Reading Notes: Herring, "I Hate New York"
Oct. 10th, 2010 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxI have to read this paper for two classes this week --- both Colloquium and Transsomatechnics --- so I'm not entirely clear what I should be reading for. I'll figure something out.
The author takes issue with the way queers have to justify living most places inside our community but don't have to justify living in New York. I've caught fragments of this when moving to Indiana; other friends of mine who have moved to Texas have caught hella flak from fellow queers and freaks in counterproductive ways. My slice of queer culture tends to center around San Francisco, not NYC, but I think it's a similar phenomenon, although some of the "Why the hell would you live in Indiana?" I've gotten has been based on a more general coastal city preference/bias. [0]
Apparently Warner in 1999 wrote that NYC served as a valuable reference point to know that things were different somewhere; Herring points out that there are at least thirty-five gay bars in North Carolina. (Even though, as suggested in Mary Gray's piece, people may have to drive an hour or two to get to the services they want. [1]) He says that Warner's work is "necessary" but this formulation "contributes to one of the dominant themes of a lesbian and gay normalization that he and many other critics elsewhere resist." I really like that he points out the "reference point" of NYC as something that allows rural queers to define their own spaces but also requires a sort of double consciousness.
Core point: "The non-metropolitan or rural --- broadly defined --- in visual or print culture, in performance, and in fashion studies is a premier site of queer critique against compulsory forms of urbanization."
Hah! Apparently the census considers Bloomington, IN a city and doesn't differentiate (at least at the level Herring is looking at) between Bloomington, LA-Long Beach-Santa Ana, and Appleton, WI. I have been to Appleton, WI. It is maybe not rural, but it is not urban like LA is, either. (Somewhat snarkily and assuredly problematically, my definition of a city is "a place where I can eat.") He wants to stress that the urban/rural distinction is shaky and thus when it is applied it is "standardizing."
OK I kinda want to know what a "radical faerie commune" is. Here are some links: http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/radical_faeries.html http://www.radfae.org/about.htm *boggle* I had no idea. That's awesome. (Although I wonder how they would respond to trans people; the radical lesbian communes of the same era... left something to be desired.)
Anti-urbanism has a history of racism and "politically bankrupt regionalism" (11) Warner correctly critiques some queer anti-urbanism as espousing a sort of homonormativity, and so Herring says "I want to differentiate between a reactionary anti-urbanism and a critical anti-urbanism." Looking for "a queer use of Marx's anti-urbanism" (this is Leo Marx, not Karl) and a way to open up more spaces rather than deny urban ones.
Urban or rural motifs and behaviors can occur in all spaces --- wearing coyboy boots to a dyke bar in Oakland can be a disruption of urban/rural hierarchy in queer spaces. Yeah, I can dig that. Halberstam talks about "metronormativity" and I think this came up in class recently? Or maybe we just talked about shadow feminisms. Metronormativity must work along six axes:
"Potentially nourishing metronormative projects can sometimes amount to cultural and subcultural damage."
Herring's idea of "paper cut politics" on page 25 is resonant with the discussion of micropolitics and Baradian agential cuts we had in transsomatechnics class last week. "pester from a point of distraction to a point of disruption." I really like this term.
Notes some limitations of his work I agree with: first, the mixing of lesbian and gay culture, in which he mentions Sedgwick saying "there can't be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay [metronormativities] together. Or separately." This is still a little sloppy; if you're going to talk lgbtq, what about how you're conceptualizing everybody else? :)
"There is a danger of neglecting transnational movements as well as the urbanities of other nation-states." Goal is to complicate that while acknowledging that his analysis is US-focused and may not say much about spaces outside that.
Also he has angst surrounding losing his rural and lower-middle-class identity as part of becoming a professor! Yeah, I can resonate with that. I never really had a rural identity to lose --- although I do feel that my academic and personal paths have pretty much cut me out of ever being a real part of Cranston culture again --- but the class thing, yeah, I get it. [2]
...and there it ends, because it's the introduction to a book, and actually I'd rather like to read the book, although probably not right now since it's not relevant to any of the papers I need to write this semester.
