Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Second Edition [1 ed.] 9781848882089, 9789004372207

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Gender and Love

Critical Issues Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Lisa Howard Dr Ken Monteith Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Peter Mario Kreuter S Ram Vemuri

Simon Bacon Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig Kenneth Wilson

A Critical Issues research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ The Gender and Sexuality Hub ‘Gender and Love’

2013

Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Edited by

Noemi de Haro García and Maria-Anna Tseliou

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-208-9 Second Edition, 2013. First published in the United Kingdom in eBook format in 2012.

Table of Contents Introduction Gender and Love Noemi de Haro Garcia and Maria-Anna Tseliou Part 1

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Gender and Love: Concepts, Norms and Subversions Philosophical Analysis of Gender, Love and Inter-Personal Relations Rekha Navneet Intimate Agency: A Radical Sexual Revolution Haruki Eda

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‘Loving Many’: Polyamorous Love, Gender and Identity António Fernando Cascais and Daniel Cardoso

21

Beyond the Pair: The Changing Meaning of Intimate Relationships in the Context of Non-Monogamy Serena Petrella Part 2

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Gender, Love and Children Parenting for Latinos in Same-Gender Love Relationships Jennifer Ann Boeckel, Debora Ortega and Michael Chifalo Father-Son Expressions of Love and Intimacy: Social and Cultural Evolution in Contemporary Western Society Jon Ross Eros as Pedagogy: Teaching Children Gendered Loving Hannah Dyer

Part 3

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43

55 65

The Power of Representations Representations of Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro Cristina Nicolaescu Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern Gender Roles in Turkey Murat Seçkin

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Singing Women: Gender and Ecology Suja Roy Abraham

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James Bond and Gendered Love Lena Nans

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‘Apoyá en el Quicio de la Mancebía’: Homosexuality and Prostitution during Franco’s Regime Raquel (Lucas) Platero Family Photographs: Love and Gender in 1940s Spain María Rosón Only Entertainment? Music, Images and the Identity of the Young Survivors of Francoism Noemi de Haro García Subverting the (Hetero)Normative Museum Maria-Anna Tseliou Part 4

115 125

133 143

Narratives of Gender and Love Love, Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy in the Narratives of Trans People and Their Partners Tam Sanger

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Loving My Sissy Self: Being Queer in the Rural Southern United States Jay Poole

163

Introduction: Gender and Love Noemi de Haro García and Maria-Anna Tseliou Gender and love are two concepts that have been addressed numerous times across different disciplines, forming an interdisciplinary field of study. The chapters in this volume reflect the discussions that occurred during the 1st Global Conference on Gender and Love, held as part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of research projects and of the Gender and Sexuality Hub run by InterDisciplinary.Net at Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom in September 2011. This edited collection of chapters provides a snapshot of the inquired, discussions and conclusions drawn at this conference. Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is an interdisciplinary publication where scholars from all around the world analyse gender and love issues from a wide range of perspectives. In particular, the selected papers consider gender in relation to various kinds of love with regard, for example, to self, spirit, religion, family, friendship, ethics, nation, globalisation, environment, and so on. How do the interactions of gender and love promote particular performances of gender; conceptions of individual and collective identity; formations of community; notions of the human; understandings of good and evil? These are just some of the questions that occupied this project and eventually this publication. During the 1st Global Conference on Gender and Love, five main themes were explored in general: Love as a Disciplinary Force: Productions of Gender Norms, Normativity, Intimacy Gendered Yearnings Global Perspectives on Gender and Love Representations of Gender and Love In this publication, the division of chapters is slightly different from the structure of the conference itself. Thus, Gender and Love: Interdisciplinary Perspectives consists of four sections: 1. Gender and Love: Concepts, Norms and Subversions 2. Gender, Love and Children 3. The Power of Representations 4. Narratives of Gender and Love The four chapters in the first section, entitled ‘Gender and Love: Concepts, Norms and Subversions,’ look at the concepts of norms, normativity, intimacy and transgressions globally. Rekha Navneet in ‘Philosophical Analysis of Gender, Love and Inter-Personal Relations’ offers an ethical-philosophical analysis of gender,

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__________________________________________________________________ love and interpersonal relation. The author develops the main argument through some comparison between Platonic and Kantian philosophical viewpoints with liberal feminist ones, calling for a reconsideration - based on love and care - of ethics, humanism, interpersonal norms of impartiality, love and complementary reciprocity. In ‘Intimate Agency: A Radical Sexual Revolution’ Haruki Eda expresses the idea that in order to radically change our society and cause a radical revolution, we first need to radically change the way we perceive our interpersonal relationships. The paper discusses this theme by looking at the impact and possible connections between Marxism and notions like Queerness, genderqueer, non-monogamy and non-normative sexualities. The author sets as a prerequisite for a human revolution, the transformation of the currently prevailing social norms on gender and sexuality. Driven by the continuous change in the meaning of the concept ‘relationship’ and the different content of words to describe it with either sex-related words or feelings-related words, António Fernando Cascais and Daniel Cardoso explore the notion of ‘polyamory’ in ‘“Loving Many”: Polyamorous Love, Gender and Identity.’ Their discussion is based on the findings they gathered during their research on e-mails exchanged during 2009 in alt.polyamory, the first emailing list about polyamory. The paper concludes with a reconceptualisation of love, having as a basis the notion of polyamory. ‘Beyond the Pair: The Changing Meaning of Intimate Relationships in the Context of Non-Monogamy’ presents the preliminary findings in Serena Petrella’s research on open relationships in gay/lesbian/queer communities as well as in heterosexual polyamorous communities. She focuses on how self-identified erotic dissidents position themselves against the hegemonic norm of monogamy, specifically on the way meanings of love, intimacy and relationship are negotiated in the context of open erotic play. The author concludes that openness is articulated as an ‘abject response’ to the ‘normative’ imposed ethics of monogamy, an ‘abject response’ that consolidates into new normative structures. Therefore the ‘normative’ and its other reveal themselves both as historically contingent and socially constructed in a specific socio-historical period. ‘Gender, Love and Children’ is the title of the second section of this book. The three chapters included in it consider issues around the relationship between gender and love and children. Jennifer Ann Boeckel, Debora Ortega and Michael Chifalo examine the experiences of gay parenting in ‘Parenting for Latinos in SameGender Love Relationships.’ Based on their qualitative research on the experiences of Latinos same-gender love relationships and through interviews with Queer and Latinos parents they attempt to discover the potential positive outcomes that these unique identities of the parents could bring in their families, especially when living in oppressive contexts. In ‘Father-Son Expressions of Love and Intimacy: Social and Cultural Evolution in Contemporary Western Society’ Jon Ross reflects on the limitations

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__________________________________________________________________ of the traditional father-son relationship and on the existence of a countermovement that challenges this traditional model. The author proposes Dollahite and Hawkins’ theory of ‘generative fatherhood’ as an example of this countermovement and as a way to overcome traditional, unsustainable models of masculinity and fatherhood. Hannah Dyer in ‘Eros as Pedagogy: Teaching Children Gendered Loving’ considers love as pedagogy and its potential to contribute positively in children’s learning and knowledge. The author develops an argument that calls for a school curriculum that will be based on love and eventually will prevent children from racism, sexism and homophobia. This curriculum will have at its heart the idea of familiarising children with tolerating difference and not regarding it as a threat. The third section is entitled ‘The Power of Representations’ and the chapters included in it discuss different aspects of gender and love representations both in literature and audiovisual culture. In ‘Representations of Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro’ Cristina Nicolaescu analyses the way gender and human agency are represented in the fiction of the renovated Canadian feminist writer Alice Munro. The author employs the arguments of psychoanalytical feminism to study some of the feminine characters in Munro’s collections of short stories. She highlights that this writer’s stories involve issues of love and sexual relationship that construct, deconstruct or reconstruct women’s private lives at a deeply psychological level and that agency is a relevant concept to understand Alice Munro’s feminine characters. Murat Seçkin in ‘Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern Gender Roles in Turkey’ examines the problems of westernisation and modernisation in relation to the construction of a national identity (and therefore of a national ‘imagined community’) in Turkey after the ‘War of Independence’ at the beginning of the 20th century. To do so the author analyses the novel Sodom and Gomorrah written by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. He shows how in this book gender issues function as metaphors of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways of modernisation in Turkey; being the right one nationalistic, authoritarian and, above all, heterosexist, and being the wrong one represented by the liberal modernity symbolised by decadent Istanbul. According to the author the underlying homophobia and misogyny of the text informed the emerging modern gender roles in the Middle East at the start of the 20th century too. Suja Roy Abraham looks at the relation of gender and love within the context of folksongs in ‘Singing Women: Gender and Ecology.’ The author, based on the research in folksongs from Central Tracancore region of Kerala in South India, explores how gender and nature are connected to each other. Discussing the particular connection between women and land, the author concludes with the potential that the understanding of such a relationship could have for our current ecological crisis.

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__________________________________________________________________ The notions of gender and love within the context of James Bond movies are considered by Lena Nans in ‘James Bond and Gendered Love.’ Based on Judith Butler’s ‘gender performativity’ the author looks at the development of gender relations throughout all the movies of James Bond, coming up with the conclusion that as society changes, so does the representation of male and female models in James Bond movies. Three chapters in this section deal with gender and love issues under Franco’s dictatorship in Spain focusing on the possibilities that cultural products offered to the subjects to challenge and resist dominant discourses. In ‘“Apoyá en el Quicio de la Mancebía”: Homosexuality and Prostitution during Franco´s Regime’ Raquel (Lucas) Platero refers to francoist legislation and to the Spanish songs called coplas referring specifically to the case of Ojos verdes where desire, prostitution and homosexuality are an issue. The author states that, through reworking cultural manifestations such as coplas, Spaniards had the possibility to reinterpret them and transgress francoist norms: Ojos verdes could be interpreted in different ways, and therefore it could be used by ‘social dangerous’ subjects as a passing strategy to survive. Furthermore, even for the majority subject to the rules of decency, passion and love were paradoxically embodied in objects such as these coplas and the marginal lives of its characters. María Rosón in ‘Family Photographs: Love and Gender in 1940s Spain’ analyses family photographs of the first part of Franco’s dictatorhip as spaces of gender socialisation within the family context. The relevant role of photography in the construction of individual and collective identity during this period is stressed. Following the research approach of scholars such as Jo Labanyi, and therefore focusing on the reworking of cultural products that audiences could make under the first decades of francoism, the author goes beyond the dominant approach of the Spanish academy to these products. On the one hand she addresses photographs as material, cultural and emotional objects and, on the other hand, she argues that family photograph provided a space for agency to various kinds subjects (photographers, models and receptors) that could use it to resist to dominant ideologies. The presence of representations that challenged the gender roles and stereotypes promoted by the regime in dictatorship-controlled mass media is studied by Noemi de Haro García in ‘Only Entertainment? Music, Images and the Identity of the Young Survivors of Francoism.’ She argues that this has to do with the paradoxical situations produced by the changes francoism underwent in order to survive, and follows Teresa Vilarós’ analysis of francoist mass media as a foucauldian regulatory technology. The author analyses the television show on pop music Último grito as an example both of the success of the progressive concessions of francoism, as well as of their subversive potential. In the final chapter of this section, ‘Subverting the (Hetero)Normative Museum,’ Maria-Anna Tseliou looks at the possibility of challenging the notions

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__________________________________________________________________ of gender and love through culture. Museum exhibitions are seen as useful tools to contribute in the subversion of heteronormativity and the consequently, in the challenge of the social norms around gender, sexuality and love. By looking at three recent UK museum exhibition, the author develops the argument towards the potential of museums and culture to challenge public perceptions on gender, love, family, marriage, and so on. The two chapters in the last section of this book, ‘Narratives of Gender and Love,’ examine more personal narratives on the concepts of gender and love. Tam Sanger in ‘Love, Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy in the Narratives of Trans People and their Partners’ examines the centrality of love and gender in the narratives of trans people and their partners when they discuss the negotiation of their intimate lives. The author also analyses how social norms feature in this negotiation. To do so she presents four of the stories collected during her previous research on trans people and their partners, as well as some questions regarding love, gender, sexuality and intimacy raised by these narratives. The author states that what she terms the ‘ethics of intimacy’ and what experiences such as the ones she has studied show, indicate possibilities for living intimacy more ethically. Finally in ‘Loving My Sissy Self: Being Queer in the Rural Southern United States’ Jay Poole uses autoethnography and explores his personal narrative in the context of his cultural environment of origin. He describes his own narrative as one of ‘social clashes interfacing with some internal, perhaps biological desire for sexual expression in a manner that does not fit the dominant, normative paradigm’ and discusses the role of shame in it. He also examines the challenge of coming to love one’s self while existing in the margins. The author argues that embracing plural identities is a way to integrate and understand the diverse, sometimes conflicting, elements in one’s narrative and, thus, that it could be a part of coming to love one’s selves. We would like to express our gratitude to all the scholars that took part in the 1st Global Conference on Gender and Love and to its organisers Dikmen Yakali Çamoğlu and Rob Fisher. Furthermore we would like to thank the authors of the chapters included in this book for their cooperation in the editing process.

Part 1 Gender and Love: Concepts, Norms and Subversions

Philosophical Analysis of Gender, Love and Inter-Personal Relations Rekha Navneet Abstract This chapter analyses a major area of concern and inquiry pertaining to an ethicalphilosophical analysis of gender, love and interpersonal relations viz., the dichotomy between an impersonal or a formal norm of duty, and an informal or an intimate bond of love and care. In my understanding, based on a dialogical and critical examination of the evolution of philosophical thinking through the various epochs, a hierarchy has been established between the pursuit that is considered abstract, universalistic, formal, duty-centric, dispassionate and impersonal and is therefore perceived as archetype or superior, on the one hand, and that which considers each person as an individual with sentiments of love and care by placing importance on affective-emotional constitution and concrete historicity, is noninstitutional and contextual and is thereby pronounced lesser significant, on the other. Also, most importantly, the former perspective which has been propagated as a better and a more desirable reference in the mainstream traditional ethical and philosophical thinking, has by and large, been considered to be epitomised by men and in male enterprise. On the other hand, in most denotations and in conceptual analyses, women and their pursuits have been cited in relation to the latter approach, which has been often critiqued as a parochial, non-ethical and nonphilosophical one. In the present chapter, I have compared and contrasted Platonic and Kantian philosophical positions with the liberal feminist thinking and have attempted to support the thesis that ethics based on love and care, as propounded in women studies, provide potently viable and desirable paradigms of ethics, humanism and of inter-personal norms of impartiality, love and complementary reciprocity. Key Words: Gender, love, care, public, inter-personal relations, universality, contextuality, Plato, Kant and ethics. ***** 1. The Problem The problem that I am struck with is that all through the historical evolution of human kind, it can be noticed that the area or segments, which are considered meaningful, rational, moral and Universal (with a capital U) have been considered the most desirable pursuits and have largely been propagated to be best exemplified in men and in their enterprise alone, and have only been occasionally cited in relation to women. On the other hand, other aspects of life like love, care and other cognates of feeling and emotions like interpersonal bonding have been

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__________________________________________________________________ considered as lesser significant in merit and have been mostly discussed with reference to women. This limitation, in my understanding, has not been confined only to philosophical discourses and treatises but has, over a period of time, entered into the contemporary world-view with a parallel kind of dualism between public (always referred to as the universal) and private (mostly referred to as the contextual or even parochial). This dualism is further explicated in terms of hierarchy, since ‘impersonal’ and thereby the ‘significant’ public domain is considered far superior to that space which has ‘narrow’ confines of interpersonality and thereby referred to as ‘insignificant’ private. My contention is that these biased perspectives are not merely representative of the present day sociological and psychological ethos but have been present in the philosophical tradition all through history (both chronologically and anachronistically). The two most respected thinkers in the western philosophical tradition, viz., Plato 1 and Kant 2 eulogised for advocating impartiality and egalitarianism have, probably, contributed significantly to this ‘engendered’ bias. Though separated by many centuries the underlying thought pattern in Plato and Kant is almost similar. Both advocate rationality as being the essential aspect of human nature and according to both of them only the rationalistic endeavor is the ideal epistemic methodology and/or the ethical goal. Also, one comes across a celebration of an ideal principle in their works. Plato calls it the Form 3 and Kant calls it the Moral Law. 4 Therefore detachment and duty (i.e., the impersonalised principles) become the norms for inter-personal/ social conduct. According to both these philosophers, these impersonal epitomes of perfection can be achieved only by men, since they in comparison to women are competent and capable of rational and/ moral disposition and effort. It would be pertinent to briefly expound some excerpts from their vast writings, and then compare these to those early 20th and later part of writings from feminist scholarship and from some classical, modern and contemporary mainstream philosophical discourses that have critiqued these. 2. Plato and Kant: Central Thought i.) Plato In Platonic philosophy, the ‘Form’ (with the capital F) is referred to as being the only truth or the reality. (Truth and reality have also been used interchangeably and refer to the ideal). The form(s) denotes the epitomes of knowledge and morality and are thereby expressed either as the Beauty or the Good. The characteristic feature of Platonic ‘Ideal is that it has been enunciated as being the archetypal principle belonging to the realm of pure rationality, i.e. reasoning a priori.’ 5 Also, according to Plato this Ideal or the Form can be appropriated only through the rigorous operation of the reason. Any reference to empirical or sensuous derivations is thereby deprecated as a non-rational or even an irrational

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__________________________________________________________________ method of inquiry. However, despite an insistence on the language of reason and rationality being the only tool to make philosophical inquiry, Plato has devoted two major works on the analysis of love or passion i.e., The Symposium 6 and Phaedrus, and has described love as ‘passion for the beautiful’ in The Symposium and as a cognate of the ’divine madness’ in Phaedrus. 7 To substantiate my points a cursory reference to these two works would be appropriate here. In The Symposium, Platonic Socrates recounts that the thesis presented by other interlocutors that love was considered to be the ‘principle of generation and fertility.’ Also, he refers to the procreation due to heterosexual union as one’s of the divine things. Yet, as an antithesis, he ranks the love between men and women as the lowest kind in the ‘ladder of love.’ 8 According to Plato, the heterosexual or interpersonal instances of love can never lead the lover or the philosopher to have the vision of the Form Beauty. Also, the philosopher love in his analysis can be denoted only by a man (mentioned in the lines,204-205d). The bias for males is clearly enunciated in the elaboration of this ladder of love. (209b4-c1). It may also be noted here that Plato does consider a substitution instance of inter-personal tie, through an erotic yet non-sexual love, in the Phaedrus between the philosopher lover (male) and the boy beautiful, who reminds the lover/philosopher of the Divine beauty. However, even in the same sex love or in ‘homo-eroticism’ 9 he clearly maintains pederasty and demarcates between men and women as the potent agents of love and philosophy and completely deprecates women as being the reason for diverting these rational men away from divine pursuits and in making them humanly or irrationally mad about the world of senses. 10 It seems ironical that Plato who excludes women both from the agency and volition of love had venerated the art of erotic, as taught by Diotima, the priestess in the beginning of The Symposium and in and through the Phaedrus by his constant reference to madness as rationality and tracing the origins of madness to prophecy and mantikie (244c1-d1), all of which are feminine incarnations. 11 ii.) Kant Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) has propounded a philosophical pattern of thought that is similar to Plato. The difference, probably, is that the paradigm has shifted from being the epistemic principle of perfection (as in Plato) to the ethical archetype. Nevertheless, like Plato, rationality i.e., reasoning a priori or abstract reasoning is central to Kant’s whole idea of morality. According to Kant, rationality is so central to being moral that ‘even beings who are not humans can also be moral agents provided they act rationally.’ 12 Acting rationally implies acting from the right motive. ‘The only motive that confers the moral worth on us is the motive of what he calls duty, i.e., the Moral Law. This moral law, according

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__________________________________________________________________ to Kant, further entailed acting in accordance with the categorical imperatives,’ i.e., ‘Duty for the sake of Duty.’ 13 These maxims, or the categorical imperatives, as propagated in Kantian moral thought, are undoubtedly the paradigmatic notions of impartiality and equality. Yet if we scratch their analyses made by Kant, further, in relation with human nature and especially in the context of women, we really get a dismal and extremely biased picture, especially of women. If we turn to one of the later writings of Kant, we find that Kant has not credited women with the humanly essential characteristic of being rational. According to him, they work in accordance with pleasant sensations or with reasoning based upon empirical situations and are not really the rational agents. He says. Women will avoid the wicked not because it is not right ... they do something because it pleases them ... I hardly believe that fair sex is capable of principles ... Her philosophy is not to reason, but to sense ... A woman who has head full of Greek ... or, carried on fundamental controversies about mechanics, might as well have a beard ... . 14 It becomes clear from the above stated excerpt that according to Kant, rationality is the dominant and essential human characteristic and is therefore associated with masculinity or in being male, (... to have a beard) for instance. On the other hand, beauty and aesthetic sensibility are worked in and through sensuous, pleasant and a posteriori situations and are, therefore, subordinate characteristics and thus associated with femininity i.e., with being women. 3. Philosophy of Limited Universality / Contextuality and Ethics of Care It can easily be argued that what is lacking in this ‘essential’ or ‘universalistic’ characterisation of human nature by both Plato and Kant are those traits which were historically and contingently subordinated both in the civil society and in the political cultural life. In the traditional philosophy, as we have seen specifically in the cases of Plato and Kant, that both Plato and Kant have ironically characterised what is contextual, grounded in or fostered by sentiments, emotions of love and feelings of care and sympathy as the denotations of non-rational, nonphilosophical and even irrational efforts (as in Kant, in The Symposium and in the Phaedrus respectively). Most of the modern and contemporary feminist thinkers which include notably some male thinkers and scholars (with their overt or incidental support) have problematised this ‘strict’ detached, abstract universalisation in discourses of love and inter-personal relations. Aristotle’s ethics of virtue 15 and David Hume’s 16 support of passion over reason have found an uncanny influence on some of the

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__________________________________________________________________ recent trends in feminist interpretations of love and inter-personal conduct. Contemporary and modern writers like Milton Mayeroff, Sartre, women thinkers like Carol C. Gould, Simon De Beauvoir, Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, Susan Sherwin, Martha Nussbaum etc., 17 have, for instance, (and almost in agreement) argued that singular or unitary concepts of rationality is pertinent to a miniscule aspect of elitist meritocracy and thus, by the large, inapplicable to most realms of human conditions and living. We have seen, that according to the concept of ‘essential universality’ as put forth by Plato and Kant, and which has also been the guiding force in creating the dichotomy between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘non-ideal’ worked only through the criterion of what was essentially similar and negated any acknowledgment of difference. I have, in the present chapter, paraphrased some of the overlapping currents of thought pattern in these formulations and analyses and have interspersed these by putting them into a perspective by trying to work upon what I call ‘limited and practical universality’ which encompasses a ‘new ethic of human connect.’ These phrases are purely based upon my inference of the philosophy and thought pattern of the mentioned discourses. It is that alternative view which seeks the totality of all features, those shared in common and those which are different and individuating. It is this ‘intelligent’ or ‘reassembled’ perspective that can alter the thought pattern that has always sought and still seeks to associate the most desirable and elitist aspect with the larger or a cosmic picture which was associated in the traditional thought only with men, and in the contemporary situations with the pure professional aspects of life, and again mostly in relation to men. The concerns that foster from appreciating the dynamics of a particular situation would be largely concerned with the interpersonal aspects of loving and living, i.e., with a sympathetic, loving and empathetic response rather than an abstract rationalist understanding. My contention is that the perspective which considers love as a cognate of care as opposed to love as a connotation of an impersonal aspiration or a duty provides coherence to a new kind of moral and philosophical theory which may facilitate a thought pattern that is based upon human connections; is not gender specific or biased and depends less on formal meaning of perfection. The moral categories that accompany such interactions would probably be those of commitment and promise, and the corresponding moral feelings that accrue would be those of respect and dignity. The ethics of care seeks viewing each and every person as an individual with a concrete situation of history, identity and a particular affectiveemotional constitution like the feeling of love. To rephrase Virginia Held’s and Beauvoir’s arguments, 18 ‘our relation to others is governed by the norms of equity and complementary reciprocity.’ Each is entitled to expect and to assume from the other those forms of behaviour through which the other feels recognised and confirmed as an individual being with specific needs, talents and capacities. The norms of our interaction need to be dealt with as case to case or on one to one basis. Hence these affiliations may be ‘non institutional’ ones but would be based

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__________________________________________________________________ on love, care and amicability.’ As a result this ethics of love based on amicability and care, which according to Held and Susan Sherwin have moved center-stage in the field of medical ethics 19 and have provided credibility to the role of context (as in the evolving field of casuistry ethics 20 ) are being appreciated as an alternative model of treating others in accordance with the morality of love and care and thereby confirm not only the others’ humanity but also cognising the others’ individuality. To rephrase Virginia Held’s observations would also enable to put this in a new ethical-philosophical perspective, i.e., ‘when we bring women’s experience into the domain of ethical consciousness, we realise that moral theory has hitherto neglected the intermediate region of filial and friendly relations based on sympathy and concern for the particular others.’ 21 However, this thesis does not imply that men are incapable of practicing this ethics of love as care; it is being recommended here that this mode of interpersonal conduct is inclusive rather than an exclusive philosophical ethics. Also, it does not entail any unexamined preferential bias. My emphasis is that this philosophy of appreciating contextuality and an ethic of love as care can give credence to moral philosophy of impartiality. I would, quote from Carol Gilligan to substantiate my contention and also to conclude this chapter. The contextuality, narrative and specificity of women’s moral judgments is not a sign of weakness or deficiency, but a manifestation of a vision of a moral maturity that views the self as being immersed in a network of relationship with the others. 22

Notes 1

Plato, about whom A. N. Whitehead remarked that, the entire western philosophy could be written as footnotes to Plato. The reference about his thought in general have been taken here from: A History of Philosophy, Volume-I, Part I by Fredrick A. Copleston (Image Books, 1962) for any further reference, copl. 2 Immanuel Kant, the most revered ethical philosopher. References to his theory in general are from: 1) Modern European Philosophy, ed. Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) for further references, MEP. 2) Robert L. Holmes, Basic Moral Philosophy (Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003). For further references Basic Moral Philosophy. 3 For detailed understanding of Platonic Theory of Form or the Ideal (he uses them interchangeably) copl, 185-188. 4 Kant’s exposition of the Moral Law, was discussed as theory of Morality in his work Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Black (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 56-136.

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__________________________________________________________________ 5

The Symposium extensive reference to this work have been used here from Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation, revised with an introduction by Hayden Pellicia (New York: The Modern Library, 2001). For all further references, Selected Dialogues. Also, I have used lines from the Dialogue as mentioned in the work, wherever possible and put them in parenthesis. 6 In The Symposium Plato’s idea of love was that love in procreation in the realm of absolute beauty. So, love is a serene kind of passion. 7 On the other hand, in The Phaedrus the vocabulary of zealous passion is used and thus divine madness, though repeatedly Plato asserts divine madness is different from commonly known irrational behaviour or human madness. Phaedrus in Selected Dialogues. 8 The elevation of love in terms of the elevation in philosophic insight, as in The Symposium, in Selected Dialogues, 257-259. 9 It is my interpretation based on A. W. Price’s reference to Platonic love in his work, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 226-232 that clearly entails this expression. 10 Phaedrus, in Selected Dialogues, 155 (lines paraphrased, 253a-254b) from the Dialogue. 11 Mantike, prophecy or the etymology for madness is explicated in the Dialogue (244c-e) in Phaedrus, Ibid., and Diotima, ‘the wise woman,’ in Symposium (201d), Ibid. 12 ‘Kantianism’, in Basic Moral Philosophy, 109-110. 13 Critique of Practical Reason, 56-135 and 131-135. 14 Observation on Beautiful and Sublime, as mentioned in MEP, 256, op. cit. 15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and com. F. H. Eterovich (Washingot, DC: University Press of America, 1980), Book 1, chapters 1-3. 16 David Hume, internet link, http://www.wikipedia.org. 17 Various thinkers and their works: 1) Milton Mayerof, On Caring (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 2) Jean Paul Sartre, the mid- 20th century thinker set in the philosophy of Existentialism. He has been one of the most dominant philosophers of all times. He clearly took an anti-essentialist view. 3) Carol C. Gould in Key Concepts in Critical Theory, Gender, 4) Simone De Beauvoir, Second Sex, 1949, 5) Nel Noddings, Caring, A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press, 1984), 6) Virginia Held and Susan Sherwin as referred in Bioethics: An Introduction to the History, Methods and Practice (to be referred as Bioethics for further reference), eds. Nancy S. Jerker, Albert R. Jonsen and Robert A. Pearlman (Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2010). 18 1) Virginia Held, Bioethics, 161-162, 2) Simone De Beauvoir, Second Sex, from chapter I, 3-5. 19 Virginia Held, ‘Feminism and Moral Theory’, in Bioethics, 161 and 211-212.

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Susan Sherwin, ‘Feminist and Medical Ethics: Two Different Approaches to Contextual Ethics’, in Bioethics, 183-184. 21 Bioethics, Section-2, ‘Philosophical Theories and Principles’, ‘Casuistry and Clinical Ethics’, 164-167. 22 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Bibliography Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and comments by F. H. Eterovich. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980. Black White, Lewis. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason. Chicago: University Press, 1949. Copleston, Fredick A. A History of Philosophy. Volume I. Image Books, 1962. Gilligan Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Gould, Carol C., ed. Critical Theory and Gender. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1999. Holmes, Robert L. Basic Moral Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003. Jecker, Nancy S., Albert R. Jonsen, and Robert A. Pearlman, eds. Bioethics: An Introduction to the History, Methods and Practice. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, 2010. Mayerof, Milton. On Caring. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Nodding, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Pellicia, Hayden. Selected Dialogues of Plato: The Benjamin Jowett Translation. New York: The Modern Library, 2001. Pippin, Robert B., ed. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

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__________________________________________________________________ Price, A. W. Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Sherwin, Susan. ‘Feminist and Medical Ethics: Two Different Approaches to Contextual Ethics’. In Bioethics: An Introduction to the History, Methods and Practice, edited by Nancy S. Jecker, Albert R. Jonsen, and Robert A. Pearlman. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, 2010. Rekha Navneet teaches Philosophy at Gargi College, University of Delhi, India. She has keen interest in Platonic thought, moral philosophy, aesthetics and gender studies and in formulating inter-disciplinary perspectives of these with other academic disciplines.

Intimate Agency: A Radical Sexual Revolution Haruki Eda Abstract A radical revolution is not complete without a radical transformation of the ways we view interpersonal relationships. What possibilities do non-normative sexualities, particularly Queerness, genderqueer, and non-monogamy, offer to the theories and practices of Marxist revolution? How would this transformation contribute to and be understood as human evolution, as Boggs and Boggs (1974) urge us to envisage? These questions challenge some assumptions: 1) that only certain sexualities are acceptable; 2) that revolutionary movements merely involve class struggles separately and remotely from our sexuality; and 3) that sexuality is in any way mutable in our attempts to break away from capitalism that helped create dichotomies between mind and body, labour and leisure, women and men, land and people, public and private, and so on. Drawing on existing literature around class struggle and sexuality, I will explore how various social theories help us understand the workings of oppression through capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, and monogamy. I will examine how the social norms of monogamy is placed on different types of gendered, racialised, dis/abled, and classed bodies, then analyse how we can deconstruct this system through communism and non-monogamy, and finally suggest some radical possibilities that non-monogamy offers to us. Because such English terms as ‘polyamory’ and ‘non-mongamy’ are limiting in discussing the most revolutionary interpersonal relationships, I coin a term ‘intimate agency’ to highlight the capability of defining and redefining our own individual intimate relationships. I argue that intimate agency can promote individual autonomy in defining our own intimate relationships regardless of the level of sexual interaction because it disrupts the normativity of monogamy and revolutionises the ways in which we relate to one another. If we are to take the Marxist sense of equity seriously, we must integrate this sexual revolution and evolution into our social revolution and evolution. Key Words: Non-monogamy, intimacy, gender, love, queerness, relationships, Marxism, communism, revolution, sexuality. ***** 1. Introduction We have historically witnessed how revolutionaries alienated sexuality as a private matter that should not be discussed or even related to their struggles. However, dismissing sexuality as peripheral to our being fails to recognise the level of empowerment that healthy sexuality offers to us. Because we cannot be fully empowered without celebration of our own diverse sexualities, reintegration

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__________________________________________________________________ of sexuality into the centre of our efforts for a revolution is an inevitable task. In other words, a radical revolution is not complete without a radical sexual revolution. This requires a transformation of the ways we see and engage in our interpersonal relationships, since the existing institutions like marriage, family, education, and media under capitalism are fundamentally sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and heterosexist. This is not to say that demolition of capitalism will automatically solve all these issues. Rather, more critical questions I explore here are, what would and should our sexualities and interpersonal relationships look like in the light of communist ideals? What possibilities do non-normative sexualities, particularly non-monogamy, offer to the theories and practices of Marxist revolution? How would this transformation contribute to and be understood as human evolution, as James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs urge us to envisage? 1 These questions are important because they challenge our assumptions that only certain sexualities are acceptable, and revolutionary movements merely involve class struggles separately and remotely from our sexuality. It also enlightens us that sexuality is anything but mutable in our attempts to break away from capitalism that forcefully disjointed mind and body, labour and leisure, women and men, land and people, public and private, and so on. To explore these questions, I will firstly define some terminologies around non-monogamy. Second, I will explore how various social theories help us understand the dynamics of oppression through capitalism and monogamy. I will then analyze how we can deconstruct this system and finally suggest some radical possibilities that non-monogamy offers to us. Coining a term intimate agency, I will argue that non-monogamy can promote individual agency in defining our own intimate relationships regardless of the level of sexual interaction because it disrupts the normativity of monogamy and revolutionises the ways in which we relate to one another. If we are to take the Marxist sense of equity seriously, we must integrate this sexual revolution and evolution into our social revolution and evolution. 2. Terminology Many people erroneously use non-monogamy and polyamory interchangeably. Monogamy is commonly understood as a type of marriage between two people at a time, in which the two are expected or have agreed to have sexual interactions exclusively with each other. Today, this may also refer to romantic relationships not legally recognised as marriages. Thus, non-monogamy should be defined as any practices of intimate, romantic, or sexual relationships outside the context of monogamy. This is different from polygamy, a marriage between one man and several women. Polyamory can be obfuscatory because it literally means ‘multiple love,’ often used to imply both identity (polyamorous) and behaviour (polyamory). More specifically, Crooks and Bauer explain that polyamorists distinguish their relationships from other non-monogamous relationships by emphasising emotional commitment in their multiple sexual relationships. 2 In my analysis, this definition

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__________________________________________________________________ still confuses sexual interactions and romantic relationships altogether, despite its emphasis on the latter. Ultimately, this term is limiting in transforming our relationships because its very emphasis on ‘love’ alienates sexual interactions that are not necessarily based on deep emotional commitments. In addition, Noël points out that texts on polyamory are written by and for an assumed audience of White, middle-class, able-bodied, educated, American people. 3 Because we do not have the language in English to discuss the relationships and the practice thereof that I imagine as most revolutionary and evolutionary, I devise a new term, intimate agency, to highlight the capability of defining and redefining our own individual intimate relationships. Additionally, I use the word nonmonogamy to refer to the practice of engaging in multiple intimate relationships, sexual or non-sexual, at once. In fact, it is common for polyamorous people to invent, challenge, struggle with, reclaim, and transform existing dominant language of monogamy so that they can comfortably identify with alternative terms around identity, relationships, and emotions. 4 3. Capitalism and Monogamy Like Engels did, it is highly meaningful to examine how material conditions shape ideologies around sexual relationships because capitalist development promoted heterosexual monogamous marriage as an institution that contributes to and maintains capitalist economy. In fact, capitalism and monogamy function in concert with each other to create the foundation for the system of oppression. Because the division of labour is not only a matter of stratification but also a gendered phenomenon, monogamy, as the ideology of the ruling class, has institutionalised marriage to claim men’s ownership over women and children’s bodies. This clearly fostered White patriarchy, which oppresses both White women and women of colour in each unique way. In such unequal relationships between women and men, reproduction becomes overly emphasised, resulting in compulsory heterosexuality that leaves little visibility and agency for people whose sexual identity or behaviour did not conform to it. Therefore, the institution of monogamous marriage reinforced rigid gender binary, gender roles, male supremacy, and heterosexism, constructing only a narrow array of relationships as the natural, moral, and acceptable ones. So how exactly are these two concepts, capitalism and monogamy, connected? To understand this seemingly convoluted dynamic, it is helpful to turn to Foucault’s theory of sexuality and power. Foucault argues that in contemporary societies, the state controls the population by regulating sex through public discourse. 5 In this discourse, sexual conduct of the population is both an object of analysis and a target of intervention by institutions like medicine, science, school, public health, law, religion, and family. Thus, sex becomes a public issue between the state and the individual, and the state’s power encroaches on bodies and pleasures through the construction of non-normative sexuality, or perversion.

