Queer Theory 2011

What does pet love do to normative conceptions of partnership, desire, intimacy, marriage, and relationship? Draw on Kuzniar’s argument, your own experience, and our class discussion as you answer this question.

I always end up relating this topic back to my experience with horses. When working with a horse, a true partnership is formed. Some riders click with a horse, while others do not. It’s similar to relationships with people in that some people get along, while others do not. I have had many horses in my life that I have done fairly well with, several who I have not clicked with at all, and one special horse who I had a perfect partnership with. These partnerships with horses are extremely special, especially when taking into consideration that a horse and rider work together without using English to communicate. Body language is incredibly important. The quote from Donna Haraway that Kuzniar uses in her essay struck me the most. She says, “I resist being called the ‘mom’ to my dogs because I fear infantilization of the adult canines and misidentification of the important fact that I wanted dogs, not babies” (Kuzniar 207). This has always been important to me. My horse was my partner, not my child. I wanted him seen as my equal in a partnership towards something, not someone that I bossed around.

Why is sm potentially more boundary-breaking, creative, or liberating (in social and personal terms) than other kinds of sex? Draw on our class discussion to answer this question.

S/M is powerful because S/M has the power to make is think in ways that other kinds of sex do not. S/M decenters the orgasm as the purpose of sex. The play, the power dynamics, those are the centers of S/M sex. S/M asks us what if sexuality was not about desire but about pleasure, not about identities but about acts? It is not reproductive and not focused on the genitals or the gender of the sexual object choice. S/M eroticizes male vulnerability, something unheard of in our social climate. S/M rethinks pleasure all together, including age differences, power differences, number of partners, actions, and fantasies, odd things, strange, body parts, and unusual sensations. S/M is a simulation of fantasies; it is performative, not real. The tableau is what is important to S/M sex.

What does the media portrayal of gays and lesbians have to do with the idea that to be a “homosexual” one must fit into certain stereotypes? Do shows like Queer as Folk and The L Word, that seem to only show young, attractive, successful queer individuals give a skewed perspective on the LGBTQ community? Are the stereotypes within the queer community different than those portrayed on television?

I think the media’s portrayal of gays and lesbians has a lot to do with the idea that homosexuals must fit into certain stereotypes. McWhorter suggests that when she came out, she had no idea how to be a homosexual because she did not fit any of the categories she was given to fit into. This has to do with Foucault’s issues with identity categories in general. Why does homosexuality have to be an identity category that ones fits into? Can’t someone just be herself, a human, and also like women? While I do think that the few stereotypes portrayed on television give a skewed view to GLBTQ youth about the reality of life, I also think that these stereotypes are not wholly inaccurate. Someone who fits each of the stereotypes I have seen exists; they just aren’t as common as the media would have us believe.

queer theory dictionary

-mi*nor*i*tiz*ing: the understanding of same-sex desire as the property of a minority population

-u*ni*ver*sa*liz*ing: seeing same-sex desire as an abstract force that cuts across established sexual identity

-be*yon*ding: rhetoric people use when they have a desire not to be stuck; a fantasy of passing through a phase

-im*pas*se: a holding station that doesn’t hold but opens out into anxiety; that dog-paddles around a space whose contours remain obscure; a delay; a lag one hopes to have been experiencing all along

fave quote wall

“Early critiques of queer theory focused on the fancy pedigrees and highly abstract language of early practitioners as signs of ‘elitism’ of the field. I would say, instead, that it was the move away from minority sexuality identities and toward a general theory of sexuality that raised the profile of sexuality (or queer) studies and allowed it to ‘outperform’ gay and lesbian studies. The consequences for those of us who teach sexuality studies that, whatever our intellectual position, vis-a-vis so-called identity politics or the value of queer studies, we are indebted to the universalizing claims of these critics. They argued successfully that sexuality might matter to anyone: as a result, we have gained professional standing, clout, university press imprints, degree-granting programs, tenure lines, and so on.” (Love 182)

• How has the universalization of queer benefitted all of us? I can easily see how it has benefitted me. Without queer’s universalization, I would not have been able to create my individualized major in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, something I had always wanted to do. What else could be possible for me? How would this universalization not happening have negatively affected me?

