Sexuality, Literature, and Culture Studies PDF

## 8 - Sexuality, Literature, Culture and Queer Studies: - Lillian Faderman, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Eve Sedgwick, Donna Haraway. - *Á la recherche du temps perdu*, Marcel Proust's early twentieth-century great novel cycle, offers a famous example. The girl Albertine, with...

## 8 - Sexuality, Literature, Culture and Queer Studies: - Lillian Faderman, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Eve Sedgwick, Donna Haraway. - *Á la recherche du temps perdu*, Marcel Proust's early twentieth-century great novel cycle, offers a famous example. The girl Albertine, with whom Proust's novelistic alter ego falls in love, was in the reality of Proust's life a boy. Lesbian and homosexual writers saw themselves forced to disguise same-sex relationships as heterosexual ones. - Moreover, we may expect to find gender ambiguities, role playing that involves gender, and other coded references - such as certain recurrent symbols - to the fact that not everything is what it would seem to be to the unsuspecting reader. - “blurring of boundaries” - Queer theory - which has turned a term that traditionally disparages homosexuality into a proud banner - comes in more than one form. - Foucault's multi-volume *History of Sexuality* (1976-84) and his argument that especially ‘deviant’, that is, non-heterosexual, forms of sexuality play a prominent role in the organization of Western culture. - For Foucault, Western culture has turned sexuality into a discourse - What he is saying is that in the later nineteenth century sexual acts between men were no longer seen as incidental to their lives, that is, as acts that anyone might engage in under certain circumstances, but as expressions of their identity. - It led to the fixation of identities (homosexual, heterosexual) and the surveillance of the border between them. In other words, this production of homosexuality is intimately connected with power. Just like other sexual identities, homosexuality is ‘a result and an instrument of power’s designs’. - Judith Butler: ‘the word "queer", understood less as an identity than as a movement of thought and language contrary to accepted forms of authority, always deviating’. - Queer theory questions traditional constructions of sexuality and sees non-heterosexual forms of sexuality as sites where hegemonic power can be undermined. - Sinfield: subcultures -in which he expressly includes sexual subcultures -'may be power bases -points at which alternative or oppositional ideologies may achieve plausibility'. - Sedgwick: homosocial - In a later book, Sedgwick proposes an equally wide-ranging thesis. *Epistemology of the Closet* (1990) begins with a Derridean(binary) deconstruction of the heterosexuality, homosexuality opposition that according to Foucault dates from the late nineteenth century, when the homosexual became a distinct ‘species’. - Judith Butler: *Gender Trouble*. effect of repetition. Gender ‘is always a doing though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed’. ## Edward Said - orientalism - binary oppositions - Homi Bhabha - interaction and encounter - mimicry and hybridity - Spivak - difference - gender and social class, the female subaltern - Auto-orientalist representation = orientalizing yourself ## Colonized and Colonizer: - Colonizer needs the oriental other, partly dependent on the colonized to define itself. - Colonized imitates the colonizer. - Gaze of the colonizer is oppressive. - Hybridity: fusion of cultural forms can be productive. ## The Subaltern: - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - Subaltern: unheard, can't voice opinions. Subaltern subject is heterogeneous. - Bertha in *Jane Eyre*. - Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-first Century: ## 7 - Postcolonial Criticism and Theory: - Driving forces in 60s/70s: - Cultural self-definition: Former colonies sought to define themselves. - Political self-determination: Political liberation and independence. Making decisions about their nations. - Chinua Achebe: *Colonialist Criticism* 1974. *Things Fall Apart* 1958. As its title indicates, *Things Fall Apart* is written in English, as the former British colony. - Commonwealth Literary Studies and Eurocentrism: - ‘Commonwealth literature’ = hierarchical and eurocentric. Traditionally humanistic. - This new approach also exposed and contested the ideological underpinnings of the colonialist enterprise (in what was called ‘colonial discourse analysis’), and in one important version argued that the relationship between the former colonial powers and their colonies could most rewardingly be analysed with the help of Marxist concepts (with the colonized as the oppressed class). - From this Marxist perspective the work of Commonwealth writers was either involved in an ideological "resistance" against (neo-)colonial forces "or" else ideologically "complicit" with them. - Postcolonial Studies (1980s): - Hyphenated identities (Turkish-German etc.) - At the heart of postcolonial studies we find a trenchant critique of Eurocentrism -with its division of the world into ‘modern’Europeans and backwards ‘others’-and a strong focus on those who in one way or another have become the victims of Euro-centric thought (its utilitarian rationality), attitudes (racism), politics (military expansion), and exploitation (economic or otherwise). - Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, Joseph Conrad's *Heart of Darkness*, and E.M. Forster's *A Passage to India* -> new readings - This expansion is partly the result of the incorporation of