2001-03-11 - 02:37:14
(Dirty) Girls Just Want To Have Fun
(Dirty) Girls Just Want To Have FunI am finally ready to begin responding to Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.
First off, I'm somewhat disappointed that the accessible, clear tone of Warner's Introduction (from which I quoted here) gets displaced in Chapter One by abstruse language and poorly organized paragraphs. (Yours truly recognizes academic prose from a mile away, eh?) A few well-placed topic and transition sentences would have helped; as it was, I had to read the chapter twice over to begin to make sense of his argument.
Let me see if I can paraphrase what Warner might be trying to say in Chapter One, "The Ethics of Sexual Shame".
The opening sentence deserves a quote: "Sooner or later, happily or unhappily, almost everyone fails to control his or her sex life." Sex is inherently disgraceful, according to Warner; there is no way around that fact. He calls this unavoidable disgrace 'shame,' being punished by others (or punishing oneself) for doing something wrong or bad or taboo. He distinguishes shame from 'stigma,' a deeper sense of wrongness or badness based on who/what one is. [1]
Moralistic North American culture perpetrates and codifies sexual shame. Over time, various sexual expressions not aimed at making babies within heterosexual marriage have been proscribed and condemned: masturbation, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual behavior. While some taboos have lessened--few bible thumpers preach the evils of masturbation anymore--archaic moralisms are alive and well in the 21st century. (Sex toys are illegal in Texas, as are blow-jobs--queer or hetero--in Virginia, for example.)
Moralism enforces shame through offensive statutes, yes, but it works more insidiously too: on the level of consciousness, Warner argues, sexual shame fucks us up by restricting knowledge of "what's out there" erotically that we might like. Sexually-speaking, mainstream culture stunts us. What's more, we don't even know we're repressed until we stumble onto such taboo knowledge; a bunch of social forces do their damndest to make sure such information and experience does not circulate.
Erotic variety has long been society's dirty little secret.
Alongside the ubiquitous shame which society inflicts on anyone--even the President--who has sex outside breeder marriage, Warner argues that gays and lesbians also face the stigma of being homos. Homosexuality became an identity, so the trendy poststructuralist Foucault argues, when 19th century medical and sexological doctors 'invented' homosexuals. No longer was sodomy merely a sin; homosexuals became an identifiable--and pathological--group, no matter whether they were actually taking it up the bum or not.
While our modern gay identity was born out of this shift over a century ago in the way we were being talked about and pathologized, Warner also concedes that the shift from shame to stigma gave rise to an important political movement: our fight throughout the 20th century for rights and dignity as gay people.
The crux of Warner's argument is this: with the gay movement's single-minded attempt to de-stigmatize our identity, it has shied away from combating the shame which mainstream culture continues to impose--on us and other erotic nonconformists--for sexual transgression. Our movement's leaders don't want to talk about the indignities of sex; they've become "enthralled by respectability," all too quick to condemn any sex within the so-called 'gay community' which does not conform to heterosexual norms.
Warner hints at a dissenting tradition within queer culture, a more radical embrace of and, paradoxically, opposition to sexual shame, long embedded in our history. This dissident streak in queer culture has its own set of ethics. I assume he will have more to say about that in subsequent chapters. He says our movement's trend towards normalizing (i.e., desexualizing) gay identity is misguided; instead of helping repress erotic knowledge and space, Warner says, the queer movement must radically challenge that repression.
That's my summary; now what do I actually make of all this?
I couldn't agree more. So far, I think Warner's argument is bang-on. I have long been disenchanted with gay politics' increasing emphasis on assimilation, the way our own 'leaders' urge us to to ape heterosexual norms.
I'm also impressed, so far, that Warner does not make reverse judgments about the choices queer folks make in their lives. He has not criticized "conventional" homos, gay men and lesbians for whom some or all heterosexual norms make sense; instead, he takes issue with the way the gay movement reproduces and entrenches moralistic judgements about shame in its wish to become respectable.
I prefer life down here in the gutter, thanks. And if some gay Republicans have a problem with that, fuck them.
We all know they'd enjoy it.
I was going to end there; it's late, and I'm beat. But I can't quite leave it at that.
I'm not as mad about this, most of the time, as Warner is. My experience has been that a lot of assimilationist queers are not judgmental, are actually quite fascinated and curious about the choices I make in my life, as are heaps of straight folks. Those kinds of "mainstreamers" are not the problem: I want to be perfectly clear about that.
I guess a lot of what I write here is an attempt to combat the shame of sex. I seem to keep insisting that zany, nonsensical, "shameful" erotic experience can bestow as much insight, beauty and emotional value as anything happening monogamously between the sheets in white-picket-fenced houses down the block.
And that, I suppose, is radical.
[1]I didn't get his distinction until I realized that for Warner, 'shame' seems to mean what I call guilt. His 'stigma' is akin to what I define as shame. I would have preferred that Warner used these terms, but I won't harp on this any further.
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