“In its current rendition, queer politics is coded with class, gender, and race privilege, and may have lost its potential to be an politically expedient tool for addressing the needs—and mobilizing the bodies—of people of color. As some queer theorists and activists call for the destruction of stable identity categories—for example, moving instead toward a more fluid understanding of sexual behavior—left unspoken is the class privilege that allows for such fluidity. Queer theorizing that calls for the elimination of fixed categories of sexual identity seems to ignore the ways in which some traditional social identities and communal ties can, in fact, be important to one’s survival.” (Love 184)

• This quote really unnerved me a little bit. I have middle class privilege and white privilege. While I may not always fit gender norms, I’m also not challenging them all the time. I really became even more aware of my own privilege. I haven’t experienced any social identity or communal tie that has been important to my survival. Has this privilege really enabled me to identify more with queer?

“In the 1990s I felt that I needed to write openly, undefensively, and with explicit narrative pleasure about sexuality and sex, to convince people—students, really—to be willing to unlearn their attachments to normativity, with its compulsive formalism and unimaginative be-gooderness. My favorite verb was to lubricate: as in, I want my intellectual performance to lubricate a discussion about the centrality of sex, sexuality, and subjectivity to being ordinary in the normative political, juridical, and intimate domains of the social. That discussion needed lubrication because it is hard to talk about sex and sexuality without everyone getting jittery, defensive, and ineloquent (including the ineloquence of cliche).” (Berlant 81)

• Ahahaha. I absolutely love the verb to lubricate. I think I’m going to use it in this context more often. I also agree that most conversations about sex and sexuality need to be thoroughly lubricated. While there are many discourses about sex in our country, not many of them are completely honest and open. Plus, I really want to use the verb lubricate in an academic setting.

“‘Irrational exuberance’ was picked up as a phrase to address the more general question of whether optimism itself were always irrational, and it makes one wonder what burden of fear the word irrational betrays: it implies a preference for sensible risk, risk that does not impose itself on the senses as a threat to a comfortable rhythm of the subject in the event. Irrational exuberance is what sex requires, although the scale of the even might be as small as a blurt.” (Berlant 82)

• I think I kind of live my life in a state of irrational exuberance. I’m definitely a risk taker, but they aren’t always rational risks at all. Maybe I get an adrenaline rush off of it. I don’t know, but I’ve always been the kind of person who goes for what I want, no matter what the risk.

critical questions 

• Love says, “These days, queer is not only also about race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nation, but is also about affect, citizenship, the death drive, diaspora, digitality, disability, empire, friendship, globalization, the impersonal, indirection, kinship, living underground, loss, marginality, melancholia, migration, neoliberalism, pegagogy, performativity, publicity, self-shattering, shame, shyness, sovereignty, subversion, temporality, and terrorism” (182). Can queer be an umbrella term for all of these things? Do you think that it can possibly cover all of these things effectively?
• Love writes, “I am not ready to give up on the vision of coalitional politics once promised by queer, thought I am no longer sure that queer is the name it should travel under. Not only are the failures of the term to date bound to alienate many, but at root I think the ‘post-identity’ aspect of queer makes it difficult for it to work across identity categories” (184). If not queer, then what other term could be used to identify these categories? Can you think of anything all encompassing enough, or would a new word have to be created?
• “Sex is not a thing, it’s a relation; it’s a nonrelation in propinquity to some kind of recognition; it’s a sock drawer for the anxious affects; it’s a gesture cluster that can be organized in an identity for the purpose of passing through normative sociality; it’s an event an episode; it feels so good, or not; it’s an experience of becoming disorganized that, at the same time, can be lived through, assimilated, talked about, tracked (noticed, fetishized, historicized, genealogized), and forgotten, while also being a threat to well-being and to fantasies that in the good life people ought to be protected from being too chaotic, unstable, ambivalent, or enigmatic,” writes Lauren Berlant. What do you think of this? Does sex do all of these things in your own life? Have you seen sex do these things? Do they seem possible?
• Berlant writes that the television show The Office is the classic example of the impasse in television, part of the English genre of “sit-trag.” Do you think The Office provides a good example? Why or why not?

