Part II in a series on Glee

When I teach Media Effects, one of my favorite examples is the Glee/GQ controversy. The story broke just as I was teaching that segment of Intro to Media Studies for the first time, and I’ve continued to use it. Partially, this is because it’s pretty much the only show my students and I have in common. But it’s also so utterly textbook that I can’t pass it up.

For one promotional photo shoot among the dozens that the cast has surely done by now, the appearance of Glee’s actors in GQ was sure a big deal. Even now, 6 months later, I can pull up fifteen Google News results for “glee gq,” because it gets mentioned any time they talk about how the show is a criticism magnet or how Dianna Agron is more demure than her castmates or, most importantly for this blog piece, the way that Lea Michele is often considered to be overly sexy. Any excuse will do to bring it up, really. It even made the show’s Wikipedia page! (See the third paragraph of this section.)

Here again, it was Isabel Molina-Guzmán’s take on Ugly Betty in Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Mediathat let me put my finger on what was going on. Molina says that actress America Ferrera “embodies genuine and wholesome ‘American’ values,” which “makes it easier to promote Ferrera, Betty, and the program” (131).

This is all fine and well to the extent that it holds, but when Ferrera proves to be different than Betty’s self-sacrificing femininity things get shaky. “Consequently, among fans there is a careful filtering of information about Ferrera that might work against their readings of the character and actor” (ibid).

More than just selective attention to information that complies with their desires, “fans wanting to maintain the suspension of disbelief that character and actor are one sometimes police Ferrera for actions that do not fit their assumptions” (ibid.). And that’s where Lea Michele comes in.

As the Jocelyn Noveck of the AP put it:

“You’re a couple of great-looking, talented young actresses on the hottest show on TV. You’re adults. So why NOT pose for some seriously saucy photos in GQ, a magazine for adult men? Well, it gets a little thorny when the show is “Glee,” beloved by 8- and 9-year-olds, and when you’re posing as a high-school girl in nothing but skimpy panties, spreading your legs sky-wide on a locker room bench. Or suggestively licking a lolly as you lean — in the same skimpy panties — on a high-school locker.”

What do we learn here? Michele and Agron have the right to be sexy if they’re so inclined, but they are imagined to have abused that right by making bad decisions about it. Michele is particularly often policed for this, with the complaint that her photo shoots are too sexy for children coming nearly as regularly as there are stories about pictures being taken of her (though, tragically, I can’t find them now).

The absurdity of this is perfectly captured by Agron’s retort to the outrage over the GQ shoot: “If you are hurt or these photos make you uncomfortable, it was never our intention,” she said. “And if your 8-year-old has a copy of our GQ cover in hand, again I am sorry. But I would have to ask, how on earth did it get there?”

That is, kids might love Glee, but on no planet is it really for them. Similarly, no matter how much children love the show, promotional materials appearing in disparate locations like men’s magazines aren’t for them either.

But this doesn’t stop the perpetual-outrage machine, which, oddly, is not outraged at the magazine industry or the photographer or the people who buy GQ. Instead, it’s the person in the photos who is imagined to be at fault.

No one would deny that Michele sluts it up on a regular basis (which is to use “slut” in a sex-positive way, btw). Indeed, someone (can’t remember who) quipped that she discovered that she was hot recently and is making the most of it.

However, her decisions to appear all sexed up are a) probably at the behest of photographers, though clearly she does go along with it; b) her own business because it’s her body; and c) not necessarily indicative of any propensity to have sex at the drop of a hat, which would d) not be anybody’s business anyway.

The fact is, if she wants to enjoy being young, good looking, and famous, she can, and it’s really not her fault she plays a high school character on a show kids love. People make fun of fans for their supposed tendency to collapse the actor and the character, yet here organizations like the Parents Television Council are doing that very thing in the mainstream media.

It’s totally reasonable to critique the system that has made this a standard mode of celebrating one’s own attractiveness. We can think the photographer who made the GQ shoot look like 70s faux-high-school porn is skeezy, sure.

But to accuse Michele of being the amazing corrupt-o-matic simply for appearing in some photos—which were (admittedly) ill-advised and did specifically play on the eroticization of underage girls—is so outdated and anti-woman that I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Didn’t we have a movement about this already? You know, the one that urged us to look at the structures that produced particular possibilities and outcomes for women?

