States of Higher Education

Syllabus of Sex, Slavery, and Sexuality Course

2011-10-27T17:57:00.002-04:00

Judaic Studies 398W

Sex, Slavery, and Sexuality

Spring 2011

EN B118

TTH 12:25 pm – 1:40 pm

Corinne E. Blackmer, Ph.D.

Department of English

Office: EN D236

Tele: (203) 392-6715

E-Mail: blackmerc1@southernct.edu

I. Course Description

This special topics course centers its critical inquiries around the following pertinent facts: a

1. For most of recorded human history, most human cultures across the world have practiced some form of human chattel bondage.

2. Apart from the Qur'an, as well as ancient Greek and Roman texts, the Hebrew and Christian Bibles (AKA, Old and New Testaments) remain the only ancient texts that were written within cultures that practiced chattel bondage, but that are still read in Western cultures that, like virtually all other contemporary human cultures, have formally (or juridically) abolished and repudiated chattel bondage.

3. The Hebrew and Christian Bibles (as well as the Qur'an) have, historically speaking, stood at the center of impassioned ideological and political struggles over the ethics of human chattel bondage.

4. Whereas those in contemporary monotheisitc cultures assume that the Hebrew and (for many) even more so, the Christian Bibles condemn chattel bondage, the view of these sacred texts as opposed to chattel bondagege, as well as the prevalent view that «biblical ethics» ended slavery in the United States, are at best biased conclusions.

5. Until the 16th century, European culture, and the writings of Church Fathers, were virtually unanimous in their view that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures supported and indeed justified slavery. Views on biblical morality began to change in substantial fashion only in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, with the simultaneous advent of industrialization, innovations in agriculture (which increased crop yields) and German High (and low) biblical criticism, which set the Scriptures in historical context.

On the basis of the above-mentioned facts, this course will conduct a sustained critical inquiry, assessment, and evaluation of the following inferential hypotheses and critical theorums:

6. The Hebrew Bible, a sacred text written over an extended period of time by many different writers, is not merely informed by the polytheistic worship and slave-holding norms of ancient near-eastern cultures. Rather, an intense, ambivalent, and passionate struggle around and against ancient near eastern polytheism and slave holding constitutes the «center» of this text, from the narrative of the liberation from bondage under Pharaoh to the statutes regulating slave-holding and the treatment of women as subjects of property contracts between men.

7. The Christian Bible's discourses against «unnatural passions» do in fact condemn homosexuality, but in doing so do not reveal the morally problematic nature of homosexuality per se, but rather the morally unpalatable consequences of the cultural normalization of human chattel bondage.

8. Homosexuality became subject to moral condemnation in the Christian Scriptures because two men could not (in interpreting the law of the Holiness Code at Lev. 18:22) «contract» to remand another man into chattel bondage without eliminating the power of men, as a class, to contract period. For these reasons, women, whose sexual relations were not subject to juridical prohibition in the Hebrew Bible, became prohibited from romantic-sexual unions because such unions opposed what the Christian and, to some extent, the Hebrew Scriptures, perceive reflexively as slave-holding morality.

9. Western homophobic and sexist animus and legislation centers around and originates in such slave-holding morality. But whereas the Hebrew Bible does not legislate around women and condemns «male homosexuality» in the specific, and, arguably, very different form of public rape of vulnerable «stranger» males in order to destroy their social identities and power to contract with other men, the Christian Bible sees such relations as immoral per se.

10. The social norms of slave-holding cultures do not only inevitably produce anti-homosexual and anti-lesbian animus, but also likely form the root of the most enduring and troubling of all Western obsessive denunciations: anti-semitism. That the G-d of Israel had liberated «His People» from bondage under Pharaoh not only excluded Jews from the «moral laws» of slave-holding cultures, but also transformed Jews into an enduring threat to the moral logic and legitimacy of slave-holding per se.

11. Whereas the United States abolished chattel bondage in the nineteenth century, the use of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in contemporary American society to justify (and moralize) homophobic and sexist animus and exclusion reveals the continued seductive power that slave-holding morality (and visions of social order) continues to exert over contemporary individuals in cultures that have otherwise repudiated chattel bondage.

II) Required Texts

The required texts are available at the SCSU Bookstore or through an online vendor. Please purchase all of them immediately.

Mary Prince, A History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. CreateSpace, 2010. ISBN

978-1450551830.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grover/Atlantic, Inc.

ISBN 978-0802135162.

NIV International Bible. New York: Zondervan, 1987. ISBN 978-0310906520.

Drew Gilpan Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the

American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

ISBN 978-0-8078-5573-7.

III) Course Learning Goals

1. As this Special Topics course is a writing intensive W-course, students shall demonstrate knowledge of relevant course subject matter through producing twenty-five pages of critical prose. This prose shall be revised for coherence, correctness, development of argumentation, integration of evidence, implications, and structural development.

2. Students shall be formally evaluated as editors and revisers of each others' written work, and be expected to achieve professional level standards.

3. Students shall in this capacity demonstrate their ability to control for syntactical and grammatical correctness, to provide coherent connections among paragraphs and sentences, to appropriately imbed quotations and use paraphase to effect, to use the MLA style of citation, bibliography, and formatting correctly and consistently, and integrate atbibliography correctly and consistently.

4. Students shall demonstrate their ability to use critical thinking to formulate new knowledge and, hopefully, engage in professional collaboration with the instructor with the design of producing publishable research.

Critical prose demonstrating knowledge of the subject matter shall have the following characteristics:

1) Clarity of Focus. Writing that has a clear, lucid and coherent and limited purpose.

2) Thesis. Writing that constructs a powerful and coherent thesis that states an argumentative thesis that can support more than one viewpoint.

3) Evidence. Judicious, informed, and intelligent use of primary and secondary source material as evidence to support an argument.

4) Stylistics. Judicious, sophisticated, and correct use of diction, idioms, and levels of style appropriate to the audience and rhetorical purpose.

5) Correctness. Consistent control over grammatical, syntactical, and mechanical issues.

6) Citation. Consistently correct and mindful use of the MLA Style, as well as capacity to control for appropriate use of paraphrase and direct quotation, respectively.

7) Structure. Elegant transitions between and among paragraphs, use of embedded quotations, and strong, coherent overall structure.

IV) Course Requirements and Methods of Evaluation

Four 4 page argumentative essays 50% final grade

Eight page final research-based project 30% final grade

Peer editing and revision group work 20% final grade

V) Course Policies

Attendance. More than two unexcused absences shall be cause for failure.

Time on Task. In a course in which your peer editing and revision partners will depend on receiving your work in a timely fashion, lateness is a disaster for them and for the entire class. Papers will be marked down one full grade for each calendar day they are late.

Punctuality. Students who arrive late disrupt the class, and shall be counted absent for tardiness of more than ten minutes.

Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty. Cheating or taking credit for others’ ideas or language without giving them proper credit are serious offenses, and can result in expulsion from the university.

Disability Accommodations. If you are a student with a recognized and documented disability, please see me as soon as possible in the beginning of the semester so that we can make appropriate arrangements with the Student Disability Office.

Course Schedule

Part I: Reconsidering Slavery (Weeks I-IV)

1.25 Introduction

Phyllis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

1.27 Genesis 16; Genesis 21:1-21

Exodus 21: 1-11

Leviticus 25: 35-55

Deuteronomy 15: 12-18

2.1 First Letter to the Corinthians

Letter to the Galatians

2.3 Letter to Philemon

Colossians 3:18-4:1

Epistle to the Ephesians 5:21-6:9

2.8 I Romans 2:11-2:7

Dale Martin, from Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in

Pauline Christianity

2.10 Catherine Clinton. “With a Whip in His Hand: Rape, Memory, and

African-American Women.”

2.15 Mary Prince, Narrative of Mary Prince

2.17 Mary Prince, Narrative of Mary Prince

Part II Women as Property and Property Holders (Week V-IV)

3.1 Genesis 1-3

Genesis 34

3.3 Number 5: 11-31

Deuteronomy 22: 22-30

Judith Hauptman, “Rape and Seduction.” From Rereading the Rabbis: A

Woman's Voice

3.8 Mishnah Ketubot 1:2, 4:4, 5:5, 8, 9 (Marriage Contracts)

Babylonian Talmud 10a, 82b (Exile and Marital Caste)

Mishnah Kiddushin 1:1–5 (Money, Sex, or Contract)

3.10 Ephesians 5:21–6:9

Matthew 5

Sarah J. Tanzer, «Ephesians.» From Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist

Commentary

3.15 Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South

3.17 Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South

Part III Jewish Views on Homosexuality (then and now) (Weeks X-XI)

3.29 Genesis 18, 19: 1-19

Judges 19-23

3.31 Leviticus 18, 20

Deuteronomy 23: 17-18

Joseph Caro, Shulhan Arukh, Even Ha-Ezer 24

Susan Niditch. "The Sodomite Theme”

4.5 Trembling Before G-d (2001), dir. Sandi Simcha Dubowski

4.7 Hineini: Coming Out at a Jewish High School

Part IV: Back to the Roman Empire: Christianity on LGBT Persons (then and now)

4.12 Romans 1-3

I Corinthians 6: 9-11

I Timothy 1: 8-10

Vanessa Brown, from Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist

Perspective

4.14 Thomas Schmidt, «Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the

Homosexuality Debate»

Jack Rogers. "Sex, Philosophy, and Politics: How and What the Church

Must Decide in the Debate over Ordination of Homosexuals."

4.19 For the Bible Tells Me So

4.21 For the Bible Tells Me So

4.26 Chris Glaser. "The Love That Dare Not Pray Its Name: The Gay and

Lesbian Movement in America's Churches." (150-57)

4.28 Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

53. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

5.5. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

5.10 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

5.12 Conclusion

Course Evaluations

Final Portfolio Due 4

IV. Selected Bibliography (see handout for works placed on reserve at Buley Library)

Adler, Rachel. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish

Publication Society, 1999.

Alpert, Rebecca. Like Bread on the Seder Plate. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Bahnsen, Greg L. Homosexuality: A Biblical View. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House,

1978.

Bailey, Derrick Sherwin. Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition. London:

Longmans, Green, 1955.

Balka, Christie, and Andy Rose. Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian, Gay, and Jewish. Boston:

Beacon, 1989.

Bartlett, David L. "A Biblical Perspective on Homosexuality." Foundations 20 (1977) 133-47.

Beck, Evelyn Torton, ed. Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon,

1989.

Berlin, Ira, ed. Remembering Slavery. African Americans Talk about their Personal Experiences

of Slavery and Freedom. New York: New Press, 1998.

Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western

Europe from the Beginning of the Christen Era to the Fourteenth Century. Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1980.

___. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. New York: Villard, 1994.

Boughton, Lynne C. "Biblical Texts and Homosexuality: A Response to John Boswell." Irish

Theological Quarterly 58 (1992) 141-53.

Boyarin, Daniel. "Are There Any Jews in 'The History of Sexuality'?" Journal of the History of

Sexuality 5 (1995) 333-55.

Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish

Man. 1997.

Boykin, Keith. One More River to Cross: Black and Gay in America. New York: Anchor, 1996.

Brooten, Bernadette J. "Paul's Views on the Nature of Women and Female Homoeroticism." In

Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality. Ed. Clarissa W.

Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Mararet R. Miles. Boston: Beacon, 1985, 61-87.

___. Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Cahill, Lisa Sowle. "Sexual Ethics: A Feminist Biblical Perspective." Interpretation 49:1

(1995), 5-16.

Carey, John J., ed. The Sexuality Debate in North American Churches, 1988-1995:

Controversies, Unresolved Issues, Future Prospects. Symposium Series 36; Lewiston, NY:

Mellen, 1995.

Cherry, Kittredge, and Zalmon Sherwood, eds. Equal Rites: Lesbian and Gay Worship,

Ceremonies, and Celebrations. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995.

Cleaver, Richard. Know My Name: A Gay Liberation Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster

John Knox, 1995.

Coleman, Peter. Gay Christians: A Moral Dilemma. London: SCM, 1989.

___. Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality. London: SPCK, 1980.

Comstock, Gary David. Gay Theology Without Apology. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 1993.

___, and Susan E. Henking. Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology. New York: Continuum,

1997.

Corley, Kathleen E., and Karen J. Torjesen. "Sexuality, Hierarchy and Evangelicalism." TSF

Bulletin 10:4 (1987) 23-27.

Countryman, L. William. Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their

Implications for Today. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Maryknoll,

NY: Orbis, 1999.

Edwards, George R. Gay/Lesbian Liberation: A Biblical Perspective. New York: Pilgrim, 1984.

Ellison, Marvin M. Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality. Louisville, KY: Westminster

John Knox, 1996.

Fabre, Geneviève and Robert O’Meally, eds. History and Memory in African-American Culture.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American

Civil War. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Feinberg, Leslie. Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul. Boston:

Beacon, 1996.

Fulkerson, Mary McClintock. "Church Documents on Human Sexuality and the Authority of

Scripture." Interpretation 49:1 (1995), 46-58.

Furnish, Victor Paul. The Moral Teaching of Paul. Nashville: Abingdon, 1979.

Geis, Sally B., and Donald E. Messer. eds. Caught in the Crossfire: Helping Christians Debate

Homosexuality. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994.

Gluck, Robert, ed. Homosexuality and Judaism: A Reconstructionist Workshop Series. Wyncote,

PA: Reconstructionist Press, 1993.

Gomes, Peter J. The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart. New York: Morrow,

1996.

Goss, Robert. Jesus Acted Up: A Gay and Lesbian Manifesto. San Francisco:

HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.

Gramick, Jeannine and Pat Furey, eds. The Vatican and Homosexuality: Reactions to the "Letter

to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons." New

York: Crossroad, 1988.