images, audio, and / or video

I absolutely think The Office is an example of an impasse. That is how the characters live their lives. The trailer I’m including really demonstrates that.

MLA Citation

Berlant, Lauren. “Starved.” After Sex? Halley & Parker, eds. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2011. Print.

Love, Heather. “Queers _____ This.” After Sex? Halley & Parker, eds. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2011. Print.

queer theory dictionary

-re*pro*duc*tive fu*tur*ism: “terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Edelman 2); putting the hypothetical Child in front of anyone else in importance; this can be seen in the fight against abortion currently—the Child must be protected, even at the expensive of the living mother 

-fu*tur*i*ty: the belief that there is a future, that it has the potential to be ‘good,’ and that meaning will be exposed in the future; the belief that we are fighting for the Child, and therefore the future of the world

-good: the something that everyone hopes for in the future; the nonexistent entity that society sets its stores in for the future; the reason a lot of people get up in the morning, because tomorrow will be good, even if today is not

-jouissance: untranslated in Lacan’s works, this means pleasure or enjoyment, but implies a sexual connotation not seen in the English meaning of enjoyment; the queer gets access to this pleasure in a way that the normal does not

fave quote wall

“Such ‘self-evident’ one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought.” (Edelman 2)

• Why is the Child the ultimate for everything? I just don’t understand that. our world is already overpopulated as it is. How can we keep justifying everything by saying “it’s for the children”? The No Child Left Behind act did that for sure, and yet all it has had are negative effects. Children are struggling all over the board. Because schools insist on focusing on the children who are doing the worst, all other children are beginning to do poorly, especially gifted kids, who are given no opportunities at all. This is more a crime against the children than anything else I can see.

“In contrast to what Theodor Adorno describes as the ‘grimness with which man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial,’ the queerness of which I speak would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our ‘good.’ Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call ‘better,’ though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan’s characterization of what he calls ‘truth,’ where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good.” (Edelman 5)

• By severing ourselves from the knowledge that we are good and instead aiming to better ourselves in the future, maybe humans really can create a better existence. Edelman however, does not see this as really possible. The word better implies nothing different than the word good. Just a different scenario, I suppose. Or maybe the potential for betterment instead of automatic assumptions of ‘good’ in the future.

“The embrace of queer negativity, then, can have no justification if justification requires it to reinforce some positive social value; its value, instead, resides in its challenge to value as defined by the social, and thus in its radical challenge to the very value of the social itself.” (Edelman 6)

• By challenging the benefit of social norms and values, queer negativity makes itself invaluable. That is what gives queer negativity its own value. No other system is willing to challenge the values of the social. How is it that social constructions receive no other challenges? The queer doesn’t believe in the social system that it sits on. This gives it power and value outside of the system that it stemmed from.

“Queerness exposes the obliquity of our relation to what we experience in and as social reality, alerting us to the fantasies structurally necessary in order to sustain it and engaging those fantasies through the figural logical, the linguistic structures, that shape them.” (Edelman 6-7)

• This is another important aspect of queerness. It exposes how the systems of our society work. Queerness enables us to understand how these systems work so that we can subtly tear them down.

