New Directions

The thing about research is that it never ends...or at least it seems that way. My research on gay British writers from the height of the empire is far from over; in fact, I'll be presenting some of my work from this project at a conference at the end of the month. 

At the same time, my work on this project is in a bit of a lull, and there are new projects I'm starting. One of these projects is for my religion class that I'm taking this semester, Gender and Conservative Religion. For my project, I'm researching how gay Orthodox Jews attempt to reconcile their sexuality with their faith. I think I'm going to use this blog to catalogue some of the work I do for this project as well, and I wanted this post to kick of that work with this video I just found of testimony from gay Orthodox men. Enjoy!

The Joys of Close Reading: Theory at Work

Literary studies has a habit of appropriating the rhetoric of scientific study. Words like "theory" and "method" are common, but it's hard to know what exactly these words mean in a literary context until you use them. With that in mind, I thought I'd try to demonstrate a specific "technique" or "method" on which a large amount of literary criticism is based. We call this method "close reading."

Look at those colors!

Close reading is basically what it sounds like: you read a text closely. This doesn't mean your nose should be in the book's seam, but instead it means that you read for details. These details are often symbolic or linguistic/syntactical. For example, a close reading of The Wizard of Oz might focus on a detail, like the use of color, and suggest how the use of color takes on a larger symbolic meaning. Through this technique, it becomes evident that colors symbolize money; the primary colors in the film - gold/yellow, red, and green - all have strong connotations with money. From this detail, the critic could then go on to focus on how this symbolism contributes to the film's larger meaning. An example of a linguistic or syntactical close reading can be found in Hamlet. In the play, Hamlet famously states, "To be or not to be - that is the question." The word choice, repetition, and parallelism in this soliloquy makes obvious the fact that the central interest in Hamlet's speech is what it means to be or to live. It's metric arrangement is also important; unlike most of Shakespeare's verse, which uses ten syllables per line, this line uses eleven. The uneven number of syllables is an important linguistic choice that mirrors Hamlet's indecision and inaction; just like Hamlet is unable to act on his desires, the line is unable to be metrically complete. The fact that the line ends with the word "question" further suggests that it is unresolved. After all, Hamlet does not offer an answer to the question that he poses. From this linguistic close reading, the critic might go on to to focus on how indecision and unresolved actions or speeches are important to the play. In both of these examples, the power of close reading is that you can get a lot out of a little. Small details like color contribute to a grander meaning in The Wizard of Oz just like small details like word choice and meter contribute to a larger meaning in Hamlet. 

I've been rereading some short stories by E.M. Forster these past few days. One story that sticks out is "The Other Boat." This story is simply amazing, and it is what inspired this entire project. Rereading it, I was struck by how much I forgot or how much I noticed for the first time. Doing a close reading on the story brought out even more new details with only a few lines. Close reading the opening three lines in particular helped me to see how in three lines Forster develops the entire framework for his story. The lines read:

"Cocoanut, come and play at soldier."

"I cannot, I am beesy."

"But you must, Lion wants you."

Symbols of Empire: A Lion and Britannia

These lines are exchanged between one of the March children, a child brought up in an English colonialist family, and Cocoanut, an ambiguously ethnic lower caste. The lines establish the foundational themes and motifs that repeat throughout the story. The tension between different races is dramatized by the two characters' names, Cocoanut and Lion, which is short for Lionel. The names suggest a fundamental difference between the characters; one man is an exotic fruit while another is a lion. The emphasized segment "cocoa" in "Cocoanut" racializes this difference by suggesting Cocoanut's darker skin. In contrast, the word "Lion" recalls the image of a lion as a symbol for the British Empire, a reminder of the national differences between the two men.

These lines also establish differences in power and space. Cocoanut is being commanded to play a game that he doesn't want to play. He is not allowed to disagree with Lionel's desires. The fact that this game involves imitating soldiers suggests another form of power, militarized power, that Forster is trying to explore. The lines imply a difference in space between what is "here," where Lionel is, and what is "there," where Cocoanut is. It also suggests travel between these two different spaces when Lionel wants Cocoanut to come to where he is. This spatial difference becomes more important and noticeable later in the story as a boat travels from England to India and explores the spaces and differences in between the two countries, one which rules and the other which is ruled.

The phrase "play at soldier" suggests a gap, similar to the spatial gap between here and there or England and India, that Cocoanut cannot traverse. At best, he can pretend to be a soldier; he can pretend to be a decision maker in the British Empire, but he can never actually be that soldier. He cannot be Lionel's equal, only his play thing. Any power he has comes through a game, through pretending, or through lying. 

