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[T]he violently contradictory and volatile energies that every morning’s newspaper proves to us are circulating even at this moment, in our society, around the issues of homo/heterosexual definition show over and over again how preposterous is anybody’s urbane pretense at having a clear, simple story to tell about the outlines and meanings of what and who are homosexual and heterosexual.
— Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
IT IS a major tenet of queer studies that, among other instances of sociosemiotic double binds, modern culture places sexuality at (or pretty near) the center of individual identity, while at the same time discouraging recognition of its relevance for cultural studies. If gender is absolutely determinant (just try conducting any of the affairs of daily life without making reference to it), sexual identity runs a close second: no matter what sexual identity you subscribe to, most of those around you, from virtually any and all social sectors, feel that it is the most “natural” thing in the world to assign one to you, no matter how grossly or how subtly they do it. Thus, even idealistic liberals who wish to pretend that gender and sexual identity shouldn’t matter so much and thus attempt to conduct themselves as though it didn’t are both reinforcing the fact that it does, after all matter, and creating as well an anomaly of classification for most individuals who have gotten used to simply living with what may, inalterably, be there as part of our abiding sociosemiotics. Maybe we can reframe it, but the chances, due to strongly competitive ideological interests, of doing away with it, as idealistic liberals seem to want, are not a very promising proposition.
Yet, if questions of sexuality are, for the foreseeable future at least, inalterably there, one wonders what to make of the abiding refusal of large segments of literary scholarship to acknowledge the relevance of sexuality in the examination of texts, whether that sexuality (and I have in mind a multidimensional definition of sexuality not just simply hypostatized categories such as “gender” and “preference”) relates to authors, characters, or readers. The point here is the need to scrutinize, theorize, and question in substantive ways heteronormative assumptions about cultural production and to incorporate into critical discourse knowledge about sexual identity, desire, and choice, queer or otherwise, as an integral part of the process of cultural production.
What this means is that just as we consider important issues like national identity, regional roots, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and linguistic affiliations, we must now explore questions of sexual “preference” or “orientation”: all these are, perhaps, squishy categories, but part of multicultural thinking is to presume they have some weight, however they may be strategically defined, in the process of cultural production and consumption. One is speaking here not of biographical determinism for any of these features (and for others that could be proposed) but rather of how they serve as part of a calculus of interpretation whereby such categories provide the critic with, at least, working parameters that may turn out to be highly significant, even as they may turn out to be irrelevant. Just as few would now propose examining literature without a presumption of the importance of gender identity, it is proposed equally that sexuality, because of its ideological importance in most societies, cannot be ignored. And if language is accepted to be an intimate, almost inextricable part of one’s personality, sexuality is no less so, and this is just as pertinent for purportedly majoritarian heterosexuality as it is for the minoritarian homoerotic. Let me push my analogy a bit further: to write in globalized English is very different from writing in minority Czech or Romanian (I am thinking here of Gilles Deleuze’s proposals regarding “minor literatures” [Deleuze and Guattari]). What I argue in this essay is that the understanding of an author’s work is as much distorted by ignoring the subscription of heteronormativity as it is by ignoring its queer associations, as much as understanding would be distorted by the difference between writing in English and writing in Polish or writing as a man or writing as a woman.
There is another point to be made here as well, and that is how the intersection of any of the aforementioned categories beginning with national identity work themselves out in conjunction with others. One must be careful to understand that just as nationalism may work significantly differently when from a bourgeois rather than a proletarian point of view and just as feminism may mean something very different to a professional in the United States than it would to a professional in Brazil, so too the working disjunction heteronormative/homoerotic (which is preferable to the more patriarchal formulation, heterosexual/homosexual) must be nuanced in conjunction with other categories: homoerotic life is very different from one society to another, from one class to another, and from one ethnoracial identity to another: just as there is resentment among women of the so-called Third World to the indifference of Anglo-American and western European feminism, so too there is a sense that the Western gay movement becomes overwhelmingly generalized as an international model.