Gramick, Jeannine, ed. Homosexuality and the Catholic Church. Chicago: Thomas More, 1983.

Grayston, Kenneth. "Adultery and Sodomy: The Biblical Sources of Christian Moral Judgment."

Epworth Review 15 (1988) 64-70.

Halpern, Micah D., and Chana Safrai. Jewish Legal Writings by Women. Ifrat, Israel: Urim;

Brooklyn, NY, Lambda, 1998.

Hart, Hendrik. "Reply to Wolters." Calvin Theological Journal 28 (1993) 170-74.

Hauptman, Judith. Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice, 1998.

Hays, Richard B. "Relations Natural and Unnatural: A Response to John Boswell's Exegesis of

Romans 1." Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (1986) 184-215.

Helminiak, Daniel A. What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. San Francisco: Alamo

Square Press, 1994.

Heyward, Carter. Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God. San

Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Holter-Stavanger, Knut. "A Note on the Old Testament Background of Rom 1,23-27." Biblische

Notizen 69 (1993) 21-23.

Holtz, Raymond C., ed. Listen to the Stories: Gay and Lesbian Catholics Talk About Their Lives

and the Church. Garland Gay and Lesbian Studies 6. New York: Garland, 1991.

Horner, Tom. Homosexuality and the Judeo-Christian Tradition: An Annotated Bibliography.

American Theological Library Association Bibliography Series 5; Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow,

1981.

Horner, Tom. Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times. Philadelphia:

Westminster, 1978.

Hunt, Mary E. "On Religious Lesbians: Contradictions and Challenges." Homosexuality, Which

Homosexuality? International Conference on Gay and Lesbian Studies. Ed. Dennis Altman,

et al. Amsterdam: Schorer, 1989, 97-112.

Ide, Arthur Frederick. Zoar and Her Sisters: Homosexuality, the Bible and Jesus Christ. Oak

Cliff, TX: Minuteman, 1991.

Jordan, Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1997.

Jung, Patricia Beattie, et al, eds. Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Lance, H. Darrell. "The Bible and Homosexuality." American Baptist Quarterly 8 (1989), 140-

51.

McGrath, Alister E. An Introduction to Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Malick, David E., "The Condemnation of Homosexuality in Romans 1:26-27." Bibliotheca Sacra

150 (1993), 327-40.

Maguire, Daniel C. Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World

Religions. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001.

Dale B. Martin. Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity, 1–30 .

Martin, Dale. "Heterosexism and the Interpretation of Romans 1:18-32." Biblical Interpretation

3 (1995), 332-55.

McNeill, John J. The Church and the Homosexual. Boston: Beacon, 1988.

Matthews, Shiela, Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, and Melanie Johnson, eds. Walk in the Ways of

Wisdom: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press

International, 2003.

Melton, J. Gordon, ed. The Churches Speak on: Homosexuality: Official Statements from

Religious Bodies and Ecumenical Organizations. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.

Miller, James. "The Practices of Romans 1:26: Homosexual or Heterosexual?" Novum

Testamentum 37 (1995), 1-11.

Monroe, Irene. "The Aché Sisters: Discovering the Power of the Erotic in Ritual." In Women at

Worship: Interpretation of North American Diversity, ed. Marjorie Procter-Smith and Janet

R. Walton. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993.

Nelson, James B. Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology. Minneapolis:

Augsburg, 1978.

Niditch, Susan. "The Sodomite Theme in Judges 19-20: Family, Community and Social

Disintegration." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44 (1982), 365-78.

Nugent, Robert, ed. A Challenge to Love: Gay and Lesbian Catholics in the Church. New York:

Crossroad, 1983.

Olyan, Saul M. "'And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman': On the

Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13," Journal of the History of Sexuality

5 (1994) 179-206.

Plaskow, Judith, and Carol P. Christ. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality.

San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Prince, Mary Sara. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Written by Herself.

London: Penguin, 2004.

Pronk, Pim. Against Nature? Types of Moral Argumentation Regarding Homosexuality. Transl.

John Vriend. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993.

J. Raboteau. African-American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Sands, Kathleen, ed. God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2000.

Satlow, Michael L. Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality. Brown Judaic Studies 303.

Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995.

Satlow, Michael L. "'They Abused Him Like a Woman': Homoeroticism, Gender Blurring, and

the Rabbis in Late Antiquity," Journal of the History of Sexuality 5 (1994) 1-25.

Scanzoni, Letha Dawson, and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott. Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A

Positive Christian Response. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Scroggs, Robin. "The Bible as Foundational Document." Interpretation 49:1 (1995), 17-30.

___. The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Contemporary Debate.

Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983.

Sears, James T. Growing Up Gay in the South: Race, Gender, and Journeys of the Spirit. New

York: Haworth, 1991.

Seow, Choon-Leong, ed. Homosexuality and Christian Community. Louiville, KY: Westminster

John Knox, 1996.

Shokeid, Moshe. A Gay Synagogue in New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Siker, Jeffrey S. Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of the Debate. Louisville, KY:

Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Siker, Jeffrey S. "How to Decide? Homosexual Christians, the Bible, and Gentile Inclusion."

Theology Today 51 (1994) 219-34; reprinted in Homosexuality in the Church: Both Sides of

the Debate. Ed. Jeffrey S. Siker. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1994, 178-94.

Smith, Abraham. "The New Testament and Homosexuality." Quarterly Review 11:4 (1991) 18-

32.

Soards, Marion L. Scripture and Homosexuality: Biblical Authority and the Church Today.

Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox, 1995.

Stegemann, Wolfgang, "Paul and the Sexual Mentality of His World." Biblical Theology

Bulletin 23 (1993), 162-66.

Stemmeler, Michael L. and J. Michael Clark, eds. Homophobia and the Judaeo-Christian

Tradtion. Gay Men's Issues in Religious Studies Series 1. Dallas: Monument, 1990.

Sullivan, Andrew, ed. Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con: A Reader. New York: Vintage, 1997.

___. Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality. New York: Vintage,

1996.

Swidler, Arlene, ed. Homosexuality and World Religions. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press

International, 1993.

Verhey, Allen D. "The Holy Bible and Sanctified Sexuality: An Evangelical Approach to

Scripture and Ethics." Interpretation 49:1 (1995), 31-45.

Wegner, Judith Romney. Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah.

Williams. Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk.

Wolters, Albert, "Hart's Exegetical Proposal on Romans 1." Calvin Theological Journal 28

(1993) 166-70.

Wright, David F. "Homosexuality: The Relevance of the Bible." Evangelical Quarterly 61

(1989) 291-300.

Wright, David F. The Christian Faith and Homosexuality. Edinburgh: Rutherford, 1994.

Wright, J. Robert. "Boswell on Homosexuality: A Case Undemonstrated." Anglican Theological

Review 66 (1984) 79-94.

Zanotti, Barbara. A Faith of One's Own: Explorations by Catholic Lesbians. Trumansburg, NY:

Crossing, 1986.

My Article on Nella Larsen's Passing

2011-10-26T16:13:00.001-04:00

When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and final novel, Passing, in 1929, the Supreme Court's "separate but equal" interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had been law for over thirty years. Plessy turned on the issue of the constitutionality of so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated racially-segregated facilities for whites and "coloreds" throughout the South. Homer Plessy, a resident of Louisiana who described himself as "seventh-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood" (1138), was forcibly rejected, after he refused to leave voluntarily, from the first-class, whites-only section of a railroad car in his home state. Declaring that "the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race," Plessy argued that the Louisiana law violated his constitutional rights of habeas corpus, equal protection, and due process. The Supreme Court denied the validity of this reasoning on several counts, among them that various state laws forbade interracial marriage on the grounds, as the State of Virginia later argued unsuccessfully before the Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), that "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."(1) Second, in an egregious instance of conceptual blurring of categories of persons that implied, without submitting the proposition toloical scrutiny, that white males were intrinsically more `adult' and `able' than non-whites or women, the Court argued that most states had established "segregated" schools "for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and ... for poor and neglected children" (Plessy 114).(2) The Court avoided responsibility for promoting institutional racism and established the constitutionality of de jure segregation by stating that "the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority ... is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put the construction upon it" (1143). They made an invidious distinction between the cultural and political rights of whites and `coloreds' on the basis of the intrinsic "reasonableness" of long-established cultural practices.(3) Writing for a majority of seven, Justice Henry Brown allowed that while the officers, empowered to judge racial identity by outward appearances might conceivably err in their judgment, the "object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either" (1140).(4)

In the fifty-eight years between Plessy and the Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), which declared separate public facilities based on race inherently unequal," many African-American authors pursued an actively critical engagement with the convoluted and contradictory terms of racial identity and identification set forth in Plessy. On the one hand, African-American letters faced the onerous burden of proving the cultural worth of black culture to an often doubting, condescending, and largely white audience. On the other hand, the legal decision and the Social Darwinism underlying it provided an unwelcome opportunity to thematize the willful ignorance and blindness informing racial segregation by exploring how racial stigmas were not founded in the "natural" superiority or inferiority of the races but rather constructed through historical prejudices and arbitrary (often illusory) social distinctions. Moreover, since Plessy not only denied the long if publicly unacknowledged history of interracial sexual unions (which had produced, among others, Homer Plessy as subject) but also strengthened existing miscegenation statutes by forbidding the social commingling of the races, narrative treatments of interracial sexual unions featuring characters who "passed" racially became an ideal vehicle through which to explore the inevitable intersection of racism (and, in some cases, sexism) with sexual taboos.

Seen in the light of the legal and cultural assumptions informing its production, Larsen's Passing, the curious plot of which has thus far eluded satisfactory analysis, becomes a searching exploration and critique of the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological incoherences that confronted Larsen as an urbane African-American woman author who eschewed racial separatism and nineteenth-century racial uplift, rhetoric - which might in part explain why she abandoned her promising literary career after writing this novel.(5) Indeed, Passing, a relatively late example of this topos of American writing, represents both an original reconfiguration of and commentary on more conventional plots of racial "passing," which typically center on a psychologically and culturally divided "tragic mulatto" figure, in such novels as James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun, among others. While these novels offer trenchant critiques of institutional racism, they also emphasize the heavy personal costs of crossing over the color line" and thus in some measure reinforce the con@ sequences of racial division in an equally separatist "national" literature. Passing, in contrast, stresses the interpretive anxieties and sexual paranoias that make convention-bound people reluctant to allow others the freedom to travel freely throughout the many worlds, identities, and sexualities of American society. Larsen's novel not only explores a legally fraudulent inter racial union in the marriage between Clare Kendry and John Bellew, but also subtly delineates the intraracial sexual attraction of Irene Redfield for Clare, while the former projects her taboo desires for Clare onto her husband Brian. Ironically, Brian Redfield, who the text implies might be homosexual, evinces no sexual interest in women, but Irene nonetheless begins to suspect that Brian and Clare are conducting an illicit, clandestine affair. Since the term "passing" carries the connotation of being accepted for something one is not, the title of the novel serves as a metaphor for a wide range of deceptive appearances and practices that encompass sexual as well as racial "passing." Focussed principally on the operation of chance and accident as well as the epistemological crises of unknowability that result from self-silencing and self-repression, Larsen's novel ostensibly passes" for a conventional narrative of racial "passing."

The story is narrated from the point of view of irene Redfield, a light-skinned, middle-class African-American woman who disdains "passing" and is married to a successful doctor, too dark to "pass," by whom she has had two sons. Irene, although self-consciously proud of her African racial heritage, has internalized the "separate but equal" dictum of Plessy as well as the ideology of bourgeois morality, both of which lead to a notable prudishness on her part and an obsessive attention to seemingly miniscule distinctions of caste and class. The well-regulated surface of her existence is shattered, however, ever, by the unexpected arrival of Clare Kendry, a light-skinned African-American woman from Irene's long-forgotten childhood past who has, through a combination of personal adventurousness and familial mishaps, ended up marrying John Bellew, a prosperous white businessman who knows nothing of her racial identity and by whom she has had a daughter. Hence, these once intimate childhood friends are simultaneously separated and tethered together, so to speak, by the divergent strategies they have adopted as adults to cope with their racial identities and their options to "pass" racially. The fact that they are, like Homer Plessy but unlike the vast majority of their fellow African-Americans. sufficiently light-skinned to "pass" marks them out as relatively privileged and distinctive individuals, ideally situated to both embody and expose the Janus-like duplicity of social arrangements that divide the races according to "discernible" outward appearances and, hence, "inner nature."

