Preface Introduction Spot the Homo: Definitions

NOTES Preface 1. Examples are too numerous to represent adequately here, but a few of the more prolific scholarly writers include John Boswell, L. William Countryman, Robert E. Goss, Mark Jordan, Stephen D. Moore, Elisabeth Stuart, and Mona West. 2. One cannot hope to do justice to the scope of these writings with a brief representative list, but by way of offering a few possible starting points for further exploration, see works by Rebecca Alpert, Sandi Simcha Dubowski, Jyl Lynn Felman, Andrew Harvey, Judith Katz, Badruddin Khan, Winston Leyland, Devdutt Pattanik, Lev Raphael, and Karen Tulchinsky. Introduction Spot the Homo: Definitions 1. I draw here on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s use of translation as a metaphor, for which he cites a range of criticism to explain how translation can represent the relationship between past and present: this relationship does not entail translating two radically different, incommensurable views that have no relationship to each other; nor is it about successfully making two different things neatly commensurable (17 and 263–264, n. 57). Adding the visual metaphor of transparence versus opacity, he avers that such translation projects aim for neither; instead, they aim for translucence. 2. Leo Bersani attests, “There has been an absurd and reductive misreading of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, a reading that claims that ‘the homosexual’ didn’t exist before the middle of the nineteenth century. I don’t think Foucault believed that for a single moment. I also think he would have been shocked by the frankly stupid confusion between the homosexual as a category of the psyche with elaborately defined characteristics (in large part, that is a modern invention) and the homosexual as an individual primarily oriented toward same-sex eroticism” (“A Conversation with Leo Bersani,” by Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman, 12). 3. Diana Fuss offers a similar view in Essentially Speaking, where she argues that the apparent distinction between “social constructionism” and “essentialism” is not at all as clear or impermeable as it might seem. 4. John Boswell notes, “To pretend that a single system of sexual categorization obtained at any previous moment in Western history is to maintain the unlikely in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary. Most of the current spectrum of belief appears to have been represented in previous societies” (1989: 34). 5. Jordan holds that a “sodomitic sin-identity, medicalized or camped, turned therapeutic or ironic, is still in many ways a sin-identity” (2001: 184). Edsall contends that the language of unnatural versus natural became that of healthy versus sick: “Doctors were the new priesthood” (44, 46). 188 Notes 6. In Susan Harvey’s words, “Ancient Christianity defined God as ineffable and inconceivable” (18). 7. Dinshaw (203); see also Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian and Leila Rupp’s A Desired Past. Valerie Traub’s The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England supports this claim by contrasting the profusion of representations of sex between women in the early modern era in England with other time periods; she characterizes this profusion as historically unique. 8. Margaret Farley offers a concise overview of the Hellenistic influence on Christian understandings of the sexual body in her “Sexual Ethics.” 9. James B. Nelson attests, “Homophobia thrives on dualisms of disincarnation and abstraction that divide people from their bodily feelings and divide reality into two opposing camps” (385). 10. See Evans, 1996: 65–66; he notes, “For a strong argument that rationality in science and rationality in religious belief are analogous, see Michael C. Banner, The Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)” (1996: 66, n. 28). 11. Antonio Damasio offers an interesting possibility, but it remains hypothetical. 12. I confine my discussion of Catalina to the scholarly views presented in the 1996 edition of her memoirs because I use the debate staged in that one book to exemplify the more general debates about lesbian and gay history. For further analysis of Catalina, see Sherry M. Velasco’s study. Velasco largely agrees with Stepto and Stepto, arguing that, “Regardless of how we configure Erauso’s sexuality today (homoerotic, lesbian, ‘woman-loving butch,’ allegorical, and so forth), the early modern representations of [Erauso’s] erotic desire reveal the perception that she was a masculine woman who was attracted to other women and not to men” (69). 13. For an overview of theological writings on this topic, see Eugene F. Rogers, Jr.’s Theology and Sexuality: Classic and Contemporary Readings. 