Showing papers in "GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in 2000"

How to do the history of male homosexuality

Abstract: The history of sexuality is now such a respectable academic discipline, or at least such an established one, that its practitioners no longer feel much pressure to defend the enterprise—to rescue it from suspicions of being a palpable absurdity. Once upon a time, the very phrase “the history of sexuality” sounded like a contradiction in terms: how, after all, could sexuality have a history? Nowadays, by contrast, we are so accustomed to the notion that sexuality does indeed have a history that we do not often ask ourselves what kind of history sexuality has. If such questions do come up, they get dealt with cursorily, in the course of the methodological throat clearing that historians ritually perform in the opening paragraphs of scholarly articles. Recently, this exercise has tended to include a more or less obligatory reference to the trouble once caused to historians, long long ago in a country far far away, by theorists who had argued that sexuality was socially constructed—an intriguing idea in its time and place, or so we are reassuringly told, but one that was taken to outlandish extremes and that no one much credits any longer.1 With the disruptive potential of these metahistorical questions safely relegated to the past, the historian of sexuality can get down, or get back, to the business at hand. But this new consensus, and the sense of theoretical closure that accompanies it, is premature. I believe that it is more useful than ever to ask how sexuality can have a history. The point of such a question, to be sure, is no longer to register the questioner’s skepticism and incredulity (as if to say, “How on earth could such a thing be possible?”) but to inquire more closely into the modalities of historical being that sexuality possesses: to ask how exactly—in what terms, by virtue of what temporality, in which of its dimensions or aspects—sexuality does have a history. That question, of course, has already been answered in a number of ways, each of them manifesting a different strategy for articulating the relation between

"Unnatural Acts" in Nature: The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals

Abstract: Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth. . . . In the United States, storytelling about nature, whatever problematic category that is, remains an important practice for forging and expressing basic meanings. . . . A recent visit to the San Diego Zoo confirmed my conviction that people reaffirm many of their beliefs about each other and about what kind of planet the earth can be by telling each other what they think they are seeing as they watch the animals. —Donna Haraway

The Evidence of Felt Intuition: Minority Experience, Everyday Life, and Critical Speculative Knowledge

Abstract: I don’t travel much, but as my acquaintances all know, I like to make much of my travels. Lately in particular, I’ve tried to mine my relatively meager experience along these lines for possible critical insight into the meanings of identity, citizenship, and U.S. nationality.1 These efforts represent an undertaking that is only just beginning; and yet, in some ways, it has been going on for a long time. For instance, I remember a journey I took during the 1985 – 86 academic year (needless to say, that’s the way I measure time—in academic years), a journey from Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to visit my boyfriend, Thom Freedman, back to Ithaca, New York, where I was finishing my graduate coursework. Actually, to be precise, the leg of the journey that concerns me here took me only from Madison to Syracuse, as it entailed travel by rail, and Ithaca then had—and, as far as I know, still has—no train station; I would in Syracuse either be picked up by a car-owning friend from Ithaca or transfer to a bus in order to finish my route, depending on the availability of friends with cars.

Age Preferences among Gay and Bisexual Men

Abstract: One of the fundamental questions of sexuality research is how erotic attraction arises across the social fault lines of gender, age, and kinship. The social promotion and institutionalization of sexual relations between (some) men and (some) women are the universal prerequisites of heterosexual reproduction, but they are only starting points in understanding how eroticism comes about among different classes of people and how these attractions are turned into socially recognized categories. While traditional conceptions of sexuality in Western societies have tended to rely on a semiotic binary distinguishing “the” normative heterosexual family from other forms of sexuality that “deviate” from it, cumulative research in anthropology, history, and sociology—and, more particularly, research influenced by feminism, gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, social constructionism, and poststructuralism— has demonstrated just how ethnocentric and limited these widely held conceptions are. The variation among heterosexual family forms is immense,1 and they, as well as alternative sexual formations, are socially patterned after basic categories of gender, age, kinship, and, in complex societies, race and class. In many societies documented by anthropologists and historians, gender is not the sole or even the overriding source of erotic difference. In societies characterized by strong fraternal interest groups, men may exercise control over women’s bodies and also assume sexual rights over younger, subordinate males in hierarchical, military, age-graded, or mentor-acolyte relationships.2 Authority, rather than gender per se, may be the most salient signifier of sexual practice. Similarly, kinship codes may generate a system of desire and affiliation that both creates and supersedes gender: there are Melanesian, Australian, and Amazonian examples of same-sex bonding that follow the same lineaments of clan exogamy as their heterosexual counterparts.3 Kinship rules governing incest and the union of members of appropriate clans are more dominant than gender in these instances.