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__________________________________________________________________ Specifically, according to Foucault, sexual repression under capitalism functioned initially as integral part of bourgeois order. Women were assigned with conjugal and parental obligations and considered hysteric when they did not follow such norms. Children were expected to preserve the line of descent as well as their social class and problematised when they masturbated. This repression has reached the proletariat because, as Foucault suggests, pleasurable pursuits of sex do not conduce to intensive labour capacity that needs to be exploited from the workers. In this process, the bourgeoisie controls the body of the proletariat, ‘the body that produces and consumes.’ 6 Construction of the conventional family plays an important role in subjugating the urban proletariat because the family operates to anchor sexuality and provide it with a perpetual support. This detailed analysis helps us understand how the capitalist state controls the individual sexuality by governing the ruling ideology of the family, which assumes heterosexuality and monogamy. 4. Communism and Non-Monogamy After examining how capitalism and monogamy operate together to create and maintain the system of oppression, we have a better sense of how to disrupt these dehumanising institutions. Since Marx has already enlightened us with his revolutionary concepts of socialism and communism, we know what a postcapitalist society should look like. For the other half of the problem, monogamy, I hope to explain how we can revolutionise the ways we think of our sex and relationships. This should also facilitate further human evolution as we focus on and strive for ultimate compassion for all living things, an attitude we have never collectively had, at least in the past several hundred years. What is particularly relevant in Marx’s theory is the ideas that under communism, workers will be able to recognise the value of their own work in terms of the creation, creative activity, fellow humans, and species being in natural production. This implies that work is perceived as a holistic experience that reunifies mind and body, labour and leisure, public and private, individual and collective, and so on. I see this reunification process as an opportunity to reintegrate the sexual and the non-sexual, which were forcefully split under capitalism, by uprooting and transforming the moral, social, political, and scientific values and meanings added to sex and by renouncing sex as a significant ‘boundary marker.’ In my view, such processes will provide us with possibilities for a radical sexual revolution and evolution, as we will once again be able to recognise the value of our own sexualities and intimate agency, or the capabilities for defining our own intimate relationships outside the context and language of monogamous marriages. What exactly does this radical sexual revolution through non-monogamy look like? To explore this question, first we need to unravel the historical context of sexual repression, liberation, and revolution as separate political climates. As we

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__________________________________________________________________ have seen, the present form of sexual repression resulted from the emergence of capitalism. However, this does not necessarily mean sexual repression helps maintain capitalism. According to Soble, Herbert Marcuse introduces the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to discuss ‘the liberation of sexuality manipulated by an oppressive social order for its own purposes.’ 7 This suggests that capitalism can be maintained through the liberation rather than repression of sexuality; it seems reasonable when we observe the corporatisation of gay and lesbian movements and the commodification of gay and lesbian identities, such as Pride corporate sponsorship, Human Rights Campaign’s products, and buyEquality, which consolidates the directory of gay-friendly companies. On the other hand, Soble also brings up another argument that what is commonly referred to as ‘sexual liberation’ was not really liberation after all. I see that these arguments make sense to some extent, but questioning how liberatory those historical moments in the 1960s and 70s in the U.S. were does not enlighten us as much as examining why they were considered liberatory. This is because, as Boggs and Boggs remind us, there is no final struggle or ultimate revolution with which we can somehow get over. To contrast with my view of a radical sexual revolution, I would like to point out why the ‘sexual liberation’ was only liberatory at best and not revolutionary at all. As I mentioned, this ‘liberation’ coexisted with, if not maintained, capitalist political economy. In this ‘liberated’ atmosphere, while premarital sex and extramarital sex are more visible, heterosexual monogamous marriages remain as the norm and the goal of romantic sexual relationships. This is reflected on the same-sex marriage movements, which eagerly attempt to maintain the institution and privileges of marriage. Gender roles may have slightly shifted due to the emergence of feminism, but gender equality is yet to be achieved, and rigid gender binary is still prevalent in every aspect of society. Indeed, information of sex has been disseminated through the media, science, and education, but most of it is exchanged as a commodity between the individual and the state, the school, the corporate, and the non-profit. Importantly, it is quite possible to argue that the U.S. has regressed to the state of sexual repression since the 1980s, marked by antiabortion campaigns and the promotion of abstinence-only sex education. Looking at the discourses around sex and relationships, we notice their historical transitions from sexual repression to ‘liberation,’ as illustrated in Figure 1. In the sexual discourse under sexual repression, any acceptable sexual acts Figure 1 are limited to heterosexual vaginal intercourse within marital relationships. Sex When the discourse makes the transition = to so-called ‘sexual liberation,’ a small Marriage discrepancy arises between sexual acts and what is now commonly called as sexual repression sexual liberation

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__________________________________________________________________ romantic ‘love’ instead of marriage, allowing for sexual acts without ‘love,’ such as ‘friends with benefits.’ This appears liberatory because of this room for premarital or extramarital casual sex. However, these terms indicate that marriage is still assumed as the goal of most sexual relationships and that formal, serious, planned sex is more valued. Meanwhile, ‘love’ remains to occur only in the context of sexual relationships. This means that we cannot talk about emotional attraction that does not involve sexual desire, which is the dominant factor in this discourse of sex and relationships. In other words, sex and ‘love’ are conflated. This discourse is ultimately limiting because, just like many polyamorists are concerned, it discriminates between friendships and romantic relationships, with their boundary marked by sexual acts and desire. 8 Finally, I would like to introduce my idea of a radical sexual revolution. Since the key concept of this revolution is intimate agency, this post-capitalist discourse around all human relationships will be discussed in the framework of intimacy. Figure 2 illustrates this dynamic. This discourse is revolutionary because it emphasises the level of intimacy in individual relationships with everyone we interact with. Figure 2 This means that boundaries between friendships   and relationships become more porous, if not disappear. This process is facilitated by a radical transformation of values and meanings attached to sexual acts. For example, the institution of marriage will no longer exist in this revolutionary society, and we will be treating both sexual and non-sexual Sexual revolution relationships equally without comparing the importance of them. In other words, whether we decide to have sex or not does not affect how much compassion we pour into a relationship. This allows us to see each relationship individually as a qualitatively different unit from one another and to strive for the greatest possible degree of intimacy in each relationship. Therefore, such a radical discourse of sex and relationships offers us intimate agency without referring to the oppressive framework of heterosexual monogamous marriages. The concept of intimate agency is useful in several ways. First, because it describes a capability instead of an identity or a certain behaviour, it enables us to move away from endlessly inventing further categorisation. Rather than creating just another box, this idea allows us to simply recognise the power within, what already exists in ourselves as a source of agency around relating with others. Second, this empowering nature allows for various identities and behaviours to coexist without having a hierarchy. In other words, one may recognise her or his intimate agency and still practice monogamous relationships because that is how she or he chooses to define the relationship. This is different from the notion of

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__________________________________________________________________ polyamory as identity and a set of corresponding behaviour. Moreover, the emphasis on the intimacy, not sexual acts, can address various ways of human connections, whether heterosexual, pansexual, or asexual, and render such existing classifications more porous. This is a revolutionary possibility because it can help eradicate various boundaries that divide us along the lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, age, and so on. Overall, this creates a society in which our relationships become Queer-centric, in a sense that norms around sexuality will vanish and nothing will be normative. 5. Conclusion We must remember that a radical revolution must also contribute to human evolution. Because all forms of oppression are essentially embedded in the same structure, one form of oppression cannot be eradicated without deconstructing all others, including patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, and nationalism. The institution of monogamous marriage has been a key aspect of this system of oppression, as it dictates the ways in which we relate with each other and establishes at what age, with whom, where, how, and what kind of relationships it is socially acceptable to have. In reality, this benefits hardly anyone on the personal level, while it only maintains structural oppression and gives more power to the state. When we collectively imagine and struggle, with unwavering trust and hope in compassion for all living things, toward a society free of oppression, the concept of intimate agency shall empower us to continue this journey. This ongoing questioning of how to ‘love’ one another through intimacy-building situates us directly opposite from violence, war, and exploitation. After all, any change will occur only through dialectical processes, and we must actively take part in such processes by constantly learning from the past.

Notes  

1

James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 2 Robert Crooks and Karla Baur, Our Sexuality (Cengage Learning, 2007). 3 Melita J. Noël, ‘Progressive Polyamory: Considering Issues of Diversity’, Sexualities 9 (2006): 602-620. 4 Ani Ritchie and Meg Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Languages in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy’. Sexualities 9 (2006): 584-601. 5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: Random House, 1978). 6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 107. 7 Alan Soble. Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (Yale University Press, 1986), 12.

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8

Ritchie and Barker, ‘There Aren’t Words for What We Do’, 584-601.

Bibliography Boggs, James, and Grace Lee Boggs. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974. Crooks, Robert, and Karla Baur. Our Sexuality. Cengage Learning, 2007. Engels, Frederick. ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. Accessed May 3, 2010. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/originfamily/index.htm. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I. New York: Random House, 1978. Noël, Melita J. ‘Progressive Polyamory: Considering Issues of Diversity’. Sexualities 9 (2006): 602–620. Ritchie, Ani, and Meg Barker. ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Languages in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy’. Sexualities 9 (2006): 584–601. Sears, Alan. ‘Queer Anti-Capitalism: What’s Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation?’ Science & Society 69, No. 1 (2005): 92–112. Soble, Alan. Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality. New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Haruki Eda is a postgraduate student pursuing a MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He plans to earn a Ph.D in sociology, focusing on social movements, Queer politics, and transnationalism.

‘Loving Many’: Polyamorous Love, Gender and Identity António Fernando Cascais and Daniel Cardoso Abstract In times of changing sexualities and identity politics, some people are changing the way they define relationships, from sex-related words, and to feelings-related words. Polyamory, meaning literally ‘loving many,’ is one such case. Polyamory makes sex a peripheral subject in defining a relationship, but the original referential is still there: monogamy as a normative institution, against which polyamory stands. Love, here, takes the grand-stand and becomes the fundamental source of difference from other behaviours portrayed as being more sexualised and less about the feelings and emotions. The ideal of polyamory is also closely related to the idea of confluent love and a pure relationship, both concepts created by Giddens. From the analysis of e-mails exchanged during 2009 in alt.polyamory, the first mailing list ever about polyamory (and one of the birth-places of the word), we attempt to analyse the ways in which polyamorists talk about themselves and how they perceive polyamory by welcoming and interacting with newcomers to the mailing list, and how love is understood and conceptualised in here. In denying a more traditionalist and romantic/binary approach to love, a reconceptualisation of what love is needs to be formulated and argumentatively supported. Also, since polyamory is portrayed as a more feminist-oriented view of love, gender and gender’s relation to feelings and intimate relationships are also put into question and made problematic in these messages. In all of this, the intelligibility of this new identity and its non-normative aspects interact with different narratives of love, emotion and gender in ways to be explored in this chapter. Key Words: Polyamory, gender, love, non-monogamy, internet, mailing list, intimacy, Foucault. ***** 1. What is Polyamory? Although the adjective ‘polyamorous’ has seen sporadic use since 1953, 1 the word ‘polyamory’ only came about in the last decade of the 20th century, in two very different contexts: once associated with a neo-pagan inspired workshop on relationships, and again as a neologism used to create a mailing list (the first occurrence in 1990, and the second in 1991). Haritaworn et al., 2 define it as ‘the assumption that it is possible, valid and worthwhile to maintain intimate, sexual, and/or loving relationships with more than one person.’ The main point in this definition is that polyamory can be defined fundamentally as an assumption - in other words, as an ideological background or moral bottom-line from which an identity can then be formulated.

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__________________________________________________________________ Polyamory’s relationship with sexuality, heterosexuality and monogamy is fraught with rupture. As Pepper Mint 3 states, even if the people involved were to remain sexually monogamous or sexually inactive (as is the case with asexuals), the challenge to mono-normativity would remain. 2. Polyamorous Ethics? So, what is the main guideline, in ethical terms, when it comes to polyamory? Well, it is said, jokingly, that the mantra of polyamory is ‘communicate, communicate, communicate’ - this of course raises the question of what has to be communicated, and promptly raises the suspicion that this communication is, after all, just another form of confessional discourse. 4 But, actually, the kind of discourse we find in blogs dedicated to polyamory, in forums and mailing lists, is not so much the typical hierarchical truth-game between the specialist and the analysed (the game of confession works like that: someone talks to a specialist in order to be interpreted and to be told the truth about oneself), 5 but closer to what the Greeks termed the epimeleia heautou, the ‘care of the self.’ 6 Within the logics of the ‘care of the self,’ subjects necessitate one another to form and develop their own subjectivities, and discourse is not a form of decryption, but enacted in search of commentary, of self- and hetero-reflexivity. Both commenter and commented learn from this dialogic exchange. Foucault 7 talks about ‘writing of the self’ as a form of epimeleia heautou, where a friend is fundamental for the subject to constitute himself as such, by using παρρησία (parrhesia), which means frankness. This writing comprises everyday events, the person’s own thoughts and feelings, unlike confessional discourse - it is ethopoietic, it produces ethos, by transforming truth into that very same ethos, empowering the ‘addressee, arming the writer - and eventually any other readers.’ 8 Such an attitude has the potential to bring about an ‘intellectual ethics, a letting go of oneself as a form of constant self-refashioning,’ where the subject can aim to form a co-incidence between his words and his actions. 9 In much of this, polyamory seems to be interwoven of several characteristics presented by Giddens 10 as part of the ‘pure relationship,’ a relationship that is maintained for its own sake, only while all those involved feel fulfilled by it. As defended elsewhere, and employing here the four aspects that constitute a moral subject according to Foucault 11 - determination of the ethical substance; mode of assujetissement; elaboration of ethical work; subject’s teleology -, the polyamorous ethical subject is linked to his own honesty or frankness; connects with groups of other polyamorous subjects so that he can constitute himself as a subject; he cares for the self, in order to (from the insider’s point of view) attain more freedom, independence and, ultimately, self-control. 12 Within this frame, the subject seems, indeed, to be conspicuously without any gender markings. Even so, polyamory can be seen as a form of feminine empowerment 13 in two ways: first, its theoretical background entails the end of the

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__________________________________________________________________ moral double standard that accords men the possibility of having more than one sexual or romantic partner and be seen as more empowered by it whereas it demeans women who do the same; second, it brings to the foreground of discourse (the discourse that should be founded on parrhesia) the topic of emotions, feelings, of the private sphere, beyond the stereotypical rationality that is supposed to dominate male speech. Indeed, if (frank) communication is a corner-stone of polyamorous ethos, then such communication is only possible and effective under conditions of parity - a subdued alterity does not allow for the constitution of the subject. At the same time, this erasure of gender can generate other problems, namely that of invisibility. 3. Methodological Approach to alt.polyamory and Main Results To collect the data for this presentation, all the conversation threads that related to newcomers presenting themselves where collected for the whole of 2009: a total of 26 threads, containing 2501 emails. From those, 13 threads were randomly selected in order to be subjected to Content Analysis. Due to inequalities in the number of emails per thread, this represented a total of 580 emails, containing 46.448 words. 14 The coding table used was a modified version of the one developed by Keener. 15 The most frequent categories was one added to the original coding scheme: offtopic. Indeed, off-topic conversation is the single most frequent item in the corpus, in a mailing list that’s supposed to be single-themed (29% of all coded text). Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that this ‘offtopic’ is far from irrelevant: it is through it that older members reassert their belonging to the community created there, offering support and giving their opinions about matters that are interesting to them as multifaceted people, not only as polyamorous. In second place, contemplating 28% of the coded text (almost as much as the off-topic category) is the ‘Honest communication is vital!’ category, reinforcing the importance that honesty (meaning frankness, parrhesia) has within polyamorous discourse. One other topic that permeates the discourse of those who participated on the debates was that polyamory is hard work - emotional work, scheduling work. But all with a clear goal: to reach a greater level of perceived empowerment. What exactly is the measure of that empowerment? Control - emotional control as it implies control over one’s life, control over the origin of those very same emotions; not necessarily a suppressive form of control, but one that would shape one’s emotions by reflexively (and rationally) analysing them and thusly mastering them. As feelings have power over these subjects, as they feel feelings as something within that acts upon them, so do they search for a way to have power over those feelings. This raises a problem: others might try, also, to control one’s feelings, instrumentalising them and thus the person to whom they belong - in this

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__________________________________________________________________ sense, mastery over oneself and one’s feelings is also a safeguard against the loss of autonomy due to external malicious action. The presence of gender and gendered discourse within alt.polyamory is not a straight case of inclusion or exclusion. There are several conflicting trends here: some people use the expressions ‘zir’ and ‘zie,’ neologisms by corruption of German words, that mean to replace pronouns carrying a gendered weight in English (but this is rare); at the same time, there is a concern for how the gendered social constructs (as well as sexual orientation ones) can affect someone’s take on a relationship. The idea that women are raised to be what is called ‘indirect communicators’ is also present, here, but not as essentialist. 4. Love in Polyamory There is a clear difference in how love is mentioned, between the group of newcomers and the group of habitués. There was never, during the time-frame of the analysis, a discussion solely or even mainly dedicated to talking about the definitions of love, but nonetheless, it was a theme that pervaded many conversations, especially from the side of the neophytes, trying to integrate a new thought structure into their discourse. Matters dealing directly with love where more sparsely commented upon by the regular users, and most of the commentary was of a utilitarian nature, seeking to direct the original poster to a course of action or to reflect upon her or his experiences. A. The Neophytes’ Love - Negotiating Life Changes Context is paramount to understanding the process of talking about love in altpolyamory. The majority of new-comers share a specific trait: they are, in that very moment, in a situation of non-monogamy which they are trying to cope with for the very first time. Most of the starting emails are lengthy descriptions of what the current situation is, and at the same time a request for feedback or help from the users that are already there. Marks of patriarchal reasoning (ownership, centrality of male experience) are present still in such discourses. One (self-reported) male user employs objectifying terms when talking about the experiences of a friend of his, with whom we wanted to develop a sexual and romantic relationship. But that depends on him getting to ‘win her over,’ referring to his friend. Commenting on the fact that his girlfriend does not mind the idea of another person in the relationship (where ‘another person’ needs to be read as ‘another woman’), he calls her ‘just self less [sic] like that sometimes.’ One other user, that identifies as Sky Marie, has started a relationship with a man that already had another girlfriend - ‘I love him so very much that I changed a lot to be able to be with him.’ Love then is a promoter of change or, seen in another perspective, a motive for the subject to sacrifice and modify itself in order to accomplish the obtaining of someone else’s love.

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__________________________________________________________________ PolyGirl (before, Sky Marie), after a few emails from some of the older users, reflects: I also feel that he has too much power, in the sense that he *can* make me feel secure, by telling and showing his love. But I also feel that it shouldn’t be necessary … . He affirms his love for me, but I do think that our love is not equal. He loves me as much as he can, yet I love him more, and while I don’t think more equals better, I think that love has to be equal. So love is linked to power, and to the demonstration of power: being loved can be something upon which dependence can be built. And as PolyGirl tries to change her viewpoint, still she struggles with quantifying but not quantifying love. Love’s equality is, here, not a matter of quantity (and yet she loves him more), but of quality - how that quality is ascertained is beyond her reflection. Later on, she muses on the role of society, in relation to how her own views of love are constructed due to social conditioning. She questions those ‘beliefs’ and replaces them with others but, in the meantime, there is an essential kernel that remains the same: I grew up having a whole bunch of beliefs about love and relationships that I have come to question. I do believe that you can fall in love with more than one person that this can happen simultaneously. …BUT I also think that essentially, the principles are the very same: love, commitment, trust, honesty… These sets of ‘principles’ that ‘are the very same’ serve as a way to link the users past experiences and upbringing to the new forms of relationships she is experimenting with, denying the possibility of a complete rupture or of a substantially different paradigm, and thus to an extent disabling the potential that polyamory brings to question the normative circumstances behind that ‘whole bunch of beliefs.’ B. The Voice(s) of Experience - Love Reconsidered All of these messages got replies, from other users, that are frequent and longtime dwellers of the alt.polyamory mailing list. For example, to Sky Marie/PolyGirl, Stef responds: ‘Loving someone doesn’t automatically mean that being in a romantic relationship with them is a good idea.’ So relationships and love are separated, with more attention given to the persons involved, and on how they feel beyond that notion of love.

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__________________________________________________________________ Subjectivity and its importance is also maintained by the denial of absolutes and imperatives, and by the reaffirmation of the importance of control (selfcontrol, and the autonomisation of the self) - again Stef responds to PolyGirl: ‘Not everyone needs every one of their love relationships to be equal. … Also, be careful to distinguish between degree of love and degree of need.’ Need here, as in the need for the other’s affirmation and reassurance, is framed as a potentially negative thing. The person that needs the most is the person, in this view, that is the least independent, the least autonomous, and therefore the one that might have more difficulties being happy. C. Specific Experiences: The Punalua Even though the possible queerness and challenge that polyamory might (not) posit to normative experiences of love and intimacy, some specific situations do that of their own accord, in confusing (queering?) the distinctions between romantic and non-romantic love, turning love into more of a continuum, rather than a set of poles that might or might not overlap. The notion of punalua is originally Hawaiian, and has been imported into polyamorous vocabulary, meaning ‘my lover’s lover.’ One of the newcomers, CJZslwz, comments her husband’s other love: … I do care for her too. In large part, that is because my husband loves her, and my opinion is “how could I NOT love someone he loves?” … I have developed my own fondness for her, that is not quite the same as friendship, not quite like a sister, hard to describe. … . The confusion present in this quote stems from a notion of love that creates some words (and thus brings some modes of loving into existence) while not creating others. ‘Hard to describe’ is then the only position available - the failing of speech that then motivates creative linguistic acts (that’s how ‘polyamory’ was invented). 5. Loving Conclusions So what is there to say regarding Gender and Love? On both counts, there is confusion - confusion as to the role of any of the matters (all in all, conversations of love are peppered around the e-mails, but do not usually constitute a main topic; conversations about feminism and about the role of gendered experiences in polyamorous life are absent as well, but any misogynous posturing is quickly shot down and even gendered nuances are offered as example), and also confusion at the level of the personal experiences as such. Emotion is indeed present in this mailing list, as a conversational topic, and as something that needs to be put under control. This very same injunction to control

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__________________________________________________________________ (to autonomy from feelings, in a way) gives this topic an uncertain standing. If, on the one hand, it is not shunned away in favor of a pure rationality (something that our Cartesian cultural frame makes it hard to accomplish), on the other hand feelings are meant to be kept under control, and function in an apparent externality to the subject itself, and so even the fusing of (stereotypically) male and female themes is diminished by this instrumental take on feelings and their relation to how the subjects see themselves. Gender is, here, a phantasmal experience, a web of presuppositions and, seemingly, lacking self-reflexivity except at the cusp of more confrontational debates, where it becomes a data-point to be taken in consideration. Love, on the other hand, can be both a facilitator of happiness, but also a locus of control loss, of dependency, and something to be managed in relation to subjectivity.

Notes 1

Daniel Cardoso, ‘Polyamory, or The Harshness of Spawning a Substantive Meme’, trans. Daniel Cardoso, Interact 17 (March 1, 2011), http://interact.com.pt/17/poliamor/. 2 Jin Haritaworn, Chin-ju Lin and Christian Klesse, ‘Poly/logue: A Critical Introduction to Polyamory’, Sexualities 9, No. 5 (December 1, 2006): 518. 3 Pepper Mint, ‘Polyamory Is Not about the Sex, Except When It Is “Freaksexual”’, 2008, http://freaksexual.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/polyamory-isnot-about-the-sex-except-when-it-is/. 4 Michel Foucault, História da Sexualidade I - A Vontade de Saber (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1994). 5 Daniel Cardoso, ‘Amando Vári@s - Individualização, Redes, Ética e Poliamor’ (Masters’ Thesis in Communication Sciences, Lisbon: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010). 6 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981-1982, eds. Frédéric Gros and François Ewald (New York: Picador, 2006). 7 Michel Foucault, O que é um Autor? (Lisbon: Passagens, 2006). 8 Ibid., 148. 9 Cascais and Miranda in Ibid., 25. 10 Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). 11 Michel Foucault, História da Sexualidade 2: O Uso dos Prazeres (Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1994), 33-34. 12 Cardoso, ‘Amando Vári@s’, 63. 13 Daniel Cardoso, Carla Correia and Danielle Capella, ‘Polyamory as a Possibility of Feminine Empowerment’, in Proceedings of the 9th Conference of European

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__________________________________________________________________ Sociological Association (presented at the 9th Conference of European Sociological Association, Lisbon, 2009). 14 cf. Cardoso, ‘Amando Vári@s’, 54. 15 Matt C. Keener, ‘A Phenomenology of Polyamorous Persons’ (University of Utah, 2004), http://www.xmission.com/~mkeener/thesis.pdf.

Bibliography Cardoso, Daniel. ‘Amando Vári@s - Individualização, Redes, Ética e Poliamor’. Masters’ Thesis in Communication Sciences, Lisbon: Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010. —––. ‘Polyamory, or The Harshness of Spawning a Substantive Meme’. Translated by Daniel Cardoso. Interact 17 (March 1, 2011). http://interact.com.pt/17/poliamor/. Cardoso, Daniel, Carla Correia, and Danielle Capella. ‘Polyamory as a Possibility of Feminine Empowerment’. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of European Sociological Association. Lisbon, 2009. Foucault, Michel. História da Sexualidade 2: O Uso dos Prazeres. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1994. —––. História da Sexualidade I - A Vontade de Saber. Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1994. —––. O que é um Autor? Lisbon: Passagens, 2006. —––. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 19811982. Edited by Frédéric Gros, and François Ewald. New York: Picador, 2006. Giddens, Anthony. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Haritaworn, Jin, Chin-ju Lin, and Christian Klesse. ‘Poly/logue: A Critical Introduction to Polyamory’. Sexualities 9, No. 5 (December 1, 2006): 515–529. Keener, Matt C. ‘A Phenomenology of Polyamorous Persons’. University of Utah, 2004. http://www.xmission.com/~mkeener/thesis.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ Mint, Pepper. ‘Polyamory Is Not about the Sex, Except When It Is “freaksexual”’, 2008. http://freaksexual.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/polyamory-is-not-about-thesex-except-when-it-is/. António Fernando Cascais teaches at the New University of Lisbon since 1990. He has a PhD in Communications Sciences by that same University, has edited several numbers of the RCL academic journal and published several books. He is currently the main researcher in a project about the visual history of medicine in Portugal. Daniel Cardoso teaches at the Lusophone University of Humanities and Technology, and is a PhD student at the New University of Lisbon. His Masters’ thesis was on Polyamory in the internet, and he is also part of the Portuguese team of the European project EU Kids Online 2.

Beyond the Pair: The Changing Meaning of Intimate Relationships in the Context of Non-Monogamy Serena Petrella Abstract In my previous research, I have argued that intimate loving relationships can be analysed in the Foucauldian genealogical tradition of Governmentality, as one of the many ‘folds’ in the technology of sexuality. The sexual regulation of paired relationships is deployed though the teleology of the pair and the deontology of monogamy. Individuals act out monogamy, becoming ‘good erotic citizens,’ who self-regulate. I have now shifted my research focus on those individuals who choose to live at odds with the dominant sexual norms of our culture. My current work addresses open relationships. In this chapter, I present my preliminary findings in my investigations on how gay/lesbian/queer communities, as well as heterosexual polyamorous communities, negotiate meanings of love, intimacy, and relationship in the context of open erotic play. My task, as a genealogist turned ethnographer, is to tease out how self-identified erotic dissidents position themselves against the hegemonic norm of monogamy, articulating new teleologies for intimate life which organically call into being new blueprints for identity formation, as well as new ‘ethical practices,’ that are utilised for self-reflective evaluation, to ascertain the level of ‘relational success’ one has achieved. I conclude by arguing that it is possible trace the ‘unfolding’ of a new normative cycle: openness is articulated as an ‘abject response’ to an imposed ethics of monogamy. Such resistance takes various forms, which vary in their degree of ‘openness.’ The normative and its abject then, function in tactical collusion with one another, in ‘fruitful cyclical crisis.’ These forms of openness are historically contingent and socially constructed in a period when sexuality, intimacy and love have been valorised as ‘ultimate realms for human potential’: they are privileged loci to construct a perceived ‘authentic’ self, which remains the product of governance practices that are in-folded. Key Words: Relational norms, sexual regulation, dissident eroticism, the normative cycle, ethnography of openness. ***** 1. Introduction In my research I investigate an under-examined area in sexuality studies and sexual governance studies: open relationships. In this chapter, I present my preliminary findings of an ethnographic project that studies hetero/gay/lesbian/trans/queer communities, which choose to live at odds with the dominant sexual norms of our culture. The aim of the project is to map out how

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__________________________________________________________________ individuals who have rejected the erotic exclusivity of hegemonic monogamy, fashion meaningful, intimate and committed relationships for themselves. I discuss what I term ‘dissident eroticism’ in the Canadian context. This is an understudied area in sociology. There are only a handful of ethnographic studies on openness or polyamory, and most are article-length works. 1 Through deductive reasoning, I formulated a number of hypotheses based on my genealogical background on sexual norms, and proceeded to test them out by using the qualitative methodology of in-depth, open-ended interviewing; I canvassed 22 individuals who self-identified as ‘open.’ 2 2. Grid for Analysis: Normative Monogamy and Dissident ‘Openness’ I have discussed elsewhere that, since the 1850 in the West, the discourses that target the technology of sexuality have generally been articulated into three schematic ‘layers.’ 3 The first level targets ontology and pertains to ‘modes of being’ or ‘blueprints’ for a stylised self. The second level is teleological: it outlines the ‘idealized life goals’ that are at stake (for example, the ‘perfect’ relationship, or the ‘good life’) and the general aspirations for existence. The third level has to do with ascetics, and is made up of the ‘bundle’ of moral directives that one must follow. It delineates the ‘ethical’ comportment that one must practice to become the idealised ‘beings’ of the first level, as well as to reach the envisioned ‘lifegoals’ of the second level. It is important to realise that this last level is severely self-reflexive, or de-ontological: it entails practices of self-scrutiny, how one must analyse and critically evaluate her/his success in reaching the ontological, the teleological and the ascetic schemas. 4 I argue that counter-normative discourse on sexuality, emerging against mononormative directives, has been articulated along the same schematic layers outlined above. I can also make the observation that they have splintered further, at times coalescing against the ‘hetero’ directive, at times against the ‘monogamous’ economy, while at times they have enthusiastically and pan-sexually merged the two! My task, as a genealogist turned ethnographer, is to tease out how the selfidentified erotic dissidents I interview position themselves against the hegemonic monogamous norm. In what ways do they envision their relational life-goals? How do they describe their ideal intimate, emotional and sexual lifestyles? Next, what blueprints for identity formation do they utilize to ‘name’ themselves? Further, what ethical practices do they enact to achieve these goals? And finally, how they scrutinise themselves, self-reflectively, to ensure they are adhering to their selfprescribed ideals and ethics? 3. Analysis 3.1 How Can One Be Open? Blueprints for Being As stated earlier, discursive schemas in the technology of sexuality are generally articulated into three schematic ‘layers,’ comprising modes of being as

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__________________________________________________________________ well as modes of action. The first level pertains to ontology, or the ways one has to ‘be’ in order to have to ‘right’ to name oneself a certain kind of open being. Here multiple possibilities emerge as potential ‘blueprints’ in the context of an open identity. Gay, lesbian, bi, trans … at times come ‘first’ - one defines oneself first as ‘non-straight’ or ‘queer,’ and second as ‘open.’ In other instances, openness comes first: it is the economic directive to ‘go beyond two’ that matters most in the characterisations of those interviewed. At stake here are multiple nexuses for resistance to sexual norms. The first group, the queer group, pitches its blueprint for identity against ‘straightness.’ Essential to this positioning is the issue of desire: direction becomes fundamental. The refusal to desire the opposite, or, ‘only’ the opposite, effectively fashions one as ‘(fill any of the above mentioned options here).’ It is important to note that ‘straightness’ remains an essential linchpin against which to define the new and ‘abject’ ontology; the counter-ontology cannot exist without its ‘normal other.’ The ‘open’ aspect of the self comes second here: openness is then cast as a feature of the queer self. Openness is hierarchically subsumed to the master ontology, which is ‘queer,’ and then ‘open’ because queer first. 5 Another recurring theme worth mentioning is what I term the ‘emerging authentic self.’ Interviewees often describe a process of becoming that echoes the discourse found in the narratives of queer emancipation. This mode of being is outlined in a manner that epitomises enlightenment: becoming open is something that ‘grew from within,’ an inevitable impetus, the emergence and consolidation of a ‘truer’ version of the self that could no longer be denied. 6 Yet, the most interesting ontological casting encountered in my research has to be the doubly-abject ontology that is articulated by those who find their sense of self in relation to the already abject. Here subjects deploy their identity in differentiation to other erotic dissidents, or by ‘not being’ another kind of ‘open’ person. Emblematic is the example of K. and T., who vociferously refused to name themselves ‘poly’ because they understood it to be a very exclusionary term, with strongly normative undertones. To them, ‘being poly’ was ‘just as bad’ as being ‘straight’ and ‘monogamous’: it entailed conformity, exclusion and especially a refusal of sexual plasticity. The ‘open’ ontology they utilised to define themselves was then specifically cast against the politically exclusionary and sexually severe polyamorous one. 7 3.2 Envisioning ‘Open’: The Heterogeneity of Idealised Lifestyle The second level in the discursive schemas of the technology of sexuality is teleological in nature, and articulates ‘idealised life goals.’ And here we once more return to what Foucault has aptly named the ‘tactical polyvalence of discourse.’ 8 It is not always the case that the ‘economy of monogamy’ is refused or suspended in the anti-hegemonic discourses on the technology of sexuality. For example, many gay/lesbian/queer/trans individuals continue to hold on to certain aspect of

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__________________________________________________________________ monogamy - emotional monogamy - as an essential feature of the ‘ideal’ relational life-path, valorising it as the ultimate mode for intimate love. In a sense, then, certain counter discourses of sexuality can be ‘abject’ at the ontological level yet ‘normalised’ at the teleological, the ascetic and the de-ontological levels. In my findings, teleologies of openness were very diverse. 9 For example, in more than one instance, homosexual partners named their relationship as ‘sexually open’ but as ‘emotionally closed.’ The teleology cast here was one of playful sexual abundance but strong and exclusive emotional fidelity. This hierarchically positioned monogamous love above plasticity in the relationships, and made intimacy an area of concern that needed safe-keeping and guarding. 10 In another case, a marriage between gay partners was defined as sexually and emotionally ‘open.’ 11 Some individuals were more circumspect in their descriptions of ideal relational life. They specifically crafted an open teleology in more discreet terms, by casting it specifically against ‘non-viable’ and ‘overly idealised’ poly versions, and this operation was justified because more ‘realistic’ and ‘practical.’ 12 Finally, an even more politicised teleology for polyamory was articulated. S., as self identified poly woman, made the point that all her poly relationships had to be on ‘equal footing’ when it came to love, intimacy and sexuality. 13 A defining feature of the ‘poly’ teleology then, was a commitment to make all relationships ‘loving’ ones; this insistence on love was the discursive linchpin that allowed for differentiation from other ‘open’ forms of relationships. So, the ideal life was defined as entailing many egalitarian and concomitant loves. 14 3.3 Doing and Monitoring ‘Openness’: Ethical Practices for Proper Behaviour The third level, as mentioned earlier, deals with asceticism or with ‘moral practices.’ It is de-ontological in nature and entails a self-reflexive monitoring of one’s ability to ‘live up to’ imagined blueprints for open identity and idealised relationship goals. What practices do open individuals enact to analyse and critically evaluate their success in reaching the ontological and the teleological schemas they prescribed to themselves? The first issues that deserve attention are ‘honesty’ and ‘surveillance of reciprocity.’ The theme of honesty was present in all narratives, but the areas targeted and the demands for disclosure were different. For the sexually open but emotionally closed relationships, this had pragmatic applications: it entailed, for example, disclosing websites used to cruise, handles used, ads posted, as well as all encounters; it also entailed a ‘debriefing’ with the partner after each and every encounter. The primary demand here was honesty about sexual attraction concomitant to the suppression of emotional closeness. 15 For the hierarchically organised open relationships, the demand for full honesty was specifically targeted towards emotional connection (although other areas, such as the frequency of sexual encounters, were also mentioned). The amount one

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘loved’ was the primary area of concern, and had to be closely monitored, to ensure the primary relationships was not eclipsed. A fundamental responsibility was to ensure that new lovers were aware of the relational hierarchy. 16 For the poly relationships, honesty and disclosure were discussed in different terms. One had to be generally honest and open (disclose encounters, partners etc. …), but more specifically, one had to commit to honesty about love; each and every new lover had to be informed about this pledge. One form of poly ethics then, was that each individual ‘audition’ their new potential partners, to ‘weed out’ the ‘frivolous’ or the ‘emotionally superficial’ (promiscuous people). Avoiding involvement with the ‘loose apples’ was essential. Beyond this prime directive, however, the other aspects of relationships could be monitored less strictly. 17 A number of issues arose in the discussions of the self-evaluation of one’s ‘open’ performance. Self-critique was often rigorous and extensive. It was astounding how often self-deprecation around possessiveness and jealousy emerged: often individuals spoke of ‘letting oneself down,’ as well as their partners, on these problematic areas. Jealousy was often described as an issue of strength of character and something one had to ‘work through.’ Additionally, it was tied to the issue of emotional work. One’s responsibility was to ‘manage’ possessiveness and jealousy by giving partners emotional support, so that insecurities could be dealt with and fears of abandonment assuaged. Failure to provide such support was seen as a lacuna that deserved immediate attention and rectification. 18 The issue of jealousy was also discussed as something one must guard from in others, and intertwined into a language of relational ‘rights.’ One had the right to be watchful of possessiveness and police a lover’s jealous outbursts. E., for example, explained that an over-jealous partner was aberrant to the lifestyle, and should not to be tolerated; he argued that leaving such an untreatable partner behind may be a justified and ethical last resort in the pursuit of relational happiness through openness. 4. Conclusion In the previous discussion I have illustrated that the ‘normative’ and its other, the ‘abject,’ function in tactical collusion with one another, in ‘fruitful cyclical crisis,’ or ‘discursively productive gyrations.’ The practice of erotic dissidence in openness can be understood as the ‘unfolding’ of a new normative cycle: from hegemonic monogamy, to the rejection of this sexual economy, to a new tactical deployment of new modes of being and forms of eroticism that are ‘dissident’; and then back again, as the new ‘abject’ forms re-order themselves into legitimacy and into ‘open’ vs. ‘poly’ norms. Openness is indeed articulated as an ‘abject response’ to an imposed ‘ethics’ of monogamy, against which one must rebel. The resistance to a mandatory teleology of paired life is then articulated in various forms, which vary in their degree of ‘openness’ and the manner in which they crystallise into new norms.

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__________________________________________________________________ Individuals in open relationships enact ‘practices of the self,’ stylised life-goals and ethical modalities for comportment, in their efforts to live more ‘authentic’ lives. Ultimately, these ‘abject’ practices inevitably consolidate into new normative structures, as the occasion for dissidence is re-crystallised into new normative formations, for the ‘good’ ‘open’ or ‘poly’ person. These forms of openness are historically contingent and socially constructed in a socio-historical period in which sexuality, intimacy and love, have been valorised as ‘ultimate realms for human potential,’ a privileged locus for a technology of the self that gives access to a ‘perceived’ authentic self, which is still the product of governance practices that are in-folded.

