Feeling Backward (why queer theory still matters)

I recently received a reader’s report for a book proposal in which the anonymous reviewer refers to queer theory as being ‘mid 1990s’ and ‘once cutting edge’. I was struck by the notion that queer theory was over, faddish and outdated and my first response to this was that queer theory will be over when homophobia, the closet, and so on is also over. In order to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of queer theory I would like to introduce a few ideas from a recent ‘queer theory’ book that also helped me make sense of pleasures that might be construed as wholly negative. The question then is why is Brokeback Mountain pleasurable when it also makes me feel bad?

In Heather Love's Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2007) she explains why hurtful, melancholic and depressing experiences constitute contemporary queer identity and thus need to be acknowledged, incorporated and negotiated since ‘many of these unlikely feelings are closely tied to the realities of queer experience past and present.’ (147) In this respect, Brokeback Mountain is a text that has a backward logic. It uses the past to speak to the present as it narrates a depressing story of historical injury and bad feeling in order to connect to a contemporary audience who may feel that they are still negotiating or finding it difficult to dispel a shameful and homophobic past – homosexuality is problematic! Love continues:

'Backwardness means many things here; shyness, ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, shame. I describe backwardness both as queer historical structure of feeling and as a model for queer historiography.' (146)

Many of the terms in Love’s quote may describe the characters and their narrative situations in Brokeback Mountain, as well as the spectator’s response to the film. It is important that the film does provoke negative and bad feeling. It is not a joyous experience; rather it is a film that leaves one feeling hurt and emotionally devastated in its backward turn. Yet, this is somehow what is rewarding about the film also. Brokeback Mountain’s stress on negative and depressive histories of the homosexual past help to constitute contemporary gay and lesbian identity and subjectivity since ‘the experience of queer historical subjects is not a safe distance from contemporary experience; rather, their social marginality and abjection mirror our own.’ (32)


The backward feeling and the pathos in the film articulate a refusal to see progress in the way it is often imagined by gay pride discourses. Brokeback Mountain demands us to accept that homosexuality is still impossible for many, that it is still permeated by tragedy and melancholia, and that it has a history that is still unresolved and needful of being properly negotiated in the present. Love’s work helps to unlock the process of understanding negative pleasures in political terms especially in relation to films like Brokeback Mountain. The film reminds queers that their modern subjectivity is constituted by a painful, closeted, homophobic history and that feeling backward and feeling bad are also important affective dimensions of queer subjectivity in the present.

(image: screen grab; permissions)

Re-Reading a scene from Red River

Retrospectatorship after Brokeback Mountain

Patricia White in her book unInvited proposes the concept of retro-spectatorship. Retro-spectatorship is a way of negotiating the history of Hollywood through contemporary practices of spectatorship and the identities and cultural politics we now bring to our viewing of the past. Through retro-spectatorship, Brokeback Mountain solicits us to re-view the classical Hollywood western ‘that belongs to the past but is experienced in a present that affords us new ways of seeing’ (97). Therefore, as a contemporary western Brokeback Mountain’s helps us to shape a retrospective reading of older westerns, particularly those westerns such as Red River and Calamity Jane that have either struggled to disavow their homoerotic underpinnings or made obvious a range of queer possibilities. Its not that re-reading the classic western is an appropriating practice or subversive re-imagining rather, no reading of the text is the correct one its just that straightness is the default position of culture that we have all some point internalised as a practice. The point here is that Brokeback Mountain answers the call to all those elided and hinted at stories of same sex desire in the Hollywood western by retrospectively prompting a return back to films like Red River from a vaulted position of contemporary spectatorship. Brokeback Mountain engenders a privileging of being able to un-think assumptions about westerns in relation to sexuality. As Patricia White brilliantly demonstrates in her re-reading of lesbianism in classical Hollywood cinema, our spectatorial vantage point as queer subjects is steeped in knowingness about how Hollywood edited out homosexuality and cast it to the realm of the merely connotative. D. A. Miller in his analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope, suggests that the eliding of homosexuality’s denotation ‘exploits the particular aptitude of connotation for allowing homosexual meaning to be elided even as it is also being elaborated’ which, explains how homosexuality by its absence is made meaningful throughout classical Hollywood cinema.

