>it's amazing how fast all
>this is changing. I agree the essentialism/panic about bisexuals has been
>worse in college towns/academic-type environments, I think it's partly
>because those subcultures are just more self-righteous about everything.
>also more obsessed with the whole notion of het privilege, people who are in
>many ways privileged are often -- out of a combination of guilt and
>repressed entitlement -- peculiarly focused on whatever specific exclusion
>they're experiencing.
A somewhat related set of thoughts:
1. I agree w/ Angela and Yoshie: ultimately what goes on is a reinscription of the het/homo binary in some form or another, where ultimately the reference is back to heterosexuality and the very real, often violent ways in which heterosexism is maintained and reinforced in society.
2. I won't use 'phobia' words (though I do like this bi-weariness; this is a most excellent word Yoshie) Like Carrol I tire of the endless proliferation of isms and phobias for they become meaningless after awhile and sometimes people treat them as if they're all the same. But we do have to use words and name things so... As I pointed out to Carrol on another list, 'phobia' invokes the sense that it's some sort of irrational fear harbored by individuals, whereas as a concept like heterosexism points to social structural mechanisms--social practices and institutions that shape the dynamics of oppression
3. Academia/non-academia is probably too simple. I have a colleague who gets really annoyed b/c people often seem to think that the range of glbt identity can be reduced to the experiences of people living either in NYC or San Francisco. The issues, the forms of violence/oppression, the sources of community and the tools for thinking about identity practices operate quite differently depending on whether you're living in Perth or Sydney, AU, right Angela?
I just moved to the South--though some wouldn't say FL is the SOUTH. I was quite stunned last semester when one of my students went to a gay bar for one of the qualitative research assignments. In class she revealed that she was quite shocked to think that gay men could be so gorgeous and that she was even more shocked to think that everyone she met there was a 'professional' of some sort. She was from inland Florida, a different animal compared to coastal Florida. Well....all I can say is that I had to listen while holding my hand under my chin to keep my jaw from dropping. The rest of the students in the class were quite stunned in the same way she was.
And the butch/femme thing Angela. Look, I grew up in the 70s. My dad was the chief paper boy for the local sm. town newspaper and one of the few people who'd hire 'out' lesbians from the local college. He later made an unsuccessful attempt at owning a bar where they migrated and mixed it up, oddly enough, with one of the more hellish frats in town. Butch/Femme--it was very nearly non-existent. I didn't even know what this was 'til I went to college in my mid-20s. Yeah, anecdotal and maybe completely aberrant....
3. We've been talking about transgressive sexuality and sexual identity on another list. One thing Butler and others of her ilk help us do is think of identity as a set of practices that have *effects* Sometimes I get annoyed with Butler because I think that she's ignored an entire sociological tradition that has understood this well since, oh at least the turn of the century. Hell, Goffman wrote a nifty little piece about getting fooled by a transvestite back in the sixties, inspiring his work on "Gender Advertisements" And, of course, there was _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life_ where he made it quite clear that the self/identity is a performance--not willy nilly voluntaristic, of course.
But what I've said over and over here since we've been talkin' Butler is that she's different because she points us toward the *effects* of identity practices. I'm not a big fan of her work or much of what is called pomo/poststruc. But it seems to me that it's important to consider it, to take it up. Not only because I *have* to in the sense that doing so is, in my mind, good scholarship and integral to good teaching, but also because I think critical theory demands that we take seriously 'the struggles and wishes of the age' Some of these struggles are found in the academy, but they can also be found outside of the academy if we look--hence my refs to Roseanne and Identity Politics as taken up by those who, for one reason or another, start to see that oppression has several faces, as Iris Young has pointed out.
4. Re Yoshie's concern with the social construction argument v. the search for genetic 'causes' There's a great deal of anxiety here and, as Liza notes, things are changing altogether too quickly for a lot of folks. The social con. argument destabilizes in particular those who've come to support glbt rights/liberation on the basis of their assumption that it's a biologically determined category. It's destabilizing, of course, because to speak of the soc. con. of queer identity is to also speak of the social construction of het identities.
5 Now a rilly rilly tangential issue, but one that might be really interesting is this: if it's the case that people are, more and more, recognizing the radical dynamism of sexual identities, then someone please explain the furor over Chasing Amy. Yes, yes I realize that the film came off as an adolescent buoy's fantasy. But you know, she didn't end up marrying the fellah living happily ever after in wedded het bliss, now did she. And, now that I think about, that ending may well conform to an adolescent buoy's fantasy in so far as now he can pine for her as his one true love for the rest of his life--now that's a Hollywood staple too. But anyway, I didn't pay as much attention to the whole thing when it was happening--too immersed in other stuff at the time. So, if anyone has any thoughts I'd sure like a good spanking on this one.