Notes 1

Meg Barker, ‘This is My Partner and This is My … Partner’s Partner: Constructing a Polyamorous Identity in a Monogamous World’, Journal of Constructivist Psychology 18 (2005): 75-88; Kristian Klesse, ‘Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy and Differentialist Anti-Promiscuity Discourses’, Sexualities 8.4 (2005): 445-464; ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’: Contesting the Terms of NonMonogamy’, Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 565-583; Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli, ‘Choosing not to Choose: Beyond Monogamy, Beyond Duality’, in Breaking the Barriers to Desire, eds. Kevin Lano and Claire Parry (Nottingham: Five leaves Publications, 1995), 41-67; Ani Ritchie and Meg Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Language in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy’, Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 584601; Paula C. Rust, ‘Monogamy and Polyamory: Relationship Issues of Bisexuals’, in Bisexuality, ed. Beth A. Firestein (London: Sage, 1996), 53-83; Elizabeth Sheff, ‘Polyamorous Women, Sexual Subjectivity and Power’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34.3 (2005): 251-283; ‘Poly-Hegemonic Masculinities’, Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 621-642; Petula Sik Ying Ho, ‘The (Charmed) Circle Game: Reflections on Sexual Hierarchy through Multiple Sexual Relationships’, Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 547-564. 2 At this phase of the research, I am working with a ‘sample of convenience.’ This is structurally selective for both class and education (it excludes the non-computer literate); this bias arises from my own privileged social positioning [Klesse, ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’, 566; Ann Phoenix, ‘Practicing Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and “Race” in the Research Process’, in Women’s Lives form a Feminist Perspective Researching, eds. Mary Maynard and June Purvis (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 49-71]. I hope to resolve these representation issues as my sample widens.

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__________________________________________________________________ 3

Serena Petrella, ‘Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy’, in Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality, eds. Margaret Sönser Breen and Fiona Peters (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 169-182; ‘Erotic Civility: Normative Monogamy as a Technology of Governance and SelfGovernance in North America, 1850s to the Present’ (PhD diss., Carleton University, 2008). 4 Petrella, ‘Only with You’, 176-177; Petrella, ‘Erotic Civility: Normative Monogamy’, 51-53. 5 I must specify that in the case of the open or poly blueprint, the refusal of ‘straightness’ is not necessary: one can be ‘straight and open/poly.’ Yet, often the ‘bi’ and ‘open’/’poly’ ontological blueprints merge. This was also found by Sheff, ‘Polyamorous Women, Sexual Subjectivity and Power’, 266; Sheff, ‘PolyHegemonic Masculinities’, 625, and Klesse, ‘Bisexual Women, Non-Monogamy’, 448. 6 This finding is supported in Barker, ‘This is My Partner’, 83-85. 7 This was also found in Barker, ‘This is My Partner’, 82, Ritchie and Barker. ‘“There Aren’t Words”’, 590, and Christian Klesse, ‘Heteronormativity, NonMonogamy and the Marriage Debate in the Bisexual Movement’, The Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review, 7.2 (2006): 577. 8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1978]), 100. 9 Also found by Klesse, ‘Heteronormativity, Non-Monogamy’, 569-570, and by Ritchie and Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words”’, 592. 10 Also found in Klesse, ‘Heteronormativity, Non-Monogamy’, 577 and 579. 11 Sexual plasticity was deemed ‘superficial’ by both, and hierarchically positioned as ‘inferior’ to intimate love. The relational teleology of poly was elevated, because it was more intimate and loving, and therefore qualitatively better. This was also found by Ritchie and Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words”’, 592 and Sheff, ‘Polyamorous Women, Sexual Subjectivity and Power’, 263. 12 In these instances, the primary dyad was strongly privileged, and openness was articulated as either a form of ‘survival openness’ (stripped of lovers who had behaved ‘badly’ and had to be left behind due to their misconduct), or a ‘compartmentalised openness’ (in which new lovers were ‘kept at bay’ and clearly informed that the principal dyad was privileged). 13 She specifically explained that not to give each and every one relationship ‘all of herself’ would have been unethical, because it would diverge from the ‘spirit’ of polyamory. 14 We return then to the fascinating normative gyration based on a doubly abject differentiation: for some, the ‘ideal life’ is open because not poly; for others, the ‘perfect lifestyle’ is poly because it goes beyond simple openness. This was also

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__________________________________________________________________ found by Ritchie and Barker, ‘“There Aren’t Words”’, 592, and Klesse, ‘Heteronormativity, Non-Monogamy’, 572-573. 15 The act of disclosing sexual interest for others was at once ontologically grounding and liberating. First, it was a way to be ‘truly gay,’ and second, it allowed one to live a more ‘authentic’ lifestyle. Yet, emotional closeness was strictly taboo. This was found by Barker, ‘This is My Partner’, 78-81, and Klesse, ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’, 571. 16 One participant, F., used the stratagem of introducing each new lover to his wife. He did this to ensure that the new partner had realistic expectations and honourable intentions. If the potential lover refused to meet his wife, she was discarded, because deemed ‘dishonest’ and thus ‘unworthy.’ 17 Also found by Klesse, ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’, 577. 18 Also found by Sheff, ‘Poly-Hegemonic Masculinities’, 627-628.

Bibliography Barker, Meg. ‘This is My Partner and This is My … Partner’s Partner: Constructing a Polyamorous Identity in a Monogamous World’. Journal of Constructivist Psychology 18 (2005): 75–88. Haritaworn, Jin, Chin-ju Lin, and Christian Klesse. ‘Poly/logue: A Critical Introduction to Polyamory’. Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 551–529. Ho, Petula Sik Ying. ‘The (Charmed) Circle Game: Reflections on Sexual Hierarchy Through Multiple Sexual Relationships’. Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 547– 564. Klesse, Christian. ‘Bisexual Women, Non-monogamy and Differentialist AntiPromiscuity Discourses.’ Sexualities 8.4 (2005): 445–464. —––. ‘Polyamory and its ‘Others’: Contesting the Terms of Non-Monogamy’. Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 565–583. —––. ‘Heteronormativity, Non-Monogamy and the Marriage Debate in the Bisexual Movement’. The Lesbian and Gay Psychology Review 7.2 (2006), 162– 173. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1978].

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__________________________________________________________________ Pallotta-Chiarolli, Maria. ‘Choosing not to Choose: Beyond Monogamy, beyond Duality’. In Breaking the Barriers to Desire, edited by Kevin Lano, and Claire Parry, 41–67. Nottingham: Five leaves Publications, 1995. Petrella, Serena. ‘Only with You - Maybe - If You Make Me Happy’. In Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality, edited by Margaret Sönser Breen, and Fiona Peters, 169–182. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. —––. ‘Erotic Civility: Normative Monogamy as a Technology of Governance and Self-Governance in North America, 1850s to the Present’. PhD diss., Carleton University, 2008. Ritchie, Ani, and Meg Barker. ‘“There Aren’t Words for What We Do or How We Feel So We Have to Make Them Up”: Constructing Polyamorous Language in a Culture of Compulsory Monogamy’. Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 584–601. Phoenix, Ann. ‘Practicing Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender and “Race” in the Reserch Process’. In Researching Women’s Lives form a Feminist Perspective edited by Mary Maynard, and June Purvis, 49–71. London: Taylor and Francis, 1994. Rust, Paula C. ‘Monogamy and Polyamory: Relationship Issues of Bisexuals’. In Bisexuality, edited by Beth A. Firestein, 53–83. London: Sage, 1996. Sheff, Elizabeth. ‘Polyamorous Women, Sexual Subjectivity and Power’. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34.3 (2005): 251–283. —––. ‘Poly-Hegemonic Masculinities’. Sexualities 9.5 (2006): 621–642. Serena Petrella, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Brandon University, Canada.

Part 2 Gender, Love and Children

Parenting for Latinos in Same-Gender Love Relationships Jennifer Ann Boeckel, Debora Ortega and Michael Chifalo Abstract This qualitative research project, based on the principles of phenomenology, has used semi-structured interviews with Latino gay and lesbian parents to explore the understanding of how the intersectionality of these two identities influence their parenting styles, decisions, and concerns. Nine interviews were conducted with Latino parents in same-gender love partnerships who lived in western United States metro communities. Data from the interviews were analysed for emerging themes. This chapter discusses three of these themes: same-gender parented family strengths, Latino cultural assets and dynamics of good parenting. The data reveals that Latino parents in same-gender relationships display love for their children by negotiating multiple oppressive social systems, reinforcing cultural connection, and consciously teaching their children acceptance of diverse people. Key Words: Parenting, family, queer, gay, lesbian, Latino, Chicano, Hispanic, identity, oppression. ***** 1. Introduction Scholarship on parenting is well represented in the literature. Surprisingly there is a dearth of research on Latino parenting despite the commonly held belief that a defining feature of Latino culture is being family focused. Even the literature on same gender parents surpasses the research on Latino parents. Consequently there is an even wider gap in research examining parenting by same gender Latinos. This chapter examines how the intersectionality of marginal identities shape parenting beliefs and behaviours. More specifically, how in the face of oppression, do Latino parents in same-gender relationships use their unique cultures to intentionally create families with explicit values. Values reflect not only the love of parents for their children, but for community and culture, as they teach their children about acceptance of other people. One-on-one interviews were the foundation for this qualitative phenomenological study that explored the lived experience and meaning of parenting for Latinos in same-gender love relationships. 2. Same-Gender Parenting The literature about same-gender parenting predominantly compares the outcomes of children raised by same-gender parents to those raised by heterosexual parents. This research often focuses on whether children of same-gender parents identify as lesbian or gay because of their exposure to same-gender parents. In fact, children of same-gender parents report the same rates of heterosexuality as those

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__________________________________________________________________ raised by heterosexual parents. 1 In addition, no differences were found to exist between teenagers of heterosexual parents and teenagers of same-gender parents on psychological well-being; school outcomes; and family relationships. Ultimately, children of same-gender parents, who reported having loving close relationships with their parents, were well adjusted. 2 The adoption or fostering of children by same-gender parents continues to be a societal flashpoint for controversy despite the undeniably high need for stable homes for children in the United States child welfare system. When comparing same-gender adoptive families to heterosexual adoptive families, the results are quite similar. When same-gender adoptive family functioning was compared to heterosexual adoptive family functioning there were no statistically significant differences in scores of functioning. 3 The differences for the children of samegender parents does not occur as a result of the sexual orientation of the parents, but rather the family’s concern about being treated fairly in a predominantly heterosexual society. 4 The literature on same-gender parenting also indicates that these families face unique challenges because of their sexual orientation. Related to this concept is the issue of publicly disclosing one’s sexual orientation (i.e., coming out). Coming out in the context of parenting specifically refers to the process by which individuals disclose their identity as a gay father or lesbian mother involved in a relationship with a member of the same gender. 5 Decisions like these impact each individual in the family. Living in a same-gender parented family also means that children decide a time and manner to come out to peers and adults as well. Parents must be sensitive to children’s levels of identity acceptance as a member of a same-gender parented family. 6 3. Latino Parenting Latinos are the fastest growing population in the United States and it is expected that by 2025 they will be the largest minority in the United States. 7 As this population continues to grow, so does the need to understand the parenting practices, goals and values of Latino culture in contrast to the dominant culture. In the United States, Latino families reportedly hold the value of male dominance, or machismo, 8 and female submission or, marianismo. 9 This reinforcement of sex roles is especially distinct in parenting styles and beliefs of first and second generation families to the United States. 10 Often machismo is painted in a negative light, ignoring positive behaviours such as protection and provision for the family. Indeed, ethnographic works shows that Latino fathers often appear to be warm, nurturing, especially with young children. 11 Current research demonstrates that parenting is a central task in the lives of Latino parents. 12 Latino mothers and fathers are described as involved in childrearing and place the greatest importance on the following characteristics: being independent, exercising self-control, obeying, getting along with others, and

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__________________________________________________________________ succeeding in athletics. 13 Other research studies have tended to categorise Latino parenting as authoritarian; however some describe these characteristics as coping mechanisms needed for socialisation. 14 Although recent studies have begun considering cultural and ethnic variations in fathering, emerging views of today’s United States fathers still largely describe mainstream white fathers. 15 As research has begun to consider the culture and context of Latino families, studies demonstrate that using white middle class measures do not adequately describe Latino parenting. Not surprisingly, the four primary parenting styles existing in literature: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful, only describe about one third of the Latino families studied. Using dimensions of warmth, demandingness and autonomy in addition to the categories listed above, four new parenting categories were created (protective, cold, affiliative and neglectful). The results showed that the majority or 61% of parents were categorised as protective while 31% were categorised as affiliative. 16 Additional research asserted that characterising Latino parenting styles as authoritarian is misleading. Instead, traditionally defined authoritarian parenting may be appropriately responsive parenting. 17 For example, if both parents and children view their neighbourhood as dangerous, children found it acceptable to be forbidden to play on the street. Also, parents who under the traditional parenting style assessment were ‘low on the parenting dimension of responsiveness’ were actually responsive to their children’s needs. 18 For example, adolescents reported that when their parents could not help them with their homework, parents still found ways to ensure their children were assisted. 19 Despite cultural constraints, parents sought to help their children by maximising their resources by asking other family members to help their children. 4. Latino and Same-Gender Parenting The only relatively comprehensive information about same-gender Latino parents is from the data collected by the United States Census Bureau. Unfortunately, because the Census Bureau does not ask about the sexual orientation of respondents, information about parenting can only be extrapolated from respondents living in same-gender households who identify each other as husband/wife or unmarried partners. Lesbian and gay Latino parents who are not living with their partners or are single remain invisible to researchers using census data. 20 An analysis of the United States 2000 census indicates that 105,025 households identified as being either same-gender husband/wife or unmarried partners with one of the couple identifying their ethnicity as Hispanic. According to census data, 54% of Latina lesbians and 41% of Latino gay males (or in both cases bisexuals currently living in same-gender relationships) were raising at least one child under the age of 18. This percentage is greater than non-Hispanic white same-gender couples, with female couples parenting at 32% and male couples at 19%. 21

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Method A semi-structured interview guide was developed based on an understanding of the literature. An initial draft was piloted with two parents of primary school children. Interviews were conducted in places where the participants felt most comfortable and safe to share their experiences. The interviews lasted between 60 and 120 minutes. One-on-one interviews were conducted with nine (five women, four men) parents who identified with the intersectionality of Latino and same-gender. Researchers followed an interview guide using probing and follow up questions. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and uploaded into the qualitative software package ATLAS.ti. Coding and analysis was guided by Charmaz’s analytic methods, 22 with three levels of coding: quotation meaningful units, open code gerund phrases and thematic groupings. Inter-rater reliability was ensured with three researchers analysing and coding all of the data. Data from the interviews were analysed for emerging themes, and triangulated with existing literature on Latino parenting and same-gender parenting. Through analysis of the data three constructs emerged; dynamics of good parenting, samegender identity strengths, and Latino cultural assets. 6. Same-Gender Parented Family Values From analysis, the first theme that emerged was how participants became parents. For some of our participants, multiple routes were considered before deciding which way she/he would become a parent. While for others, the preplanning deliberation of how to become a parent was removed, while diversity of how the family was created was still shown. Prior to deciding how to become a parent, one of our participants considered her age and thought about life’s regrets. ‘I started when I was around 41, I started thinking what would be a regret I would have when I was 50, or would I have any regrets. The main thing that I came up with was not being a parent.’ In addition, this participant, who was involved in a partnership at the time, assessed her partner’s desire to parent. When she discovered that her partner did not want to parent, she ended the relationship and chose to be a single parent. ‘…when I approached the subject about having a child, my partner did not want to co-parent. And, so we went through counseling and decided that we wouldn’t be partners anymore.’ Same-gender parents interviewed also considered foster care and adoption as well as pregnancy. One participant, who was adopted, considered the grief and loss that she experienced due to her adopted identity, and decided to have her own biological child. ‘I am a second generation adopted person and so I thought that I would rather my first choice would be to try and have a child.’ If pregnancy was chosen as the way to create a family participants then considered how to become pregnant. One participant chose artificial insemination

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__________________________________________________________________ via an anonymous donor. This participant also considered the advice of other same-gender parents, and selected the donor’s ethnicity to match her own biological background of Latino. Other same-gender female parents faced the difficulty of deciding which partner would get pregnant. One woman said, ‘Ohh, we both wanted to be moms forever and we’ve been together for twelve years. Yeah, the hardest part was deciding who was gonna go first but she had the baby.’ Although same-gender parented families often chose to consciously create their families, not all same-gender families are planned. One interviewee had a child from a previous heterosexual relationship. Tragedy in extended families also thrust some same-gender couples into parenting roles. In two different instances the death of a loved one motivated the creation of family. 7. Latino Cultural Assets Research on acculturation of Latinos in the United States often uses language as an indicator of acculturation. Latinos who do not speak Spanish are considered more acculturated. This belief is related to the idea that language is a key method to transmitting cultural values and also easily measured in surveys. Respondents spoke about a complicated relationship between their identities in relationship to language. Some of these complications are born from experience of the United States English language dominance as well as the belief that the United States should be a monolingual country. One father recounts a story familiar to many United States Latinos, ‘My parents grew up in the generation where it was bad to speak Spanish. They were in public schools, and they used to get beat if they spoke Spanish.’ This generational backdrop is the context for the personal and familial struggle around language. This struggle at times is described in terms of winning and losing, ‘… like language … Even for my brother and sister who gave up so much they were like, you gotta do it, you gotta win.’ While winning the struggle to keep language and identity is at times described as a struggle with an outside force, participants also conveyed a struggle within the Latino community about the power dynamics related to Spanish language facility. Shame about not being able to speak Spanish and feelings of inferiority were communicated. One respondent described her daughter’s experience, ‘You know, so you are 100% Mexican but what do you think alienation is? She (her daughter) doesn’t speak Spanish. So she doesn’t speak Spanish and I had a heck of a time growing up learning Spanish. I still can’t speak Spanish.’ Some respondents convey a sense of loss related to their inability to speak Spanish, ‘... if I struggle with the fact that I’m not bilingual, I wish I was, and I’m really disappointed, that my family did not carry it over to me.’ Same-gender partnered Latino parents in relationships with monolingual English speaking non-Latinos related the importance of their partners’ support of teaching Spanish to their children. Supporting the Spanish language development of children in a dominant English-speaking society forced some parents into

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__________________________________________________________________ difficult decisions regarding education. One parent described the dilemma of choosing a bi-lingual pre-school and feeling that the educational quality was compromised because the school was located in an economically challenged neighbourhood, as were all of the Spanish bi-lingual pre-schools. Finally, those families that had the ability to reinforce Spanish in their homes described the importance between Spanish language and retaining their cultural identity even when their Latino ethnicity was different then their adoptive children. ‘… our kids only and exclusively speak Spanish with us, to us and at our home and with each other, so, we’re very strong on maintaining our cultural identity through our actions and especially through our language.’ 8. Good Parenting Dynamics When describing how to be a good parent, interviewees immediately identified meeting basic needs and protecting children as high priorities. One parent stated, ‘Because that is one of the things that you have to do, you have to protect your children from other people.’ There were other expectations that same-gender Latino parents felt must be done in order to be a good parent. Having clear boundaries and setting expectations for behaviour was mandatory. ‘To be a good parent, I think is to be a good listener and to set clear boundaries and expectations and have lots of follow through and flexibility.’ If these expectations were not met, it was important that parents followed through with appropriate consequences. Same-gender parents also felt that preparing children for real life was extremely important, and in order to do that one had to be honest with their children. Same-gender Latino parents showed love in many ways. Specifically spending quality time with each of their children was paramount. During this time it was essential to listen to children and to convey understanding. Described by one parent, ‘... so being a good parent means providing that structure, means, means showing love in ways that she knows, you know, like when I look at her with love in my eyes and I know she’s looking at me comfortably back with love in her eyes, I love that.’ Role-modeling love for self and others was important to parents. Teaching kids to respect themselves, and live as good people was discussed frequently. Same-gender Latino parents in our sample talked about instilling good morals in their children and wanting them to be kind and accepting people. Being a healthy parent was important for Latino same-gender parents. This was evident through discussion about giving a ‘whole self’ to the child by living a balanced life. Toward this, not losing oneself in parenting was identified as significant; as was the desire was for children to see parents taking ‘adult time.’ This translated to developing careers, spending time with friends, and displaying healthy partner relationships. Parenting was about being more than a parent, it was about knowing oneself, and giving back a healthy whole self. Finally, it was extremely important that same-gender Latino parents gave culture back to their children. Teaching them Spanish, as well as sharing cultural

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__________________________________________________________________ activities was necessary when raising children. For one parent having the child know her culture was directly related to the child being a strong woman, ‘I want her to be a strong woman and to know about her culture and background and to feel comfortable in her skin.’ 9. Conclusion Three themes emerged through analysis of interviews: same-gender family values, Latino cultural assets and good parenting dynamics. Same-gender families are created in a multitude of ways, whether they were consciously deliberated before or not. Latino cultural assets illustrate needs for establishing space for cultural experiences, teaching Spanish and valuing respect for self and others. Parenting is viewed as a privilege with high expectations and standards necessary to achieve success raising children. Four distinct parenting goals expressed by participants included: creating a loving respectful individual with a collective identity, giving unconditional love in a way that children understand, developing a safe and often self-selected community, and finally, providing a balanced life for children. At the heart of these goals is love, love for self, love for family, love for community, love for culture as well as love for others. This foundation of love may be the defining distinction and parenting gift Latino same-gender parents give to their children.

Notes 1

Gary Mallon, ‘Gay Men and Lesbians as Adoptive Parents’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 11 (2000): 1-22. 2 Charlotte Patterson, ‘Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents’, Association for Psychological Science 15 (2006): 241-244. 3 Stephen Erich, Patrick Leung and Peter Kindle, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Adoptive Family Functioning with Gay, Lesbian, and Heterosexual Parents and Their Children’, Journal of GLBT Family Studies 1 (2005): 43-60. 4 Gary Mallon, ‘Gay and Lesbian Adoptive Parents’, 1-22. 5 Fiona Tasker and Charlotte J. Patterson, ‘Research on Gay and Lesbian Parenting: Retrospect and Prospect’, Journal of GLBT Family Studies 3 (2007): 934. 6 Steven James, ‘Clinical Themes in Gay-and Lesbian-Parented Adoptive Families’, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 7 (2003): 475-486. 7 Nancy Hill, Kevin Bush and Mark Roosa, ‘Parenting and Family Socialisation Strategies and Children’s Mental Health: Low-Income Mexican-American and Euro-American Mothers and Children’, Child Development 74 (2003): 189-204.

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__________________________________________________________________ 8

Colmar De Von Figueroa-Moseley, et al., ‘Variations in Latino Parenting Practices and Their Effects on Child Cognitive Developmental Outcomes’, Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Science 28 (2006): 102-114. 9 Wendy Gamble, Sri Ramakumar and Abel Diaz, ‘Maternal and Parental Similarities and Differences in Parenting: An Examination of Mexican-American Parents of Young Children’, Early Childhood Research Quarterly 22 (2007): 7288. 10 Raymond Buriel, ‘Childrearing Orientations in Mexican American Families: The Influence of Generation and Sociological Factors’, Journal of Marriage and the Family 55 (1993): 987-1000. 11 Rodrigo Campos, ‘Considerations for Studying Father Involvement in Early Childhood among Latino Families’, Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences 30 (2008): 133-160. 12 Jose Ruben Parra-Cardona, et al., ‘Shared Ancestry, Evolving Stories: Similar and Contrasting Life Experiences Described by Foreign and U.S. Born Latino Parents’, Family Process 47 (2008): 157-172. 13 Teresa Jullian, Patrick McKenry and Mary McKlevey, ‘Cultural Variations in Parenting Perceptions of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, and AsianAmerican parents’, Family Relations 43 (1994): 30-37. 14 Jullian, McKenry and McKlevey, ‘Cultural Variations in Parenting’, 30-37. 15 Melanie Domenech-Rodriguez, Melissa Donovick and Susan Crowley, ‘Styles in a Cultural Context: Observation of Protective Parenting in First-Generation Latinos’, Family Process 48 (2009): 195-210. 16 Domenech-Rodriguez, Donovick and Crowley, ‘Protective Parenting in FirstGeneration Latinos’, 195-210. 17 Angela Arzubiaga, Miguel Ceja and Alfredo Artiles, ‘Transcending Deficit Thinking about Latino Parenting Styles: Toward an Ecocultural View of Family Life’, in Charting New Terrains of Chicana(o)/Latina(o) Education, eds. Carlos Tejeda, Corinne Martinez and Zeus Leonardo (New York: Hampton Press, 2000), 93-106. 18 Arzubiaga, Ceja and Artiles, ‘Latino Parenting Styles’, 100. 19 Ibid., 93-106. 20 Jason Cianciotto, ‘Hispanic and Latino Same-Sex Couple Households in the United States: A Report from the 2000 Census’, in National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Latino/a Coalition for Justice (New York: 2005). 21 Cianciotto, ‘Hispanic and Latino Same-Sex Couples’. 22 Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory a Practical Guide through Quantitative Analysis (London: Sage, 2006).

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__________________________________________________________________

Bibliography Arzubiaga, Angela, Miguel Ceja, and Alfredo Artiles. ‘Transcending Deficit Thinking about Latinos Parenting Styles: Toward an Ecocultural View of Family Life’. In Charting New Terrains of Chicana(o)/Latina(o) Education, edited by Carlos Tejeda, Corinne Martinez, and Zeus Leonardo, 93–106. New York: Hampton Press, 2000. Buriel, Raymond. ‘Childrearing Orientations in Mexican American Families: The Influence of Generation and Sociological Factors’. Journal of Marriage and the Family 55 (1993): 987–1000. Campos, Rodrigo. ‘Considerations for Studying Father Involvement in Early Childhood among Latino Families’. Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Sciences 30 (2008): 133–160. Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory a Practical Guide through Quantitative Analysis. London: Sage, 2006. Cianciotto, Jason. ‘Hispanic and Latino Same-Sex Couple Households in the United States: A Report from the 2000 Census’. In National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Latino/a Coalition for Justice. New York: 2005. De Von Figueroa-Moseley, Colmar, Craig Ramey, Bette Keltner, and Robin Lanzi. ‘Variations in Latino Parenting Practices and Their Effects on Child Cognitive Developmental Outcomes’. Hispanic Journal of Behavioural Science 28 (2006): 102–114. Domenech-Rodriguez, Melanie, Melissa Donovick, and Susan Crowley. ‘Styles in a Cultural Context: Observation of Protective Parenting in First-Generation Latinos’. Family Process 48 (2009): 195–210. Erich, Stephen, Patrick Leung, and Peter Kindle. ‘A Comparative Analysis of Adoptive Family Functioning with Gay, Lesbian, and Heterosexual Parents and Their Children’. Journal of GLBT Family Studies 1 (2005): 43–60. Gamble, Wendy, Sri Ramakumar, and Abel Diaz. ‘Maternal and Parental Similarities and Differences in Parenting: An Examination of Mexican-American

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__________________________________________________________________ Parents of Young Children’. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 22 (2007): 72– 88. Hill, Nancy, Kevin Bush, and Mark Roosa. ‘Parenting and Family Socialisation Strategies and Children’s Mental Health: Low-Income Mexican-American and Euro-American Mothers and Children’. Child Development 74 (2003): 189–204. James, Steven. ‘Clinical Themes in Gay-and Lesbian-Parented Adoptive Families’. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 7 (2003): 475–486. Jullian, Teresa, Patrick McKenry, and Mary McKlevey. ‘Cultural Variations in Parenting Perceptions of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, and AsianAmerican parents’. Family Relations 43 (1994): 30–37. Mallon, Gary. ‘Gay Men and Lesbians as Adoptive Parents’. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 11 (2000): 1–22. Parra-Cardona, Jose Ruben, David Cordova, Kendal Holtrop, Francisco Villaruel, and Elizabeth Wieling. ‘Shared Ancestry, Evolving Stories: Similar and Contrasting Life Experiences Described by Foreign and U.S. Born Latino Parents’. Family Process 47 (2008): 157–172. Patterson, Charlotte. ‘Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents’. Association for Psychological Science 15 (2006): 241–244. Tasker, Fiona, and Charlotte Patterson. ‘Research on Gay and Lesbian Parenting: Retrospect and Prospect’. Journal of GLBT Family Studies 3 (2007): 9–34. Jennifer Ann Boeckel is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. Currently, Boeckel is in the process of writing her dissertation on the level of burden experienced by Native American grandparent caregivers. Boeckel works as a research assistant at the Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship (DULCCES) at the University of Denver, and is an Independent Research Consultant in her home state of North Dakota. Her research interests include Latino gay and lesbian parenting, delinquency in Chinese youth, Native American caregivers and child welfare issues in rural and frontier areas. Debora Ortega, PhD, is the director of the University of Denver Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship (DULCCES), an associate professor at

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__________________________________________________________________ the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work, and a faculty member of the Joint PhD program in Religious and Theological Studies at the University of Denver and The Iliff School of Theology. Dr. Ortega’s work has focused on marginalised communities including: low income mothers, youth aging out of the public child welfare system, policies on Latino health, education, immigration, and economics, and the experiences of intersectional communities such as queer Latino families. Michael Chifalo is a PhD student in the University of Denver’s (DU) Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW). His research interests surround gay, lesbian, bisexual queer families and parenting, queer identity formation and power, privilege and oppression. At DU GSSW, Michael teaches multicultural social work practice, family policies and services, research methods and program evaluation.

Father-Son Expressions of Love and Intimacy: Social and Cultural Evolution in Contemporary Western Society Jon Ross Abstract Traditional masculinity - including as it is represented in popular culture - has typically reinforced gender-role behaviour that deemphasises emotional expression in male-male relationships (e.g., less physical affection, closeness, and intimacy) in contrast with what is found in female-female or female-male relationships. As this applies to father-son relationships, the behaviours of many men model these culturally enforced mores of distance, avoiding ‘emotional expressions out of a fear of appearing feminine or weak,’ 1 for example. Yet paternal distance from children - especially boys - is associated with many negative ramifications. The quality of father-son relationships (and implicitly their intimacy) is an indicator of a host of factors: conflict resolution/communication skills; respect for/treatment of girls and women; academic/educational achievement; boys’ participation in dangerous or dysfunctional behaviours (such as crime/gang activity and consuming alcohol), etc. While many cultural and societal factors still encourage and reinforce these traditional gender roles in parenting and father-son relationships, there is a countermovement. Dramatic structural changes in the economy, constructs of ‘family,’ and other forces are helping to move expectations of fathers’ roles into more of a nurturing context in line with the ‘generative fatherhood’ theory of Dollahite and Hawkins, 2 which calls fathers to be more involved with children on a daily basis (and, in fact, through various stages of their lives). The chapter will provide an overview of how social and cultural forces affecting male-male relationships (particularly in childrearing of boys) continue to evolve (though more gradually than some would like) away from traditional models. It will focus on the influences of factors from popular culture and social institutions, how these forces contribute (often in conflict) to fathers’ relationships with their sons, and their role in boys’ social and emotional development. Key Words: Fathers, parenting, parental leave, identity, masculinity, gender, social policy, family policy. ***** 1. Overview Traditional masculinity - including as it is represented in popular culture - has typically reinforced gender-role behaviour that deemphasises emotional expression in male-male relationships, particularly the father-son relationship. Based both in traditional views of ‘father as breadwinner’ as well as longstanding cultural taboos surrounding male intimacy in general, social and cultural factors mitigating against

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__________________________________________________________________ intimate father-son connections abound. The distance and relative lack of intimacy created by such practices can have tremendous effects both on the development of the child and an on society at-large (not to mention the distant father). Paternal distance from children - especially boys - is associated with many negative ramifications, including poor communication and conflict resolution skills, lack of proper treatment and respect of girls and women, and a host of antisocial behaviours, including crime. While many cultural and societal factors still encourage and reinforce these traditional gender roles in parenting and father-son relationships, there is some countermovement toward reimagining fathers’ roles and our expecations of them along the lines of a nurturing context over one of pure ‘breadwinning.’ One example is the theory of ‘generative fatherhood’ of Dollahite and Hawkins, which asks fathers to see parenting as a moral ‘calling’ and to be more involved with their sons throughout their lives to meet their needs on a continuous basis, even when they reach adulthood. 3 The chapter will provide an overview of how social and cultural forces affecting male-male relationships (particularly in childrearing of boys) continue to evolve (though more gradually than some would like) away from traditional models. It will focus on the influences of factors from popular culture and social institutions, how these forces contribute (often in conflict) to fathers’ relationships with their sons, and their role in boys’ social and emotional development. 2. The Critical Role of Father-Son Intimacy The presence of a strong, close father or fatherly relationship stands as one of the preeminent indicators of a boy’s developmental progress (and, in some cases, survival) into productive manhood. As Morman and Floyd stress, the father-son relationship is a major factor in boys’ communication (including with partners/spouses), attitudes toward and respect for women, academic/educational attainment, career potential/income, avoidance of crime, and general emotional health. 4 Fathers who serve as more ‘active’ caregivers for their sons tend to contribute to the development of those young men becoming more sensitive, empathic, and secure in their masculinity, caring and intimate in their relationships, and better at resolving conflict. 5 By the same token, an ineffective, distant, or absentee father in a boy’s development is associated with a host of negative societal outcomes, including a range of risky behaviours (such as criminal/gang activity), high dropout rates/poor school achievement, poor role/gender identity, and other factors. 6 For example, the U.S.-based National Fatherhood Initiative reports that one in three American children (about 24 million) lives in a home in which the biological father does not reside, and is five times as likely to live in poverty as those with natural fathers living in the home. 7 And statistics on crime/incarceration disproportionately focus on fatherless homes: one U.S. Department of Justice study found that two-fifths of all prisoners lived in homes without fathers present, and fully one-fifth had a

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__________________________________________________________________ natural father who had been incarcerated during their childhood/early adulthood. 8 Fully 70 percent of long-term prisoners are boys who grew up without fathers in the home, and an overwhelming share of rapists and adolescent murderers come from fatherless homes. 9 Boys need fathers - not just any father, but responsible ones. They need intimacy - not just physical touch, but social guidance - from fathers and other men, throughout their lives, in what is commonly known as ‘being a good man.’ Of course, they need mothers, too, but the connection between boys and fathers is -on an intuitive level and one supported by reams of social science data - critical to society. Boys need good fathers who are actively involved in their development from birth, as Chodorow noted, ‘to ensure that children develop a sufficiently individuated and strong sense of self and positively valued and secure gender identity.’ 10 In a society in which nuclear families are smaller and more removed from multiple generations of family members and other support structures than in years past, for many boys a father is not just the primary male figure but perhaps the only one present in their formative years. With so much at stake, this hard reality of 21st century society makes it imperative that fathers be directly and actively involved in their sons’ lives - much more than the traditional figure of breadwinner who relies on the mother to do most of the childrearing. 3. Social Factors Mitigating against Father Intimacy Even with the generally accepted position that father involvement and intimacy with children (especially boys) are critical to child development and life outcomes, many forces in Western society - the United States in particular - seem to work contrary to father-son intimacy. Insofar as public policies (such as paternal leave) can contribute to fathers’ involvement from a child’s birth, social policy lags behind the realities and needs of families and children. As Gurian notes, ‘[t]he first days and years of a child’s life are critical, where virtually all of his or her development occurs.’ 11 Yet many fathers - particularly those of lower socioeconomic class or job status who either do not qualify for or cannot afford to take parental leave - are not or cannot be active parents and childrearers, nor are they adequately prepared to do so. In addition, these men typically are minimally, if at all, involved in the pregnancy and prenatal care of their spouse or partner, at least in terms of participating in childbirth classes, breastfeeding education, and related activities. Their lack of involvement during pregnancy not only translates to less caregiving and childrearing once the baby arrives, it contributes to other factors that affect the baby’s health. For example, expectant fathers knowledgeable about the benefits of breastfeeding can be strong advocates for the practice; in fact, three-fourths of women whose spouses/partners attend a breastfeeding education class eventually breastfeed. 12 A man’s awareness of breastfeeding and its benefits clearly is associated with his partner’s initiation of breastfeeding, with their children nearly

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__________________________________________________________________ twice as likely to breastfeed after one month as children whose fathers are not aware or advocates of breastfeeding. 13 The active caring - clearly, a form of intimacy - a man expresses (or fails to express) to his partner typically extends to his newborn child. If a father is not involved in the care of his partner during pregnancy, he is less likely to be present from birth as a caregiver (diapering, waking up at night, dressing, etc.), and is far less likely to be an active parent/caregiver months and years later. 14 A lack of direct, active involvement in his child’s development and caretaking can lead to him becoming, in essence, an absentee father, one lacking a meaningful relationship with his child and, more importantly, inadvertently endowing society with, in many cases, a ‘problem child’ who becomes a malcontent adult, one more likely to be a substance abuser, dropout, or violent criminal. 15 The bonding and intimacy that occur in a child’s first days and months are central to healthy development in ways that have already been mentioned, and, needless to say, involve a good deal of physical touching and intimacy that are strong contributors to the child’s physical and emotional health. 16 But social practices and traditional definitions of ‘masculinity’ and what is considered appropriate, acceptable male behaviour work against even the most fundamental expressions of intimacy; the ‘hands-off’ mindset (at least as it applies to many fathers and their sons) begins at a child’s birth and continues through early childhood into adolescence and adulthood. It thus becomes generational, passed on from a father to son, then from that son to his children, and so on. It is no surprise that the literature confirms that relationships between men, including fathers and sons, are typically less intimate and affectionate than those between women or men and women, 17 not to mention that the lesser degree of intimacy in male-male relationships, including father-son relationships, is considered acceptable. Whether men are more likely to refrain from real affection and intimacy because such behaviours are considered ‘feminine,’ avoiding ‘emotional expressions out of a fear of appearing feminine or weak’ as some suggest, 18 or that they are concerned about being perceived as homosexual, the ultimate taboo for many men, as others posit, 19 the result is the same. As these practices pertain to men and their sons, the consequences are particularly troubling. If being a father is not seen as a mission or calling, comparable to a moral imperative, in which intimacy with one’s offspring is considered the norm, the negative effects can be like ripples in a pond. Even among those fathers, including men studied by Dermott, 20 who seek greater intimacy with their children and claim to be ‘new fathers’ much more involved in their children’s lives than their fathers were in theirs, what ‘intimacy’ constitutes to them is still distant from assuming ‘active,’ day-to-day roles of caregiving, including being a coparent or stay-at-home father. Most cultural and media-reinforced representations of fatherhood still emphasise the traditional role of father-as-breadwinner. Yet some alternative representations to this role -