Surface Tensions: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in Contemporary Taiwan

Abstract: It is probably impossible to think about the English term homosexuality in a contemporary context without addressing at some point the shadowy enclosure of “the closet”; in Taipei’s tongzhi activist and academic circles it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the presence of “the mask.”1 While it would be difficult to argue simply that the mask operates in Taiwan where the closet does in Europe, the United States, and Australia—since, for one thing, the language of the homosexual closet [ yigui ] coexists with and interpenetrates that of the mask [mianju] in Taiwan—I nevertheless hope to hold the tropes analytically distinct to a certain degree.2 This essay, then, considers the mask and the closet and is particularly concerned with some specific questions, which include the following: If the closet is organized around an irresolvable tension between secrecy and disclosure, how does the mask operate in relation to these terms? Is it possible that the mask has other, different investments instead of or alongside them? What perverse relationships might there be between the tongzhi mask and the idea of tongzhi “identity”? What kind of subject and what kind of “homosexuality” are projected by the trope of the tongzhi mask in its various deployments? My project is to chart some of the logics of the tongxinglian/tongzhi mask, not necessarily in decisive distinction to those of the homosexual closet, but nevertheless to take account of the mask’s cultural and historical specificity. I am aided in these speculations by a consideration of Ta-wei Chi’s 1995 novella The Membranes, which appears in the final section of this essay as a text inhabited by a logic and a subject analogous to those suggested by the mask.

Eternal Flame: State Formation, Deviant Architecture, and the Monumentality of Same-Sex Eroticism in the Roman d'Eneas

Abstract: This essay will examine allegories of state formation in the Roman d’Eneas (c. 1160–65), an anonymous Anglo-Norman “translation” [translatio] of Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the earliest examples of vernacular romance, and a precursor to the modern novel.1 I will show that the Eneas uses rhetorical, narrative, and allegorical strategies to consolidate power in an incorporated, patriarchal, and dynastic model of the state and, as its corollary, a procreative, phallocentric, and heteronormative sexual regime.2 The allegorical production of the polity suggests, on the one hand, a coherent system of rigidly constructed, multiply articulated levels of meaning in which timeless truths of political order are predicated through hypostatized metaphors. But on the other hand, the polysemic configuration of allegorical meaning might be understood to repudiate absolute structure and point instead to a multiplicity of possible semantic and phantasmic investments and to the potential disruption of metaphors of power through an anarchic or disordered production of political and sexual meaning “otherwise.”3 Gordon Teskey identifies in the etymology of allegory “an oscillating movement” between a negative, intolerable otherness (“the chaotic otherness of the world,” or discursive difference generally) and a positive, transcendent otherness (the supernal realm of unchanging essences). He suggests that intolerable otherness is not subsumed to the transcendent perfection of essences in allegory (as

The Famous 41: The Scandalous Birth of Modern Mexican Homosexuality

Abstract: On 17 November 1901 Mexico City police raided a private party and arrested the forty-one men in attendance, half of them dressed as women. “The ball of the 41,” as it came to be known, quickly became the scandal of the year, inspiring over a month of strident, often fanciful newspaper reporting; a barrage of corridos and poems, some illustrated with etchings by José Guadalupe Posada; vociferous editorials and sermons; and several fictional narrations of the event, including a novel. Through all this clamor the party gained immense symbolic importance in Mexico as the number 41 itself came to signify male homosexuality. Perhaps more important, the event initiated the first significant discussion of same-sex sexual relations in Mexico since colonial times and raised questions about sexuality, masculinity, and Mexicanness itself that are still debated nearly a century later. As Carlos Monsiváis has noted, same-sex sexual bonding was a topic so entirely absent from public discourse in nineteenth-century Mexico that descriptions about men sharing beds or cuddling up naked could be related without controversy.1 For example, in Mexico’s (and Latin America’s) first novel, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), just such a scene occurs in a dive in which a group of scoundrels are reduced to betting the clothes off their backs, “some of them being left naked as the day they were born, without so much as a maxtle, as they call it, which is a scrap of cloth that covers their shame, and there were some rogues who would wrap themselves up in a blanket in the company of another guy, whom they would call their protector.”2 Although critics have occasionally questioned Lizardi’s taste—Luis Urbina describes him as, at times, “filthy to the point of being disgusting”—no one has ever accused him of writing a text that was in any way queer.3 While effeminacy in men was a major concern in Mexican literature of the nineteenth century (it was clearly one of Lizardi’s preoccupations), male homosexuality did not exist in the imagination of the general