A contemporary viewing of Red River, armed with the knowledge that one of its central stars Montgomery Clift was gay, provides the insight that retrospectatorship reveals in the films homoerotics that are barely contained in ‘the shadow kingdom of connotation’. (Miller: 125) The spectator’s first introduction to Montgomery Clift’s as the Matthew Garth character is startling in its invitation to look at his handsome boyish looks, standing aloof he seems to be gazing down towards John Wayne’s crotch while sucking on a piece of straw (shot 1).

Shot 1

The camera cuts from the medium shot to a close-up of Clift’s face as he looks towards Wayne that instantly constructs him in relation to a relay of desiring looks. In the facial close-up Clift looks on, tonguing the single piece of straw that dangles from his mouth.(Shot 2 and 3) The shot of Clift’s face seems to linger for an extra beat but it’s the minor detail in the piece of straw where a queer reading of Clift’s body and performance values such minutiae as it suddenly jumps out retrospectively as a signifier of Clift’s queerness, his character’s desire for Wayne and our desire for him. He plays with the piece of straw in a way that hints and suggests sex, an oral tease, delicately phallic but undeniable in its capacity to be read as homoerotic.

Shot 2

Shot 3

Steve Cohan also discusses Clift’s performance in Red River describing how he ‘uses physical gestures to draw attention to his presence in a shot, rubbing his face, caressing his nose, holding his chin, sitting side-saddle on his horse’ to the extent that it ‘implies Matthew’s passivity as erotic spectacle’. (216) Cohan’s reading of film emphasis ‘the trope of boyishness’ in Montgomery Clift in contradistinction to the manliness of John Wayne as the film sets out working through its opposition between the soft boy and the hard man. Clift’s softness in Red River helps to define his erotic appeal and Cohan points out that its precisely this aspect of his performance which challenges the hegemonic forms of masculinity typified in the film by John Wayne.

References
Steve Cohan (1997) Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. New York and London: Routledge
D. A. Miller (1991) ‘Anal Rope’ in Diana Fuss (ed) Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. London and New York: Routledge.
Patricia White (1999) unInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

(Images: screen grabs; permissions)

"Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache"

While researching my book on Brokeback Mountain I am also exploring the multiple connections between the western (as a genre) and the West (as a mythic concept) in relation to gay culture. The concept of the West as a space of homosocial freedom and the fantasy of the cowboy are ongoing fascinations and it’s interesting how they are transformed and made meaningful in relation cultural identity. ‘The West’ in US gay culture is also a reference to the movement Westward to California in the 1970s, San Francisco in particular, and is a migratory moment resonant in the history of American post-Stonewall gay male identity; it’s the implicit subject of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the recent film Milk. This idea also finds its widespread expression in the Village People’s over-exposed disco anthem Go West (1979) that explicitly connects discourses of liberation and self-discovery with the movement Westward, in fact, their very first release was titled San Francisco (You got Me). Go West reworks the nineteenth century expression ‘go west young man’ coined by US politician and newspaper editor Horace Greeley. While the sentiment of Greeley’s phrase is rooted in colonial conquest and expansion in the move Westward along the Mississippi River, the Village People’s lyrics instead signify that other movement of men West, the so-called 1970s ‘gay flight’. However, the Village people are a rather problematic group when it comes to sexual politics and it’s a misnomer to think of them as in any way ‘a gay band’ or even properly representative of disco despite their self-conscious fashioning through the iconography of gay machismo and the four-to-the-floor beat. The genesis of the band was a response to an advert in a music paper that read "Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance And Have A Moustache". As an eventual pop realisation of disco the Village People were eschewed by gay culture proper and would rarely if ever be heard in the legendary discos because the Village People was actually a bit naff and rather embarrassing. More importantly, the Village People were often tight lipped on homosexuality in interviews (most of them it turns out were straight) despite being sold as an idolatory vision of popular gay macho stereotypes. Thus, despite being explicitly if parodisitic in their visual presentation of gayness and macho vocal posturing, a band name that alludes to New York’s Greenwich Village, and suggestive lyrics focusing on gay culture (Cruisin') and gay positive expressions (I am what I am), the Village People’s apparent homosexuality (which I imagine is axiomatic of how most people interpret the act) was nothing more than smoke and mirrors with good musical production.