Larsen connects the arbitrarily segregated lives of these two married women by having them meet accidentally in the rooftop restaurant of a Chicago hotel, where they are not in company with their husbands, and where Irene, in this instance, has resorted to "passing" to escape a sweltering heat wave. Clare's chance meeting with her long-lost childhood friend instigates a potent desire in her, described in an effusive letter intertwining romantic and racial longings for Irene, to escape the isolated life of deception and secretiveness forced upon her by "passing":

"... For I am lonely, so lonely ... cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life ... You can't know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of.... It's like an ache, a pain that never ceases...."(174)

These profound if, significantly, somewhat inarticulate yearnings to return to the conditions of her childhood, before she and Irene "fell" into the self-divided divided condition of adult women, culminate in her decision, near the end of the narrative, to abandon her husband and child and return home to Harlem. As Clare's plans to reassume her earlier identity as an unmarried African-American crystallize, Irene convinces herself, with inconclusive evidence at best, that Clare actually intends to steal her husband Brian, a discontented if wittily urbane man who expresses periodic disgust with United States racism and who cherishes a dream, actively suppressed by Irene, of emigrating with his family to Brazil. In the denouement, which again takes place on a rooftop, Clare, Irene, and Brian assemble for a party hosted by a couple ironically named the Freelanders. John Bellew, who, unbeknownst to everyone save Irene, has accidentally discovered the racial identity of his wife by running into Irene with a woman too dark to "pass," bursts into the apartment. Before the scene can develop beyond Bellew's initial reaction of pained horror and outrage, Irene "accidentally" pushes Clare from the window and she falls to her death. In the end, Clare - whose death, the text indicates, is interpreted and dismissed by the authorities as an "accident" or "suicide" - becomes a poignant symbol of the victory of de jure segregation and narrow social conformity over integration and self-creation, and thus a symbol of the eclipse of the potential of both Irene as an independent woman and the Harlem Renaissance as an artistic movement:

Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eves, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene's placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter. (272)

Given the unconventional nature of this plot, which conjoins Larsen's interest in the operation of contingency and accident with her use of an unreliable narrator, earlier critics have judged Passing an artistic failure that represents resents an uneasy admixture of "public" issues of race and racial "passing" with the more "private" ones of sexual jealousy. The gender bias of this critique is not difficult to detect, and subsequently several African-American feminist critics focused on Larsen's use of irony to critique, through the character of Irene Redfield, conventional bourgeois notions of feminine propriety and racial identity and identification (see Fuller, Youman, Ramsey, Tate, and Christian). In her 1986 introduction to the reissue of Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, moreover, African-American feminist Deborah E. McDowell broke from (and, in some senses, extended) these critical interpretations in an atmosphere that, influenced most prominently by Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Audre Lorde's essays and poems, gave new importance to issues of lesbian sexuality in African-American literature. Treating Passings ostensible concern with racial passing as a rhetorical cover, McDowell contended that the novel,s apparent inconsistencies resulted from Larsen's actual concern with exploring the taboos against lesbian desire. According to this analysis, the novel "superficially" concerns "passing for white" and related issues of racial loyalty, but "underneath the safety of that surface is the more dangerous story - though not named explicitly - of Irene's awakening sexual desire for Clare" (xxvi).

This interpretation elucidates many of the otherwise quixotic motives that impel the narrative and serves in part to explain Irene' highly contradictory and volatile reactions to Clare as instances of what Patricia Juliana Smith has termed "lesbian panic," which finally impels Irene to destroy her friend in order to prevent disclosure, perhaps even to herself, of her taboo sexual desires.(6) Nevertheless McDowell's analysis, which in effect substitutes sexual for racial passing, both dehistoricizes and somewhat mischaracterizes the text, in which lesbian desire becomes an aftereffect, or, perhaps more accurately, an inevitable corollary of racial panic and thesexualization of socially taboo racial contacts in an environment governed by the legal and cultural presumptions of Plessy. In a narrative centered on the emotionally charged relations between two light-skinned African-American women, both of whom hold the secret of Clare,s racial identity as an intimate and potentially explosive bond between them, their friendship also becomes fraught with secret sexual fantasies as the mysterious and alluring Clare becomes for Irene both an exotic object and a projection of her profound dread of and taboo desires for sexual pleasure, worldly experience, independence from men, and escape from the narrow conventions of the marriage plot. Clare's legally proscribed liberation from the constraints of racial identity configured through marriage implies, for Irene, the equally terrifying possibility of liberation from those of "feminine" and heterosexual propriety as well. Irene may be intensely curious about - and, indeed, both desirous and envious of - the capacity of an "exotic" person like Clare to resist or evade the forces of domination, but her fear of freedom eventually impels her to act much like a Social Darwinist, and thus to force this representative of sexual and racial "exoticism" to lose the battle for survival.

Although Larsen, in 1929, uses the term "passing" to connote both racial and sexuality masquerading, the recent shift in criticism from issues of racial to sexual "passing" can itself be historicized, for "passing" now refers almost exclusively to the self-protective disguise of identity practiced by lesbians and gays in a society presumed and enjoined to be universally heterosexual. Moreover, homosexuals continue to occupy both in law and culture an analogous if not parallel position to that held by the minority of African Americans under Plessy who were sufficiently light-skinned to "pass" for white and thus to hide their "innate" inferiority. The differences are significant inasmuch as the vast majority of African-Americans under Plessy could not (or chose not to) "pass" for white, whereas the vast majority of lesbians and gays do pass for, and are assumed to be (unless declared otherwise), heterosexual. The similarities between the groups are equally compelling, however, inasmuch as when Larsen wrote Passing, blackness and homosexuality were both held to be stigmas that disqualified the bearers of these labels from freedom from undue social burdens and equal protection under the Constitution. For Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, the social deployment of the hidden knowledge of racial identities (and homosexual desires) in contexts presumed to be universally white (and heterosexual) takes a form uncannily similar to what Richard D. Mohr calls "The Secret," or that informal community contract of complicity and deception which characterizes the epistemological regime of the majority of lesbian and gay lives (30)(7). That Larsen inextricably intertwines both forms of "secrets," like both forms of "passing," indicates her interest in stressing the interrelationship of racial identification and homoerotic desire. That tragedy ensues in Passing once Irene Redfield misinterprets her own attraction for Clare Kendry, however, also clarifies the complex cultural and historical precedents of recent Supreme Court decisions that, deploying the hatred of homosexuals as an "invisible" fulcrum, have developed a mode of historically-based legal reasoning that threatens to erode relatively recent extensions of Constitutional protections to both women and racial minorities.

Since the late 1930s, the Supreme Court has identified several considerations for determining which governmental classifications require "heightened" scrutiny, under its three-tier equal protection analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment: (1) whether the discrimination is unjustifiable or invidious; that is, based on an obvious, immutable, or distinguishing trait that frequently bears no relation to the ability to contribute to society; (2) whether the class historically has suffered from purposeful discrimination; and (3) whether the class lacks the political power necessary to obtain protection from the political branches of government. But most courts have ignored purposeful historical discrimination and lack of political power and have simply concluded, without supporting authority, that heightened scrutiny is inapplicable in cases involving lesbians and gays, because homosexuality is not an "immutable characteristic."(8) The very mode of framing this debate as one of a voluntary decision between heterosexual (i. e., "moral") behavior on the one hand and homosexual (i. e., "immoral") behavior on the other is itself deeply homophobic, as it assigns arbitrary values to the intrinsically neutral category of sexual orientation. This debate has, moreover, encouraged some scientific researchers to ascertain a biological basis for homosexual identity to meet the legal criterion for equal protection.(9) By framing the issue in biological terms that implicitly regard homosexuality as a "crime against nature" and reducing the cultural dimensions of homosexual identity to criminal "acts," he courts have thus far evaded a broader ethical debate concerning the right to privacy, which embodies the moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole."(10) Therefore, the present laws of the United States give force to societal homophobia by defining lesbians and gays, as they once defined African-Americans and women, as objects of contempt and lesser mortals who have a fundamentally different (and inferior) "nature" from other human beings, and thus do not deserve equal protection under the law.

The fact that the law offers no protection for sexual orientation has forced most homosexuals to adopt costly and self-damaging stratagies of secrecy and self-disguise, just as, before the Court's adoption of "heightened scrutiny" of racial classifications, Clare Kendry "passes" racially and adopts similarly destructive deceptions to elude "recognition" by American society. The peculiarly exposed condition of homosexuals has also obscured the fact that whereas race, gender, alienage, and illegitimacy can, like sexual orientation, be changed or concealed, these former conditions have, in recent times, been defined as "immutable characteristics, and thus compel heightened scrutiny by the courts. For these reasons, Kurt D. Hermansen has recently argued that "immutable characteristic" not be treated as a presumably biological category defined through history, culture, and politics, but rather in reference to a particularly reprehensible form of discrimination inflicted upon minorities qua minorities:

While one might be able to alter or conceal traits such as race, gender or sexual orientation, that change can only occur at a prohibitive cost to the average individual. The court only looks to the immutable traits, which are central, defining traits of personhood, which one may alter only at the expense of significant damage to one's identity. In this context, sexual orientation fulfills the requirement that the identifying trait be immutable.(174)

Nevertheless, even if the courts refuse to grant sexual orientation the status of an "immutable characteristic," they, must make the more important decision as to whether the perpetuation of social stigmas against homosexuals constitutes a legitimate state interest. In Palmore v. Sidoti (1984), for example, the Supreme Court held that a white father could not sue for custody of the child he had had with his divorced wife, a white woman who had remarried an African-American man, on grounds that social recrimination against a mixed-race marriage would inevitably damage the child. In this case, the Supreme Court ignored the high-tier equal protection analytic it had set out for itself, because that analytic, which holds that promoting the welfare of children constitutes a compelling state interest, would have resulted in giving custody of the child to the father. Making no explicit reference to race, the Court held that while social prejudices may be outside the reach of the law, "the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect." The principle in Palmore, if neutrally considered, holds that the perpetuation of stigmas does not constitute an acceptable means by which the state can carry out its interests. Hence, in City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center (1985) the Court, quoting Palmore, struck down zoning laws that gave effect to fears and biases over having a group home for the mentally challenged nearby, even though the Court refused to broaden its equal protection analytic by holding that discriminations against the mentally challenged were "suspect" or "quasi-suspect."(11)

One year later, however, in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court not only refused to see but also pointedly denied the relevance of Palmore or Cleburne for gays and lesbians and upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law on the grounds thatSodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was forbidden by the laws of the original thirteen States when they ratified the Bill of Rights," and that the law expressed a legitimate state purpose in that it promoted "morality," which the Court defined simply as "majority sentiments about ... morality." The second dissenting opinion, written by justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Justices William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, not only pointed out that the original sodomy statutes had applied neutrally both to heterosexuals and homosexuals, and married and unmarried persons, but also that at one point in the 20th century, Georgia's law was construed to permit certain sexual conduct between homosexual women even though such conduct was prohibited between heterosexuals" (2857).(12) Since the Court had previously established that a State may not prohibit sodomy (here defined as anal intercourse or cunnilingus) between married couples in Griswold or between unmarried heterosexual couples in Eisenstadt, the Court had to establish why the selective enforcement of the statute against the class of homosexual persons constituted a compelling state interest. By disdaining to advance an adequate rational basis for this selective enforcement, the dissent strongly implied that the Bowers majority had, ironically, transformed homosexuals into a "suspect class." Moreover, Justice Harry Blackmun, as if to underscore the majority's unprincipled departure from presumably settled legal precedents, noted in his dissenting opinion the "almost uncanny" parallels between Bowers and Loving v. Virginia (1967), in which the petitioners employed biblical doctrine as well as majority opinions regarding morality) to show that "traditional Judeo-Christian values" proscribed interracial marriage.(13)

By employing arguments from biblical morality and social custom to deprive lesbians and gays of equal protection, the Bowers decision also places women and African Americans in greater jeopardy as the rights of both these groups are guaranteed, as Passing amply illustrates, by relatively recent extensions of constitutional law rather than long-standing tradition. indeed, Richard D. Mohr has argued persuasively that Bowers stood behind the Court's subsequent decision in City of Richmond v. Croson (1989), which crippled municipal and state affirmative action programs by establishing the fundamental rights of white people, much as Bowers upheld the fundamental rights of "heterosexuals", (or, more accurately, the ill-defined class of "non-sodomites"). In City of Richmond, Mohr notes, the Court held that state and municipal minority set-aside programs are unconstitutional under the equal protection clause because racial classifications made with respect to whites are as "suspect" as those made with respect to blacks:

If, as per Bowers, it is those actions that are by tradition socially averred that are the actions that are performed by right, then it is the people whose privileges are by tradition socially averred who have those privileges as a matter of right. it is the history and tradition of white privilege that converts the privileges into white rights. Thus, the style of reasoning specifically developed to deny rights to lesbians and gay men is now used to restrict legal protections afforded to other minorities and to enhance majority privilege. (72-73)

The peculiarly insidious manner in which social prejudice against lesbians and gays is employed to undermine the basis of civil rights protections, perhaps most notably for African-American women, is exhaustively illustrated in Passing, where Irene Redfield's sexual and racial panic transforms her into the unwitting instrument and reinforcer of social prejudices and legal prohibitions designed to keep women and African Americans in place. Charles R. Larson has recently used biographical evidence to suggest that Larsen's marital difficulties with her husband, Elmer Imes, a professor of physics at Fisk University who subsequently became romantically involved with a white woman, are reflected in the plot of Passing, where Irene suspects her husband of infidelities with Clare and, like the latter, becomes a woman with unspeakable secrets" after she destroys her rival. While Larson describes with great insight the mind of an intensely suspicious, rather cloistered woman who does not fully understand the story in which she becomes implicated as the central narrative consciousness, this critic's "heterosexualization" of the narrative not only ignores the fact that Larsen's marital difficulties and divorce occurred after the publication of Passing, but also reprises the humiliating public scandal that Larsen subsequently endured in 1932, when the Baltimore Afro-American conflated Larsen with her fictional character Clare Kendry and suggested that the former `jumped' from the window( in the wake of her discovery of her husband's affair with a white woman.(14)

Passing is not fictionalized autobiography so much as it is acute social observation of her artistic peer community, for Larsen fashioned herself as a writer in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, most of whose major figures were both racial and sexual minorities.(15) In addition, Larsen dedicated Passing to her literary sponsors, Carl Van Vechten and Fania Marinoff, the white patrons and promoters of the Harlem Renaissance. Since Van Vechten actively sponsored lesbian and gay modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ronald Firbank in addition to African-American authors like Larsen (whose novels he assisted in having published by Alfred Knopf), herimbrication of the issues of racial and sexual "passing" can be seen as both an appeal to her potential audience and literary colleagues and an informed critique of socially conservative African Americans like Irene Redfield, whose understandable desire to gain marginal acceptance and security in American society under Plessy compels her to imitate the prejudices of the dominant society. Unfortunately and tragically, Irene reinforces her identity as an `American' by destroying an African-American woman much like herself in outward appearance and thus diminishes, through ignorance, perceived necessity, and limited moral agency, the value and meaning of her own selfhood.

