Somerville's newest project is entitled "Queering the State," which as she puts it intends to "de-naturalize naturalization" or to queer it. In this case, queer is meant to be used as a term that calls into question categories, particularly categories of identity. For Somerville, queering categories is a project that ultimately shows how categories are produced as social constructions. She notes that historically, identity categories have been used to police the lines between "normal" and "abnormal" -- she extends the analysis in this case to refer to the categories of "citizen" and "alien." She begins by discussing her intersectional approach, which is a notion we've been introduced to via "Queering the Color Line." Intersectionality is also central to her current project. Her intersectional approach is meant to highlight the notion that sexuality should not be studied in isolation, but should be studied in conjunction with other categories such as race. While the research that Somerville has looked at so far includes both laws and policy surrounding the naturalization process, for this particular lecture she looks closely at the rituals and ceremonies surrounding citizenship. Her project is to historicize the naturalization ceremony paying particular attention to discourses surrounding sexuality and race.
This is clearly just a short snapshot of Somerville's lecture, but you can start to see how this analysis is a continuation of her project in "Queering the Color Line." For my part, I found this lecture to be quite interesting -- particularly the images of the heterosexual nuclear family that are part of the armory of booklets that are given to newly naturalized citizens. It is clear from this image how the discourses of heteronormativity and citizenship overlap in order to instruct and compel various behaviors via the naturalization ritual.
Recently in Somerville Category
In Chapter 4 Somerville provides a textual analysis of how both mixed-race identity and interracial desire function and become intertwined with issues of gender inversion and homosexuality in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (anonymously published in 1912, reissued with credit in 1927). Somerville contends that the heterosexual (interracial) marriage that is pursued in the narrative is secondary to the "perverse" desire that is explored in regard to the protagonist's male homosexuality. As she states, "the representation of the mulatto body is mediated by the iconography of gender inversion, and interracial heterosexual desire functions in the text as both an analogy to homosexual object choice and a screen through which it can be articulated" (112). Importantly, the ex-coloured man is an unnamed protagonist, who is constructed as both object and subject of desire through the course of the narrative. "The very proximity of these oscillating racialized and sexualized 'perversions' is integral to Johnson's fascination with, and critique of, his unnamed protagonist" (112).
In the introduction to Queering the Colorline, Siobhan Somerville introduces two important legal cases that took place in the late 1800s. The first, Plessy v. Ferguson, illustrates the origins of "Jim Crow" segregation; and the second, the Oscar Wilde trial in which he was charged with "gross indecency" through the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885. In juxtaposing these two events, Somerville introduces her theory that "the simultaneous efforts to shore up and bifurcate categories of race and sexuality I the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deeply intertwined" (3). Somerville stresses that she is not trying to say that race persecution was "like" sexual persecution, but rather tries to "historicize and therefore denaturalize their relationship" (7).
Somerville sets up the book by defining the terms she uses throughout. Her use of the term "sexuality" refers to "a historically and culturally contingent category of identity" (6). She defines race as "a historical, ideological process rather than [a] fixed transhistorical or biological characteristic" (7). She is influenced by Omi and Winant's definition of "racialization," defined as "the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group" (7).
Somerville continues to explain how and why race and sexuality must be viewed as simultaneous historical social constructions, highlighting the material effect of "language and representation" (8). She states: "Those whose bodies were culturally marked as nonnormative lost their claim to the same rights as those whose racial or sexual reputation invested them with cultural legitimacy, or the property of a 'good name'" (9). Although she begins with examples from legal decisions, Somerville reveals that the remainder of the book will focus on other ways that discourse constructed race and sexuality (and the lines that otherized those that were "abnormal"). From medical and scientific literature, to early cinema, to African American fiction and non-fiction, Somerville's goal is to show how sexual and racialized identities were created through "repetition, resistance, and appropriation" (14).