It’s called feminism; look it up.

Queer Time, Queer Space, Queer Coalitions, Queer Erasures

As it turned out, I spent last weekend in what was quite possibly the best location from which to write a response to Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, as it both confirms some of her postulates about queer time and space and troubles some of her neat compartmentalizations. So here it is, written in present tense as it was originally conceptualized.

From where I sit, I can see sheep lying down in the grass, and already today I’ve been serenaded by the braying of donkeys, the crowing of roosters, and the squawking of guinea hens. Metronormative, this place is not.

Halberstam wants to contest the ways in which “rural and small-town queer life is generally mythologized by urban queers as sad and lonely, or else rural queers might be thought of as ‘stuck’ in a place that they would leave if they only could” (36), and where I’m sitting right now is a perfect example of the ways in which queer rurality needn’t signify sadness, loneliness, or stuckness.

However, this place also demonstrates the ways in which, for all her critique of others for their lapses Halberstam herself “occludes the lives of nonurban queers” (15)—or at least some of them.

She notes that “until recently, small towns were considered hostile to queers and urban areas were cast as the queer’s natural environment,” wherein “affluent gay populations are often described as part of a ‘creative class’ that enhances a city’s cultural life and cultural capital, and this class of gays are then cast in opposition to the small-town family life and values of midwestern Americans” (15).

Through conflating the small town or rural with the Midwest, Halberstam, much like the “Queering the Middle” symposium held on at the University of Illinois earlier this fall, replicated a pattern of erasure in which rurality is imagined to exist only in the Midwest. Queering the Middle at least had the excuse of being a conference about the Midwest.

Sitting in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada on what could easily be interpreted as a ranch—there are lots of animals, lots of land, and no crops, though the people who live here do actually make their living in town in urban-coded occupations of therapist and county mental health program manager—I have no doubt that I am both decidedly in a rural space and decidedly not in the Midwest anymore, Toto.

While the nonqueer people who live around here surely have a great deal in common with Midwestern farmer types in terms of things like “values” and voting patterns, they aren’t the same and deserve to be respected in their specificity. In a book disputing the elision of the particularity of people and places, in which Halberstam troubles so much other received wisdom, this is a particularly perplexing oversight.

Looking around the inside of the house where I’m staying, on the other hand, with its marks of middle-classness and parenthood—and the state-recognized marriage that I know about but can’t actively see at this moment—there are clearly things that are not queer about it, though I don’t have the heart to come in here as queerer-than-thou and tell them that they have succumbed to reproductive time.

I imagine that they’d be horrified to think that they are participating in “respectability, and notions of the normal on which it depends,” even as they are quite comfortable with their “middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (4). Certainly, this household inhabits “the time of inheritance”—not least because so much of its remodeling after purchase was financed by the wealth of my mom’s partner’s parents.

In a broader sense, however, it clearly functions under a “generational time within which values, wealth, goods, and morals are passed through family ties from one generation to the next” (5). It’s also quite obviously wrapped up in “the kinds of hypothetical temporality—the time of ‘what if’—that demands protection in the way of insurance policies, health care, and wills” (5) that signal middle-classness more than anything.

So, given that the adult partnership in this household is same-sex, is this a queer time, or place, or both, or neither? I think the most fortuitous part of being here while thinking through Halberstam is the ways in which this location and its inhabitants disarticulate metronormativity from reproductive temporality.

Here, more than I have observed even in the drowning-in-corn-and-soybeans Urbana-Champaign, it is clear that the two modes of normalization of queerness that Halberstam identifies don’t have to always go together, even though she seems to think that they do.

Indeed, though Halberstam herself doesn’t quite make this connection, when she points in the cases of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard to “the complex interactions of race, class, gender, and sexuality that result in murder, but whose origins lie in state-authorized formations of racism, homophobia, and poverty” (46), it begins to suggest that some sort of intersectional analysis is in order if the fullness of these formations is to be appreciated.

Any given person is more or less normative on a variety of axes—with ultimate normativity being, as Butler reminds us, impossible to embody. So my mom and her partner challenge metronormativity, but they reinforce reproductive temporality, and there is no contradiction in doing both at once—however unfortunate the latter may be—because these are formations that intersect in various ways for various people.

