Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
Michel Foucault vs. The Victorians
Should sexy talk and sexy acts always be hidden behind closed doors? In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that a society’s rules for discussing “taboo” topics shed light on how we are controlled by the capitalist patriarchy. If only those in power are given a voice, then “non-normative” ways of being are silenced. Erased. Kaput. Dunzo.
Sex wasn’t such a big deal to folks in the 17th and early 18th centuries. (Think Ben Franklin and the French courtesans.) But then the European monarchies lost their power, and the decadent ways that came with that power.
And when that happened, the upper middle class—a.k.a. the Victorian bourgeoisie—became the new Big (Wo)Men on Campus. Wanting to distinguish themselves from the previous generation of rulers, these dudes and dudettes distanced themselves from all the trappings of the old aristocracy.
So while the then-Old Fogies were fine with going to Funkytown, the Victorians covered up from head to toe. They decided the “in” thing would be to prude it up. They locked their bedroom doors and stopped talking about sex.
Well, not completely.
Foucault points out that in the jails, mental institutions, and the halls of science you could still talk about sex. Aha: this is how the abnormal was born. See, any sexual behavior other than man + woman + locked bedroom = baby now supposedly belonged in brothels, jails, research hospitals, or insane asylums.
What was to be done? How would we save millions from being relegated to the category of “abnormal”, and thereby denied the basic rights of other humans? It’s Sigmund Freud to the rescue, y’all. Sort of.
Foucault tells us that Freud was the guy who finally got people talking about sex. So, he effectively threw open the door to our Victorian imprisonment. Dramatic, no?
But if we read Foucault carefully, we know that to talk about something (especially in the very public manner that Freud did) is to make a grab for social power. To control the conversation about something is to control the thing itself, Mr. Foucault would say.
So, while Sigmund Freud did us all a solid by shattering the Victorian silence around sex, he’s still a white man of means and privilege. Which means that, by “claiming” the conversation about sex, he’s still silencing a lot of other important voices.
Like those of poor people, queer people, and people of color, to name just a few.
Sadly, Freud’s “breakthrough” ushered in an era where the “battle of the sexes” revolved around penis power and penis envy. And a lot of white therapists telling the women (and other oppressed groups) who laid on their couches that they were crazy just because they were different.
Le sigh.
Judith Butler vs. Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan
Freud’s work suggests that a man’s penis is a symbol of power, what he called the phallus. And women want men because they want that power-plaything for themselves (yep, he’s talking about penis envy here). Jacques Lacan, yet another groovy French guy, took this idea a bit further.
He said a man can actually obtain the phallus as long as there is a woman around to be the phallus—to serve as a place-holder, where the penis goes. Um, what? Compose yourselves, please. Now, let’s try to think about this rationally.
You might say that Lacan was arguing that a gun has no power unless it has something to hit. Until the gun fires, it’s only a symbol of power. The target is the gun’s whole reason for existing, in a way.
So, what’s a penis if there’s no woman to put it in? Ugh. To rephrase this question in a less vulgar way, we might say: what’s oppression without the oppressed?
But then Butler steps in with her groundbreaking work, Gender Trouble. And she’s all, Hang on fellas. You guys got issues. While she appreciates these theorists’ focus on power, she’s totally fed up with the male perspective; her work is all about casting the male (and his penis) out of the spotlight of our conversations about gender and sexuality.
Butler believes you’d have to be crazy to define women as simply the inverse of men: as not-men, or not-masculine. That’s straight-up sexist (and heterosexist), she says. Not to mention the fact that these categories of men and women are totally made-up anyway; real gender performances are so much more fluid and complicated than that, she goes on to say.
But there are rifts between Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas, too.
Freud’s whole idea of the "Oedipus Complex" claims that boys feel like they are in competition with their fathers for power. As a result, they are attracted to their own darling mothers. But wait a second, says Lacan.
Lacan believes that if the mother is the real source of the phallus—i.e., of men’s power—then aren’t all heterosexual men actually attracted to the phallus? Sounds pretty gay, right? Butler would say: yes.
Bahaha. If you’re starting to get confused, then queer theory has worked its magic on you. It’s supposed to unsettle what you think you know about yourself and your world. This is the kind of “trouble” Butler uncovers.
Butler believes we all have contradictions in our gender identities and hidden desires that we try to mask when we go out into the big, bad world. In her mind, we perform gender roles in order to cover up our anxieties concerning these desires.
So really, gender’s just a mechanism for covering up the truth, a little blue pill to palliate our anxieties. But feeling boxed in by gender roles can drive anyone crazy. Catch-22 much?
Whew, what an epic bout of intellectuals vs. intellectuals. Intermission please.
Eve Sedgwick vs. The Closet
Come out, come out, wherever you are… Using Foucault and Butler as guides, Eve Sedgwick argues that we all want to be tattle tales. Except the people we want to tell on are ourselves. Huh?
Allow us to explain. Sedgwick thinks that when we reveal secrets about ourselves, we perform a coming out. And boy does it feel good to breathe that sweet, sweet air of freedom.
See, silences are what cover over our well-kept secrets. And what we don’t talk about influences us just as much as what we do talk about. As you may have noticed, Sedgwick is another one of those queer theorists who’s obsessed with examining the Victorians and their stuffy prudishness.
And she thinks that by coining the term homosexual, the Victorians created space for two—and only two—options for sexual expression.
Either you do it with men or you do it with women. You are either abnormal or normal. You can fit into one and only one category. Sounds terribly restrictive, doesn’t it? So Eve Darling wants us to kick these categories to the curb in favor of talking about anything and everything all the time.
Sedgwick also points out that the “gay” and “straight” categories were made by men, for men, to categorize men, men men men men men. Sorry, we got a little carried away there. But really: when we call someone gay, we mostly think of a gay man, right?
A woman who likes women is called a lesbian; far fewer people use the phrase “gay woman.” Once again, then, all these categories make us feel like women, and women who are attracted to women, are only talked about with respect to men, only defined in opposition to men.
And thatz not okay.
In sum: hard and fast categories are not good. Neither are binaries. So, Sedgwick wants us to think of queer sexuality as a third sex. With this idea, we are also again reminded of how interconnected gender/sex and sexuality seem to be. (Why do you think that is, Shmoopers?)
Now, back to that whole issue of the closet. The closet is a place where we hide certain aspects of ourselves while performing a pretty little act for other people. And when one decides to “come out” of the closet—i.e., to declare one’s self gay, or transsexual, or any “non-normative” thing—this is one of the biggest performances of all.
Since society has worked so hard to shut us all up, talking about risqué topics is hard work. But Sedgwick suggests there is not such thing as stable sexual categories. We don’t just “come out” as our true selves; our “true” selves are always changing, and guess what? Saying “I’m here, I’m queer, I’m real” is just as much of an identity performance as anything else.
Ouch. Our heads hurt. Guess there’s no easy way out of this one; us people are pretty complicated beings.