I’m looking forward to when academic discourse begins to catch up with ongoing discussions online regarding representations of gender and sexuality in video games and other geeky ephemera. Today in the genre is a short history of sex in video games by Cara Ellison in Vice. I think it focuses a bit too much on the explicitly sexual and thus misses some examples that aren’t meant to be titillating. The most obvious is Atlus’s Catherine, which explores desire and infidelity in the context of — because why not — a puzzle game. But otherwise, it’s a fun read that also gives some nice nods to the way the medium has grown and matured over the past few decades.
Month: July 2014
Conservative politics will have conservative results
I’m not infrequently asked why I think that gay marriage support has basically reached takeoff velocity in the past couple years. My ordinary response is obliquely related to what I’ve been talking about in my past couple posts; it’s largely the effect of more and more people coming out of the closet. The cumulative effect of these individual acts simply reveals first, the ordinariness of gay people and second, their prevalence. The regional differences I’ve noted are obviously important, but for the most part people have gotten used to the fact that queers are here and they’ve gotten used to it. Joan Walsh, however, points to why gay marriage demands have, in the grand scheme of things, been relatively easily been accommodated: its politics are essentially conservative:
I’ve come to believe that the difference exists because, except for far right religious extremists and outright homophobes, marriage equality is, at heart, a conservative demand – letting gays and lesbians settle down and start families and have mortgages just like the rest of us will contribute to the stability of families and society.
As she acknowledges, this echoes a long-standing and ultimately successful argument in favor of gay marriage by the likes of Andrew Sullivan and more recently Ted Olsen. But Walsh also puts this trend into dialog with more troubling developments regarding women’s rights. While we’ve seen the onward march of gay rights, feminist accomplishments are being rolled back.
Walsh tries to avoid putting LGBT accomplishments into conflict with women’s rights (“I don’t mean to pit women against the LGBT community, or suggest one side is “winning” at the expense of the other), but its actually a bit hard to do. If the movement, as represented by mainstream organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, has deployed an essentially conservative vision of the family, then should we not recognize the possibility that it has, in fact, contributed to the solidification of opposition to forms of sexuality outside it? Gay marriage advocates have very effectively normalized gay partnerships, but in doing so they’ve also normalized the family itself and so have perhaps contributed to the resistance to a politics dedicated to increasing not just women’s, but everyone’s sexual autonomy outside those confines.
Content Warning: “Homosexual Wedding”
Today, I came across another article related to my continuing interest with people who apparently don’t know any gay people. This one is from a town in Pennsylvania whose high school has canceled a performance of Spamalot because there’s apparently a same-sex marriage. I’ll take the principal’s word on that, but the local news article, while largely sympathetic to those protesting the move, seemed to only reinforce the school’s claim that “homosexuality does not exist in a conservative community such as South Williamsport” with its reference to a “homosexual wedding” as if its some odd foreign custom, rather than an act that has been legal in Pennsylvania for a couple months now.
Evidence, however, apparently exists that homosexuality does, in fact, exist in South Williamsport: “I’d just seen one of my friends walk with her girlfriend the other day. It’s definitely in my school and all around,” said Gianna Goegard, a student from South Williamsport. I love this. Goegard had “seen” one of her friends walking with her girlfriend. Did her friend not introduce the two of them? Had the friend told Goegard that she was gay? Did they ever talk about girlfriends and boyfriends? Did those gay people who were “all around” reveal themselves? Its a quick quote, to be sure, but Goegard seems to be making an assumption, rather than speaking on the basis of actual knowledge.
Even in its attempt to poke at the principal’s assertion that there were no “homosexuals” in South Williamsport, the article enforces that very view by raising evidence that relies on the closet itself. In other words, even the attempt to reveal the existence of homosexuality in a “conservative community such as South Williamsport” relies on enforcing homosexuality’s otherness by virtue of its continuing status as the “secret which always gives itself away” (David Halperin, Saint Foucault