Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline†*

Knowl. Org. 39(2012)No.6 417 P. Keilty. Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline†* Patrick Keilty 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G6, <[email protected]> Patrick Keilty is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His writing examines and critiques knowledge structures, digital culture, digital humanities, gender and sexuality, intersectionality, and science and technology studies. With Rebecca Hong, he is co-editor of Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (forthcoming). With Katie Shilton, he is currently co- editing Critical Information Studies. In addition, he is editing Gender and Sexual Boundaries and prepar- ing a monograph entitled Seeking Sex: Embodiment and Electronic Culture, which examines how the Internet has reconstituted our ways of being sexual. His most recent essays have appeared in Knowledge Organization, Proceedings of the iConference, and InterActions. He has recently presented papers at the iConference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and Thinking Gender. Keilty, Patrick. Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline. Knowledge Organization. 39(6), 417- 431. 57 references. ABSTRACT: The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the mechanisms of power around classifications of gender and sexuality are not always top-down or bottom-up. Instead, the weight of social discipline among members of sexual subcultures themselves helps to create these classifications, often reflecting the nomenclature of subjects and desires within sexual subcultures in a complex relationship to a dominant culture. Critically examining two benchmarks in the development of sexual nomenclature within queer subcultures, this paper finds its evidence in George Chauncey’s little known analysis (1985) of a navy investigation of male homosexuality at the Newport Naval Training Station during the World War I era and in contemporary folksonomic classifications of representations of queer desire within Xtube, a database of online pornography. Social discipline within these sexual subcultures occurs in the stabilization of nomenclature through socialization and through members' overt intervention into each others' self-understanding. Both the Newport and Xtube evidence also reveals a complex social and cultural structure among members of sexual subcultures by drawing our attention to the particularity of various modes of sexual being and the relationship between those modes and particular configurations of sexual identity. In the process, this paper allows us to reassess, first, a presupposition of folksonomies as free of discipline allowing for their emancipatory potential and, second, the prevailing binary understandings of authority in the development of sexual nomenclatures and classifications as either top-down or bottom-up. Received 9 May 2012; Revised 3 July 2012; Accepted 3 July 2012 † The author is extravagantly indebted to Melissa Adler for allowing him to lend, borrow, and exchange ideas with her. He owes the inspiration for this paper to conversations with George Chauncey and Jim Schultz. Special thanks go to Dustin Friedman and Matthew Schuman for their assistance. As ever, Johanna Drucker, Jonathan Furner, and Greg Leazer provided encourage- ment. * This article is an expansion of the author’s conference paper, which appeared in Knowledge Organization 39.5—Ed. 1.0 Introduction members of sexual subcultures themselves helps to create these classifications, often reflecting the no- The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the menclature of subjects and desires within sexual sub- mechanisms of power around classifications of gen- cultures in a complex relationship to a dominant cul- der and sexuality are not always top-down or bottom- ture. The past half-century has seen an established up. Instead, the weight of social discipline among body of scholarship that documents and forcefully 418 Knowl. Org. 39(2012)No.6 P. Keilty. Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline critiques institutionally sanctioned and authoritative on his thesis, including Jeffrey Weeks (1977), Lillian forms of classification that order human interaction. Faderman (1981), D. A. Miller (1989), Nancy Arm- Some prominent examples include, among others, strong (1990), Eve Sedgwick (1990), Jonathan Dolli- Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s Sorting more (1991), David Halperin (1997), and Joseph Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences Bristow (1997). (1999), George Lakoff ’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous With particular proliferation in the last decade, li- Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind brary and information scholarship, too, critiques the (1997), V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa: Gno- effects of institutionally sanctioned and authoritative sis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988), gender and sexual subject categories, including San- and, of course, Michel Foucault’s The Order of ford Berman (1981 and 1990), Ellen Greenblatt (1990 Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (trans. and 2011), Hope Olson (1998, 2001, 2002, and 2007), 1970). These works reveal the ways in which the clas- Grant Campbell (2001 and 2004), Andrew Lau sificatory structures and knowledge organization of (2008), Ben Christiansen (2008 and 2011), Patrick government and medical institutions have both pro- Keilty (2009), J. K. Rawson (2009), Matt Johnson ductive and coercive effects. Each of these texts en- (2010), Melissa Adler (2009, 2012, and 2013 forth- courages readers to think critically about the process coming), and Analisa Ornelas (2011), to name only a at the moral and political core of institutionally sanc- few. Most of these scholars have forcefully shown the tioned and authoritative classificatory work. way the Library of Congress Subject Headings or the The same period has seen an established body of Dewey Decimal Classification System do not reflect work concerning the influence of authoritative classi- the nomenclatures accustomed to gender and sexual fications of gender and sexual subcultures. Foucault’s non-conforming people. Such a disconnect, they ar- History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge gue, not only restricts queer people’s access to infor- (trans. 1978) is perhaps the most influential of such mation, but also forces these subjects to navigate and scholarship. In examining the creation of sexual sub- adopt offensive nomenclature about their very per- jects during the late nineteenth century, Foucault ar- son. These scholars often cast the “power to name,” gues that the proliferation of medical and legal dis- to borrow Olson’s famous phrase, as a matter of ab- course around sexuality paradoxically causes us to in- solute authority imposed on a sexual subculture, in ternalize categories of identity, thereby forcing us to which the mechanisms of power around classifica- collude in our own disciplining. Following Foucault, a tions of gender and sexuality occur in a top-down number of scholars have examined the “invention of fashion. It seems reasonable, then, that scholars the homosexual,” that is, the determination, around committed to counteracting such hegemony might 1900, that homosexuality was limited to certain iden- look to bottom-up mechanisms of power for naming tifiable individuals for whom it was an involuntary gender and sexual subject positions that do not ad- sexual orientation of some biological or psychological here to a particular institution’s or dominant culture’s origin. Like Foucault, the most prominent advocates roles and nomenclature. of this thesis have argued that the medical and legal In the past few years, Lau, Adler, and Ornelas have discourse on homosexuality that emerged in the late suggested that folksonomic forms of classification, nineteenth century played a determining role in this e.g., tagging, are one way to augment institutionally process, by creating and popularizing the medico- sanctioned forms of classification. Lau, Adler, and legal model of homosexual behavior. It was on the ba- Ornelas view folksonomies as having potential eman- sis of this new model that individuals came to assume cipatory power. For Lau, “standardized classification a homosexual identity (and to be labeled as such in alludes to the authority of a privileged ontology and/ popular culture), as sexual perverts different in nature or perspective, and runs the risk of perpetuating ‘in- from others, rather than as sinners whose sinful na- formation imperialism’ through homogenization.” In ture is the lot of humanity. Foucault’s History of order to counteract such imperialism, Lau finds that Sexuality has had such an outsize influence on our “folksonomies acknowledge local and situated knowl- prevailing understandings of the creation of sexual edges by including the voices of multiple ontologies, subjects and identities that it would be impossible to rather than prescribing how information should be enumerate the various reiterations of his thesis organized” (2008, 1). Adler persuasively demonstrates among gender and sexual scholars over the past half- the emancipatory capacity of folksonomies for access- century.1 It is sufficient enough to identity only a few, ing transgender books in LibraryThing. She describes among many, of the early influential works that rely it as a democratizing force that responds quickly to Knowl. Org. 39(2012)No.6 419 P. Keilty. Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline shifts and expansions of categories, even if it lacks tags” (2009,

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