[Warning: Discussion of sexual abuse in this post]
Do not talk to me on an airplane. When I sit down, normally with headphones already on, book in hand, I am not inviting a conversation with a stranger. And yet, my most recent trip (a short hour and change flight, thankfully) these standard strategies utterly failed in the face of an older woman who just needed to chat. I could tell, 20-minutes in, that I was not escaping this so I settled into a rhythm of “uh huhs” that I figured I could keep up for the rest of the flight. The worst that would happen, I assumed, was that I lost an hour while providing some company to a lady who, at most, lacked the self-awareness necessary to realize that I just wanted to finish my novel. But what a chat it became.
It started innocuously enough. She told me about her life, her children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. She was a retired teacher and school superintendent and a pastor. She told me about beginning teaching at 19, barely older than her students, and some of the problems and difficulties that entailed. She worked for 42 years before retiring. Things took a turn, however, when she began tell me why she doesn’t substitute teach any longer. She told me about an incident when she had to call a young kindergartner’s parents after the child had swore at her (“bitch, don’t touch me,” she claimed she said). Obviously not a good look for a five-year old, though who knows if that’s what was actually said. In any case, my airline companion proceeds to explain that she called in the students parents and it turns out that it was two dads. The child, who the teacher assumed was a girl, turned out to be a boy wearing girls’ clothes.
I gave a talk last week at the Art Gallery at Texas Christian University on the “queer gaze” in late nineteenth-century Paris. I arrived at an argument about the police’s relationship to that gaze that I didn’t necessarily expect. Here’s Part 1:
I came across the following tweet this morning and couldn’t help but think of all the times this has happened to me:
Today, I was sitting in front of a cafe in downtown D.C., minding my own goddamn business, when three people who were clearly tourists of some sort walked up and gestured for me to take out my headphones. And I did and one of them said: “Can we pray for you?”
I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now, so I’ll take the tweet (the whole thread, really) as an opportunity.
When this has happened to me, it’s usually either been because I am Jewish (my mom says I don’t “look Jewish,” but I’m not so sure) or because of random bad luck. The most vivid time it happened was when I was about 14, trapped on a ski lift with a random guy who just asked what my faith was and when I answered “Jewish,” launched into a speech (one he clearly delivered frequently) about how I should accept Jesus Christ. It shook me. Since moving to Mississippi, I’ve encountered proselytizing with more frequency than I had in Michigan or Ohio, but not by a huge amount. I remember sitting in a grocery store parking lot in Ann Arbor once, when a guy knocked on the car window in order to ask if I accepted Jesus. What has differed, however, is the way those moments have combined with other interactions to reinforce just how “weird” it seems to people to find a Jew down here.
Granted, part of this is my own doing insofar as I don’t attend the local synagogue (there is one). And yet, I’ve been surprised at how frequently I’ve felt that it was not my sexuality that rendered me different living in the Deep South, but rather my existence as a (secular) Jew. One time, after being approached by a stranger in a restaurant who asked if I had “found Jesus,” I tried to explain to someone who had grown up here their whole life why I found it so offensive. Namely, that it reeks of anti-Semitism to assume that Jews need “saving” and that it is incredibly condescending to assume that I haven’t considered my own spirituality just because I don’t practice a religion or haven’t turned toward Christianity. I understand that some forms of Christianity are more given to proselytizing than others, but such practices rely on a myopia about other people that helps explain some of the broader fears about strangers of all kinds that is so prominent in today’s conservative politics.
I’ve witnessed this firsthand throughout my four years in Hattiesburg, as again and again I encountered behavior that came out of ignorance much more than malice. During my first year here, I attended a university function that opened with a Christian prayer. A student asked me why the “Jews decided to go into the ghettos.” A burlesque show of all things told the audience they “loved their Jew friends” before peppering the crowd with basic trivia about Hanukah. Another student asked if I was “of the Jewish race,” while a third declared that Jews are more likely to get typhus “because of the Holocaust.”