I don’t know how these issues work themselves out with reference to Anglo-American literature or the literature of other cultures, although I suspect that matters are not as open and resolved as the enormous bibliography might superficially lead one to believe. But I do know in the case of my broad area, Hispanic studies, that the resistance is overwhelming (for surveys see Saint Saëns; Eisenberg). Take, for example, a recent article by Douglas K. Benson in Hispania, the official journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, on the Spanish poet Gloria Fuertes. Fuertes was highly controversial during her lifetime for her unconventional personal life, including her lesbian relationships, and she is an important generational figure in the transition from the Franco dictatorship with its congealed images of the sacred family, Catholicism, mystic Spain, and virginal morality (all of which, as is well known, have been industriously dissected by the great Spanish queer filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar [see Smith]) to the sort of democratic society that makes Almodóvar’s filmmaking possible and the recovery of the full dimensions of the poetry of someone like Fuertes imperative.
Yet the article to which I am referring dismisses the sexual dimension of this imperative by grandly rejecting the need to any recourse by the critic to “unfortunate stereotypes” about Fuertes’s personal life (210). Now, I don’t know what counts for unfortunate stereotypes in the personal universe of this critic, although I would certainly like to hope that the persistent harassment of Fuertes for her sexual life by the official institutions of Franco Spain and the semiofficial institutions of academic and journalistic criticism counts as one cluster of unfortunate stereotypes. However, the tone of the context leads me to suspect otherwise. Instead, I would guess that the unfortunate stereotypes at issue are the various erotic liaisons Fuertes enjoyed throughout her life. Maybe it only means the way those liaisons were discussed among “those in the know” (who always seem to know more about one than one does oneself), insinuated in the press, and used with crushingly silent eloquence to discriminate against Fuertes in her professional and creative career. Homophobia always needs both hands to function: with one hand it holds out the lure of what is insinuated to be dreadful information about the individual but with the other it cautions that such information really has nothing to do with the intellectual and artistic matters under discussion. The rhetorical device of modestia sententiarum functions very well here to sully rather than to dignify, and trial lawyers know that even if the evidence they have just got the witness to introduce into the record is struck by the judge as a consequence of an objection, the damage of its introduction is irreparable.
Now, lest you think I am being unrelentingly harsh with the Hispania scholar, I would ask you to consider why the matter is even raised in the first place. Of course, I think it should be raised, and in the case of Fuertes, my colleague Alberto Acereda has done a superb job of surveying the recurring and not so surprisingly vicious homophobia that has characterized the treatment of Fuertes’s poetry. Among persons of good breeding, silence is supposed to be preferable to a snicker, but neither does much to advance the cause of cultural criticism and both are equally devastating. Although “silence = death” is a principle of gay activism, silence in scholarship is a mark of ineptitude: first, it may mark inadequate information, which leads to a querying of the protocols for obtaining information necessary to adequate intellectual analysis; second, it may mean the judicious eliding of information because, in response to gut-felt horizons of acceptability, one believes it cannot really matter, as though there were a way of determining a priori that something does not matter and therefore needs not be interrogated as to whether it does, in fact, matter (if you think that this is one of the ploys of censorship, I won’t object); or third, it actually does somehow matter but there is a resistance, on any number of interlocking grounds, to see what that pertinence is.
One cannot propose exactly how information regarding sexuality can automatically be pertinent to the assessment of cultural production, any more than one can suggest how nationality, ethnic allegiance, linguistic nativeness, social class participation, or gender inscription is automatically understandable vis-à-vis a writer’s production, as though we had some formula to link the complexities of a writer’s work to the fact that that writer is a native speaker of a particular (and multiply determined) dialect of a language. Isn’t the work of criticism to propose in a theoretically driven and cogently exposited way what the pertinence involved can be? Surely no work of criticism can cover all the territory, so I am not saying that one should always have to discuss Gloria Fuertes in terms of her sexuality, which I cannot even presume to pigeonhole, although it seems to range over the homoerotic, the queer, the lesbian, to judge by the unfortunate stereotypes generously provided in a more blatantly homophobic fashion elsewhere than the Hispania author, to his credit, does.
