Queer History and the pitfalls of self-righteousness

As of this morning, the fall class schedule for Pasadena City College is finally online.  First, let me invite all of my students who read this blog to consider enrolling in my History 24F (scroll down) course:  Introduction to Lesbian and Gay American History: A survey of Queer American History from the 17th century to the present, with special attention to the 20th and
21st century gay rights movement.  It will meet Mondays and Wednesdays at 1:35PM, folks.

I'm not crazy about the subtitle I gave the course.  I had all of five minutes to come up with it last month, and would have perhaps written something more elegant with more time.   I was clear that I wanted to use the term "Queer", however.  When I first taught this course (back in 2001), I decided not to use the word that is today the standard descriptor for work in the field of gay and lesbian studies.   Some folks, I was afraid, would find the word too radical; others (especially of an older generation) would only know "Queer" in its pejorative sense, and be mystified as to why it would be used in a course outline.  I've changed my mind since, largely because I've come to see the terms "gay and lesbian" as both more limiting and historically more problematic than "Queer".

When I first taught the class, I expected outrage from the community.  I got very little.  I got a couple of nasty anonymous phone calls and e-mails, but nothing like what I had anticipated.  No one from our conservative Board of Trustees complained.  I'll confess, I experienced a mixture of relief and disappointment.  The relief was linked to the hope that the community wasn't reacting because they saw nothing significant to which to react.  Perhaps Pasadena has become, on balance, progressive enough to be utterly unfazed by a course on Queer History at the community college.  Perhaps those who were troubled by such a course felt that it wasn't worth their time or their effort to publicly complain.  (Many folks did speculate, of course, about my sexuality.  Maybe all of those marriages were a sham?  Maybe that fondness for trendy clothes means something?  Heck, the only folks who didn't question my sexual orientation were my gay friends!)

All of this silence was disappointing, of course, because (as my posts this past week have made clear), a small but not entirely insignificant part of Hugo just spoils for a good old-fashioned row!  In this sense, it was probably for the best that I didn't have to defend the course to anyone.  Everyone missed out, thankfully, on what (at least back in 2001) would have been a self-righteous tirade about tolerance, inclusion, and justice.   I suspect some of my more conservative colleagues decided not to give me the satisfaction of an argument, and that was probably for the best.  (I mean, I wouldn't have hit anyone, for Pete's sake, but I would have climbed rhetorical heights with gusto.)

This time around, I'm not "spoiling" for a quarrel.  If complaints and questions come, I pray that I'll deal with them gracefully and tactfully.  I hope I'll have compassion for those who are troubled by what they see as the "ongoing slide of our culture into the moral abyss", and who see courses such as this as "hastening the decline of a once-great society."  Rather than tease or lampoon these folks, I hope I'll be a polite listener.  Above all, I'm praying that if trouble does come, God will preserve me from the sins of smugness  and self-righteous certainty.  I'm prone to those faults, never more so than when I fancy myself an intellectual and pedagogical crusader for justice!  I pray that I always remember that doing gender or Queer studies work is not about me, it's about telling the story of the marginalized, the abused, the exploited, the feared, the hated and the ignored.  I'm not teaching Queer History to be cool or edgy, I'm teaching it because it needs to be taught, and it will be taught most effectively when I get my own ego out of the way.  As some of my critics, friends, and students know well, that isn't always as easy a task as it ought to be!

Comments

[NancyP]

So what sorts of readings do you assign? (not a student, just a reader).

[cmc]

And why is the term "queer" preferable? (To my ears, that term does sound a bit trendy and too overly politicized to be an academic term.)

[NancyP]

An alternate to "queer" is the alphabet soup. LGBT or variants thereof.

[Caitriona]

it will be taught most effectively when I get my own ego out of the way.

Isn't that the way it is with all of us? I know that over the past two days, I was trying my hardest to place the last of my scholarship students on my own power. That last one just wasn't coming. My deadline was 9am Pacific Time, or 11am my time. I was sweating it. 10:45am and I still didn't have that last scholarship placement.

Wouldn't you know. At 10:53am, just as I was about to call in a favor, the phone rang. It was a lady who is a friend (and 2nd mom) to our 17yo son's girlfriend. The girlfriend had told her she needed to host one of my scholarship kids. The lady contemplated, then finally decided to call... just in the nick of time.

That wasn't me. That was God working.