In Chapter 1, Somervile focuses on race and sex in scientific and medical discourses. She utilizes a literary and historical method to conduct a textual and contextual analysis. Her goal is not to prove how racist or not racist the authors of the medical texts were, but "on how these writers and thinkers conceptualized sexuality through a reliance on, and deployment of, racial ideologies" (17). First, she explains the field of "sexology" as emerging in an effort to make medicine the definer of sexual "abnormalities" rather than the law. Thus, "deviant" sexual attraction (referred to as "inverted") shifted from being seen as "criminal" to "pathological." For example, the first terms used in this field to describe same-sex behavior were "Urnings" ("to describe the model of a female soul in a male body" (18)) and "contrary sexual feeling." One of the most important books to emerge from the field was Havelock Ellis' Sexual Inversion, which made some effort to "defend homosexuality from 'law and public opinion'" (19). Another essay, "The Intermediate Sex" by Edward Carpenter also tried to fight the stigma against homosexuality, and Carpenter's writings suggested that "inverts" were "'intermediate types' on a continuum of male and female characteristics" (20). Somerville notes that the audience for these writings extended beyond the medical field, and she sights one gay male as saying both works helped him understand his own sexuality. Sexology was challenged with the onslaught of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis which suggested that "homosexuality played a part, in differing degrees, in everyone's sexuality" (20).
From here, Somerville expands on evidence of scientific racism. She explains the meanings of two commonly held beliefs about race, monogeny and polygeny. Monogeny refers to the life that "all of the so-called races were members of the same species and that they had descended from common ancestry" (22), and polygenists believed that "different races were actually different species with distinct biological geographic origins" (22). Both were ways of maintaining white supremacy. Similarly, evolutionary models of race and sex were prevalent, including the idea that women and people of color weren't fully evolved in the stages of "evolutionary 'progress'" (24).
In what is perhaps the most disturbing part of the chapter, Somerville describes the horrifying method of "comparative anatomy," which "gave sexologist a ready-made set of procedures and assumptions with which to scan the body visually for discrete markers of difference" (25). This process enabled scrutinization and exploitation of bodies of color and women, but it was black women that were targeted most. The infamous image of the "Hottentot Venus" is an example of this kind of practice; scientists Flower and Murie focused on the "protuberance of the buttocks" and "the remarkable development of the labia minora" (26). Focusing on the sexed female body parts of women of color provided another way for race and sexuality to be simultaneously othered and objectified. Flowers and Murie's account of female genitalia as "appendages" also invoked a sexual and gender deviance in the African American women, invoking "the anatomy of a phantom male body inhabiting the lesbian's anatomical features" (29).
From here, Somerville explains that the eugenics movement as one that "advocated selective reproduction and 'race hygiene'" (30). Eugenics becomes another clear way to illustrate the connection between race and sexuality; Somerville notes that "eugenics was tied to the concerns of sexology, even though most eugenicists did not generally emphasize question of homosexuality" (31). Despite that blatant language against "inverts" wasn't common in eugenics literature, the hatred for all things "mixed" emphasized a disdain for same-sex practices. Mulattos, for example, were often seen as a threat to "white purity."
The next section of the chapter focuses on an article written by Margaret Otis called, "A Perversion Not Commonly Noted" (1913). In it, Otis writes about the same-sex relationships between black and white students at an all-girls school. Somerville asserts that the reason Otis found this important to write about is less about the same-sex "lovemaking" and more about the interracial element of the sex. Otis asserts that "the difference in color...takes place of the difference in sex" (36), and Somerville draws on other theorists who suggest that representations of lesbian desire "requires an added measure of difference, figured racially" (36).
In the conclusion, Somerville analyzes two more recent examples of race and sexuality construction through a reading of the 2000 Census and Leslie Feinberg's novel, Stone Butch Blues. Questions of language and interpellation emerge again, and Somerville notes that the history of the census has denied agency to people of color to name themselves; after only giving the option of "black" or "white" in the early 1900s, Sommerville explains that the 2000 census may be designed with a new "multiracial" category---(if anyone knows what ended up happening with this, I'd be curious to know!). Somerville then points out the way that race is a category that the government is willing to see as fluid, but gender is not. From there she brings in Feinberg's masterful novel (IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY, READ THIS BOOK!!!). She discusses ways that the gender non-conforming character Jess is simultaneously riddled with racialized elements to her narrative. From Jess' identification with Native American Dineh women who helped raise her, to her friendship with an African-American butch who provides Jess with W.E.B. DuBois' writing (which emerges at pivotal moments in the story), Feiberg "demonstrates how discourses of race have been available and indeed instrumental in providing a language and conceptual framework for [trangender] embodied subjectivity" (175).