Given the secrecy and duplicity enjoined upon Clare and the self-deception unwittingly practiced by Irene, neither woman can, in any sense, be considered a morally exemplary or self-consistent character. Within these intractable limitations, however, Larsen explores the crucial distinctions between Clare's highly self-conscious rhetorical deployments of the fictions of race and Irene's unself-consciousinternalization of the dictum of Plessy. While Clare becomes adept at subverting expectations and eluding capture through selective shape-shifting and camouflage, Irene has a self-divided consciousness both as an African American and a woman, for she believes she can gain security and meaning solely through marriage and ignore the larger implications of living in a racially divided and segregated society. While Irene finds Clare's refusal of her own "feminine" ideal of self-effacement, self-denial, and service to men proof of her selfish, immoral, and "cat-like" disposition (173), the example of Clare's nonconformity not only invokes her reluctant admiration but also eventually shatters her illusions of the inviolability and `sanctity' of masculine propriety and power. Moreover, Larsen makes the point about Irene's sexual attraction to (and fear of) Clare and the defiant bid for freedom she represents, in two crucial scenes that represent an extremely detailed and, I would argue, intentional representation of the epistemological uncertainties attending both racial and sexual "passing." In the first, both forms of passing, are inextricably imbricated through projections of "exoticism," while the second illustrates that the social predicaments faced by African Americans who "pass" are structurally analogous to those faced by homosexual who "pass."

The first occurs in the initial encounter between Irene and Clare, which sets the stage for the action that follows, which takes place in a rooftop tea-room of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago. Significantly, Irene is away from her home in New York City, not in company with her husband, and therefore "free" to exercise the option of "passing" for white to escape a heat wave. Once settled in this unfamiliar environment, Irene's attention becomes riveted on a "sweetly smelling" woman wearing a "fluttering dress of green chiffon [with] mingled pattern of narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths" (176) that associate her with familiar topoi of feminine artifice and French exoticism. Her aura of illicit sexuality is heightened, moreover, by her brief appearance with a white man, neither her husband nor a mere platonic friend, whom the woman swiftly if gracefully dismisses from her company. Since this scene takes place in a hotel, an acute reader might surmise that this woman is an expensive mistress or prostitute, although the text, narrated from Irene's characteristically discreet and unobservant point of view, does not comment further. Instead, Irene openly admires the woman's dress, "her dark, almost black, eyes,", her "wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the ivory of her skin," and her "odd sort of smile" (177), which Irene interprets as hovering between sexual provocation and self-assurance. Conscious, at last, that she has been staring at this woman, she is even moredisconcerted when the stranger, in turn, stares back at her, like one who with the utmost singleness of mind and purpose was determined to impress firmly and accurately each detail of Irene's features upon her memory for all time" (178)

Ironically, although irene cannot determine what she sees when she gazes at this alluring woman, or what the woman sees when she gazes at Irene, in reality she looks at someone who very much resembles herself in outward appearance, indicating that Irene, at least when alone, does not "see" herself as an African American (or an exotic, woman). Racial identification (and self-identification) is, Larsen hints, a matter of context and social convention. As if to underscore Irene's limited self-knowledge and fear of self-disclosure when confronted with her mirror image, in another woman, she begins to question her own outer appearance and suspects this woman might "unmask" her racial identity, an anxiety uncannily similar to that an unconscious lesbian would experience in company with another suspected, lesbian to whom she found herself unaccountably attracted. Although Irene experiences "a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar" (178), she promptly dismisses her fears of racial disclosure, as white people were so stupid about such things" and "always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a Gypsy" (178). In this context, Irene's fear of racial exposure both parallels and masks her fear of sexual exposure, particularly to herself. Irene, however, automatically assumes that the woman staring at her must be white, suggesting that irene regards this stranger as possessing an ineffable power over her which, on the one hand, distances them, but on the other, draws them together in an ineluctable bond of mutual attraction and fascination. In this instance, then, racial invisibility camouflages all other modes of recognition, enabling Irene to deny what she sees and finds compelling about this mysterious woman.

At this point, however, the stranger approaches and, with grace and warmth. `unmasks' herself as Irene's long forgotten childhood friend, Clare Kendry. Having experienced life on both sides of the `color line', and thus expert at distinguishing reality from conventional appearances, Clare immediately recognizes Irene on a personal and historical rather than an abstract or "exotic" level. She launches into a picaresque account of the accidents and misadventures that have befallen her since the death of her white father (which, ironically, removed her from the black community) and that have resulted in her perpetrating a legal fraud by marrying a white man who knows nothing of her racial identity. By the end of this story, irene, whose experience has been far more limited and uniform than Clare's and who already projects a certain taboo "exoticism" on her friend, longs to ask Clare how she sustains her racial masquerade, but, with her customary propriety, finds herself unable to think of a single question that in its context or its phrasing was not too frankly curious, if not actually impertinent" (187). In other words, the intimate details of how Clare "passes" for white are inappropriate questions for a "proper lady" to ask, and Irene therefore retains an essential ignorance regarding Clare that becomes increasingly fraught with danger as the narrative progresses. On the other hand, Clare's knowledge of the profundity of others, capacities for self-deception and the complexity of her own experience has obviated temptations on her part to exoticize or primitivize others. Nevertheless, the manner in which the accidents of her personal history have made her unacceptable in both the white and African-American worlds becomes illustrated in the next major scene of the novel, after Clare convinces a highly reluctant Irene to attend an afternoon tea party in her apartment.

Clare and irene are joined by Gertrude, a childhood friend of both women who has pursued yet another social configuration of racial identification inasmuch as, like Irene, she does not pass" for white, although she too, like Clare, has married a white, man. In this context, Irene, unaccustomed to being out of place," feels both outnumbered and defensive, while Clare, with her almost ludicrous attention to environmental disguise, has decorated her sitting room in dark browns and blues in order to obscure the sharp visual distinctions between white and black. This masquerade of interior decor serves to further ironize the problematics of racial identity and identification when Clare's husband arrives to rescue, them from a stilted conversation that has devolved into embarrassing banalities and heavy silence. John, with no hint of self-consciousness, refers to his wife, whom he affectionately complains has become "darker" since their marriage, by the nickname "Nig," but then complains viciously about the "niggers" he reads about in the newspapers. Larsen reveals the limits of knowledge conveyed through language when compared with the ambiguities of perception inherent in experience, since the difference between marital love and racial animus comes down to the syllable "-ger." In launching into an ignorant and bigoted attack on blacks in the company of three African-American women "passing" for white, this scene replicates with remarkable accuracy the social dynamics experienced by closeted lesbians and gays when in company with people who, presuming everyone to be heterosexual (or, perhaps more insidiously, shaming those suspected of being "queer" into silence), openly attack or ridicule homosexuals.

Clare, however, seemingly determined to make her friends admire her recklessness and share the intense contradictions of her day-to-day life, almost goads her husband into displaying his dangerous blindness, as if this humiliating spectacle, will finally expose thespeciousness of her own rationales for "passing." in reality, her friends can hardly "enjoy" the presumed superiority of their insight into the real state of affairs, since their knowledge leaves them powerless in the face of Bellew's privileged and voluble ignorance. Therefore, this strategy places Clare and her friends in an ironic double bind, since they must modulate between secret knowledge and the social presumption of whiteness. As in the analogous case of lesbians and gays, if they defend blacks against his racist slander, they might expose themselves as the very people Bellew attacks, and thus jeopardize Clare's marriage and social masquerade. In effect, this scene reveals to the women their limited moral agency in providing them the untenable choices between silent complicity and exposure. Thus, the question of what `loyalty' to race, to sex, or to Clare might mean in this context is impossible to determine, since any valid description of reality depends upon the articulated language of personal history and experience rather than obscure appearances offered visually. Yet this carefully crafted visual illusion eloquently demonstrates the limits of "passing" and thus dramatizes the inescapable moral conundrums that finally impel Clare to leave her husband and return to Harlem.

Unfortunately, this scene does not have the `intended' effect on Irene, who feels justifiably enraged over her powerlessness in the face of Bellew's bigotry and thus adamantly resists acknowledging the full dimensions of Clare's predicament. Since Irene, like society at large, is unwilling to assume responsibility for her knowledge, in any sense, of Clare Kendry, she becomes for Irene a sign, for the intractable social and moral dilemmas attendant on Plessy. Significantly, however, although Irene vows never to see Clare again and dismisses her lingering "sense of panic" (212) by projecting onto Clare the abstract offense of racial disloyalty, she cannot for longrepress the profound attraction she feels for Clare as an exotic" woman sufficiently daring to violate the conventions of American society, particularly since her successful defiance represents a potential model for Irene herself. Thus, although Irene on one level shuns and condemns Clare, on another level her attraction redoubles when Clare, exercising her formidable will against the force of circumstance, arrives uninvited and unwanted at Irene's home. Once Clare breaks into the sanctum" of Irene's private bedroom and "drop[s] a kiss on [Irene's] dark curls" (224), Irene's distance and aversion transform almost magically into admiration and desire for intimacy: "Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling. Reaching out, she grasped Clare's two hands in her own and cried with something like awe in her voice: Dear God! But aren't you lovely, Clarel!'" (225).

The quasi-sexual gallantry of this encounter is reinforced when Clare comments suggestively that, in asking the post office for letters from Irene that never arrived, she had felt sure that they were all beginning to think that I'd been carrying on an illicit love affair and that the man had thrown me over" (225, italics mine). Since virtually all of Clare's `affairs' are, in some measure, "illicit," and irene feels constrained by her sense of "decorum", not to probe into the truth, the remainder of the text details the intense ambivalences Irene experiences through her realization that Clare, "in spite of her determined selfishness ... was yet capable of heights and depths of feeling that she, Irene Redfield, had never known. indeed, never cared to know" (226).

Indeed, once Clare threatens to return to Harlem and thus to transform from an "exotic" dream into a "familiar" reality, Irene seems impelled to associate Clare's bid for freedom and self-creation to her husband Brian's long deferred dream of escaping to Brazil. At last, in a kind of interpretive desperation Irene conflates Clare and Brian in her imagination as potential "run-aways" and imagines that she is really involved in a rather mundane plot of marital infidelity. While it is perfectly true that Clare, as the scene in the Drayton Hotel implies, is far from a conventionally moral woman, there is no tangible evidence to suggest that she plans to secure her position in Harlem society by stealing Brian from Irene. In fact, Irene's determination to make Brian's dream of Brazil "die" constitutes the first in a series of destructive longings for stability and order that culminate in her determination to destroy Clare as the embodiment of her own socially, racially, and sexually transgressive desires. The remaining narrative is played out against a backdrop of Irene's increasingly pronounced extremes of physical attraction and moral aversion for her exotic, friend. Aware of the racial and sexual masquerades enjoined upon the characters by Plessy, Irene decides that she must maintain her social respectability and economic security at any cost, even if "only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known" (234). As she fears that "If Clare were freed," anything might happen" (268), she acts in the guise of a Social Darwinist compelled, as it were, to vanquish Clare as an instance of an exotic, culture that, however seductive and admirable, must fall before the "superior" forces of American civilization. In removing Clare, however, Irene also eliminates the possibility of her own freedom from the shackles of the racial and sexual conventions that imprison her.

While the strategies of self-disguise and masquerade Clare employs are far from ideal, they represent viable means of survival and self-transformation under conditions that temporarily limit her moral agency as she fashions an identity that allows her greater autonomy and self-determination. Tragically, Clare is not permitted to complete this journey or force the other characters in the novel to confront their ignorance or drop their self-protective disguises. Thus, a novel by an ostensibly heterosexual author forcefully critiques censorship and self-repression as well as the conventional narrative paradigms that compel her, through the agencies of Irene Redfield and John Bellew, to destroy anyone who resists these stifling social and artistic conventions. Hence, through the destruction of Clare Kendry, Larsen also suggests the intractible artistic limits that confronted her in this, her second and final novel. Accordingly, the social and legal dimensions of racial segregation and sexual "panic" are neither separable nor tangential issues in Passing. Rather, they are central in an innovative narrative that posits a choice between a racially divided and moralistic model of social and artistic decorum ultimately enforced by John Bellew and his like, and an integrated and worldly model that challenges not only the lingering separatist traditions of Plessy v. Ferguson but also the willful ignorance and sexual paranoia embodied in its contemporary legal analogue, Bowers v. Hardwick.

