hunter of justice

Queer and (in the) country

Following is an interview in Wiretap magazine
with Mary Gray, author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, a new book on rural gay life. The author, a professor in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, is doing readings this fall in New York, DC, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other locations; full schedule and details are here. Although not about legal issues,the discussion opens a window onto an aspect of lgbt political and social life about which little is known.

The advice given to queer and questioning youth by gay rights icon Harvey Milk was simple: Move to the nearest city. Why is this statement a disservice to queer rural youth?

This sentiment effectively tells rural LGBTQ-identifying youth they can't be happily queer right where they are and should expect -- perhaps deserve -- hostility if they do stay in their communities.

Many of the youth I met struggled with reconciling the deep connection or pride they feel for their hometowns with the popular representation of their communities as backward, ignorant and unlivable -- not just for queer folks, but for anyone with taste or class. They feel they're not supposed to see their communities as viable options, and are being told they need to choose between being queerly out of place in the country and moving to a big city to find legitimate visibility.

How does class affect the lives of LGBTQ folks in these areas?

Working class and poor rural communities require citizen solidarity to weather the neglect and marginalization from the nation-state. In this environment, LGBTQ people must be seen primarily as "locals" and risk too much advocating for their concerns as queer folks because familiarity, not difference, ensures one's access to basic necessities.

Beyond churches, there are few resources available in rural communities to cover these basics should one's family be unable or unwilling to provide them. The fact that rural queer youth feel they have to choose speaks to the assumption that queerness not only resides in urban settings, but only comes with social and economic mobility.

According to the 2000 Census, rural America is 82 percent white. How do queer people of color navigate their personal and political alliances in a space of overlapping marginalization?

Queer youth of color are doubly estranged and, if they openly identify as queer, have more to risk. While parallels drawn by white peers or allies between the civil rights and LGBTQ rights movements might help young people of color feel more connected to LGBTQ activism, this uncritical argument also creates dissonance. As one young African American man named Brandon noted, he could see the connections between the two movements, but ultimately felt a greater responsibility to be a leader among students of color because that's where his community was.

For Brandon, the internet introduced another layer to racial divisions. He went online to find other bi- or gay-identifying men in his region and found almost exclusively white men, some of whom spoke about their desire in ways that struck Brandon as incredibly racist. While Brandon still felt the internet was an important part of allowing him to feel his desire for other men was normal, it also demonstrated how hard it would be for him to synthesize his racial and sexual identities.

How is the internet used by rural queer youth to shape or reinforce one's own queer identification?

The internet's value to rural queer youth identification can't be understated, but its impact cuts both ways. The internet offers an opportunity to explore queer identifications and search for other youth in the area, but it also make things more difficult by homogenizing what LGBTQ life and people are like and erasing the rural from the picture of queer life.

The internet also gives ideas for organizing politically that have no viability in rural communities. A door-to-door voter registration drive for LGBTQ issues won't work in a place where people don't see LGBTQ issues as a local concern.

What should national organizations do to re-center rural queer youth needs in the larger gay rights movement?

We need to re-examine our assumption that rural places are endemically hostile to queer folks. The frequency of hate crimes in cities should signal to us that rural and urban spaces are differently [but] not more or less violent to queer people. Without rural communities and their LGBTQ constituents, national and statewide advocacy groups will be unable to advance basic civil rights issues on a national scale.

Assuming LGBTQ life necessarily improves through securing the right to marry without equally valuing, and in rural communities prioritizing, accessible LGBTQ-specific healthcare and job protections will do very little to change the lives of working class and poor rural LGBTQ youth. Anyone who thinks rural queer kids are just a wedding ring away from full citizenship and equality hasn't spent time looking for healthcare or a living wage in rural Appalachia.

Your research was rooted in uncovering best practices for rural queer youth organizing. What strategies did you find?

The importance of coalitional politics in rural communities and the need to prioritize the "localness" of an issue is crucial. In some cases, gay-straight alliances will work, but human dignity student clubs that address homophobia alongside other discrimination may work better to build community support. The argument that non-LGBTQ folks should care about LGBTQ issues like marriage equality because it's "the right thing to do" misses the complicated meaning of marriage and families to people who depend on those institutions for both material and symbolic support.