Though these comments often set me back on my heels, I tried to use them as learning opportunities, especially with my students. That said, they reveal the ways in which the evangelism practiced in so many local churches is born out of a kind of ignorance that renders Jews something totally foreign. This only makes these encounters more uncomfortable: you know that if you engage you’re going to have a one-sided conversation. I honestly don’t think those who do this kind of thing really think about its actual (versus imagined) effects of those they approach. The assumption that all others share the same spiritual goals (we don’t) is reinforced by the notion that anyone who hasn’t found the “correct” path simply needs to be shown the way (we don’t). This is not to say that racism doesn’t also shape my life in the north, but this specific kind was unique to my experience in the south. Others’ mileage may vary.
I’ve just agreed to participate in a proposed workshop on personal identity, diversity, and academia at this year’s Western Society for French History. I certainly have some things to say about my work in sexuality studies, but ultimately it has been these experiences that have been most troublesome in the past few years. I should say very clearly that I have met wonderful people in Mississippi. But at the same time, I have never felt more “other” for being a Jew than I have while living here.
As I mention below, I’ve had the opportunity to talk and think about bit more about my teaching this academic year than is ordinary. I sometimes mention that I teach Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to undergraduates without actually assigning The History of Sexuality, which is usually too difficult (but also too central) a text to treat as just another course reading. Now that I’ve shared my strategy and materials for doing so with a couple colleagues and friends, I thought I’d just put them here. As always, feel free to adapt and use with acknowledgment.
First, it’s worth noting that I have a very specific goal when I introduce Foucault: to help students understand sexuality as a social construction. I most recently used the lesson in my Gay and Lesbian History course, but I’ve also used it in advanced seminars that may have broader themes. But the goal remains focused on that single task, rather than a broader introduction to Foucault’s thought. Of course, getting at that central point requires some discussion of Foucault’s understanding of power (for instance), but his broader theoretical insights often fall out of the conversation. I’m not really trying to introduce Foucault, but rather a central idea by way of a key thinker in the field.
My strategy follows the goal. Rather than taking up the book as I whole, I choose four individual paragraphs that (step-by-step) take us through Foucault’s line of thought on that particular issue (if time, I also include a fifth, on “resistance” on the PowerPoint as well). Breaking apart the argument allows me to simplify the claim (overly simplify, perhaps): that Foucault wanted us to focus not on the ways that sexuality has been “repressed,” but rather how it was “produced.” I reduce this idea to a mantra that I repeat over and over: “production, not repression.” I emphasize the idea because of the ways we (not just students) can so often find ourselves sliding into analyses and interpretations that emphasize repression. When we see the police encountering men who sought sex with other men, for instance, we tend to move them into the boxes of oppressor and oppressed. That may be, in part, the case, but it doesn’t capture Foucault’s argument. (This is, it is worth emphasizing, how I get at some of Foucault’s notions of power without directly addressing it in class or bogging down our conversation).
The four chosen paragraphs (see the handout) emphasize four parts of the overall claim and proceed in order of the book (as well as, I believe, order of difficulty): The “Repressive Hypothesis,” the “Incitement to Discourse,” the “Multiplication of Perversions,” and the “Production of Sexuality.” After introducing Foucault’s basic biography and his contribution to the field (so to explain why we’re going to spend so much effort understanding him), I get students into groups with a single task: explain what one of these paragraphs mean. By removing the argument from the overall context of the book, students are able to better focus on the sentence-level argument being made, without worrying about not grasping the whole thing. That’s not to say that this is easy (it is definitely not). But it is easier to show students that they can break apart difficult texts, isolate the parts from the whole, and, only after understanding them on their own terms, bring them back together.
So, to take one example, the first paragraph lays out the “Repressive Hypothesis.” The paragraph lays out the idea that, beginning in the seventeenth century, the modern West laid out a series of “prohibitions” on how one could take about sex. The Victorian era in particular had an approach to sex could be defined by a single word: “Censorship” (17). For students who have encountered something of Victorian history, they get this on the basis of their vision of the period. For students without such a background, they get it on an intuitive level.
