An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship In
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
AN ARCHIVE OF SHAME: GENDER, EMBODIMENT, AND CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation by REBECCA LYNNE HARRIS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2012 Major Subject: English An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture Copyright 2012 Rebecca Lynne Harris AN ARCHIVE OF SHAME: GENDER, EMBODIMENT, AND CITIZENSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE A Dissertation by REBECCA LYNNE HARRIS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Sally Robinson Committee Members, Claire Katz David McWhirter Mary Ann O’Farrell Head of Department: Nancy Warren May 2012 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture. (May 2012) Rebecca Lynne Harris, B.A., Randolph-Macon College; M.A., Virginia Commonwealth University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Sally Robinson In this dissertation, “An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture,” I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an “archive” of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire’s Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the iv gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process—theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships. v For Ronny Harris vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been envisioned or completed without the help and support of a great many people. First, I would like to thank my chair, Dr. Sally Robinson, who listened to a crazy story about Eliot Spitzer and believed it could turn into a dissertation project. Many thanks to her for believing that I would one day connect my theoretical dots. I am grateful to the rest of my committee members, Dr. David McWhirter, Dr. Mary Ann O’Farrell, and Dr. Claire Katz, whose careful, insightful, and challenging readings helped me to crystallize my thoughts at every stage of the writing process. This project has also benefited from the generous funding of the Texas A&M English Department Dissertation Fellowship, as well as travel grants from the Texas A&M Women’s and Gender Studies Department and the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for the Humanities. I would like to thank Dr. Kimberly Cox for reading parts of this dissertation in its infancy and for her generous feedback and friendship. Dr. Anne-Marie Womack has read or listened to nearly every idea I have had about this project, and I would not have made it through this process without her reflections, and certainly not without her company and sense of humor. Shannon Wilson has been nothing short of a partner in the theoretical work that went into this project. She is an invaluable sounding board, collaborator, and friend, and I look forward to our academic futures together. My work would be incomplete without her. vii I owe a great deal of thanks to my parents, Shari and Ed Galloway and Greg Harris. What others might have called “obnoxious,” they thought of as “strong-willed” or “independent,” and their encouragement is reflected in the methods of critical inquiry in all of my work. I would also like to thank the rest of my family, including my siblings, Jared, Elizabeth, and Rachel, and my grandmothers, Frieda Sawyer and Linda Harris, for being a great cheering section. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Shawn W. Moore for listening to my rants, talking me off the ledge, keeping my spirits up, and sharing meals with me for the past two years. Finally, I would like to thank my grandfather, Ronny Harris, not only for his generous financial support, but also for his faith in me as a scholar and a woman. His belief in the value of education has motivated me throughout my life and given me the courage to pursue this course. I love him very much, and it is to him that this project is dedicated. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: ARCHIVING TEXTS, BODIES, AND CITIZENS: A GENEALOGY OF SHAMEFUL HISTORIES .......... 1 “Freaks,” Women, and the Archive in Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love ............................................................................................... 4 A Theory of the Body in the Archive ............................................. 18 Abstraction, Shame, and the National Imaginary .......................... 23 Building Alternative Archives: The Scope of the Project .............. 33 II JAMIE LEIGH JONES, NARRATIVES OF INCEST, AND THE SEXUAL STATE OF EXCEPTION ................................................... 43 The Future is Whose Stuff? ............................................................ 48 Jamie Leigh Jones and the Enforced Silence of the Sexual State of Exception .................................................................................. 55 Push, The Queer Welfare Queen, and the State ............................. 64 Making People Nervous: Dorothy Allison, Bone Boatwright, and a Fatherless Existence .............................................................. 75 Conclusion: The Ideological Relationality of Jamie Leigh Jones, Claireece Precious Jones, and Bone Boatwright ............................ 88 III RESISTING NORMALIZATION: GENDER NON-CONFORMITY AND RADICAL PRIVACY IN THE L WORD AND MIDDLESEX .. 91 Rights Discourse, the Family, and Queer Theory .......................... 94 The L Word, the Midwest Migration, and Transgender Pregnancy 104 Middlesex, Migration, and the Family ........................................... 115 Conclusion: Negotiating Queer Identities ..................................... 141 ix CHAPTER Page IV IN SICKNESS AND DEATH: HIV, VIRAL INFECTION, AND THE CITIZEN BODY ......................................................................... 143 Containment and Disease: Discourses of HIV in American Culture ........................................................................................... 147 "Explain it to Me Like I'm a Four-Year-Old": Epiphanies of Normalcy in Philadelphia and Angels in America ......................... 154 Caregiving and Barebacking as Sentimental Ethics ....................... 169 Conclusion: Toward a Feminized Ethics of Care ......................... 184 V CONCLUSION: DOING POLITICAL AFFECT: QUEER FEELINGS AND MOTIVATIONS ....................................................