Not-about-AIDS

Abstract: Since the 1996 International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, where the success of protease inhibitors was officially announced, there has been a great deal of talk in the United States about the end of AIDS, and much of it has implied that the need to talk about AIDS has ended as well. Reports both in the popular media and in lesbian and gay publications have suggested that we have reached the end of the AIDS epidemic. While acknowledging that most people across the world do not have access to the new drugs, these accounts put forward the idea that the AIDS crisis is over. In the absence of a cure or vaccine, this “end-of-AIDS” discourse is striking. In his controversial article “When AIDS Ends,” published in the 10 November 1996 New York Times Magazine (fig. 1), for example, Andrew Sullivan writes: “A difference between the end of AIDS and the end of many other plagues: for the first time in history, a large proportion of the survivors will not simply be those who escaped infection, or were immune to the virus, but those who contracted the illness, contemplated their own deaths, and still survived.”1 Cover articles in other major publications of the period further demonstrate this shift in AIDS discourse and share in its assumptions, from Newsweek’s 2 December 1996 issue “The End of AIDS?” (fig. 2) to Time’s 30 December 1996 selection of Dr. David Ho, a pioneer of this new AIDS treatment research, as “Man of the Year” (fig. 3), which indicates that an understanding of AIDS as a manageable condition rather than a terminal one has taken shape. In late 1996 AIDS returned to the forefront of U.S. culture only to announce its departure. Not surprisingly, the end-of-AIDS discourse soon led to a general lack of media interest in AIDS and to calls from gay figures for “post-AIDS” identities and cultures. These developments have left me wondering what it means to continue to prioritize AIDS in discussions of contemporary gay culture and politics. How might we return our critical attention to AIDS in light of the shifts in the political, cultural, and sexual climate of the late 1990s? In this essay I explore two central questions: how might the “end of AIDS” itself be understood as an AIDS dis-

Molestation 101: Child Abuse, Homophobia, and The Boys of St. Vincent

Abstract: It is nearly impossible today to open a magazine or newspaper without reading an account of a shocking child abuse scandal. Such scandals provide “commentators” with endless opportunities for numbing reiterations of their banal outrage and with a culturally sanctioned outlet for their prurient imaginings of ritualized retributive violence.1 Much of this violence is, whether explicitly or not, homophobic, and the discourse around child abuse has given stalwart homophobes (that is, almost everyone) a seemingly unassailable venue for homophobic ecstasy in the guise of inflamed righteousness. That, for example, gay child abusers are statistically negligible, especially compared to the abusers sheltered in healthy heterosexual homes, does not prevent gay pedophiles from attracting the lion’s share of public scrutiny.2 The antihomophobic “solution,” however, is not to insist that homosexuality has nothing to do with child abuse. The link between child molestation and homosexuality may well be, in other words, a homophobic illusion, but the effort to challenge the political ideology underlying this link—an ideology of sexual oppression in general—is better served by a thorough examination of structures uniting homophobia and abuse paranoias than by a simple debunking of this homophobic illusion as counterfactual. I would further resist the collapsing together of child abuse and pedophilia, as well as the distancing of homosexuality from both; while it should go without saying that pedophilia, whether “acted out” or merely fantasized, is not the same thing as child abuse, the fact that pedophilia and pedophilic relationships are legible only under the rubric of abuse attests to the power of the bleakly monochromatic discourse around child abuse, pedophilia, and childhood sexuality. Such a collapsing together of pedophilia and child abuse often lurks in popular attempts to clean up homosexual desire for public consumption, the often abject apologias that chastise gay pedophiles, among others, for frustrating one’s heartfelt gropings toward normality, for giving queers a bad name. But queers

