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raxCHAPTER 4: The Beast In The Closet
This section brings us back to the homosexual panic idea from the introduction. She's working with Henry James who I unfortunately haven't read; I think my last reading of her book tapered off around here. (I had only been assigned the introduction; I liked it so much I kept going, until it hit texts I knew nothing about, and then I sort of petered out.)
"a post-Romantic tradition of fictional meditations on the subject quite specifically of male homosexual panic." (183)
Argument that generic issues, like respectable/bohemian or cynical/sentimental, are also workings out of anxiety around hetero/homo binary. I would take a little bit of issue there and say that is one of the things they might represent, but a reading that suggests that's the only or necessarily primariy thing going on may be missing other important matters.
p184 sodomy as anti-christ not using in this paper but could be helpful later
She cites her previous work Between Men to talk about molly-houses and the effects of legal violence on homosexual discourse and expectations. The really interesting thing here, I think, is the idea that the rules were set up so that "no man [would] be able to ascertain that he is not (that is bonds are not) homosexual."
Her take on p186 on how the paranoid Gothic foregrounded homosexual panic is interesting but it's so English, like as a discipline --- I imagine someone coming from a different approach could come up with a totally different reasoning. Is the literature representative or productive of the other reasonings that could be used here? It's sort of a gimme question but it's one I would expect her to address a little more than she does. She does mention the bachelor classification but she's still very literature-focused with it.
p189 bachelor as partially feminized, different from Gothic hero, references to Thackeray, Trollope, and Sponge; I mean Thackeray sure but does she really expect people to have read Trollope? Sponge? It's not that she uses these texts, that's fine, it's the way that she uses the texts without reallllly explaining what's going on. Although in her defense she does explain the ones she's going to use in detail, like Thackeray's Mr. Batchelor on p190-191.
Holy crap p192 suddenly is turning bachelors into cats, giving them claws and whiskers, just to make a point about cattiness. I have to work a quote from this in somewhere this is amazing. Your sexual orientation is muddled therefore you must become a cat??? (That explains SO MUCH.)
"Even that renunciatory high ground of male sexlessness has been strewn with psychic land mines." (194)
This biography of Henry James only leaves me more confused about Henry James. JUST TELL ME IF HE WAS QUEER OR NOT. Or I could go look it up myself. That helps me understand why he's such a good example; Sedgwick really could have just summarized that for me, that would be awesome. What little she says on page 195 is not helpful but is worth quoting in a discussion of how unhelpful she is.
HUH. "The worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion to desire women and its attendant deceptions of self and other" ( 198)
Detailed work on the Beast in the Jungle, trying to tease out the possibility of a homosexual reading as one of many possibilities that need to be considered together.
Whoah. "...the most potent attraction toward men who are at crises of homosexual panic . . . — Though, for that matter, won't most women admit that an arousing nimbus, an excessively refluent and dangerous maelstrom of eroticism, somehow attends men in general at such moments, even otherwise boring ones?" (209) For the character this is "gender-political resilience in her as well as love... forms of excitement, too, of real through insufficient power, and of pleasure." (210) The first quote, though, blasts open a huge question in the way it is voiced and the address to "most women." Sedgwick suggests here that no only does the character May Bartram get something out of observing this panic, but that Eve Sedgwick does, and you, female reader, quite possibly do too. Is this objectifying? Is this empowering? Is this feminist? There are like a thousand questions here and the fact that she just tossed it in there and then moved on, whoah. This totally goes in the paper.
CHAPTER 5: Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet
It's the "I haven't read Proust what in the hell are you talking about" chapter! I didn't even know he was gay until I looked him up on Wikipedia just now. This is probably a serious gap in my literature background --- I feel sort of embarrassed not having read any and not having known anything about him aside from "oh god his masterwork is like 3200 pages long" but having an MA in English. But whatever.