All of these points suggest a fundamental difference between people or between places that cannot be reconciled. This gap, or difference, can even be read in the language Forster uses: Cocoanut speaks in dialect, while Lionel uses standard English. Any attempt to cross any of these gaps merely leaves the traveler lost in between one spot or the other; often, we refer to this sort of in between stasis as a liminal space.

Finally, the phrase "Lion wants you" is significant. The word "want" suggests sexual desire. In this passage, the two characters are children, so it is hard to imagine them as sexual beings (although I would argue it is not entirely impossible to do so). Later, when they become men this "want" does become full fledged desire. This desire fuels each character's need to cross the chasm between space and identity, although they ultimately fail and end up stuck in liminal loneliness.

Ize can do close reading, plz?

Close reading is a powerful and invaluable to any literary theorist. A good close reading is one of the easiest ways to build a strong argument. It yields rich, provocative details from scant resources. Tools like close reading give me a lot to work with, and they are making it hard to narrow down topics and materials for my presentation. Still, opening up a text and reading the details hiding under its surface is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of the literary theorist, and it is a goal that close reading makes easily achievable. 

Class and Homosexuality in Empire: A Conversation with Dr. Whisnant

Today has been a bit of a head trip in terms of research. I had a meeting with Wofford's own Dr. Clayton Whisnant, who also researches homosexuality and Empire, although his focus is on homosexuality, masculinity, class, and the German Empire. Despite these differences, our talk was incredibly fruitful and I gained a ton of new perspectives and resources. For example, Dr. Whisnant is interested in the intersections between class identity and sexual identity. I've never really pursued the class dynamics behind homosexuality; certainly, they are there, but at best they are background noise in the realm of scholarship that I consider "interesting." Still, Dr. Whisnant's insistence that class identity is related to sexual identity is an important one. In his view, gender presentation is strongly related to class so that working class gay men were more likely to be highly effeminate, while middle class gay men were more traditionally masculine. These middle class, masculine homosexuals were invested in their masculinity in a way that Dr. Whisnant argues can be read in their sexual preferences. To keep up their masculine performance, they frequently chose sexual partners that allowed them to express dominance; such partners could include effeminate, working class homosexuals, over whom the middle class men held more economic and gender power, or colonized men, over whom the middle class men held racial superiority (and gender power, as Anne McClintock argues).

I never asked Dr. Whisnant which came first, the class or the sexual preference, but even so it's obvious that there is something to be said for the relationship between class and sexuality in Empire. Given this reading, Dr. Whisnant's argument makes middle class homosexuality a drama of masculine identity, while my research so far has mostly ignored the gender politics at stake in favor of the sexual politics. Class and economics were undeniable factors that contributed to the rise of imperialism. If it is true that they also influenced sexual preferences so that there seems to be a link between class, homosexuality, and sex between Englishmen and colonized men, as Dr. Whisnant suggests, then perhaps exploring the class dynamics in Empire would be a worthwhile endeavor.

All in all, I really enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Whisnant. My head hurts a little bit from all of the new information, but "no pain, no gain," right?

Get Your Government out of My Bedroom!

It is no shock that my project is built around exploring the relationship between sexuality and Empire, a relationship I've sometimes phrased as "exploring the intersection between queer theory and post-colonial theory." I've been trying to make it clear why I think this relationship is an important one to explore by outlining some of the benefits this project has for the scholarly community.

But one problem I am facing is that I think some sense of urgency for Americans is always lost through my explanations. After all, I am looking at British literature, British laws, and British culture. How could the lessons I draw from across the pond ever apply over here?

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has a way of articulating the colonial contest that makes it not just a contest over land but a contest over culture. The influence of colonialism in Britain ensured that the British cultural scene at the time (1880-1947) was a thoroughly imperialistic cultural scene. What happened in Britain was influenced by what happened in its colonies, a relationship Said describes as existing between metropole and colony. Said says that this same dynamic also exists in France (though with a few different flavors), and that it was inherited by America. He argues that what makes America different is that it did not have the colonial history Britain had (meaning it never explicitly had colonies of its own similar to Britain's), but its cultural dominance has always existed in an imperialist form.

Hottentot Venus

Said's point should be no shocker. Many people have argued that America is a sort of empire in its own right. Wars in the Middle East and neocolonial policies in Latin America have been interpreted time and time again as America's attempt at asserting dominance over another nation without having to physically set up camp.