Masculinity without Men

Abstract: The year 1999 saw the publication of two widely publicized feminist studies of men, Susan Bordo’s Male Body and Susan Faludi’s Stiffed.1 Written for a broad readership, these works emerged at the end of a decade during which academic gender studies turned the methods of feminist, gay, and lesbian inquiry to a consideration of masculinity. The scholarship on masculinity has expanded the terrain of gender and sexuality, bringing fresh insights to familiar texts and revealing the category of straight white manhood to be something like the Wizard of Oz, a tenuous, vulnerable figure hiding behind a screen of smoke and mirrors. Men across the disciplines have been interrogating their own masculinities; interpreting their relationships with their fathers, brothers, and male friends; confessing their feelings of alienation and weakness; and sometimes productively translating those personal revelations into renewed commitments to the analysis of gender and sexuality.2 At its best, this work brings new vitality to feminist questions and suggests crucial points of contact between feminism and queer theory.3 Yet the sheer amount of ink spilled over this topic might give us reason to wonder why men— admittedly, now appropriately situated and theorized—have once again become the focus of analytic attention. Too often the study of masculinity seems to come at the expense of the study of women, with the unfortunate implication that questions about women have become uninteresting or are so familiar that they no longer need to be asked. Moreover, when focused on the burdens of gender and the

"Marked by Genetics and Exile": Narrativizing Transcultural Sexualities in Memory Mambo

Abstract: How and to what extent have discursive legacies of colonialism shaped sexuality —not simply object choices and gender identifications but the very formulation of the terms in which we might desire or imagine ourselves as desiring subjects? How, that is, has narrative worked to produce not only (trans)national subjects but the very particulars of their desires? One might read Achy Obejas’s 1996 novel Memory Mambo as a prolonged meditation on these questions, as it tracks its heroine—Cuban American lesbian Juani Casas—in her attempt to understand both her recent breakup with her lover, Gina, and her family’s past.1 Juani obsessively turns to narration to produce and explain both identities and desires, trying through this discursive maneuver to depoliticize love, desire, and sexuality and casting them as separate from, as an escape from, and even, at points, as an antidote to political conflicts. Memory Mambo, however, undercuts the narrator’s attempts at erasure and disavowal, revealing instead how Juani’s narrative has been structured by a deeply political sense of exile and its attendant emphasis on memory, loss, and violence. And just as on the formal level the novel hangs on a political frame, on the plot level Obejas insistently represents individual erotic subjectivity as emerging from political categories such as ethnicity, nationality, and race. The novel thus forces the reader—if not Juani—to see both subjects and desire, concepts so often fondly held as the most private and autonomous of forces, as publicly and politically determined at every stage, determined in this case by an exilic structure of loss and violence. The novel’s narrative strategy must be read against the backdrop of an ongoing relationship between narrative and colonial conquest in the Americas. As other critics have demonstrated, the project of empire building (or, in its more recent U.S. form, the project of manifest destiny, imperialism, and capitalist

The Child with a Lion: The Utopia of Interracial Intimacy

Abstract: The Significance of the Interracial The first question should be, why address the sex between black and white men in America as a social, political, aesthetic, or other category? Racism stigmatizes me as a white “nigger lover” for my intimacy with black men. My video works Ghost Body, IDI, and message from the messenger: three poems by Paul Celan address black-white interracial male homosexuality, objectifying material from my personal life, and I have been called on publicly to articulate positions of racial identity, desire, and representation on the occasions of screenings of my videos.1 My work suffers what a review of the premiere screening of Ghost Body calls “an already familiar debate around the uses to which white gay artists . . . put Black gay male bodies.”2 In the discussion following the screening, Ghost Body was denounced for “the master/slave relationship” of its imagery of black hands caressing a white body. “Sexual politics” reduces the interracial to black self-hatred and white exploitation of social disparity. I chafe against the poverty of this politics. But I am wary of the ethic of speaking from one’s place of personal contradiction. To point out the poverty of the politicization of the interracial is not sufficient to render the interracial illegible as such. Darieck Scott’s 1994 essay “Jungle Fever? Black Gay

Tobacco and Boys: How Queer Was Marlowe?

