Chapter 10: Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Criticism

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the second definition of the word “margin,” which is fitting for literature critique is the blank space bordering the written or printed area on a page. This is the space where many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender authors have existed in relationship to their printed text. As Tyson explains, “we are given very little, if any, biographical information about a writer’s lesbian or gay sexual orientation, let alone information concerning how that orientation affected her or his life and literary production” (p. 318). Marginalization then is practice of excluding a social group from the mainstream of the society, placing that group-legally or socially-on the "margins" of the society. In this case, the group is made up of men and women who are excluded because of emotional and sexual attraction, which is directed toward members of the same sex, otherwise known as homosexual. In American culture, heterosexuality, emotional and sexual attraction directed toward members of the opposite sex is the only sexual orientation receiving full social legitimacy.

Tyson remind us that “gay men and lesbians in America still face discrimination in the military; in obtaining jobs and housing; in using public facilities, such as hotels and taverns; in areas of family law such as the right to marry, retain custody of their children, adopt children, or provide foster care, as victims of police harassment and violent hate crimes; and in AIDS-related discrimination” (p. 320). This discrimination is compounded when we the gay person is also a person of color or if he dose not conform to traditional gender roles. While many lesbian women of color have found their voice and have managed to write about their experience, gay men of color continue to be silenced by a complex system of discrimination. It is not just discrimination experienced as a sexual minority, but gay men and lesbian people of color have also suffered oppression within the white dominated gay culture. The brown body is fetishedized and eroticized while simultaneously pushing him and her further out into the borderlands of identity. Consequently, the discussion of this experience continues to be defined in lesbian criticism, gay criticism and queer criticism, each of which are briefly address below.

Lesbian criticism has much in common with feminist criticism given that both are responses to patriarchal oppression. Where feminism address issues related to sexism and shaping personal identity and political action beyond the influence of sexist ideologies, lesbian critics address heterosexism, which is privileged status based on sexual orientation. Lesbians who have raised awareness of heterosexual privilege have created tension within the feminist movement. Heterosexual feminists have distanced themselves from lesbianism given the threat that they too might be perceived as homosexual. This was made even more complicated by feminist women of color who wrote about their experience as lesbians, which revealed yet another layer of within group oppression where white lesbian’s racist attitudes exposed their white privilege. Together they “analyze how the sexual/emotional orientation of lesbian writers have affected their literary expression; how the intersecting of race and sexual/emotional orientation has affected their literary expression of lesbians of color; and how the intersection of class, race, and sexual/emotional orientation has affected the literary expression of lesbians of working class origins. Lesbian critics also analyze the sexual politics of specific texts by examining, for example, how lesbian characters or “masculine” women are portrayed in literature by and about lesbians. They study canonized heterosexual texts, too, in order to learn what attitudes toward lesbian they embody explicitly or implicitly. ” (p. 329).

What I found significant about this section writing was the discussion about the contemporary sexual system of the U.S. white middle class compared to that of Mexican and South American cultures. In the U.S., emphasis is given to object choice as a crucial factor in defining sexuality, homosexual desire itself, stigmatizes one as a homosexual. The Mexican/Latin-American sexual system is based on the configuration of gender/sex/power. This is articulated along the active/passive axis and organized through the scripted sexual role one plays. It highlights sexual aim – the act one wants to perform with another person toward whom sexual activity is directed – and gives only secondary importance to the person’s gender or biological sex. “As a macho, a man can have sex with both men and women and not be considered what Americans call homosexual. Because the U.S. system places much emphasis on sexual desire, there is, a great deal of focus is placed on the maintenance of masculinity. This is what makes the expression of flamboyant drag queens and camp salient to gay criticism. These roles are “subversive in that it mocks authority and traditional standards of behavior by imitating them in outrageous ways, often thought the use of exaggerated gestures, postures, and voice” (p. 332). The other significant area of importance to gay criticism is related to the impact of HIV on the gay community. AIDS was first identified in 1981, and by the end of the decade, a generation of gay men had died from it. Given the slow response of the government and public health system to address this disease, the gay community created a national response that formed political organization and generated a great deal of writing that has had a significant impact on American culture.

Originally, the word “queer” referred to something suspicious or 'not quite right', or to a person with mild insanity or who exhibits socially inappropriate behavior. As we see in this branch of criticism, the meaning of words are taken and redefined in a way that minimizes the stigmatizing effects and turns it on its head by making it a badge of pride. For example, the meaning of the word “queer” remained fundamentally the same, the connotations of the word changed substantially in the late 20th century. It was used in the late 1960s by radical writer Paul Goodman in his book The Politics of Being Queer (1969), which had a significant effect on the early gay liberation movement in the USA, especially as it became more widely and openly radical in the 1980s and 1990s. At this time, a movement developed within this larger movement, which sought to reclaim queer and wear it as a label of self-respect, as had already begun happening in some communities with epithets such as faggot and dyke (p. 337). This has resulted in a politics of sexuality that defines individual sexuality as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible sexuality. Thus, sexuality is see has different at different times over the course of our lives or even at different times over the course of a week because sexuality is a dynamic range of desire. For queer theory, then, our sexuality is socially constructed (rather than inborn) because it is based on the way in which sexuality is defined by the culture in which we live (p. 338).

Finally, the boundaries among lesbian, gay and queer criticism remains somewhat fluid. Given the attention to the social construction of categories of normative and deviant sexual behavior, it turns identity inside out. It reflects the emphasis on identity politics, which is common among contemporary progressive movements. The flipside of identity politics is the politics of shared ideas where communities and activism is based on shared beliefs, commitments, values, and goals rather than on shared immutable characteristics or oppressions. A sexual and gender liberation movement based on ideas could encompass everyone who shares the goal of free choice in the areas of sexuality and gender expression, regardless of their personal sexual or gender identity.