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Fags Are Their Own Worst Enemies

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Fags Are Their Own Worst Enemies Balloon Boy By Douglas Gregory Ellis Student Number 2242869 Integrated Studies Project Submitted to Professor Gordon Morash In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta May 1, 2007 As a child growing up I recall my mother reminding me of the old maxim, “sticks and stones” as a phrase to remind me that words are just words and they cannot really hurt me. How ironic this phrase has become for me as I have grown to learn and embrace the power of words within our culture and understand how those words have helped to make me who I am today. This project that you are about to read speaks to the power of words and how those words affect us on both an individual and cultural level. The key word to understand in this discussion is power and only by understanding possible uses and abuses of power can we understand how power operates in various aspects of our constructed culture. This project is personal and uses the language that I have come to know during my life. This project is not an apologia, I am happy and have developed a good sense of self and I am very grateful for the personal insight that this project has provided me as a man. This project is about men and an awareness of how men communicate power with other men. Most importantly, this project provides possible insight of how men are emotionally crippled and limited by their androcentric communication patterns. This type of insight, if used as a starting point for personal reflection, may help to improve relationships that men enter into with all people. My frame of reference for reflection in this project is the frame of a homosexual man who has lived (at different times) within the arbitrary boundaries assigned to sexual identity. A 2 starting point for me in this project was to look at a classic gay man’s memoir written by Paul Monette in the early 1990s. Paul Monette (1992) in his award winning, Memoir entitled Becoming a Man, Half a Life Story, explains that self‐pity becomes the oxygen [sic] of homosexual men who live their lives in the closet. When men, who have sex with men remain in the closet their lives are not fully lived. I say “men who have sex with men” rather than gay, queer, homosexual, etc., because I believe that the arbitrary identities provided by academia are political, cumbersome, inaccurate and limiting. What self‐respecting heterosexual male would admit to being bi‐sexual just because he likes to occasionally engage in specific sexual acts with other men? Men who have sex with men are not something that is new and the labels attached to this behaviour speak to our heterosexist beliefs about variant sexual behaviour. Let’s face facts, men have been having sex with men since our earliest time on this planet and the labelling discussion related to this variant sexual behaviour reflects only judgement from a heteronormative perspective. I don’t mean to be cavalier but I believe that the ontological debate of identity within the academe is simply hegemony that speaks to constructivist absolutism. For this final project for MAIS 701, I will explore the possibilities of a model that embraces sexual identity, as simply an essential part of what it means to be human. Perhaps a model that creates a better understanding of the elements of sexual identity that are constructed and those that can only be attributed to 3 something beyond our ability to construct. To begin I would like to go back to a quote in Paul Monette’s book that echoes my sentiments in writing using the autoethnography as a research methodology. “I speak for no one else, if only because I don’t want to saddle the women and men in my trip with the lead weight of self‐hatred, the particular door less room of my internal exile. Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment. The self‐delusion of uniqueness. The festering pretence that we are the same as they are. The gutting of all our passions till we are a bunch of eunuchs, our zones of pleasure in enemy hands. Most of all, the ventriloquism, the learning how to pass for straight. Such obedient slaves we make, with such very tidy rooms.” (Monette, 1992. p.262.) I am speaking for myself based on my experiences and I hope that my narrative is presented in a non‐judgmental manner. There are many ways in which I can present my narrative and I am conscious of this. I can choose to hate myself because I buy into the masculine hegemony that guides men in their day‐to‐day lives. I can choose do live in exile in this heteronormative world. I can choose be imprisoned by my narcissism, my internalized homophobia and my distain for being oppressed in culture. I can also choose to let my penis control my behaviour but the one thing I cannot choose or change, is the core object, of my sexual desire. This core object is the biological “thing” that stimulates, regulates and motivates my sexual desire. If I can choose to embrace or reject the prison 4 that Monette (1992) suggests that gay men live in then I choose to reject it emphatically. I also choose to challenge the signs presented by queer theory that seek to categorize what I am, why I am and what I cannot be. Therefore because of the personal pain that the demeaning word queer has injected in my life, I will not use it other than to refer to the nascent world of queer theory. In this paper I am going to call on my epistemic privilege to hereinafter refer to “men who have sex with men” as fags. The etymology of the word fag is ambiguous and to me, the word is more affirming and a less value‐laden word than the label queer. According to Kirsch, (1999) epistemic privilege is the “belief that people who occupy marginal positions in culture offer more insightful, more complete interpretations of that culture than those who do not possess the double perspective (their culture and dominant culture). This privilege allows me to reclaim and use words that are, or have been abusive and demeaning to men who have sex with men. Please read my text carefully as on the surface the words, or “signs” as suggested by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure, may appear homophobic or disrespectful and that is not my intent. I choose to use the word fag as a simple word that is commonly used among gay men to describe the entire category of men, who have sex with men. Words have power and I choose to reclaim the word fag as a personal reclamation for understanding that men are the objects of my core, sexual desire. Intellectual discourse about sexuality and identity politics has embraced the discourse of the postmodernists 5 and poststructuralists and it is a moot point why this has been embraced so emphatically by scholars. Postmodernism is a frame of reference that has been embraced by queer theorists as it favours identity as constructed by culture and rejects any notions of essentialism. Postmodern theory posits (among other things) that everything human is constructed, that identity is fluid and that grand narratives should be rejected and studied to understand the power within the narratives. Postmodernist’s rejection of grand narratives is to me ironic, as queer theory often uses postmodernism to explain gender construction. At the same time queer theory rejects any discussion of narratives that posit gender and sexual identity from an essentialist perspective. The purpose of this paper is not to debate the essentialist/constructivist approaches to explaining sexual identity but rather to present my personal narrative related to my sexual identity and the marginalization of the “femme” from both inside and outside gay culture. My epistemic privilege will be a frame of reference that I will use in this paper and these thoughts will be presented using both authoethnography and academic research. My epistemic privilege also allows me only to speak to the world of fags and therefore I have little right (or ability) to speak to the lives women who have sex with women. It is my personal belief that women who have sex with women have little in common with fags other than the political interests related to equity for same‐sex persons. Before embarking on this discussion of sexual identity within fag culture I want to discuss the purpose and limits of autoethnography as a research methodology. 6 According to Denzin and Lincoln (2000) the term autoethnography was first attributed to the anthropologist, David Havana (1975) to refer to a method of using personal narrative to connect the self to culture. Furthermore, Reed‐Danahay (1997) explains that autoethnography as a “genre of writing and research that connects the personal to the cultural, placing the self in a social context.” Tierney (1998) further explains the possible power of authoethnography as a research methodology. “Autoethnography confronts dominant forms of representation in an attempt to reclaim, through self‐reflective response, representational spaces that have marginalized those of us at the borders.” (Tierney, 1998, p.32) Denzin and Lincoln also explain the purpose of autoethnography; and I hope attain this purpose in this paper. You might also judge validity by whether it helps readers communicate with others different from themselves, or offers a way to improve the lives of participants and readers or even your own.
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