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__________________________________________________________________ including depictions of male-male intimacy - are portrayed in modern-day contexts, portraying fathers in intimate, caregiving scenarios with their children. One such work is Dana Glazer’s 2010 documentary on stay-at-home fathers, The Evolution of Dad, which depicts men of all walks of life in representing intimate fathering in ways that align closely with Dermott’s concept. 21 4. Generative Fathering It is in the context of fatherhood as a lifelong ‘mission’ that the premise of ‘generative fathering’ provides a welcome alternative to many traditional perspectives. Rooted in Erik Erikson’s work on development, generative fathering proposes a lifelong commitment to generations as a core component of an adult’s development, or as Dollahite, et al. put it, ‘enlarging a sense of self to include the next generation (one’s own children and other children), and committing to care for them.’ 22 Erikson identified three stages of adult development: identity (our choice of what we want to do and who we want to be); intimacy (our choices of family and close friends); and generativity (the people and concerns we choose to care for, our legacy). 23 Generative fathering offers some hope that a shift -if not a sea change- in expectations surrounding fatherhood may be occurring. Fulfilling this sense of lifelong parenting, even long after one’s capacity or desire to father children, stands as a cornerstone of the paternal and communitarian approach generative fathering offers - to care for one’s children and younger generations in a way that fulfils evolving needs throughout their life cycle, but to prepare them to care for the generation[s] that follow. This suggests a passing of the torch across generations of men related by blood and by wider community bonds. To Gurian, this represents the power of ‘elder males,’ who ‘teach boys how to develop healthy boundaries with girls and women ... to navigate changes in their bodies, minds, and souls ... to find a mission … to teach boys how to contribute to the world through sacrifice, not self-description.’ 24 The absence of generativity, it follows, is a threat to family and community stability, but, given smaller families and fewer multigenerational families, is an uncomfortable reality in the 21st century. Yet it stands as a responsibility involving the sustained involvement of men as fathers in some form throughout their lifetime. In this context, Dollahite, et al. frame generative fathering in a strong moral and spiritual context termed ‘fatherwork.’ 25 They believe that the use of the word ‘work’ in the context of fathering motivates many men to appreciate and account for the importance of lifelong caring, noting that ‘thinking of fathering as work generative work - may help men see more clearly the connection between their personal responsibilities to care for the next generation and the capabilities they have within them and can continually develop.’ 26 In this sense, they position fathering and generative fathering in a traditional role male context. From childhood, most males are conditioned to think about what they want to do when they ‘grow up,’ with the question and answer typically

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__________________________________________________________________ confined to work and career. Few boys would consider - much less be encouraged to respond along the lines of ‘A good dad.’ But if elder males, beginning with their father and reinforced across their environment, are rearing and supporting young boys with an eye toward their own future standing as active fathers, boys may begin to walk and talk generativity. As Keen notes, ‘[b]oys are taught early that they are what they do.’ 27 So if framing ‘fathering’ - in any of its contexts - within the purview of ‘work’ and its accompanying self-worth in the eyes of many men is effective at encouraging them to take the hard work of caring for another throughout their lives actively and seriously, perhaps doors will be opened. So many men, as Keen states, ‘have spent a lifetime missing intimacy with their sons and daughters, but lacked the communication skills to open a dialogue,’ 28 that perhaps the rhetorical pull - not to mention the appeal to inculcated values - will engender a response and set of actions that will bring about male-male intimacy. 5. Future Scope A father raises his son in his own shadow, one both dark and beautiful, in which the son will learn essential lessons about how to live, first as a boy, then as a man …the father blesses the son with a man’s power to shape both his inner and outer world as a male. 29 Generative fathering is a relatively new concept, and it is too early to assess its effect on fathers and society. Western society is slowly emerging and evolving from traditional, unsustainable models of masculinity and fatherhood, moving in ‘baby steps’ toward wider social acceptance and expectation of active fathers, gender equity in the home and parenting, and even an end to gender roles at all. But this progress will be slow, and wider acceptance of active/co-parenting fathers and male-male intimacy can be expedited by expansion of public policies (in the United States, at least) guaranteeing parental/paternal leave, as well as breaking down unsustainable notions and images of masculinity and fathering that are reinforced through culture and mass media. But generative fathering and the behavioural elements it implies offer hope for men to come together individually and collectively in a spiritual and moral commitment to their children and communities. As Keen writes in Fire in the Belly, A man must go on a quest To discover the sacred fire In the sanctuary of his own belly To ignite the flame in his heart To fuel the blaze in the hearth To rekindle his ardour for the earth 30

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Notes 1

Mark T. Morman and Kory Floyd, ‘A “Changing Culture of Fatherhood”: Effects on Affectionate Communication, Closeness, and Satisfaction in Men’s Relationships with Their Fathers and Their Sons’, Western Journal of Communication 66, No. 4 (2002): 398. 2 David C. Dollahite, Alan J. Hawkins amd Sean E. Brotherson, ‘Fatherwork: A Conceptual Ethic of Fathering as Generative Work,’ in Generative Fathering: Beyond Deficit Perspectives, eds. Alan J. Hawkins and David C. Dollahite (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1997). 3 Morman and Floyd, ‘Changing Culture of Fatherhood’, 398. 4 Ibid., 395-396. 5 Ibid., 396. 6 Natasha J. Cabrera, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Robert H. Bradley, Sandra Hofferth and Michael E. Lamb, ‘Fatherhood in the Twenty-First Century’, Child Development 71, No. 1 (2000): 127, doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00126. 7 National Fatherhood Initiative, http://fatherhood.org/Page.aspx?pid=403. 8 Ibid. 9 Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Me (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 1982), 111. 10 Nancy Chodorow, ‘Family Structure and Feminine Personality’, in Feminism in the Study of Religion: A Reader, ed. Darlene M. Juschka (London: Continuum, 2001), 66. 11 Gurian, The Wonder of Boys, 115. 12 National Fatherhood Initiative. 13 Ibid. 14 Lenna Nepomnyaschy and Jane Waldfogel, ‘Paternity Leave and Fathers’ Involvement with Their Young Children: Evidence from the American Ecls-B’, Community, Work and Family 10, No. 3 (2007): 448, doi: 10.1080/13668800701575077. 15 National Fatherhood Initiative. 16 Robert E. Salt, ‘Affectionate Touch between Fathers and Preadolescent Sons’, Journal of Marriage and Family 53, No. 3 (1991): 545. 17 Mark T. Morman and Kory Floyd, ‘Affectionate Communication between Fathers and Young Adult Sons: Individual and Relational-Level Correlates’, Communication Studies 50, No. 4 (1999): 295. 18 Ibid., 295. 19 Ibid., 296.

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Esther Dermott, ‘“The ‘Intimate Father”: Defining Paternal Involvement’, Sociological Research Online 8, No. 4 (2003), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/8/4/dermott.html. 21 Dana Glazer, The Evolution of Dad (New York: Dane-Gramp Productions, 2011). 22 Dollahite, et al., ‘Fatherwork’, 18. 23 Ibid., 21. 24 Gurian, The Wonder of Boys, 45. 25 Dollahite, et al., Generative Fathering, 20. 26 Ibid., 22. 27 Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (New York: Bantam, 1991), 52. 28 Ibid., 137. 29 Ibid., 106. 30 Ibid., n.p.

Bibliography Cabrera, Natasha, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, Robert H. Bradley, Sandra Hofferth, and Michael E. Lamb. ‘Fatherhood in the Twenty-First Century’. Child Development 71, No. 1 (2000): 127–136. doi: 10.1111/1467-8624.00126. Chodorow, Nancy. ‘Family Structure and Feminine Personality’. In Feminism in the Study of Religion: A Reader, edited by Darlene M. Juschka, 48–66. London: Continuum, 2001. Dermott, Esther. ‘The ‘Intimate Father’: Defining Paternal Involvement’. Sociological Research Online 8, No. 4 (2003), http://www.socresonline.org.uk/8/4/dermott.html. Dollahite, David C., Alan J. Hawkins, and Sean E. Brotherson. ‘Fatherwork: A Conceptual Ethic of Fathering as Generative Work’. In Generative Fathering: Beyond Deficit Perspectives, edited by Alan J. Hawkins, and David C. Dollahite, 17–35, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1997. Glazer, Dana. The Evolution of Dad. New York: Dane-Gramp Productions, 2011. Gurian, Michael. The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 1982. Keen, Sam. Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. New York: Bantam, 1991.

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__________________________________________________________________ Morman, Mark T., and Kory Floyd. ‘A “Changing Culture of Fatherhood”: Effects on Affectionate Communication, Closeness, and Satisfaction in Men’s Relationships with Their Fathers and Their Sons’. Western Journal of Communication 66, No. 4 (2002): 395–412. Morman, Mark T., and Kory Floyd. ‘Affectionate Communication between Fathers and Young Adult Sons: Individual and Relational-Level Correlates’. Communication Studies 50, No. 4 (1999): 294. National Fatherhood Initiative. http://fatherhood.org/Page.aspx?pid=403. Nepomnyaschy, Lenna, and Jane Waldfogel. ‘“Paternity Leave and Fathers” Involvement with Their Young Children: Evidence from the American Ecls-B’. Community, Work and Family 10, No. 3 (2007): 427–453. doi: 10.1080/13668800701575077. Salt, Robert E. ‘Affectionate Touch between Fathers and Preadolescent Sons’. Journal of Marriage and Family 53, No. 3 (1991): 545–554. Jon Ross lives in Chicago and is a doctoral student in Interdisciplinary Studies (Public Policy Concentration) at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, where he serves as Associate Editor of its student journal, Penumbra. With 25 years of experience in public policy, legislative/public affairs, communication, and related areas, he teaches Communication, Interdisciplinary Studies, and American Government at two Chicago-area institutions of higher learning.

Eros as Pedagogy: Teaching Children Gendered Loving Hannah Dyer Abstract This chapter explores love as pedagogy and the role of love in children’s production of knowledge. Educational theorists have begun to study the role of affect in student’s acquisition of knowledge about race and gender. The child has been an object of calculation in educational theory, and the supposed necessary recipient of pedagogies which help them to adjust to a phobic world, instead of desire to alter it. Here I will suggest that classrooms which are supervised by pedagogies with predetermined ends or instrumental rationality cannot support students in learning to relate to the other. A pedagogy of love, instead, might allow for passionate attachments to the other that may correct apathy or racialised and gendered violences. This chapter explores eros as antidote to oppressive regimes of knowledge surrounding gender and race and asks what a curriculum of loving might be able to accomplish in the realm of children’s subject production. I am interested in who and what children’s curriculum teaches them to love, and the influence of these lessons on their racialisation and gendered subjectivity. Childhood is both a site of crisis and renewal for humanity, as it holds the promise of newness and continuity - a promise that Deborah Britzman appraises as easily broken. This chapter will suggest that a pedagogy that does not aim to ‘protect’ children from the dangers of gender, sexuality and difference, but helps them to tolerate the confusions which arise out of them, and to take the risk of loving another, is necessary. Love, I propose, can work against denials of difference or pain that comes as a result of ‘growing-up’ within racist, sexist and homophobic cultures. Love can create a learning that can extend children beyond themselves. Key Words: Gender, love, pedagogy, childhood, violence, psychoanalysis. ***** To love another is to take a risk. Especially dangerous, is to risk loving an object that is outside of or oppositional to the ideals protected by one’s culture. To love something or someone is always to risk coherency of self and to invite vulnerability. Julia Kristeva describes love’s riskiness as deriving from its power to dissolve the boundaries of one’s identity. 1 To desire a loving relationship with an object that escapes or is evicted from your community’s distribution of love or care poses an especially difficult sort of risk: a heightened potential loss of approval, protection, legibility and potentially the love of your community. In this scenario, the ever-present threat of loss, which psychoanalytically is tracked to an original severing from the mother, becomes especially forceful. Adults, then, work very hard to protect the forms and expressions in which children’s love manifests. Risky

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__________________________________________________________________ loving makes risky futures. The threat of a loss of love compels children to remake or rearticulate desire so that their families, teachers, communities extend invitations of belonging and protection. And in the shadows of these lessons, a child learns shame. An exploration of who and what schools try to teach their subjects to love, to hate, to admire, to forge an identification with, might reveal how the limits of a culture’s love are produced and supervised, and why lessons on how to distribute one’s hate persistently mark school curriculum. Gender is not necessarily inevitability, but a meticulous tutoring of one’s desires, drives and the careful channelling of aggression and love. Curricular lessons on what it means to practice ‘good’ gendered relations and ‘good’ sexuality are subject to the child’s conscious and unconscious interpretations, to the unpredictable ways that the unconscious meddles with learning, and therefore can coerce lessons into being received astonishingly differently than teachers and schools intend. Classrooms ruled with forced identifications, instrumental rationality and predetermined ends cannot grapple with the surprising and irrational ways that children understand and make use of gender, or develop and make use of their feelings of love and hate. Education that is meted out through threats of alienation has a difficult time supporting children through their fears. Psychoanalytic ruminations on ideology can reveal that it requires falling in love. The practice of educating is a struggle to, if only for a moment, have another submit to one’s theories. A critical pedagogy, which does not demand mimetic performance or submission to stagnant truths, requires a different sort of passion. This chapter suggests that a reflection on eros (self love; the life drive; passion; desire) and the dynamics that drive practices of loving is integral to teaching and learning to live within the margins of gendered and racial identities that propel injustice. I suggest that what and who the teacher, parent, educational practitioner, hopes the child will learn to love is demonstrative of the adult’s need for coherence of self, and that their lessons on loving are often motivated by the need to reinforce the boundaries of community which protect them. Taking the force that love has on our ability to learn seriously, I propose, might help mend the gap between children’s formal education on gendered and sexed identities and the fantasies they have about becoming or enacting desire for someone or something else. I raise questions about what the force of eros does to our biographies of learning and how our practices of loving are supported or disparaged by our education. A reason often cited for dissuading youth from queer relationships, for example, is a concern for the difficult and dangerous life that awaits the queer youth in a homophobic culture. We should protect children, it is suggested, from the unnecessary pain that they will endure if they practice queer loving. Curricular repression or foreclosure of the pain and grief caused by heteronormativity, sexism or homophobia, through forced idealisations with ‘suitable’ love objects, is, I argue, damaging. Despite skillful repression of those

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__________________________________________________________________ fantasies and traumas that constitute our relations to difference, that mostly cannot be articulated within the socialities and epistemologies we navigate, we will symbolise and act them out elsewhere. If children learn to repress turmoil or curiosity or the results of conflict, if they are not supported in encounters with persistent questions, violence will persist to structure their phantasies of others (and the phantasies they might have about themselves and their futures). Love is more complex and multifaceted than relationships forced because of gendered imperatives or shared identity categories which try to funnel and form how love manifests. There is the persistence of desires and attempts at articulation that are excessive of culture’s decrees on loving and these surpluses impact both pedagogy and the reception of knowledge. I am wondering what it could mean to practice a pedagogy that does not aim to ‘protect’ children from the dangers of gender, sexuality and difference, but instead tries to help them tolerate the questions and aggressions that might be turned their way if they risk expressions of such love. How then can teachers create lessons and classrooms in which children can take the risk of loving another (and themselves) despite and because of their differences or risky identifications, wishes (desires)? Melanie Klein made unsuccessful attempts to protect her son, Fritz, from damaging fantasies and anxieties that she believed were provoked through her culture’s repression and denial of sexuality and the curiosities that surround it. 2 Klein refused to assuage the ‘pain’ of learning about sexuality and gender, and decided to speak openly with her son about reproduction, sex and puberty, at a young age. To her surprise, despite pedagogical tactics of truth and reality, with which she hoped to conquer violent phantasy and make lucid the ‘mysteries’ of sexuality, Fritz remained ignorant to the ‘enlightened’ thinking she tried to instill in him. His imaginative inquiries, such as, ‘Where was I before I was born?’ and, ‘When will the boy become a Mama’? made palpable his refusal to accept her logics of gender and sexuality. In his reflection on Klein’s attempt at psychoanalytic education, J. B. Pontalis deems the curious subject, ‘The Question Child.’ 3 Klein’s analysis of Fritz’s insistent fantasies folds in on itself, as the child returns the analyst to … her own prescriptions and anxieties, maybe even her own parent’s. The question child offers the adult an unusual test: to use the child’s question to find truth of the adult’s existence. The question child tests the adult’s reality by way of questioning the adult’s knowledge and proximity to phantasy. 4 Klein reminds us that children do not always recognise themselves in the representations or explanations that are meant for them to take-up as theirs. Or, our answers do not often quell their phantasies. Sometimes they want to be somebody else and sometimes the adults’ explanation of the ‘facts of life’ can foreclose

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__________________________________________________________________ children’s ability to imagine an abundance of gendered existences. Britzman points out that the ‘question child’ has the capacity to call ‘the foreclosure of his own parent’s knowledge into question.’ If ‘question children’ are defiant in the nature of their response to ‘knowledge,’ then it seems that the nourishment of question children who are resilient to ‘enlightened’ or ‘truthful’ gendered and sexed identities and ways of living, is radically hopeful. Britzman proposes that what is at stake in punishing ‘question children’ for their inability or refusal to cohere under the signs of identity or approved practices of loving laid out for them in education is the relinquishing of their ability to determine their own history and futures. What will children incorporate as meaningful into the stories they tell about themselves and their growth? What will they deny or disavow or forget as important despite the teacher’s insistence of the goodness of his or her lessons? For children (and often too for adults) acceptance is impervious to ‘truth’ and indifferent to ‘facts,’ but has more to do with how an object might substitute for what has been lost or how well a story satisfies their inquisitiveness. Children’s relationship to knowledge constantly shifts; there is a simultaneous acceptance and refusal of new knowledge, and vacillation between love and hate. And what does satisfy is often only temporary. Educator’s anxieties and fears about losing control over lessons on love, gender and sex often foreclose the power of children’s invention and creativity. Adam Phillips explains, Children want to know about sexuality, but the grown-ups tell them they need to know about something else - call it culture - to distract them from what they are really interested in. Education, Freud implies, teaches the child either to lose interest in what matter most to her or to compromise that interest. Interest has to have something added to it, called education to make it acceptable. 5 Britzman and Phillips, after Freud, agree that we have curiosity because we have sexuality. And, because curiosity must come before knowledge, Britzman is sure that our first ideas about sexuality must have ‘run from the ridiculous to the magical and from the paranoid to the sublime.’ 6 Ursula Kelly suggests that the cold and institutionalised aesthetics that mark the school’s architecture are not at all representative of the passionate and intimate encounters that take place within its walls. 7 Learning is intimate and even mouldy textbooks and dusty chalkboards cannot bar the passion that drives this affair. But not all pedagogies are motivated by the same amount or type of passion. The definition of love that motivates liberal classrooms does not usually account for the complexity of eros and the contours of jouissance. Jouissance, as defined by Slavoj Zizek, ‘emerges when the very reality that is the source of unpleasure, of pain, is

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__________________________________________________________________ experienced as a source of traumatic, excessive pleasure.’ 8 Jouissance occurs when pain is enjoyed, when loss yields pleasure. For Lacan, who guides Zizek’s definition, the transgression of prohibitions placed on a subject’s pleasure, results in pain. For Lacan, what lies beyond the limits of the pleasure principle, is not pure pleasure, but shares of pain. Jouissance is pleasure that is almost too much to bear. It has educational significance because it can connote a yearning to articulate oneself or use language in a way that transgresses the limits of the subject, to be or to speak from the margins of knowledge. Perhaps to speak ourselves into being at the limits of culture/language is pleasure almost too difficult to bear. The aim of eros, as defined by Laplanche and Pontalis, is to bind. 9 In opposition to the death instinct, which works towards destruction and the unfastening of bonds, Eros represents the life instincts and aims for unification. Freud borrowed from the Greek myth of Eros, the story of the god of love and beauty, and son of Aphrodite. Eros falls in love with Psyche but meddlesome sisters drive a division between the two; Psyche leaves Eros and he spends the rest of his life searching for her, for wholeness and mutuality. Driving Eros’ journey was the desire for wisdom; he did not hope to own or dominate knowledge, but rather to remember beauty and his proximity to it. He sought perfect immersion with what he lost, not domination or mastery over knowledge. Under Plato’s hand, eros became ‘humanised’ and was used as catalyst for the inauguration of pedagogy. 10 In Symposium, Plato describes pedagogy as the art of crafting direction out of the energies of eros. For Freud, the ‘radical impossibility of teaching’ results from the unconscious’ proclivity for refusal of the canons of educational texts and lessons that we are subjected to. Our conscious is amenable to education but daydreams and raw affects swerve from education’s hold. For many scholars interested in theorising emotions of love and passion in relation to learning, eros has came to represent the constant pull of ‘inquiry’ and pedagogy’s task has been defined as siphoning inquiry into motivation for self transformation. Maxine Green proposes that, ‘education is a process of futuring, or releasing persons to become reflective, of provoking people to repair lacks and to take action to create themselves.’ 11 Here she is in the realm of discussing the creative attributes that eros brings to the work of education, and eros’ promise for subverting claims of finitude in the making of knowledge. For Kerry Burch, eros is the bonding agent that can deter the erosion of a public self and apathetic relations to learning. Eros might renew hope for transformative education, interested in mutuality, it can dissuade education as investment in the production of ‘obedient managers of neutral information.’ 12 Curriculum that idealises certain practices of loving or objects of love might assist in hardening the student’s ego boundaries in a defence against the pain or wounding that a passionate attachment could stimulate. These lessons are not dialogue and only leave prescribed spaces for wonderment. The imposition of learning as linear or a processional accumulation of facts does not leave space for

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__________________________________________________________________ the unruliness of phantasy and the unconscious, which is brimming negativity, violence, destruction, ambiguity and with both love and hate. Curriculum that tries to ‘educate’ desire is involved in the project of helping children organise a biography and usually tries to help them determine when they have reached stasis or maturity, when they have ‘become.’ But, to repeat Phillips line of inquiry: When is the end of investigation? Determining this has to do with how children theorise, but also, how we theorise childhood, and how our theories of development impact the modes of subjectivity that children have access to. When classrooms are supervised by pedagogies that are detailed with predetermined ends, or instrumental rationality, students are not adequately supported in making attachments with what is excessive of the curriculum’s truth. Daniel Liston and Jim Garrison suggest that instead of learning the ‘truth’ of a story, students should be guided by the passion that is neglected in forced idealisation. 13 Love, they suggest, ‘makes us vulnerable and that vulnerability invites loss and grief.’ 14 Love does not eclipse the pain and grief that human suffering elicit, but can be a ‘… yearning to connect with our natural and social worlds in a meaningful fashion, can fuel our critical intent to act against structures that block an abundant and engaged approach to teaching and learning.’ 15 This love is closer to what drove Eros’ movements towards unification. Because we cannot create a method or tighten around a curricula for loving, as it can ‘overwhelm every intelligent purpose,’ it might be lethal to calculated idealisations or scripted relationships to others. 16 Teachers can attempt to authorise parameters of passion that their student might create with the object of a lesson, but a moratorium on passionate or inventive attachments may adversely work to proliferate desires. Susan Huddleston Edgerton furthers love as a question of risk and believes that it is a prerequisite for learning to love without a master. According to Edgerton, love can incite a ‘knowledge that abidingly questions its own authority.’ 17 Edgerton contends that freedom to desire is mandatory for both learning and loving, and this desire must not be guarded by authorised sources of knowing. ‘Love and learning are marginal passages,’ she writes, and ‘love (learning) calls into question the very notion of identity.’ The everyday pain of living within phobic cultures incites an array of losses for children. Rachael Kessler identifies a web of losses and traumas that a child, to varying degrees and intensities, inevitably experiences. Death, divorce, relocation, ‘premature loss of childhood’ and the ‘ordinary losses of growing up,’ potentially mark all childhoods. 18 But, as Anne Anlin Cheng infers, for those children who exist under an episteme that privileges that which they can never be, ‘[t]here are deep-seated, intangible, psychical complications.’ 19 Endless deferrals of working through these losses cannot support children in developing healthy practices of loving another or themselves. The question of how best to love another and how to build loving relationships with oneself gains immediacy in a culture that exuberantly refuses to .

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__________________________________________________________________ support a range of expressions of passion. Schools, like other communities, promise feelings of love and belonging in exchange for ‘good’ students, but what is repressed in order to gain access to love proffered under these signs? Children love their stuffed animals, they love chocolate milk and mud, they love to perform being scared of what they say they fear, and they love pyjamas. They also learn love as a risk and are undergoing the laborious and interminable project of wrestling with feelings of love and hate for their parents. Freud was passionately interested in the education of children and antipathies between their dreaming life and the education imposed on them. Mostly, he asked questions about how children respond to adult’s attempts to educate their desires. Phillips summarises Freud’s interest in children as a fascination with their refusal to ‘be seduced by reality’ and their likelihood of being ‘unimpressed by other people’s truths’: ‘The relentlessness of the child’s questions, the sense that the child’s curiosity was his destiny - that was what Freud took to heart.’ 20 His theories of the unconscious, a neon nucleus of repressed affect, ideation and desire, threw a wrench into linear notions of learning. Finding out how the child learns to control his or her instincts (to wield a pretence of not knowing, not feeling, not desiring something) was firmly on Freud’s clinical and theoretical program. ‘The Freudian child is driven by questions and doesn’t believe any of the answers, except his own that he finds satisfying.’ 21 Freud teaches us that education can be both liberating and damaging. In the classroom, our curiosities are not extinguished, but the radical possibilities of the content of our imaginations are generally not treated as integral to our education.

Notes 1

Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 2. 2 Melanie Klein, ‘The Development of a Child (1921)’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945 (London: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975), 1-53. 3 Britzman documents Klein’s provision of a psychoanalytic education in both After Education and The Return of ‘The Question Child’: Reading Ma Vie en Rose through Melanie Klein, http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/britzman.htm. 4 http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/britzman.htm. 5 Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 21. 6 Deborah Britzman, After Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 144.

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Ursula Kelly, Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 1997). 8 ‘Love thy Neighbor? No thanks!’, in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 167. 9 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974), 242. 10 Kerry T. Burch, Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 20. 11 Maxine Green, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988), 22. 12 Kerry T. Burch, Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 9. 13 Daniel Liston and Jim Garrison, eds. Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice (New York: Routledge, 2004). 14 Liston and Garrison, Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice, 2. 15 Ibid., 2-3. 16 Ibid., 8. 17 Susan Huddleston Edgerton. Translating the Curriculum: Multiculturalism into Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 68. 18 Rachael Kessler, ‘Eros, Pedagogy, and the Pursuit of Happiness’, in Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice, eds. Daniel Liston and Jim Garrison (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13. 19 Anne A. Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 17. 20 Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites, 11. 21 Ibid.

Bibliography Britzman, Deborah. After Education: Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, and Psychoanalytic Histories of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. —––. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. —––. ‘The Return of “the Question Child”: Reading Ma Vie En Rose through Melanie Klein’. Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts. September 30, 2006. http://www.ademyanalyticarts.org/britzman.htm.

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__________________________________________________________________ Burch, Kerry T. Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Cheng, Anne A. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Edgerton, Susan Huddleston. Translating the Curriculum: Multiculturalism into Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Green, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1988. Kelly, Ursula A. Schooling Desire: Literacy, Cultural Politics and Pedagogy. New York: Routledge, 2007. —––. ‘The Place of Reparation: Love, Loss, Ambivalence, and Teaching’. In Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice, edited by Daniel Liston, and Jim Garrison, 153–168. New York: Routledge, 1994. Kessler, Rachael. ‘Eros, Pedagogy, and the Pursuit of Happiness’. In Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice, edited by Daniel Liston, and Jim Garrison, 99–136. New York: Routledge, 2004. Klein, Melanie. The Psychoanalysis of Children. Translated by A. Strachey. In The Writings of Melanie Klein, edited by Roger Money-Kyrle. New York: Free Press, 1984. —––. ‘The Development of a Child (1921)’. In Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945, 1–53. London: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1975. Kristeva, Julia. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Lane, Christopher, ed. The Psychoanalysis of Race. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

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__________________________________________________________________ Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1974. Lorde, Audre. ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’. In Sister/Outsider, 53–59. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984. Liston, Daniel, and Jim Garrison, eds. Teaching, Learning and Loving: Reclaiming Passion in Educational Practice. New York: Routledge, 2004. Phillips, Adam. The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Pitt, Alice. ‘The Dreamwork of Autobiography: Felman, Freud and Lacan’. In Feminist Engagements: Reading, Resisting, and Revisioning Male Theorists in Education and Cultural Studies, edited by Kathleen Weiler, 89–108. NY: Routledge, 2001. Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain. Translated by Catherine Cullen, and Philip Cullen. NY: International University Press, 1981. Rose, Jacqueline. The Last Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Walkerdine, Valerie. Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso, 1991. —––. ‘Progressive and Political Struggle’. In Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, edited by Carmen Luke, and Jennifer Gore. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hannah Dyer is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, in the fields of education and gender studies.

Part 3 The Power of Representations

Representations of Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro Cristina Nicolaescu Abstract This chapter is an attempt at demonstrating the close relationship between gender and human agency as mirrored in the fiction of a renowned feminist writer, in the context of contemporary Canada. Characters’ subjectivity in making choices and taking sides as opposed to the social restrictions, in search for a constant balance, is another major issue of my analysis. My choice of the topic was determined by the increased interest on gender studies in the Western culture and their revival in my country. Furthermore, I noticed a scarcity of recent comprehensive criticism of Alice Munro writers on this topic, particularly from this angle. In order to pursue my aims I will employ the arguments provided by psychoanalytical feminism. For this, the principal aim in view is to see how influential gender could be on human agency in connection with human thinking, behaviour, attitude and other components of gender identity construction in Munro’s fiction. In this chapter I will analyse the most representative collections of Alice Munro’s short stories for the topic I propose, i.e., the ones that illustrate gender difference best: The Lives of Girls and Women, The Progress of Love and The Moons of Jupiter. Key Words: Gender, feminism, agency, identity, relationships, difference. ***** 1. Gender Identity ‘Gender,’ as a fundamental aspect of personal and social identity, is a biological, psychological, and cultural category of paramount importance. In addition, gender is often a criterion for social stratification and different political treatment, as well as a favoured symbol for expressing values and beliefs. It is continually reconstructed in global processes of economic and political change. The purpose of this chapter is to foster awareness of the importance of gender in personal and public life, and to stress how public policy is shaped on a regional, national and international level. Inherent in Alice Munro’s thematic interest in the personal construction of identity is an awareness of the significant role played by gender in establishing who we are and how we see the world. For example, Lorna Irving refers in her articles to several of Munro’s stories in which the motherdaughter relationship is pivotal. 1 Also in Bronwen Wallace’s essay, the focus is on the themes of gender and identity in Munro’s works, including the mother-daughter relationship and the contradictory nature of maternal feelings, women’s bodies, male-female relationships in which women maintain various selves in the face of men’s struggle to control or deny them. 2

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__________________________________________________________________ With the advent of postmodernism, attempts to explain apparently universal gender inequalities of power were abandoned and the focus returned to gender as an attribute of individuals constructed through cultural practice. Instead of analysing gender in terms of social structures and social systems the construction of gendered subjectivities of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ became important. This can be seen as part of the ‘cultural turn’ within sociology whereby ‘culture’ displaced society and economy as a focus of theoretical concern. This shift can be understood as a move from studying socio-sexual divisions of labour to studying gender symbolism and gender identities. Although academic postmodernism has contributed to a destabilization of overly dichotomous and generalizing conceptions of gender, an equally (if not more) important impetus has been the political failure of such understandings of gender to illuminate the complex material realities of sexuality, race, and class as they are constitutive of gender categories. 3 In Beverly Rasporich’s Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro there is a feminist critical perspective, with arguments set out plainly: Munro’s art is informed by being female. Her folk art and her irony are natural expressions of her gender, her use of landscapes and place are bound up with the female psyche, and fictional form and content develop in a variety of ways from writing the body. 4 She considers the two collections of stories: The Lives of Girls and Women and The Progress of Love to be reflective of a writing form defined by French feminist critics as l’écriture féminine. Rasporich states that her resistance to linear narrative gives rise to multiple climaxes and multiple epiphanies: a denial of the transcendent One through the divergent many. 5 Her emphasis on alternating perspectives and contingent arrangements undermines any definite position, and this includes the authority of patriarchy and its gender stereotypes. Judith Butler conceptualises gender as a system of signs infused with power. Gender, sexuality and identity are all elements of the discourse of heterosexuality and it is within discourses that power is constituted. Conceptualisations of gender as performance or as part of the discursive construction of subjectivities has been criticised for its lack of attention to systemic power relations which, it is argued, derives from Foucault’s apparent denial of an extra-discursive, material reality in which power is based. Gender has also been conceptualised in terms of social practice and here the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his concepts of ‘habitus’ and disposition have been influential. His theory provides a materialist

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__________________________________________________________________ alternative to the idealism of Michel Foucault and post-structuralism. For him social reality exists, notwithstanding its social construction. This sets him apart from the idealist formulations of those who argue that social reality has no existence outside discourse. And it is through social practice that gender relations are reproduced and/or transformed. This sort of approach can be found in the work of Cynthia Cockburn who explores the way in which gender identities are dependent on the continued existence of particular material social relations, besides having a cultural meaning. In addition to this, she shows how gendered social actors reinforce or challenge gender relations through the social practices of their daily lives. 2. Becoming a Feminist This is a complex process of women’s diverse lived experience as they live it and structure it. Sociological theorisations of gender are therefore marked by a tension between idealist and materialist theories and between those which see gender as difference and those which take gendered power as fundamental to gender relations. For all, however, sex, sexuality and the body as well as gender have come to be seen as socially constructed. In ‘Jesse and Meribeth,’ for example, Munro reworks material from The Lives of Girls and Women. Munro’s stories persistently explore the ways in which contemporary society confers adult status on women and men as they accomplish certain tasks like finding jobs, getting married, having children, and accumulating property. She uses the old meaning of life as a journey, using terms related to travel as metaphors: arrival, destination, progress. In The Progress of Love Munro incorporates many of the same themes found in her earlier work as she continues exploring the lives of girls and, increasingly as the author herself ages, the lives of women. Within this 1986 collection, Munro’s form has altered significantly, particularly in terms of her use of narrative technique. Whereas in The Lives of Girls and Women Munro relied upon a retrospective first-person narrator throughout, the latter collection includes three distinct types of narration depending in broad terms on the thematic material that the stories contain. In the majority of the stories in The Progress of Love, Munro has abandoned the first person voice in favour of two variations of narrations in the third-person. In the main plot, Jessie, who like Del transforms a male acquaintance into an imaginary lover, involves herself in a similar process: What about the real Mr. Cryderman? Did all this made me tremble when I heard him at the door, lie in wait for him, hope for a sign? Not in the least. When he began to play his role in my imagination, he faded in reality. 6 The protagonist of The Progress of Love story must grapple with the contradiction she discovers between stories from her mother’s and her aunt’s point

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__________________________________________________________________ of view. The mother recounts a painful memory in which she discovers her own mother attempting suicide as a result of her unhappy marriage, while Aunt Beryl’s version describes the event as nothing more than a childish hoax to get attention. Instead of a chronological pattern, the author uses associative links to move among the various flashes from the past and the present, exploring her interest in ‘the way people relate, or don’t relate, to the people they were earlier.’ 7 In ‘The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink,’ the central event is how the adolescent Sam and his cousin Edgar establish an odd relationship with the maid called Callie in their boarding house. In ‘Circle of Prayer,’ the narrator describes two intense moments which Trudy, the protagonist, experiences at pivotal times in her life: her honeymoon and her separation from her husband: It seems she stood outside her own body … She stood outside her happiness in a tide of sadness, and the opposite thing happened the morning Dan left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like over. But it was the same thing, really, when you got outside. What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life - - what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all? 8 3. Identity and Positioning A fundamental point is that each embodied female subject represents a complex network of identities and positions, and must be conceived of as a process in a constant state of dynamic transformation rather than a static entity. People interact and are influenced in their decisions on how to act or react, particularly when emotions are involved. It is important to understand the sort of feminine subject position a narrative constructs for the readers within the meaning of the term positionality as described and used in the theoretical works of Hutcheon, Butler, and Irigaray. In Munro’s stories the position may be either of a victim or a victimiser, depending on the development stage of the characters and the choices they make. They learn from the experiences they have in their personal and social life. Positionality in Munro’s fiction is mostly related to power. Most relationships are full of tension and imbalance, with sudden changes of attitude or illuminations. The relation between sexes is masterfully represented in an early work by Munro. The Lives of Girls and Women is a coming-of-age story, a kind of Bildungsroman. The story-teller demonstrates what happens when the gulf between the sexes is such that each is isolated in its own discrimination both personally and socially. To discuss Del’s development into a woman and a writer, one should take a look at men in her life. Her short relationship with Mr. Chamberlain starts from the fantasy of being the object of his desires. She let him manipulate her. Later on

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__________________________________________________________________ she was not certain whether the masquerade was worth it. In the opinion of Rasporich, Del is: [R]escued from Mr. Chamberlain by absorbing the joke at her own expense; the gloomy landscape is dispelled when she realizes the ironic incongruity between her expectation and the mean reality of Mr. Chamberlain. 9 Men are herein unclear, yet their image is very significant in understanding Del’s development into a woman and a writer: Del finds in her father, her brother, and in Uncles Benny, Craig and Bill, a contentment that contrasts to the endeavour typical of a female. Men appear satisfyingly independent of women, unlike the females (her aunts and Naomi) that are completely dependent upon the opposite sex to define themselves, while paradoxically they regard men as childish, weak and in need of toleration and protection. Male characters have freedom of action, whereas Del feels the same frustration as her mother, because of all the physical limitations on the lives of girls and women. Through the technique recognised in Munro’s short fiction as paradox, the most complex human characteristics are captured in the description of successful academics as ‘such brilliant, such talented incapable men’ or in Del’s discussion of egotism women feel in men, something ‘tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd.’ 10 This device, being more than a stylistic tool, is very relevant in the portrayal of human nature and of people’s emotional reactions at all times. Paradox is the way in which variations over time (for example, when people hate and then go on to love again) are shown in their amazing complexity, as a paradoxical nature of feelings and vision: They [Del’s aunts] respected men’s work beyond anything; they also laughed at it. This was strange; they could believe absolutely in its importance and at the same time convey their judgement that it was, from one point of view, frivolous, non-essential. 11 Del Jordan’s growth, besides being an examination of alternative options that are available to women, is also an exploration of realities such as: death, religion, sex and art. During this process, a series of contrasting worlds confronting each other and against Del’s uncertain sense of ‘real life’ are shown in images of characters’ lives. Munro does not only identify differences in their life-styles: these differences are explicit facets of independent worlds, which in most cases are at variance with each other for the exclusive right to define experience. Del’s nighttime fantasies of Frank Wales are followed by real dreams ‘never so kind, but full of gritty small problems, lost socks, not being able to find the Grade Eight

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__________________________________________________________________ classroom.’ 12 Irony appears in Del’s final attitude after ending her intimate involvement with Garnet: Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life. 13 In the chapter entitled ‘Baptism,’ Del Jordan’s struggle against Garnet’s insistence is a symbolic struggle against male dominance and loss of self. The feminine metaphors of baking and pirouetting, incompatible with Bobby’s gender, imply that the inner drive must be that of the feminine powers. In none of the males does Munro portray the balance of masculine and feminine powers necessary to achieve a change in society equivalent to that which Mrs. Jordan envisages for women. The female characters also reveal a similar imbalance. On the other hand, in espousing her masculine qualities Mrs. Jordan faces social ridicule, while in repressing her feminine powers she becomes as Del sees her, brittle, eccentric. Munro shows in Del a development, occurring in the last two chapters of the novel and which is undoubtedly motivated by the masculine powers she identifies herself with. As Judith Butler states: [E]ven if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two - and hence - man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily a female one. 14 This idea, of male/female characteristics in a person also appears in The Moons of Jupiter, an artistic achievement that uses flashbacks to approach the acts of loving and letting go, connection and separation. It is Munro’s first work structured by a coherent psychological argument that unifies it around the metaphor of Jupiter’s moons. Repeatedly, these stories relate women’s behaviour to the irresistible force of their attraction towards the men they love. Ada’s generation has grown old, represented now by a woman like Mrs. Kidd, confined to a nursing home. The subject of these stories is what is generally called romantic love, either love that the characters are doing their best to make work, or love they are recovering from. But there is little romance in the love Munro’s women find, and certainly none of the grand passions and infatuations with which fiction so often concerns itself. Instead, Munro’s women find comfort in the best love available to them, or are unhappy over the loss of a love that was not all that good to start with.