non-European texts that fitthe older canon's expectations (and might have been incorporated a good deal earlier), but it also results from a new appreciation of genuinely different aesthetic traditions. - Hybrid subjectivities, merging of indigenous and other cultures. - Homi Bhabha, important postcolonial theorist. - Postcolonial themes: Colonial (neo-colonial) repression, resistance to colonization. ## Orientalism - Edward Said's book. He is influenced by Foucault. - Said examines how these texts either implicitly or explicitly construct the Orient through imaginative representations (in for instance novels), through seemingly factual descriptions (in journalistic reports and travel writing), and through claims to knowledge about Oriental history and culture. - Together, all these texts constitute a Foucauldian discourse - a collection of related written and visual representations, reports, studies, claims, and the like, that constitutes a discursive field within which ‘knowledge’ concerning a particular subject matter is constructed. - Orient is imaginative, constructed geography. - He examines Orientalism as a discourse. - Oriental discourse legitimized western imperialism, that is why the west constructed it. - Orientalism creates West and East, as binary oppositions. - The inferiority that Orientalism implicitly attributes to the East, in spite of its acknowledged achievements, simultaneously serves to construct the West's superiority. ## The New Historicism (american) and Cultural Materialism (british): - The new historicism leaned more towards Foucault in its focus on power, on the discourses that serve as vehicles for power, and on such issues as the discursive construction of identity, while cultural materialism leaned more towards the Marxism of Raymond Williams (who had coined the term 'cultural materialism’) and its focus on ideology, on the role of institutions, and on the possibilities for subversion (or dissidence). - The new historicism and cultural materialism reject both the autonomy and individual genius of the author and the autonomy of the literary work and see "literary texts as absolutely inseparable from their historical context." - Stephen Greenblatt: ‘the work of art is the product of a negotiation between a creator or class or creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society’ - The literary text, then, is always part and parcel of a specific cultural, political, social, and economic order. - The literary text is a time-and place-bound verbal construction that is always in one way or another political. ## The New Historicism: - Because it is inevitably involved with "ideologically charged" discourses, it cannot help being a vehicle for power. - Identities are discursively constructed. - Literature is not simply a product of history, it also actively makes history. - *Renaissance Self-Fashioning* argues that 'in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process'. - The new historicism pays special attention to thus far hidden and unsuspected sources of, and vehicles for, power and on the question of how power has worked to suppress or marginalize rival stories and discourses. It has a distinct interest in the dis-empowered, the marginalized, those whose voices we hardly ever hear. - In fact, power needs subversion and actively produces it: ‘subversiveness is the very product of that power and furthers its ends’ ## Cultural Materialism: - One of their main interests was the way in which the dominant social order sought (and seeks) to legitimize itself, for instance through the construction of socially marginalized groups as ‘other’. - In the early modern period we also find an increased emphasis on the idea that marriage should be personally fulfilling. This ‘contradiction in the ideology of marriage’ -one of Sinfield's ‘faultlines’ allows Desdemona to disregard her father's wishes... - It is the faultline in question that creates what Sinfield calls ‘dissident potential’. - Focusing on the cracks in the ideological façade that texts offer, cultural materialism reads even the most reactionary texts against the grain, offering readings of dissidence that allow us to hear the socially marginalized and that expose the ideological machinery that is responsible for their marginalization and exclusion. ## 6 - Literature and Culture: Cultural Studies, The New Historicism, Cultural Materialism: ## Cultural Studies: - Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. - Both emphasized the valuable and life-enhancing qualities of cultures, in particular working-class culture, that from the perspective of high culture were generally condemned. - Hoggart goes on to stress that ‘they still have a felt sense of the texture of life in the group they cater for’. - Working-class culture is simple, often even ‘childish’, but it is genuine and affirmative, and it also plays a valuable role in the lives of millions of people. - A new, manipulative mass culture created by corporate interests and directed at the passive consumer is taking the place of an older popular culture that came from below and in which there was still a bond, a system of shared values. - The further development of that common culture is then described as a process of organic growth aided by its members: ‘The idea of a common culture brings together... at once the idea of natural growth and that of its tending’ - Williams puts his hope in a common culture, based on working class-values such as “democratic solidarity” -“the basic collective idea" that finds expression in, for instance, trade unions and cooperative ventures as the place