by Bruce Bawer
The response to Nevius’s presentation can be summed up in two words: stunned silence. Finally the next speaker, Mary Scott-Brown, finds something to say. “I’m a bit struck by my young colleague,” she tells us. “I’m of a different generation.” (She’s fiftyish.) This is a polite way of saying that the idea of being American first and black second goes against every fiber of her being. The next speaker, a very young woman named Jarenda E. Williams (she looks like a student but is, in fact, a faculty member), seems even more unsettled by Nevius’s remarks. It’s important, she says, to “claim [one’s] African heritage” and recognize one’s connection to “African people throughout the diaspora.” She suggests that “until we know what it is to be African, we cannot take on the American part. We are not viewed as American anyway.” She takes an excruciatingly long pause, not knowing what else to say. She finds a suitable, and safe, academic cliché: “We rely on corporations to tell us how we feel about ourselves.” Another long pause. “President Obama,” she says, rather inscrutably, “is a poster child for this.” Yet another pause. A man in the audience says something about Obama’s America being “transracial.” Williams objects: “We have a different background than President Obama. He’s not a descendant of slaves.”
Next up is Jihan N. Gales, a young woman from North Carolina Central University and the only graduate student on the panel. She takes exception to Williams’s Afrocentrism. “Although I love Africa,” she says, “I believe there is a romanticism about Africa.” She notes that while black Americans idealize Africa as a place of authentic blackness, in fact black Africans take their cultural cues increasingly from black America: young African men “idealize hip-hop culture” and young African women use “skin lighteners” and “fake hair” just like their black American counterparts. Young black people, she insists, need to understand themselves “in current perspectives”: “we came here as slaves,” but “there has been progress” and “we need to think about the future.” As for Obama, “if we see success” of the kind he represents, “we can use that” to achieve more success and transcend the past. Obama, she says, is a “role model,” and role models are necessary because “they represent success for black America at the moment. When [people] look at the president, they see a black man.”
When the time comes for Q&A, a man in the audience rips into Nevius for including a book by McWhorter on his reading list. McWhorter, the man charges, is a “poster child for the far right” who is “paid handsomely to denigrate a race of people.” The man insists that “other groups have been afforded a greater chance of assimilation than we have” and that whites “don’t see us as Americans.” In response, Nevius assures the audience that he uses McWhorter only “to emphasize the American process. . . . I want to clarify not minimize ethnicity in this country.” As he nervously strives to distance himself from McWhorter, I reflect that this exchange offers a good example of the way in which outliers in these identity-oriented, orthodoxy-fixated disciplines are gently but firmly nudged back into the herd. Nevius does stand firm on one point: “If students don’t understand what it means to be American, they can’t understand themselves and be successful as Americans.” He also says that he leaves it to other colleagues to emphasize the African stuff; his job, as he sees it, is to emphasize “understanding the American process.” Still, he feels a need to point out that while his students respond enthusiastically to Lerone Bennett’s The Shaping of Black America, “they didn’t like [McWhorter’s] book at all.” The audience member who challenged him about McWhorter shouts back angrily: “Nor should they have!”
Though intersectionality, as I’ve noted, is a significant presence throughout identity studies, it plays a less pronounced role in Black Studies than in any of the others. There’s an element of feminism in Black Studies, but it generally takes the form of “womanism,” a term coined (as noted) by the black novelist Alice Walker. Womanism refuses to make an enemy of black men, whom it views, rather, as allies in the struggle against white racism and oppression; it also tends to contain a theological element. Large swaths of Black Studies, moreover, have resisted infiltration by “Queer Theory”; indeed, Black Studies tends to go out of its way to ignore or soft-pedal the gay identity of important black Americans such as poet Langston Hughes, author Countee Cullen, and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. For all its revolutionary pretensions, one gathers that Black Studies, to a considerable extent, shares the black community’s traditional discomfort with the subject of homosexuality.
To be sure, some Black Studies practitioners have challenged the discipline’s resistance to intersectionality, to “theory” (queer and otherwise), and to the soup-to-nuts thematic preoccupations of Cultural Studies. These challengers’ cause goes by the name of Critical Black Studies. At the 2010 annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association, I attend a session titled “New Conceptions of Racism” (which takes place, appropriately enough, at the Martin Luther King Student Center) and hear Jared Sexton, a light-skinned young African American from the University of California, Irvine, who seems smart and exudes energy, give a paper in which he talks at length about “higher levels of theoretical development” and the “analysis of power structures,” praises Du Bois’s extremely didactic-sounding 1928 novel Dark Princess for its “prophetic messianism,” and tells us that American society is now divided not into whites and everyone else but into blacks and everyone else.