Along with these policies abroad, there has always been a movement at home to normalize the culture. This movement is where I am most interested. This attempt at normalization is often also an attempt to define the nation through opposition. One easy example comes from the British Empire. In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock highlights several ways the Brits saw themselves as fundamentally different from their colonies. One such difference is the "invention of race," and another is differences in thought. The Brits had a faith in science and reason, and they projected the opposite nature onto the colonies (McClintock's focus is on Britain's African colonies in particular). In the cultural imagination, while John Bull was busy at his microscope, his African counterpart was superstitious. Through these differences emerged a sort of British identity or nationalism (I don't think McClintock ever used these terms) so that if you wanted to be British you had to be white and scientific or logical (among many other things).

Meet the Cleavers: A "Normal" American Family

In America, a similar form of cultural identity emerged. The process is less clear, but its products are astoundingly evident. Think about the Cleavers. This family became a foundation of American familial identity. The family should have a mother and father and angelic children, it should be white, it should be middle class, and it should be fairly patriarchal. If you didn't have a similar nuclear family, you didn't have an American family. This Americanizing image created an idea of normalcy that pressured Americans into being "normal" and shamed them if they were anything less. 

This attempt at normalizing functions through shame, and it plays a part in nearly every aspect of national culture, including sexuality. Michael Warner articulates how it works in American sexual politics in The Trouble with Normal, but I would argue that a similar process occurred in imperial Britain as well. The fact that people feel pressure to behave sexually in a certain way at the risk of jeopardizing their national identity is a form of state intrusion into sexuality. 

State control over sexuality is everywhere. We rely on the State to sanction our relationships through marriage, we listen to the State when it tells us where we can and cannot have sex, the State influences sexual expression when it restricts pornography, etc. State control is blindingly obvious by examining the State's relationship to any form of sexuality outside of monogamous heterosexuality. Gay marriage is just one example of State control over sexualities other than heterosexuality. Other examples include sodomy laws, using the "gay panic" excuse as a legal defense, the government's response to the AIDS epidemic, and a lack of gay representation in the media.

This State control over sexuality existed in Britain at the time of Empire, and it continues to exist in America. I believe that it depends upon a colonial dynamic that was established in Britain and then translated to America. Sometimes this dynamic is obvious. Gay men are frequently depicted as retrogressive, superficial, and oversexed degenerates. Think of Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno or Nathan Lane in The Birdcage (see above). These characters are meant to be seen as odd, Other, and less than their straight counterparts, in the same way that natives were depicted in, say, the image of the Hottentot Venus. In an even more astoundingly colonial remark, Marcus Bachmann referred to gays as "barbarians" in a 2010 interview when he said, "Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined."

So to say that Americans have no stake in British colonial culture would be ignorant. Anyone who has a sexuality (and I would say that this means all of us) should take an interest in the State's attempts to influence our sexual lives. My bedroom is meant for the person I love, not the person I elect. The plight of homosexuals in both Britain and America is sad proof that we continue to practice the colonial system we inherited, whether we know it or not.

Yer Gonna Make Me Give Myself a Good Talkin' To

I'm caught in a rut where I have a lot of ideas to write and not a lot of energy or ability to articulate anything. I've been doing research, though: I finished the Warner book, will probably finish Said's Culture and Imperialism in a day or two, and am steadily working on Forster's A Passage to India. I also bought a collection of Forster's short stories, The Life to Come, and read the introduction to Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet.

I've been thinking a lot about really big concepts, like space, geography, love, and the body. If I were a poet, I would articulate this in a nicer way. These themes represent a significant chunk of my research. I will probably write something about them in other areas, too. I wanted to post a poem that I thought related to these areas in the same ways I am thinking of them, but the best example I could think of was Ondaatje's "The Cinnamon Peeler" and I didn't want to repeat it. Rather than posting all of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, or any number of other novels I consider "favorites," I decided to upload Shawn Colvin's cover of Bob Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." Listen and weep. 

Elements of Queer Style

You have to love something about this way of writing. It’s shallow, it’s mean, sure, but its style breathes new and bitchy life into jesuitical pieties you thought you would never hear in public again…The story works, for many, because it is rooted in a developmental narrative. It makes the “we” of gay people into a big individual who experiences history as the phases of maturation, like acne. The decades leading to and following Stonewall were our adolescence. Now we are adult, and ready to marry.

This quote comes from Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, a book I’ve been working through (and loving) these past couple of days. The quote is a response to Andrew Sullivan’s article arguing for gay marriage. Warner, a queer theorist, is developing an argument against gay marriage, and so he is taking issue with Sullivan’s argument with this quote.

But rather than looking at the argument in this quote, I wanted to share it to talk about style. As I read more and more, I become more aware to differences in style between different authors and fields. And as I’m reading more in queer theory, I am especially aware of a type of style queer theorists employ in their writing, a style that I think Warner’s writing exemplifies.