For more information, visit:

http://queercountry.fromthesquare.org/

Important new book on gay marriage

Lee Badgett's new book When Gay People Get Married is out soon from NYU Press; you can order it now.  Here's the description:

In order to find out the impact of same-sex marriage, M. V. Lee Badgett traveled to a land where it has been legal for same-sex couples to marry since 2001: the Netherlands. Badgett interviews gay couples to find out how this step has affected their lives. We learn about the often surprising changes to their relationships, the reactions of their families, and work colleagues. Moreover, Badgett is interested in the ways that the institution itself has been altered for the larger society. How has the concept of marriage changed? When Gay People Get Married gives readers a primer on the current state of the same-sex marriage debate, and a new way of framing the issue that provides valuable new insights into the political, social, and personal stakes involved.

The experiences of other countries and these pioneering American states serve as a crystal ball as we grapple with this polarizing issue in the American context. The evidence shows both that marriage changes gay people more than gay people change marriage, and that it is the most liberal countries and states making the first move to recognize gay couples. In the end, Badgett compellingly shows that allowing gay couples to marry does not destroy the institution of marriage and that many gay couples do benefit, in expected as well as surprising ways, from the legal, social, and political rights that the institution offers.

Porn in 19th century NYC

Kudos to Donna Dennis (Rutgers-Newark) whose book on 19th century erotica snared a review in the April 5 NY Times Sunday book review section. Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York describes how, by the 1840's, "flash weeklies" had appeared in the city, catering to a sexually cosmopolitan audience.

Here's an excerpt:

Dennis traces the ways in which provocative material was passed off as edifying, like the guides to the city’s prostitutes that purported to steer unknowing rubes away from their clutches. And she also notes that prohibitions of one sort of racy material only led to another innovation, often more popular than the first. From closer restrictions on sexually explicit writing came the success, in the mid-19th century, of the novelist George Thompson, who combined graphically violent scenes set in urban dystopias with coy peekaboo references to sex. Thompson stopped short of describing those scenes but encouraged the reader to imagine them, while mocking the authorities for compelling him to draw the curtain.

New book on conservative cause lawyering

The following review in the Law and Politics Book Review describes Ann Southworth’s LAWYERS OF THE RIGHT: PROFESSIONALIZING THE CONSERVATIVE COALITION, published late last year by the University of Chicago Press.  Southworth is a member of the founding faculty at UC-Irvine Law.  The review was written by Joshua Wilson of the Government Department at John Jay College.

...As the title suggests, Southworth looks at issues related to both infrastructure development as well as the “conservative coalition’s” use of litigation as a political tool. The book’s main task, however, is to describe who the various lawyers within the broader conservative coalition are (e.g. where they went to school, their socio-economic status, what motivates their work, and so on), as well as what connects and separates the various groups that these lawyers represent and to which they belong. ....

[The book] delv[es] into the descriptive details that open the “window into the world of lawyers for conservative causes and probes the little discussed cultural conflict among them” (p.1). Southworth begins this section by asking “whether lawyers of the conservative coalition are likely to contribute to mutual understanding and cooperation within the alliance or whether disagreements and dissimilarities among them make them unlikely to build consensus” (p.42). The short answer to this question is that the lawyers, like the constituencies they represent, are divided by social space and policy goals.

Chapters Three and Four use data about law schools attended, practice location and setting, religion, funding sources, motivation, and professional identity to illustrate the social differences between the various groups of lawyers. Chapter Five begins by continuing this demographic data argument by applying generational grouping to the various lawyers, but it also transitions to investigating other potential substantive or issue-based bridges for the gaps exposed thus far. [For example], the disharmonies around the specifics regarding the desire to reshape the Federal bench and other issue-items, as well as the shared “dissatisfaction with what they viewed as the pillars of the liberal legal establishment” were quite compelling (p.116).

Chapter Six is possibly the most interesting in the book. The data from the preceding three chapters expose multiple rifts that lead one to question the usefulness of collectively identifying the groups as being part of a conservative coalition or movement. In the words of one interviewee, “you quickly find out that [conservative public interest law groups] are really autonomous and inward looking. And there’s not a lot of [collaboration]” (p.121). Chapter Six, however, ... provides the support for the claim that these groups are still part of a common movement.