from which to critique the free market ideology of capitalism which alienates people from their true selves. - In the course of the 1970s and 1980s the question of culture, and in particular that of a culture that could offer resistance to an apparently omnipresent capitalist order a place in which cultural critique could be lived or from where it could be offered - became ever more important. - A third reason for the ever increasing importance of culture (and of cultural studies) was the insight, derived from structuralism and poststructuralism, that all cultures, no matter how seemingly authentic, were constructions. And if cultures were constructed, they could be contested, perhaps even changed. - Williams, influenced by Gramsci, who had argued that resistance to the dominant culture was a valid option, developed a theory of culture that recognized both the power of the dominant culture to win consent without the use of force and a self-determination that made resistance possible: ‘no dominant culture in reality exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention’ - Given its background in oppositional criticism, cultural studies was eager to find resistance to the pressure of hegemonic culture in niches and subcultures that at first seemed wholly commodified and to show how the creative and subversive appropriation and reworking of hegemonic culture - by for instance women or minority artists - could be a positive source of pleasure. And so, for a while, cultural studies sought political subversion in practically every subculture, and tended to see hybridity - the coming together of elements taken from two or more cultures in one new (sub) culture as oppositional in itself, as a form of resistance to a homogeneous corporate culture. ## French Feminism: - Helene Cixous, L. Irigaray, Julia Kristena. - *écriture feminine*, a feminine or female practice of writing - “The Laugh of the Medusa” - It is a sort writing practice that ‘surpasses’ what Lacan calls the Symbolic and that we may associate -but not identify -with his Imaginary. - Lacan: symbolic is greater than imaginary. Cixous: symbolic = semiotic - Julia Kristeva (1941-), literary critic and psychoanalyst, stays close to Lacan with her concepts of the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘semiotic’, which is a version of Lacan's ‘Imaginary’. For Kristeva, what has been repressed and consigned to the ‘semiotic’finds its way into the not yet fully regulated language of children, into poetry, into the language of mental illness -into all uses of language that for whatever reason are not fully under control of the speaker or writer. ‘symbolic’and ‘semiotic’language are never to be found in their ‘pure’state: all language is a mixture of the two. - Symbolic = linguistic, structures, differences ## Postmodern Criticism: - Postmodern criticism started as the response of American critics to a new mode of writing that took matters of authorial control, coherence, and unity far less seriously than modernist writing had done, and that as often as not undermined its own authority by flaunting its constructed status and by incorporating wholly unrealistic if not downright zany scenes and events. - Postmodern: No authorial control, coherence or unity. Meaning is unstable. - It saw the universal claims of "Enlightenment thinking" and liberal humanism as a form of (unfounded) essentialism and as "covertly totalitarian". - Poststructuralist theorists: Derrida, Foucault. - Lyotard: ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’ was over, to be replaced by the far more modest and benign rule of limited, local narratives. - "postmodernism was an 'incredulity towards metanarratives" - postmodern condition inevitably involved "incommensurability", and would produce "unsolvable dilemmas". Undecidability like Derrida. - Jean Baudrillard: they were both real and what he called "hyperreal". Reality itself had at some point become unreal, a simulation, simulacra, because of the ubiquitous commodification caused by free-market capitalism. - Fredric Jameson: he defined postmodernism as 'the cultural logic of late capitalism'. Powerful march of capitalism had led to what he called a 'waning of affect’. - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: subversion of "liquidation of the principle of identity". "rhizome", a mode of lateral growth that 'has no beginning or end', and 'is always in the middle, between things'. - Deleuze advocates 'deterritorialization', 'flows', 'nomadic' thinking. ## Lacan: - Freudian psychoanalysis has been heavily criticized for its sexist character, but perhaps even more so for its claims to universal validity. - One size fits all. - Freud's suggestion that his Oedipal model of infantile development is of all times and all places has become increasingly unacceptable. - For Lacan, too, the subject is split beyond repair. But in Lacanian theory that split is not the result of an Oedipal conflict, but of the infant's entry into the slippery world of language. - In Lacan's terminology, the infant leaves the world of the "imaginary" - a state in which it cannot yet speak, is subject to impressions and fantasies, to drives and desires, and has no sense of limitations and boundaries - and enters the "symbolic", in which the real - the real world which we can never know is symbolized and represented by way of language and other representational systems. (We cannot know the 'real' because it can never be fully represented it is beyond language.) - Three registers: imaginary, symbolic, real. Real cannot be spoken. Symbolic is representation. - This