To understand this style better, it might be good to be familiar with some of the basic tenets of queer theory. Queer theory developed in a post-modern world, a world with an aesthetic that utilizes pastiche, commercialism, vulgarity, and references to popular culture. Like critical theory, whose motive is to question and critique society, queer theory is also a field that is highly critical of the world around it. It wants to offer radical solutions to society’s basic problems. Thus, Warner, who sees gay marriage as something that would merely reenforce heteronormative hierarchies of shame, argues against gay marriage from a radical perspective devoted to breaking down repressive societal structures, not from a traditionally conservative fear of gay marriage. In general, queer theory can be best understood by this radical streak.

I love the style that Warner and other queer theorists use because simply through the way these writers write instead of what they actually say they are practicing the theory they preach. This writing subverts the expectations we have about writing – that it is boring and lifeless – and celebrates radical, “vulgar” life through its use of colloquial jargon (what other academic would refer to another person’s writing as “bitchy” and be serious about it?). It refuses to pander to institutionalized norms, whether that means not including standard citations (Warner uses virtually none, except for a small notes section) or including in-your-face pictures, like Warner’s book cover, which features a man in a white tux standing next to a sexually provocative man in leather against a hot pink background with bold lettering. Further, the writing doesn’t just rely on facts to make a point but metaphors. The image Warner offers of the collective gay masses going through puberty helps him to make two points that would be lost if he relied on simply stating the facts: First, just like everyone matures through puberty differently, Warner subtly suggests that every gay person develops differently so that marriage wouldn't be a priority or final developmental stage for everyone. Second, with the reference to the visceral image of acne, Warner questions if the puberty and maturation that lead to wanting gay marriage are even things that gay people should want to experience. After all, who among us remembers with fondness the awkward middle school years, random breakouts on your face visible for everyone, or having to worry if your voice would crack every time you spoke out in class?

Queer theory offers a style of writing that I really enjoy. Simply through its style, it questions the norms and pushes the boundaries of what academic writing can be. If, as Audre Lorde says, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s home,” queer theorists, by using tools from outside the heteronormative academic institution, are certainly able to bring their own tools to work.

Bringing Sexy Back: A Praxis of Writing

As far as research goes, today was a fair day. I did some reading out of Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal. I like the book and some of it has really useful ideas, but today's chapter will probably end up being useless for this project. I also mapped four of my main points that I want to explore and then tried to think of ways I could work toward proving them.

More importantly (and more fun) than this work, though, I also had a meeting with my advisor, Kim Rostan. I always love my meetings with Dr. Rostan. The great thing about having her as an advisor is she’s so personable and takes a genuine interest in my ideas while still making sure that I’m not making ridiculous, uneducated claims.

We talked about a lot in our meeting. I caught her up on my project, where I want to go with it, and some of the larger themes I see in it. She suggested some things to read, mostly Forster’s A Passage to India, a novel I knew I would have to read eventually (but that I’m nevertheless excited about reading!). But mostly we talked about ideas we have for future projects and our opinions on some literary theories.

At one point in our talk, I mentioned a project to Dr. Rostan that I was thinking about proposing for summer work. The problem, I told her, was that, while I liked my idea, I was self-conscious about if it would be edgy enough or if it would be something in which others would be interested. I wondered if I should modify it into a project that I thought would have more of a chance of being funded instead of something I wanted to do.

At this point, Dr. Rostan gave me great advice. She told me to trust myself and to follow my interests or risk stifling creativity for the sake of pleasing others. As she said, creative, well written ideas are often more interesting than something that may be edgier but less well written. And she assured me that my idea seemed interesting. As she put it, it was a “sexy idea,” and sexy ideas – which are often the best and most needed ideas – are only realized through self-confidence and risk.

I often feel like a very self-conscious writer and thinker. I worry if my ideas make sense or are even good enough to compete with a sea of thinkers who I think are more brilliant, edgier, and more eloquent. I think this anxious, self-conscious feeling is common for a lot of writers. Hannah, another researcher, recently wrote a post where she addresses some of these anxieties. In an attempt to combat these anxieties, she cites Anne Lamott, who suggests “writing shitty first drafts and letting go of perfectionism.”

JT ain't got nothin' on me

I like this advice. It requires the same confidence that Kim advocated to me earlier. Besides, if we don’t let go of perfectionism, if we fall victim to our self-conscious anxieties, how we will get anything done? Isn’t a “shitty” first draft better than none at all? At least that’s a starting point. If we can’t take a risk to write our ideas in the first place, how will we ever find the sexy ideas the academy has such a need for?

This Interim, I’m going to try to write, and to write boldly. I’m going to let go of my anxieties. I’m going to find sexy ideas. I’m going to bring sexy back.