Sexton is followed by Maisha Wester, a black woman from Bowling Green State University whose paper is titled “Forgetting to Re-member: ‘Post-racial’ Amnesia and Racial History.” Wester sneers at the idea, which has gained currency since the election of Barack Obama, that “race matters less than it used to,” pointing out that there were “racial incidents” immediately after Obama’s inauguration in 2009. “I don’t buy into the notion of ‘post-racialism,’” she says flatly, explaining that she has come here to “interrogat[e] the idea of the ‘post-racial.’” One damning aspect of “post-racialism,” as she sees it, is the un-nuanced representation of American history (from Colonial Williamsburg to accounts of the U.S. military’s role in bringing down Nazism) as “heroic.” Wester somehow appears not to have noticed that thanks to the efforts of Howard Zinn and company, American history courses, from primary school onward, now pay ample attention to U.S. atrocities and hardly ever dare portray Americans as heroes.
When the time comes for Q&A, a woman in the audience pours out a pure stream of jargon that I can’t write fast enough to take down. Another woman observes that “[i]t seems as if the black body is the necessary host for the parasitic product of progressive discourse.” The word power keeps cropping up: Jared condemns the “paranoid modality” of white Democrats who view the “struggle against power” by black civil rights activists as an “accumulation of power.” And he accuses unspecified “elements of the left” of being “very resonant with far-right discourse.” Labeling himself “polemical,” Jared describes “settler colonialism” as a “genocidal project,” tells us he’s “intervening in a particular context,” and assures us that he hates the “politics of inclusion.” And he tells Wester that what he’s offered in his paper is “a space-clearing gesture for the kind of discourse you’re talking about.” Wester, for her part, keeps quoting Toni Morrison, and says that she looks forward to a “pluralist” but not to a “universal” or “post-racial” culture. After listening to fifteen or twenty minutes of this material, I find myself thinking that all this rhetoric isn’t about people and their lives; it’s just about words: interrogating is good, pluralism is good, multiracialism is good—but post-racialism, color blindness, and a host of other things are just plain bad.
At one point Wester catches herself in the act of using the word colorblind in a positive way, and she laughs—and everyone seems to share her mirth. For an instant, the masks drop; it’s as if everyone has shared a friendly wink, acknowledging that they’re all just spouting jargon that has no real connection to their
own lives and convictions (if any).
Acknowledging, that is, that it’s all a game and that they’re all playing it together—all hustling away.
Chapter 4
Visit to a Queer Planet: Queer Studies
I’m at a Queer Studies conference at Humboldt University in Berlin, listening to a talk by Susan Stryker, a middle-aged American woman with a strapping male body and a deep male voice. After telling us she is here to offer some “provisional thoughts on a new line in my work,” Stryker warns that her “argument is not entirely worked out even to my own satisfaction.” She proceeds to serve up what seems like a grab bag of observations, from a brief history of the post–World War II American economy to reflections on the 1970s advent of punk rock as a form of “resistance to market-driven culture.”
Eventually something resembling an argument comes into focus: now, as in the 1970s, an economic crisis is spawning a musical reaction. Back then it was punk; now, according to Stryker, it’s “alternative country.” She brings in the Tea Party movement, which she regards as a fascist, racist “upsurge of right-wing populism among non-elite white residents of the United States.” Yet she’s so hostile to the “neo-liberal” U.S. establishment that she sees the Tea Party as a promising development. She asks: Why do members of “the leftist intelligentsia” (of which she counts herself a member) who oppose the U.S. government respond with such reflexive negativity when right-wing nonacademics say they oppose it, too? The Tea Party movement, she insists, makes it clear that both the intellectual left and the populist right share a hostility to the “neoliberal middle,” and raises hopes for an anticapitalist coalition between the two.
Listening to Stryker savage democratic capitalism (she takes it for granted, of course, that everyone in attendance shares her contempt for it) and talk blithely about forming an alliance with people she considers to be fascists, I look out the high windows at Unter den Linden. Here we are in what was once East Berlin, only a few minutes’ walk from where the Berlin Wall once stood. This place was tyrannized by two succeeding sets of rebels against liberal democratic capitalism. There is a point crying out to be made, and it is made, if delicately, by Adrian de Silva, a graduate student at Humboldt, who has been appointed to provide a “commentary” on Stryker’s paper. Though he praises parts of her presentation, he notes that “as a German” he is made uncomfortable by her sympathy for “right-wing populist racism.” Her tone-deaf reply: she is desperate for “a politics of resistance” against capitalism, and she sees promise in the current success of the “right-wing fascism” of the anti-establishment Tea Party. In short, this woman who has done so handsomely under the American system (she commutes weekly between San Francisco and Indiana University, and freely pursues a way of life that would have landed her in a prison cell or gas chamber in the Third Reich or East Germany) has no clue how utterly out of touch she is with the solemn reality of this place—a place where fascism and communism are not abstract theoretical notions but have, in living memory, been brutal realities, and where the advent of democratic capitalism was a blessed deliverance.
Next up is Roderick Ferguson, a young black man who teaches race and critical theory and chairs the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Much like Stryker, Ferguson (who describes himself as a Marxist “who is trying to get Foucault and Marx to talk to one another”) goes on at length about the 1960s and ’70s without it even occurring to him to think about what it was like here—in what was then East Berlin—during those decades. Ferguson sneers at the separation of discourse about homosexuality from “critiques of race, imperialism, and patriarchy,” about the fact that “queerness” has become “a subject of rights,” and about committed gay relationships and their acceptance by establishment institutions—all of which defy the imperatives of “queer.” An audience member gives Ferguson’s paper a thumbs-up, arguing that “we have to see the richness of not belonging again.”
