Final Post

Trying to articulate what I learned in this course would take a lot of time considering the amount of material we covered. I came in with only a minimal amount of academically gained knowledge about feminism, the queer community, and queer theory. This caused some conflicts in my head. I had an idea of feminism as a primarily political collection of ideologies. Since they are perceived to be founded upon political struggle, it can be difficult to isolate the theoretical from the political, and think about feminist and queer theory without immediately attempting to link them to political reality. In my first post, I even suggested that perhaps feminists should resist abstractedly theorizing for theorizing’s sake. In other words, if it is a discussion that does not lead to a practical improvement in the lives of real people, drop it. Through readings and discussion, I learned the importance of continually questioning, and how keeping an open dialogue is what is most practically beneficial for both theoretical inquiry, and real life. Though feminist theory and the political struggle faced by women and members of the queer community are inexorably linked, using this course to primarily concentrate on discussing theory and literature allowed me to think about ideology in a more abstract way.

Gender was also a topic which we frequently discussed, and I tried to use this opportunity in developing my own theory of gender. Intersex birth in particular, brings up many questions in relation to gender, and presents a direct challenge to the perceived gender binary in our society. As a result, we have learned, society often designates one part of that binary for people born with conflicting anatomies. Identity may be the most important part in designating gender. It may be beneficial to stop thinking about gender so categorically. Instead, perhaps the gender a person identifies themselves as is the gender they are, and since identity is subject to change, perhaps gender is fluid and also subject to change.

My Creative Piece

Although it is currently a work in progress, I have solidified some ideas regarding making a creative piece that demonstrates the theory my project is based upon. Since my project is about intersex births and unintelligibility, the creative piece had to reflect this in some way. I decided to write a short story in the style of a Chandleresque private detective story. This fits, since in creating our theories we are acting as detectives, linking pieces of knowledge to form a new cohesive whole and solve the case, so to speak.

In the story, told in first person from the perspective of the private detective, a client comes to the office because someone has stolen their gender. The PI doesn’t bat an eye, and takes the case. Butler tells us that we “undo” each other, and that some people are unintelligible in our society. The client has been “undone” because someone has taken this person’s gender away from them, or worse, dictated their gender to them. The client is unintelligible because his gender has literally been taken away from him, it is impossible to articulate who he is, gender-wise.

By the end of the story, the detective will have found a gender-stealing company called Society Inc., which grinds the stolen genders up and gives them back to people damaged or changed. I might rethink this idea, or change the story to make everything more symbolic and less blatant, but that’s what I have at this point. The main point of the story is to demonstrate, in a fictional way, the theory I build that argues what changes are necessary for intersexed people to become intelligible. Please feel free to comment if you have any ideas or suggestions about this or the project a whole, I could use them.

-Ziev

Butler's Take On Intersex

As per Professor Renzi’s recommendation, I looked at chapters 3 and 4 of Undoing Gender in order to build the theory for my project. As I said in class, Butler believes that those of intersex birth are “unintelligible” in our society, and they suffer social violence because of this. At this point, my project will aim to develop a way to make intersex people intelligible in our society. I am still considering ways to go about doing this, and if I can’t develop any arguments that are convincing enough, I might instead build upon Butler’s theory regarding why these people are not intelligible.

The challenge lies in finding a solution to this problem in a general, theoretical way, and not simply list off the practical changes that would need to be made in arenas like law, media, and education. Since intersex people are not acknowledged often enough in our society from the top down, it would be a paper on policy rather than theory.

So how does Butler reach her conclusion that intersex people are unintelligible? Her theory uses a case of an intersex birth in which David Reimer found himself in the middle of an ideological battle between two conflicting doctors, John Money and Milton Diamond, which she discusses in chapter 3 (62). Money believed that gender occurred as a result of socialization and was malleable, meaning that through being raised a certain gender, an intersex person could become either a man or a woman both anatomically and mentally. Diamond believed that gender was fixed at birth depending on the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, and should be surgically corrected if the anatomy does not reflect genetics. Butler, of course, states that she neither confirms nor denies Money’s theory, social construction, or Diamond’s theory, gender essentialism (67). Instead, she believes that gender is more fluid and less fixed, and that intersexed people are robbed of their autonomy for being forced to conform to this perception (81).

It is the commonly accepted notion that gender is permanent and fixed that ultimately makes those born of indeterminate sex, existing physically and behaviorally across a range of gender identification that could be subject change with personal evolution, that results in their unintelligibility. It is the perception that they sick, ill, or simply “wrong” that results in their oppression. Butler quotes Isay’s belief that diagnosis undermines the autonomy of children and mistakes it for pathology. By pathologizing “Gender Identity Disorder” and diagnosing it, the “medical machinery” Butler mentions is enacted and intersex infants suffer a form of social violence that robs them of their ability to exist as they are, and in turn, robs them of their autonomy.