I'd just about bet that some of your best, most informative classes work along the same lines - when it's not you, it's God working. Keep it up.

[*Christopher]

Hugo,

I too would be curious to know what readings you'll use.

I use "queer" here and there, and sometimes, it fails to communicate what we intend. Audience is important, I've learned, sometimes the hard way. Folks at the Benedictine house where I'm a member generally are older, and "queer" comes across as a putdown for lgbt folk, and my communication failed to some extent because of my use of the term.

I'll pray you respond with grace and a listening ear.

pax Christi

[Sally]

Hugo will know much, much more about this than I do, but I think part of the reason that "queer" works better for a history class is that our current categories for sexuality are products of a particular historical moment. The whole idea of "homosexuality" didn't really exist until the 19th century. It's anachronistic to talk about gay history before then, because the concept didn't really exist (although the behavior that would now be termed gay sex certainly did.) "Queer" is a much broader category than "gay and lesbian": it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you're less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.

Is that more or less right, Hugo?

[NancyP]

There have been a number of worthwhile offerings making the point that our current understanding of homosexuality as a category is recent and to a surprising extent class-based. Two such that I have read recently are Jonathan Katz's book on 19th C. American men (Love Stories) and George Chauncey's book on "Gay New York" (covering 19th and early 20th centuries).

[Paul M. Martin]

Good for you. I now is a good time for straight people who view "gay rights" as the simple human rights issue for which it is, to stand up and be counted. My second post when I started my blog in March was in support of gay marriage/rights.

[Joe Perez]

Hugo,

FYI I linked to this post here:

http://www.joe-perez.com/2005/06/quote-of-day-hugo-schwyzer.html

Personally, I use "gay" unapologetically in my writing to mean what you mean by "queer." But I'm also comfortable with all the other terms too and try to mix it up.

[Hugo]

Sally, bingo. Thanks, everyone!

[Rad Geek]

Sally: '"Queer" is a much broader category than "gay and lesbian": it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you're less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.'

Well, no it doesn't--not really. There are lots of forms of sexuality that are non-normative, in this society or in past societies, but which aren't part of what "queer" is commonly accepted to mean: e.g. paedophilia, bestiality, incest, polyandry, liasons between black men and white women, etc. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here, but I doubt that Hugo's class is going to cover all of these topics in any particular depth, and I also doubt that it should. (I know that I, for one, would be quietly puzzled if interracial relationships were being considered under the same heading of "queer" and furious if paedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. were.)

Generally I think it's pretty well understood that when people say "queer" it means something like "gay" in the broad sense or the ever-expanding alphabet soup (on a recent trip to a college campus I noticed that the "community" had now expanded to "LGBTIQ") -- that is sexualities that differ from the norm mainly in regard to the sex or the gender identity of the people involved. Of course there are problems with each of these ways of trying to say what you mean -- sticking to words like "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and "sexual orientation" reifies categories that are actually very specific to our own times; using words like "gay" can do the same thing and also prioritizes the experience of gay men; using the alphabet soup is unwieldy, falls back on the same reified categories, and creates expectations of false universality; but I think "queer" is just as bad in creating the impression of false universality (although the sort of universality it suggests may be different) and also, frankly, hard to give any coherent definition to whatsoever that doesn't just fall back on one or more of the terms that it's supposedly trying to replace.

None of this is an argument against using any of these forms of speech, incidentally. I just don't think that there's any good one-size-fits-all solution to the linguistic problem and that we are better off keeping things simple while being critical of the terms we use than finding some "right" word to use.

[Hugo]

Rad, to a great extent, I agree with you. I use "Queer" because that's the term the vast majority of those who teach in the burgeoning field of Gay and Lesbian Studies have chosen to use. It's the best available term, in my mind, which is not the same as saying it's the RIGHT term.

[mythago]

It's also commonly used because of a couple of other issues: one, the perception by lesbians that "gay" tends to write them out of the picture, and "gay" or "gay and lesbian" completely ignoring bisexuals.

[Sally]

You're right, of course: queer means any sexuality that's non-normative with regards to gender. I don't really have a stake in this fight, but I guess I do think there's a virtue in avoiding "gay and lesbian," only because students are so comfortable with those categories that they have a hard time grasping that they aren't universal. Part of the virtue of "queer," I think, is that it's unfamiliar enough that students don't take it for granted.