entrance into the ‘symbolic’ necessitates an acceptance of the language and of the social and cultural systems that prevail in the child's environment. It implies the acceptance of limitations and prohibitions. Lacan calls the massive configuration of authority that works through language the *nom du père*, the name of the father, in recognition of the patriarchal character of our social arrangements. The same recognition leads him to speak of the phallus as the signifier that signifies that patriarchal character. (Note that he avoids the term ‘penis’because in Lacan's conception of things male dominance is a cultural construction and not a biological given. The phallus is thus always symbolic.) Hence the term *phallocentric*, which is of feminist origin and denotes the (false) assumption that maleness is the natural, and in fact only, source of authority and power. - *nom du père* = name of the father (not biological). (its biological in freud). - He talks about symbolic signifiers. Father can be the state, church or any other authority. - We go from the Imaginary to the Symbolic through the "mirror stage" in which we are confronted with the ‘mirror’image that the world gives back to us. But that image, just like the image that we see in an actual mirror, is a distortion that leads to a ‘misrecognition’. - Still, that misrecognition is the basis for what we experience as our identity. For Lacan, we need the response and recognition of the outside world to develop a self. Our ‘subjectivity’is construed in interaction with ‘others’, that is, individuals who resemble us in one way or another but who are also irrevocably different. We become ourselves by way of the perspectives and views of others, a process in which language plays a crucial role so that we may be said to be constructed in language. - Since our identity is constituted in interaction with what is outside of us and reflects us, it is "relational", the idea of difference in the process of identity construction. - For Lacan our identity is the product of acts of misrecognition and will never fully satisfy us. - With the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, in which we submit to language and reason and accept 'reality'as it is, we lose that feeling of wholeness, of undifferentiated being, that, as in Freudian theory, will forever haunt us. Because we do not have access to this pre-verbal self we live ever after with a lack. - We will always be split. ## Discourses: - In its policing of ‘abnormal’ behaviour, the authority of the human sciences derives from what they claim to be knowledge. - Such a cluster of claims to knowledge in a particular field is what Foucault calls a discourse. In his *The Archaeology of Knowledge* (1972) Foucault tells us that a discourse is ‘a series of sentences or propositions’and that it ‘can be defined as a large group of statements that belong to a single system of formation’- a so-called discursive formation. - Thus, he continues, ‘I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse’. - These rules determine what counts as knowledge with regard to the field in which they operate and thus establish bodies of ‘knowledge’ that apply to us all. - Reverse discourse may legitimize original discourse. - "If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but to say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse." - Like Althusser's interpellation. - Subject = bizim özne olmamız - Subjection = iktidarın üzerimizde kurduğu otorite -Power subjects us and turns us into objects. - Foucault, however, places language in the centre of social power and of social practices. ## Poststructuralism and Psychoanalysis: - We have just encountered the "'historical unconscious' of a period" and in the discussion of literary criticism based on Althusser's critique of ideology we have met with the "unconscious' of the literary text". - Sigmund Freud, for whom it is that part of our mind that against our wishes preserves whatever we want to forget and seek to repress: traumatic or shameful experiences, undesirable urges, unwholesome impulses that we must suppress because they would take us into forbidden territory. - Still, although our "conscious mind vigorously polices the border with the unconscious" - whose traumas and unfulfilled desires always want to remind us that they are still there - the unconscious has ways of getting past its vigilance. - It first of all manifests itself in unguarded moments, in slips of the tongue, for instance, or in unintended puns, or in our dreams. But the unconscious also slips through, according to Freud, in language that we see as figurative - symbols, metaphors, allusions, and the like. - Literary language manifests the unconsciouss, Freud thinks. - The unconscious can for instance hide a repressed desire behind an image that would seem to be harmless - a trick that Freud called "displacement" - or it can project a whole cluster of desires upon an image in a manoeuvre that Freud called "condensation": a dream figure can for instance combine characteristics of a number of people we know. - Displacement and condensation. - Although we have no access to our unconscious it is a considerable influence in our day-to-day activities. That is dramatically the case if a repressed traumatic experience breaks into our consciousness and we are forced to relive - and perhaps for the first time fully understand an extremely disturbing event (a delay of impact that Freud called *Nachträglichkeit* - literally, ‘afterwardsness’). - Psychoanalytic criticism focuses on ‘cracks’ in the text'sfaçade, on what slips through