Gender in Children’s Books Harmful?

After “queerifying” various children’s books, our class came to a unanimous consensus regarding the depiction of gender within them. As nearly everyone observed, the illustrated characters within these books are given aesthetic features “typical” of either males or females. The book I queerified, Little Miss Christmas, was no exception. For example, Little Miss Christmas is given long hair, pigtails, and heeled shoes to indicate her femininity. On the other hand, most of the male characters lack any defining physical features at all. Mr. Christmas is the same shape as Little Miss Christmas, but lacks her feminine features, indicating that he is male. All of the female characters within the book had “Little Miss” preceding their names while all the male characters simply had “Mr.” preceding theirs. The book’s creators evidently decided that the female characters should be smaller, since a typical perception of gender is that women are smaller than men. This is a perception that can easily be shattered if one simply observes that in real life, people come in different sizes. The discrepancies between the way gender is depicted within children’s books and the possibility illuminated by some theorists (e.g. Butler) that suggest gender does not even really exist creates a question: If these books are conditioning children to perceive gender according to a superficially gendered discourse, should this be a concern?

In “The Rhetoric of Sex / The Discourse of Desire,” Samuel R. Delany relates sitting down to read the children’s book, Corduroy, to his young daughter. He tries to change Corduroy’s gender from male to female as he reads, but his daughter catches the error and argues that Corduroy is male due to his depiction within the book (“Because he’s got pants on!”). Despite wearing the same overalls as the bear, she understands that the character’s gender is determined due to the discourse of children’s books. He is male because he wears pants, and because most protagonists in children’s books are male. The fact that Delaney’s daughter wears pants too isn’t incongruent because she does so within a different discourse, her life. “I was wrong. Corduroy was a boy. No matter how unfair or how pernicious it was or might prove, the discourse of children’s books made him a boy” (7). Delaney suggests that the predetermined nature of some discourse creates its own truth, which is why even his young daughter understands that even though she and Corduroy both wear pants, no contradiction exists because the pants exist within different discourses.

What if not all children recognize this however? Do some expect the gender determinants within children’s books to hold true in reality? I think that this is a strong possibility, but I am not sure that it should be a concern. Even if children do begin expecting males and females in reality to look and act like their illustrated counterparts, it won’t necessarily lead to a closed-minded or confused post-childhood. I was read Corduroy as a child by my parents, and I don’t use overalls as a visual gender determinant today. Though children’s books do present a gendered world usually only minimally similar to reality, I don’t think the inaccuracy will lead to lasting harm. Delaney is correct in recognizing that a separate discourse exists within children’s books that depicts gender in superficial, stylized ways. Because these discourses are inherently separate, I think that most children will eventually realize that not all women wear dresses, and that men sometimes do. Other things such as family, friends, culture, religion, and experience will have more of a hand in determining whether that child will be closed minded about it.

Mapping Queerness At MSU

As I first looked at the map of MSU and tried to think how I could “queerify” it, I came to the conclusion that it would be best to simply look at the map and think of unique characteristics of some of the places on campus. Certain buildings were the first things that stood out. Fee Hall, on the East side of campus contains a morgue, for example. This building, as it relates to embodiment, reverses the separation between live bodies and dead ones as students often walk by doctors in scrubs wheeling corpses if they happen to have a class in the building. This was one of the strongest examples of queer buildings on campus.

Other buildings I circled were Van Hoosen and Yakeley Halls, for being all-gril dorms; the IM sports buildings, for the strange aggressive vibe within them that results from people being places made for physical exertion; the MSU surplus store was circled because it sells things that are deemed to be no longer useful, and I thought this related to queerness in that it is a store that sells “rejections.” The incinerator was circled for the same reason, it utterly destroys whatever it is that the university decides to put in it. I circled the psychology building because the façade at its entrance displays carvings relating to physics and astronomy, and I believe that this incongruence between its name and its aesthetics is queer.

Buildings were not the only queer thing on campus, of course. There is a strange, abstract sculpture called “The Funambulist” which was recently put in behind Snyder Hall. This steel, black and red sculpture does not really fit in with the aesthetics of the collegiate brick dorms around it. As we discussed in class, many of the bridges around campus display graffiti, and this subversion makes them queer. A bit North of Brody Complex on campus is a teepee with an orange traffic cone in it that someone built in the woods. There are buildings on Michigan Ave. that have been unused since I was a freshman that are marked as “future redevelopment sites.” The ways in which all these structures exist, whether it has deviated from its original purpose and exists in limbo, or sticks out like a sore thumb among the structures around it, this abnormality makes them queer.