Describing Research

It has become increasingly clear that some parts of my research are more difficult than others. In particular, one difficulty has surprised me, mostly because it is something that I never anticipated would be hard: describing my project. 

Not what I'm doing

I think what makes describing this research difficult is that people don't understand what it means to be a humanities researcher. In imaginations influenced by popular culture, research is something that happens in a lab with complicated equipment at specific times of the day. This idea of research is just not how things work for us humanities folks. Our version of research mostly involves reading, thinking, and writing, and it can be done anywhere at nearly any time. 

Even people that understand literary research frequently forget that literary criticism involves multiple forms of analysis. When I tell my friends that I'm researching gay British writers in floruit at the height of the British Empire, they almost always come back with the same questions: Who? How many gay writers were there? How can there be that much available for study?

I think this confusion is partly my own fault. I articulate my research project somewhat poorly in the form of a convenient one liner instead of a detailed summary. But I also think this confusion is the result of a lack of knowledge about literary criticism. As I see it, literary criticism has two main strains. The first strain involves detailed analysis of a work's meaning. It would be like telling you what Hamlet means when he gives his famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy. The second strain involves an analysis of a work's sources. It would be like if I told you that large chunks of Hamlet's soliloquy are actually are actually from a famous speech, made by a Danish king, that predates Hamlet (for the record, it doesn't as far as I know). My explanations are super brief and general, but they represent the main differences I see in the scholarship I read and emulate.

My research is a mixture of these two strains, and right now I'm putting heavy emphasis on the second strain by researching what went into the creation of a work instead of just looking at what a work means. What this means is that even though there were not a ton of gay writers writing in the British Empire, I am not at a want for research material because I am looking at the sources that influenced a writer's work instead of only their work. So, I'm not just analyzing what E.M. Forster wrote, I'm reading about what his contemporaries said and thought about topics like homosexuality and colonization, and I'm finding ways that this thinking manifests itself in Forster's writing. In this reading, works like Forster's aren't just artistic creations, they are literary artifacts of a previous era that express how people at that time thought. 

Words like "artifact" may make this project seem stuffy and boring, but when you think about it this assumption is part of a pretty bold thesis that contradicts popular notions of the Artist. In this idea, Artists are not creative, ahistorical people with a higher calling to produce art. Rather, they are deeply indebted to their histories and cultures, so much so that cultural traces and influences can be read in their oeuvre, despite an artist's attempts to exclude them. I am certainly not the first to argue this point, but that does not mean that it is not a point worth arguing. 

Hopefully this post makes humanities research a little clearer. If nothing else, I hope it's clear just how much work I have before me! 

Giving Thanks: Research Edition

So addicting, it's like academic crack. It's crackademic.

I have a confession. I'm addicted to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In case you don't know, The Chronicle is a news source, both in print and online, that reports stories on - what else? - higher education. Stories range from pieces on academic culture, the job market, different things that schools around the nation are doing, and just about everything in between. 

While it's not really intended for undergraduates, I think it is an absolutely fabulous and interesting resource. Also, after working closely with a mentor involved in the same university politics in which The Chronicle takes an interest, I feel somewhat invested in the issues at hand, so why not read about them?

Recently, I've been drawn to the Advice section of the paper. Generally, I hate the content that appears in advice columns. I suppose I'm young and stubborn, but I've always believed that whatever problems I have are best solved by myself, not on the advice of strangers. And given that it's easier to give advice than to take it, there always seems to be an overabundance of advice in these sections, and such advice always seems to be cheap and poorly wrought. (I have similar feelings about self-help books, for the record.)

Upon my most recent glance through the Advice section, one article caught my eye, Rachel Toor's "Reading Like a Graduate Student." I was drawn in by the title alone. "How," I wondered, "does a graduate student read, exactly? Do they annotate extensively? Perhaps they all know that the key to great literature is to read from right to left, instead of left to right like I've been so foolishly doing for so long? Maybe they don't read at all?" So, determined to discover the elusive secrets of graduate-level reading, I clicked on Toor's article.

This was the most ridiculous image of Harold Bloom I could find. I like it.

In Toor's vision, graduate students have been taught to read almost too well. They are overly critical of everything. She applies Harold Bloom's theory about the anxiety of influence when she notes that "overworked and overwhelmed" students are overly critical of the scholarship they read. Toor believes that this excessive criticism stems from the students' efforts to secure a place for themselves in the academy by noting where their predecessors fell short.

