Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture

Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture Patrick Scott Lawrence, PhD University of Connecticut, 2016 Tracing a cultural history from the 1970s to the 1990s, Obscene Gestures places popular and legal notions of obscenity in conversation with anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist resistance movements, women of color feminism, and LGBTQ activism. Since the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Miller v. California, obscenity discourse has policed the shape of the nation by marking non-normative bodies as objectionable. The dissertation’s study of the cultural artifacts this discourse concerns opens by situating the history of literary obscenity alongside the key theories of sexuality, power, race, and knowledge. The first body chapter links the Miller ruling with 1970s-era neoconservative policies by considering some of the decade’s major novels, including Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), revealing a home- front cultural politics that stymied dissent by classing as out of bounds many forms of political speech, including Huynh Cong Ut’s 1972 photo The Terror of War. Chapter Two builds upon the polarization this moment caused via an analysis of the feminist battles over pornography in the early 1980s. I juxtapose figures on both sides of this debate with works by women of color, such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), that address the histories of embodiment that this debate tended to obscure. The occlusion of race in organizing around pornography parallels the role of possessive individualism in justifying racial wealth disparities during the Reagan administration, which the third chapter highlights. Working in the shadow of the 1986 Meese Commission report, this chapter interprets neoliberal economic policies as an enactment of racial indifference through the metaphors of sex and violence in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and American Psycho (1990). Finally, Chapter Four addresses the transformation of these politics during the AIDS crisis, when a family-values rhetoric asserting middle-class social norms as the basis for civic participation was both appropriated and resisted by LGBTQ activists. This final chapter teases the tension arising between mainstreaming and resistive visibility demonstrated in such works as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1993). i Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture Patrick Scott Lawrence B.A., University of Southern California, 2004 M.A., New York University, 2008 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut 2016 ii Copyright by Patrick Scott Lawrence 2016 iii APPROVAL PAGE Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Obscene Gestures: Sexual Transgression and Late Twentieth-Century American Political Culture Presented by Patrick Scott Lawrence, B.A., M.A. Major Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Martha J. Cutter Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Kate Capshaw Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Chris Vials Associate Advisor ___________________________________________________________________ Josh Lambert University of Connecticut 2016 iv Acknowledgements While composing this dissertation, I typed away for hours on an old Dell laptop in my office in the Philip E. Austin Building, Homer Babbidge Library, the house at 89 Spring Street, a handful of coffee shops, in the passenger seat of a Subaru Outback, on lawns, in parks, and on planes. Hammering away on the keys, I was mostly by myself. But the writing was a conversation and a dialogue with and among the handful of people in my life who were generous enough to invest in me their wisdom, intellect, care, and time—and in that sense, I was never alone. The scholarly conversation of the dissertation was most significantly impacted by Cathy Schlund-Vials, a matchless mentor, colleague, and friend. Her work in the fields of Asian American Studies and Critical Race Theory has given me a lens to see my archive in ways that were illuminating and revelatory and that will frame all of my scholarly work for the rest of my career. I hope that I can, in that way, extend her influence and allow her insight to reach more spaces and impact more conversations and so carry on her work. As an advisor she has been exceptionally—even intimidatingly—diligent, committed, and dedicated. I was pushed, drug, cajoled, and lured into completing this dissertation by her, and I appreciate it deeply. I have also benefitted from the generous efforts of my dissertation committee, who not only read my work, but acted as formal and informal mentors and guides. Martha J. Cutter has been an advocate of mine for over 6 years and has molded my development as a scholar of ethnic literatures while providing me with innumerable professional opportunities within the MELUS community and beyond. Kate Capshaw’s insightful questions and pitch-perfect recommendations have helped me to grow as a scholar in significant ways with the subtlest of touches. Chris Vials has been an encyclopedia of important ideas and contexts I cannot ignore, as well as an enduring v compatriot in ways I hope will continue long beyond graduate school. And finally, Josh Lambert’s work frames my own on obscenity, giving me a sense of what is possible in this field, even if it is hard to see how I could ever achieve as much. Other colleagues have helped me along the way, too, notably Jorge Santos, Steve Mollmann, and Jarred Wiehe. Each has been buffeted by the high crests and deep valleys of graduate school alongside me, and steered me along sometimes gently and sometimes forcefully, and without ever grumbling about the imposition, at least not in my presence. Driving and underwriting the deliberation of what to learn and how to express it was a conversation about why to do any of this at all. My confidence often flagged, but Stephanie Golaski, my wife and friend and partner in everything, never doubted my project or my abilities and was never more upset with me than when I doubted myself. She has brought bold humor and keen wisdom to this project and—more than anything else—purpose. It would have been impossible to complete this work without her, and I would not have had any reason to. vi Table of Contents Introduction: “Making Sense of the Obscene” 1 Chapter 1: “Anti-War and Anti-Warren Court: 1973 and Obscene Critiques of the Global Militarism” 50 Chapter 2: “The Porn Wars: Feminist Resistance to Patriarchy and Pornotroping” 114 Chapter 3: “Obscene Wealth: Rapacious Capitalism in Excessive Novels of the 1980s” 171 Chapter 4: “Performing Family Values: Obscenity and AIDS Discourse” 232 Works Cited 290 Obscene Gestures, Introduction Introduction: Making Sense of the Obscene “Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals?” William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch 34) With these words, the narrator of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) pauses briefly mid-paragraph to wonder aloud at his own narration, the content of which comprises absurdly graphic scenes and descriptions of excreta, violated bodies of myriad varieties, and sexual couplings involving all of these. Burroughs’s novel alternates between these carnivalesque passages describing seas of debauchery, sex, and violence (pages 32-35, for example) and passages that critique the institutionalization of power (112-13, for example). The political critique of the latter, though, fails to fully contain the excess and shock of the former. That is to say the novel is not general remembered for its political stands—though its political fortunes are sometimes discussed—but for the sex and violence and drugs that made it outrageous. There are many reasons for this, but the tale of Naked Lunch is hardly unique. Other books pushing the envelope from this period are often remembered most for their excessiveness and only secondarily for any social critique. Thus, exploring precedent from this era can help us understand the idea that the book represents a threat that a narrator might want to spare a reader, and a threat that might go beyond offended sensibilities or mere modesty. What seems to underpin the speaker’s concern that the scandals—the novel’s violation of taboos—are excessive and that the reader ought to be spared such scenes, is the presumption that they do something to him, they produce the risk of harm to the reader. The reader is affected Lawrence 1 Obscene Gestures, Introduction negatively in a way that the speaker/author recognizes is unfair or improper. Thus, the final sentence of the epigraph, which wonders if it is possible to represent the scene in question might just as easily be read as wondering if is responsible to represent the scene in question. His inquiry reflects the reader’s own confusion, repugnance, and ambivalence when faced with such content.1 We ask ourselves, perhaps less rhetorically than the narrator, what we make of a text that so profoundly violates taboos and that seems to make us accomplice to its transgression. This project, Obscene Gestures, seeks to understand, in a provisional and partial way, why we presume ourselves to be accomplices to such transgression and why—even when we do not— that the danger of contamination and of adverse effects is great enough, and accepted enough in society at large, both nationally and internationally, that laws exist to limit the circulation, dissemination, and consumption of such works. Perhaps more importantly, this nexus of danger, harm, and shock coalesces in a legal discourse that frequently silences resistive discourses and challenges to status quo structures of power. Thus we must follow our suspicion that something about the discourse of harm is allied with a discourse of power—and that there is more at stake than modesty.

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