Abstract: Christopher Marlowe has been a significant figure in the refiguration of the English Renaissance, the working-class outsider/spy/sodomite who gives the lie to the Elizabethan world picture and to a whole complex of traditional assumptions about the aims of English Renaissance drama. My argument here, however, is that the transgressive Marlowe is largely a posthumous phenomenon. I begin with the portrait that hangs in the hall of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (fig. 1), though with no conviction that it is in fact a portrait of Marlowe. It was discovered, badly damaged, in a heap of builders’ rubbish during the renovations of the Old Court of Corpus in 1952; it was then thoroughly and conservatively restored. It is inscribed with the date 1585; the sitter’s age, twenty-one; and a motto, to which I will return. All that could be determined about its history was that it had been nailed to a wall in the Master’s Lodge; the lodge was built in the 1820s, and there is no way of knowing when after that the picture was installed, where it had hung before that, or when it came into the possession of the college. There is, in short, no record of its existence before 1952, though it is undoubtedly an Elizabethan painting.1 The suggestion that it is a portrait of Marlowe was made in 1955, not by anyone connected with the college, which does not claim that it represents him. Nevertheless, it is continually reproduced as the only extant portrait of the poet. The problems with this identification are manifold: Marlowe certainly was twenty-one in 1585, but why would a Cambridge undergraduate, a scholarship boy from an artisan-class background, have commissioned such a portrait? If somebody else—some admirer or patron—commissioned it, who was he (or, less likely in Marlowe’s case, she), and why did the painting end up in the possession of the college, rather than of the patron or the sitter? Charles Nicholl, who is eager for the portrait to be Marlowe and uses it on the cover of his book The Reckoning, about Marlowe’s murder, suggests that the college itself commissioned the picture

A French connection. Modernist codes in the musical closet

Abstract: The tone and language leave little doubt but that this letter constitutes what we would call, in contemporary parlance, a coming-out statement Sam Barber had already, precociously and secretly, come to terms with his irrefutable desire and resolved to follow it in spite of his society’s expectations The pursuit of this desire attached to a particular identity, and it was a dangerous one: as its (repeated) binary juxtaposition with athletics here makes clear, this identity was figured in opposition to conventional masculine and heterosexual positions2

Life with Pinky Dots

Abstract: Color acts as a feature of political display and a means of subjectivity formation. A bright, stylish, flamboyant pink, for example, remains the most popular representation of both performed gender and masqueraded sexuality. From race to sexuality to class, color matters,1 and in Ma Vie en Rose the color that matters is a definitive pink. How queer is pink? How white is pink? How girl is pink? How pink is queer? Ma Vie en Rose, Alain Berliner’s surprisingly toned and attuned portrait of a seven-year-old garçon-fille, celebrates pink as the color-trace of gender, sexuality, and race. Ma Vie en Rose might be thought of as a hybrid of fairy tale and freak show. Ludovic (the fabulous Georges Du Fresne), the seven-year-old, lives happily in the suburbs with his nuclear family. Dad (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) is a publicist, mom (Michèle Laroque) is homey and sensitive, big sister is on the verge of puberty, the two brothers are dull as posts, and grandma (the dashing Hélène Vincent) is a bit queer herself. Ludo, who thinks of himself as a girl, openly expresses and embodies his taste for being a she until his bold wedding game with Jérôme (Julien Rivière), the boy next door, sets things queer in the pastel-colored suburban community and provokes a family crisis. Jérôme also happens to be the son of dad’s quasi–Christian fundamentalist boss. Other films have addressed the questions of identity and of teen and child desires through the fantasy of realness, from Dottie Gets Spanked (dir. Todd Haynes, 1993) to Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson, 1994) and The Hanging