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__________________________________________________________________ In ‘Bardon Bus,’ the narrator is still getting over an affair from the previous summer while on a field trip to Australia. She still thinks obsessively about the man. She envies her friend Kay for moving from one affair to another, going to the extremes in falling in love and out of it. In ‘Accident,’ the protagonist Frances actually got the love she wanted as a result of an accident causing the death of her lover’s son. Now, thirty years later, she and Ted are still married and have had two daughters, in addition to the two daughters from Ted’s previous marriage. ‘She’s had her love, her scandal, her man, her children. But inside she’s ticking away, all by herself, the same Frances who was there before any of it.’ 15 And Dennis has opinions on various matters, but the most intriguing one is about gender differences: ‘I have a new theory about the life of woman. … Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The choices you would have.’ 16 In the title story, the narrator waits for her father to decide to undergo heart surgery while at the same time tries to solve the riddle of her two grown daughters’ lives, especially Nichola, who at the moment is incommunicado. In ‘Labor Day Dinner’ as George and Roberta and Roberta’s teen-age daughters Angela and Eva visit their friends, it is interesting to follow the dynamics of the relationship between George and Roberta, who got married two years ago, and about his relationship with his two step-daughters, and about how they are all attempting to make this new relationship work. At the end of the story, nothing really happens, until on the last page they are saved from a fatal traffic accident. ‘Hard Luck Stories’ shows a conversation between the narrator and her friend Julie, a woman who, despite being married, had once believed that she had totally missed out on love. The narrator had once told Julie that there are several kinds of love. Although Julie is now having a very satisfying affair with a man named Douglas, the focus in not on him, but on the conversation that mostly consisted of Julie’s telling of two previous interactions with men, and the narrator telling of a rather strange experience she once had with a lover. The three collections of short-stories are connected thematically, around the male-female relationship, with a clear distinction between sex and gender. In Munro’s fiction, femininity and masculinity are expressed in behaviours, attitudes, postures, gestures, language, so they are learnt, not natural, features. 4. Conclusions Many of Munro’s stories involve issues of love and sexual relationships that construct, deconstruct or reconstruct women’s private lives at a deeply psychological level. Munro’s short stories present women who make choices even in broken relationships, contribute to their misfortune, and they are neither the only victims nor totally innocent and helpless. The constant shifts of planes do not affect the text coherence, on the contrary, this is a narrative technique that enables the

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__________________________________________________________________ readers to gather the significant details of the storyline and see events and characters’ acts from several angles, masterfully made possible by this beguiling storyteller. Love is alwas viewed from a woman’s perspective, and manifested through various experiences, when reality and dream-like states combine harmoniously yet ambiguously. Specific of it is the intricate interplay between desires and external forces the characters cannot really control. Being more influential, men exert their power on women’s agency through the roles they typically fill in a certain context of interaction.

Notes 1

Lorna Irving, ‘Hostility and Reconciliation: The Mother in English Canadian Fiction’, American Review of Canadian Studies 8, No. 1 (1978): 56-64. 2 Bronwen Wallace. ‘Women’s Lives: Alice Munro’, in The Human Elements: Critical Essays, ed. David Hewwig (Ottawa: Oberon, 1978). 3 Barbara Marshall, Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics (ON, CAN: Broadview Press, 2000), 13. 4 Beverly Rasporich, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990), 167 5 Ibid., 461-462. 6 Alice Munro, The Progress of Love (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986), 179. 7 Geoff Hancock, ‘Interview with Alice Munro’, in Canadian Fiction Magazine 43 (1982), 89. 8 Munro, The Progress of Love, 273. 9 Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 114. 10 Ibid., 197. 11 Ibid., 32. 12 Ibid., 135. 13 Ibid., 242. 14 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 6. 15 Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter (Toronto: Macmillan, 1982), 109. 16 Ibid., 121.

Bibliography Bailey, Nancy I. ‘The Masculine Image in Lives of Girls and Women’. In Canadian Literature 80 (1979): 113–120.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge: New York, 1990. Cockburn, Cynthia. The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. London: Zed Books, 1998. Connell, Bob. Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Carrington, Ildiko de Papp. Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 2002 [1969]. Hancock, Geoff. ‘Interview with Alice Munro’. In Canadian Fiction Magazine 43 (1982): 74–114. Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1998. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Irving, Lorna. ‘Hostility and Reconciliation: The Mother in English Canadian Fiction’. In American Review of Canadian Studies 8, No. 1 (1978): 56–64. Marshall, Barbara. Configuring Gender: Explorations in Theory and Politics. ON, CAN: Broadview Press, 2000. Munro, Alice. Lives of Girls and Women. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

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__________________________________________________________________ —––. The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. —––. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. Rasporich, Beverly. Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990. Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi: Sage, 2003 [1993]. Wallace, Bronwen. ‘Women’s Lives: Alice Munro’. In The Human Elements: Critical Essays, edited by David Hewwig. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. Cristina Nicolaescu is teaching assistant at the Christian University Dimitrie Cantemir and doctoral candidate (the 3rd year) at the University of Bucharest. While interested in Canadian Studies in general, currently her research and writing is devoted to contemporary Canadian literature.

Sodom and Gomorrah on the Bosphorus: Emergence of Modern Gender Roles in Turkey Murat Seçkin Abstract In 1928 a novel entitled Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodom ve Gomora) by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu was published in Turkey and it deals mainly with the life in Istanbul during the Allied Forces’ occupation between 1920 and 1922. The novel was addressed to a reading public who fought the ‘War of Independence’ and established the modern Republic. Turkey was then going through an accelerated program of westernisation and the readers were eager to turn to the West for cultural inspiration. The West was the inspiration but it was also a source of anxiety for the readers since it came fraught with new and confusing gender roles for the men and women. Karaosmanoğlu makes a distinction between the ‘right way’ of modernisation (nationalistic, authoritarian, and above all heterosexist) and the ‘wrong ways’ of liberal modernity. I would like to use Sodom and Gomorrah’s text to examine the gender issues used as metaphors to expound problems of westernisation and modernisation in a culture that serves as a link between East and West in Turkey. The society which is creating itself as a modern nation-state defines its gender roles according to its nationalistic ideology, and therefore Karaosmanoğlu deals with the questions of how the East and the West, through the filter of Pierre Loti and similar ‘orientalists,’ regard the East and its gender issues. The author’s apparent homophobia and misogyny, which are shared by the new state, inform the emerging modern gender roles in the Middle East at the start of the last century. Key Words: Turkey, nationalism, modernisation, westernisation, masculinity, gender roles, homophobia, misogyny, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu. ***** Nationalism and nation building activities need heroes and heroes are traditionally men by definition. The ideology of nation building needs to define a new masculinity and this is what we witness in the emergence of Turkish Republic at the beginning of the twentieth century. As R. W. Connell asserts, ‘gender [is] historically changing and politically fraught’ 1 so we observe how gender roles and love relations are constructed in this historically significant period in Turkey. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu’s novel Sodom and Gomorrah, written in 1928, reflects the period of 1920-22 when Istanbul was under Allied Armies’ occupation; and the ‘War of Independence’ was organised and fought by a nationalist underground located in Ankara to establish the indepent Turkish state. This period of history, the Armistice, is known to the Turks as ‘one of the worst periods of

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__________________________________________________________________ Turkish history.’ 2 The novel reflects the nationalistic ideology of the new Republic which still regarded Istanbul (as it was the capital of the Ottoman Empire where the novel takes place) with suspicion. I would like to discuss Sodom and Gomorrah to examine the gender issues used as metaphors to expound problems of westernisation and modernisation in Turkey. Turkish society as it is formed as a modern nation-state defines its gender roles according to its nationalistic ideology, and therefore Karaosmanoğlu deals with the questions of how both the East and the West regard the East and its gender issues. The new nation is an imagined one and so is its national identity, as Benedict Anderson suggests. 3 This imagined community must create its enemy or ‘the Other’ 4 so that it can establish itself as the politically, economically, and culturally dominant factor in the new regime. The author’s apparent homophobia, xenophobia, and misogyny, which are shared by the new Republic, inform the emerging modern gender roles in the Middle East at the start of the last century. The novel was originally addressed to a reading public who fought the war and established the new Republic in Ankara. Since the nineteenth century Turkey was going through an accelerated program of westernisation and the readers of this novel were eager to turn to the West for cultural inspiration. The West was the inspiration but it was also a source of anxiety for the readers since it came fraught with new and confusing gender roles for men and women. The author makes a distinction between the ‘right way’ of modernisation (nationalistic, authoritarian, anti-capitalistic, and above all heterosexist) and the ‘wrong ways’ of liberal modernity whose symbol is Istanbul. As the title of the novel suggests, we enter the world of the Old Testament and Marcel Proust’s novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. On the one hand we have the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (as interpreted by the Christian ideology: the Cities of the Plain were punished because of the sinful same sex desires of their male population) and on the other, we have that what Karaosmanoğlu sees in Proust’s novel is a critique of an extremely decadent society at the end of nineteenth-century Paris. The novel’s hero Necdet is presented as a Western educated man (mainly in Germany and France) who seeks to find his place in a nationalistic Turkish society that is emerging from the ashes of a multilingual, multicultural, and multiethnic Ottoman Empire. 5 The ideology of nation building needs to define a new masculinity first. The Ottoman Empire was, in the eyes of the West, the nexus of eastern masculinity; however, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, due to repeated defeats in the wars with the West, a new consciousness arose in the Empire to change the fate of military setbacks. Being defeated in war is always a blow to the masculine ego and the defeated regards the defeater from the perspective of a less-than-manly position. This is, of course, one way to rationalise the need for the reform movement; the conservative asserts the need for change only when his manhood is endangered. However, the state and the intellectuals were regarding the West with

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘a secret fear and loathing’ yet also with ‘an admiration and something that comes close to love.’ 6 Istanbul is shown from the beginning as a city teeming with evil individuals who are evil for the reason of being foreigners (both the occupying army and those Levantines who have settled there for commercial reasons) or for failing to be Muslim and Turkish. On the one hand we have a new generation of Muslims who is fed up with the economic crises at the beginning of the twentieth century and looks at the capitalistic system more favorably; and on the other hand, we have the inheritance of the Ottoman civil and military bureaucracy who regards this profit oriented commercialism and war profiteering as disgusting. 7 Men in Turkey, whatever culture and religion they belonged to for centuries, learned to be men from the ideology of Islam that shaped their lives. With the westernisation of society, new models of being a man came into play. One of the new models was the establishment of the concept of Turkishness that informed the new Republic. This novel shows the confused years just before the establishment of the new nation state Turkey. We see a catalogue of different gender roles for men, both foreigners and locals. The foreigners are mainly British and French officers whose ‘abnormalities’ are obviously overstressed. Major Will, who is rumoured to be the second in command to the British Police Forces, is presented as a man with animal traits: he is said to be ‘pink like a new-born pig’ 8 and ‘has huge and soft hands, like white bear’s paws.’ 9 The character is created as a man that would look abhorrent to the Turkish readers. Being like a pig is naturally the most disgusting simile for a Muslim reader. Then there is Jackson Read who is created to be too beautiful; he is a heterosexual, yet he is likened to Dorian Gray. And the worst of all of them is Marlow who is homosexual. Our problematic hero Necdet struggles through the streets and salons of Istanbul in his quest for becoming a new Turkish man. To show this quest the author makes him meet the representatives of the British occupying forces, Levantine and non-Muslim people, and Turks who have degenarated into ‘monsters’ due to their advanced levels of westernisation. The book, like Proust’s, is constructed around large gatherings which illustrate the horrors of enemy invasion, the corruption of foreign soliders, the collaboration of non-Muslim locals with the enemy, and worst of all, the degeneration of Turkish people. In the middle of the book, a rich and enigmatic British army major throws a party in his mansion on the Bosphorus. He also has a Turkish aristocrat aide-decamp who has become the servant of Major Will. This is what has happened to Turkish masculinity - Karaosmanoğlu seems to be saying -, it has become a mere servant to the occupying forces. We see how imitative westernisation and evil capitalism have caused the military defeat. Karaosmanoğlu looks back to a Ottoman past with yearning where none of these evils invaded the habitus of

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__________________________________________________________________ individuals as well as the public arena, yet he himself is extremely muddled due to his western education which has stripped the vestiges of his Ottoman past. The confusion of our hero, Necdet, arises from his insecurity regarding his masculinity. He seems to have the right impulses of a Turkish man: basically he hates the foreigners, foreign armies that occupy his homeland, and their nonMuslim collaborators. He has inherited these traits from his Ottoman ancestors. Yet he is a westernised man himself; even though he hates foreigners, he limits this hatred to the Anglo-Saxon cultures. He is described as someone who has sown his wild oats when he was abroad. As a true Ottoman gentleman, he has ‘experienced all the sensual pleasures of European life while he was there and even had a few mistresses.’ 10 He is a man and he has done what he is entitled to do. But the possibility of his fiancée Leyla to have a sensual life of her own will create a major blow to his male ego. He is learning the new prerequisites to be a nationalist as well. In a drunken state Necdet leaves a party after having a fight with Leyla due to her liberal ways with foreign officers; he then stumbles into a bar in Pera and watches his surroundings like a good racist. The bar is teeming with non-Muslim Ottomans and all Necdet does is to crane his neck to observe the horrifying scene. He sees a conclave of evil forces having fun at the expense of the newly emerging Turkish nation. They are all depicted with the prejudice of what the nationalists see as the cause of the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He sees drunk Greek shop assistants joke and scuffle around in a vulgar manner; 11 on a table in front of him there is an Armenian man who ‘carries the large and round spectacles on an olive skinned, heavy eyebrowed, unrefined primitive face as if it is the only sign of elegance and civilisation.’ This man is not only Armenian (therefore, ‘unrefined and primitive’) but a businessman, a capitalist who ‘might be figuring out the easiest and darkest ways of making a financial swindle.’ 12 The worst of all, of course, is the way women behave; they are shown to be all after one thing and that is to capture an officer of the occupying armies. A man may be driven into insanity when his country is occupied by foreign armies, and when he notices certain evil elements in them, due to their racial, religious, economic, cultural, and gender formations, he may feel happy about it. Necdet’s feelings of emasculation escalate and he has no way out but drinking himself senseless. What Necdet observes, of course, through the ideology of the new Republic, is that non-Muslim groups are not only racially inferior but also that their greed clashes with the anti-capitalistic, corporatist economic system that is being promoted by the Ankara goverment. The foreigners and their local accomplices do not only bring about ‘immorality’ but a new capitalistic system which finds adherents even among the Muslim bourgeoisie. Leyla’s father, for instance, gives parties in his house to foreign dignitaries so that he can make his chances in trade relations better. He is also less careful in his protection of his daughter’s ‘honour’ due to his greed. If we go back to Major Will’s ball, we see that the greatest crime he has committed is the transformation of the mansion that once was owned by an

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__________________________________________________________________ aristocratic Muslim Ottoman family into the temple of orgies for the foreign enemy. At the party couples of both the locals and the the members of the Occupation Army mingle with the visiting American billionaires. The Turks are regarded by the foreigners as zoo animals and the former are busy to inspect the mansion and the luxurious oriental wonders which existence in the Orient they never imagined. When the guests tour the house they come across Major Will’s bedroom which was the mesdjid of the mansion until the Muslim owners had to leave. Then comes the sacrilegious part. Major Will’s bedroom lights are turned on and we see that he has transformed the room into [A] bedroom filled with erotic pictures and statues. In the mihrab, for instance, there was a statue of a couple, as large as two ten year old children, kissing on the lips and coiling around each other’s bodies. From a distance, it gave the impression of being a work of art but at close inspection one could see that these plaster Paris statues were made for lecherous purposes. There were also pornografic paintings wall to wall. 13 We see the Muslim temple profaned by a Christian marauder.These shocking details are lovingly admired by all who visit the room. The visitors and their exclamations help to create the shocking scene for what appears to be the ideal decadent atmosphere where the author expects God’s wrath to strike it down as in the Bible. The party progresses with wild abandon. This ‘Babylonian gathering’ 14 turns into an orgy of scandals where two ‘Sodomite girls[sic]’ are captured ‘entwined as one.’ People find them in Major Will’s bedroom: Fanny Moore and Nermin are making love, naked on his bed and Will is behind a curtain watching them. Such ‘outrageous’ incident is laughed at by the guests. 15 Moore is a lesbian American journalist who seduces the American educated young woman Nermin. This debauchery is then ogled by the decadent British. Moore’s lesbianism is understandable to Necdet because she is American and therefore evil, but this is unacceptable for a Turkish woman. Yet Nermin has been educated by these ‘abnormal’ Americans at a school founded by missionaries. Another shocking character in the novel is Captain Marlow; he represents the homosexual masculinity and is presented as the typical man of Sodom. We see all the western/Christian prejudices about homosexuality played on him. He comes to the East to have sex with eastern men, following the tradition of Byron. Marlow says he is there ‘with the dream of being ravished by half-wild handsome faced Turks.’ 16 He is, at first accosted by Muslim woman Azize who falls in love with him and tries to lure him by turning herself into an Aziyadé figure of Pierre Loti’s eponymous novel. 17 Of course, Marlow ignores her and yet visits her because he is interested in her husband Atif. Atif is a professional gambler and a bisexual man.

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__________________________________________________________________ His gender role is explained by his marginal status in society and his shady business interests. But even he regards Marlow with disdain for he is a homosexual man (and obviously Atif does not regard himself as one) and makes him shave of his moustache. This emasculation reduces the English man to a feminised position in his eyes and puts himself in a superior position. All these anomalies present a major blow to the newly developing consciousness of Necdet. As the Turkish Army approaches Istanbul, he focuses on the new patriarchal system which will make a new man of him: a man who abandons his beloved Leyla and her wanton sexuality, a man who becomes a monogamous, loyal husband, and a civil servant helping the corporatist state to run smoothly.

Notes 1

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 3. 2 Hilmi Ziya Ülken, ‘Mütareke’, in Mütareke (Destan), ed. Halûk Nihat Pepeyi (Galata: Bcid Basimevi, 1938). Cited in Turk Romaninda Isgal Istanbulu (Occupied Istanbul in Turkish Novel) by Mehmet Törenek (Cağaloğlu, İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 19. 3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 4 Edward Saïd, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 5 Azade Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008). 6 Halil Berktay, ‘Taklitçi Türk Irkçılığı’ (Imitative Turkish Racism), Taraf, August 10, 2010, accessed February 28, 2012, http://www.taraf.com.tr/halilberktay/makale-taklitci-turk-irkciligi.htm, 2. 7 Ayşe Saraçgil, Bukalemun Erkek (Chameleon Man), trans. Sevim Aktaş (Istanbul: İletişim, 2005), 180. 8 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu, Sodom ve Gomore (Sodom and Gomorrah) (Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1972), 16. 9 Sodom, 101. 10 Ibid., 37. 11 Ibid., 40-41. 12 Ibid., 41. 13 Ibid., 110. 14 Ibid., 15. 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Ibid., 89.

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She, together with Karaosmanoğlu, failed to see the homosexual subtext of Pierre Loti’s novel. However, Roland Barthes refered to it as ‘a little Sodomitic epic’ in the preface he wrote for the Italian translation of the novel published in 1971 by Franco Maria Ricci. Roland Barthes, ‘Pierre Loti: Aziyadé’, in New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 113. Cited in GLBTQ. The World’s Largest Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture, accessed February 28, 2012, http://www.glbtq.com/literature/loti_p,2.html.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983. Berktay, Halil. ‘Taklitçi Türk Irkçılığı’. Taraf, August 10, 2010. Accessed February 28, 2012. http://www.taraf.com.tr/halil-berktay/makale-taklitci-turkirkciligi.htm. Connell, Raewyn. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. GLBTQ. The World’s Largest Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture. Accessed February 28, 2012. http://www.glbtq.com/literature/loti_p,2.htm. Karaosmanoğlu, Yakup Kadri. Sodom ve Gomore. Ankara: Bilgi Yayınevi, 1972. Milas, Herkül. Türk Romanı ve ‘Öteki’: Ulusal Kimlikte Yunan İmajı. Istanbul: Sabancı Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2000. Saïd, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Saraçgil, Ayşe. Bukalemun Erkek (Chameleon Man). Translated by Sevim Aktaş. Istanbul: İletişim, 2005. Seyhan, Azade. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in a Comparative Context. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2008. Törenek, Mehmet. Turk Romaninda Isgal Istanbulu. Cağaloğlu, Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ Murat Seçkin, English Department, Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University, Turkey.

Singing Women: Gender and Ecology Suja Roy Abraham Abstract Folksongs reflect the social, economic and cultural organisation of the group, which creates them. These songs are handed down orally from generation to generation. Folksongs in general are expressions of emotions that do not find an outlet in any other form either due to social restriction or due to personal inhibition. They articulate discontent with issues such as casteism, sexism, economic exploitation and so on. Further, they also reflect a way of life closely associated with the land, in which life is not seen in terms of conflict with and conquest/subjugation of nature, but rather as a harmonious co-existence with it. This paper will take up folksongs from the Central Travancore region of Kerala, a state in South India in order to examine the relationship between gender and nature. As the Kerala society was principally and primarily agricultural, the peasant folks, especially women, were tied to agricultural work and their lives were tuned to the rhythms of the agricultural occupation. They evoked and reminded the specifics of their unsung pasts, and articulated their engagement with their experiences and the world of humans and nature around them through these songs. These songs are encountering a flail of opposition from the state workers trade union as they feel that the workers do more work when they sing. There is a dire need to preserve these songs as they are in danger of becoming extinct and along with them would be lost a vital, alternative paradigm for leading our lives in consonance with nature. My paper aims to analyse some of the agricultural folksongs of Central Kerala as historical heritage and examine the close connection that existed between the land and the women whose lives drew sustenance from it. They believed that the earth was their mother (female) who paired with the sky (male) and gave a rich abundance of crop. Thus they came to honour the bounteous Mother earth and invest it with sanctity and perennial meaning. The women came to be regarded with an energy and fertility attaining higher nodes of consciousness. I would also be arguing that the understanding of the relationship between women and nature expressed in these songs provides an alternative understanding of our place in the world and postulates a lifestyle that can offer solutions to the ecological crisis that threatens our globe today. Key Words: Folksongs, agricultural folksongs, pulayar, parayar. ***** Folksongs are a fertile area of research and discussion since they reflect the social and cultural organisation of the group that creates them. These songs are handed down orally from generation to generation. Folksongs in general are

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__________________________________________________________________ expressions of emotions that do not find an outlet in any other form either due to social restriction or due to personal inhibition. They articulate discontent with issues such as casteism, sexism, economic exploitation and so on. There is a dire need to preserve these songs as they are in danger of becoming extinct with the shift from agriculture to industrialisation and with the advent of cinema and modern forms of entertainment. My paper aims to analyse some of the agricultural folksongs of Central Kerala as historical heritage and to examine the close connection between the land and the peasant women. Central Kerala is a region where agriculture is the primary occupation. It is a highland - the topsoil has rocky pebbles and the bottom soil is laterite. This is highly suitable for agriculture. The Kuttanad area of Central Kerala is known as the rice bowl of Kerala. Therefore it has a rich tradition of agricultural folksongs. It is commonly believed that the earth was their mother (female) who paired with the sky (male) yielding rich abundance of crop underlies these folk compositions. Thus they came to honour the bounteous Mother earth and invest it with sanctity and perennial meaning. The women came to be associated with energy and fertility attaining higher nodes of consciousness. The agricultural labourers of Central Kerala are drawn from the Pulayar and Parayar castes - the backward communities in Kerala. There are several etymological bases for the word pulaya advanced by scholars and historians: The word Pulaya etymologically has two meanings: pulam means the paddy field; Pulaya, therefore, means man of the field. In the ancient times people were known by their work. As the Pulayas were working in the field (pulam) it is convincing enough that they came to be known as Pulayas. Pula also means pollution; and therefore Pulayas also means polluted. The pollution was so abominable that even their shadow polluted the caste Hindus. 1 While it was predominantly the Pulayars and the Parayars, who worked as agricultural labourers, there was a clear division of labour between the genders. The important tasks performed by women were transplanting, field levelling, weeding and harvesting, while men were engaged in bund construction and repairing, ploughing, sowing, applying fertilizers, pesticides, and tilling. However, these communities did not own the land they worked on. This was a privilege reserved for the upper castes: the Nambootiris and the Nayars. Thus, while agriculture brought the upper castes and the lower castes into close contact, it also preserved caste hierarchy. Power relations were played out while engaging in agricultural tasks and often these communities negotiated their relationship with each other through agricultural folksongs.

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__________________________________________________________________ The primary source of my presentation has been the songs collected from various agricultural workers, all women: both composers and performers. Most often the composer herself sings the songs, while a group of women, the performers, join her in the refrain. Sometimes, the lead-singer is paid an additional sum of money by the landlord as it ensures a higher efficiency in labour. Mariamma John, who has been conferred with the title of a Fellow by the Kerala Folklore Academy, Thangamma, a composer and performer, C. J. Kuttappan, folklorist and workers from the farms of Kottayam, Pattanamthitta, Ernakulam and Alapuzha were the contributors of these songs. The songs were recorded on audio and video either, while they were being sung by the women in the field, on request, or from professionals, who gave performances. Through these songs, the Pulayar and Parayar women gave a form of expression to their experience of struggle and toil. These songs are not merely a genre, but a way of life. Nowadays, these songs are sung in professional performances rather than in agricultural fields. The peasant women do not sing these songs in the fields freely anymore because the state workers’ trade union has learnt that the songs facilitate work, and it does not want these women to do more work than they should. There is an urgent need to preserve these songs, as this vital, alternative paradigm of life in consonance with nature is likely to be lost soon. Most of these songs were closely connected to land. Since the Kerala society was primarily agricultural, the peasant folks used to be closely linked to agricultural work. They evoked and reminded the specifics of their unsung pasts their antiquity and their ancient, tranquil existence through these folksongs. These songs helped the singer to cope with the strenuous nature of their work. Women’s connection with land has been especially strong as it is not only a means of subsistence for them, but is also closely interlinked with every aspect of their lives. Voices of Peasant Women, A Report of the National Conference on Management and Regeneration of the Natural Environment, observes: ‘In poor peasant households, women have a closer relationship with their natural environment as they depend on the ecosystem for food, fodder, fuel, water and livelihood for their families.’ 2 Though it is traditionally men, only from the upper castes too, who own lands, women were much more closely associated emotionally with land, especially as the productivity of the land has often been associated with women’s reproduction. Therefore, land is not only important for women as an economic resource. There are other links that bind them together. Bina Agarwal discusses this link in her article ‘Women and Land Rights in India’ thus: ‘… while underlining the material and social significance of land and women’s lives, its symbolic importance in rural cultures, for providing a sense of identity and rootedness cannot be gainsaid.’ 3 Central Kerala has various categories of agricultural folksongs. In a society called upon to express its energies in the cultivation of field and fallow, these

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__________________________________________________________________ songs have become a pattern among the labouring folks who are oppressed, suppressed and repressed at every turn. The Pulayar and Parayar communities are the ones, who have supplied physical labour for the landlords and these communities, by allowing themselves to be subjugated, have strengthened these systems of oppression. Again, within these subaltern communities, women occupy an even more subaltern position. They are exploited not only by the upper castes but also, very often, by men of their own communities. It is in this context that folksongs sung by them become significant as recording voices of resistance. The folksongs articulate their frustrations as well as their aspirations, which do not find expression elsewhere. In his article ‘TiNai Poetics and Tamil Poetry,’ Nirmal Selvamony makes a distinction between Primal tiNai, an ecosystem bringing together naturo-cultural as well as human elements and a Hierarchic tiNai thus: ‘The kin-like tiNai of primal societies allow freedom with responsibility, duties, obligations, and rights bind people, spirits and nature quite intricately,’ 4 while ‘in the hierarchic or political tiNai, the members stand in a hierarchic relationship, with the sacred at the top, the humans in the middle and nature at the bottom.’ 5 Both these types of ecosystems can be seen represented in the agricultural folksongs taken up for analysis here. In these folksongs, women often talk about the close connection that exists between them and the land they work own, though they do not own it. The following folksong serves as a good example: 1) Flourish, flourish, flourish, flourish Land must flourish, world must flourish Thatched roofing flourish, threshold flourish Just like the prime of sweet sixteen, Thatched roofing flourish. When thirty three trees were planted Only three fruit yielding trees blossomed Flowers of that tree are in my head. ‘Turn away, turn away, Pulayan, make way Thickets thither and thorns hither. How am I to head the way? I have children in my arms And a toddy pitcher on my head How am I to board the boat thither? Unless it come hither. Didn’t you break the coconut we gave? Didn't you see the kernel and the contents? When you are poked, it is the same blood When we are poked, it is the same blood Then why speak of caste superiority?

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__________________________________________________________________ Why talk of caste and untouchability? 6 The burden of the above transplantation song harks back to a time, when the arrogant and overbearing ruling class had more or less stifled the aspirations of the poor and the humble women folk of Central Kerala. The refrain in this song points out how the poor folks have necessarily lived a constrained life within the limits prescribed by the upper caste people. It is the upper most sentiment of the women folk that they must surge ahead towards a golden era of hope and fulfilled dreams, and that everything should be subordinated to a splendid future. The song foresees a utopian future, when there will be no sharp division between the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak. The song hints strongly at the isolation and insulation of one community from the other. Thus the theme relates with poignant relevance the burning issue of caste discrimination and caste distinction. This song is a clarion call for change. The refrain of ‘Flourish, flourish, flourish’ is almost a catchword. It is a call for the flourishing of the land and the world around. There is a prophetic hint that there should be a renewal and transformation in the thinking of all. The lines, ‘Flourish, flourish, flourish, flourish / Land must flourish, world must flourish / Thatched roofing flourish, threshold flourish / Just like the prime of sweet sixteen’ compare the flourishing of the land to the flowering of a young maiden in her prime. Human procreation and natural productivity have been seen as cognate and related. A womanly nature has come to be attributed to the earth. Thus a productive field and a fertile woman came to be revered and upheld in the folk mind. A woman labourer’s life is brought into clear focus in the following folksong. The difficult circumstances of the neglected and socially downgraded Pulayar and Parayar are highlighted. This song captures the precariousness of the existence of the Pulayar and Parayar women roughly a century ago: 2) O God, listen. To this groan of agony Cut forest to walk, made hut to make it a house After six days of its birth the mother Lay the baby under the tree With the ox and the buffalo Which is tied together for land ploughing On return when she sees The baby has been worn to death by the red ants O God, Listen To this groan of agony 7 The toiling masses are painted here as lacking even a protective roof or wall for the just born child, who is bitten to death by ants for it, was consigned to the shade

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__________________________________________________________________ of a spreading tree. This act of leaving the child to a natural death under a tree shows the isolated situation of a mother, who has brought forth a child and, with little respite after delivery, is seen toiling under the hot sun, with the child of a very tender age laid aside to rest. The lines ‘After six days of its birth the mother / Lay the baby under the tree’ shows that the Pulayar and Parayar lived in an indissoluble bond with nature. The mother lays the baby under the protection of the tree - which is symbolic of security and warmth - just like a mother, who caresses her baby under her warmth. Thangamma, an agricultural folksong singer, also recalls this degraded situation, where she used to lay her children in the pits made in the field and work from dawn to dusk. This song brings out the disjunction between appearance of economic independence and the reality of compromises and sacrifices made by a woman working on the land. While working on the land and contributing to the economic resource of the family seems to give women economic freedom, it also serves to undermine other roles that they are expected to play. Nancy Folbre points out this paradox that women are confronted with though she does this in the context of developmental processes, ‘… the same aspects of the development process that increase their economic independence as individuals increase their … vulnerability as mothers.’ 8 There were times when the mother had to forego even feeding the baby as she would be reprimanded and denied adequate daily wages by the masters. The ‘groan of agony’ is evocative of various nuances of meaning such as a cry for protection, call for mercy, voice in protest against the ruthless exploitation and perhaps also the groan of a mother seeing her child dead. When we review themes of agricultural songs, composed by Pulayar and Parayar women, we are struck at once by what they reveal. The woman, as pictured in them, is a figure of resolute resistance against the oppressive society she lives in. She appears not only brave but also formidable in guarding her pride. Ironically, she is also characterised as being a dutiful servant to her master. Incursions into the privacy and personal morality of the representative Nili girl is recorded in the following agricultural folksong as the burden of the song, which is also the burden of her life: 3) Nīli girl nīli girl where are you going? To reap the firstlings, young master How thirsty I am due to the scorching sun Give me some water that you had drawn from the well The drawn water is not stored, young master Receptacle and the rope have gone into the well Give me a firebrand Let me light my cigarette as a pass time Even the firebrand has been extinguished, young master

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__________________________________________________________________ Where has your father Pulayan gone? To the hilly field to harvest young master The young master sought a rupee currency from his pocket The young master sought a rupee currency from his pocket Slowly, slowly he stretched the currency note Nīli girl being indignant thus said ‘The harvest sickle is in my hand, flee for your life.’ 9 This song records the sexual exploitation of the Pulayar and Parayar women by men of the upper castes. The young master is engaged in an exchange of words with the Nili girl. She is described as the possessor of strong moral values and also a high sense of honour. The young master makes sexual overtures to this young girl. Far from succumbing to the pressure, she stands up for her own dignity. She threatens the young master with dire consequences brandishing the harvest sickle, which acts as her armour. The Pulayar and Parayar women came to be regarded by their men folk with an energy and fertility attaining higher nodes of consciousness. This investiture of a Mother is the one, which has led to the exaltation in Hindu scriptures of Bhooma Devi and has also accounted for the Pulayar and Parayar communities clothing their women with spiritual piety. 10 Vaanamamalai observes that, ‘All over the world fertility and agricultural objects came to be intertwined with certain mother deities and goddesses.’ 11 One central practice in all ancient religions is the adoration of the Mother Earth: The earth was adored because all things came from it and all things returned to it. The earth, to primitive religion is consciousness, is something immediately experienced and accepted, its sise, its solidity, its variety of landscape and of vegetation, formed a live active cosmic unity. 12 This aspect is seen in the following song: 4) Seeking oldness and earthiness My uncles are also searching for wealth The earth has mothered me And the earth departs from me And the seekers of wealth for me Are my uncles who sought Directions must be ascertained country must prosper God in the form of five elements must prosper Earth must prosper

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__________________________________________________________________ Space must prosper Troubles must cease Life must prosper Earth and wealth sought and built by my forefathers Rising in the east and setting in the west. Come within earshot and dwell with us O’ my fathers and forefathers. 13 The Pulayar and Parayar were not accustomed to the scriptural, civic forms of worship. The lower castes were denied entry into the temple porches and access to scriptures, and any well-meaning contact with their counterparts or compatriots was proscribed. They, therefore, sought and obtained a tangible contact with the oldness and earthiness of the earth. They worshipped their ancestors, the Earth which mothered them, and the Sky. ‘Among the primitives the understanding of a primordial pair: sky (male) and earth (female) is quite common.’ 14 The Pulayar and Parayar women, in their earth-bound experience and in their recognition of the holiness of the sky, came to exhibit a candid religious experience. The sky to them was infinite and transcendental symbolising a most high dimension of divinity. In the light this intimate relationship between the land and the women, it may be concluded that songs 1, 2 and 3 are about a hierarchic tiNai society whereas song 4 illustrate the primal tiNai society. The agricultural folksongs of the Pulayar and Parayar women, as the paper has sought to demonstrate, spring from a close association with the land they work on. The land to them is not merely a means of subsistence to be exploited to the utmost possible extent but rather an elemental entity that sustains and nourishes their life, a characteristic of the primal tiNai. The land becomes the wellspring of their songs by providing them with both form and content, that is, by providing them with theme and images as well as rhythm. Their lives, therefore, are in consonance with nature and not in conflict with it to gain mastery over it. Here, if anywhere, can the contemporary world order look for remedies for the problems plaguing it, the problems springing from a hierarchical tiNai. From these women can be gained an alternative understanding of our place in the world and the possibility of a lifestyle that can offer solutions to the ecological crisis that threatens our globe today.

Notes 1

Vishnunamboodiri, Pulayurude Pāttukal (Kottayam: National Book Stall, 1983), 35. 2 Voices of Peasant Women, A Report of the National Conference on Management and Regeneration of the Natural Environment, 26-30 August 1991, (New Delhi: Centre for Women’s Development Studies, 1991), 2.