But then, we move to the next paragraph (which follows very closely in the book itself), which directly contradicts the point of the first. This paragraph usually requires more work. The language is more jargony (you have to be ready to define “discourse,” “power,” and other complexities) and the paragraph is constructed on the basis of rejecting the assumptions of the reader. Students need to learn how to read closely to catch the various signs of internal disagreement, of Foucault moving through the argument himself. Take the first sentence. The keyword “however” tells us that the prior point may not be correct. But then rather than telling the reader what he actually believes, Foucault introduces another statement that may be wrong (“I am thinking not so much of the probable increase in ‘illicit’ discourses…” [emphasis added]). The final sentence, beginning with “But,” finally gets to the actual claim: That “an institutional incitement to speak” during the period contradicts the idea of “censorship” (lots of words to define here too). Lesson 1 then: Foucault believes that the “Repressive Hypothesis” is wrong and that in fact people were encouraged to speak about sex in “endlessly accumulated detail” (18). If students remember just that point, I am more successful than the first time I taught the book.
Breaking the book into simple(r) pieces and then breaking those pieces into smaller bits allows us to slowly scaffold a fuller understanding of the material. It took two class periods and change (so perhaps about 2.5-3 hours total) to go through all four paragraphs last time I did this. That length of time wouldn’t be necessary (or wouldn’t happen naturally) with a less talkative group, but the time is well worth it because of how well it builds a foundation to which we can constantly go back.
This semester, I participated in a couple roundtables on teaching the history of the sexuality. The first, unfortunately not recorded, took place in Memphis, TN and was sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Featuring historians working in both universities and elsewhere, the discussion took on the broad topic of “Approaching Difficult Topics in the Classroom.” The second was a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Western Society for French History entitled “Teaching Gender and Sexuality in French History” and was recorded. I’ve embedded the video of my part below; links to the other participants, as well as to the audience discussion portion, is available in the most recent edition of the H-France Salon.
All too often we struggle to just get the next class prepped, so I valued the opportunity to really just stop and think about my teaching. In both cases, I tried to consider how my specific experience teaching gender and sexuality at the University of Southern Mississippi not only tells us something about the deep south, but how we can integrate these topics more fully into our classrooms elsewhere as well. That my institutional context in some ways requires me to think more carefully about how I address sex in particular only heightens, I think, my own awareness of the necessity of developing clear strategies in doing so. At the same time, that sexuality studies is not as present here also reveals the sheer demand for such courses. One thing I have learned is that students have a deep desire to have these conversations. Its up to us to find ways to provide the space for them to do so.
Forrest County Courthouse and Confederate Monument located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
A couple days ago, in my role as a member of the advisory board of the USM Center for Human Rights and Civil Liberties, I organized and moderated a forum on Confederate memorialization. The context of such an event is contentious, to say the least. For the past 102 weeks (they are counting), protestors have appeared every Sunday to demonstrate against the removal of the Mississippi state flag from campus, which occurred in the wake of Dylan Roof’s attack in Charleston, S.C. The Mississippi State flag is the final flag in the country to include the Confederate battle flag. Any discussion of memorialization connects immediately to the debate over the flag, which led the Sons of Confederate Veterans to advertise our event and ensure that some folks were present to represent their views. A few did show up, including one woman — wearing a shirt with a small Confederate flag — who decided to film the proceedings without asking permission and another who audibly moaned and called the panelists’ “idiots” under her breath. Coming face-to-face with right-wing internet culture was certainly an experience (the one who kept moaning called a grad student — who had said nothing during the proceedings — a “social justice warrior” after he expressed displeasure at her rudeness, which included calling an undergraduate a “shitface”).