The meaning of the Village People’s later songs were expressed in a double-voiced strategy (lyrics mean different things to different people) but the group were certainly anchored through the stereotypical way in which different iconic forms of American masculinity such as the cowboy become a fancy dress version of gay erotica in popular culture writ large. However, when images of cloned up cowboys are couched in lyrics that celebrate the West as a gay utopia it continues to foment the West and the cowboy through liberation and freedom. California was the new frontier for gay America and it just so happens that some of those men were free to dress in ways that channel the apparent freedom the cowboy represents recasting the horizon as a sexual frontier. What is important here is that the Village People’s song that suggests going West ‘where the air is free, we'll be what we want to be’ is grounded in discourses of the West and the cowboy thus bringing together a historical moment in American post-stonewall gay identity, the continuing movement of men westward, and an ongoing tradition of a male-male relations in Western lore. Furthermore, this western dance music fantasy continues well after disco to include Divine’s Walk Like A Man (1984) Erasure’s Who Needs Love Like That (1985), and more recently the knowingly homoerotic rodeo styling (clothes by Dsquared - S/S 2006 picture below) of Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me (2000).

(Image Credits - Casablanca Records; Dsquared; Permissions)

Goldilocks (aka Amanda Holden) and the Three Bears.

Last night (Friday 29th) I was privy with millions of other television viewer’s to a camp spectacle on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. This spectacle was called The Dreambears. Three twenty-something chubby gay men camping about on stage doing all manner of pirouettes, arrières, and changement de pieds; all this is choreographed to the Weather Girls Its Raining Men. Why is it worth blogging about? My answer is not The Dreambears attempt at ballet (or burlesque or Bob Fosse) which of course is fine rather, I’m bothered by the way in which prime-time television negotiates and mutes the subcultural aspects of their bear-ness in order to make gayness hyper-legible to the audiences through terms they are more familiar with. The Dreambears are not off the hook either since they are in part complicit in their own camp debasement as the first prime-time bears. This legibility in their performance is achieved through the erasure of the bear’s subcultural aspects that then work to contain the potential of bear masculinity to be viewed as completely ordinary, unfussy, and ultimately boring for TV. The way Britain’s Got Talent erases the bear, except in name, was manifold in three strategies that disrupt the bears’ literal masculine definition of themselves as the man’s man version of gayness. Here are a few observations.

Strategy 1. Make them look as camp as possible. Dress all the bears up as Daffyd from Little Britain in ultra tight PVC shorts and sparkly union jack vests. The Dreambears mention the costume department’s role in bringing us this tired vision. As an extra note one should observe that known gay presenters on television (the BBC holy trinity of Graham Norton, Dale Winton and John Barrowman) are compelled to wear sparkly, glittery, reflective, and garishly patterned suits as a semiotic articulation of their prime-time gayness which otherwise remains unspeakable.

Strategy 2. Deal with their fatness. Since the bear’s chubbiness is considered to be erotically appealing within the subculture it’s important to disavow this central aspect of bear identity by making them look silly as fat bodies out of place. Put them in camp outfits five sizes too small and make them do ballet that ought to do the trick. Did I mention that the connection to the Weather Girls It’s Raining Men is not just about music also but also corpulent excess?

Strategy 3. It’s really got nothing to do with sex. Bear subculture is also predicated on a sexual hierarchy based on age, size and ways of communicating within those hierarchized relations through terms such as ‘daddy’ and verbs like ‘to paw’ and ‘to maul’. In the first instance, The Dreambears look like cubs to me and have not yet graduated to being fully-fledged big daddy bears. If you didn’t know already bears tend to be stout gay men, preferable hirsute but not essential, accommodating of a wide but hierarchical age range (which is then divided into cubs, otters, wolves, polar bears etc). An oversimplification of their self-promotion would suggest that bears often shun the apparent narcissistic, sissified, slender, fashionable, and consumption-led gays that have often come to represent the stereotypical gay as if bears themselves were not just as regulated as the next queer.


