Re: Often, Faggot Precedes Vaginal.
Kym Cavrak
I would like to begin by outlining a distinction between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies, as related yet distinct strands of thinking within art history and visual/cultural studies. I would not want to be divisive here; both modes of inquiry get important work done. Yet, their basic strategies could hardly be more different. The aim of this first section of the discussion is to create at least a provisional sense of the aesthetic and political aims of queer cinema. Later, I will be discussing Todd Haynes as pioneering throughout his career a particularly interesting kind of queer film-making, though our focus here will be on a single film, Poison, from 1990.
In his introduction to the landmark volume Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (1994), Whitney Davis explains that the intention of the anthology is to present "important but little known or new evidence, accompanied by original documentation and interpretation, as well as reconsiderations of relatively familiar events, objects, images or texts;" to rectify the historical record, which has been "so constructed, arranged and published that materials of direct interest to lesbian and gay studies have often literally dropped out of immediate view or have completely disappeared;" and to cover as wide a historical range as possible, "from the ancient through the medieval, early modern and modern worlds."1 I must say that I have no quarrel with any of the stated aims of the collectionand wish there were a dozen more anthologies like it. But it is clear that the position from which the volume is conceived is "minoritarian"that the emphasis is on doing justice to art that by virtue of its content or authorship can considered lesbian or gay, and that because of that has been ignored or repressed in academic discussion. The minoritarian strategy in art history means restoring to visibility the culture of a social group that, having been cut out of art history virtually since the inception of the discipline, now rightly seeks inclusion and a place at the table. In the same way that a certain strategy within feminist art history sought to bring the work of women artists into the canon, and to interrogate the ideology of the discipline that had excluded them in the first place, gay and lesbian studies are concerned with overcoming prejudices so deep that even in the case of such central figures as Leonardo or Michelangelo or Winckelmann the question of sexuality has until now been systematically silenced within scholarship.
When gay and lesbian art history sets out to transform this dismal situation, who could possibly be against it? And yet there is a classic problem with minoritarian thinking: that once the record has been revised and the canon extended, once the visual expressions of gay and lesbian desire can be as freely explored as their heterosexual equivalentsend of story. Minoritarian tactics turn on precise and delimited goals; that is their strength, but also their disadvantage. As Michael Warner puts it in his introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet (1993), "there are many people, gay and straight, who think that . . .discrimination should be eliminated, but that [once this is achieved] gay people have no further political interest as a group."2 Yes, art historians should be free to write about Paul Cadmus, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, and so on; there should be more attention paid to the aesthetic consequences of same-sex desire in the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo. But once this is accomplished, the campaign is over.
Queer art history and visual studies proceed differently, from a majoritarian position: the stigmatization of gay and lesbian people and culture is regarded not simply as a local issue, to be resolved through a politics of inclusion; rather, stigmatization is thought of as massively overdetermined, as connected to all dimensions of cultural normalization. "Every person who comes to a queer self-understanding," writes Warner, "knows that her stigmatization is connected with gender, the family, notions of individual freedom, the state, public speech, consumption and desire, nature and culture, maturation, reproductive politics, racial and national fantasy, class identity, truth and trust, censorship, intimate life and social display, terror and violence, health care, and deep cultural norms about the bearing of the body."3
Since aspects of homophobia are to be found in virtually every domain of cultural life, questions of gay and lesbian visual culture are too narrowly conceived if they are simply a matter of ending discrimination, adding gay or lesbian artists to the canon, or acknowledging the gayness of the artistsLeonardo, Michelangelo, et alalready canonized. The stakes are considerably higher: not supplementing the literature with a monograph on such-and-such a gay or lesbian artist, but investigating the ways in which structures of heteronormativity pervade the whole of the canon and its organization; not petitioning for membership in the club so much as investigating the ways the club itself has been profoundly determined by a compulsory heteronormativity that affects and shapes its entire visual field. The majoritarian outlook of queer art history and visual studies cannot settle for adding anythingartists, works, styles, iconographies. The difficulty with a politics of formal inclusion is that it is not necessarily motivated to question the status quo. For queer art history, the status quo, by contrast, emerges as a prime object of knowledge.
I feel obliged to mention a further distinction between gay and lesbian art history and visual studies, on the one hand, and their queer counterparts, on the other, over the issue of what might be called indigenous versus discursive understandings of the relation between desire and representation. An acute problem within minoritarian cultural politics is the tendency to dramatize and to valorize authentic expressions of the minority in question: the minority is thought of as embodied in a particularly radical or foundational way, as possessing a ground of being that is then, as it were subsequently, expressed through art and other cultural forms. That is, an essential x, whether this be femininity or negritude or gayness, is thought (i) naturally to express itself unless (ii) such self-expression is blocked by phobia and discriminatory practices; in which case (iii) the task is to clear away the screens and distortions imposed by the dominant regime, and to return to a vision of xin this case, gay or lesbian desirein its authentic mode, as a direct expression of the body: female body, black body, gay or lesbian body.
Belief in spontaneous or indigenous self-expression may be the chimera of minoritarian inquiry in general, but in the case of art history and visual studies there are additional factors that make the cult of authenticity especially insidious and hard to think beyond. It would be difficult for a cultural historian to start talking about a timeless Africa or the essential Japaneseness of Japanese art without this move being noticed and questioned as heavily ideological. Yet in the modern sexual dispensation, that is, ever since the creation of a scientia sexualis as a key component of modernity, the categories of "heterosexuality" and "homosexuality," together with the whole zoology of the perversions, have been understood as culturally non-specific and invariant. Sexual behavior might be stylized or elaborated in different ways in different periods, but its principal forms are conceived in universal terms, so to speak, as prime numbers, incapable of further reduction or explanation in terms of anything else. Such categories might be inflected by history, but they are thought of as standing essentially outside the historical process, as they also stand outside structures of class, wealth, education, ethnicity, and so forth. Transposed into visual terms, this has meant that, for instance, in Michelangelo's or in Winckelmann's way of idealizing the male body, a system of erotic emphases could be found that expresses or enacts same-sex desire in a basically timeless way. In Michelangelo's Captives and ignudi, as in Winckelmann's response to the erotic allure of Greek sculpture, the selections and emphases around the male body cut across the centuries, forming a recognizable, familiar set of idealizations that can be recognized, and maybe appreciated and enjoyed as such, by gay viewers even today.
Queer art history typically harbors a deep skepticism over the question of timeless desire: it may or may not be true that sexual acts and fantasies stay more or less constant over the long haul; but the place of sexuality in the culture, whether it is accorded a major or a minor role, how it is taken up by other social agencies, what discourses move in on the prima materia of sex, how they articulate and transform the sexual impulse, all that is a matter of history, and the history, specifically, of discourse. For queer art history and visual studies, gay or lesbian desire cannot so easily be isolated from discursive history, or approached as an authentic ground of being. From the time that the categories of heteronormativity came to be instituted in their modern form through the new juridico-medical apparatus of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stigmatization of the category "homosexuality" has been profoundly constitutive of the heteronormative order, in all of its forms. From this perspective, central questions to be asked of gay or lesbian desire concern the latter's positioning vis--vis discourse, its articulation with the institutions of law, medicine, religion, the family, the school, art, literature, cinema, television. Queer art history and visual studies have no less an ambition than to take on heteronormativity's entire visual field.
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