Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California): “Queer Betrayals”
My work, like Leo Bersani’s, seeks to counteract scholarly endeavors committed to the excavation of the gay or lesbian subject from the burial grounds of history. Such projects, worthy as they are, center the LGBT subject within globalized rights based projects and re-imagine all kinds of social contracts via the agency of such subjects. But in more recent queer theory, the positivist projects committed to restoring the gay subject to history and redeeming the gay self from its pathologization have been recognized as part of a process of homo-normalization and some theorists want to replace them by emphasizing the negative potential of the queer, and thus rethinking the meaning of the political through queerness precisely by embracing the incoherent, the lonely, the defeated, the traitorous and the disloyal and the formulations of selfhood that these negative modes set in motion. But many of these negative formulations of queerness proceed through psychoanalytic models and operate without any particular reference to materiality or lived reality. In order to illustrate what might be at stake in thinking through a concept like “queer betrayals,” I take, in this talk, the example of homophobic characterizations of fascism as somehow perverse and specifically as homoerotic and homosexual. While it may seem like a betrayal to move with rather than against the logic that binds fascism to homosexuality (most famously for example in Susan Sontag’s essay “Fascinating Fascism”), sometimes, as Ann Stoler argues in a brilliant book on the colonial archives, you have to think along rather than against the grain.
Lucas Hilderbrand (University of California, Irvine): ”A Suitcase Full of Vaseline, or Mapping Gay Travel in the 1970s”
This presentation will examine the ways in which the gay travel magazine Ciao! charted the emergent gay public scenes in cities across the U.S. and around the world during the transitional decade of the 1970s; through in-depth travel features on specific destinations, the magazine negotiated the intersections of gay identity and sex, economic shifts, and cross-racial desire in ways that both reflected unique local scenes and projected erotic fantasies upon them. This analysis of a now mostly forgotten periodical dedicated to gay sex tourism came out of—and has helped form—research for his separate and broader book project on the cultural history of gay bars in the U.S. The bar project, like Hilderbrand’s previous study of videotape, comes out of an investment in historicizing and thinking through the social affects of cultural form that has been so pervasive as to be nearly overlooked in critical analysis and that has more recently attracted claims of obsolescence. In his other work, Hilderbrand often explores issues of queer generationality and cultural memory, particularly in its mediated iterations.
Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania): “Absolute Zero: The Scandal of Love Outside the Family”
This paper considers the backward temporality of the spinster via a reading of the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal (and the Zoe Heller novel on which it is based). The film and the book offer an excruciating portrait of what the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann calls “true loneliness”—extended, deep isolation that threatens to erase the boundary between life and death. There are two scandals in the film: the affair between first-year art teacher Bathsheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) and her 15-year-old male student Steven (Andrew Simpson), and the obsessive, jealous, unacknowledged love of the veteran teacher Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) for Bathsheba. I argue that Bathsheba’s desire for Steven is portrayed as an extension of her maternal role, and therefore ultimately less scandalous than Barbara’s sterile, pedagogical desire for Bathsheba. Alienated from the rhythms of heterosexual domesticity and reproduction, Barbara lives in the serial, repetitive time of the institution. The spinster is frozen out of the family, and the emptiness of her life and slowed-down time of her life suggests an image of the world running to ground. At the same time, Barbara’s desire, while drained of vitality, is monstrously productive, and is thus identified with the inhuman force of narration. Notes on a Scandal’s representation of the vampiric, dried-up spinster has made it unpopular with LGBT audiences. Still, I want to suggest that Barbara’s embodiment of “true loneliness” offers a powerful vantage point on the violence and exclusions of the nuclear family.
Shane Vogel (University of Indiana, Bloomington): “Madam Zajj and US Steel: Bioperformance, Calypso Theatre, and Duke Ellington’s Philosophy of the History of Jazz”
This talk proposes a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance, or more simply bioperformance, with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s A Drum Is a Woman. Presented on the drama anthology program The US Steel Hour, this theatre-music-dance suite fused elements of Afro-Caribbean rhythm with swing and bebop to tell a history of jazz and featured acclaimed performers such as Carmen De Lavallade, Margaret Tynes, Joya Sherrill, and Talley Beatty. Structured by the conventions of the corporate sponsored anthology drama, the CBS broadcast promoted two competing and incompatible narratives: one that traced a direct line from the innovations of mid-century corporate prosperity to middle-class domestic security, and another that followed a black expressive line of flight as it moved across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, New Orleans, the US urban north, and finally the moon. Through their musical/theatrical/televisual experimentation, I argue that Ellington and Strayhorn created a hybrid performance in the mode of “calypso theatre”: a formal and thematic engagement with an Afro-Caribbean performance history. Their calypso theatre sounded and staged a philosophy of the history of jazz predicated on the production of a “people” that emerge as a refusal of the biopolitical population addressed by US Steel. By focusing on the televised performance’s dance and dramaturgy, this analysis shows how A Drum Is a Woman imagined a de-corporealization of the body and a queer transubstantiation of sound that contested the corporate body of national citizenship and the regularized body of Jim Crow.