At such moments, one’s mirth at the inanity of Queer Studies gives way to distress and, yes, anger at its moral irresponsibility—its fashionable pretense that having equal rights and being treated with respect and dignity are somehow a matter of being “co-opted” by the establishment, of embracing the evils of “normativity,” of sacrificing one’s magnificent otherness. For these professors, who know that when their workday is over they will be able to walk the streets and go shopping at various stores and make their way home with a high degree of certainty that they will not be targeted for violence for their differentness, all of this rhetoric about “otherness” is nothing but a dishonest pose, which cruelly ignores the fact that for many gay people around the world today, the “normativity” these professors actually enjoy—even as they mock it—is something gay people in other societies can only dream of.
What is especially ironic about these professors’ rhetoric of “otherness” and “queerness” is that they are, in fact, by any real-world measure, extremely conservative, lockstep, institutional, careerist creatures. Their sense of identification with their universities, their departments, and their fields of “study,” not to mention the obvious way they size one another up by their titles, academic affiliations, and publications, is stifling. So are their endless pious references to Marx, Foucault, and Derrida, which bring to mind the obligatory nods to the Great Leader at some Communist Party congress.
Then there’s their curious inarticulateness. One speaker after another, reading his or her own prose aloud, gets tangled up in its mottled, murky thickets. Indeed, some of them, despite their impressive résumés, seem borderline illiterate. José Esteban Muñoz, author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, is a leading figure in Queer Studies, got his Ph.D. at Duke, and is a professor at New York University, but he is one of the worst public speakers I have ever heard, taking excruciatingly long pauses, stumbling repeatedly over his text, concluding one sentence after another by asking “Right?” and mispronouncing simple words: he turns library into “liberry,” says “denouncement” instead of “denunciation,” stresses the third syllable of nonsynchronous, puts the stress in the adjective adept on the first syllable, and stresses the syllable “late” in inarticulateness, pronouncing it like the word late.
As the conference drags on, the endless rhetoric about “patriarchy” and the “intersection” of sexuality “with other formations such as race and gender” sounds more and more like Muzak. This academically approved rhetoric pretends to be unorthodox, deviant, threatening, and antinormative—but is, in point of fact, mind-numbingly conformist. There’s plenty of talk about colonialism, most of it by American scholars whose domination of this English-language conference in a German-speaking country could itself well be viewed as a colonial enterprise. At one point between sessions, it occurs to me that here are all these gay men and women talking about matters supposedly touching on sex, and there’s nothing remotely sexy about any of it—it’s dry, boring, without a hint of a whiff of a frisson. How can anybody with the slightest libido say the words “sexuality as an artifact of institutionality” with a straight face?
As it happens, the setting of this conference is historically fitting—though I wonder how many of the participants realize it. For if Americans invented Queer Studies, it was Germans who invented its estimable predecessor, Gay Studies, of which Queer Studies—as we shall see—is an unfortunate betrayal.
Indeed, any proper account of the serious scholarly attempt to reckon with the reality of sexual orientation begins with the life stories of Germans like Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, who, after losing his position as a government lawyer in 1857 when his homosexuality became known, went on to perform extensive research into human sexuality, to write several books (which were banned and burned across Germany), and to use his findings to argue for the decriminalization of homosexuality. To be sure, Ulrichs did not call himself a homosexual (a word that was not coined until 1869, by the Hungarian writer and human righ
ts activist Karl-Maria Kertbeny), but an “Urning”—a word that Ulrichs adapted from Plato’s Symposium, and that many of his gay British contemporaries took up, translating it as “Uranian.” Though many readers found the focus of his work scandalous, he was respected enough in certain academic circles to earn an honorary degree from the University of Naples. Perhaps the first gay person in history to “come out” publicly, Ulrichs died in exile in Italy in 1895.
His work strongly influenced Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician who two years after Ulrichs’s death cofounded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which engaged in sexual research and continued Ulrichs’s campaign for the abolition of the German law against homosexuality (an effort that won the open support of Einstein, Rilke, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and other luminaries). Hirschfeld also established the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin, which in addition to studying human sexuality offered sex and marriage counseling, housed a sizable library, and promoted contraception, sex education, and the equal rights of women, gays, and transsexuals (a term that Hirschfeld coined). Hirschfeld was also the founder of the World League for Sexual Reform, which held conferences in several European capitals in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Though Hirschfeld’s effort to liberalize public attitudes about human sexuality gained ground under the Weimar Republic, it ended abruptly when Hitler came to power. The Nazis closed the institute, seized its property, threw its director into a concentration camp (Hirschfeld was on a U.S. lecture tour at the time), and burned almost the entire contents of its library and archives. (It is believed that the Nazis saved the institute’s mailing lists and later made use of them to round up gays.) Hirschfeld spent the rest of his life in self-exile in France, dying there in 1935; after the war West German courts upheld the Nazis’ actions against the institute.