But what aggravates me here is that Fuertes’s sexuality is made an issue of—well, in all fairness, it is not directly identified as being a matter of her sexuality, but the reader either knows that this is the controversial aspect of Fuertes’s public persona or can guess that it’s the only sort of sordidness that can still be acceptably hinted at but must then, out of clubroom decorum, be hushed. Homophobia may be morally deplorable because of the violence against those who are the subject of its discourse, but there is something to be said for carrying through the issue that you have raised rather than proceeding to strike it from the record. At least Dulce María Loynaz’s literal trashing of one of the typescripts of Federico García Lorca’s play El público (as reported by Marcelle Auclair in García Lorca [iv]) or the early systematic denial of place in the nascent Chicano canon to John Rechy because his gay characters could not possibly be appropriate role models for heterosexual macho saviors of Aztlán had some honest if perverse, coherence to them, which refusing even to consider the sexuality of an author like Fuertes does not (see Bruce-Novoa, “Homosexuality” and “In Search”; Tatum).
I said that a discussion of sexuality (like anything else, to be sure) has a need to consider that of the author, the characters in a work, or the reader, to which should be added the need to engage in a triangulation or calculus of these three dimensions, since while it ought to be clear that they cannot simply be allegorical images of each other, it ought also to be clear that they are not merely independent levels that have nothing to do with each other: not all Chicano writers write about the so-called Chicano experience and not everyone who writes about the so-called Chicano experience is a Chicano writer, but we understand there to be some sort of privileged connection between the two. However, just as we have recognized successively that issues of ethnicity and class are not simply irrelevant givens in cultural production, we have come to recognize that gender is vastly more than the grammatical markers we use to refer to an author or a character. Concomitantly, then, sexuality can also never be simply a given in the characterization of the identities of an author or a character. My focus on the Hispania article about Gloria Fuertes may give the impression that I am mainly interested in defending a respect for the queer or nonheteronormative author. This is true, but only up to a certain point. The task is larger than overcoming the violent silence imposed by scholarly homophobia. It must also mean the deconstructing of heteronormativity, the presumption of heterosexuality and heterosexism, and the generalized assumption that sexual desire is also unquestioned or unquestionably given.
I have always been bemused by the insistence that we can never know for sure about the sexuality of the seventeenth-century Mexican nun-poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz because, although there are some love poems by her marked by feminine apostrophe, the majority of her erotic texts comply with the supposedly ground-zero markings of heteronormativity (this is one of Octavio Paz’s points). While I appreciate the work done by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, in both a mock interview and a work of fiction, to demonstrate that Sor Juana’s female same-sex preferences are not all that arcane and unrecoverable from either a specifically lesbian or generalized queer point of view, her conclusions, which are convincing to me, do not still one of the dimensions of unease generated in me by heteronormative and homophobic analysis of her work (see also Altamiranda). This is because of the unexamined assumption such analysis makes that tradition—whether an extraliterary heteronormative tradition or a specific set of traditions grounded in Hispanic culture and its sources—simply dictates that erotic poetry be cast in terms of a rigidly defined heterosexist gender binary (él y ella) that is also a rigidly defined sexist binary (yo soy él y tú eres ella). Such an assumption is willing to purchase blithely the sexist transvestism whereby the female poet must speak in the masculine, enunciating a universal abstract male-female love relationship that, it is proposed (although more by implication than explicitly), transcends her condition as a woman and is one in which her condition as an asexual (or at least partially defeminized) nun is only a trivial autobiographical detail. But such an assumption finds it virtually impossible to invest in a proposition whereby if a nun is going to write about the worldly affairs of erotic and passionate entanglements, then the transvestism involved is of an entirely different order and one that is also very worldly indeed: that a woman might address herself to another woman as a man not out of compliance with heteronormative literary conventions but because she wishes to signal, through the accrued horizons of knowledge about passion that may inhere in such conventions, the legitimacy of a woman addressing another woman in the same nature of erotic engagement with which a man might address a woman. None of this wishes to revive psychobabble to the effect that women who desire other women are men cursed with a woman’s body. Rather it is meant to perturb heteronormative assumptions and to inaugurate the inquiry as to how, precisely, might the desiring subject manipulate heteronormatively congealed genres to do the work of showing what all those conventions mask in terms of the varieties of desire that transcend our still so limited ways of talking about human experience.