After all, not everyone is considered eligible for or the proper subject of the horizon of futurity of reproductive time in the first place, which is why “the abbreviated life spans of black queers or poor drug users, say, does not inspire the same kind of metaphysical speculation on curtailed futures, intensified presents, or reformulated histories” (3) as arises from the deaths of white gay men from AIDS.

We have to reckon with the fact that people who occupy the same place on one axis—queerness or poverty—but differ on other axes—black queers vs. white ones, rural poor vs. urban—can’t actually be understood as entirely the same.

That is, though Halberstam is right to hail “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed” as “queer subjects” who “live (deliberately, accidentally, or by necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned” (10), it is equally vital that we not collapse the distinctions between these groups into one big pile of “queer subjects” in our search for a coalitional politics.

We can have the same interests without reducing our complexities to a single characteristic to organize around, because this sort of reduction inevitably works to establish the interests of those most privileged by other characteristics (such as white, middle-class, homo- and metronormative queers) as universal.

Halberstam’s complication of the rural/urban and straight/queer binaries begins to show a way to think about shared interests in a way that is different from our standard modes, and in so doing she potentially begins to point to a way out of our accidental complicities with heteronormativity.

Fandom as Public Sex

In one of the many sidebars in his 2006 book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins notes that an “analogy to Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence lies close to the surface” when discussing the efforts of game companies to encourage their fans to produce content (p. 165).

But earlier in the text, there’s another analogy that seems quite fruitful to pursue. In the pre-Internet days of fandom, he says:

Corporations might now, abstractly, that such transactions [trading around of unauthorized songs and stories] were occurring all around them, every day, but they didn’t know, concretely, who was doing it. And even if they did, they weren’t going to come bursting into people’s homes at night. But, as these tractions came out from behind closed doors, they represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over their intellectual property (p. 137).

Maybe this is just a product of re-reading this in juxtaposition with some queer theory, but this just screams Lawrence v. Texas to me.

For those who are unfamiliar, this is the Supreme Court case that ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional. The case revolved around the arrest of two men who were found to be engaged in consensual homo-sex in Lawrence’s home by police who were (legally) entering for another reason. The argument that swayed 6 of the 9 justices was based, at least in part, on the right to privacy, or the idea that what happened “behind closed doors” wasn’t anyone’s business. For more information, see the Wikipedia article.

Sounding familiar yet?

It is in this context that Jenkins’s assertion that “the Web provides an exhibition outlet moving amateur filmmaking from private into public space” becomes very interesting (p. 142). This and other fan practices have now “come out,” ceased to be private, begun circulating openly.

We’re here, we’re fans, get used to it.

Yet, just as the decriminalization of particular sex acts between particular configurations of people is a limited victory, both Jenkins and Francesca Coppa, in her 2008 piece Women, “Star Trek,” and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding point to ways in which some fan practices remain equivalent to sex in public, not covered by the new amnesty.

Thus, on one hand, fan films of the Atomfilms Star Wars contest, largely created by male “filmmakers who were making ‘calling card’ movies to try to break into the film industry” are encouraged, publicized, and rewarded (Jenkins, p. 154).

On the other hand, “female fan writers sharing their erotic fantasies” (Jenkins, p. 154), and the vids that are essentially equivalent (Coppa, Jenkins), aren’t so lucky. Indeed, these queer texts have become newly actionable, continually taken down from YouTube for copyright violation.

Jenkins has a vision that “if the corporate media couldn’t crush this vernacular culture during the age when mass media power went largely unchallenged, it is hard to believe that legal threats are going to be an adequate response to a moment when new digital tools and new networks of distribution have expanded the power of ordinary people to participate in their culture” (pp. 157-8), but to some degree he misses the point.

You can’t stop fans, but you can hope to contain them, and the validation of particular, gendered practices of fan filmmaking would seem to be exactly a move toward containment.

The Notorious Traffic in Women: Alfred Hitchcock Meets Gayle Rubin

The scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (available in its entirety on YouTube) in which Alicia Huberman wakes up after her drinking spree to find Devlin in her house dramatizes the film’s problematic gender politics in a particularly clear way. In this scene, we can see that Alicia’s role in the film—both in the awareness of the characters and that of its makers—is to be bought, sold, and traded around among men to achieve desired ends.