I think a lot of what she's doing here is inside baseball with other Proust critics. Now, there's nothing explicitly wrong with that; the non-fiction portion of my MA thesis was total inside baseball in _Lacanian Dubliners scholarship._ NOT EVEN "Dubliners scholarship," or "Lacanian Joycean analysis," but _internal detail wanking amongst scholars who are all using the same text to critique the same other text._ But I didn't tack it onto the end of a general-interest book. (...yet. :P )
p217 The chapter of Proust under discussion really calls into question the minoritizing/universalizing question that she posits earlier, and I bet she's going to make a case that the chapter comes from that question's rupture. She is still advancing her core arguments, just with what I read as a very narrow example.
p219 is yet another place trans theory could have been interesting.
p222 she puts Proust in the closet --- combination of homosexual knowledge and homophobic ingrained feelings
p230 "Establishment of the spectacle of he homosexual closet as a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, of authority --- someone else's authority --- over world-making discursive terrain that extends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homosexual." Again, this comes back to the things she said she wanted to do at the beginning.
p231 Proust presents "the spectacle of the closet as the truth of the homosexual" --- because of Charlus's closet, in part, it is hard to fix a homosexual identity on Albertine at all despite the obvious potential queer readings.
p233 basically "If Albertine's a man it all goes to hell"
p234 The word transsexual appears!!! But only to refer to Albertine as someone who might 'actually' be some other sex in the world of the author's head. OK maybe I am beating a drum about this a little bit.
p237 has interesting side notes about the possibility of oral sex having suddenly become popular in the late 19th century --- they tried to try Wilde on anal sex and that was not what he was into and apparently it was a Thing?
Sedgwick is so good at teasing things out of text.
"The crossing of an axis of sexual desire by an axis of gender definition has most the effect of guaranteeding, in the incoherence of the conceptual space thereby articulated, the infinite availability of hidden bolt-holes for the coverture of meaning, intention, regard." Yes! This is one of the places that this "gay and lesbian studies" approach she takes --- in some ways a nascent queer theory --- entangles itself with her feminism to great potential. There's more on page 239 here too, the "chalky rag of gender" and the "blackboard of sexuality" and a "hidden voice." ("If you're in it for the long haul in the last chapter in the middle of a long section about a close reading of a text, you don't mind if my text suddenly starts mimicking Prufrock's scansion and turns entirely poetic for a while." <3 )
p240-241 she basically admits that she is way the hell down the Proust rabbit-hole. She calls it both "textual abuse" and empowerment.
Aaaaand bisexuality shows up briefly at the very end. Right. Time to outline.
Also I need a queer icon.
This section brings us back to the homosexual panic idea from the introduction. She's working with Henry James who I unfortunately haven't read; I think my last reading of her book tapered off around here. (I had only been assigned the introduction; I liked it so much I kept going, until it hit texts I knew nothing about, and then I sort of petered out.)
"a post-Romantic tradition of fictional meditations on the subject quite specifically of male homosexual panic." (183)
Argument that generic issues, like respectable/bohemian or cynical/sentimental, are also workings out of anxiety around hetero/homo binary. I would take a little bit of issue there and say that is one of the things they might represent, but a reading that suggests that's the only or necessarily primariy thing going on may be missing other important matters.
p184 sodomy as anti-christ not using in this paper but could be helpful later
She cites her previous work Between Men to talk about molly-houses and the effects of legal violence on homosexual discourse and expectations. The really interesting thing here, I think, is the idea that the rules were set up so that "no man [would] be able to ascertain that he is not (that is bonds are not) homosexual."
Her take on p186 on how the paranoid Gothic foregrounded homosexual panic is interesting but it's so English, like as a discipline --- I imagine someone coming from a different approach could come up with a totally different reasoning. Is the literature representative or productive of the other reasonings that could be used here? It's sort of a gimme question but it's one I would expect her to address a little more than she does. She does mention the bachelor classification but she's still very literature-focused with it.
p189 bachelor as partially feminized, different from Gothic hero, references to Thackeray, Trollope, and Sponge; I mean Thackeray sure but does she really expect people to have read Trollope? Sponge? It's not that she uses these texts, that's fine, it's the way that she uses the texts without reallllly explaining what's going on. Although in her defense she does explain the ones she's going to use in detail, like Thackeray's Mr. Batchelor on p190-191.
Holy crap p192 suddenly is turning bachelors into cats, giving them claws and whiskers, just to make a point about cattiness. I have to work a quote from this in somewhere this is amazing. Your sexual orientation is muddled therefore you must become a cat??? (That explains SO MUCH.)