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Agarwal, ‘Who Sows, Who Reaps: Women and Land Rights in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies 15, No. 4 (July 1988): 535. 4 Selvamony, Essays on tiNai (to be published), rev. ed. ‘Oikopetics with Special Reference to Tamil Poetry’, in tamizhiyal aayvuc cintanaikaL (Thoughts on Tamilological Research), eds. Jean Lawrence and K. Bhagavathi (Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, 2003), 2. 5 Selvamony, Essays on tiNai (to be published). Rev. ed. ‘Oikopetics with Special Reference to Tamil Poetry’, 3. 6 Agricultural Folksong rendered by Kuttappan in 2002, Tiruvalla, Central Kerala. 7 Agricultural Folksong rendered by Vatsala and Ramani in 2001, Kottayam, Central Kerala. 8 Folbre, ‘Engendering Economics: New Perspectives on Women, Work and Demographic Change’, The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, World Bank, 1991, 139. 9 Agricultural Folksong rendered by Mariamma in 2002, Chenganacerry, Central Kerala. 10 Sebastian Kappen, Hindutva and Indian Religious Traditions (Changanacherry: Manusham Publisher, 1996), 8. 11 N. Vaanamamalai, Interpretation of Tamil Folk Creations (Trivandrum: Dravidian Linguistics Association, 1981), 68. 12 Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1983), 242. 13 Agricultural folksong rendered by Kuttappan in 2002, Tiruvalla, Central Kerala. 14 Mercea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion (London: Sheed and Ward, 1983), 65.

Bibliography Agarwal, Bina. ‘Who Sows, Who Reaps: Women and Land Rights in India’. Journal of Peasant Studies 15, No. 4 (July 1988): 531–575. Eliade, Mercea. Patterns of Comparative Religion. London: Sheed and Ward, 1983. Folbre, Nancy. ‘Engendering Economics: New Perspectives on Women, Work and Demographic Change’. The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, World Bank, 1991. Kappen, Sebastian. Hindutva and Indian Religious Traditions. Changanacherry: Manusham Publisher, 1996.

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__________________________________________________________________ Selvamony, Nirmal. Essays on tiNai (to be published). Revised Edition, ‘Oikopetics with Special Reference to Tamil Poetry’. In tamizhiyal aayvuc cintanaikaL (Thoughts on Tamilological Research), eds. Jean Lawrence, and K. Bhagavathi, 314–332. Chennai: International Institute of Tamil Studies, 2003. Vaanamamalai, N. Interpretation of Tamil Folk Creations. Trivandrum: Dravidian Linguistics Association, 1981. Vishnunamboodiri. Pulayurude Pāttukal. Kottayam: National Book Stall, 1983. Voices of Peasant Women, A Report of the National Conference on Management and Regeneration of the Natural Environment, 26-30 August 1991. New Delhi: Centre for Women’s Development Studies, 1991. Suja Roy Abraham is an Assistant Professor in English Department at Joshi Bedekar College, Thane, Mumbai. She has completed her M.Phil. and Doctorate from Madras Christian College, Chennai and her areas of specialisation are Folk Literature and Women’s Studies.

James Bond and Gendered Love Lena Nans Abstract James Bond from the 1960’s through the present day is an iconic man to many people. The interest generated by this character has inspired me to explore the concept of love and gender as they are portrayed in his films. Do the roles of women change in James Bond movies over the fifty years since this character has gained popularity? How prominent is love and its relation to gender in this movie franchise? Some people write these movies off as sexist drivel while others hail them for their sheer entertainment value. However, these films and others of their ilk are undeniably popular. In this text, I viewed James Bond films within their respective chronological social context. Then I compared them with one another to get a sense of evolution in gender relations as portrayed in movies geared towards the male population. While exploring this topic, I use the work of Judith Butler to analyse how women are presented in these films. There are also various psychological lenses which can be used to view the love and gender question in Bond films. What does love mean to James Bond? What does it mean to the women with whom he interacts? How legitimate is that portrayal to reality? After exploring this topic, I find that these movies present their target audience with canons of sexuality and love. James Bond is supposed to represent the masculine ideal and the women in these films, especially in the earlier phases of this franchise, are more superficial. As time progresses, women have more flushed out characters. This exploration shows how films have two primary roles in society. First, they perpetuate a status quo. Second, when the same theme is presented over time, reflects how society has changed. Key Words: James Bond, love, gender, Judith Butler, performative. ***** 1. Introduction Many people, upon hearing love and James Bond uttered in the same sentence will think that it is oxymoronic to compare the two concepts. In fact, most would view such films as completely chauvinistic and unflattering to women. This chapter is meant to explore that concept and to state that these notions, though well founded on many levels, are not always the case. In fact, over the fifty years that Bond films have been a part of popular culture, movie-going audiences have evolved, and thus, films have evolved with them. We now have higher demands for the characters we love. Technology, politics, and competition for viewership have caused filmmakers to mature with their audience. James Bond films are no exception. They are not only popular because they present us with the same spy in

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__________________________________________________________________ glamorous, action sequences, but they also change with demands as people seek more character development and meaning. 2. Gender Relations in James Bond Films When the Bond film series first made its debut in the 1960’s, gender roles were becoming more contested. Popular culture was still portraying women within their designated domestic sphere, while men held their place in the public sphere. At the very least, Bond Movies began showing women in a more independent light. Aside from the physical roles of men and women, different genders were prescribed different mental characteristics. Men were said to be more professional, strong, and calculative while women were attributed with qualities like uncontrollable emotions and heightened maternal instincts. These notions combined with the pre-conceived gender roles in society meant that women were enculturated to be more submissive and physically attractive to appeal to men. These roles and characteristics were said to occur naturally within the respective sexes. Most people took it for granted that such things are socialised or practiced. The James Bond series in many respects upheld these gender roles to attract the typical hetero-normative male audience. As the decades progressed however, we do see more dynamic female characters that can perform tasks which were more traditionally men’s roles. Women in later movies were even shown to have more roles that needed physical strength and combat knowledge. The character M is just one example of shifting gender interactions as movies eventually changed that character from male to femalecalling forth an inter-gender power dynamic since M’s powerful character demands respect and loyalty. 3. Judith Butler’s Gender Performative Research and James Bond I chose to study Bond films for this project because I thought they conveyed a type of male fantasy. They were picturesque in their portrayal of masculinity - to the point of absurdity. They also show what men idolise in women as well. Because many of these films are so formulaic, James Bond provides viewers with a means to analyse various female characters in similar settings. Women in these films were types of gender representatives for their decades. This way, their common characteristics could be said to influence not only how men saw women, but also how women believe they themselves should act. Bond films are an example of how film can be a means to socialise people both overtly and unconsciously. Judith Butler’s work was summed up by Gill Jaggar when she said ‘… far from being an internal property of a pre-existing subject … gender is rather tenuously constituted in time through this “stylised repetition of acts.”’ 1 Acts within their respective decades are repeated socially, idealised, and then films like this series will glorify them and exaggerate a few aspects of gender relations. Perfomative

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__________________________________________________________________ gender roles can in part be exemplified in the costumes that people wear in films. In the film, Moonraker (1979), Corinne Dufour as a helicopter pilot and employee of Drax, is wearing a revealing outfit that consists of a low-cut shirt and very short shorts. A member of the audience seeing a person in this kind of sexy costume while working as a pilot is almost cartoonish. One does not take her character seriously despite the unique quality of her role. In the earlier decades of Bond films, women wore more fetishised or flamboyant clothing; whereas now, they have more practical clothing conducive to their occupations. This all contributes to the visual style or aesthetic of the performative that Judith Butler proposes in her theories. 4. Cannons of Sexuality and Love in James Bond Analysing relationships pertaining to love in these films, we have an extensive presentation of an ideal, masculine male, James Bond. He is the independent, mysterious, clever, resourceful, and witty man that easily gets whatever woman he desires. Even as different actors, directors, and writers portray him with slight differences over many decades, James Bond maintains these characteristics throughout the series. He takes on all odds, jumping onto planes and helicopters midflight, disarming bombs with only seconds to spare, and singlehandedly fighting off many armed men. Though Bond stays the same, female leads vary greatly throughout the films. James Bond films are accused of portraying women in three unflattering ways. Many Bond films portray women as: brainless, helpless, and inept at their field work. However, one does see these undesirable qualities decrease significantly over the years as this series matured with the sexual liberation of women and with other civil rights movements. 5. Brainless but Beautiful In some Bond films, the lead female roles have no substance. Characters in these parts would have minimal development and they would not make any contributions to the plot. For instance, the first film, Dr. No (1962), had a lead female character, Honey Ryder, who fits this accusation. Bond finds her wandering around an island looking for sea shells. Though we as an audience are supposed to assume that there is more to her than meets the eye based on the dagger she carries; she has a minor backstory and she does not make any major contributions to James Bond’s battle with Dr. No. One could pick any female character from any of the films produced after 1995 and this would not be the case to such a great extent. As in The World Is Not Enough (1999), one character, Elektra King is explored at great length and proves to be a dynamic person who changes as the plot unfolds. Initially, she is the young, beautiful, and naïve daughter of a rich oil baron. But, we later find out that she is

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__________________________________________________________________ not as naïve as she seems. At the end of this movie, James Bond has to make the difficult choice of killing her to prevent a nuclear attack. 6. Inept The second reason why female roles in these films are so criticised is because many of the female leads are visibly incompetent in the field. Some of the characters that stand out as the most inept are Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love (1963), Tiffany Case from Diamonds Are Forever (1971), and Holly Goodhead from Moonraker (1979). One character, Mary Goodnight, is especially incompetent as an MI6 agent in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Once obtaining an advanced, technological power cell, she gets kidnapped. To make matters worse, when Bond goes to rescue her and the item, she (like Honey Ryder) wanders around the island of her captor in a bikini. Additionally, she almost kills Bond accidentally and unintentionally destroys the entire island by disrupting the coolant temperature of power generators resulting in an explosion. When compared to Wai Lin, Goodnight is very inexperienced and unintelligent. Wai Lin is one of the main female characters from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). She was an agent in People’s External Security Force of China who was clever, graceful, and resourceful. A very skilled martial artist and convincing undercover operative, she was on par with Bond’s skill; and, she was an integral part to his success at the end of this film. Jinx from Die Another Day (2002), (a film shot just five years after Tomorrow Never Dies) was also a woman portrayed as a competent field operative. Even the writers of this film tried to innovate her character by making her story less dependent on Bond. With Jinx, [the] Bond girl in Die Another Day, [they] thought, what would happen if Bond walked into another movie? And [they] applied this to Jinx … . She is someone who lives in the shadow of death, she takes her pleasure where she finds it, she has no regrets. She is very much like Bond in that respect. So, it’s a meeting of equals. 2 This provides a stark contrast to many of the women in films before this time. Though they all might seem independent and strong to some degree, more recent female characters seem to have a class all their own. 7. Helpless Helplessness can be closely related to ineptitude. One more stereotype to consider of female roles in Bond films (as in many action adventures) is the helplessness of women. This quality is exemplified in the impotence of many

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__________________________________________________________________ women in earlier films to aid James Bond as he fights off many men. They often need his help as they face life or death situations. Solitaire in Live and Let Die (1973) is an example of helplessness because she is controlled by Mr. Big so significantly that she often fears going against him. This fear makes her reluctant to stand up for herself when her life is in danger. 8. Love and Bond Certainly, James Bond has had many relationships over the course of the movie series which have nothing to do with emotional love. He does demonstrate caring qualities for many women he encounters, but there are two specific times when his character falls in love. Of the twenty-two films in this series which have debuted, he has fallen for La Contessa Teresa Di Vincenzo in Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) and for Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006). These two women stand apart from other bond girls in many ways. They also can be distinguished from each other since both characters are from movies of different decades. Teresa Di Vincenzo In the opening sequence of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Teresa Di Vincenzo is saved by James Bond as she attempts to escape from mysterious, antagonistic men. Her character stands out from other preceding Bond girls because she eventually displays courage and competence when she saves Bond during a chase in the Swiss Alps. True, her character does have helpless moments. And the fact that her father suggests that she needs a man, ‘to dominate her’ keeps up with the chauvinistic aesthetic of most previous Bond films. The revelation of a father figure discussing the rearing of his daughter with Bond, affirms Butler’s sociali aspect of gender performity. A father who does not think his daughter acts in a desirable way resorts to using other men to socially condition her later in life. However, it is not the demands of her father which make Bond fall for her. It is her courage and independence. Vesper In the recent movie, Casino Royale, Bond’s character falls in love with a woman, Vesper Lynd who accompanies him to a high-stakes poker match as a banker whose company supplies the cost of Bond’s participation. She is a character that has to be unique because, ‘[Vesper’s] relationship with Bond in this film defines Bond’s relationships with women in the future.’ 3 Since this movie acts as a prequel for all the other James Bond movies, it sets a new trajectory for the intergender relations between Bond and other women. She can be viewed as similar to previous Bond women because she breaks down emotionally after the sight of violence demonstrating a need for Bond. She is also kidnapped and Bond attempts to save her. However, Casino Royale provides a

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__________________________________________________________________ twist to this usual sequence of events as she sacrifices herself twice so that James Bond might go free. Unlike other women in earlier films, she fully understands what is going on around her. She is able to manipulate people for the sake of ultimately saving Bond’s life. Her character is not as one dimensional as previous women in this series. Vesper chooses death in the end to protect James Bond and MI6 from the evil organi, SPECTRE. In Caino Royale, and in Quantum of Solace, James Bond visibly battles with feelings of betrayal and love for her. She has affected him so much that his struggle to avenge her death carries over into the latter film. And though he would act as though women do not mean anything to him, the audience can plainly see that Bond does foster an attachment to the women with whom he deals. 9. Love and Bond Girls It would seem as though James Bond is less affected by women as they are by him. He might not fall in love with all the women he takes to bed, but they are certainly enamored by him. If they do not outright say they love him as one woman, Lupe did in License to Kill (1989), they are certainly quite affected by him enough to rethink their entire outlook on their situation. Many of the misled women in James Bond films will rethink their position after he helps them see the error of their ways. Even if it means betraying their employer or potentially betraying their country, many women will do this. Tatiana Romanova in From Russia with Love as a Russian special agent went against her orders before she even knew she was working for SPECTER. 10. Previous Generations and the New James Bond Comparing the beginning of the series to the recent, newer generation of Bond is quite difficult as they are so different. Initially, I wanted to look at all of the movies as time progressed. I tried to pay careful attention to slight changes in the roles of women and love in Bond films. There is no concrete time I can give where all the female characters make a distinctive switch. In the first few films (the ones from 1962 to 2002), women are portrayed in a similar, simplistic fashion. Movies after that have some complex characters, but among those are women who maintain the less desired traits of characters from the past. The most notable shift in the series is the new direction of Daniel Craig’s portrayal. Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace both have plots where women make major contributions to the progression of the story, the main women in here have their own, strong character arcs that Bond gets involved in, and both of the women in these films take the initiative to fulfill their own agenda. As simplistic as it seems, if one counts the numbers of sexually consummated relationships in these latest films, James Bond only has sexual relations with one woman per film. Sure there still exists some flirtation and kissing, but based on the

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__________________________________________________________________ screenplays and the character’s performances, relationships with women have become less campy and more involved. Another interesting shift in the gender performances in James Bond films is the turn of the gaze from the ideal of the female body to one of the male body. ‘Casino Royale … refocus[es] the gaze onto the body of Bond: it is not merely trim and handsome; it is ripped, it is desirable, and it gets comparable screen time to the Bond girl’s bodies.’ 4 Many people highlight a scene where James Bond is emerging from the water on the beach, ironically much like Honey Ryder from the first movie, Dr. No. On a visual level, the male physique appears to be as important as a female one. As a final illustration, the character Camille Montes in Quantum of Solace (2008), is also a unique, strong and competent character. She is fueled by her desire to avenge the murder of her father and the rapings of her mother and sister. Her near success with this act towards the beginning of the film is actually blundered by James Bond’s act of saving her rather than any ineptitude on her part. Uniquely, the relationship between her and Bond is never fully requited or consummated. Love in Bond films is not such a highlighted theme. However, its subtle occurrences throughout the series makes Bond more humanistic and vulnerable. Without love, without the caring he shows for other women, his character would be too perfect for his audience to relate to him. So, based on the starting point of the series, following the development of various portrayals of Bond and intra-gender relationships, female characters are becoming stronger and beginning to stand more on par with male characters in James Bond films. Heterosexual relationships and love in these films are becoming more dynamic as well. We as an audience are seeing how James Bond is becoming more invested in the meaningful relationships he has in each film. With regards to Butler’s gender performative research, Bond films contribute to the sociali of genders. They take key aspects of popular culture and repeat them back to the audience which then incorporates these movies into its sociali process. So, film evolves with viewers and it constantly shifts with the changing events in the world. A medium such as this series is used to socialise people with love, seduction, and luxury. These qualities all change with the times and the cycle of sociali is an ongoing process where people interact with and alter this series as time progresses.

Notes 1

Jagger, Gill, Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Perfomative (London: Routledge, 2008), 188.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2

Laurent Bouzereau, Lee Pfeiffer and Dave Worrall, The Art of Bond: From Storyboard to Screen: The Creative Process behind the James Bond Phenomenon (New York: Abrams, 2006), 206. 3 Bouzereau, The Art of Bond, 108. 4 Christoph Lindner, The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 103.

Bibliography Black, Jeremy. The Politics of James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2001. Bouzereau, Laurent, Lee Pfeiffer, and Dave Worrall. The Art of Bond: From Storyboard to Screen: The Creative Process behind the James Bond Phenomenon. New York: Abrams, 2006. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjugation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Chapman, James. Licence [sic] to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Comentale, Edward P., Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman. Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Jagger, Gill. Judith Butler: Sexual Politics, Social Change and the Power of the Perfomative. London: Routledge 2008. Lindner, Christoph. The James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. 2009. Smith, Jim, and Stephen Lavington. Bond Films. London: Virgin Books. 2002.

Filmography A View to a Kill. Directed by John Glen. Perf. Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, and Tanya Roberts. London: Eon Productions, 1985.

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__________________________________________________________________ Casino Royale. Produced by Charles K. Feldman. Screenplay by Wolf Mankowitz, John Law, Michael Sayers. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 1967. Diamonds Are Forever. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Perf. Sean Connery, Jill St. John, and Charles Gray. London: Eon Productions, 1971. Die Another Day. Directed by Lee Tamahori. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, and Rosamund Pike. London: Eon Productions, 2002. Dr. No. Directed by Terence Young. Perf. Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, and Bernard Lee. London: Eon Productions, 1962. For Your Eyes Only. Directed by John Glen. Perf. Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, and Topol. London: Eon Productions, 1981. From Russia with Love. Directed by Terence Young. Perf. Sean Connery, Pedro Armendariz, Lotte Lenya, and Ian Fleming. Culver City, CA: MGM/UA Home Video, 1992. Goldeneye. Directed by Martin Campbell. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Sean Bean, and Izabella Scorupco. London: Eon Productions, 1995. Goldfinger. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Perf. Sean Connery, Gert Fröbe, and Honor Blackman. London: Eon Productions, 1964. License to Kill. Directed by John Glen. Perf. Timothy Dalton, Robert Davi, and Carey Lowell. London: Eon Productions, 1989. Live and Let Die. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Perf. Roger Moore, Yaphet Kotto, and Jane Seymour. London: Eon Productions, 1973. Moonraker. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Roger Moore, Lois Chiles, and Michael Lonsdale. London: Eon Productions, 1979. Octopussy. Directed by John Glen. Perf. Roger Moore, Maud Adams, and Louis Jourdan. London: Eon Productions, 1983. On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Sean Connery, Sean, and Ian Fleming. Culver City, CA: MGM/UA Home Video, 1992.

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__________________________________________________________________ Quantum of Solace. Directed by Mark Foster. Perf. Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, and Mathieu Amalric. London: Eon Productions, 2008. The Living Daylights. Directed by John Glen. Perf. Timothy Dalton, Maryam d’Abo, and Jeroen Krabbé. London: Eon Productions, 1987. The Man with the Golden Gun. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Perf. Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, and Britt Ekland. London: Eon Productions, 1974. The Spy Who Loved Me. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Roger Moore, Barbara Bach, and Curd Jürgens. London: Eon Productions, 1977. The World Is Not Enough. Directed by Michael Apted. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, and Robert Carlyle. London: Eon Productions, 1999. Thunderball. Directed by Terence Young. Perf. Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, and Adolfo Celi. London: Eon Productions, 1965. Tomorrow Never Dies. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode. Perf. Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, and Michelle Yeoh. London: Eon Productions, 1997. You Only Live Twice. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Perf. Sean Connery, Akiko Wakabayashi, and Mie Hama. London: Eon Productions, 1967. Lena Nans is a graduate student at San Diego State University in the Master of Liberal Arts and Sciences program. Though her particular interests are in anthropology and fine art, she finds extreme value in using interdisciplinary methods while conducting research in cultural studies.

‘Apoyá en el Quicio de la Mancebía’: 1 Homosexuality and Prostitution during Franco’s Regime Raquel (Lucas) Platero Abstract During Franco’s long dictatorship (1939-1975) three key institutions strongly controlled Spanish people: the State, the Catholic Church and scientific discipline of medicine. This triangle often showed that what constituted a crime was also a sin and an illness. Homosexuality and prostitution were examples of what an outlaw, a sinner and an ill person were; and were punished using this triple alliance, in which the State took a relevant role classifying and disciplining subjects considered as a ‘social danger’ to society. The aim was to prevent future crimes before they happened; they were potential delinquents, despite the crimes being victimless, they became victims themselves. Using the analysis of both legislation and coplas (popular songs) I argue that subjects had more space for agency that we once had thought; using the strategic disclosure of their identities and practices, acknowledging that the core element of what constituted a crime was the ‘public scandal,’ not the crime or sin itself. Also, subjects did not follow and obey the normative models of ‘decency’ in a straight forward way, but reworked cultural manifestations, such as the copla, in which even good girls and boys could dream of the passion that only outlaws could portray in the social imaginary. Those ‘social dangerous’ subjects loved and were loved, even becoming symbols of the ideal love in popular products such as copla songs. Key Words: Spain, dictatorship, gender, prostitution, homosexuality, copla, Miguel de Molina, Conchita Piquer. ***** Se dice / It is said Se dice si vas sola / It is said that if you drift alone, qué desgraciada eres / You are miserable. Se dice qué coqueta, / It is said that you are a flirt, si con un hombre vas. / if you are with a man. Si ves a dos mujeres, / If you see two women, también se dice que / it is also said that el mundo está al revés. / the world is upside down. La cosa es murmurar. / It is all about rumours. Eres muy buena si / You are skilled if con arte, sabes fingir. / with ease, you can play the part. Eres muy mala si / You are inept if no sabes disimular / you do not know how to perform,

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__________________________________________________________________ y con la verdad, pretendes vivir. / and intend to live truthfully. Amar, yo quiero amar con libertad / Love, I want to love freely porque nací mujer, para querer / because I was born a woman, to love y hacer mi santa voluntad. / and do as I will. Amar, sin escuchar el que dirán / Love, without listening to what they will say, pues todo es hablar / talking is everything, hablar, por no callar. / talking, to fill the silence. Song interpreted by: Concha Piquer Composed by: Caro, Landeyra and Novacasa. In 1933, during Spain’s 2nd Republic, the well-known artist Conchita Piquer sang this copla (a type of popular song): Se dice (It is said) of which we show a fragment, which talked about women’s love and, especially, the social control exercised over them. This cheerful copla is a testimony to the everyday public recognition of the existence of relationships between women. It challenges those who claim the absence, invisibility and impossibility of these relationships at that time in history. But, above all, it suggests the existence of possibilities for agency and choice for women within a specific social framework. The art of pretending was a quality every woman needed to possess in order to protect her reputation. But after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), pretending was an ability also men had to make use of, as they had to appear to be the subjects demanded by the dictatorship’s national-catholic values. There were many cases in which a more ‘decent’ and adequate past had to be invented in order to abide by the dictatorship’s rules. María Rosón 2 provides an example of identity change, of leaving behind the old self and reinventing oneself. She states that some people even changed their name, which was something quite common, in order to avoid repression. Passing for somebody you were not was not only a strategy present in society, but also in films produced at the time. The identity changes/games included social class, race (gypsies who chose to become ‘non-gypsy’ and make their gypsy past disappear 3 ) and gender, with many instances of cross-dressing. For lesbians and homosexuals the pretending process was double. First of all, they had to hide their desire and sometimes their camp mannerisms or female masculinity, although, as the copla shows, their existence was acknowledged. Secondly, they had to hide who they were before the war, since the republicans were extremely repressed during and especially after the war. Some specific examples of passing strategies were the ‘false photographs’ used to hide a civil marriage and make it into a catholic one, or to erase those who could not publicly be part of their past. Faced by the threat of punishment of anything that could raise ‘public scandal’ - which is an idea that becomes part of the legislation - people

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__________________________________________________________________ responded through the art of pretending and appearing to be what was demanded of them. During the long francoist period (1939-1975) a legal and social framework was imposed which exercised control over people very efficiently through several institutions, such as the Catholic Church, which was present in most areas of society including education, healthcare, charity, prison surveillance, etc. More specifically, it exercised individualised control through rituals, such as confession or compulsory mass attendance. Psychiatry played a vital role, through the pathologisation of all behaviours deemed to deviate from national-catholic values, ranging from a search for the ‘red’ gene of the defeated during the war to justifying the inferiority of women and those ‘who practiced homosexualism.’ In fact, the new scientific discourses turned prostitution into pathology, presenting prostitutes as degenerates, product of an organic problem, mentally ill, associated with delinquency, drug abuse and diseases, as opposed to the idea of them as sinners or a immoral. 4 The third institution that was fundamental to repression was legislation. The Laws Against Slackers and Delinquents (1932, 1954) and Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation (1970) punished anything that was considered ‘socially dangerous,’ which included female prostitution and homosexuality. The latter was mainly understood to be male homosexuality, but not exclusively. Among that stringent control where sin was illness and also a crime, what chance did a person have to love and be loved? Especially when that person’s sexual orientation diverged from the heterosexist norm, when her or his gender identity broke the traditional roles, or when his or her morality was at the margins of decency, normality and legality? Going back to the social context we see that in the 1950s there was a rise of a ‘moral and sexual panic,’ which was manifested in the promotion of specific legislation punishing homosexuality 5 (1954), through the reform of the 1933 Law Against Slackers and Delinquents, penalising a latent predelinquent state and aiming to prevent crime. We know that over the years following the Spanish Civil War and the post-war period Franco’s regime did not pay homosexuality much heed, as it was focused on dealing with the aftermath of the war and handed over moral regulation of behaviour to the Catholic Church. 6 The Penal Code, after its 1944 reform, considered ‘homosexual acts’ to be a crime when they went beyond the private and had social repercussions. This sexual panic also focused on punishing prostitution 7 (1956), through an order in council which abolished Tolerance Centres and other measures addressing prostitution. Falangist 8 propaganda represented prostitutes as ‘the nemesis of the honest woman,’ where women embodied the nation: the 2nd Republic was the prostitute and the virtuous woman was embodied by Franco’s dictatorship. 9 The double standard morality considered prostitution as a necessary evil, allowing prostitution but demonising the prostitute. 10 It was common for lower class women to be imprisoned on and off accused of prostitution. The wide-used term

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__________________________________________________________________ quincenaria was coined to refer to women having been sentenced to 15 days of prison for prostitution. 11 Until 1956, clandestine street prostitution was persecuted, whereas brothel prostitution was legal. The 1956 Law required a national list of brothels and Tolerance Houses to be drawn up. Prostitution was deemed ‘illegal trafficking,’ also penalised as public scandal under art. 431 of the 1944 Penal Code. Corruption of minors was also penalised under art. 438. As prostitution had ceased to legally exist, health cards/books and checks were abolished. The Spanish Promorality League, which had been obscure up to then, started a crusade to ‘dignify women’ 12 in April 1956. And again, the idea of ‘public scandal’ was key to the repression underway. As Enrique Jiménez Asenjo stated in 1956 regarding the prohibition of prostitution, ‘[w]hile furtive exchanges might be ignored, any public display must be repressed.’ 13 Until the 50s legislation did not penalise behaviours per se but tried to defend society from the individual behaviours it considered dangerous. It was causing scandal to a third party and not the act itself which was a crime. Therefore the legislation punishing ‘victimless crimes’ aimed to eradicate the possibility of scandal. 14 Prostitution and homosexuality, the threat of being called a ‘whore’ (puta) or a ‘fag’ (sarasa) appeared to be the key limits of francoist morality. However, this surveillance was more centred on the working class, whereas the higher classes had other options. 15 The social conception of the world during this period was binary, organised in good and bad, righteous and sinners, francoists 16 and reds, as well as men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals. Heads of family and mothers were the pillars of society - on the other side were delinquents, whores and the socially dangerous. This occurred after special circumstances during the Spanish Civil War, where segregated spaces were created and separate gender roles were prescribed. There were also special allowances when men were in short supply, which enabled women to enter spaces, which were traditionally considered masculine. The idea of camaraderie in the trenches was extolled and used as representing the basis of all relationship between men. A wide variety of segregated spaces for men and boys were promoted: schools, social and sports clubs, barracks, seminaries. 17 The language of fascism prevailing in them promoted a masculinity set as the opposite of the stereotype of the homosexual, while maintaining an intense homoeroticism. 18 There was also great permissiveness regarding the consumption of prostitution, which was of easy access due to the prevailing poverty and the high number of brothels. Around the 1950s there was also a transition from this fascist masculinity to a paternalist model, where men now became responsible for the family’s upkeep, the ‘breadwinner.’ 19 There was a strong surveillance of men’s behaviours, which was apparent in all forms of cultural expression, including film, and also reached the

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__________________________________________________________________ realm of legislation. A paranoid-style control emerged, leading to the creation of specific legislation against homosexuality and prostitution - which is still in place in the case of prostitution. The regime was especially worried at the time about those it considered ‘socially dangerous’ - vagrants, slackers, and those that presented a potential evil or whose behaviour in fact transgressed fundamental moral norms, or those of life and property. Music, and especially the copla, during francoism reflected the strong gender division in place. The copla’s form resembles that of a poem, including rhyme. Its language is colloquial and very direct, using double meanings, rendering it full of eroticism and irony. The coplas were rewritten during the dictatorship and came to be sung exclusively by women. Men had to sing other genres or they ran the risk of being considered effeminate and therefore homosexual. During the dictatorship the copla represented the recuperation of the national identity. Ojos Verdes, written by Rafael de León, Manuel Quiroga and Salvador Valverde was a good example. Let us look at a fragment: Ojos Verdes / Green Eyes 20 Apoyá en el quicio de la mancebía / Leaning on the doorjamb of the bawdyhouse miraba encenderse la noche de mayo / I looked at how the May night lit up Pasaban los hombres y yo sonreía / Men passed by and I smiled hasta que a mi puerta paraste el caballo / until you stopped your horse at my doorstep Serrana, ¿me das candela?/ Lass, do you have a light? y yo te dije: gaché / And I told you ‘Chap’ Ven y tómala en mis labios / Come and get it from my lips que yo fuego te daré / That I will light you up. Dejaste el caballo / You left the horse y lumbre te dí / and I lit you y fueron dos verdes luceros / and two green May stars were de mayo tus ojos pa' mí / your eyes for me. This was a very well-known song from the 40s onwards, which was a ‘storm’ for the francoist regime, which eventually decided to reappropriate it, as well as and copla in general, turning it into a francoist symbol. There are up to seven versions of Ojos Verdes, the main difference being between the censored version and the rest. Censoring did not, however, succeed in erasing its sensual and erotic content. The strategy was based on changing one of the initial verses: Uncensored version: Apoyá en el quicio de la mancebía / Leaning on the doorjamb of

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__________________________________________________________________ the bawdyhouse. Censored version: Apoyá en la puerta de mi casa un día / Leaning on the doorjamb of my house one day. There was also a difference depending on whether the singer was a man or a woman. When Conchita Piquer sang it, Ojos Verdes was the story of a prostitute who foregoes payment. When interpreted by Miguel de Molina it was about homosexual love. The different embodiment of the song posed a challenge to the dictatorship. Conchita Piquer preferred not to change the lyrics and pay the fine. Molina suffered several attacks for being ‘a red and a fag,’ which eventually led him to exile in 1942. We also have to take the audience into account, those who listened to the song and had the agency to reinterpret it, appropriating the music the dictatorship had rewritten. Let us now go back to our original question: what chance did people at the margins of gender, sexuality and national-catholic norms have to love and be loved? We have commonly thought that there was no chance for ‘loose women’ and ‘queers,’ who exemplified those marked by sin, disease and criminality. When looking close we see that laws have effects on real people, they frame their feelings and the possibilities allowed to them on the margins. We think of the asylum, prison and hell as their destiny - ‘tattooed on the skin,’ as the copla song Tatuaje goes. However, the very existence of punishment renders their identities and feelings intelligible. Stigma provides a space of recognition, even if it is a negative one. The evidence of the existence of these outlaws that coplas provide showed us people’s trangressions, and how they often chose passing as a survival strategy. Those who, due to their social class or position had other options could choose to show their options regarding their love lives or not and opt to be selectively exposed to the socially known punishments. The working class could use passing strategies, linked to pretending, trying not to create ‘public scandal,’ which truly constituted a crime. Nonetheless, it could be argued that not everyone was able to choose where to show and present oneself. The hypervisibility of female masculinity, 21 or effeminate men 22 and transvestites implied that passing was not always possible and they were threatened in the course of their daily lives, as we know, by the cruel punishment determined by the law, psychiatric treatment and by the actions of the Catholic Church. They could also rewrite the francoist songs to sing or to identify with whichever character they chose, or to dance at home. For the majority, subject to the rules of decency, the passion and love in their everyday songs resided in the lives of those who were at the margins. It was, paradoxically, those lives that embodied love. Therefore, a good decent girl could imagine she was a prostitute or

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__________________________________________________________________ a handsome homosexual man who told his green-eyed lover ‘Estás cumplío, no me tienes que dar ná.’ (‘You’ve given your share, you owe me nothing’) while seeing him ride off.

Notes 1

‘Leaning on the doorjamb of the bawdyhouse,’ first line of the copla song Ojos Verdes. 2 María Rosón, ‘Realidad, Hiperrealidad y Memoria: La Construcción Visual de Identidades de Género en el Primer Franquismo a Través de los Medios (19391953)’ (PhD diss. Project, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2011). 3 David Berná, ‘Un Golpe de Estado y 2 Billetes de Autobús. Mujeres, Gitanas y Lesbianas en la Dictadura Franquista’, in Memoria y Sexualidad: Mujeres bajo el Franquismo, ed. Raquel Osborne (Madrid: Fundamentos, 2012, forthcoming). 4 Aurora G. Morcillo, The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and Francoist Body Politic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 95. 5 A note on the control of homosexuality in Spain that we will find in a Napoleonic style Penal Code reformed by Primo de Rivera (1928), who penalised homosexuality because he considered it a crime against honesty as well as a public scandal. During the 2nd Republic, the Penal Code was reformed again and Primo de Rivera’s reference was removed. Nevertheless, a Law for Slackers and Delinquents (1933) was approved. Homosexuality was added to this law during Francoism (1954). Homosexuals were explicitly considered a ‘danger’ to society; the state would be in charge of imprisoning and controlling ‘dangerous’ individuals, which included ‘homosexuals, pimps and scoundrels.’ This law was followed by the 1970 Law of Dangerousness and Social Rehabilitation (Ley de Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social), modified several times in its original draft bill form. In this text, homosexuals were also regarded as ‘dangerous’ individuals, and the name ‘homosexuals’ is replaced by ‘those people who carry out homosexual acts,’ for whom measures of surveillance and control were designed. See: Nicolás Pérez Canovas, Homosexualidad, Homosexuales y Uniones Homosexuales en el Derecho Español (Granada: Comares, 1996), 20; Juan V. Aliaga and José M. Cortés, Identidad y Diferencia (EGALES: Barcelona, 1997), 29. 6 Francisco J. Bastida Freijedo, Jueces y Franquismo. El Pensamiento Político del Tribunal Supremo en la Dictadura (Barcelona: Ariel, 1986), 185. 7 A note on the control of prostitution in Spain during the Francoist regime: right after the end of the Spanish Civil War a number of laws addressing ‘sexual indecency’ were enacted. This included criminalising abortion (1941), adultery, infanticide, abandonment of the conjugal home and family obligations (1942), and also included a reform of the Penal Code in 1944. Later on, on March 3rd 1956, prostitution was decreed illegal, and the Foundation for the Protection of Women

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__________________________________________________________________ (Patronato de la Protección de la Mujer) was the institution in charged of reeducating women freed from brothels; although instead of returning to their home towns or entering the Foundation for their re-education, most women chose clandestine prostitution. See: Morcillo, Seduction of Modern Spain, 92 and 125. 8 Falange was a right wing party with fascist ideology that emerged during the 2nd Republic. Francisco Franco, dictator that ruled Spain during 1939-1975, supported the Falange ideology, close to the nazi and fascist ideologies in Germany and Italy. 9 Morcillo, Seduction of Modern Spain, 90. 10 Ibid., 92. 11 Raquel Osborne, ‘“Entonces Ellas se Convertían en Rojas”: Desencuentros y Amistades Entre Prostitutas y Rojas en las Cárceles Franquistas’, Mora. Revista del Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género15, No. 2 (2009), 0-0. 12 Jean Louis Guereña, La Prostitución en la España Contemporánea (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003), 436-440. 13 Enrique Jimenez Asenjo, Abolicionismo y Prostitución. Justificación y Defensa del Decreto-Ley de 3 de Marzo de 1956 (Madrid: Instituto Editorial Reus, 1963), 240. Cited in Morcillo, Seduction of Modern Spain, 125. 14 Javier Ugarte Pérez, Una Discriminación Universal. La Homosexualidad Bajo el Franquismo y la Transición (Madrid: EGALES, 2008), 25-30. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 During the Spanish Civil War a great deal of the national troops, who were of middle or lower class origin, still considered it normal for a man to have intercourse with another man as long as it was within men’s culturally assigned gender roles. It was thus accepted as long as it was a mere sexual encounter between a manly man and an effeminate one. Franco said ‘There were no fags in the armies that followed the orders of the national rising.’ However, this was but an illusion in the dictator’s mind, who was at several times in the course of his life referred to as ‘Miss Canary Islands 1936’ or ‘Fat-assed Paca’ (Paca is the feminine nickname for Francisco). See Fernando Olmeda, El Látigo y la Pluma: Homosexuales en la España de Franco, 2nd edition (Madrid: Oberón, 2004), 53. 17 Mary Vincent, ‘La Reafirmación de la Masculinidad en la Cruzada Franquista’, Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 135, No. 28 (2006): 139. 18 On homoeroticism in the army and the link to Spanish colonial rule in Morocco see: Susana Martín-Marquez, Disorientations Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 19 María Carmen Muñoz Ruiz, ‘Género, Masculinidad y Nuevo Movimiento Obrero bajo el Franquismo’, in Del Hogar a la Huelga. Trabajo, Género y Movimiento Obrero durante el Franquismo, ed. J. Babiano (Madrid: La Catarata, 2007), 245-285. 20 Translated in Morcillo, Seduction of Modern Spain, 290.