Baroque art—and Sor Juana is certainly a baroque artist—is supposed to be all about constructed and shifting masks and complex ambiguities of meaning, which is all the more reason to be quite startled at how so much criticism on one of the great baroque poets of the Spanish language can comfort itself with saying that we can never really know what Sor Juana’s sexual desires really were. I think this means to say that we should, therefore, stop wondering about what they were, because such wondering might lead us to believe that she was a lesbian. Such a view goes on to maintain that Sor Juana was only adhering to the poetic conventions of the genre traditions within which she was writing. This in turn means, I believe, that none of her contemporaries could have been queer either, at least in any meaningful way, because they were also writing true to convention. If some of the “shes” of their poems were really “hes,” we can also never really know for certain; but, of course, when someone writes in a “he-to-him” mode, as Shakespeare did in the preponderance of his sonnets, that is also another form of literary convention that cannot have any real-world significance. The queer possibilities of Luis de Góngora’s poetry (Góngora is the great male and Spain-based counterpart to Sor Juana) are now recognized as legion (see Díaz-Ortiz), but that leads one to wonder if Góngora will also be heteronormalized because the he-she binary holds firm in the bulk of his erotic poetry. Francisco de Quevedo, another great baroque poet who is not himself free of queer dimensions, alleges to have fumigated the house he bought that Góngora had lived in to free it from the “vile stench” of the latter’s verses, and one would like to entertain the notion that it had as much to do with rejecting the gender instabilities of Góngora’s poetry as it did with, as literary history claims, repudiating the latter’s verbal ingenuities, especially since specific reference is made by Quevedo to Góngora’s Soledades, which is definitely a text open to a queer reading.1 The question here is an overwhelming one: given heteronormative literary conventions and the heteronormative sociocultural ones that frame and sustain them, how do the uncontainable vagaries of erotic desire get written? (See Edelman on this matter.) Sor Juana may have had it easier because the iron-clad gender binary of conventional love poetry allowed her to mask female-to-female desire behind the supposedly reasonable transvestism of a woman assuming the patriarchally authoritative masculine voice. Much more problematical would be Góngora’s transvestism whereby he either slips into the gown of the female vocative or transgenders the masculine nominative (on transvestite deixis in San Juan de la Cruz, see Geirola, “Esbozo”; see also Geirola, “Juan de la Cruz”). The sheer inability or refusal to contemplate any of these combinations only serves to confirm the enormously heteronormative sway that continues to attain in the scholarly discourse, at least in Hispanic studies, and perhaps most of all in the classroom (see various papers in Haggerty and Zimmerman). What is particularly engaging—morbidly engaging—is that convention is used to deny the possibility that the personal pronouns of the poetry can mean anything else, either literally (in Sor Juana) or as transgendered reworkings (in Góngora), and then is used to say that, because they cannot mean anything else, the poetic production can never have any real-world or autobiographical import, although everything else in the production is taken to have such an import.
In the foregoing, I have not so discreetly suppressed one of the terms of my original formulation, which was the triangulation or calculus of author, character, and reader. While there is a certain amount of scholarship concerning how queer authors write their queerness, whether framed in autobiographical terms (Robinson) or as a semiotic process (Edelman), and while there is a large body of criticism dealing with queer characters, it strikes me that there is as yet little scholarship having to do with how nonqueer readers engage with queer writing (beyond the strategies of silencing and rejection mentioned above), how queer readers engage with nonqueer writing, or how queer readers engage with queer writing. All these are highly problematical and probably untheorized categories (at least in the way I tick them off here), but that is, of course, the point of my characterization at this juncture: there is a need to scrutinize and theorize them; to repudiate heteronormative assumptions about cultural production; and to incorporate into critical discourse knowledge about sexual identity, desire, and choice, queer or otherwise, as an integral part of the process of cultural production.