They needn’t have worried as the views of the SVC would have been represented regardless, in some form at least. Confronted with the notion that the Confederacy cannot be distinguished from the cause for which it was fought (slavery, for the record, or, if you prefer, white supremacy), some audience members seemed bewildered, others launched canards and red herrings at the presenters. What seems to come up most often, both from proponents and opponents of the monuments, is the idea that one can abstract the Confederacy out of its specific historic context and instead stand it as an almost universalizing principle (honor, loyalty, defense of family, etc). One person stood up and said that it was impossible to know why many of the soldiers fought in the Civil War, so to memorialize them was not necessary to memorialize slavery or white supremacy. This is a red herring. It is true that we cannot know why many individual soldiers fought in the Civil War; but it is also true that we do not memorialize individual soldiers (beyond the commanders). The memorial in Hattiesburg, for instance, is dedicated to the Confederate soldiers who fought for “their country.” The memorial stands in for the soldiers as a group who, together, fought to preserve the institution of slavery. Whether or not any individual soldier did not agree with or did not even understand why the war was being fought is irrelevant to what the Confederacy stood for and to what these memorials in turn represent.
It is precisely the need to be clear as to the meaning of the Confederacy that complicates one of the first fallacies to come up at our panel: the slippery slope (combined with a bit of whataboutism). The idea that we cannot distinguish between a statue of George Washington — or even Thomas Jefferson — from someone like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis is absurd on its face. As Josh Marshall says, “the first question we should ask is: What is the person known for? How did they earn a place in our collective public remembrance?” If the answer is simply and only “the Confederacy” then we have a problem; if the answer is more complex, then we can have a good discussion. The only reason we remember either Lee or Davis is their association with the Confederacy. Washington and Jefferson, for all their very real faults, are remembered for more than their position as slave-holders (though we should do better at incorporating that into our memory of both).
As several of the students in the audience recognized, the case of the Nazi past is instructive. Although it elicited gasps from our neo-Confederate audience members, the comparison may not be exact, but it is apt. It is not worth outlining all the pros and cons of the comparison, except to note that both the Confederacy and Nazi Germany were regimes that fought in the name of white supremacy and the enslavement and murder of a specific group of people (even if the ultimate goal was not shared and the targets were different and — significantly — defined in very different ways). Generally speaking, Germany does not have memorials to the soldiers of the Wehrmacht. This absence is not because German families do not understand the sacrifice of the soldier. Indeed, historians have not shied away from asking, not only to what extent were ordinary soldiers perpetrators of the crimes of the Nazis, but to what extent they were — especially toward the end of the war — also victims. These questions are complex and the histories that emerge out of them are likewise complicated. But memorials do not lend themselves to complication; rather, they simplify, usually in the name of glorification. They stand for what we want, as a community, to represent “us.” They are, in this sense, active in the production of community. As Germany wrestled with and eventually came to terms with its own crimes, it decided that it would not recognize even the abstract values of the World War II soldier because to do so would be to bind it to the cause for which it fought. We should recognize the same with Confederate memorials.
We need more shame in this country. The resistance to acknowledging what the Confederacy was and what Confederate memorials represent is, in itself, a resistance to shame. Shame of our country; shame of our ancestors; shame of ourselves. But shame is a good thing for a community to acknowledge because it helps it recognize error; it helps us mature. Those who defend the monuments want to be proud of their ancestors; the urge is recognizable. But ultimately, it is fine to be ashamed of them. Their crimes only reflect upon you if you allow them to.
At the end of the event, a student asked if the German example offered any lessons for us today. Although I was serving as moderator, not as panelist, I took the question as the only Europeanist present. I explained a bit about how in some ways Denazification paralleled Reconstruction. If both ultimately failed, they did so for different reasons and, I argued, Denazification at least set the groundwork for a later re-appreciation of the Nazi past in the way that the end of Reconstruction and the urge to forgive and forget did not. In that regard, I said, the German experience of memorialization has only limited value as a lesson to us because we missed our opportunity; we will, I argued, have to find our own path.
