They consider themselves to be goths passing as corporate lawyers. Quite imaginative, that. Are they really goths? Or are they really corporate lawyers? Are we really butterflies dreaming that we're human?
As warm and fuzzy as this makes me, I don't really see what it has to do with identity.
Mr. D--I'm also leery of Halberstam's argument, and you've really nailed the potential problem with it in your earlier response. But, I'm still finding it troubling my waters.
As I see it, this critique of corporate lawyers saying they're "inside" really goths, is kind of what Halberstam seems to be getting at. It's not that we should be leery of all such arguments--we need to respect that people's "internal" sense of themselves may not fit with the way social categories would define them based on their external, physical presentation. Which is, of course, considerably different than a lawyer's suit and salary, I think, "hiding" a goth identity. Nor is it that people should be "locked" into unchanging categories.
I understand her, in that book, in part, to be seeking to apply a class-based critique to certain modalities of a hip urban queerness, which exclude as inauthentic/closeted (or hopelessly trapped) those rural queers, for example, who deliberately choose to stay in their "hopeless"/"backward" environment. I'm not sure her argument works, either (the book as a whole is super disjointed, bears scars of having radicatlly changed directions midstream), but I'm interested.
And I think the sense that people have fought and died for certain identities to be acceptable as fully human--black, women, gay, lesbian--is, first off, an indictment of this history within Western rationalism (particularly since the Enlightenment) that some persons are not fully human. Non-w/m/h are always either, at some level, trapped in a perpetual childhood or positively subhuman. That's always got to be the first line of critique. People who died for them said: you must regard us as human, fully human, fully adult when we are grown.
Here's what she says in an interview a few years back about loving a kind of prodigality, prolixity of identity categories:
For me, the term female masculinity also records what can only be called a "taxonomical impulse." My book argues for greater taxonomical complexity in our queer histories. Unlike a theorist like Butler who sees categories as perpetually suspect, I embrace categorization as a way of creating places for acts, identities and modes of being which otherwise remain unnamable. I also think that the proliferation of categories offers an alternative to the mundane humanist claim that categories inhibit the unique self and creates boxes for an otherwise indomitable spirit. People who don't think they inhabit categories usually benefit from not naming their location. I try to offer some new names for formerly uninhabitable locations. In fact, my inspiration for taxonomizing comes from Eve Sedgwick's introduction to Epistemology of the Closet where she offers up a list of ways that people could map sexualities and desires. Her list refuses the banality of the homo-hetero binary and suggests that we are limited not simply by the law but by a failure of the imagination. I hope my work can help to reimagine the complex set of relations between sexuality, gender, race and class.3
[8] JAGOSE: Certainly your recent work has been revisiting - perhaps in some important sense, reinventing - categories of gendered identity. This seems to me a provocative critical move since many queer theorists - and, arguably, the most resistant effects of queer itself - are working against identificatory taxonomies, perhaps particularly those sexual taxonomies allegedly stitched up by gender. I read your work on female masculinity as being in sympathy with the denaturalising gestures at the heart of those queer projects. Yet opposing what you characterise as a mundane humanism, you say, in an idiom not much heard these days, "I embrace categorization." I am interested in this embrace of yours, the way in which it resists the increasingly spooky assumption that recourse to categories of self or categories of gendered embodiment are necessarily bound to essentialist or conservative projects. Yet it seems to me that the near critical consensus on this rests not on the humanist principles that you index here but the more plausible post-Foucaldian axiom that categories of identification are most banally in the service of the technologies of regulation. Is this distinction registered in your articulation of new "acts, identities and modes of being" in relation to female masculinity?
[9] HALBERSTAM: This is obviously a complicated question but it does register important concerns about a tactic of "productive classification." Of course, as you say, queer theory has been much preoccupied with the relationship between identity and regulation; post-Foucault, as you suggest, we recognize that to embrace identities can simply form part of a reverse discourse within which medically constructed categories are lent the weight of realness by people's willingness to occupy those categories.
[10] HALBERSTAM: However, I think that we have allowed this Foucauldian insight to redirect discussions of identification away from the subject of categories themselves. The term "reverse discourse" in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 identifies and rejects the traditional formulations of gay and lesbian political struggle as essentially oppositional. Since certain sexual liberation discourses, recapitulate the very terms of the homo/hetero binary which oppress us in the first place, then these discourses become part of the installation of the very sexual hierarchy that they seek to oppose. However, Foucault also understands emancipation struggles as strategically and historically necessary; furthermore, a "reverse discourse" is in no way the "same" as the discourse it reverses. Indeed its desire for reversal is a desire for transformation.4
[11] HALBERSTAM: Consequently, I don't see the point of simply rejecting all reverse discourses per se (coming out, organizing, producing new categories) but I do think it is limited to think of them (coming out, for example) as end points: Foucault clearly believes that resistance has to go beyond the taking of a name ("I am a lesbian") and must produce creative new forms of resistance by assuming and empowering a marginal positionality.
[12] JAGOSE: So what kind of marginal positionalities are you thinking of here?
[13] HALBERSTAM: Well, like a historian such as George Chauncey, I am less interested in expert-produced categories ("the homosexual," "the invert," "the transsexual") and far more interested in sexual vernaculars or the categories produced and sustained within sexual subcultures. Obviously, a project like this originates with the work of Gayle Rubin who has spoken eloquently about the limits of expert discourses on sexuality (like psychoanalysis) and the importance of questions of "sexual ethnogenesis" or the formation of sexual communities. I think scientific discourses have tended to narrow our ability to imagine sexuality and gender otherwise and in general the discussions that take place in medical communities about embodiment and desire may be way behind the discussions taking place on email lists, in support groups and in sex clubs. Doctors use categories in very different ways than people cruising for a sexual partner use categories. I think we should take over the prerogative of naming our experiences and identifications.
So her later argument is clearly growing out of this position, and trying to incorporate a class critique. I'm still mulling it over, grateful for help. |