critical questions 

• How would seeing a ‘better’ in the future be different than seeing ‘good’ in the future? Is one more radical than the other? How do these two terms differ from Lacan’s ‘truth?’
• Edelman writes, “Truth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the ‘aberrant or atypical,’ to what chafes against ‘normalization,’ finds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good” (6). Is this true? Does truth have to make unbelievable every idea of a possible good to be true? Or can the truth be good?
• How does queerness engage and expose the fantasies that structure our society? What are these fantasies? Can you think of any in your own life that you buy into? How can you go about changing these or challenging them?
• Edelman mentions Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and in particular the line “What you get married for if you don’t want children?” Is this how marriage in our own government works? Is marriage still for procreation only? For Edelman, the child is a prop of the secular theology on which our social reality rests. Is this true? (Edelman 12)

Images, Audio, / Video

I’m following this with a cartoon about No Child Left Behind, one I’ve always thought was incredibly poignant.

MLA Citation

Edelman, Liz. “The Future is Kid Stuff.” No Future. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2004. Print.

queer theory dictionary

-dog love: the passion and adoration that many people feel for their dogs; this love can also apply to other animals: cats, horses, chickens, etc; this love is more innocent and pure, while at the same time being more queer and radical

-trans*-spe*cial love: love that exists between two members of different species; does not follow the rules or the constrictions of the gender and sexuality binaries

-Pix*a*volt films: a group of animated films that focus on certain thematics central to the success and and emotional impact of Pixar films; proceed by traditional tactics about individual struggle, but ones that give way to “intricate stories of collective action, anti-capitalist critique, group bonding, and alternative imaginings of community, space, embodiment, and responsibility” (Halberstam 271); these films transform our ideas of relationality, morality, and social change; Halberstam includes: Finding Nemo, Over the Hedge, Shrek 1, Shrek 2, Chicken Run, Babe, Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and Monsters, Inc.

-trans*bio*lo*gy: the contemporary reorganization of living matter; takes place in labs, in the incorporation of new technologies such as artificial insemination, cloning, and regeneration; new narratives about the horror of human embodiment

fave quote wall

“I resist being called the ‘mom’ to my dogs because I fear infantilization of the adult canines and misidentification of the important fact that I wanted dogs, not babies. My multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms. We need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species, just as we did (and still do) for the spectrum other genders.” (Kuzniar 207)

• I completely agree with this. Why do we have to be moms to our animals? My horse was my partner, not my baby. Maybe that’s why it makes me so angry when people are all “omg this horse is my baby, I love him so much!” Most of the time when people say that, they can’t even ride the horse, let alone have a real partnership with him. Like this writer, I don’t want children. Neither does my girlfriend. Our horses won’t be substitutes for children in our life. They have their own special place.

“To put it another way, perhaps the reassurance and calm a canine companion brings arise because trans-special love transcends the constrictions that gender and sexuality place on the human body. Pet devotion has the potential to question the regulating strictures and categories by which we define sexuality, eroticism, and love, though not in the banal sense that if offers different forms of genital stimulation, indeed quite the opposite. Dog love corroborates Lacan’s famous dictum: ‘quand on aime, il ne s’agit pas de sexe’ [when one loves, it is not a question of sex](1975, 27), whether ‘sex’ be interpreted here as intercourse or as the sex of the person one loves. Those who have an ardour for dogs know that their passion is unavailable and inaccessible elsewhere: it opens up the subject in unique ways that, precisely because independent of gender and sexuality, are liberating.” (Kuzniar 208)

• The thing about horse love for me is that it is totally different from relationships with humans. My partnership with my horse was based on mutual trust and learning from each other WITHOUT sharing the same language. I think that is the main difference between relationships of any sort with humans and relationships with animals. It is so ridiculous to me that someone I was in a relationship with was jealous of the partnership I had with my horse. When she didn’t support me giving up my horse, the one thing I loved the most, that was when I knew our relationship was over. Now I’m dating someone who understands how complex and amazing partnerships with horses can be, and I couldn’t be happier.

