I am often mulling questions about the use of so-called 'queer' (used to mean so many object and subject positionings) characters or specifically lesbian (often a quite compressed and narrowed version, focused on love or sex objects and not a larger expressive and communicative culture or community) characters in speculative fiction.
There is something about the oft-vaunted proliferation of straight writers producing such characters in 'normal' (i.e. saleable to a 'wider audience') genre works as well as queer authors producing works read and championed by a 'wider' audience that I continue to find disturbing without being able to easily identify the exact nature and source of my misgivings. I go back and forth: just curmudgeonly, or is there something there?
Reading a ton of '90s and early millenial queer and feminist theory has recently stoked these musings. An article on 90s male dance films provoked this post, mostly so I could park these quotes somewhere I would remember them... but...
There's something here about the need to go beyond simply opposing obvious homophobia, promoting 'positive' images in 'reclaiming' traditional narratives, and creating more product that is consumable, to push towards a clearer understanding of the uses to which gay men, lesbians, and gender-transgressive people have been historically and are now (in some ways differently, in some ways similarly) used in the service of maintaining either or both heteronormativity or heteroprivilege:
"[11] The term 'queer' lacks definite character. It has been described as 'contra-, non-, or anti-straight' (Doty, xv) and as 'an in-your-face-rejection of the proper response to heteronormativity, a version of acting up' (Hennessy, 967). I am not completely satisfied with these ways of thinking about the term queer, for they tend to reinforce the opposition between the queer and the heteronormative, whereas I am not convinced that these terms are oppositional (Weber). For this reason, I tend to think of queer in much the same way that Barthes thinks of the plural, as 'that which confuses meaning, the norm, normativity' (Sade, 109), which is different to standing against the norm or normativity. This is an important difference, because what I think these contemporary male dance films demonstrate is that, paradoxically, heteronormative masculinity is secured in and through queer dance performances."
"[12] In very different ways, each of these films challenges the common sense notion that what is 'normal' and what is 'queer' are opposites --however those terms are inscribed in specific contexts. Homosexuality does not only make heterosexuality possible as an opposite to it. Heterosexuality happens in homosexual, non-straight, and queer spaces. Indeed, contemporary heterosexuality (and, more broadly, heteronormativity) seems to require a passing in, if not a passing through, queer spaces in order to establish itself as 'normal' and 'dominant'. The result is a variety of heteronormative masculinities (as well as queer masculinities). Yet however varied these masculinities are, they all share debts to queerness in their construction --not merely by opposing it (or, for queer masculinities, by embracing it), but by passing through it."
and, after explaining the greater, covertly queered context of the Swan Lake ending of Billy Elliot, which I had forgotten about in the Broadway musical version, hmm...
"All of this is reminiscent of Teresa de Lauretis' observation about lesbian representations, that because 'conventions of seeing, and the relations of desire and meaning in spectatorship [remain] partially anchored or contained by a frame of visibility that is still heterosexual,' it is extremely difficult to alter the 'standard vision, the frame of reference of visibility, of what can be seen' (33, 35; emphasis in original)."
-from Genders 37 2003, " 'Oi. Dancing Boy!' Masculinity, Sexuality, and Youth in Billy Elliot," by Cynthia Weber article
Anyway, that's what's on my mind this MLK day weekend, along with excitement at hearing "Pariah" is in theaters on the coast, which means eventually we may get to see it here in flyover country. And perhaps celebrating Anita B... er, a certain faux-Minnesotan hatah's recent lack of support where it counted.
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