NOTES (1) The Court not only held that the invidious racism of Virginia's law violated the Equal Protection Clause, but also that the law deprived the Lovings of due process by denying them the freedom of choice to marry that had long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men" (2854). (2) Specifically, the Court treats age (as well as poverty and neglect) as if they are parallel to the categories of race and sex. States can thus establish different schools on the basis of race and sex using the same "principle" used to establish separate elementary, junior, and high school facilities. (3) In this instance, the Court applied the standard of "reasonableness" to the Fourteenth Amendment, and found that "in detemining the question of reasonableness, [the Court] is at liberty to act with reference to the established usages, customs, and traditions of the people, and with a view to the promotion of their comfort, and the preservation of the public peace and good order, (4) In his lone dissenting opinion, Judge Harlan noted prophetically that "the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case"(1146). (5) After the publication of Passing, Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship (the first awarded to an African-American woman) to write her third novel, Mirage, which was to focus on the intersections of Latin, Anglo, and African-American cultures, but she never finished the project. She subsequently returned to her earlier career as a nurse, and some critics, notably Charles R. Larson, have speculated that the breakup of her marriage with Elmer Imes, in addition to the furor over Larsen's supposed plagiarism of a short story, "Sanctuary" caused her to retreat from writing. Nevertheless, the ending of Passing, which presents a classic instance of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has termed "no ending to write beyond" seems an equally compelling reason for Larsen,s decision to abandon literature. (6) Smith defines "lesbian panic" as "the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character ... is incapable of confronting her own lesbianism or homoerotic desire." I thank her for access to her unpublished work ("And I Wondered If She Might Kiss Me" and "Nothing Happened,"'). (7) In arguing in favor of outing, Mohr argues that "The Secret [that] currently binds the [gay and lesbian] community together is a commitment to a belief in the community's worthlessness. The very structuring principle of the community functions as a denial that the community exists - indeed, a denial that it should exist" (30). (8) In Woodward v. United States the Federal Circuit cited no authority in asserting that "Members of recognized suspect or quasi-suspect classes, e. g., blacks or women, exhibit immutable characteristics, whereas homosexuality is primarily behavioral in nature" (1076). In High Tech Gays v. Defense Industry Security Clearance Office, the Ninth Circuit repeated this language almost verbatim, asserting that Homosexuality is not an immutable characteristic; it is behavioral and hence is fundamentally different from traits such as race, gender, or alienage, which define already existing suspect and quasi-suspect classes" (573). (9) In "homosexuality and Biology," gay scientist Chandler Burr marshals the growing if highly contested evidence for the biological basis of homosexual orientation, and concludes by noting that while opponents "discern in the biological quest the seeds of genocide ... the spectre of the surgical or chemical `rewiring' of gay people, or of abortions of fetal homosexuals who have been hunted down in the womb ... Five decades of psychiatric evidence demonstrates that homosexuality is immutable, and nonpathological, and a growing body of more recent evidence implicates biology in the development of sexual orientation" (65). Burr realizes, however, that scientific research can provide no antidote to the misuse of science in a homophobic society. For this reason, the struggle for gay rights must ultimately rest on "fundamental questions involving human rights, human freedom, and human tolerance." See also Halley, who contends, arguing against legal strategies that seek to secure rights for sexual minorities by tethering homosexuality to the legal discourse of "immutable characteristics," that the supposed homogeneity of the category "heterosexual" needs to be exposed as an intrinsically incoherent, self-contradictory legal fiction. (10) Quoted from Justice Blackmun in his dissenting opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), who quoted Justice Stevens quoting Fried, Correspondence, 6 Phil. St. Public Affairs (1977): 288_289, in his concurring opinion in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 476 U. S., at 777, n. 5, 106 S. Ct. at 2187, n. 5. While the right to privacy has come under attack recently as an appropriate legal strategy for securing rights for sexual minorities, it is important to remember that, while privacy and secrecy can overlap, they are nonetheless distinct entities. A disclosure of sexual orientation does not violate privacy since such a disclosure reveals nothing about private sexual acts or activities between consenting adults. (11) The decision of the Court in Cleburne not to decide the case on heightened equal protection scrutiny indicates that the Court (perhaps with lesbians and gays in mind) wants todelimit the class who can claim suspect or quasi-suspect status. The Court refused to deem the mentally retarded a quasi-suspect class because doing so would make it "difficult to find a principled way to distinguish a variety of other groups who have perhaps immutable disabilities setting them off from others, who cannot themselves mandate the desired legislative responses, and who can claim some degree of prejudice from at least part of the public at large ... We are reluctant to set out on that course, and we decline to do so." (12) Justice Stevens cites Thompson v. Alredge, in which the Georgia Supreme Court held that the sodomy statute referred to anal intercourse and did not prohibit lesbian activity. In Riley, v. Garrett, moreover, the Georgia Supreme Court held that the same statute did not prohibit heterosexual cunnilingus. The current Georgia statute under consideration in Bowers provides that "[a] person commits the offense of sodomy when he performs or submits to any sexual act involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another," (Bower 2849). Stevens also refers to tile definition of sodomy given in May: "Sodomy, otherwise called buggery,bestiality, and the crime against nature, is the unnatural copulation of two persons with each other, or of a human being with a beast ... It may be committed by a man with a man, by a man with a beast, or by a woman with a beast, or by a man with a woman-his wife, in which case, if she consent, she is an accomplice." While Justice Stevens points out the wide historical variability of sodomy statutes, neither of the two dissenting opinions mentions that English Common Law had never specifically applied to lesbian sexuality. The decision in Bowers to group lesbians under homosexual sodomy" is thus a very new social construction of sexual taboo with very little history or tradition to support it. (13) See Loving v. Virginia. Justice Blackmun notes that in Loving as in Bowers, the petitioners "relied heavily on the fact that when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, most of the States had similar prohibitions [against sodomy and miscegenation, respectively]." (14) In some senses, Larson's introduction can be seen as a direct response to McDowell's earlier introduction to Quicksand and Passing. Larson never refers to McDowell's introduction, underplays Larsen's feminist concerns, and makes no mention of the possibility that Passing might depict female (or male) homoerotic desire. Larson quotes the headlines from three articles in the Baltimore Afro-American: "Fisk Professor Is Divorced by N. Y. Novelist"; "Friends Think Love Cooled While Wife Wintered in Europe"; and "Recall `Jump' from Window" (xvi-xvii). (15) Eric Garber notes that many of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance - for example, Bruce Nugent, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Bessie Smith, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Alberta Hunter, and Gladys Bentley - were gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

WORKS CITED

Burr, Chandler. "Homosexuality and Biology." Atlantic (Mar. 1993): 47-65. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 Westport: Greenwood , 1980. City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc. 473 US 433, 488. 1985. Fuller, Hoyt. Introduction. Passing. By Nella Larsen. New York: Collier, 1971. Garber, Eric. "A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem." Hidden from History: Reclaiming tbe Gay and Lesbian Past. Ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. New York, 1989. Halley, Janet E. "Misreading Sodomy: A Critique of the Classification of `Homosexuals' in Federal Equal Protection Laws." Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hermansen, Kurt D. "Analyzing the Military's Justification for its Exclusionary Policy: Fifty Years Without a Rational Basis." Loyola of Los Angeles Legal Review 26 (1992): High Tech Gays v. Defense Industry Security Clearance Office. 895 F.2d 563. 1990. Larsen, Nella. An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen. Ed. and intro. Charles R. Larson. New York: Anchor, 1992. Larson, Charles R. Introduction. An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen. New York: Doubleday, 1992. xv-xvii. Linda Sidoti Palmore v. Anthony J. Sidoti, 104 S. Ct. 1879. 1984. Supreme Court Reporter. St. Paul: West, 1987. 1879-83. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1, 87 S. Ct. 1817, 18 L. Ed. 1010. 1967. May, J. The Law of Crimes 203. 2nd. ed. 1893. McDowell, Deborah E. Introduction. Quicksand and Passing. By Nella Larsen. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1986. Michael J. Bowers v. Michael Hardwick, 106 S. Ct. 2841. 1986. Supreme Court Reporter St. Paul: West, 1989. 2841-59. Mohr, Richard D. "Black Law and Gay Law." Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon, 1992. 72-73. -. "The Outing Controversy." Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon, 1992. Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court Reporter 16. St. Paul: West, 1986. Ramsey, Priscilla. "A Study of Black Identify in `Passing' Novels of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century." Studies in Black Literature 7 (Winter 1976): 1-7. Riley v. Garrett. 219 Ga. S. E. 2d 367. 1963. Smith, Patricia Juliana. "And I Wondered If She Might Kiss Me: Lesbian Panic in Postmodern British Women's Fiction." MLA Convention. New York City, 28 Dec. 1992. -. "Nothing Happened': Lesbian Panic and the Disruption of Narrative." Diss. University of California, Los Angeles, in progress. Tate, Claudia. "Nella Larsen's, Passing: A Problem of Interpretation." Black American Literature Forum 14 (Winter 1980): 142-46. Thompson v. Alredge. 187 Ga. 467, 200 S. E. 799. 1939. Woodward v. United States. 871 F.2d 1068. 1989. Youman, Mary. "Nella Larsen's Passing: A Study in Irony." College Language Association Journal 18 (December 1974): 235-41.

Review of El-Youssef's The Illusion of Return

2011-10-25T21:08:00.000-04:00

Compressed, evocative, and deeply intelligent, this is a necessary work for anyone looking to get past propagandistic and sensationalistic headlines about suicide bombers and reprisals and understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its origins and consequences. El-Youseff's novella concerns a younger Palestinian man living in London who casts his glance backward on a period of his life in Lebanon he cannot forget or transcend. While in London, he battles with student Palestinian militants, who assail him, and agrees to meet an old friend at Heathrow airport. This friend has been accused of acting as a collaborator with the Israelis, and so is en route to the United States, where he can flee accusations and persecutors. His entrance, however, provides an entre back into history and to the recollection of the final evening that four troubled Palestinian friends spent in London before the Lebanese Civil War of the 1980s enveloped their lives and sundered them.

Like his friends, all of whom harbor some secret or hidden handicap, the narrator has guarded a family secret for years--one that prevents him from "returning" to family (whether in Lebanon or the Occupied Territories) in any significant fashion and one which makes the Palestinian desire to return to their native lands seem like an illusion and, in some senses, a distraction. After all, the presumptive meaning of Palestinians' return is a return to their homeland and the memories of that homeland. But here is where societal repression and forgetting come in. What if return to home has become unfeasible because of permanently concealed lies? The Palestinian resistance movement forms part of the reason for his family secret, as his sister, in order to escape a stifling life at home, became a female soldier within that movement. However, she remains so harassed and bullied by her older brother, who wants her to relinquish her role, that she commits suicide, The family seals this event as a traumatic secret secret by lying about what happened, and it will disappear forever once the family has died. The narrator keeps a vigil for the memory of his sister. In the meantime, in the end, the friend who had been exiled to America for the crime of collaboration finds the means to return. He asks for forgiveness and receives it, inspired, in America, by the conversations he has had with a Holocaust survivor. El-Youseff speaks loud and clear for the absolute necessity of forgiveness as, in the end, he unites the historical fates of the Palestinians and Jews as the story of two dispossessed people staring at the other half of themselves that stares back in the mirror. For an excellent article on El-Youseff's vision of peace and forgiveness, read the Courage of the Mad in the Guardian.

American Experience: LGBT Identities and Literature Syllabus

2011-10-24T13:21:00.002-04:00

English 218 American Experience:
LGBT Identities and Literature

Instructor: Corinne E. Blackmer, Ph.D.

Office: EN D236

Telephone: (203) 392-6715

Fax: (203) 392-6731

E-mail: blackmerc1@southernct.edu

Office Hours: MW 11:10 am-1:50 pm; TTH 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

Course Description

This course in American Experience shall focus on LGBT American literature since WWII in the genres of fiction, drama, and film, using specific methodologies to analyze distinctive LGBT modes and vehicles of creative expression. These include the use of “code” language, the coming out narrative, the historical documentary (or docudrama), camp travesty, AIDS memorials and installations, parades, performance art, and diverse narratives of self-invention and self-transformation. In addition to primary literary works, we shall read Leo Bersani’s Homos, a work of critical expository prose about LGBT culture, politics, and identity in contemporary America. This course shall examine how LGBT American literature and identity constructions have intervened in homophobic definitions of medicine, law, politics, religion, and culture. Since WWII, LGBT Americans have moved from the closets of “sickness, sin, and criminality” and into the limelight as individuals struggling for full citizenship and inclusion around marriage equality, AIDS funding, open service in the military, workplace anti-discrimination legislation, and measures to effectively address anti-gay bullying and teenage suicide.

Learning Outcomes

Critical Thinking. Students will demonstrate critical thinking skills around grasping issues, analyzing premises and assumptions, and using appropriate forms of argumentation to reason inductively about the interactions among culture, politics, and religion that have informed the characteristics of American LGBT literature since WWII. Relevant questions include but are not limited to (i) the identities of closeted homosexuals who have colluded in political, social, or economic persecution of LGBT Americans; (ii) debates over the nature of sexuality identity as social construction, inborn biological orientation, or constrained performance in the context of post-WWII American society; (iii) reasons that politicized religion (rather than class or ethnic identity) emerged as chief opponent of LGBT rights; (iv) statistical methods and endemic misreporting/underreporting of LGBT suicide, abandonment, elder abuse, addiction, partner abuse; and (v) the effects of mass communications and communications technologies on LGBT voice, movement, identification, and resistance.

Written Communication. Students will demonstrate written communication skills around providing background information to contextualize written arguments, produce theses that are products of critical analysis and synthesis, use proper citation style to document primary and secondary sources (in an array of forms and locations), summarize, qualify, or refute sophisticated textual arguments using varied sources of evidence to support claims, and produce correctness in prose writing. Competent written communication will not only reflect knowledge of conventions, grammar, and rules, but also, more important, active learning of cross-disciplinary critical terms and concepts (appropriate to understanding creative expressions, concepts of sexuality and gender, and basic elements of historical analysis.

Information Literacy. Students will do unscripted problem solving around some of the more complex, nuanced, and important issues in LGBT identities and cultural expressions related to information literacy. This learning will include but not be limited to problems in the definition, and description and identification of sexualities, and therefore skewed reports about the percentages of sexual minorities in the general population, as well as bias in science and religion, respectively, and questions pertaining to the “right” to be biased.

Methods of Evaluation

2 3-page critical close readings 20% final grade

Midterm examination 15% final grade

1 6-page interpretive essay 25% final grade

In-class assignments and participation 20% final grade

Final examination 20% final grade

Required Texts

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic

Leo Bersani, Homos

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes:

Millennium Approaches and Perestroika

Audre Lorde, ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name

Sarah Schulman, The Child

Part A: The Homosexual Closet: Queer Life in America, 1945-1968

Week I

John D'Emilio, “Introduction: Bonds of Oppression: Gay Life in the

1950s.” From Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making

of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970.