I titled my map after I marked it up. The title I came up with was “Concentrations of Queerness at MSU.” It fit because it related to the process by which I marked up my map, looking for spots on it that contained something that was unique, or didn’t fit in some way. These spots are concentrations of queerness, they have to be concentrated because they are queer due to the majority of “normalcy” that surrounds them.

-Ziev

The Death of the Author’s Gender

I’d like to use this post to explore some of Elizabeth Grosz’s theories regarding the relationship between author, text, and reader. In particular, I’m interested in the way Grosz uses Roland Barthes’ famous theory, the “death of the author,” and uses it in a context of gender and feminist politics.

According to Grosz, “The sex of the author has…no direct bearing on the political position of the text, just as other facts about the author’s private or professional life do not explain the text” (21). I think the first response for many when analyzing a feminist text is to do just the opposite. If an author is producing a feminist text, I think that most readers will take the author’s background into consideration when forming their analysis. Grosz must point out that the opposite should be true. If a text is to stand alone, as Barthes believes it does, demographic considerations such as the sex of the author must have no bearing, and are not productive for analytical purposes.

Since feminist texts are often perceived to be inherently political, how can Grosz’ four features concerning feminist texts (the sex of the author, the content of the text, the sex of the reader, and the style of the text) be acknowledged in an apolitical context? Is it really possible that the sex of the author has “no direct bearing” on the political position of the text? We can certainly use the sex of the author to analyze a text, claiming, for example, that the author chose to make her protagonist female because the author is female. Whether this is true or not, analysis such as this inevitably leads us to analyzing the author rather than the text.

So how can we acknowledge that a being known as “the author” produced a text, and that this being has certain demographic and personal characteristics and experiences, without opening the door to an analysis of these features? The interesting concept Grosz brings up, that of the authorial “signature” within the text, allows us to acknowledge what Barthes says we should not: the background of the author, without forcing us to inform our analysis using it. “There are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, just as we in turn must recognize that the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)” (21). In other words, texts include traces of the author’s “corporeality.” The way we make the traces of this signature useful is by following Grosz when she says, “I am interested in the way ways in which the author’s corporeality, an always sexually specific corporeality—not the author’s interiority, psyche, consciousness, concepts, or ideas, intrudes into or is productive of the text” (21). We must look for the way that the author’s corporeality, their material nature, is in the text. In essence, with the signature we are trying to see how the author embodies a text, with the author’s body being within the text, rather than how their body affected the text as a separate unit.

Queerness and Sexuality In American Beauty

American Beauty can be interpreted to have many messages. On the surface layer, the message is to live life without sacrificing your desires. Among these desires is sexuality. The film deals with repressed sexual desires of both Lester and Col. Fitz. Lester has a repressed desire for his daughter’s friend, Angela. Is this an example of the effects of the incest taboo we drew a diagram for in class? In the film, we see that Lester loves his daughter, but no longer feels close to her. Perhaps Angela is the sexual manifestation of his desire to reconnect with his daughter. Col. Fitz has repressed his homosexuality. We see hints of this first as he feels uncomfortable when speaking to his gay neighbors, complaining about it to Ricky in the car. “How can they be so shameless?” Col. Fitz asks Ricky, suggesting that Fitz feels shame for his own homosexuality. It is also apparent in his vast collection of guns, a phallic object. This repressed homosexuality culminates in him beating his son, who he incorrectly believes is performing sexual acts on Lester, and then kissing Lester during what seems to be a mental breakdown in which he is confronted with his homosexual desires. No doubt, Fitz coming from an institutionalized military background: the opposite of Lester’s ideal way of life (because it is regimented and you are told what to do), resulted in a repression of his homosexuality, while Lester’s refusal to be told what to do eventually caused the end to his repression and his pursuit of Angela. Indeed, Lester tells us that he felt like he “woke up” with his attraction to Angela, where before he felt sedated.

What message could this movie be interpreted to have about queerness? One of the refrains repeated in the movie, first told to us by Angela, is that there is “nothing worse in life than being ordinary.” This tells us that what the movie’s characters all share in common is a desire to not be ordinary, but with the irony that by and large, and especially Angela and Carolyn, they are extremely ordinary. Angela, because she exhibits all the typical behaviors of a suburban teen, and Carolyn because she is a realtor who has lost her happiness. These characters have the least power in the movie. On the other hand, Lester, who makes a successful attempt to avoid being ordinary, in the form of disregarding institutionalized forms of authority, like his job or his marriage. Ricky is of course, the most unique character in the movie, who ordinary Angela deems a “psycho” but it is he in fact, who is confident, while Angela is insecure. He is queer because he gives in to his eccentricities, as with his desire to videotape as much as he can in order to remember things, rather than his sexuality. He is our ideal character in the movie, able to see beauty in the world and be happy living life his own way, something Lester imitates. This movie places value on not being ordinary, and as a result, its queerest characters are its happiest.

-Ziev