14. White defines these genres thus: “Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it—the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology”; Satire is “dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death, which is man’s unremitting enemy”; “Comedy and Tragedy, however, suggest the possibility of at least partial liberation from the condition of the Fall and provisional release from the divided state in which men find themselves in this world. In Comedy, hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds. Such reconciliations are symbolized in the festive occasions which the Comic writer traditionally uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation. In Tragedy, there are no festive occasions . [Yet, by the end, there] has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the protagonist’s exertions against the world have brought to pass” (8–9). 15. Linda Hutcheon notes that White is not the first in this general line of thinking: “In 1910 Carl Becker wrote that ‘the facts of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them’ ” (qtd. in Hutcheon, 90). 16. I am indebted to James Phelan for this point. 17. Frederic Jameson holds a similar view, specifically regarding history in terms of its textuality: history exists apart from texts, but because our access to it depends entirely on texts, according to Jameson, history denotes the transcendent reality that we cannot fully know. 18. I adapt this definition from Dallas Willard (talk given in Los Angeles on November 1, 2003). 19. Theologian Rowan Williams analyzes a related argument offered by David Jones, that the very “notion of sign implies the sacred” (86; for further points of connection with my project here, see also 84–86, 138, and 154). 20. According to Richard Walsh, the sense of mystery expressed in fantastic storytelling also characterizes Judeo-Christian traditions: “The Bible’s ancient ‘central impossibility’ (Irwin 1976) was its commitment to the divine sovereignty as a fantastic alternative to various imperial Notes 189 sovereignties,” but “[w]ith Constantine the fantasy ended”: “The subversive stories became the establishment’s property and were made the mythic basis of institutional religion. As a result, the biblical narratives ceased to challenge ‘reality’ and became its basis” (137–138). Since the Enlightenment enthroning of reason, however, “the ancient biblical narrative became an alternative to reason’s hegemony. Now, the fantastic crux, the ‘central impossibility,’ was miracle, rather than an alternative politics” (139). 21. Religious studies scholars widely agree on the significance of the divide between theology and religious studies, as Mark Taylor avers (12–13); in Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Taylor, ed.), Jonathan Smith goes so far as to hold the term religion to be “an anthropological not a theological category” (269). Throughout this book, I rely far more on the scholarship of theologians than religious studies scholars for precisely this reason: the participatory perspective of theological scholarship more effectively counters the objectification tendencies my project works to ameliorate. 22. I draw here on Phelan’s “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading” (2001). 23. Regardless of the extent to which a specifically queer reading might contribute to understanding the novel, sexual and affective desires in general certainly reside at its core. Beloved’s name defines her in terms of another’s desire for her. The sexual and affective connections thematized in the various characters’ relationships to Beloved foreground how such relationships especially were damaged and lost to history because of the oppression of slavery—families and lovers divided and broken, such that Paul D. at first does not even “fit” in a domestic space (the rhythms of his song are described as being too big for it), and the very names of Baby Suggs and Sethe serve as fractured or fragmentary evidence of sexual and affective relationships otherwise obliterated from historical record and even from memory (Morrison 1987: 40, 142, 62). Chapter One Mysterious Hauntings and Revisionist Histories 1. “Sub rosa,” Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1989 ed. 2. Examinations of homoeroticism in Absalom include studies by Don Merrick Liles; John N. Duvall (101–118); Diane Roberts (28–37, 150–51, 166–68); Noel Polk (140–143); and Doreen Fowler (95–127). 3. I am indebted to Judith Sensibar for alerting me to Gwin’s work on this subject. 4. Matt Ramsey sounds a cautionary note about the extent to which Faulkner may be taken as antiheterosexist (“ ‘All That Glitters’: Reappraising ‘Golden Land,’ ” paper presented at the William Faulkner Society meeting at the 2005 MLA in Washington, DC).

Load more