"Even that renunciatory high ground of male sexlessness has been strewn with psychic land mines." (194)
This biography of Henry James only leaves me more confused about Henry James. JUST TELL ME IF HE WAS QUEER OR NOT. Or I could go look it up myself. That helps me understand why he's such a good example; Sedgwick really could have just summarized that for me, that would be awesome. What little she says on page 195 is not helpful but is worth quoting in a discussion of how unhelpful she is.
HUH. "The worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion to desire women and its attendant deceptions of self and other" ( 198)
Detailed work on the Beast in the Jungle, trying to tease out the possibility of a homosexual reading as one of many possibilities that need to be considered together.
Whoah. "...the most potent attraction toward men who are at crises of homosexual panic . . . — Though, for that matter, won't most women admit that an arousing nimbus, an excessively refluent and dangerous maelstrom of eroticism, somehow attends men in general at such moments, even otherwise boring ones?" (209) For the character this is "gender-political resilience in her as well as love... forms of excitement, too, of real through insufficient power, and of pleasure." (210) The first quote, though, blasts open a huge question in the way it is voiced and the address to "most women." Sedgwick suggests here that no only does the character May Bartram get something out of observing this panic, but that Eve Sedgwick does, and you, female reader, quite possibly do too. Is this objectifying? Is this empowering? Is this feminist? There are like a thousand questions here and the fact that she just tossed it in there and then moved on, whoah. This totally goes in the paper.
CHAPTER 5: Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet
It's the "I haven't read Proust what in the hell are you talking about" chapter! I didn't even know he was gay until I looked him up on Wikipedia just now. This is probably a serious gap in my literature background --- I feel sort of embarrassed not having read any and not having known anything about him aside from "oh god his masterwork is like 3200 pages long" but having an MA in English. But whatever.
I think a lot of what she's doing here is inside baseball with other Proust critics. Now, there's nothing explicitly wrong with that; the non-fiction portion of my MA thesis was total inside baseball in _Lacanian Dubliners scholarship._ NOT EVEN "Dubliners scholarship," or "Lacanian Joycean analysis," but _internal detail wanking amongst scholars who are all using the same text to critique the same other text._ But I didn't tack it onto the end of a general-interest book. (...yet. :P )
p217 The chapter of Proust under discussion really calls into question the minoritizing/universalizing question that she posits earlier, and I bet she's going to make a case that the chapter comes from that question's rupture. She is still advancing her core arguments, just with what I read as a very narrow example.
p219 is yet another place trans theory could have been interesting.
p222 she puts Proust in the closet --- combination of homosexual knowledge and homophobic ingrained feelings
p230 "Establishment of the spectacle of he homosexual closet as a presiding guarantor of rhetorical community, of authority --- someone else's authority --- over world-making discursive terrain that extends vastly beyond the ostensible question of the homosexual." Again, this comes back to the things she said she wanted to do at the beginning.
p231 Proust presents "the spectacle of the closet as the truth of the homosexual" --- because of Charlus's closet, in part, it is hard to fix a homosexual identity on Albertine at all despite the obvious potential queer readings.
p233 basically "If Albertine's a man it all goes to hell"
p234 The word transsexual appears!!! But only to refer to Albertine as someone who might 'actually' be some other sex in the world of the author's head. OK maybe I am beating a drum about this a little bit.
p237 has interesting side notes about the possibility of oral sex having suddenly become popular in the late 19th century --- they tried to try Wilde on anal sex and that was not what he was into and apparently it was a Thing?
Sedgwick is so good at teasing things out of text.
"The crossing of an axis of sexual desire by an axis of gender definition has most the effect of guaranteeding, in the incoherence of the conceptual space thereby articulated, the infinite availability of hidden bolt-holes for the coverture of meaning, intention, regard." Yes! This is one of the places that this "gay and lesbian studies" approach she takes --- in some ways a nascent queer theory --- entangles itself with her feminism to great potential. There's more on page 239 here too, the "chalky rag of gender" and the "blackboard of sexuality" and a "hidden voice." ("If you're in it for the long haul in the last chapter in the middle of a long section about a close reading of a text, you don't mind if my text suddenly starts mimicking Prufrock's scansion and turns entirely poetic for a while." <3 )
p240-241 she basically admits that she is way the hell down the Proust rabbit-hole. She calls it both "textual abuse" and empowerment.
Aaaaand bisexuality shows up briefly at the very end. Right. Time to outline.
Also I need a queer icon.
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Date: 2010-10-16 10:11 pm (UTC)Quote!