Lesbians, Gays, Straights, and the Media

Abstract: It is sad to find yourself craving attention from people you can never trust, begging to be represented by industries that do not much care who you really are, selling yourself to people you cannot see, but there it is. The relationship of the sexually marginalized, both as individuals and in organized movements, to “the media” has been, like that of all kinds of marginalized people, relentlessly conflicted. Mass entertainment and the news have been simultaneously discrediting and credentialing sites of visibility, resources for liberatory models of identity and behavior but also for horrifically distorted ones, tools for inclusion and mainstreaming that also push some people in “the community” further toward the margins. The line between using media and being used by them has been difficult to discern and tricky to walk. The meeting of mass-produced, impersonal forms of communication and anything sexual—typically seen as individual and personal—yields weird results. Over the past decade a growing body of literature has attempted to document and analyze this meeting, either by tracing media images of sex, homosexu-

“SOMEONE LIKE DEBBY”(De)Constructing a Lesbian Community of Readers

Abstract: Many scholars agree that the 1940s saw dramatic changes in the way that Americans conceptualized same-sex erotic love. Allan Bérubé has examined the changes in homosexual identity and community that occurred in the military. Charles Kaiser and George Chauncey have looked into the formation of male homosexual subcultures in New York City, while John D’Emilio has traced the development of homosexual communities in the military and has briefly discussed the opportunities for same-sex contacts among women on the home front.1 Although much more work has been done on the history of homoerotically inclined men than on that of homoerotically inclined women, several historians have begun to trace the development of twentieth-century female homoerotic identities and communities. In her important article “ ‘They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong,’” Martha Vicinus describes some female homoerotic figures from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Fast-forwarding to the middle of the twentieth century, she explains how “the politically and economically turbulent 1930s narrowed women’s sexual options.” In the next paragraph Vicinus asserts, “By the 1950s everyone knew what a lesbian was; she had been assigned a clearly defined role.”2 This claim raises two contentious issues. First, what had happened in the intervening decade of the 1940s to disseminate this knowledge so widely? Second, did “everyone” really “know” the same thing about the figure of the “lesbian”? The 1940s did see shifts in cultural conceptions of female homoeroticism, and historians have begun to document these changes through examinations of texts and through oral history projects based on interviews with people who lived through this time. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis investigate the development of a lesbian bar culture and a circuit of house parties in Buffalo, New York. Leila J. Rupp discusses female couples active in the earlyto mid-twentieth-century women’s rights movement. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Lillian Faderman

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS: Talking Transgenders

Abstract: Of the four books under review, three are by transgenders and the fourth is by a sociologist with a history of research on gender variance. Leslie Feinberg’s collection contains “adaptations” of speeches given in 1997 to a variety of queer audiences, from a transvestite gathering in Texas to a queer studies conference in New York. Interspersed are brief personal accounts by members of the communities

Philadelphia and the Race of "Brotherly Love"

Abstract: The white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big Daddy, he focuses on “whiteness” all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against “blackness”—upon himself, what he is, and all those who look like him, remind him of himself. —Eldridge Cleaver, “Notes on a Native Son”

Double jeopardy; or, what's eating you?

Abstract: It is not immediately evident that differences in sexual preference are by their very nature more revealing about the temperament of individual human beings, more significant determinants of personal identity, than, for example, differences in dietary preference. And yet, it would never occur to us to refer a person’s dietary objectchoice to some innate, characterological disposition or to see in his or her strongly expressed and even unvarying preference for the white meat of chicken the symptom of a profound psychophysical orientation. —David M. Halperin, “One Hundred Years of Homosexuality”

"Race Woman": Reproducing the Nation in Gabriela Mistral

Abstract: The Chilean poet, educator, and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral (1889 –1957) is an example of a Latin American queer intellectual who was instrumental in instituting sexual and racial normativity through nationalist discourse. This article expands the scope of the inquiry into Mistral’s sexual identity by examining her status as “race woman,” a public position that she fiercely claimed, as opposed to any public nonnormative sexual stance.1 Within the Latin American public, Mistral upheld the heterosexual matrix. But was her queerness completely out of public view? Certainly, Mistral alluded to reproductive sexuality every time she spoke of race. She consistently portrayed herself as the spokesperson of Latin America—which she referred to as “our race” [nuestra raza]—posing as the mixed-race mother of the nation. Mistral devoted many prose pieces to the subject of a Latin American unified culture achieved through individual and social reproduction. Well known for her defense of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, she frequently and vigorously alluded to the process of mestizaje. Through the stance of race woman Mistral aided the state in managing Latin America’s racially heterogeneous populations, regarded as a problem since the Wars of Independence. Both publicly and privately she addressed topics ranging from the classification and hierarchical ordering of racial “mixings” to the status of black Latin Americans in nationalist discourse, from desirable mestizaje in the Latin American territory to dangerous mestizaje beyond the watchful purview of the state. It is tempting to separate Mistral’s sexual and racial identities, envisioning one as private and the other as public, one secret and the other on strident display. Typically, the quandary of a subject such as Mistral is to be analyzed one identity at a time. The story of her romantic life is separated from the story of her public career, even as her public figure unfolds in accordance with the narrative of repub-