Questions:
1. In the introduction, Somerville goes to great length to critique the absence of discussion of race in LGBT scholarship, and the absence of discussions of sexuality in literature about race. In light of that, I was surprised that Somerville makes no mention of class. Do you think that there is an absence of discussion about class in this text? When it is mentioned (such as in Ch 3 when she sidenotes that Hopkin's protagonists are middle class), does she do it in a way that explicitly problematizes how class identity intersects with race and sexuality? Is it okay that it isn't made more prominent since it's not the focus of the book, or is it an integral component to this history that shouldn't be ignored?
2. In Chapter 1, Somerville highlights the F.O. Matthiessen response to the sexology literature that helped him understand that "[he] was what [he] was by nature" (20). Clearly, I cringed at this response, but then felt guilty about cringing over someone's own experience/feeling. This reminded me of the conversations we've had about "skipping to step 3." What's at stake in the challenging of biological notions of sexuality being an essentially determined thing vs. a choice? I also thought of Butler and her belief that "possibility is as essential as bread" for those whose lives are made unintelligible. Did problematic sexology literature act as a form of "possibility" and "intelligibility" for this population? Is the evolution of "queer" a result of more time to be imaginative and the ability to create more possibilities?
3. Reading about the exploitation of black female genitalia reminded me of the discourse around female circumcision (or, more commonly called, "female genital mutilation"). How can we compare the very public campaigns about black female genitalia in the present to what was occurring in the early 20th century? Are there problematic parallels?
4. What other examples do we see of interracial homosexuality in contemporary popular culture? Do you agree that there is often an interracial element in the depictions of lesbian relationships in an effort to show difference? I can think of a whole lot of that on "The L Word"....Other examples?
5. Outside of the items discussed in the conclusion, what other contemporary examples can we understand through Somerville's framework more generally?
Chapter 2 of the book discusses the use of blackface and drag both in stage productions and in film. In this chapter, Somerville uses the story A Florida Enchantment to demonstrate how the the use of cross-dressing both on stage and in film, "evoked contemporary excitement and anxiety over changes in gender norms," (Somerville, 46). In the time that passed between the novel and the production of the film, gender ambiguity and cross-dressing became increasingly associated with "abnormal" sexual practices and homosexuality. The chapter discusses the differences in how the two "mannish" women conduct themselves sexually. Lawrence's white masculinity is portrayed as being within the limits of genteel codes of behavior, while Jack's sexuality is portrayed as uncontrollable and agressive.
The white women who attended these movies also become a topic of discussion. Somerville explains how their attendence was a product of a shifting economy. As the economy shifted to a consumer based economy, in which women were responsible for much of the purchasing, walls between the tradition male and female spheres began to break down. Women were now moving from the domestic sphere into the public, formerly male, sphere.
Chapter 3 focusses on race and homosexuality in Pauline E. Hopkins' fiction. In this section, Somerville explains that, "because African American women were associated with sexual accessability under slavery while white women were priveleged as sexually 'pure,' it was crucial for African American women to begin to redefine their own sexuality," (Somerville, 93). This chapter also discusses how love between women in literature is often difficult to decipher and has come to be labeled "romantic friendship". Almost always, these "romantic friendships" end it heterosexual endings for both female participants.
She also discusses a story of male homoerotic desire, cross-dressing and interracial relationships. Hopkins explores ideas of interracial and homosexual desire as a means of establishing African American female sexual freedom. Importantly, though, Somerville explains that "in stories of impersonation, the exposure of the 'true' identity of a character usually signals a return to the established social order of a fictional world," (104).
One of the most important elements of the conclusion is the focus on black/white, male/female, homo/hetero binaries.
Topics to discuss:
-connections between drag and blackface in terms of performance and identity
-how and why are binaries established? Why are binaries problematic?
-Homosocial vs. homosexual desire
-female movement into the public sphere
-the literary convention of heterosexual resolution