Indeed, though Wikipedia argues that the uranium is the film’s MacGuffin, I would contend that Alicia fills that position, existing to drive the plot forward but having little specific importance herself. Using the “political economy of sex” elaborated by Gayle Rubin in The Traffic in Women (the link goes to an HTML version hosted at UChicago; here the pagination is for the one in  Toward an Anthropology of Women)  it becomes clear why the men in Notorious relate to Alicia Huberman in the way that they do.

If, as Rubin argues, marriage has traditionally been a mode through which women are used to pay debts, the entire plot of this particular movie is set into motion by Alicia Huberman’s status as payment for her father’s debt to the United States. Though Rubin specifically mentions debts incurred by owing someone a woman to replace one given for a previous marriage, I don’t think extending this formulation to other kinds of debt is unreasonable; I’m also sure that there is anthropological evidence for this practice in some place and at some time. (p.182.)

The first intimation of such a system comes when Devlin informs her that, by becoming a spy on the Germans in Brazil, “you could make up a little for your daddy’s peculiarities.” In this respect it is particularly salient that not only do they expect Alicia to pay for the sins of her fathers, but she is to do so with her body, as such “debts are reckoned in female flesh” (p. 182)

Thus, she is to use her “feminine wiles” to get information from and about Alex Sebastian, and the fact that she literally marries him merely makes this configuration so obvious that it cannot be missed.

Relatedly, Rubin argues that, though “it is women who are being transacted,” the beneficiaries are “the men who give and take them”; this is to say that the woman serves as “a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it,” and “women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation” (p. 174).

In Notorious, Alicia is “transacted” several times: from her father to the U.S. government, from the Englishman trying to take her to Havana to Devlin, from Uncle Sam to Alex Sebastian, and from Sebastian to Devlin. The first two of these happen in this scene, and indeed these otherwise quite peculiar interactions only make sense when read through Rubin’s lens.

The sale of Alicia from her father to America, for whom Devlin serves as proxy, explains his behavior

Alicia and Devlin, from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_Bergman_%28Notorious%29.png

toward her in this scene. He ignores her insistence that she’s not a “stool pigeon,” ignores her when she tells him to go away twice, ignores her claim that she’s not interested, instead calmly explaining what it is they want her to do; this only makes sense if he is already sure she will do what he wants—if he already owns her.

Devlin’s attitude toward Alicia in this scene also demonstrates the bodily component of his ownership, as he repeatedly insists that she drink from the glass on the bedside table and even commands her to “Finish it.” Though this is presumably some sort of hangover remedy, and later in the scene he asks her “Feel better?” his primary attitude toward her is unsympathetic, which is reinforced by the fact that the camera is more often in his position than hers, allowing us to see Alicia while his commanding voice comes from nowhere.

Near the end of the scene we have a second instance of Alicia changing hands when Alicia and Devlin’s conversation is interrupted by the Englishman who has been trying to get her to go to Havana with him. In this scene, like our previous encounter with the Englishman at the party, he takes a proprietary stance toward Alicia, insisting that she go and ignoring not only her general lack of enthusiasm but the fact that she specifically says she’ll “think about it,” not that she intends to go.

This overriding of her wishes, combined with his offer to help her pack, as if she’s incapable of taking care of herself, indicates that he envisions himself to know what’s best for her. His parting words, “see you soon,” indicate complete confidence that she’ll do what he wants. The end result of the interaction with him in this scene is that his claim to Alicia is invalidated, overridden by her father’s debt to the United States. This is clear from the fact that, rather than turning him down herself, she says to Devlin “You’d better tell him.” After all, she’s not her own boss.

This early scene, then, provides a microcosm of the Alicia’s role in the film: America’s claim on her is stronger than her father’s, the Englishman’s, and, especially, her own. Consequently, she must go to Brazil and give up her body in payment of this debt—sexually, certainly, but she is also distinctly in danger of dying for the cause until Devlin swoops in to save her.

Though in 1946 the Alicia-as-patriotic-spy thread of the plot might have seemed a bit transgressive of gender norms, and Devlin’s secret love for, and eventual rescue of, Alicia surely seemed romantic, looking at this film with feminist eyes over sixty years later shows just how enmeshed in a deeply problematic set of gender roles it was. Along with its love story and get-those-Nazis plot, moviegoers got to see Alicia traded around to form certain relationships which were advantageous to the men surrounding her—as surely as in any marriage economy described by Lévi-Strauss.