Isherwood, A Single Man

Week II

Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community (1985),

dir. Greta Shiller and Robert Rosenberg

Isherwood, A Single Man

Week III

Isherwood, A Single Man

A Single Man (2009), dir. Tom Ford

Week VI

Isherwood, A Single Man

Leo Bersani, Homos

Part B: The Stonewall Riots, Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism

Week VI

Henry L. Minton, “Evelyn Hooker, Frank Kameny, and Depathologizing

Homosexuality, 1957-1973.” From Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America.

Audre Lorde, ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name

Week VII

Lorde, ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name

Bersani, Homos

Week VIII

Lorde, ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name

Bersani, Homos

Part C: The Religious Right, AIDS, and LGBT Families

Week IX

Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Week X

Kushner, Angels in America

Week XI

Kushner, Angels in America

Week XII

Sarah Schulman, The Child

Week XIII

Sarah Schulman, The Child

Week XIV

Schulman, The Child

Week XV

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic

Week XVI

Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic

Methods of Evaluation

2 3-page critical close readings 20% final grade

Midterm examination 15% final grade

1 6-page interpretive essay 25% final grade

In-class assignments and participation 20% final grade

Final examination 20% final grade

Selected Bibliography

Adam, Barry D. The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints

of a Worldwide Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni's Room. New York: Delta, 1956.

Bannon, Ann. Beebo Brinker. New York: Cleis Press, 2001.

—.I Am A Woman. New York: Cleis Press, 2001.

—.Odd Girl Out. New York: Cleis Press, 2001.

Bardhard, Kevin. “Visibility as Paradox: Representation and Simultaneous Contrast.”

Media/‌Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents. 2007 ed. 2007. Queer Resources

Directory. Web. 1 Dec. 2009. .

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Mariner, 2007.

Bergman, David. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New

York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Binnie, Jon. The Globalization of Sexuality. London: SAGE, 2004.

Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us. New York:

Routledge, 1994.

Bowles, Jane. Two Serious Ladies. London: Peter Owen, 2003.

Brown, Rita Mae. Rubyfruit Jungle. New York: Bantam, 1977.

Bull, Chris. Witness to Revolution: The Advocate Reports on Gay and Lesbian Politics,

1967-1999. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 1999.

Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St.

Martins Press, 2004.

The Celluloid Closet. Dir. Epstein Rob and Jeffrey Friedman. 1995.

Cleto, Fabio. Camp Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Cooper, Dennis. Closer. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of

Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

D'Angelli, Anthony R. Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Identities Over the Lifespan:

Psychological Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Day, Frances Ann. Lesbian and Gay Voices: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to

Literature for Children and Young Adults. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000.

D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politcs, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual

Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1998.

Ex-Gay Watch: Monitoring the “Ex-Gay Movement.” http://www.exgaywatch.com/

Duberman, Martin B. A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

New York: New York University Press, 1997.

—.Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001.

—. Queer Representations: Reading Lives, Reading Cultures--A Center for Lesbian and

Gay Studies Book. New York: New York University Press, 1997.

Eribon, Didier and Michael Lucey. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Durham: Duke

University Press, 2004.

Escoffier, Jeffrey. litical Economy of the Closet: Towards an Economic History

of Gay and Lesbian Life Before Stonewall." In American Homo: Perversity and

Community. New York, 1998.

Eskridge, William N. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003.

New York: Viking, 2008.

Faderman, Lillian. Chloe Loves Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the

Seventeenth Century to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

___. Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir. University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

___. Odd Girls Out and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century

America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. New York: Alyson, 2004.

Gallagher, John and Chris Bull. Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay

Movement, and the Poltics of the 1990s. New York: New York University Press,

1997.

Garnets, Linda D and Douglas C. Kimmel. Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Experiences. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Gay Agenda News. .

Ginsberg, Allan. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.

GLAAD: Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. .

Goodman, Paul. Nature Heals. 1963.

___. “On the Nature of Being Queer.” Crazy Hope and Finite Experience:

Final Essays of Paul Goodman. New York: Analytic Press, 1997.

Gross, Larry P. and James D. Woods. The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in

Media, Society, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Gross, Larry P. Up from Invisibility: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Media. New York:

Columbia University Press, 2001.

Hacker, Marilyn. Selected Poems, 1965-1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Halliwell, Martin. American Culture in the 1950s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2007.

Haring, Keith. Journals. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Harris, W. C. Queer Externalities: Hazardous Encounters in American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.

Hausman, Bernice L. Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of

Gender. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

HavenWorks: National and International Gay News. http://HavenWorks.com/

Hedwig and the Angry Itch. Dir. John Cameron Mitchell. New Line Cinema. 2001.

Highsmith, Patricia. The Price of Salt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Holleran, Andrew. Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath. New

York: DeCapo Press, 2008.

___. Dancer from the Dance. New York: Harper, 2001.

Holmlumd, Chris. Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay

Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997.

Horrigan, Patrick. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies. Ann Arbor: U

Minnesota Press, 2001.

I’m Still Here . . . Damn It! Dir. Marty Caliner. Palm Pictures. 2000.

The International Lesbian and Gay Cultural Network. .

Isherwood, Christopher. A Single Man. Ann Arbor: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Jones, Steven G. Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. London:

SAGE, 1998.

Katz, Jonthan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. New

York: Penguin, 1976.

Kaufman, Moises. The Laramie Project. New York: Grove, 2000.

Kramer, Larry. Faggots. New York: Grove, 2000.

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York:

Theater Communications, 2003.

Keen, Lisa and Suzanne B. Goldberg. Strangers to the Law: Gay People on Trial. Ann

Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of

Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Kim, Rebekah. Research Archives on GLBT History. .

Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde F. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the

Human Male. Urbana: Indiana UP, 1998.

Leap, William. Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2006.

Lewin, Ellen, and William Leap. Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology

in a Globalizing World. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Collected Poems. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

__. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press, 2007.

Lorde, Audre. ZAMI: A New Spelling of My Name. New York: Crossing Press, 1982.

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1997.

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Nealon, Christopher S. Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before

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Narrating the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Syllabus

2011-10-22T18:38:00.000-04:00

Instructor: Corinne E. Blackmer, Ph.D.

Office: EN D236

Telephone: (203) 392-6715

Fax: (203) 392-6731

E-mail: blackmerc1@southernct.edu

Office Hours: MW 11:10 am-1:50 pm; TTH 9:00 am – 3:00 pm

Course Description

In this course, you will develop the critical thinking skills necessary for academic success. You will learn how to identify types of logical argumentation and their components, evaluate arguments in terms of assumptions and evidence, and write well-reasoned and well-supported arguments.

This course shall focus specifically on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a seemingly intractable contest that has persisted for almost one hundred years. We shall examine the origins of this conflict in terms of divergent conceptions of time and place converging upon the same geographical location. We shall also examine other processes of social conflict and consensus-making in the Israeli-Palestinian contest such as nationalism, geopolitics, historical memory, and military, religious, educational, and legal institutions. We shall do so through reading expository prose that presents a wide range of perspectives on the conflict, as well as through prose fiction that espouses peace and reconciliation. The latter fictional narratives shall highlight cultural awareness and help guide our explorations of ethical judgment, and the role ethical judgment plays in sound critical thinking and conflict resolution.

Course Objectives

This course prepares you to identify problems and to think effectively about their dimensions and solutions, both of which require making good arguments and critically assessing information. These skills are necessary for active learning and independent thinking, and they are also essential to academic success and good decision-making in your personal, professional, and public lives. Critical thinking is foundational to the broad liberal education you shall receive here at Southern Connecticut State University.

In essence, by learning how to identify and evaluate arguments, you will be able to critically analyze and compose your own arguments.

Student Learning Outcomes

To accomplish the above course objectives, the Liberal Education Program at Southern has established the following key student learning outcomes for this course.

A. Logical Argumentation

1. Students shall be able to identify arguments and distinguish what makes them different from explanations, illustrations, descriptive passages, and other uses of expository language.

2. Students shall be able to identify the components of an argument (e.g., premises/evidence and conclusion/thesis) and demonstrate an understanding of the relationship between these elements.

3. Students shall be able to identify arguments in prose narrative, and in the specific contexts of Judaic Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

4. Students shall be able to recognize different types of inductive reasoning (e.g., generalization, analogy, and reasoning to the best explanation).

B. Evaluation

1. Students shall be able to assess the reliability and reasonableness of the sources of our assumptions and evidence.

2. Students shall be able to apply criteria for evaluating the success of each kind of inference.

C. Analysis

1. Students shall be able to read, summarize, and evaluate a complex piece of argumentative writing, criticize it in terms of logical soundness and coherence (Is the thesis clear? Does the evidence support the conclusion? Are unwarranted inferences being drawn?), and write a critical and analytical response to it.

D. Synthesis

1. Students shall be able to write a well-reasoned and well-supported argumentative essay that draws upon reliable evidence.

Course Materials

To supplement these materials, students will be directed to a critical thinking website when available.

Curtler, Hugh Mercer. Ethical Argument: Critical Thinking in Ethics. 2^nd edition. New

York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0195173163.

This introductory text combines ethical theory and practice with the elements of critical thinking, including inductive and deductive logic, fallacies, premises, theses, conclusions, and the distinctions between arguments and description, illustration, and other forms of language. Engaged in a sustained critique of moral relativism, the author invites the reader to critique the argument at every stage, thus integrating the skills of critical thinking with ethical judgment.

Grossman, David. The Yellow Wind. Trans. Betsy Rosenberg. New York: Farrar

Straus Giroux, 1990. ISBN 0312420986

Grossman, a former Israeli intelligence officer, considers the tragic aspects of the occupation of the West Bank, and the dire, traumatic effects of militaristic occupation upon traditional Jewish ethics and humanitarianism.

Robert L. Rotberg, ed. Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double

Helix. Bloomfield: Indiana University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-253-34767-1.

A collection of critically acclaimed and meticulously researched expository essays exploring diverging and converging narratives of conflict from historical, sociological, geopolitical, cultural, and institutional religious and educational perspectives.

Samir El-Youssef, The Illusion of Return. New York: Melville House, 2008. ISBN 978-

1-933633-61-9.

In this novella, the Palestinian peace activist Samir El-Youssef presents an unnamed narrator, a Palestinian refugee in Southern Lebanon who has lived in London for the past fifteen years. Critical of ideological sloganeering and simplistic historical narratives, a visit from his old friend Ali becomes the occasion for contemplations about homophobia, sexism, shame, and the exorbitant costs of Islamic and anti-Zionist extremism. The text ends with a comparison between the dispossession of the Palestinians and a Holocaust survivor living in the United States.

Course Requirements

1.) Two 2-page critically evaluative analyses of an argumentative piece of writing

2.) Two 3-page argumentative essays, well-reasoned and well-supported through reliable evidence

3.) 6-page critically evaluative analyses of ethical judgments and critical thinking in fictional narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

4.) In-Class Final (a written evaluation of a short expository piece of writing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

In addition to informed oral participation in class discussions and a written final examination, students will demonstrate their knowledge of the subject matter through expository prose that has the following characteristics:

1) Clarity of Focus. Writing that has a clear, lucid, coherent and limited purpose.

2) Thesis. Writing that constructs a powerful and coherent thesis that states an argumentative thesis that can support more than one viewpoint.

3) Evidence. Judicious, informed, and intelligent use of primary and secondary source material as evidence to support an argument.

4) Stylistics. Judicious, sophisticated, and correct use of diction, idioms, and levels of style appropriate to the audience and rhetorical purpose.

5) Correctness. Consistent control over grammatical, syntactical, and mechanical issues.

6) Citation. Consistently correct and mindful use of the MLA Style, as well as capacity to control for appropriate use of paraphrase and direct quotation, respectively.

7) Structure. Elegant transitions between and among paragraphs, use of embedded quotations, and strong, coherent overall structure.

Your work over the course of the semester shall culminate in a research-based argumentative essay and a brief oral presentation. You shall research relevant facets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the end of proposing an equitable resolution of the conflict that takes into account relevant factors impinging upon or inhibiting peaceful settlement. Your essay shall respond to the following questions:

1.) What are the most important factors that have contributed to and/or shaped the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

2.) Given those factors, what course of action do you propose to resolve the conflict?

You shall gather background information from the course readings and from various online and print research sources. We shall work with a librarian to learn the facets of conducting library and online research. The capacity to locate, evaluate, and effectively use information is crucial to your success as a university student. You shall learn how to make ethically and legally appropriate use of such information in your own research. The skills in critical thinking and ethical judgment you shall learn this semester shall be put to use evaluating the evidential information you gather for the arguments you make in your research project.

Alignment of Learning Goals and Assessment Measures

In this writing-intensive course, learning of the subject matter through readings, discussion, and lectures, guided by the pedagogical principles of inquiry-based learning, shall be demonstrated in and assessed through 22-24 pages of revised expository writing whose features shall address the learning outcomes for an LEP critical thinking course.

Course Policies

1.) Attendance. Attendance is mandatory. You are allowed three excused absences for the semester. More than four unexcused absences shall result in automatic failure.

2.) Academic honesty. Plagiarism, or the use of the intellectual work of others without acknowledgement, defeats the purpose of university education, and is subject to severe sanction, including termination from the university.

3.) Disability Accommodation. If you have a recognized disability, please see me as soon as possible at the beginning of the semester so that we can arrange appropriate accommodations.