Gender war in Iraq

From The Guardian:

Women [in Iraq] are being killed simply for being women," says Nadje Al-Ali when I meet her at her home in south London. "In Basra in 2008 a reported 133 women were killed for not 'being Islamic' enough. And these are only the ones that made it to be officially counted. I saw the police photos - they were horrific."

Al-Ali's new book, What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq, analyses how Iraqi women have fared since the US invasion of March 2003. The news, unsurprisingly, is grim. Written with the political scientist Nicola Pratt, the book is based on interviews with 120 women, including Iraqi women's rights activists, NGO workers and international policymakers. The climate that they describe in Iraq is one of lawless "hyper-patriarchy", and with this evidence in tow, Al-Ali and Pratt take aim at a wide range of targets. These include the occupying powers, extremist Islamist militias, Iraqi leaders and "imperialist feminists" (those who claim solidarity with women from developing countries while stereotyping their cultures as barbaric).

Al-Ali, 42, is a second-generation Iraqi immigrant whose extended family has seen the sharpest end of both Saddam Hussein's regime and the post-invasion chaos. An established author and academic at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she is staunchly "anti-imperialist and anti-war" but finds herself regularly at odds with some of her natural allies, who object to her speaking out against Iraqi resistance fighters. Still, Al-Ali believes it's important to take this stance. "A significant proportion of Iraqi groups engaged in armed resistance against the occupation are also harassing, intimidating and even murdering ordinary Iraqis," she says, "particularly women and vulnerable groups."

In her book she highlights the fact that, as a result of consecutive wars, the Iraqi population is now disproportionately female - with some estimates putting the ratio of women to men at 65/35. There are 300,000 impoverished widows in Baghdad alone, forced to run their households on two hours of electricity a day. As early as July 2003 a Human Rights Watch report highlighted "the vulnerability of women and girls to sexual violence and abduction", and kidnaps that target women (often related to sex trafficking) have increased since the start of the war, as have female suicide rates and honour killings.

According to Al-Ali's interviewees, women are being bullied back into the home. The fact that George W Bush depicted the invasion of Iraq as a path to women's empowerment makes the situation even more outrageous. In her book, Al-Ali meticulously explains how Condoleezza Rice and Laura Bush were deployed to reassure the world that the US was concerned with women's liberation - Laura Bush being wheeled out for photo-opportunities with US organisations such as Women for Free Iraq.

Al-Ali feels that the cynical use of the women's rights discourse by the US has also led to a backlash against feminist activists in Iraq, who can be easily undermined, or even vilified, by being accused of supporting an American agenda.

Does she see the establishment of a 25% quota for women in the Iraqi parliament as a sign of progress? "Yes, but who are the 25% in practice? They are the sisters, daughters and wives of the male conservative leaders. They've no political background and when there's a vote they look around to see what the men are doing before they lift their hands. However, yes it is a positive because it has allowed six to eight secular women's rights activists into parliament who wouldn't have got in otherwise."

Tomes from (way) back in the day

From Bitch Magazine, a guide to six feminist classics - and why they're worth tracking down -

In the 1976 cross-country race film The Gumball Rally, the late, great Raul Julia rips off his rearview mirror and tosses it over his shoulder, saying “What’s behind me is not important.”

He didn’t win the race.

Maybe that’s because what’s behind us actually is important. Feminist literature and history did not spring fully formed from Betty Friedan’s and Naomi Wolf’s pens and word processors; they have had long, complex, and often buried lives. The six works profiled here, ranging from once-famous titles to all-but-unknown works, were dead-on portraits of the state of women when they were written in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, but they still resonate with readers today. Themes like race and the women’s movement, gender and identity, and body politics are evergreen; discussions of these topics still roil in books, on blogs, and in person. And while mainstream feminism may not be grappling with issues like separatism these days, the passion, politics, anger, and truth contained in these books can inspire us to burn as brightly as these authors did.