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Raquel (L.) Platero, ‘A Slacker and Delinquent in Basketball Shoes’, in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, eds. Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2010), 38-46. 22 For additional information on this issue, see for instance Olmeda, El Látigo y la Pluma and Ugarte, Una Discriminación Universal.

Bibliography Aliaga, Juan V., and José M. Cortés. Identidad y Diferencia. EGALES: Barcelona, 1997. Bastida Freijedo, Francisco J. Jueces y Franquismo. El Pensamiento Político del Tribunal Supremo en la Dictadura. Barcelona: Ariel, 1986. Berná, David. ‘Un Golpe de Estado y 2 Billetes de Autobús. Mujeres, Gitanas y Lesbianas en la Dictadura Franquista’. In Memoria y Sexualidad: Mujeres Bajo el Franquismo, edited by Raquel Osborne. Madrid: Fundamentos, 2012, forthcoming. Guereña, Jean Louis. La Prostitución en la España Contemporánea. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2003. Morcillo, Aurora G. The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and Francoist Body Politic. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010. Martín-Marquez, Susana. Disorientations Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Muñoz Ruiz, María Carmen. ‘Género, Masculinidad y Nuevo Movimiento Obrero Bajo el Franquismo’. In Del Hogar a la Huelga. Trabajo, Género y Movimiento Obrero durante el Franquismo, edited by José Babiano, 245–285. Madrid: La Catarata, 2007. Olmeda, Fernando. El Látigo y la Pluma: Homosexuales en la España de Franco. 2nd Edition. Madrid: Oberón, 2004. Osborne, Raquel. ‘“Entonces Ellas se Convertían en Rojas’: Desencuentros y Amistades Entre Prostitutas y Rojas en las Cárceles Franquistas’. Mora, Revista del Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género 15, No. 2 (2009): 0–0.

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__________________________________________________________________ Pérez, David. ‘La Homosexualidad en la Canción Española’. Ogigia. Revista Electrónica de Estudios Hispánicos 6 (2009): 55–71. Pérez Canovas, Nicolás. Homosexualidad, Homosexuales y Uniones Homosexuales en el Derecho Español. Granada: Comares, 1996. Platero, Raquel (L.). ‘A Slacker and Delinquent in Basketball Shoes’. In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman, 38–46. Berkely, CA: Seal Press, 2010. Rosón, María. ‘Realidad, Hiperrealidad y Memoria: La Construcción Visual de Identidades de Género en el Primer Franquismo a Través de los Medios (19391953)’. PhD diss. Project, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2011. Ugarte Pérez, Javier. Una Discriminación Universal. La Homosexualidad Bajo el Franquismo y la Transición. Madrid: EGALES, 2008. Vincent, Mary. ‘La Reafirmación de la Masculinidad en la Cruzada Franquista’. Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea 135, No. 28 (2006): 135–151. Raquel (Lucas) Platero, Departamento de Sociología III. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain.

Family Photographs: Love and Gender in 1940s Spain María Rosón Abstract This chapter will concentrate on family photographs of the first part of Franco’s dictatorship that have been selected from different archives, both public and private. On the one hand, it was found that the main rituals and rites of passage of the society were based on religion which underlined family unity and its ‘good moments.’ However, on the other hand, this body of images could be considered as a source of empowerment for the real bodies and their representation and consumption. Domestic photography could also be interpreted as a space of freedom and intimacy in which the subjects reinvented themselves and their memory using fantasy and imagination. In this sense, the images are places of feeling, emotions and desires where we could find different constructions of gender and love. Key Words: Family photography, Spain, Franco’s dictatorship, gender, emotion, love. ***** This chapter will focus on one of the most important locations of gender socialisation: family photography. Especially during Franco’s dictatorship, the family was the basic cell of the new society. The economy during the autarky period was fundamentally based on the idea of self-sufficiency and isolation. In this attempt to develop an alternative model to liberal capitalism based on economic nationalism, the family unit played an extraordinary role in sustaining the state. The idea was an organic metaphor for the state: the body of the ‘fatherland’ was formed through a multiple composition of other units, (mini) bodies, families. Of course, the concept was extremely paternalistic and hierarchical, because the dictator was the head of the state, as the father was the head of the family, the breadwinner. Aurora G. Morcillo in her last book The Seduction of Modern Spain. The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic showed the centrality of corporeal metaphors in the Francoist regime’s rhetorical framework. She underlined the use of biological metaphors with women’s bodies in order to speak about the nation and how ‘women’s bodies played a central role in the political imagination, and the control of those bodies was a key to biopower, the regime tried to establish in domestic policies.’ 1 Otherwise, the tremendous power of the Catholic Church found in the idea of the mononuclear family the best way to control society. The state and the church promoted this model, amongst other things, because it was the easiest way to secure the conservative and traditional ideas on sexuality and gender constructions.

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__________________________________________________________________ And, in this attempt, the concept of love was a constant and an important key to indoctrination: love for the family, love for the fatherland, love for God. Traditionally, Spanish cultural products from the first years of Franco’s Regime have been interpreted as cultural texts that reproduced very biased and propagandistic discourses that the dictatorship wanted to disseminate. In the Spanish academy, this was the predominant approach, ignoring very relevant elements, such as, firstly, the pleasures and emotions that the reception of these products shaped in the audiences. Secondly, the audience was not passive, the spectators did not assimilate the products in a straight forward way, but they reworked and re-signified them to their own purposes. Therefore, current approaches (mainly the research projects led by Jo Labanyi in relation to cinema culture 2 ) try to understand these cultural processes not only as forms of imposition or indoctrination by political power: they also focus on the different reworking that audiences could make. During the forties, photography played a very important role in people’s lives, and in the construction of individual and collective identity. We cannot forget its work as a material and emotional object: framed in privileged places of the house, it would be part of the visual memory and narrative in the family album, or sometimes hidden in a drawer. In addition, its nature as a photomechanical imprint is a fundamental key to understanding its status of presence and/or fetish of the identity of the subjects pictured. Its direct connection with the referent, as Roland Barthes suggested in Camera Lucida, partly explains the intense emotions that photographs generate as desire or their potent relationship with death and their capacity to signify life. How should one deal with this corpus of private and domestic images? One of the keys to their study could be to consider them as material, cultural and emotional objects and not only as two dimensional representations. Labanyi proposes to think of emotions as ‘practices,’ considering not what emotions ‘are’ but what they ‘do,’ and understand cultural texts as ‘things to do things: that is, things that have the capacity to affect us.’ 3 For example, in the archive, we often find manipulated photographs and here, we have to take into consideration the importance their material and emotional relevance as a cultural practice: loving dedications, special frames or, alternatively, burning or cutting. The groups and the individuals construct their own shared memory, and in this genesis they intentionally forget, as well as invent. We have to underline the relationship between family and photographs. Photos played an important role in the genesis and the genealogy of groups, being at the same time builder and repository of memory. As Bourdieu 4 explains, the practice of photography is absolutely interwoven with family and its functions. To photograph is a ritual which reproduces rituals, celebrates and fixes the ‘good moments,’ constructing ‘family emblems’ which integrate the group and consolidate their union and their memory. The image’s projection is a tool that

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__________________________________________________________________ helps in the achievement of, and a ‘proof’ of, a family’s unity. There are photos that will not be in the family album, either because they were never taken or because they were eliminated in due course. So, in that way, the family controls the production and transmission of its self-knowledge: expelling and integrating diverse members of the family network through visual documentation. Ordinary or popular photography is not a spontaneous activity, but it is usually dominated by very specific, conventional, and most times implicit, rules. When we take a ‘family’ photo, we respond to dominant mythologies of family life, to conceptions we have inherited, to images we have previously seen, for instance in advertising or in film. These internalised images reflect back at us, deploying a family view that fixes and defines us. Here is where its popular efficacy lies in, based on stereotypical selection of topic and composition. Conventional and predictable poses make them largely interchangeable, shaped by similar conventions and, due to this point, family photographs provoke identification. Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘family looking’ 5 is referring to an inclusive, affiliated look that embraces images of vastly different cultural origins. Following her work, photographs have been seen as cultural objects that support dominant ideologies but which at the same time can be used to resist and contest those ideologies. 6 During the forties, in domestic photography, we have to take into consideration people’s access to technology which was very different depending on their social class. Evolution of the medium was very slow at the beginning of the 20th century, with clear reminiscences of the 19th century portrait in the poses, composition and use of technology; for example the use of the background in studio photography. Also, the influence of pictorial portraits is notable, looking for pyramidal composition. Usually, we find common patterns in the composition through the positioning of family members, which represents the group hierarchy and symbolically, the mental values of their relationship. For instance, the older person surrounded by youth, underlining the caring family so that she or he is the centre of the union. With regard to the composition: frequently, one or some group members were sitting, which facilitated depth of field and dynamism in the articulation of the vertical and horizontal lines with oblique and diagonal lines of the heads and the eyes, ordered into different heights. Gender is a very important key to understand the configuration and a group’s order. If it is a nuclear family, either all members were sitting or, usually, the older men were standing up and women with kids were at a lower level. This disposition expresses in visual terms the prevailing norms: women were in a privileged position as wife and mother but associated with childhood and motherhood, on all occasions holding the baby, if there was any. Frequently, the father was in an erect position, not very integrated into the group, as a protector figure; this underlined his masculinity. While mothers did not seem to have any chance of movement in family photography, kids were different, especially sons and future heirs. The

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__________________________________________________________________ children’s gender is an element which articulates the group, as we see in the symmetry of composition established through their sex. In photos of friends, we also find gender as an element for homogeneity: in postures, objects or clothes (uniform versus mantilla) looking for standardisation. Another topic related with gender and family photography is the significance of women, this does not only have to do with their hegemonic representation as mothers. First of all, mothers have a very important role in the task of collecting, conserving and classifying family photos. Usually they put them in the family album or in significant places in the home. Precisely, at the end of the forties, snapshots began to become popular in Spain in the upper and middle classes, so mothers had access to the technology as photographers, so we could consider that family photography is one of the first visual repertories in which a woman’s gaze was present. Here, is where we can localise the function of photographs as artefacts that could resist and contest dominant ideologies, and we can interpret these resistances in the present. Firstly, we have to take into consideration the photographer’s gaze. The corpus we deal with is particularly interesting because they are not official photographers of the dictatorship but anonymous people who used photos for private matters. Sometimes we can find ‘pieces of reality’ of a devastated post-war country, for instance barefooted children, which could never be found in propagandistic discourse. It is not always an amateur photographer who took the photos. In many cases people went to different kinds of photographic studios: so did the lower classes, who did not have camera; and also the middle and upper classes who wanted a special studio photograph. In some villages, there were no photographic studios, so the itinerant photographer was common. Another way of looking for resistance is thinking of the agency of the photographic model. Here, gender is once more important: usually, in the corpus we deal with, men were photographers and women were models. Following the classic feminist interpretation, for example Mulvey’s, 7 this means their transformation into passive erotic objects for the active male gaze. Kaja Silverman’s 8 interpretation fits closely with my point of view: the models exaggerate, appropriate and denaturalise, through mimic, a repertory of gestures and attitudes to their own purpose, for instance seduction or persuasion. As we can see in these photographic portraits, Spanish female audiences of the forties reworked through their bodies the cinema stars’ influences. Hairstyles, make up, gestures or poses were nearly almost as the ones the stars played in movies and magazines. Women appropriated with agency some parts of cinema culture to their own purposes, and it can be considered as an evidence of empowerment in a dictatorial and sexist society that wanted to control them, as perfect catholic wives and mothers. With that theoretical framework, we could consider the models shown in the images not as passive figures but rather as active ones, as empowered subjects.

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__________________________________________________________________ These gestures or poses were part of these women’s agency; women who were fascinated with movie culture and performed some part of it. I think we should interpret the features of sensuality, seduction, sexy manners or suggestiveness which are present in these images - not as poses of women displayed as objects to the male gaze, but as gestures of audacity to their own pleasure, as part of their own sway. The relationship between the star and the spectator produces identities through the negotiation of public discourses and private narratives. And we do not think only of a one-way movement, not only as copy but as rework. In this case, during the francoism years the identification between the female spectators with the female Hollywood star was very important. Pleasures were not only at the level of fantasy, here pleasures were intertwined with embodiment experiences, for instance fashion trends. On occasions, the wardrobe of a star became fashionable, as the cardigan named ‘rebeca’ after Hitchcok’s film or the ‘gilda’ shoes. Women made their own clothes, as domestic seamstresses, and were able to alter dresses according to the fashion trends that movies created. Also, we have to take into consideration the agency of the receptors, studying the social, cultural and emotional uses of photos, sometimes captured in the material quality of the object. Here love is one of the most important emotions to consider. Photos are often vehicles of love: to represent it, to express it and to remember it. Finally, the reception of this photography today is emotional too; our emotions and the interpretations of the past that we make in the present through affective connections. Photographs as traces of the past reveal that things are not always what they seem. They construct the family mythological story, showing always the ‘good moments,’ the main social rituals, in which everybody seems to be happy and loving to each other. Precisely because of that, photos show its fiction, and leave us space to look for alternative readings, today we can ask: friends or lovers?

Notes 1

Aurora G. Morcillo, The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and Francoist Body Politic (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 263. 2 These research projects are: An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (United Kingdom) between 1999 and 2004, and a second project which has examined the cultural function of film magazines in Spain in the 1940s and 1950s, funded by the British between 2004 and 2007. See Jo Labanyi, ‘Cinema and the Meditation of Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain’ New Readings 8 (2007): 1-24. 3 Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, No. 3 (2010): 225 and 232, respectively.

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Pierre Bourdieu, Un Arte Medio (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2003). Marianne Hirsch, ‘Introduction: Familial Looking’, in The Familial Gaze, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), xiii. 6 Ibid., xiv. 7 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, No. 3 (1975): 6-18. 8 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjetivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 149. 5

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. La Cámara Lúcida. Notas Sobre la Fotografía. Barcelona: Paidós, 1989. Bourdieu, Pierre. Un Arte Medio. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2003. Hirsch, Marianne, ed. The Familial Gaze. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16, No. 3 (1975): 6–18. Labanyi, Jo. ‘Cinema and the Meditation of Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain’. New Readings 8 (2007): 1–24. —––. ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect and Materiality’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, No. 3 (2010): 223–233. Morcillo, Aurora G. The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and Francoist Body Politic. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjetivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. María Rosón is PhD Candidate in the History and Theory of Art Department, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and associate researcher (pre-doctoral programme) in the research group Contemporary Visual Cultural Studies. Her Doctoral Thesis title is Reality, Hyper-Reality and Memory: The Visual Construction of Gender Identities in Franco’s Dictatorship through the Media.

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__________________________________________________________________ Research lines: Spanish visual culture from the Twentieth century, gender constructions through the media and emotional reception of images.

Only Entertainment? Music, Images and the Identity of the Young Survivors of Francoism Noemi de Haro García Abstract The end of the Second World War forced the opening up of Franco’s regime to external influences and its adaptation to Cold War politics. The biopolitics of the regime had to change to fit the new international situation and to protect the dictatorship from negative external influences that might challenge the essence of the Spain of Franco. Spaniards started have contact with different realities from theirs and the younger generation, with no direct experience of the Spanish Civil War, reacted almost immediately. Young people were the main actors in the antifrancoist social movement which started in Spain. At the same time some members of the younger generation were fascinated by pop culture, which played an important role in defining their identity as what was called ye-yé. As part of official information policy, more and more television programs were dedicated to this emerging audience and its interests. These programs were meant to be for entertainment only but, perhaps because of this, some of them were allowed to show social models that deviated from the norm, to a wide audience. The analysis of the TV program Último grito shows how mass media and regulating technologies were involved in the definition of identities that transformed radically the social and emotional structures of Spain in the last years of francoism. 1 Key Words: Gender stereotypes, Spain, Cold War, transition, mass media, pop culture, television, regulatory technology, Último grito. ***** 1. From Autarky to Ye-Yé The forties were years of dictatorship and isolation, during which the dictatorship attempted to purify the country from what was identified as the ‘republican disease,’ eliminating those affected by it, or, if possible, re-educating them in the rules of the Spain of Franco. 2 What later on Foucault would identify as disciplinary technologies of power, were a fundamental element in establishing and maintaining the power of the dictatorship, until Franco’s death. 3 Exile, prosecution, prison, silence and misery were the only possibilities for the defeated and their future in the years that followed the ‘Victoria.’ A victory in what was called a ‘Cruzada’ (crusade) in order to link the regime and its leader with Spain’s glorious past and the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, and the emperor Charles V. 4 The values of the individuals of the ‘Nuevo Estado’ were Catholic and patriarchal; the good Spaniard had to be a producer whose interests were those of his or her country. Austerity, self-control, patience,

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__________________________________________________________________ resignation, endurance towards suffering and self sacrifice were to be his or her virtues, while protest and rebellion were improper attitudes for a ‘true Spaniard.’ In the fifties it was clear that this type of dictatorship was unsustainable: if the regime wanted to survive it had to adapt itself to the new international order that had resulted from the end of the Second World War. The dictatorship had to find new allies. Francoism’s old links with nazism and fascism were, therefore, erased and forgotten. The opening to the outside world began. The Cold War situation helped to gain the support of the USA, which was interested in using the strategic situation of the Spanish Peninsula. In exchange, Franco’s Spain entered Cold War politics as part of the Western bloc, whose aversion to communism it had shared for a long time (not in vain was Franco called the ‘Centinela de Occidente’ against Marxism). At this point, Franco made some important changes in the government: old ministers who had had too much to do with immediate post-war politics and with the Falange, were replaced by new ones. Many of the new ones were part of the Catholic organisation that would support the regime in its opening to the world and economic development: the Opus Dei. The changes in economic policies, made by the government of these technocrats, were crucial in overcoming the crisis of the forties, and starting the modernisation of the country. During the years of the Stabilisation Plan (1959-1961) and the Development Plans that followed, in the sixties and seventies, the majority of the population experienced a constant improvement in its living standards. Mass tourism, the emigration of Spanish workers to other European countries, policies that gave access to education to more people 5 and the introduction of the country into the capitalist market, exposed Spaniards to very different realities. This led some to antifrancoist protest movements; others just made changes in their private lives while they waited for Franco’s death. The result of all this was an increasing number of contradictions that francoism tried to repress, to control or to manage, so that the power of the dictator was not questioned. Many of these contradictions had to do with transformations in the habits and behaviour of Spanish society, and with changes that challenged francoist values. The regime had a clear idea of what it was to be a man or a woman, and what was expected from each of them. Its people were supposed to have that clear idea too, as the education and repressive systems of the dictatorship had been spreading its message since 1939. But in the sixties it was obvious that real people were going in a different direction, and this was especially relevant in the younger generation that had been brought up under the regime. What young people were doing differed from the official national-Catholic model that they had learned. For example, their value system was more flexible on issues related to sexuality, emancipation and marriage. They cared about personal wishes and desires too, which made them forget their obligations towards their fatherland. Many of them were enthusiastic fans of music, especially pop music, and they combined this with a strong interest in fashion. Jeans, miniskirts, long hair for boys, rock & roll, pop music and

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘guateques’ (private parties that were one of the few spaces where men and women could meet and dance) were the visible symptoms of a changing society. 6 These two elements, music and fashion were the elements that defined a group of young people who were called ye-yés. If we analyse the way some of their elders described them, it is clear that it was not only a matter of a change in aesthetics: the behaviour of ye-yés was a challenge to traditional behaviour and values. For Álvaro de Retana, the author of the first Spanish book that analyzed popular 20th century music in Spain, the ‘dictatorship of the modern song’ had had ‘a morbid influence on non-conformist adolescents and their rebel hair, jeans and languid manners’ and was the reason why young people did not fulfil their duty of service to the fatherland. 7 The most conservative sectors of Spanish society considered ye-yé young people as crazy, risible, ridiculous, superficial, languid, unproductive ... . They were traitors to their families, to their obligations as producers (as workers or women) and to their fatherland, traitors in sum to the organic state of francoism. Foreign music and habits had seduced them, the desire of money and fame too … but that was one of the consequences of the contacts with the exterior. In the forties, youngsters had been warned against cheek to cheek dancing, as it favoured lust and attitudes that were against Catholic morals. Some posters of that time recommended ‘Joven … diviértete de otra manera’ (‘You, young man/young woman … have fun in some other way’). But what could be done in the sixties with these practices that were, in part, a consequence of the modernisation of Spain? 2. Controlled But Tempting Pop Culture: Último Grito Mass media and the policies of the Ministry of Information and Tourism were used to dealing with contradictions, adapting what was new and strange to francoism to its older discourses and vice versa. Thus, as Vilarós has pointed out, 8 mass media acted as a Foucauldian reassuring or regulatory technology 9 that was designed to maintain the equilibrium of the dictatorship and thus to keep it alive. In the case of young people, it can be said that the regime had to choose what kind of youth culture was less inconvenient. In fact, ye-yés were not so dangerous, especially if compared with the intellectuals and workers who were protesting all around the country, those who were even part of clandestine political parties. At least dancing, listening to foreign music, wearing strange outfits or being rather lazy was not openly political. The best course was to protect the regime against any negative effect by integrating and interpreting this pop culture as an aesthetic trend, something that was limited to private life, leisure time and enjoyment. The policies of Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Minister of Information and Tourism from 1962 to 1969, were designed to fulfil these objectives. Just as the regime had supported Spanish abstract expressionism at the end of the fifties, to create the image of modernity it needed in the artistic field, so ye-yé culture was given space

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__________________________________________________________________ in the media to create an image of modern, but not politicised, youth. This worked at both the international level (and here the victory of Massiel and the song ‘La la lá’ in the Eurovision song contest in 1968 is to be remembered) and the national level. It was introduced into domestic and private life. Musical films with brand new singing stars were produced, music groups appeared all around the country and there were television shows centred on this kind of music. Since the arrival of Fraga at the Ministry in 1962, the television broadcasting received special support. To have a television set became one of the main indicators of social prosperity in Spain, 10 in 1966 the luxury tax on a television set was eliminated and more families could afford one. 11 That year a new channel started regular broadcasting, using the new UHF technology. This second channel had a cultural orientation and was intended for an educated audience, with film cycles and space for classical and modern music. In 1968, newspapers announced the arrival of the show Último grito, a ‘young space created for a young audience’ where ‘the large number of “new” young people can find in Televisión Española a space which they need and have lacked.’ 12 Although Spanish television had been broadcasting musical shows for a long time on its first channel (Channel 1), Último grito was very different from them. It was a show about pop-rock culture, but it was also the result of this poprock culture, a place for audiovisual experimentation and for challenging cultural norms. The relationship between men and women was the main subject of the musical moments of the program, but it was also the main issue of the short films and sketches that connected the sections on film and music. The presenters were very different from the required ‘Spanishness’ of the francoist model of man and woman. Judith Stephen was American and thus was not obliged to represent this model of femininity, she could act and dress up as much as required. How could she be judged? … Spaniards considered ‘guiris’ (the Spanish word for foreigners, wherever they came from) amusing. José María Íñigo had worked for the BBC in London, but he was Spanish and his long hair, his big moustache and his various, colourful outfits (Hawaian shorts, colourful, patterned shirts, jackets, flowers, foulards, necklaces, etc.) were definitely not what was expected from a ‘caballero español’ (a Spanish gentleman, in other words). Couple relationships were treated in these short films through stereotypes that had to do with models whose origin was in the movies: new Spanish cinema, nouvelle vague, film noir, American romances and dramas or the James Bond saga inspired these films and were mocked at in them. Where these had to do with something similar to ‘everyday life’ the characters acted according to patterns that differed from the official model, men were weak and shy, women were active, independent and strong. The contrast between the francoist model of a woman and a woman who emerges after being seduced by repressed emotions and the technologies associated

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__________________________________________________________________ with holidays appeared in one of the sketches played by Judith Stephen to open and close Último grito. 13 She is portrayed as a teacher in a typical classroom of the dictatorship, with a map behind her and a big book open in front of her. This visual composition was well known by Spaniards because when starting school each one of them was portrayed in a similar set: seated at a table with a big book opened in front of her or him, a religious reference somewhere and a map of Spain behind. In Último grito the scene presents some differences: first of all the person is not a student but the teacher, behind her there is a map of Europe (and it is not a proper map but a drawing, a drawing where no borders are visible), the scene occurs at a strange time for lessons, as we can see through the window that it is dark outside and there are no religious references around, instead the book is accompanied on the table by a film projector (does it replace the religious image?). In this sketch Judith Stephen is portrayed as a prudish teacher, she wears glasses on the tip of her nose and looks over them, never directly, her arms are folded and her hands are together, her body and movements are rigid when she speaks to her pupils. When she asks whether her ‘beloved little pupils’ have been good boys or not, and if they love her, some male voices (it is important to note that these are not children’s voices but adult men’s) answer ‘Yeah!’ At that very moment a hand appears from the bottom of the shot and puts an apple on her desk, and the scene and the emotions in it change. This is marked by music too: where the song ‘El cocherito leré’ (a skipping rope song) accompanied the first part of the sketch, it is now replaced by a modern (and adult) song in English. The body language of the teacher changes immediately, she takes off her glasses, she looks directly at the camera and moves her arms and hands freely. She announces a break, it is time for a holiday, in her excitement she even says some words in English, and she indicates that she is going to put on a film. The film is the first clip of the Último grito show, a documentary about Jaimer de Armiñán’s film La Lola no Vive Sola (Lola Does Not Live Alone) which opens with an image of Serena Vergano, a sex symbol of the alternative film scene of the time, running, escaping from the camera (and the projector). This sketch is used to present Último grito as a film (it is a film space on television) and, therefore as a domestic fiction where the rules of real life can be suspended. In this particular program, what triggers this suspension is temptation: the promise of love received by a teacher from an invisible mass of men/students, and a symbol with a long cultural tradition, the gift of an apple. Many referents can be quoted for this, whether it is Eve’s apple in the Bible, the discord apple of classical myth, or even Snow White’s. In any case the original story is distorted and it is difficult to identify the intention and identity of the one who makes the gift: is it the snake or Eve’s companion, Adam, is it the goddess of discord Eris or Paris, is it the mean stepmother, or even one of the seven little dwarves? The Último grito program, and thus the space for rule suspension, ends with the conclusion of this sketch. After what is supposed to be the end of the film the

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__________________________________________________________________ teacher appears tangled in a mass of film tape, trying to get rid of it but at the same time pretending that nothing is happening. To do so she reassumes her previous rigid attitude and says to her pupils simperingly ‘wasn’t it nice?’ The answer is a tough ‘No!’, but that does not matter and she just keeps on fighting with the tape while she says ‘Ok, see you next week, then.’ Who could want a space where rules were not so rigid to end? Who could wait a week for it to reappear? Who could remain the same after experiencing for a while the suspension of francoist norms? Who could help being affected, tangled, by this experience? 3. Conclusion In my opinion the school teacher sketch in Último grito shows how the young people that created it understood music, film and audiovisual creation in general. According to these short films, the masculine and feminine models of francoism did not work in the real private lives of the people. Without any doubt an audience that had been brought up under the francoist education system would quickly notice the absence of the official model. Thanks to these audiovisual products the young people could get to private spaces where francoist rules could not reach them, spaces where the norms were left in stand by. The power of the audiovisual products that occupied this show was so great that they were responsible for the creation of the relationship and gender stereotypes of the young (at least those who appeared in the short films and documentaries included in Último grito), replacing francoist values and models. Being in contact with these products meant being tempted by a whole new foreign world that took you away from the national essence of Spain …, and that was the worst thing that could happen, according to Franco’s New Year’s Eve message in December 1969: Young people must be conscious of the fact that mimicking foreigners has been the main cause of our decadence. Every country is the masterwork of its own genius, what is really audacious, proper to young people, is to be faithful to ourselves and create and grow from the root of our national essence. 14 The francoist government that began its activities after 1957 and was ruled by technocrats has been seen as a clear example of a ‘cyborg political regime’ 15 because it had been able to change in order to adapt to technology. It was this ability to adapt that allowed it to survive in the very different political environments it had to develop in, even when this meant the artificial survival of a regime that had been partially dead for a long time. Regulatory technologies like the mass media helped to maintain this artificial life, but at the same time a TV show like Último grito allowed alternative models and ways of life to be developed, understood and potentially reproduced all around the country. It opened

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__________________________________________________________________ a way for the uncontrolled, and this was, in some way, a menace to the fragile equilibrium of the last years of francoism.

Notes 1

The author wishes to thank Jan Treacher for her help with proofreading. This chapter has been written thanks to the support of the postdoctoral contract of the Subprograma Juan de la Cierva (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación). 3 On 27th September 1975 the last executions under francoism took place. Only three months later, on 20th November 1975, Franco died. 4 According to francoist historians, Spain would reach its ideal state thanks to the force of destiny and not because of any kind of progress. David Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Post-war Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 15-38. 5 Francoism started to concern itself with education because it was one of the requirements of a developing economy according to international advisors. Ramón Navarro Sandalinas, La Enseñanza Primaria durante el Franquismo (1936-1975) (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1990), 201. 6 Enrique Moradiellos García, La España de Franco (1939-1975): Política y Sociedad (Madrid: Síntesis, 2000), 147. 7 Álvaro Retana, Historia de la Canción Española (Madrid: Editorial Tesoro, 1967) quoted in 45 Revoluciones en España (1960-1970), Ángel Casas (Madrid: Dopesa, 1972), 74-76. 8 Teresa Vilarós, ‘Banalidad y Biopolítica: La Transición Española y el Nuevo Orden del Mundo’, in Desacuerdos 2, eds. Jesús Carrillo, Ignacio Estella Noriega and Lidia García Merus (Barcelona, Sevilla, Vitoria: Macba, Unia, Arteleku, 2005), 29-56. 9 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (London: Penguin, 2003), 239-264. 10 Enrique Moradiellos, La España de Franco (1939-1975): Política y Sociedad. (Madrid: Síntesis, 2000), 147. 11 Carlos Barrera, Periodismo y Franquismo. De la Censura a la Apertura (Barcelona: Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 1995), 171. 12 Enrique del Corral, ‘Televisión’, ABC, 26 May 1968, 83. 13 Último grito, Radiotelevisión Española Archive, tape 101 TN 30. 14 Radio New Years’ Eve discourse of Franco, 31 December 1969, in Adriana Minardi, ‘El Franquismo a la Luz de sus Metáforas’, Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación IX (2011), 130. 15 Francisco Larrubia-Prado, ‘Franco as Cyborg: “The Body Re-Formed by Politics: Part Flesh, Part Machine”’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2 (2000): 135-152. 2

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Bibliography Barrera, Carlos. Periodismo y Franquismo. De la Censura a la Aperture. Barcelona: Ediciones Internacionales Universitarias, 1995. Casas, Ángel. 45 Revoluciones en España (1960-1970). Madrid: Dopesa, 1972. Cayuela Sánchez, Salvador. ‘El Nacimiento de la Biopolítica Franquista. La Invención del “Homo Patiens”’. Isegoría 40 (January-June 2009): 273–288. —––. ‘La Biopolítica en la España Franquista’. PhD diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2009. Del Corral, Enrique. ‘Television’. ABC, 26 May 1968, 83. Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976. London: Penguin, 2003. Herzberter, David. Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Post-War Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Larrubia-Prado, Francisco. ‘Franco as Cyborg: “The Body Re-formed by Politics: Part Flesh, Part Machine”’. Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 2 (2000): 135–152. Minardi, Adriana. ‘El Franquismo a la Luz de sus Metáforas’. Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación IX (2011): 117–133. Moradiellos, Enrique. La España de Franco (1939-1975): Política y Sociedad. Madrid: Síntesis, 2000. Morcillo, Aurora G. The Seduction of Modern Spain. Lewisburg: Bucknell Universtiy Press, 2010. —––. True Catholic Womanhood: Gender Ideology in Franco’s Spain. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Navarro Sandalinas, Ramón. La Enseñanza Primaria durante el Franquismo (1936-1975). Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1990. Último Grito. Videotapes at the Radiotelevisión Española Archive.

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__________________________________________________________________ Vilarós, Teresa. ‘Banalidad y Biopolítica: La Transición Española y el Nuevo Orden del Mundo’. In Desacuerdos 2, edited by Jesús Carrillo, Ignacio Estella Noriega, and Lidia García Merus, 29–56. Barcelona, Sevilla, Vitoria: Macba, Unia, Arteleku, 2005. Noemi de Haro García is ‘Juan de la Cierva’ Postdoctoral researcher and teacher at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is interested in the relationship between visual culture, society and politics. Currently her research deals with the visual construction of dissent in the transition to democracy in Spain.

Subverting the (Hetero)Normative Museum Maria-Anna Tseliou Abstract In response to a range of political and legal developments intended to tackle discrimination on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation and to promote social cohesion, equality and inclusion for diverse communities, museums (in common with other institutions in the public sphere) have been experimenting with opportunities to contribute to these social goals. However, their attempts to challenge conventions around the presentation of narratives related to gender and sexual diversity have not always been easy and there remains uneven support amongst professionals for engaging with this topic. This situation is explained, in part, by the influence of ‘heteronormativity.’ 1 Research in different settings has shown that the prevalence of a heteronormative frame appears to exert a powerful influence over the ways in which concepts such as gender and sexuality are represented. As a result, the binarism of male-female becomes the basis upon which we think of gender and then select the way to represent its different aspects and our expectations of it. But what happens when museums stop thinking conventionally and start thinking in a non-heteronormative way? By drawing upon the research I have done on three particular case studies, this chapter will consider the museum’s potential to challenge gender norms and its implications to various aspects of the concept of love (partnerships, family, wedding), as well as the interpretive tools that exhibition teams can employ to transgress gender and sexual conventions and binarisms. The three museum exhibitions are Family Album; Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs and Queering the Museum, all of which appear to be quite progressive by employing an inclusive approach to represent the concepts of gender, love, marriage, family etc. Key Words: Museums, gender, sexuality, exhibitions, heteronormativity, love, family, wedding, partnership. 1. Introduction Almost one and a half year ago, two remarkable exhibitions took place in two quite conservative European countries. The first one was Eros; From Hesiod’s Theogony to Late Antiquity in Greece (Benaki Museum, Athens) which gave an overview of love back in ancient times both in Greece and Roman empire, including references to same sex love and desire. The second one was Ars Homo Erotica in Poland (National Museum, Warsaw) addressing the topic of homoeroticism in art. What both cases held in common was the fact that the exhibitions featured material and interpretation related to homosexuality - a politically sensitive topic in both countries - that had never been explicitly addressed in a well-established and mainstream museum of Greece or Poland

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__________________________________________________________________ before 2010. In other words, it could be argued that the cultural sector, even in countries where LGBTTQ equality issues are hotly contested and where there is limited formal (legal) recognition of the rights of sexual minorities - that is people who identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual or queer -, is beginning to pioneer work regarding the social inclusion and cultural representation of this minority. Furthermore, recent years have seen considerable changes in the way notions of gender and sexuality are perceived and understood in the realm of academia but also in the public sphere. This progress resulted from scholarly developments in the fields of gender and queer theory and advances made by the dynamic Women’s and Gay & Lesbian movements. Nevertheless, heteronormativity, ‘defined as the view that institutionalised heterosexuality constitutes the standard for legitimate and expected social and sexual relations,’ has proved to be resistant to change in the public sphere generally and in culture specifically. 2 However, the heteronormative frame has increasingly been challenged within not only academia but also across a range of domains, especially in the public sector where growing concerns for more inclusive and plural practices can be seen in policy and legal developments. As part of a turn towards more socially engaged and responsible practice, cultural organisations including many museums and galleries, have sought to engage more diverse audiences and address a range of themes and ideas that speak to contemporary identity politics. Additionally, there seems to be a growing confidence amongst practitioners in the idea that museums can and should play a role in the construction and promotion of more equitable social values and be a place in which contested issues linked to identity politics might be explored and debated. My assertion is that museums hold the potential to contribute towards positive social change and, more particularly, constitute a safe environment where contemporary ideas regarding gender and sexuality can be presented and discussed. This chapter will focus on the connection between gender and love but within the museum context. In particular, the museums’ potential to challenge gender and sexual norms will be addressed based on the study of three recent exhibitions that have all explored contemporary aspects of love but in distinct ways. By looking at the exhibition techniques employed in Family Album (Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, Sunderland), in Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs (Sudley House, Liverpool) and Queering the Museum (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham), a discussion will be developed around the extent to which heteronormativity, and consequently the common conceptualisation of gender and love, might have been challenged. 2. Heteronormativity and the ‘Post-Museum’ Heteronormativity insures that the organisation of heterosexuality in everything from gender to weddings to marital status is held up as both a model and as

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__________________________________________________________________ ‘normal.’ ‘Heteronormativity works … to naturalize the institution of heterosexuality while rendering real people’s relationships and commitments irrelevant and illegitimate.’ 3 In 1991, Michael Warner coined the term ‘heteronormativity’ to describe a system that exerts an extraordinarily powerful influence over many areas of social life but is largely taken for granted. It refers to the whole range of norms that arrange the way individuals should live. That is, living according to a set of values organised around the constructed interdependence and dualism between male and female. After many years of sociological and scientific research on gender and sexuality along with some prominent social movements, different ways of regarding these terms have been designated. Advancements have taken place around the thinking of what is gender, male, female, sexuality, heterosexuality, homosexuality, and so on, and therefore, our understandings of and attitudes towards these concepts continue to change and develop. However, despite the developments in many countries, e.g. in how women or homosexuals should be regarded and treated, it seems that there is still a gap between social life and law or academia. Heteronormativity can be easily observed in people’s daily life and often it does affect one’s thinking and behaviour without even being noticed. Perhaps some people could claim that there are signs of a less heteronormative society at least in countries, which have already made significant steps to a more democratic and inclusive society by legitimising, for instance, the right of equal opportunities in the job sector or of marriage to any citizen regardless of gender and sexual orientation. Nevertheless, a response to such an assertion could take the form of the following question: what about all the other sectors other than law? In other words, it would be worthwhile to review what evidence of such a progress can be found in the domain of education, culture and media. It is commonly accepted that all these laws of equal opportunities and rights are vital for a more socially responsible society, but unfortunately they are not adequate. Other domains too need to work towards this direction to reinforce what the laws are aiming at. Education, both from schools and culture, could act as a very functional tool, and museums are part of it, although they seem to ‘fail to address their complicity in the maintenance of heteronormativity.’ 4 However, museums have passed into a new era some time ago. The emergence of ‘post-museum,’ as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill coined it, 5 signified the transition from the modern to the postmodern museum. During this process, the characteristics attributed to museums in modernity were revised, resulting in a contemporary museum with a social role having been added on top of the rest of its roles. This new role would have equal significance, if not more, with the rest of the main responsibilities of museums, such as collecting and preserving. Whilst the idea that museums might take up a more socially responsible role is not entirely uncontested within the sector, there is nevertheless a growing trend towards the

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__________________________________________________________________ view that: [M]useums can impact positively on the lives of disadvantaged or marginalised individuals, act as catalyst for social regeneration and as a vehicle for empowerment with specific communities and also contribute towards the creation of more equitable societies. 6 Following this idea, then, museums are increasingly understood by practitioners, policy makers and audiences as institutions that should seek to be open to all members of society, and, therefore, their identities, experiences and histories deserve equal treatment and representation. In particular, a growing body of empirical studies have demonstrated that museums play a part in shaping individual and collective attitudes towards different social groups leading to further support for the idea that the stories of minority groups experiencing prejudice and discrimination, such as LGBTTQ, need to be addressed more equitably within the narratives that museums and galleries create. Part of this trend form the three exhibitions I will then discuss. 3. Case-Studies The case studies, on which this chapter is focusing, are three recent temporary museum exhibitions in the UK. The oldest one (2008-2009), called Family Album (collaboration mainly between National Portrait Gallery, London, and Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens), was a portrait exhibition looking at the notion of family from Tudor times to the present day. The other project (2010-2011), called Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Custom (Sudley House, Liverpool), was a costume exhibition presenting the concept of marriage from Victorian times to the present day. In both cases, the curatorial approach aimed to present the multiple aspects of family and marriage respectively, through the inclusion of the same-sex aspect. For instance, in Family Album a visitor could see among the rest of the portraits, the image of a same-sex male couple - that of ‘Sir Peter Neville Luard Pears; (Edward) Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten’ by Kenneth Green - whereas in Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs among the costumes from traditional weddings, the suits and images of a same-sex male couple holding a civil partnership ceremony were also displayed. Finally, the last one (2010-2011), called Queering the Museum (Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery), was a craft exhibition seeking to ‘queer’ the whole museum through interventions made by an external artist Matt Smith. The key idea was that Matt Smith would be commissioned to create some queer stories within the museum narratives either by re-interpreting objects from the museum collection or by positioning new artefacts produced by him in the place of permanent exhibits. The outcome of these curatorial techniques was that for the first time, at least in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, queer narratives were developed to

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__________________________________________________________________ such an extent within family galleries mixed with the rest of collections. In addition, it was the first time that an LGBTTQ related project was not developed separately from the rest of the museum’s collections; rather its parts were integrated innovatively within permanent collections. 4. Findings Having made a short introduction to the content of the three exhibitions under my research, I shall then move on to some of the key issues emerging from the research findings. The main sources of data used to address the question of museums’ potential to challenge gender and sexual norms were generated from semi-structured interviews with museum staff members who worked in these three exhibitions and with visitors to Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs and Queering the Museum. Overall, the selected curatorial approaches for each project have been welcomed both from the museum and visitors’ side and sound like their outcome was successful. From the museum perspective, they were all exhibitions fitting well in museums’ general mission by fulfilling some of their key tasks, such as being socially inclusive, and offering a diverse programming that appeals to different communities. Also, they all appear to have received relatively easy the necessary internal and external support, which was one of their main concerns from the outset, that of ‘having everyone on board,’ as almost all the curators stressed. In addition to this, the use of a contemporary lens for the selection of displays required for each narration, that is, for the story of family, wedding and queer culture, was regarded as a great opportunity ahead. In particular, practitioners admitted that such attempts, bringing together old and contemporary ideas within a broader context, could actually raise museum’s profile, appeal to new audiences, develop useful partnerships and build up their confidence in developing similar projects in the future. Nevertheless, one interesting point I drew out from the findings was the fact that all three exhibitions were initiated by one’s strong motivation to undertake such an inclusive approach. What is more, their personal life experiences and beliefs, at least in the case of Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs and Queering the Museum, seemed to have played a vital part in getting each curator passionately suggest a project that presents a theme but differently from its regular representations. Furthermore, by choosing to allow for multiple voices to be heard resulting in a broader learning experience, it was felt that they were contributing firstly, in the cultural inclusion of minority groups’ culture, including LGBTTQ culture, through offering them a motive for a museum visit, although at the time of the interviews they were not sure if they did manage so, and secondly, in raising awareness about alternative and non-typical ways of living at the general public, despite at early stages all project teams had some concerns about potential negative feedback and reactions to the specific inclusions of sexual minorities.