Course Schedule

Week 1 Introduction: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Film viewing: Sami Awad, Little Town of Bethlehem (2009)

David Rotman, “Building Legitimacy through Narrative”

Writing Exercise: its/it’s, plurals, and apostrophes for possession

A3 Learning Goal: analyze prose narrative structures and arguments

specific to subject matter

Week 2 Curtler, “Relativism versus Objectivism”

Writing Exercise: Embedding of Quotations

First 2-page paper due

Week 3 Curtler, “The Framework”

Discussion of ethical principles and reasoning

Week 4 Porat, “Forging Zionist Identity Prior to 1948—Against Which Counter-

Identity?”

Jawad, “The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948 War”

Writing Exercise: Theses and Overviews

First 3-page paper due

B1, B2 Learning Goals: Assess the reliability and reasonableness of assumptions and sources of evidence; assess the validity of various types of inferences

Week 5 Mordechai Bar-On, “Conflicting Narratives or Narratives of a Conflict

Ilan Pappe, “The Bridge Narrative Concept”

A3 Learning Goal: discipline specific narrative analysis

Week 6 Curtler, “Devising a Procedure”

Writing Exercise: Passive vs. Active Voice

Second 2-page paper due

A1, A2 and A4 Learning Goals: Identify what makes arguments different from other

Forms of language and analyze component parts of arguments (premises and

Evidence and conclusions and theses). Identify different types of inductive reasoning.

Week 7 David Grossman, The Yellow Wind

A3, C1 Learning Goals

Discussion of Values: Ethical Judgment

Writing Exercise: Formatting

Week 8 David Grossman, The Yellow Wind

Midterm Grades—Banner Web

Discussion of Values: Ethical Judgment

Writing Exercise: Conclusions

Week 9 David Grossman, The Yellow Wind

Curtler, “The Justification of Ethical Claims”

Second 3-page paper due

Discussion of Values: Ethical Judgment

Week 10 Dan Bar-On and Sami Adwan, “The Psychology of Better Dialogue between Two Separate but Interdependent Narratives”

Week 11 Samir El-Youssef, The Illusion of Return

A3: discipline specific narrative analysis

Writing Exercise: Quoting Multiple Sources

Week 12 Samir El-Youssef, The Illusion of Return

David Brown, “Contesting National Identity in Palestinian Education”

A4 Learning Goal: discipline specific narrative analysis

Writing Exercise: Structure and Sequencing between Paragraphs

Week 13 Ilyon Naveh, “The Dynamics of Identity Construction in Israel through Education

In History”

D1 Learning Goal: Synthesize reliable evidence in a well-argued and well-supported

argumentative paper

Week 14 Oral Presentations

Week 15 Oral Presentations

6-page paper due

Week 16 Final Examination

I. Method of Evaluation

1.) Two 2-page evaluative essay 20% final grade

2.) Two 3-page argumentative essay 30% final grade

3.) 6-page critical analyses of prose narrative 20% final grade

4.) Final 20% final grade

5.) Participation 10% final grade

Students shall also receive a midterm grade, which shall be posted on Banner Web, which shall enable students to evaluate their performance in meeting the course learning goals, and seek assistance and the construction of a plan for improvement in consultation with the instructor as needed.

II. Bibliography

Aburish, Said K. Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family. London: J. B. Tauris,

1998.

Curtler, James Mercer. Ethical Argument: Critical Thinking in Ethics. New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004.

El-Youssef, Samir. The Illusion of Return. New York: Melville House, 2008.

Folman, Ari. Waltz with Basher: A Lebanese War Story. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

Gelvin, James L. The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Grossman, David. The Yellow Wind. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990.

-----. The Smile of the Lamb. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983.

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed. The Zionist Idea: An Historical Analysis and Reader. New York:

Atheneum, 1981.

Isakson, Runo. Literature and War: Conversations with Israeli and Palestinian Writers. New

York: Interlink Publishing Group, 2008.

Jayyusi, Salma Kandra, ed. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1992.

Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Parker, Richard B. The Six-Day War: A Retrospective. Gainesville: University of Florida Press,

1996.

Peteet, Julie. Gender in Crisis; Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Shlaim, Avi. The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A History with Documents. Boston:

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

A Few Notes on My Sexuality

2011-10-21T12:46:00.004-04:00

I’ve always been a woman, never questioned my gender or sexual orientation, and from my earliest beginnings felt as comfortable with them as with my favorite down comforter. I’ve always believed it’s better to be out, and that people get spooked and annoyed by the closet, and, for whatever reason, I’ve had good luck with the people I’ve encountered throughout life inasmuch as I’ve known few homophobes and know no homophobes now. Why would anyone want to know homophobes, or, for that matter, racists, sexists, or other bigots? I don’t like to encourage or tolerate such miserable people.

Having said that, the drama really comes because, in addition to being a lesbian, I am, not in this order of importance, a homeowner, a professor, an observant Conservative Jew, an aunt, a daughter-in-law, a cousin, a sister-in-law, a wife, and a woman who has been married very happily for around ten years to another woman. Her name is Pilar—a convert to Judaism, and very close with our loving family. I don’t care how anyone feels about lesbians or same-sex marriage—people who meet and get to know my wife change or open their minds with pleasure. She is one of those gentle, thoughtful, open, strong, imaginative, soft-spoken people who everyone adores. And you should see her with children.

My drama doesn’t come from me being a lesbian pure and simple, which is perhaps why I’ve been able to do what I’m told has been a good job lessening homophobia at this school since I first started working here in 1993, when there were no domestic partnerships or anything and attitudes were more negative and toxic. Older adults might have issues, but these days younger people are simply worlds less homophobic than their elders. We still have work to do, but I am optimistic.

My conflicts with my sexuality have to do with its relationship to other parts of my identity, and others’ reactions to my various identities “put together.” About three years ago some pea-brain committed some hate crimes against me here at Southern. Specifically, my office door, which was covered with LGBT and Jewish materials was repeatedly trashed and hate epithets written on the door and hateful telephone messages left for me. I learned three things from this experience: (1) hate is not personal; it has nothing to do with a real person; (2) people who commit hate crimes are cowardly sadists who use any kind of difference they can get their hands on—race, religion, sexuality, gender, national origin, politics—to poke at and needle someone in the hopes of scaring them to death with their vile aggression and their death threats; (3) Most people who respond to hate crimes cannot report all the hate crimes if the categories don’t fit their preconceived vision of the world.

The hate crimes against me were both homophobic and anti-Semitic in character. However, the reporter who interviewed me for the evening news forgot about the anti-Semitism and strongly insinuated that lesbianism and Judaism were a kind of oil and water that for her viewers—and certainly for her—didn’t mix. Everyone erased the Jewish part of what had happened except the folks at my synagogue, my friends, and my wife and family. I am an ardent defender of the State of Israel who served in the Israeli Army during the Yom Kippur War. The truths I know and speak I have earned through hard experience and seen with my own eyes.

So, I feel very uncomfortable with the whole “leftie” segment of the LGBT movement that has decided that Israel is a criminal nation and the Palestinians pure innocent victims. Many won’t even speak with me once they’ve learned I have served in the Israeli army. All this is ironic for many reasons, particularly given that LGBT Palestinians seek refuge from persecution with LGBT Israelis and Israeli organizations.

The complexities of my experiences and identities have led me to highly prize, respect and love others who respect and love me without necessarily sharing all my same views. I am a Bible scholar and often go to conferences where there are many Christian evangelicals. They are not for the most part comfortable with gay and lesbian people and some are very condemnatory—but they have seriously renounced anti-Semitism and are strong supporters of the State of Israel. Once they learn I’m an observant Jew and that I fought in the Israeli army –and once I get around to telling them that there are those who find me guilty of indulging in Paul’s so-called, “unnatural passions,” there is a big pause and in my experience one of two things happen. The person excuses himself or the person looks at me, and makes it obvious that they are rearranging their mental categories in the light of new information they didn’t have before. Could a pro-Israeli observant Jew who had fought for her country really be one of those “bad homosexuals”?—very possibly not. Indeed, while I have managed to change the hearts and minds of many, many evangelical Christians through the testimony of my experience, I cannot say the same has happened among the leadership ranks of the LGBT movement, which is pretty conformist. I am saddened that more people can’t follow Judaism and put sexual orientation and Judaism together easily. That many cannot makes me wonder who they think lesbians are and who do they think Jews are. It’s one reason I teach religion and sexuality.

I love my students. I feel quite close with them and like we have very similar aspirations and values. Most of us are family people, and most of us have street smarts. I also find that I like regular people of all kinds—from my plumber to the homeless man down the street who has memorized the Bible—and that I can never get over how much I am surprised by human beings. Some people are good no matter what, and others are bad no matter how much good you try to through their way.

My sexuality has been a learning experience for others and myself. And this makes me happy. I have learned that it is a bad waste of time to reduce human beings to stereotypes or statistics. We should not be bullied out of our faith that we have transcendent souls and hearts.

On Edna Pontellier's Suicidality

2011-10-19T16:20:00.000-04:00

From the International Kate Chopin Society

The university students I teach have an astute appreciation for and understanding of The Awakening, but the topic of suicide is always difficult and, I suspect, leads some teachers to avoid this tragic novella. They question what, after all, impels Edna to end her life, and usually are not seduced by the repeated refrains of the "call" of the sea that, in part, envelops Edna's suicide in the sense of a repeated linguistic refrain or trope in the novel. Questioning why she commits suicide is, however, an ideal entry into this novella. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier awakens to several crucial things, none of which necessarily add up to the compulsion to end her life. She awakens to the fact, in the first place, that she neither loves nor desires her husband, Leonce Pontellier, and cannot continue to live under the passion-denying "reality principle" which he represents. The proximate cause of her marriage--rebellion against the wishes of her Presbyterian father, who does not wish her to marry a Catholic Creole--only goes so far, and never touches Edna in her interior life where she carries on a monologue that she never wishes to share with others. She awakens to the fact that she rejects proprietary marriage and monogamy, which reduced women to objects owned by men in her historical era. She awakens to the sensual desires of her body, and that she can derive pleasure, even if loveless, in the arms of a seducer like Arobin. She even awakens to her talent for drawing, but here might be one clue. Is Edna an artist or, rather, does she use an uncultivated talent for art to pay the bills in her new establishment? Mme. Reitz, the accomplished pianist, doubts that Edna has achieved the consciousness of an arrist--for an artist must be able to endure solitude and the flouting of conventional values. Further, Edna has no ambition as an artist--and no statement she wishes to express through her art to her culture at large. Nothing in the novella indicates that her drawings--of her father and children, among other subjects--are other than well-worked pieces of conventional representation. Furthermore, we see that Edna's visual imagination is childlike and sensuous, and belongs to the dreamy world of fantasy and wish fulfillment rather than connected social and spiritual realities. Her art appears of a piece with the fantasy tableaux in which she indulges of a Civil War calvary officer, a Shakespearean tragic actor and, perhaps, Robert Lebrun, although she never crystallizes an image of him for the reader--or her canvass.
One might suggest to students that Edna never has the chance to develop a language of her own, and that she experiences dread and hopelessness being trapped between the dominant languages of Darwinianism and fairy tale which inform this novella. Her friend, Adele Ratignolle, recollects, as the ideal "mother-woman," the language of romance and her other counterpart, Mme. Rietz, the language of the great romantic artist--solitary, austere, and absolutely committed. So, when Robert returns because he cannot deny his love for Edna, and stands prepared to transfer her from the ownership of Leonce Pontellier to himself, he is shocked to hear that Edna has no interest in marriage. Although she implores him to stay while she attends Adele at her torturous accouchement, he once again leaves, telling her he has done so because he loves her. The doctor tells Edna she should not have been asked to attend Adele in her accouchement, and says, to the effect, that love is one part of the illusions Nature uses to ensure that there shall be mothers for the race. Edna can escape everything--even, ultimately, Robert--but she cannot escape from her fitful love for her children. So, rather than getting dragged down into the "soul's slavery," she decides to save herself by taking her life. She dies, having never had the chance to learn that life offers different perspectives that the Darwinian one of ceaseless birth and death or the romantic one that casts her as a princess in her own dreamy fairy tale.

Visiting the Institute Library, New Haven, Connecticut

2011-10-19T06:42:00.000-04:00

The Institute Library, sometimes known as the Young Men's Institute Library , has been open since 1825 and has always been open to women as well as to men. It is one of the few remaining circulating subscription libraries in North America, and once had--and continues to have--a distinguished group of speakers and artists give lectures or shows.

Dystopia: George Orwell's "1984"

2011-10-19T04:59:00.002-04:00

One of the most dismal, powerful, and programmatic novels I have ever read, I found its evocation of the totalitarian state in which an omniscient Big Brother watches over and controls party members compelling. While the mere existence of nations like North Korea makes 1984 relevant to our world, I had a substantial number of questions about the economics of Oceania, not to mention the relationship between production and the technological prowess required for such surveillance, and the culturally televised transmission of Newspeak. As an English professor with some linguistic knowledge (I have read Wittgenstein and others) I also question the presumed dominance of Newspeak and its putative "success" in destroying new coinages, innovation, and dissonant significations in the English language.
Winston Smith, a disaffected party member, secretly hates Big Brother, in good part because he remains haunted by memories of the sudden disappearance of his family, which is fixed in his brain as a traumatic memory. Further, he suspects that Big Brother has something to do with their disappearance. Winston, who works fabricating the past so that it "syncs" with party vision, lives for years harboring his secret thought-crimes against the regime, and avoids capture by the Ministry of Love. Unable to deny the truth of his perceptions, a scrap of evidence that he comes across, or his memories of his family, he cannot make himself ascribe to the propaganda the regime concocts. His stubborn individualism places doublespeak beyond his grasp. In brief, he insists upon his ordinary human nature and therefore does not grasp the nature of the Oceanic state, which is to eradicate such human nature.
Gradually, Winston takes more and more chances of being discovered as a thought-criminal, impelled to get to the bottom of things and retain an individual human identity. He ventures into the neighborhood of the "proles" to buy a journal, starts keeping a diary, collects an antique paperweight, and even hazards having an affair with Julia, another party member and minor thought-criminal who has not eradicated her desires for sex and love. Julia and Winston begin a love affair that they acknowledge as doomed to destruction and eradication, as love and sex are criminal in the eyes of Big Brother, who wishes to appropriate all attention, desire, and loyalty. During their affair, they come across and read a heretical book that outlines how Oceania and the two other competing empires are run, and how the power hierarchy is maintained through perpetual and causeless warfare. The excruciating horror of the novel occurs in the last third part of the novel, when Winston becomes the debased object of an extraordinary technology of torture, brain washing, and degradation within the Ministry of Love. The goal of this torture is to eradicate every human instinct towards love, attachment, rational thought, and the sense of individual selfhood. The party will not allow anything save what serves the all-consuming narcissism of Big Brother, who not only has control over thought and feeling, but also the moment at which one meets ones death.