And yet, thinking on it a bit more after the event, I considered that it took about two generations for Germany to reckon with its crimes. In part, this was due to outside forces (film, especially) that encouraged Germans to look at the Holocaust in new ways. In part, however, it was also due to the passage of time; the grandchildren of the perpetrators were more prepared than their parents to deal with the guilt. If we see today’s debate over memorialization as a fight not over the Civil War, but rather over Civil Rights, then we might have some reason to hope. The grandchildren of those who fought Civil Rights are and will continue to come of age. All snark about millennials aside, it may be up to them to reshape our culture of memory.
Huge n’tl sample makes #CCES2016 great for examining age distributions of gays & lesbians vs bis. Both life-cycle & cohort effects here. pic.twitter.com/D3uuZh9qxf
After the election, I began reading a bit more conservative media in order to get out of my so-called “bubble.” One of those publications is the American Conservative, which today published a post by Rod Dreher that surprised me. Enough that it got me to actually put something new up on this here blog. Dreher is responding to some data showing higher than expected numbers of young people claiming an lesbian, gay, or bisexual identity. In response, the post argues that this rise is due to a loosening of heterosexual, familial norms, encouraging young people to experiment and identify in ways that they otherwise would not have. What the post is not, however, is an argument for immutable heterosexuality; it rests, not on the apparently natural status of heterosexuality, but rather on its fragility:
It must be that there are young people who experience homosexual desires as teenagers, but who do not act on them for reasons of religious belief or social custom. Later in life — in their twenties, say — their sexual desire solidifies as heterosexual, allowing them to form a stable marital bond with someone of the opposite sex, and start a family. Had they had the opportunity to experiment with homosexuality as a teenager, they might have remained confused and unstable well into adulthood.
Social prohibition on homosexuality activity, therefore, is needed not because homosexuality betrays some fundamental truth of nature, but because without it more people will become homosexual. As he points out, quoting a “friend and reader of this blog,” sexuality is “polymorphous.” Therefore, according to Dreher, we need strong social norms in order to encourage the building of heterosexual families, equated with “stable homes.”
Two assumptions are thus put into play. On the one hand, in agreement with queer thinkers, sexuality is not innate, but is rather socially produced. Rather than invoking this notion, however, in order to really reckon with the myriad ways people behave and identify, he uses the claim to support the reimposition of strong norms in order to enforce heterosexuality. Instead of taking up the polymorphous nature of sexuality evidence of the contingency of heterosexuality, it remains only evidence of the threat represented by non-hetersesexual identities and acts. On the other hand, while he emphasizes the dangers of sexual fluidity, he fails to even acknowledge the contingent nature of his own definition of the “stable home.” Contra Dreher, research shows that having gay parents leads to the same different outcomes as having straight parents. Preserving, protecting, and shoring up heterosexuality therefore would do little to actually achieve the goal Dreher supposedly wants to pursue: protecting and supporting children. That the post uses the example of “broken homes” to illustrate the argument, rather than any actual cases of queer parenting, underscores the slippage here. The norm’s qualitative value is always simply assumed;
The equation of the so-called “broken home” with gay parenting, combined with his reading of data showing greater numbers of self-identified LGBT people as itself, by definition, evidence “against the normalization of LGBT” showcases the base homophobia that’s really at work. The “data” that Dreher points to in order to buttress his argument simply shows that more people identify as LGBT, not that such identification constitutes any actual harm to anyone else. Few real thinkers on the subject would disagree with his initial point that sexuality emerges from some combination of nature and nature. But his conclusion that we have an obligation to ensure that the nurture remains essentially regulatory — disciplinary, in other words — only highlights his ultimate fear: that heterosexuality isn’t so strong in the first place.
This is why his conclusion actually fails to uphold the initial idea of the post. He ends by claiming that young people who experiment with same-sex sexual desire may live to regret those “choices” because “you thought your true self was something else.” No thought that the reverse could be just as true. For Dreher, homosexuality may be a “choice,” but heterosexuality is “true.” He thus participates in producing the very fiction he claims to be undoing: that sexuality is inborn. Read this way, any apparent willingness to read “sexuality” as polymorphous and socially constituted only refers to non-normative forms.