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__________________________________________________________________ From the visitors’ perspective, the interview data revealed the positive reception of the exhibitions, even in cases where individuals disclosed their opposition to homosexuality due to personal or religious reasons. What is more, at several instances, people admitted that it was specifically the holistic approach to the subject of wedding -in the case of Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs and the discretion of queer interventions - in the case of Queering the Museum that allowed for the LGBTTQ references to be presented in an effective and nonprovocative way. To summarise, it could be put forward that Family Album, Hitched, Wedding Clothes and Customs and Queering the Museum took a challenge and managed it very successfully. In the first two cases, Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Sudley House attempted to present the theme of family and marriage respectively through a more contemporary and inclusive lens and chose to step away from stereotypical views of family and marriage, whereas in the third case, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery followed a similar risky path by installing queer interventions next to traditional exhibits at various galleries, including views of love partnerships not consistent with the typical image of erotic partnership. Rather, they all transgressed the well-established gender binarism of male and female with their clearly assigned roles. Neither love nor family nor marriage was displayed according to majority’s expectations. Instead, they were all treated in a way that breaks down common beliefs on gender to some degree. For instance, the inclusive curatorial approaches probably brought a kind of surprise to the visitors by not presenting them what they would normally expect to see in an exhibition on family or marriage, which was one of the museum’s objectives, that of surprise the visitors and perhaps make them rethink their own beliefs. In other words, these exhibitions seem to challenge, even temporarily, the so-called ‘heteronormativity’ in museums, through their reluctance to display only the socially constructed norms around gender. Overall, my belief is that these particular exhibitions take museum practice a bit forward in terms of LGBTTQ representation. Instead of repeating the same formula of displaying LGBTTQ histories within museums separately and therefore, somehow maintain the heteronormative frame, these three projects managed to bring heterosexual and non-heterosexual life together under an ‘umbrella theme’ and in a sense, attempted to ‘normalise’ LGBTTQ life. This could be considered perhaps as a tackle to heteronormativity that reaches the general public and potentially support, consciously or not, the efforts of activists advocating the need for further development of sexual minorities’ rights and equality in marriage or other practical issues. 5. Conclusion Knowledge is no longer unified and monolithic; it becomes

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__________________________________________________________________ fragmented and multi-vocal. There is no necessary unified perspective -rather a cacophony of voices may be heard that present a range of views, experiences, and values. The voice of the museum is one among many. 7 The different stories about gender and its aspect of love told by these three exhibitions were just three ‘voices’ among many. Actually, they are not such strong voices, since the projects were not developed in mainstream national museums but rather in well-established local museums. Nevertheless, the importance of these voices lies on the fact that all of them could be considered as pioneers of a new inclusive way to represent gender and sexual identity within museums. That is, a way that transgress gender and sexual conventions through offering to the public an alternative insight into the broader theme of love, partnership, wedding and family, an insight where old and contemporary ideas are brought together, avoiding their regular separation. To conclude, culture and museums have a multitask role to play and can challenge to some extent gender stereotypes by allowing multiple perspectives to be presented at the same time. They should take advantage of the public view of them as trustful institutions and seek to promote social values regarding gender, sexual orientation, but also, class, race, and so on. It is vital that under certain circumstances they do have a political voice in society by choosing to touch on sensitive subjects innovatively and effectively, just like these three exhibitions managed to do by employing a new inclusive curatorial approach. A ‘knock on your face’ is not always the best way to tell a difficult and potentially contentious story. Perhaps, employing a more kind of ‘tricky’ approach could enable us, museum professionals, to tell such stories more effectively with almost any casualties!

Notes 1

Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 2 Chrys Ingraham, ‘Heterosexuality: It’s just not Natural!’, in Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 76. 3 Ingraham, ‘Heterosexuality: It’s Just Not Natural!’, 76. 4 James H. III Sanders, ‘The Museum’s Silent Sexual Performance’, Museums & Social Issues; A Journal of Reflective Discourse 3, No. 1 (2008): 17. 5 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Interpretive Communities, Strategies and Repertoires’, in Museums and their Communities, ed. Sheila Watson (London: Routledge, 2007), 81.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6

Richard Sandell, ‘Museums and the Combating of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibilities, Resistance’, in Museums, Society, Inequality, ed. Richard Sandell (London: Routledge, 2002), 76. 7 Hooper-Greenhill, ‘Interpretive Communities, Strategies and Repertoires’, 82.

Bibliography Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. ‘Interpretive Communities, Strategies and Repertoires’. In Museums and their Communities, edited by Sheila Watson, 76–94. London: Routledge, 2007. Ingraham, Chrys. ‘Heterosexuality: It’s Just Not Natural!’ In Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, edited by Diane Richardson, and Steven Seidman, 73–82. London: SAGE Publications, 2002. Sandell, Richard. ‘Museums and the Combating of Social Inequality: Roles, Responsibilities, Resistance’. In Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, 3–23. London: Routledge, 2002. Sanders, H. James III. ‘The Museum’s Silent Sexual Performance’, Museums & Social Issues; A Journal of Reflective Discourse 3, No. 1 (2008): 15–27. Warner, Michael, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Maria-Anna Tseliou is PhD candidate in School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK.

Part 4 Narratives of Gender and Love

Love, Gender, Sexuality and Intimacy in the Narratives of Trans People and Their Partners Tam Sanger Abstract Love and gender are central to the narratives of trans people and their partners when they discuss the negotiation of their intimate lives. Within this chapter I focus on some of the stories conveyed to me during my doctoral research where I interviewed trans people and their intimate partners about their experiences and relational negotiations. These vignettes offer a glimpse of the diversity which was apparent among those in such relationships and the ways in which individuals and relational couples and groups worked to reconceptualise their intimate selves both within and beyond normative social boundaries. Key Words: Transgender, intimacy, ethics, sexuality, narrative, Foucault. ***** Recent research wherein I explored trans people’s intimate partnerships uncovered stories of complex relations between love, gender, sex and sexuality. 1 Interviewees’ ideas about these concepts had been built up through their lives via their interactions with the society they lived in and their relations with other people. These ideas and ideals were often challenged when a partner identified as trans. For those partners who had been together for many years prior to one asserting a trans identity the ramifications for the partnership were often profound. Some found they could not remain in a relationship which inevitably caused them to reflect upon their sexual orientation, while others eventually came to embrace this shaking of the foundations of their selves. There were also those I interviewed who were attracted specifically to people who challenged norms of gender and sexuality, and thereby arguably love. Despite intense governance with respect to gender, sexuality and love there did seem to be some possibilities for resistance and reconsideration of normative notions of the self. Within this chapter I will discuss some of the complex interconnections between love, gender and sexuality which arose from this research and my notion of ‘the ethics of intimacy’ which posits the importance of allowing for the rethinking of the intimate self. Included will be the narratives of some of those I interviewed, evidencing the diversity of ways in which individuals live and negotiate their intimate lives and identities. 2 Whilst critical of normative ideals and the governing of intimate life I also recognise the difficulties inherent in challenging dominant norms and in opening up the self to possible discrimination and a lack of recognition.

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__________________________________________________________________ Within my PhD research I defined trans people as those who identify as a gender other than that assigned at birth. This could mean someone being assigned male at birth due to the presence of a penis and coming to identify as female, being assigned female due to the absence of a penis but realising a male identity, or indeed being assigned either gender and reconciling with an identity which does not fit into either polarised gender category. 1. Narratives of Negotiation The focus of my study was on exploring how those in relationships involving trans people, that is someone who identifies as trans or their intimate partner, negotiated their intimate lives and how social norms featured in this negotiation. To aid in my discussion here I will detail a few of the stories I was told during my research, which shed light on the limitations imposed by social norms as well as possibilities of reconceptualising these. 2. Melanie and Sally Melanie was a 48 year old trans woman who identified as bisexual and monogamous. Sally, her partner, was 44, a non-trans woman, heterosexual and monogamous. The couple had been married for 25 years at the time of interview and had been having difficulty defining their relationship since Melanie came out as trans. They variously used terminology such as sisters, friends, and partners. There was no longer a sexual element to their relationship but they were still in love with one another. Interestingly Sally was entirely resolute about her heterosexuality despite being in a relationship with a woman. This has interesting connotations when thinking about Melanie’s sense of gendered self as there is an element of recognition that could be said to be lacking in Sally’s self-description. Something I found fascinating in this research was how people’s identities affected one another, particularly for those in an intimate partnership. Throughout my interviews with trans people and their partners recognition was a central issue. Sally argued that she was ‘just not interested in having sex with Melanie even though I love the person.’ This was partly due to menopause but also because she identified as heterosexual and therefore could not envisage having sex with a woman. Here we have another interesting idea - Sally’s identification as heterosexual seems to be about sex rather than love. She loves a woman but this does not make her a lesbian or bisexual to her mind - rather, she would only change how she identified if she had sex with Melanie. Melanie stated, ‘I think other people do tend to treat it as some sort of huge deal when in reality it’s not, and at the end of the day if you love a person you love the person not their genitalia.’ So for Melanie relationships are about personality and compatibility rather than embodiment. This seems to be the compromise that Sally and Melanie have come to in their relationship. Further, Sally says, ‘[w]e’re husband and wife but you can’t say husband … now, that’s why we always say partners. We’re still

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__________________________________________________________________ married.’ So again terminology is an issue - the terminology and legal rights available to them do not allow for their particular relationship. Sally will not describe Melanie as her wife because that is not feasible within the legal framework that encompasses their lives, including their intimate life. 3. Myfanwy and Judith Myfanwy was a 51 year old non-trans woman identifying as bisexual and polyamorous, meaning she has multiple partners. Judith, who she has been married to for 35 years, is 53, a trans woman, and also bisexual and polyamorous. Throughout their time together, and particularly since Judith came out to Myfanwy as trans, there have been a number of alterations in their partnerships and also selfidentification. These alterations were in relation to bisexuality, polyamory and BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism). When Judith told Myfanwy she was trans Myfanwy started to question her sexuality and was reminded of times when she had been attracted to women in the past. She had subsumed those feelings then but Judith’s transition became an opportunity to rethink her sexuality and to embrace her bisexuality. She looked into BDSM and discovered she enjoyed it as well as realising her need for a male as well as a female partner. With respect to the latter she and Judith had become part of a triad with a new male partner five years previously. Myfanwy said, ‘I just expected to go the normal route and I think you make … your life do what you want it to do in as much as you can. A lot of the time you can and it’s only when something really big comes along that blows the whole thing open that you start to think things through.’ Many of those I spoke to told similar tales of realising their normalisation through society and relations with others because of coming out as trans themselves or a partner coming out as trans. Judith also talked about moving away from what is expected: ‘[Myfanwy] doesn’t identify as a lesbian so I suppose it only really fully resolved when we met Keith and [...] we became a bisexual household [laughs]. Yes I think she’s cast off a lot of her inhibitions about being different in that way and in other ways.’ 4. Jenny, Belinda and Lee While Jenny, Belinda and Lee, who all identify as trans, are not a triad like Myfanwy, Judith and Keith, they were linked together via a network of polyamorous relationships, and Jenny is partnered with both Lee and Belinda. Jenny, 27 and bisexual, was involved in partnerships with three individuals, plus two ‘tocotoxen,’ which she defines as ‘too complicated to explain.’ Her use of this term indicates a movement away from mainstream patterns of ‘doing intimacy’ and towards a framework that incorporates her personal narrative. Two of her three partners were Lee and Belinda, who each had one other partner at the time of interview.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lee, 25 and bisexual, indicated that he thinks about his identity with respect to gender, sexuality and intimacy a lot, asking ‘can you tell I think about these things too hard?’ This intense thinking about identity markers indicates a conscious engagement with the self, akin to the Foucauldian ethics of the self where individuals are encouraged to think and rethink themselves in order to gain greater freedom from social mores. Many of those interviewed for this study had clearly engaged in this type of thoughtful reflection or reflexivity, and had often reimagined the parameters within which they could think themselves. Increased reflexivity had led Lee, Belinda and Jenny to become more open to nonnormative expressions of gender, sexuality and intimacy, such as polyamory, not identifying squarely at one end or the other of the gender binary, asexuality, and kinky sexual practices. This openness to a wide variety of ways of being encouraged each of them to value communication in their intimate partnerships and thereby to engage in disclosing intimacy. 3 This was because they could not assume unchanging identifications or relationship statuses, and so renegotiation within relationships was often a factor which needed to be discussed. There were some interviewees who were particularly attracted to trans people: ‘I think the fact that [Jenny] was trans as well was a large component in my being attracted to her.’ This desire for trans-identified individuals could be said to constitute another sexuality category, and is sometimes referred to as such. 4 Another (non-trans) interviewee identified herself as a ‘trans lover.’ 5. Gail and Petra Gail was 30, non-trans, preferred not to define her sexuality and identified as monogamous. Her partner Petra was 32, identified as between genders, also did not like to define her sexuality and was monogamous. Petra and Gail’s narrative brought home, like the others, the impact of socialisation, or what Neil Gross has termed ‘meaning-constitutive traditions.’ 5 In other words the ideas and practices that are handed down through generations and become a taken-for-granted part of how individuals interact with the world and one another. Again relationality, or how the couple related to one another, was central to identification, recognition and acceptance, with Petra stating ‘[i]t’s very positive having somebody there who just totally accepts you.’ So for Petra Gail’s acceptance actually increased her comfort with her own identity and gave her confidence to transition in whatever way felt right for her. Gail had previously been out with a trans woman but had ended that relationship when her partner wanted to have surgery to alter her genitalia. She said ‘[n]ow I’ve changed and developed in my thinking and the way I feel about things.’ So being with Petra had broadened how she saw gender and sexuality and made her freer to explore those aspects of her identity like Myfanwy. Petra identified in a less straightforward way than Judith and Melanie, positioning herself as 90% female rather than entirely at one end of the gender spectrum. She

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__________________________________________________________________ said, ‘[w]hen they see something half and half it’s even worse for them ... and I can understand that because it was worse for me because everything is at odds with how you’ve been brought up and everyone else is brought up in similar ways but we all have those patterns.’ So again socialisation and how people are brought up within strict social norms becomes highly significant when someone is going against those norms and challenging others’ ideas about themselves and the society they live in as well as their own. 6. Questions Relating to the Negotiation of Intimacy and Trans Identities The table below indicates some of the questions I have been led to consider through carrying out this research. This was used as a handout during the Gender and Love conference. Table 1 - Rethinking love, gender, sexuality and intimacy Melanie and Sally Myfanwy and Judith 



How do we define a person’s sexuality? (gender/genitalia/other)  Must an intimate relationship involve sex? What does it mean if it is not present?  Does loving a woman as a woman automatically rule out identification as heterosexual? How do we define sexuality? Where does sex factor in?  How central is recognition to sense of self and ability to perform gender and sexuality?  Can you love a person without engaging with their genitalia at all?  What terminology can be used for this relationship? Do we need to expand our linguistic possibilities? Jenny, Belinda and Lee

Gail and Petra





Are terms like ‘tocotoxen’ useful for reconfiguring love and intimate life?

    



Can reflection on ‘the other’s’ identity lead to reconsideration of our own? Is challenging identity positive? What does it mean for society? Do we need to expand legal understandings of intimate life? Does polyamory open up more space for love and intimacy? Do we make our lives do what we want in line with social norms? Does trans open up space in the social fabric for reimaginings in the same way Foucault talked of the ‘slantwise’ position of the ‘homosexual’ (1994 [1981]: 138)? Is difference something to be avoided or embraced?

Does refusing to label sexuality lead to a lack of recognition and therefore inability to engage with

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__________________________________________________________________   





Is love a space beyond definition? Is thinking about identity ‘too much’ good for society or too narcissistic and individualised? Are trans-trans partnerships a useful way of reinforcing the gendered self? Do they open up a new dimension for intimacy studies and for how we define love and sex? Is ‘disclosing intimacy’ a type of intimacy which should be promoted in individualised capitalist societies? Would more openness to renegotiation of relationships lead to changes in social norms and ideals?







or indeed transform society? How much difference does recognition and relationality make to an individual? Should this be important or do we need to be able to validate ourselves? How much say should a partner of a trans person have in whether or not they alter their bodies? (e.g. genital realignment surgery, voice therapy, hormones, breast augmentation/removal) How can those who identify as not 100% male or female be recognised in wider society as such?

7. Ethics of Intimacy Theoretically my work has been informed by Michel Foucault’s notions of governmentality and the ethics of the self. According to Judith Butler: The question that Foucault opens up ... is how desire might become produced beyond the norms of recognition, even as it makes a new demand for recognition. And here he seems to find the seeds of transformation in the life of a passion that lives and thrives at the borders of recognizability, which still has the limited freedom of not yet being false or true, which establishes a critical distance on the terms that decide our being. 6 It was these types of lives, where supposed normality had been shaken, which I was interested in finding out more about. I have been led to thinking about what I term the ethics of intimacy. What I mean by this how do trans people and their intimate partners negotiate their intimate lives, and are there ways in which they are rethinking the self and challenging dominant discourses of intimacy? What do their experiences tell us about the limitations placed upon everyone’s intimate lives, and are there possibilities for living intimacy more ethically? Some of those I interviewed who I have not mentioned had identified themselves as trans much earlier in life than, for example, Judith and Melanie. Some of these younger trans people were very keen to challenge social norms around both gender and sexuality and new terms were being invented by those who

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__________________________________________________________________ found themselves on the borders of knowability: words such as pansexual, bigendered and genderqueer. In this way it could be argued that gender, sexuality and intimacy are being opened up beyond the norms of recognition in ways which may alter the self-perceptions of non-trans partners as well as those who identify as trans, and this may even go further afield through interactions with others, people telling their stories online or via the media or autobiographies (although media and autobiographies still tend towards the normative idealised transition tale which is very much about a discrete and definite gender identity being claimed). Foucault has argued that, [i]t’s up to us to advance into a homosexual ascesis that would make us work on ourselves and invent - I do not say discover - a manner of being that is still improbable. 7 I like this idea, that we are not just trying to discover something that has been there all the time, but are actually moving towards inventing our own identities and practices. Of course these will always be invented within the confines of society, but they may to a greater or lesser extent challenge dominant norms. Lisa, one of my interviewees who identified as female but questioning of gender with a fluid sexuality, and has since started identifying as male and taken testosterone said, ‘[b]eing queer you have to articulate your own relationships, negotiate your own relationships in a different way to being straight and being trans again, I think you’ve got the articulations of identities and roles and you have to make it up a bit more so you’ve got a little bit more creativity within that’ (Lisa, non-trans woman, 35). I liked how what she said linked in so nicely to what Foucault argued about inventing new ways of being. I wonder if the possibility exists of changing society through changing the self. I have argued that [a]s we are all both the same as and different from one another in multiple ways, how we engage with one another needs to be a more studied and reflective encounter, rather than reactions to otherness being based upon initial impressions. This aspect of the ethics of intimacy potentially allows space for more accepting and less phobic relations. 8 Awareness of what others are doing differently can also be said to open up possibilities in relation to intimate life, which certainly happened for many of those I interviewed. My focus on thinking the intimate self differently is also linked to Foucault’s statement that ‘[p]eople have to build their own ethics, taking as a point of departure the historical analysis, sociological analysis, and so on that one can provide for them.’ 9 I hope that my own sociological analysis will add to the ways

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__________________________________________________________________ people can imagine themselves and their intimate lives through being given an insight into a wide range of ways of being and relating.

Notes 1

Tam Sanger, ‘Desiring Difference? Transpeople’s Intimate Partnerships and the Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality’ (PhD diss., Queen’s University of Belfast, 2007). 2 The research project took place from 2002 to 2006. 3 Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998). 4 Patrick Califia, ‘Identity Sedition and Pornography’, in PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality, eds. Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997), 210. 5 Neil Gross, ‘The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered’, Sociological Theory 23 (2005): 286-311. 6 Judith Butler, ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’, in Feminism and the Final Foucault, eds. Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 193. 7 Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume One, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994 [1981]), 137. 8 Tam Sanger, Trans People’s Partnerships: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 135. 9 Michel Foucault, ‘Michael Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, in Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume One, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994 [1982]), 132.

Bibliography Butler, Judith. ‘Bodies and Power Revisited’. In Feminism and the Final Foucault, edited by Dianna Taylor, and Karen Vintges, 183–194. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Califia, Patrick. ‘Identity Sedition and Pornography’. In PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality, edited by Carol Queen, and Lawrence Schimel, 87–106. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997.

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__________________________________________________________________ Foucault, Michel. ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’. In Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume One, edited by Paul Rabinow, 135–140. New York: New Press, 1994 [1981]. —––. ‘Michael Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins’. In Michel Foucault. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 Volume One, edited by Paul Rabinow, 121–133. New York: New Press, 1994 [1982]. Gross, Neil. ‘The Detraditionalization of Intimacy Reconsidered’. Sociological Theory 23 (2005): 286–311. Jamieson, Lynn. Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Oxford: Polity Press, 1998. Sanger, Tam. ‘Desiring Difference? Transpeople’s Intimate Partnerships and the Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality’. PhD diss., Queen’s University of Belfast, 2007. —––. Trans People’s Partnerships: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Tam Sanger is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Childhood and Youth Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. Her published works include Trans People’s Partnerships: Towards an Ethics of Intimacy and Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity (co-edited with Sally Hines).

Loving My Sissy Self: Being Queer in the Rural Southern United States Jay Poole Abstract This chapter uses autoethnography, defined as an exploration of the author’s personal narrative within the context of his cultural environment of origin. 1 In this narrative, social and cultural factors influencing shame are discussed along with experiences of degradation that support exclusion and devaluing the self. Challenges regarding the complex intertwining of gender and sexuality are explored. In particular, the challenge of loving one’s self while existing in the margins is examined. Possibilities for embracing plural identities are offered as part of coming to love one’s selves. Key Words: Shame, sexuality, queer studies, gender studies, sexual identity, love, personal narrative, autoethnography. ***** As comfortable as I seemed with my gayness on the outside, inside was a different matter. Years of learning to hate myself just didn’t slip away because I came out, and I still struggled with my feelings of self-loathing, feelings I would later come to understand as internalized homophobia. Unlike other traditional minorities in American society (Jews, people of color), gay people aren’t raised by people like themselves when growing up. As a result, we internalize the typically homophobic attitudes of those around us, and devaluing and demeaning homosexuality becomes a part of our own self-image. This voice in your own head - the voice that constantly tells you that you are worthless is the real enemy. Like a lot of gay people, I found that other people sometimes accepted me long before I had completely accepted myself. 2 1. Introduction When I read Jennings’ reflection as noted above, my very core resonated with his observation that queer people often make worthlessness a part of the fabric of their identities. The journey toward self-acceptance is often arduous, with full acceptance of one’s self not ever realized. My personal journey has certainly been wrought with self-loathing and opportunities to reinforce my devalued self. While I currently enjoy working and living in an atmosphere that, for the most part, accepts all of my selves, I am always cognizant of that voice in my own head that whispers

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__________________________________________________________________ (and sometimes shouts) that I am not really worth very much. After all, I am an overweight, single, white American male who identifies as gay/queer. I was raised in an environment that feared difference, valued tradition, and saw damnation to Hell as appropriate punishment for sexual deviance. I transgressed the boundaries of my culture of origin by becoming educated and, more importantly, not meeting traditional gender and sexual identity expectations. My background as a working class, white, southern, fundamentalist Christian, racist male has been marred by my more current identities as a queer, academic, middle-class, feminist, progressive person. What a dilemma I have been and continue to be in, particularly when I begin to locate love for myself. As I have become more aware of the intricacies of my own identity, I have become more curious about what it means to experience complex identities and how people come to love themselves when their experiences are antithetical to self-love. Dianna Fuss talks about multiple I spaces and certainly my narrative is representative of this concept. 3 What follows is an exploration of my story within the context of my cultural and social experiences in an effort to examine how love may or may not have a presence within complex embraced here as queer- identities. 2. A Beginning I was born in 1962, during one of the most profound social change eras in American history. My parents, born and raised in post-Depression Southern American culture, were afraid that the lifestyle they knew would change and that their children would be threatened by this wave of social upheaval. My parents like many others in southern America, viewed integration and civil rights as the beginning of the collapse of the American dream. From their perspectives, Dr. King and the movement he represented was rooted in communism, which spelled the downfall of America. They were bombarded with messages of fear about what would happen if ‘black’ people were unleashed (be assured that they did not use ‘black’ as the descriptor). It was as if the Jim Crow laws of the South had contained this huge cauldron of change that, if allowed to go unchecked, would boil over and spill into the lap of a social structure that had been carefully crafted to preserve what dignity and possibility of prosperity remained after the Civil War. Keep in mind that the American Civil War had occurred only 100 years before my birth. My parents were a couple of generations away from ancestors who had fought and died in a vain attempt to preserve a way of life that was romanticised as having been peaceful and productive. Prior to my birth, my parents, fueled by fear about what was happening in the South, joined the Ku Klux Klan. They were not active in the organisation but they subscribed to its beliefs. According to what I knew of the Klan, difference was not a strength; in fact, it was difference that threatened life as it was known in the South. Whiteness, Protestant Christian beliefs, and heterosexuality were upheld as ‘normal,’ and any deviance from that was abhorrent. The Klan rejected queers and sissies, as there was no place for such

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__________________________________________________________________ softness in its mission to save southern life. Besides, no southern boy could ever become such a thing, as ‘queerness’ was something attributable to northern city boys and ‘foreigners.’ Southern boys hunted, fished, played sports, and knew how to use their fists. Sexuality was a matter of choice. Men should ‘sow their oats’ with naughty girls and settle down with a nice girl. Sure, boys would be boys and secretly play around sexually with each other, but this was not discussed and it was expected that one would grow out of such adolescent tomfoolery. Besides, prevalent religious beliefs made it clear that having sex with another man was a sin punishable by death. Thus, I was brought up to believe that anyone different from me was to be feared and avoided; that men were strong, independent, sports-oriented, and heterosexual; and that God was the supreme father who would take your life if you sinned, and homosexuality considered to be one of the worst sins. My upbringing was not very different from most males of my social status as we were all from working class families with similar values. Ultimately, I was a ‘redneck’ and it is within the so-called redneck culture that I learned how to see and be in the world. In rural Mississippi, ‘redneck’ has historically referred to white people who toiled in the fields and whose necks became sunburned, glowing fiery red - a symbol of low socioeconomic status. 4 While this term has evolved both inside and outside the culture to which it refers, it remains as a descriptor of one who belongs to the white working class rural culture either in lifestyle practices, values, or both. Rednecks adhere carefully to gender and sexual roles that are traditionally constructed as masculine and feminine. 5 Despite those who perform as a redneck, it remains clear that a ‘true’ redneck is a Caucasian person, born into a rural, family whose social status is compromised by an unending struggle with poverty. Ultimately, as Roebuck and Hickson state, ‘[t]he key criterion [for membership in Redneck culture] is being poor.’ 6 Poverty was no stranger to my family and though my parents owned the small house that we lived in, we existed at times on the fringe of destitution, particularly after my mother and father separated. It would not be until adolescence that I fully understood our dire socioeconomic status; thus, my perception of my childhood while I was a child was not one mired in the meagerness usually associated with poverty. By all family accounts, I was a happy child, and being one of the first born in my mother’s sibling group, I received much attention from my grandmothers and aunts. Interestingly, it would be early in my life that my ‘feminine’ self would emerge and be taken up as entertaining for my family. 3. My Sissy Self There is a picture in the family album that speaks volumes. I am about two years old, grinning into the camera. I am wearing my mom’s pumps, and draped on my arm is a matching handbag. Mom obviously found this get-up quite amusing and snapped the photo as I was parading around in what was probably my first

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__________________________________________________________________ drag performance. When I look at the picture now, I see no shame and no humiliation - only joy. Even more profound for me is that mom was not ashamed by my stunts; she found them entertaining and delightful. Shame would not come until later, constructed as a result of the expectations that accompany growing into so-called manhood. As a two-year-old, I could be any identity - as queer as I wanted to be- and it was fun for everyone! Other pictures reflect a similar dynamic; me helping mom do dishes, me with my toy ironing board, and me wearing toy earrings. I seem to be fully comfortable being my sissy self. Significantly, these photos show that I was allowed to be who I was until it interfered with whom I should be. There was an underlying rule; boys would ‘turn out’ queer if they were allowed to act like girls. So, when I turned 5 years old, Dad stopped my girlish fun. No more handbags and heels. I was introduced to hunting, guns, and basketball (my dad was a basketball player in high school). As I tried to follow his lead, shame was creeping around in my thoughts because a part of me wanted to put on those heels just one more time. Perhaps more profoundly, I was about to have my first same-sex sexual experience, which was coupled with humiliation about my perceived sexual identity. My mom caught my neighbour friend and me playing a ‘game.’ I was embarrassed and defeated. Her reaction told me clearly that I was doing something that was profoundly wrong. However, despite her warning not to ever do ‘that’ again, my desires did not go unfulfilled. 4. Discovering Gay By age 14 I had learned that my sexual experimentation with other boys was to be kept secret at all costs. Although I participated in ‘manly’ activities such as hunting, working in the yard, and attempting to play sports, I was learning that I could not meet the standards of Southern manliness. I was picked on at school, spit on, and called ‘faggot.’ I turned to religion and went to the altar in the Southern Baptist church to get ‘saved’ in an attempt to alleviate the growing sense of worthlessness I had inside. My only thread of hope was joining the high school marching band and finding a few supportive friends there. I fell for ‘John’ at age 16 and discovered that what I lacked in love for myself seemed to be made up in his arms. He too dealt with internalised shame, which would keep us from fully enjoying a relationship with each other. Concurrently, the Gay Rights movement was beginning to take shape as a political force. Sheltered in the South, I was not aware of how it would eventually impact my ability to crack the core of my worthlessness and claim an identity that I would first know as ‘gay.’ 5. Liberation and Love Being a young adult who claimed gay identity in the early 1980s was a scary and simultaneously exciting experience. Gay Rights as a political force empowered many people like me to claim a gay identity despite fears about what that really

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__________________________________________________________________ meant. Just as ‘gay liberation’ was being enjoyed, AIDS threatened to snuff out the notion that perhaps we gays could find an acceptable place in the social order. Survival replaced freedom as the focus of what it meant to be gay. Indeed, gay identity began to be dislocated as people recognised many ways to be outside the boundaries of gayness. In the 1990s, queer identities emerged and were explored by those who did not adhere to gay identities that were often regimented by particular ways one could look and act if one were to be gay. The rules of gayness were bent and broken as people found identities outside the boxes that had emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways, this queering allowed some people to begin to recognise that they could accept themselves just the way they were/are. Love for the self was part of the new frontier of sexual identities that began to emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ironically, I could claim my redneck past as part of my evolved present self. I could embrace all of whom I was/am rather than feeling aggrieved over who I could or should be. It was in this queering of identities that I began to discover liberation and glimmers of love for myself. 6. Looking Back to Look Ahead As existentialism asserts, each of us has a unique vantage point and it is from that shifting point-of-view that we glimpse our worlds and ourselves. As I explore my shame, I am compelled to consider how shame does or does not exist in the lives of others. My own life is a narrative of social clashes interfacing with some internal, perhaps biological desire for sexual expression in a manner that does not fit the dominant, normative paradigm. Natural for me disrupts what has been constructed as natural within the large social context of my culture of origin, and now I am discovering my ability to affect what my culture is and can be, which allows a (re) imagining of natural. Thus, I am simultaneously bound and freed by socio-cultural phenomena, as I become an agent of action existing within its clutches. My point(s) of view are evolving and what I see behind me now is colored not only by my past, but also by my current and future existence. As Evans points out, we are in a continual process of interpreting the world around us (re)creating reality maps and my so-called reality map is constantly being charted and re-charted as I interpret and re-interpret that with which I come into contact, including my own thoughts, feelings, and views. 7 Claiming identities is a fluid endeavor; for me, identities are constantly evolving. I have not abandoned my roots as a redneck, nor do I intend to. My friends are sometimes shocked at how easily I can slide into a ‘good ol’ boy’ space and just as quickly claim the ‘screaming queen’ that lurks just below my skin. Shame has not disappeared; indeed, it is part of who I am and who I have yet to be. What is important to me is that I have begun to understand shame’s place in all that I am. I hope that others are able to work toward deeper understandings about

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__________________________________________________________________ shame and its place in their lives. There is a special place in my heart for ‘sissies’ and being one of them enables me to revel in those moments when we can claim who we are. After all, possibilities for liberation and transformation lie within imagining what we are and what we can be.

Notes 1

Note of the editors: This text maintains the spelling and punctuation used by its author in order to respect its autoethnographic character. 2 Kevin Jennings, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America’s Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 121. 3 Dianna Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), 103-105. 4 Julian Roebuck and Marcus Hickson, The Southern Redneck: A Phenomenological Class Study (New York: Praeger, 1982), 25-35. 5 Hugh Campbell, Michael M. Bell and Margaret Finney, Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 6-9. 6 Roebuck and Hickson, Southern Redneck, 2. 7 Arthur Evans, Critique of Patriarchal Reason (San Francisco: White Crane Press, 1997), 40-45.

Bibliography Campbell, Hugh, Michael Bell, and Margaret Finney. Country Boys: Masculinity and Rural Life. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Evans, Arthur. Critique of Patriarchal Reason. San Francisco: White Crane Press, 1997. Fuss, Dianna. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989. Jennings, Kevin. Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir of Growing Up, Coming Out, and Changing America’s Schools. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Roebuck, Julian, and Marcus Hickson. The Southern Phenomenological Class Study. New York: Praeger, 1982.

Redneck:

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__________________________________________________________________ Jay Poole is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research interests lie in the area of identity studies with particular interests in sexual and gender identities as well as identities associated with mental illness and aging.