Also, apropos of very little, http://www.amazon.com/Southern-Comfort-Robert-Eads/dp/B000089725 is a thing and I should watch it at some point.
[0] This is not to say I do not miss coastal cities terribly, or that they don't comprise like seven or eight of the top ten places I'm most likely to live after I'm done with this PhD program.
[1] This is also something I should keep in mind; I should broaden my geographical net if I at some point decide to go looking for a scene that fits me rather than saying "meh" and just working 80-hour weeks.
[2] My personal case is interesting in that I feel like my family had a similar trajectory, too, and I'm never quite sure what to do with that, but that's not what this paper is about and I don't think I want to address it in detail in a public blog post anyway.
The author takes issue with the way queers have to justify living most places inside our community but don't have to justify living in New York. I've caught fragments of this when moving to Indiana; other friends of mine who have moved to Texas have caught hella flak from fellow queers and freaks in counterproductive ways. My slice of queer culture tends to center around San Francisco, not NYC, but I think it's a similar phenomenon, although some of the "Why the hell would you live in Indiana?" I've gotten has been based on a more general coastal city preference/bias. [0]
Apparently Warner in 1999 wrote that NYC served as a valuable reference point to know that things were different somewhere; Herring points out that there are at least thirty-five gay bars in North Carolina. (Even though, as suggested in Mary Gray's piece, people may have to drive an hour or two to get to the services they want. [1]) He says that Warner's work is "necessary" but this formulation "contributes to one of the dominant themes of a lesbian and gay normalization that he and many other critics elsewhere resist." I really like that he points out the "reference point" of NYC as something that allows rural queers to define their own spaces but also requires a sort of double consciousness.
Core point: "The non-metropolitan or rural --- broadly defined --- in visual or print culture, in performance, and in fashion studies is a premier site of queer critique against compulsory forms of urbanization."
Hah! Apparently the census considers Bloomington, IN a city and doesn't differentiate (at least at the level Herring is looking at) between Bloomington, LA-Long Beach-Santa Ana, and Appleton, WI. I have been to Appleton, WI. It is maybe not rural, but it is not urban like LA is, either. (Somewhat snarkily and assuredly problematically, my definition of a city is "a place where I can eat.") He wants to stress that the urban/rural distinction is shaky and thus when it is applied it is "standardizing."
OK I kinda want to know what a "radical faerie commune" is. Here are some links: http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/radical_faeries.html http://www.radfae.org/about.htm *boggle* I had no idea. That's awesome. (Although I wonder how they would respond to trans people; the radical lesbian communes of the same era... left something to be desired.)
Anti-urbanism has a history of racism and "politically bankrupt regionalism" (11) Warner correctly critiques some queer anti-urbanism as espousing a sort of homonormativity, and so Herring says "I want to differentiate between a reactionary anti-urbanism and a critical anti-urbanism." Looking for "a queer use of Marx's anti-urbanism" (this is Leo Marx, not Karl) and a way to open up more spaces rather than deny urban ones.
Urban or rural motifs and behaviors can occur in all spaces --- wearing coyboy boots to a dyke bar in Oakland can be a disruption of urban/rural hierarchy in queer spaces. Yeah, I can dig that. Halberstam talks about "metronormativity" and I think this came up in class recently? Or maybe we just talked about shadow feminisms. Metronormativity must work along six axes:
- Narratological: flight from country->city as a coming of age
- Racial: urban queer culture is ofte dominated by white people and images of whiteness, despite the dubious saw that cities are less white
- Socioeconomic: Moving to the city and becoming part of queer culture lets you become a queer consumer of queer goods, often in an uncritical manner
- Temporal: "Future comes from cities, right?"
- Epistemological: Urban "culture" rubs off on you whether you go to the opera or not, I guess? I don't entirely understand this one.