authorial control, and seeks to bring to light the unconscious traumas or desires of either the author, or of the characters that the text presents. - Subject is divided between conscious and unconscious. Superego is the authority, like state. ## Foucauldian Power: - We deconstruct/dismantle binary oppositions to expose hidden hierarchies. - During his career as a cultural historian Foucault wrote books on the historical trajectory of the concept of madness, on the origin and rise of clinical medicine, on the rise of other forms of knowledge in the domain of the human sciences and on the way these sciences established their authority, and on the emergence of the modern prison system, before turning to the history of ‘sexuality’ (not as a biological force but as dealt with, as managed, by culture) in his last books. - In so doing, Foucault does not focus on agency, on the individual intentionality of those involved in these historical developments, but on discourses, a notion which he gradually develops, and which he increasingly sees as instruments of power and repression until, towards the end of his career, he would seem to allow the possibility of escape from such repression - not through individual agency, but through resistance that has its source in a specific subject position. - He focuses on discourses instead of personal intentions. For example, madness is in psychological discourse so it is discursively constructed. - There can be reverse-discourse, not through individual agency but through resistance. It is not one person's agency that does something. - The humanist concept of the self-determined, autonomous individual or subject who is gifted with reason is a temporary illusion that will disappear again. - Free, liberal humanism is just an illusion to Foucault. - For Foucault the apparently humanitarian rationality that we already see at work in early modern culture and that was at the heart of Enlightenment thinking has created bodies of knowledge that in the name of discipline and order marginalize or even exclude groups such as the insane, the criminal, the abnormal, the sick. - According to Enlightenment thinkers you are a free individual. Foucault challenges this modernist approach, he is postmodernist. - Foucault's "archaeologies" seek to show how power was at work in the seemingly 'objective' vocabularies, such as the terms that define abnormality or madness, developed by the various branches of the human sciences as these constituted themselves in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. And they seek to show how repressive measures taken to deal with sources of social disruption such as madness, criminality, other forms of deviant behaviour, and contagious diseases, have gradually pervaded modern society. - Archaeologies show how repressive measures pervaded the society policies. ## The Panopticon: - Seventeenth-century society did its utmost to contain the plague through confining people to their houses, once the disease had manifested itself. But such a drastic measure demands constant surveillance. - Explores how these contagious diseases were dealt with. - There is with regard to power not a 'massive, binary division between one set of people and another', but a distribution of power through many channels and over a large number of individuals. - He believes power is distributed. Power is a network. - This ideal prison consisted of a ring of cells that was built around a central point of observation from which one single guardian could survey all the cells, which were open to inspection, on a given floor. However, the prisoner cannot see the supervisor. He never knows if he is being watched. - This is for Foucault the ‘major effect’ of the Panopticon. - Inmates supervise each other. - And so a ‘real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation’. For Foucault the Panopticon stands for the modern world in which we are ‘the bearers’ of our own figurative, mental, imprisonment. We are complicit in our own bondage. - There is no inspector but they are still subjected. Even if there is nothing, the mechanism continues. Some surveillance cameras may not be working but everyone thinks they do and act accordingly. Olmadığı halde iktidarı üreten mekanizmalar = panopticon. ## 5 - The Poststructuralist Revolution: - Everything is historical, everything is in discourse. - Identity is not seen as essential anymore. - Derrida: Meaning is fluid. Opposed Saussure. Meaning arises out of the rupture. He thinks signifier > signified. - Subject arises with a rupture, a split, a lack (Lacan). So, there is no unified, perfect notion of subjectivity. ## Poststructuralism: - Truths are not timeless - We should treat all claims based on them with caution, objective knowledge is impossible, questions essentialism(özcülük), claim to lasting truth, challenges their claims to permanence to lasting truth ## Deconstruction: - Jacques Derrida. Derrida de-stabilizes truth, closure. *Of Grammatology*(Derrida). - neologism, difference(difference to differ) - moment of signification. closure is impossible. - J. Hillis Miller: ‘Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself - differential structure & language. - The chain of signification: signifiers -> signified -> signifier - reality is discursive. there is nothing that is ‘outside-text (derrida). ## Binary Oppositions, Revisited: - rupture between the signifier and the signified. no transcendental signified. logocentrism. ## Literary Deconstruction: - Implications: - infinite flow of meanings. not true discourse but true resistance. Foucault challenges enlightenment.