Toor isn't calling for an end to scholarly critique. Rather, she laments that graduate students, in their rush to be critical, have stopped appreciating literature - scholarly and otherwise. She closes her article:

I wish there were a way to inculcate in students, as they continue through their graduate studies (and even when they enter the professoriate), the idea of how fortunate we are to be able to spend our lives reading, thinking, and writing, and that much of what we are absorbing is the best that has been said and thought in the world, even if it's not exactly their cup of decaf skim chai latte.

It's scary to come so late to a conversation (again, I think of Bloom's idea of belatedness), but I'd like to remind them that they're lucky to be included. They may not love everything they are reading. But at least they can learn to appreciate the labor taken to get it before them.

I think these points are important, but, more importantly, I think they're just beautiful and hopeful. It's easy to become stressed and overwhelmed to the point that you forget about the big picture. How awesome that we, as scholars, can make a living (or Interim) out of reading "the best that has been said and thought in the world!" How fantastic that we can be "included" in a critical conversation that has probably existed longer than we've even been alive!

It's easy to grow tired with research, to feel like you're making no progress or to become overly critical. But it's important to retain a positive perspective and realize how fortunate we are to be able to do the work we love. Retaining a positive perspective may not be how a graduate student does read, but I believe that perhaps it's a part of how the student should read.

Justifying Research, Pt. 2

Frank Mugisha, 2011 Rober F. Kennedy Human Rights
laureate and executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda

I just read this extraordinary article in The New York Times by Frank Mugisha, the 2011 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights laureate and executive director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, entitled "Gay and Vilified in Uganda."

The article raises some interesting topics for discussion when Mugisha writes, "Many Africans believe that homosexuality is an import from the West, and ironically they invoke religious beliefs and colonial-era laws that are foreign to our continent to persecute us." I love this quote for its subtle indictment of imperial policies that influence sexual politics in (now) postcolonial nations and its exploration of issues of essentialism and sexual identity  Considering how strongly related these topics are to my research, I thought it would be appropriate to share the article on here.

But I think this article is more important than the academic concerns it raises. Mugisha writes:

The right to marry whom we love is far from our minds. Across Africa, the “gay rights” we are fighting for are more stark — the right to life itself. Here, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people suffer brutal attacks, yet cannot report them to the police for fear of additional violence, humiliation, rape or imprisonment at the hands of the authorities. We are expelled from school and denied health care because of our perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. If your boss finds out (or suspects) you are gay, you can be fired immediately.

To me, Mugisha's article is a painful reminder of why I do the research that I do: because I believe that Empire's relationship with sexuality has drastic consequences, consequences that exist even in an era that purports to be "postcolonial." These consequences create a culture that is antagonistic to homosexuals everywhere, particularly in previously colonized nations, as Mugisha so aptly notes. It's easy to forget that the written records we immerse ourselves in are traces of a painful history. It's easy to forget that, often, the violence against homosexuals that we read about in writers like E.M. Forster or Alan Hollinghurst isn't just fictional, but that it's influenced by the material culture from which it comes. This article reminds me not only that we must not forget these facts, but that we must work to change the cultural attitudes that permitted these violent realities. 

How can we continue to allow these atrocities against homosexuals? How can we permit ideologies that villainize homosexuals, despite their various cultural contributions? I have too many questions and too few answers. All I know is that this is something that we cannot allow to continue, and I hope my research makes this point clear. 

Dumb Move, Michigan: Reacting to the Ban on Domestic Partner Benefits

Gov. Rick Snyder (R) bans domestic partner benefits in Michigan this past Thursday.

Let’s take a break from the research blogging for a moment, shall we?

Yesterday, December 22, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed a bill banning state agencies from extending domestic partner benefits (Joe. My. God.). This bill threatens the livelihood of many in Michigan, particularly those same-sex couples who, because of the state’s constitution, can’t be married.

Although the debate on the nature of the bill is unsettled, many believe that it will restrict Michigan’s public university system from extending domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples. Given this threat, many faculty members at the University of Michigan have threatened to leave and join universities where their benefits will be assured.

This legislation is blatantly discriminatory. It is a threat to university workers in same-sex relationships, and it is also a threat to Michigan’s public university system and the state as a whole because it has the potential to trigger a brain drain that would weaken Michigan’s intellectual community. Sonya Alvarado, president of the Eastern Michigan University Federation of Teachers, sees this bill more generally as a threat to academic culture. As she says, “The university is about inclusion. The university is about open discussion. This bill just goes against everything that the university is about” (LGBTQ Nation).