This is not the first time I have seen references to social constructionism levied to these ends (I unfortunately can’t find the article from a few years back that I’m thinking of). Such claims underscore the sometimes ambivalent relationship between theory and activism. Dreher is certainly right, for instance, when he claims that the argument that LGBT people are “born that way” was more political than it was based in any real data. Queer theorists have long warned against these kinds of “minoritarian” claims, insofar as they essentialize a minority population. And yet, arguments such as Dreher’s illustrate the flip side of the coin. The emphasis on unstable identities opens us up to claims that homosexuality is contingent and thus changeable. Both kinds of arguments reduce vastly complex features of human existence to simplicity and, most importantly for this historian, ignore the ways that identities emerge out of long processes that cannot really be reduced to any combination of nature and nurture, let alone one or the other. Better, it seems to me, is to do precisely what Dreher so fears and provide as much space as possible for people to find themselves, in whatever mode that may be.
I just listened to On the Media’s interview with Cameron Okeke, the author of a recent article at Vox regarding the recent letter sent to incoming students at the University of Chicago regarding “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.” Okeke argues that it is only by providing safe spaces in which minority students can have the opportunity to engage with one another without being imposed upon by members of the majority can universities be truly fulfill their supposed goals regarding diversity. His comments about the importance of the Office of Multicultural Affairs at Chicago brought a rush of memories about my own experience with the Student Activities Office at Washington University in St. Louis. The irony of both Okeke’s and my own memories of these spaces is that they were precisely those in which we were most challenged. These were the spaces in which people you could assume were fundamentally allies could question your assumptions, push you to consider other people’s points of view, and learn about the variety of people’s life experiences. The Student Activities Office — and especially the “Spectrum Suite,” where the campus LGBTQ group met — was where I learned about the specific challenges that face transgender individuals, where people of faith and those without worked to understand why some LGBTQ folk still found value in the church or synagogue and others did not, and where I recall quite clearly being called out for an uncritical use of the word “queer” as a political stance. Despite all the various points of potential and actual conflict what was never in question was the assumption of one another’s value as not only a fellow human being, but as an LGBTQ person.
My current institution is in Mississippi, which obviously presents unique challenges to fostering a community space that values the diversity of the state that we are quite proud to reflect. A recent “Campus Climate Survey” did not provide much good news, for instance, regarding how LGBTQ and non-Christian students in particular feel about Southern Miss. In addition, like public universities throughout the country, we are in a constant state of budget-anxiety, which is not exactly conducive to advocating for the opening of new spaces for minority groups. I bring this up because, despite these challenges, the administration does seem committed to making some changes, including the constitution of an advisory committee for LGBTQ issues that would also take the lead in training community members who wish to indicate that their office is a “safe space.” In a positive development, Southern Miss seems to committed to the creation, rather than the suppression, of at least some safe spaces.
I’ve decided to volunteer to be on this committee, but not without some ambivalence. Many people who went to college during the late 1990s and early 2000s will remember seeing little placards with a pink triangle outside faculty and dorm room doors indicating that that place was welcoming to LGBTQ people. The placards read to me too much of a period that I had thought we had moved beyond. Individual campus offices should not be “safe” because the entire campus must be; I should not have to indicate to my students that I am not a homophobe because all faculty and staff (to say nothing of the student body) should be against homophobia. The burden of the assumption seems to be misplaced in some ways. But even my last job, at a small liberal arts college in the north, where the idea of these placards would probably have been deemed passé, had a couple homophobic events during my time there (banners getting ripped down and that sort of thing). Reading and listening to Okeke and reflecting on these new initiatives reflect the continuing need for universities to take an active role in fostering the ability of their students to, basically, figure themselves out free from at least some of the constant burdens that may face in everyday life. Those who construct the straw man as a space free from intellectual or other kinds of conflict fundamentally misunderstand their purpose. It’s not to “coddle” students that such spaces are necessary, but rather to strengthen them. Perhaps that’s why those with power often seem to be so scared of them.