Sontag at 16: "I intend to do everything"

“… I killed the afternoon at a badly-done student production of three one-acts at Cal Hall, and then came by the bookstore at 5:30. We walked over to her room  [where I read the first few chapters of Steppenwolf]...[at 4 a.m.:] “My concept of sexuality is so altered—Thank god!—bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual—and an honest rejection of the—yes—perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the ‘right person’ comes along—the whole ban on pure physical sensation without love, on promiscuity. …

“I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me, and the last thing I want to do is worship knowledge. … I intend to do everything … to have one way of evaluating experience—does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful—I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere. I shall involve myself wholly … everything matters! The only thing I resign is the power to resign, to retreat: the acceptance of sameness and the intellect. I am alive … I am beautiful … what else is there?” --

-- Written in May 1949

More, from Jonathan Liu's review of Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963, the first of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals, in the New York Observer:

* * * The lasting impression on the reader * * * is of Sontag’s prodigious self-awareness. The rest of us, in comparison, barely know who we are. Whether it’s the teenage provincial attempting Rilke and Gide for the first time (“Look back on the 16 years. … Could be better: more erudition, perhaps, but it’s unreasonable to expect much more emotional maturity than I have at this point”) or the semi-prominent 29-year-old divorcée aphorizing personal failures (“Premature pliability, agreeableness, so that the underlying stubbornness is never touched, accounts for 80% of my notorious flirtatiousness, seductiveness”), Sontag’s ability to blueprint the analytic and affective machinery turning in her own mind is brilliant in the strict gemological sense—all bottomless clarity and refracting facets.

But despite the cross-eyed intensity of its inward gaze, each page sopping with the intimacy of preternatural self-knowledge, Reborn is resolutely not autobiography, of either the personal or intellectual sort. The most perilous decision of Sontag’s early adulthood—to marry the sociologist Philip Rieff after a 10-day courtship at the age of 17—occasions a yawning narrative lacuna: One moment, the reader is wrapped around tumultuous romances with fiery women; the next, “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.” Soon her son is born (David Rieff, editor of these journals), and Sontag begins raging artfully against the confines of a marriage that’s never explained.

Heteroflexibility: the fluidity of women's sexuality

Girl with Pen

Jacqueline Hudak

Sexual politics are in a time of huge transition – think Ellen and Portia – and still, there is simply no public cultural consciousness about the concept of “sexual fluidity.” A well-crafted recent book by Lisa Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire (Harvard University Press), takes another step toward putting it on the map.

While perhaps not yet a public story, the notion of women’s sexual fluidity is certainly coursing through the zeitgeist. I was in the midst of writing this post on Diamond’s book when I decided to take a break and see Woody Allen’s new film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And there it was, right there on the big screen: sexual fluidity, and all the attendant complexities.

In one scene, Scarlet Johanssen’s character Cristina, is relating the complicated story of her relationship with Maria Elena, who happens to be her lover’s ex-wife. Her friends Vicky and Doug listen intently. As Cristina pauses, Doug rushes to ask, “So, what, you mean you’re a bisexual?” To which Christina replies, with some discomfort, “Oh, I’m not really into those categories.”

Not into those categories indeed.

Diamond, a Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, has conducted, to date, the only detailed longitudinal study of women’s same gender attractions. She interviewed nearly one hundred young women at two year intervals over a period of ten years about their relationships and desires and found that, for women, love and desire are not rigidly lesbian or heterosexual. By the 10th year of her study, two-thirds of the women had changed their identity label at least once.

The notion of "sexual fluidity" contradicts the dominant cultural story about sexuality—the idea that you are one thing or another, but rarely both. That story shapes our ideas about sexual orientation as fixed in early adulthood and remaining static throughout a lifetime. But as Diamond so eloquently points out, for women, this has not been the case.

One of the many things I loved about this book was the depth and analysis of research that Diamond amassed. Having done research on this topic myself, I was aware that there was a lot of data around that supported a more fluid conception of sexuality for women – Kinsey, Adrienne Rich, and the ‘erotic plasticity’ model in 2000, to name a few. The only problem was, it didn’t conform to the (male) sexual standard. Since genital sex is not necessarily how women construct their sexual identities, the sexual experiences of women have been invisible, or somehow deviant from the (male) norm. My friends, we have been called ‘outliers.’