After this essay was completed, two additional publications have come to my attention. One is María Cooks’s study on Gloria Fuertes, interestingly titled “The Humanization of Poetry” and, like Benson’s study, also published in Hispania. And, paralleling Benson’s study, Cooks’s ignores the homoerotic content of Fuertes’s poetry. Where Benson at least acknowledges “comments” on Fuertes’s personal life, Cooks maintains the veil of complete silence. Where this becomes critically untenable is that, in line with her title, she underscores how Fuertes’s poetry is highly “intimate—almost confessional” (431) and characterized by a “marginal, intimate, feminine voice” (430), an attribution that is followed by a quote from “La mujer fuerte,” a text that easily lends itself to a lesbian reading, in Adrienne Rich’s sense, at least, of the “lesbian continuum.”
The second reference is the premier issue of the Duke University Press journal Nepantla; Views from the South. Framed as a border studies journal with specific reference to Latin America, the editors point out that nepantla is “a Nahuatl word describing the ‘in-between situation’ in which the Aztecs saw themselves in the sixteenth century, as they were placed in between ancient Aztec wisdom and the ongoing Spanish colonialization” (2). The editorial statement goes on to affirm that “Nepantla [. . .] links the geohistorical with the epistemic with the subjective, knowledge with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality in power relations” (2). Of course, it is unfair to generalize about a journal on the basis of only one issue, and Nepantla promises to be a very good journal indeed. However, the inaugural issue is notable for the absence of any reference whatever to gender or sexuality, even when there are several articles in which one feels such issues could well have been referred to (e.g., Lawrence Grossberg’s thirty-page study “The Figure of Subalternity and the Neoliberal Future”).
Acereda, Alberto. “Gloria Fuertes: Del amor prohibido a la marginalidad.” Romance Quarterly, forthcoming.
Altamiranda, Daniel. “Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Foster 192–98.
Benson, Douglas K. “La voz inconfundible de Gloria Fuertes, 1918–1988: Poesía temprana.” Hispania 83 (2000): 210–21.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Homosexuality and the Chicano Novel.” Confluencia 2.1 (1986): 69–77.
———. “In Search of the Honest Outlaw, John Rechy.” Minority Voices 3.1 (1979): 37–45.
Cooks, María L. “The Humanization of Poetry: An Appraisal of Gloria Fuertes.” Hispania 83 (2000): 428–36.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Díaz-Ortiz, Oscar A. “Luis de Góngora y Argote.” Foster 80–87.
Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Eisenberg, Daniel. Introduction. Foster 3–21.
Foster, David William, ed. Spanish Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood, 1999.
García Lorca, Federico. El público. Madrid: Centro Dramático Nacional, n.d.
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia. “The Politics of Location of the Tenth Muse of America: Interview with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Living Chicana Theory. Ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkeley: Third Woman, 1998. 136–65.
———. Sor Juana’s Second Dream: A Novel. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1999.
Geirola, Gustavo. “Esbozo para una lectura profana del Cántico espiritual.” Cuadernos para investigación de la literatura hispánica 23 (1998): 137–58.
———. “Juan de la Cruz.” Foster 98–100.
Grossberg, Lawrence. “The Figure of Subalternity and the Neoliberal Future.” Nepantla: Views from the South 1.1 (2000): 58–59.
Haggerty, George E., and Bonnie Zimmerman, eds. Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. New York: MLA, 1995.
Nepantla: Views from the South 1.1 (2000).
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o, las trampas de la fe. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982.
Porras, Antonio. Quevedo. Madrid: Editorial Plvtarco, 1930.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 227–54.
Robinson, Paul A. Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Saint-Saëns, Alain. “Homoerotic Suffering, Pleasure, and Desire in Early Modern Europe (1450–1750).” Lesbianism and Homosexuality in Early Modern Spain. Ed. María José Delgado and Saint-Saëns. New Orleans: UP of the South, 2000. 3–86.
Smith, Paul Julian. Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. London: Verso, 1994.
Tatum, Charles M. “The Sexual Underworld of John Rechy.” Minority Voices 3.1 (1979): 47–52.
© 2002 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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