We can’t afford to discriminate like this. In these tough economic times, we can’t afford to create legislation that sends the message to brilliant innovators and academics that they don’t belong because of who they love. And, to mirror Alvarado’s sentiments, we can’t afford to create an academic climate built on exclusion and censorship. These principles prevent the sort of scholarship that the world needs because they are absolutely antithetical to what is so great about the academy in the first place: the freedom to take risks, innovate, and discuss difficult topics, regardless of who you are or from where you come.

While I don’t teach, work, or even live in Michigan, I can’t help but to feel like such legislation is a threat against my work. It sends a message that members of the LGBTQ community are minor figures compared to members of the heterosexual community. Given this discriminatory hierarchy, why would anyone bother researching queer issues? This legislation censors the issue before it can ever be discussed.

And given the negative message that this legislation sends about queer issues, it also creates a negative, oppressive culture around the LGBTQ community in general. It is against this oppressive culture that I want to set my research, whether I see it in contemporary America or imperial Britain.

Justifying Research, Pt. 1

The sun never sets on the British Empire: At some point in history, all of these nations in red
were part of the British Empire. Kind of amazing, right?

Frequently – and unsurprisingly – researchers are asked to justify their research. For those in the humanities, this task can be particularly difficult. It’s rare that humanities research will produce a tangible product that will improve life somehow, whereas it’s much easier to think of research in the hard sciences as a process with concrete results applicable to everyday problems. All of this is not to say that research in the humanities is not without results or benefits, merely that both can be a little difficult to see sometimes.

Besides my love of research (and need of an Interim credit), why am I doing this research? Put differently, why should this research be done? What benefits does it yield? As I see it, there are a number of reasons why this research is valuable. Hopefully, I can hash out some of the bigger reasons for you here.[1]

Strike a Pose: Britannia

The colonial project is frequently discussed as an economic one. In this definition, such-and-such an explorer came to such-and-such a land, (re)peopled it, established a business, and linked the colonizing nation to the colony economically. This overly simplistic definition is a great reduction of colonial dynamics because it ignores the imperial side of colonial policy.  In “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes,” Engseng Ho articulates this division in colonial policy through his definitions of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” He says that colonialism is the physical engagement between native and colonizer, while “imperialism” “refers to foreign domination, without the necessity of presence or possession, over expansive, transnational spaces – and many places.” Colonialism is physical, while imperialism is more ideological. They are related projects, and they both occur in the British colonial project.[2]

Scholarship exists on the imperial dynamics in the British colonial project. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reads texts, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as artifacts containing British imperial ideologies. He argues that imperial culture is so pervasive, both in England and its colonies, that it permeates the English novel and is promulgated by it. In Said’s words, the British novels from this era are caught in “the imperial process of which they [are] manifestly and unconcealedly a part.” Anne McClintock also attempts to illuminate the process of imperialism in her work, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. McClintock reads imperialism as an ideological process that starts in the Victorian home and affects Victorian notions of gender, class, race, nation, and just about everything in between. She states, “imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere,” but instead it’s a process and ideological system that flourished in England and influenced nearly every aspect of Victorian identity. These scholars differ on where and how they see imperialism functioning – Said argues that it is a product of the British novel while McClintock ties it more closely to the Victorian household – but that they agree that there is an ideological character to the colonial contest points to an imperial project in progress.

Exploring the imperial dynamics at work in the colonial project is, I believe, an extremely important task for postcolonial scholars. It allows scholars to theorize a more complete picture of Empire, and in doing so it also allows them to begin to understand the historical and political situations for contemporary postcolonial nations. For this reason, works like Said’s and McClintock’s are invaluable. At the same time, contemporary postcolonial criticism is lacking. The rise of queer theory has shown the importance of sexuality in identity politics. If scholars want to present a complete picture of Empire and the ideology that supports it, then they should also pay attention to Empire’s relationship to sexuality. Scholarship that has been done in this area has focused largely on heterosexuality and on the colonized perspective (I'm looking at you, McClintock and Stoler). My research, in contrast, hopes to illustrate imperial ideology’s stance on homosexuality by showing how it influenced the lives of gay British men, men politically unidentified with the colonized.

Besides providing a model for understanding Empire, I hope this project also provides a theory for understanding how minority groups, specifically those constructed around sexual identity, lived as countercultures in a culture that excluded them. I also hope this project provides some ways for understanding how these minority groups internalize ideology, particularly ideology that posits them as an undesirable Other.

These are just a few of the reasons my research is academically profitable. In Culture and Imperialism, Said also brings up a few points that link the development of imperialism with the development of modernism. This would be an interesting relationship to explore further, and I am sure that scholarship on this relationship would also benefit from my research. I have yet to fully develop this idea for myself, but I am certain that reasons like this will continue to arise and lend merit to the work I am doing, even though I cannot see the consequences of my research quite yet.