Sex and Art in Ancient Rome

Abstract: Looking at Lovemaking offers a wide-ranging, exquisitely illustrated discussion of Roman artifacts with sexual themes. Unlike the snapshot collections that have prevailed until recently, it insists on putting these objects firmly in their original contexts: illustrations of frescoes, for example, are accompanied by plans of the buildings in which they are found and by discussions of their role in the buildings’ architectural and decorative schemes. This book is at its best in the close analysis of individual images and scenes; without Clarke’s careful, insightful readings, I would have missed any number of important details. On the theoretical level, however, there are occasional problems that lessen the impact of some of the book’s arguments. Clarke makes and substantiates a significant point that no one else has argued with such authority: “It is clear that images of both male-female and malemale lovemaking enjoyed considerable popularity among all classes” (142). The phrasing is revealing: here and elsewhere Clarke avoids speaking of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality,” relying instead on the less laden terms “male-female” and “male-male.” Yet there are noticeable traces of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” throughout the book. In the introduction, having declared that “we look in vain for the voice of one woman of any class” in Roman literature (an assertion contradicted, as Clarke himself observes in an accompanying note, by the existence of Sulpicia), Clarke asks: “Where are the marginal people? The many

Beyond the Pale: Francis Bacon and the Limits of Portraiture

Abstract: The English painter and homosexual Francis Bacon (1909 –92) opposed all forms of sobriety. “Only too much is enough,” the artist would say. As his biographer and friend Michael Peppiatt notes, “Bacon himself remained convinced that an artist had to go to every extreme, to ‘stretch one’s sensibility’ through excess and suffering, in order to be able to feel and communicate more.”1 This belief manifested itself in several ways, including Bacon’s penchant for sadomasochism and marathon sessions in seedy bars, drinking clubs, and gambling dens.2 These excursions were fueled in part by his interest in viewing people “in the grip of intense emotion or undergoing a crisis” (106). What fascinated him in particular were the body’s transformations as it experienced unwilled and uncontrollable states of agitation and desire—the body in extremis, contorted into recognition. Contorted into recognition: I refer here to Bacon’s own theories of artistic production, which concern the making of art and its affective potential for beholder and artist alike. Bacon, who received no formal training, did not work from sketches, from preconceived forms. Instead he practiced a type of improvisation in which he pursued the irrational formation of the image by following a series of “accidents” or chance effects produced by an unconventional application of paint

Doctor Knew Best

Abstract: Many of us studying gender in general and intersex issues in particular sometimes forget how critical it is that we move outside the psychology and sociology of contemporary life and read history. Historical analyses can confront us with fascinating instances of how reality has been produced as it reinforces our understanding that the givens of gender have not always been given. Alice Domurat Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex is an excellent example of history as reminder. Dreger documents encounters between hermaphrodites and medical professionals in late-nineteenth-century France and Britain. We learn about how physicians and medical men used (and still use) hermaphrodites (now referred to as “intersexed” people) for theory building and professional promotion and how hermaphrodites used medical professionals to help them repair their “doubtful status.” Dreger allows us to see—very concretely—that the meanings of “female” and “male” have been different at different times and even at the same time in geographically proximate places. Her book is in the tradition of scholarship that tries to elucidate the (presumably) unproblematic categories of “female” and “male” by focusing on those who violate them. Anyone who writes about intersexuality is used to being asked, “How common is it?” While offering published estimates of various conditions and presenting dozens of stories about “real” hermaphrodites, Dreger makes the important argument that any statistic is culture-specific and that determining that someone