What ITV’s strategies do here (but not forgetting the complicity of The Dreambears) is to work against the potential for these prime-time bears to destabilize normative assumptions between certain alignments of homosexuality and masculinity. In turn, Britain’s Got Talent confirms what people already think they know about homosexuality on television, light entertainment in particular, that is, its only meaningful and acceptable as risible de-sexed camp spectacle (with soaps being the alternative). Something Richard Dyer once wrote is applicable here – “In taking the signs of masculinity and eroticizing them in a blatantly homosexual context, much mischief is done to the security with which ‘men’ are defined in society, and by which their power is secured” (167). It’s precisely this potential for mischief that Britain’s Got Talent attempts to contain in its camping up and desexualisation of a modern gay subculture.

Though Amanda Holden does make a good Goldilocks!


Reference: Richard Dyer (1992) ‘Getting over the rainbow’ in Only Entertainment. London: Routledge.

(Photo credits: frame grab; pinups mag; permissions)

Remembering Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)

Two brilliant women sadly passed away in April after long battles with cancer. The legendary small screen actress Bea Arthur (1922-2009), whose obituary was of course well publicized, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009), the scholar and activist who revolutionised gay and lesbian studies. Gary Needham and Liz Morrish both pay their tributes to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

It’s now significant that I remember reading Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love (1999) while looking after the grandmother who raised me and who was fading away from (the then unknown) rapid metastasis from breast cancer. I never thought of that affective link between these two influential figures in my life until now. I came to Eve Sedgwick and queer theory on my own in my first year as a postgraduate in Glasgow (in 2000) since it was something that was never taught to me so I never knew what to expect from it, yet, I knew that I ought to start exploring it. Well, I can honestly say queer theory transformed my academic life and purpose, namely the relationship between my identity and what was really the point of being an academic in the first place; a real transformation where film studies (my discipline) was usurped by queer and LGBT studies. I’d probably be writing histories of Italian cinema and obscure movies (not that they aren’t important things to write about) if it wasn’t for the inspiration and insight that I owe to Eve Sedgwick and her books Between Men (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1993), and Touching Feeling (2003). I’m sure we all secretly have our favourite scholars but Eve was different in that she never seemed to be writing from the measured distance of most scholarship. When she wrote, especially in Tendencies, you got the feeling that a good friend was telling you this stuff. There was something about Eve’s writing that felt more like an act of sharing and the joy of her writing and thinking was not only that it was smart, in fact really smart, but that it was heartfelt and honest. So when I read that on the 12th of April Eve had passed away from the same thing as my grandmother I was deeply saddened. Even though I’ve never met Eve Sedgwick, the experience was as if a friend had somehow passed away; that’s the kind of effect that Eve’s writing has on you. I can honestly say that I wouldn’t be the scholar I am without Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. (Gary)

Eve Sedgwick was for me the Martina Navratilova of queer theory, dominating all over the place and queering the disciplines, but mystifyingly, she was not quite entirely queer herself. She leaves a husband of some 40 years. Well, that’s how the straight world might see her, but then Sedgwick’s entire project was to disrupt our expectations and conventional readings, even of the category queer. Perhaps the work which shocked the most was an essay “Jane Austen and the masturbating girl” (1989) which challenges the traditional interpretation of the behaviour of Austen’s characters. Sedgwick was rapidly elevated to queer diva status even as she was reviled by the Right in the US during the ‘culture wars’ of the 1990s. This was a time of divided campuses, when individuals were obliged to take sides. Just admitting to having read Epistemology of the Closet or Tendencies marked you as a queer radical committed to the downfall of Western civilization. Stanley Fish opened up space for alternative literary approaches at Duke and recruited Sedgwick, and she soon gathered around her a group of young thinkers and together they carried queer theory forward to its accepted position in critical theory today. (Liz)

(photo credit: David Shankbone, permissions)