- Aesthetic: "knowingness... sophistication... fashionability... cosmopolitanism"
"Potentially nourishing metronormative projects can sometimes amount to cultural and subcultural damage."
Herring's idea of "paper cut politics" on page 25 is resonant with the discussion of micropolitics and Baradian agential cuts we had in transsomatechnics class last week. "pester from a point of distraction to a point of disruption." I really like this term.
Notes some limitations of his work I agree with: first, the mixing of lesbian and gay culture, in which he mentions Sedgwick saying "there can't be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay [metronormativities] together. Or separately." This is still a little sloppy; if you're going to talk lgbtq, what about how you're conceptualizing everybody else? :)
"There is a danger of neglecting transnational movements as well as the urbanities of other nation-states." Goal is to complicate that while acknowledging that his analysis is US-focused and may not say much about spaces outside that.
Also he has angst surrounding losing his rural and lower-middle-class identity as part of becoming a professor! Yeah, I can resonate with that. I never really had a rural identity to lose --- although I do feel that my academic and personal paths have pretty much cut me out of ever being a real part of Cranston culture again --- but the class thing, yeah, I get it. [2]
...and there it ends, because it's the introduction to a book, and actually I'd rather like to read the book, although probably not right now since it's not relevant to any of the papers I need to write this semester.
Also, apropos of very little, http://www.amazon.com/Southern-Comfort-Robert-Eads/dp/B000089725 is a thing and I should watch it at some point.
[0] This is not to say I do not miss coastal cities terribly, or that they don't comprise like seven or eight of the top ten places I'm most likely to live after I'm done with this PhD program.
[1] This is also something I should keep in mind; I should broaden my geographical net if I at some point decide to go looking for a scene that fits me rather than saying "meh" and just working 80-hour weeks.
[2] My personal case is interesting in that I feel like my family had a similar trajectory, too, and I'm never quite sure what to do with that, but that's not what this paper is about and I don't think I want to address it in detail in a public blog post anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Hm, apparently I have thought about this a lot.
Date: 2010-10-11 04:17 pm (UTC)Things may have changed, but going by radio advertising when I was a teenager, there was exactly one club (dark, smoky, plays Top 40) per county, and one per several counties that was 18+. (Bars qua bars were rather more common, but as watering holes, not pick-up scenes.) So I'm not sure this is a problem unique to gay bars.
Actually, on second thought, NC is not that large, nor is it lacking in cities (my scheme goes big city -> city -> town -> the cornfields.) If only 5 or 10 of those 35 are outside Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, I'm not really clear that's a ringing endorsement of robust queer community resources [you know, gay bars!] in the area. But if your yardstick is 'nothing queer exists outside NYC', that's a really flimsy premise to demolish...
I think I would like to read this book too, although I think I would argue with it a lot. Specifically, I am curious about how the flight of queer youth from "rural" to "urban" spaces is distinguished in a meaningful way from the past ~century of youth of all sorts leaving their impoverished towns and seeking their fortunes (or at least partners) in the big city, and how violence and psychological isolation leading to self-harm and suicide are considered as motivating factors for queers showing concerns about their peers living in unfriendly communities [which exist in NYC and SF, I hear.]
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-10 06:50 pm (UTC)i think it started more exclusionary, but the strong feminist influence that came in later changed it a bit. Plus, just being men who have sex with men isn't really the transgressive part of the culture anymore. People are expected to fit in with some culture norms, which can exclude some, but mostly if they don't they won't be particularly comfortable and those expectations are pretty... undemanding. As far as i have seen, the norms mostly have to do with celebrating other fairies' choices and accepting casual lay paganism. The most exclusionary part i've run into is the norms of physical contact, which are optional, but definitely there.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-10-11 05:18 pm (UTC)There's a whole stew of urban cultures; relatively few of them involve opera. And yes, some of the culture(s) you live in will rub off on you, though you may be more or less resistant. I'm not sure what's not to understand? Or is this a more complicated assertion than I'm taking it to be?