“When the female penguin finally produces the valuable egg and must now pass the egg from her feet to the male’s feet in order to free herself to go and feed, the voice-over reaches hysteria pitch and sees sorrow and heartbreak in every unsuccessful transfer. We are never told how many penguins are successful in passing the egg, how many might decide not to be successful in order to save themselves the effort of a hard winter, how much of the transfer ritual might be accidental, and so on. And so the narrative goes, ascribing stigma and envy to non-reproductive penguins, sacrifice and a Protestant work ethic to the reproducers and always seeing a capitalist hetero-reproductive-family rather than the larger group.” (Halberstam 270)

• It sickens me a little bit how much we anthropomorphize animals. I mean, yes. They are cute. Sometimes it is easy to imagine them doing human things like falling in love or fighting to raise a family. But these things are not usually true. By anthropomorphizing them, we actually make it harder on ourselves to study them. In Gender and Biology, a class at Otterbein, we looked at how often scientists give animals human motives, especially when it comes to sexual behavior. Most of the time, the animals involved have no such motives; it’s just easier to give them the motives in attempts to understand behavior so different from that of humans.

“The Pixavolt films, unlike their un-revolting conventional animation counterparts, seem to know that their main audience is children and they seem to also know that children do not invest in the same things that adults invest in: children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious morality, they are not afraid of death, they are collective creatures, they are in a constant state of rebellion against their parents and they are not the masters of their domain. Children stumble, bumble, fail, fall, hurt; they are mired in difference, not in control of their bodies, not in charge of their lives and they live according to schedules not of their own making. The Pixavolt films offer the child an animated world of triumph for the little guys, a revolution against the business world of the father and the domestic sphere of the mother.” (Halberstam 273)

• I didn’t realize quite how different the Pixavolt films are from other animated films. Some of the ones listed by Halberstam are some of my favorite movies. Just the other day I watched Monsters, Inc. When I saw it when it came out, I didn’t realize quite how anti-corporation it is. But wow. And Chicken Run. That movie is hilarious. Watching it as an adult kind of blew my mind. Same with Over the Hedge. Another one of my favorite movies, yet I always missed the anti-capitalism message there. I want to go back and watch more of these movies and see what else I missed.

critical questions 

• How can pet love redefine intimacy, eroticism, and passion? Is it possible for humans to love their animals as much as they love each other? How does consent play into these relationships? While animals cannot verbally give consent, do they give consent in other ways to some of the activities we do with them, such as training a dog or a horse?
• Thinking about a relationship you had with a special animal or pet, how did that relationship differ from relationships with people? Did it challenge norms at all?
• Documentary film Winged Migration also studies the migratory patterns of birds, focusing on multiple species instead of just one. The film is shot from a glider plane specifically designed for the project. Instead of narration, the film is set to simple and beautiful music. How is March of the Penguins different from Winged Migration? Can Winged Migration be seen as more radical than March of the Penguins?
• In the French and German versions of March of the Penguins the penguins are given individual voices by specific actors, instead of the story being narrated by a voice of God type character. According to Halberstam, “here the animation works not to emphasize the difference between humans and nonhumans, as it does in so many Pixar features, but instead it makes the penguins into virtual puppets for the drama of human love which cinema is so eager to tell” (271). Why do you think that Hollywood is so anxious to tell this story of human love through animals? Hasn’t it been told enough with human characters? What can an animal love story do that a human love story cannot?

images, audio, and / or video

I chose to link to a clip from Happy Feet to demonstrate just how ridiculous the video really is. Even though I enjoyed it when it first came out, after reading about it and analyzing it, I can’t enjoy it in the same way anymore.

MLA Citation

Halberstam, Judith. “Animating Revolt / Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex, and the Spectacle of the Queer Nonhuman.” Queering the Non/Human. Giffney & Hird, eds. Ashgate: 2008. Print.

Kuzniar, Alice A. “‘I Married My Dog’: On Queer Canine Literature.” Queering the Non/Human. Giffney & Hird, eds. Ashgate: 2008. Print.