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[1] Including all the reasons for doing this research in this one post made it kind of lengthy, so I decided to divide it into two posts: this one will discuss the academic and theoretical reasons why I think this research is important, while the next will discuss more pressing reasons for doing this research.

[2] As a small aside, colonialism does not necessitate imperialism, just as imperialism does not necessitate colonialism. In fact, Ho’s paper attests to this fact; he investigates dynamics in US/Middle Eastern relations where no colonial structures exist.

Some Research Background: How I Got Here

Given the brief intro I gave in my last post, I figured I would use this update to lay out some of the reasons why I’m here. With that in mind, I’ll drop the exposition to start an exposition of another sort.

This is E.M. Forster. As you can see, he's a
pensive man. 

This research is not beginning, it began. In fact, it began somewhat unexpectedly last spring (2011) in a survey course I took, Survey of Later English Literature, when we read E.M. Forster’s short story, “The Other Boat.” In the story, Lionel, a British imperialist, engages in a homosexual relationship with Cocoanut, a racially ambiguous lower caste, in transit on a ship to India. The story ends when Lionel murders Cocoanut and then commits suicide by jumping off the boat into the ocean.

I was so taken with this story. The subject was a risqué one, but it was more than just a story about a shocking homosexual encounter, it was stunningly sad for such a short piece. I knew instantly I had to write about it, and I did. But once I finished my paper, I couldn’t help but feel like it was incomplete. I felt like there was more to dig out from Forster’s words, like the story I wanted to tell, the story of/in Forster’s story, was missing something.

After the semester ended, I flew to Kansas to work at Kansas State University, where I had received a research grant to develop a project of my choosing. I had planned to research trauma narratives, but when I met with my advisor, Dr. Donna Potts, I told her I couldn’t. I remembered reading “The Other Boat,” and I was intrigued by the homosexual and colonial dynamics in that story. These dynamics, I told her, were what I wanted to study. And I did.

Thanks for the grant, K-State.

I learned a few things from my time in Kansas. First, I learned how much I love doing research. I love the independence that comes with it – choosing a topic, planning your work hours, deciding where you want to work – and I love the overwhelming feeling of accomplishment that comes with doing something good or discovering something exciting (such discoveries, I quickly realized, are rare, but that makes them all the more incredible). I also learned how I do research. Everyone researches differently, which is great, but it can be difficult to figure out how you research if there is no clear model. Some people need offices with sporadic bursts of reading and writing, but, personally, I work best outside of formal environments (I love reading in the laundry room or writing in coffee shops) for sustained periods of time. Finally, I learned a great deal about the British Empire at the end of the 19^th Century/early 20^th Century, and I learned a lot about this empire’s relationship to male homosexuality.

When I saw the opportunity to do research during Interim, I knew not only that I wanted to take it but also what I wanted to research: literary representations of male homosexuality in the British Empire from c.1880-1947. Research is a sustained process in a constant state of revision. I am happy this interest has sustained for what is almost ¾ of a year now, and looking back I see how I improved and where I need improvement. From the school semester to my summer in Kansas, my material circumstances improved dramatically. I gained more time, access to a larger textual database, and more money; all of these gains helped me to focus more exclusively on my research*. Two other improvements include my constant accumulation of knowledge on the subject and my ability to more tightly focus my research questions and goals. This latter point is extremely important. I’m not doing the same work I began doing (even though I kind of am). I’ve been able to develop my ideas and articulate my questions in better ways so that I can get clearer results. For example, over the summer I read a wide range of texts from different periods, genres, authors, and nations. This sort of breadth makes for fascinating work, but it can prevent good, nuanced, culturally specific scholarship, which is what I'm after. Now, I am focusing my project on primary texts from a specific period. Doing so offers new possibilities about the questions I can ask and the answers I can get. Hopefully, it means that both are better.

I am beyond excited to resume this project this Interim. I have no clue where I will be when the month ends, but it will be a thrill to find out. I will be incredibly surprised if, at the end of the month, I come to a point where I think this project has finally ended…but I would be more surprised if I would ever want it to. 

*And yes, this is a subtle hint to pay me, dear reader.

Welcome!

Just look at the current queen, Queen Elizabeth II. She's anachronistic to my
present period of study, but she sure looks fabulous.

Greetings, Bloggerverse!

I simply wanted to make a quick post to welcome you to my blog. This January, I will be using this blog to document my research process (as well as hopefully some other things) as I investigate the intersection between queer theory and postcolonial theory by looking at the work of gay writers in floruit during the height of the British Empire.

It's sure to be a gay time (pun intended), and I hope you continue to read while I continue to learn!