The depiction of the putative success of the Oceania economic system was not convincing. Such a system, premised on the idea that each of the three competing empires are sufficiently large to be self-sufficient and self-supporting, is an illusion. If one of its "enemies" actually attempted a real armed victory, as opposed to playing the calculated game of wartime wastage and stalemate, the system would collapse. The detente, so to speak, relies upon the implicit assumption of all the empires that they are using causeless war as an instrument to control their native populations and consume surplus wealth and goods. What is wrong about such assumptions? Written in 1948, the novel does not take into its calculations that petroleum is necessary to maintain social technologies of control and warfare. Orwell has the omniscient narrator of the heretical tract on Oceania claim that human difference is the illusory product of the need to produce enemies in order to maintain state power, arrest the spread of education, and consume surplus production. However, oil production centers in the Middle East, and has produced the real differences and clashes of interest that geopolitical realities since WWII have shown us. Oceania cannot function in a self-sufficient manner--it is dependent and interdependent. George Orwell did not correctly predict that the Middle East would become the epicenter of human conflict, in the form of growing Islamic fundamentalism and authoritarian regimes, because so much oil is located there. As for language, it is impossible to prevent variations in meaning, implication, coinages, and new vocabularies from generating themselves, for these are the means language uses to continue to make sense--semantically and even grammatically--at all. So, the utopian project to harness language in the service of thought control must have, at best, ambivalent consequences. For such purposes, this regime resorts to technologies of torture that trace their ancestries in the Western world back to the Romans and their crucification of countless subjects of the Roman Empire.

The Anti-Wall Street Movement Grows

2011-10-18T23:43:00.003-04:00

Corruptology from the Occupy New Haven Protest. The movement continues to grow. On October 18, 2011, the feminist author Naomi Wolff was arrested at Occupy Wall Street as she left an "appreciation dinner" for Governor Andrew Cuomo, as the Guardian reports.

Review of Larry Kramer's "Faggots"

2011-10-18T19:32:00.002-04:00

However lost on critics, not to mention members of the gay establishment at the time, "Faggots" is a brilliant Mepinnean satire that takes as the object of its satire the intellectual conceit of gay sexual liberation, and the notion that gay culture would occupy a leadership position in showing America how to overcome its sexual prudery and commitment to values such as fidelity, monogamy, and true love. In fact, Kramer explores a subculture is which nothing is taboo except for the concept of monogamous love between men, which everyone says they want and no one does anything positive to achieve.

The central protagonist in this epic sexual-cultural-historical novel is the screenwriter Fred Lemish, who is a stand in for Larry Kramer. He descends into an underground sex world in New York City, as in Fire Island, in which no position, combination of positions, times and places for sex, or sexual behaviors are off limits. The grand scene occurs when a drop dead gorgeous young man who wants to be a model comes to New York, is given drugs, and is gradually swooped upon by an army of vulturous men, who gang rape him and others until the point of unconsciousness. There is a scene, in Fire Island, of the ultimate sexual masochism, in which a man who refuses to love Fred submits himself to anal fist sex administered by a horde of men who participate in and watch this spectacle as if it has the sacred meaning of a transformational ritual. Kramer deplores the taboo on faithful love, as he deplores the situation where the only way gay men can communicate is through sex and more sex.

Permissable Fraud: On the Motives for Perpetuating Homohatred

2011-10-18T17:55:00.004-04:00

I will use the term "permissible fraud" to explicate the motives behind perpetuating homohatred because the game of harassing, humiliating, and degrading gay persons can be characterized as a game in which no one believes--not really, including so called biblical literalists, who pick and choose according to taste and occasion like all others. On an even “deeper” level, no one believes in homophobia anymore than anyone (except the delusionally deranged) believes in anti-Semitism. If my surmise is correct, I have what in legal parlance is called probable cause to allege that the absence of authentic and deep-seated belief that gay people are actually worse than other humans in any fashion particular to them—it is equally true that homophobia practices on the profound human inclination to believe in the love of others. I have seen gay people—who I shall usually have occasion to call queer creatures or queer foundlings—go to the most extravagant extremes to maintain their faith in the foundational social contract of love. And, indeed, at times queer creatures truly are loved. I have seen some queer creatures wrap to their hearts a moment or interval of love or beauty, and guard it like a priceless thing through years and years of arid silence, embarassment, marginalization, and heroic hope. However, the experience of betrayal being what it is—an annihilation of the grounds of trust in the evidence of one’s senses—it stands to reason that many queer creatures doubt their perceptions. Their handlers, who I suspect understand love as the anguished, clinging dependence of queer foundlings on meager scraps of tenderness, do not believe in the badness of queer creatures but, rather, practice upon their stubborn belief in love. It is so perilously easy to practice upon the fears of queer creatures, particularly since they stoop under exactions of exposure, invasion of privacy, odious cruelty to whose dimensions they cannot give credence and hope to maintain their wits. Homophobia is simply a term of art for a social game that is imbued with profound aesthetic signification and the capacity to understand the origins of the human heart. This game, which many Americans perceive as their democratic right to play to the very fullness of their desire, centers, quite simply, on playing tricks with the stubborn human belief in love. That is, for the purposes of this study, the major trajectory of homophobia.

What is the purpose of such twisted jests at the human heart, and, for that matter, in what consists this passion for manipulation and pretense called homophobia? It is not only a perpetual teasing, baiting, and frustrating of the human desire to believe in love, but also a way for tormentors to contemplate, intellectualize, and conduct experiments upon the operations and inclinations of their own hearts. They look upon their suborned and vulnerable queer creatures and can relish the moments when they empathize with them and extend signs of love that—careful!—need to be rationed so as to not give the creatures the sense that they have rights or, for that matter, the capacity to recover and make clear judgments. Then, they can feel the delicious pleasures of contemptuous pity for the illusions and frailties of their queer ward.

In addressing the question of what actually constitutes homophobia, I draw my inspiration from many sources, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Patricia Highsmith's fearsome The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Herman Melville's underappreciated early novel, Redburn I would like to argue, as Twain points out, that homophobia constitutes a certain kind of social parlor game, which takes pleasure in the anguished dramas of certain others and uses them to maintain order and to create a differential system of “human error management.” We see this in Huckleberry Finn, when Jim is made to undergo those wretched, painful and utterly meaningless games for the diversion of the boys, who know nothing, are nothing, feel little, and access their “humanity” through the games inflicted upon Jim. The same might be said of our queer creatures, who might be termed, in their child-like longings for love, joy, and erotic delight, a delectably attractive object on which forgers, frauds, and manipulators ply their tricks. And, as opposed to those who take issue with the prominence that marriage has assumed in the eyes of “ordinary” queer creatures, these folks are indeed onto something of material importance. As queer creatures have been asked to live lives of brutal and taxing interference, intrusion, and grinding accusation, so too are they right to prize an object that gives them the chance of actually being sustained and supported in a contract that honors, shelters, and protects a two-party contract. Otherwise, the lives of queer creatures have been lives lived under the perpetual threat of third parties who cannot keep up their delicious amusements if they might have to give credence to the proposition that queer creatures have rights to privacy that they need to respect.

My Best Friend

2011-10-18T17:38:00.003-04:00

This is a photograph of me with my best friend, Michael Trulli. We are at a wedding in Guilford, Connecticut during the summer two years ago. Michael, who once was my student at Southern Connecticut State University, is now a massage therapist. And a very good one.

Review of Sarah Water's "Affinity"

2011-10-18T16:16:00.003-04:00

Affinity by Sarah Waters

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Margaret Prior suffers a nervous breakdown after the death of her father, who was to take her to Italy with her best friend Helen, with whom Margaret is in love. Now Helen has married Margaret's brother and her other sister is also preparing for marriage, which leaves Margaret's situation as a "spinster" even more glaring and out of place. In this situation, Margaret decides to begin to visit the women prisoners in Millbank Prison, a dreadful, dingy, regimented, cruel place that appears to have been dreamed up by Jeremy Bentham. A woman named Selina Dawes, a spiritualist, has been imprisoned there for fraud and involvement in the death of her one time employer. Selina was prosecuted because she, as well as other spiritualists, are held guilty of practicing upon the emotions of others, who are desperate to make contact with beloved dead persons, or experience some insight into the world beyond. Gradually, Margaret falls in love with Selina, and becomes part of a scheme to assist her in escaping from Millbank. Selina is to meet Margaret and escape with her to Europe. Selina does escape from prison, but Margaret eventually discovers that she has been used as part of Selina's plan and that Selina has no romantic feelings for her. The novel is a study of the appeal of spiritualism in the Victorian period as well as a tragic portrayal of a well-intentioned lesbian life doomed to disappointment and otherness.

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Review of Herman Melville's "Redburn"

2011-10-18T14:07:00.001-04:00

Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Sailor-Boy, Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, In the Merchant Service by Herman Melville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Redburn Wellingborough, a young man who idealizes his deceased Revolutionary War era father, decides to go to sea, in large part because the family has lost its fortune and Redburn wants to remake it through sea voyaging. He leaves his bereaved mother and sister and, taking with him a journal written by his father that he regards as sacrosanct, he heads for the port of New York. The moment he leaves home, however, he becomes the object of ridicule for his antique clothing, and we feel with much knowledge that Redburn has been left bereft without the presence--and the lost fortune--of his father. He is an unprotected orphan in a cruel world in which democracy and brotherhood are empty slogans. In brief, we become aware that we are in the era of Andrew Jackson, during which most Revolutionary Era pieties, institutions, and assumptions, including the assumption of having a prosperous family farm, have been exploded. Redburn is an outcast, a fact which is underscored when he encounters mean bullies in New York City and, even worse, the malignant Captain Riga, a Russian who defrauds him mercilessly. He acquires a friend on the voyage to Liverpool and, when there, he discovers that his father made his money from the slave trade. He attempts to get food for a starving mother and her children and, eventually, makes his way back to the boat for the voyage back to New York City. He has a friend who is ruthlessly and unspeakably bullied--made to engage in the most debasing sexual and social rites--and keeps a measured distance from the victim of the relentless Jackson. When he arrives back in New York, he deserts his friend, who he later learns has died. A very autobiographical novel--given that Melville suffered as a result of his father's failure in business--that is also a rather merciless indictment of slavery, bullying, social hierarchy, and the Jacksonian Era. A very good and important novel in its own right, and very helpful towards understanding Melville as a man and a writer.

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Review of Marilynne Robinson's "Home"

2011-10-18T12:55:00.000-04:00

Home by Marilynne Robinson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book begins slowly, quietly, and modestly. It steadily builds psychological suspense, drawing from the growing intimacy between Glory, whose feckless fiancee stole money from her before abandoning her, and Jack, who plays the (ironic) role of the prodigal son. An alcoholic who has been to prison, has been a thief (in boyhood), and once got a girl pregnant, Jack, as we come to know him, seems a man who has disobeyed and gone against the grain out of a kind of existential angst and, perhaps, intimation of the moral hypocrisy and limitation of his father, the Reverend Boughton. The novel is set in the 1950s--during the Civil Rights movement and before protests against the Vietnam War (and, more recently, the controversies over gay marriage) decimated the ranks of American mainstream Protestantism. Jack has been gone from home for twenty years. During this time, he has married and had a son by an African American woman whose father is also, ironically a reverend--who rejects Jack. Jack returns harboring some hope that he could move his wife and child back to Gilead, Iowa, but his father's dismal views of the civil rights movement and the all white character of Gilead make it clear that they would not be welcome (except for Glory, who is not a racist). Inevitably, but tragically, Jack leaves. A poignant, beautifully written and powerful book about moral blindness and human limitation in close historical context. One can read a wonderful interview with Marilynne Robinson about Home here.

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Review of William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"

2011-10-17T05:37:00.004-04:00

A group of boys (some children, some young adolescents) becomes stranded on a sweltering tropical island after, apparently, their plane goes down. As one boy sees the wing on fire and as the pilot apparently dies when he parachutes out of the plane and gets stuck in trees, the plane might have been shot out of the skies. After all, this book is set in the midst of WWII, and the barbarism it shows is intended to reflect--and to reflect upon--the adult barbarities of the war.

At first the boys, particularly the older ones (as opposed to the often tearful and sometimes traumatized "youngins," who suffer from nightmares) see this event as an episode out of a boy's fiction--say "Treasure Island." They send out an expedition to scout the island, and set up a form of participatory democracy, in which a leader, Ralph, is chosen. At first Ralph and Jack, the other dominant or leader-type boy, get along splendidly and indeed love and admire one another. But after a spell of time conditions on the island begin to take a toll. The island is brutally hot and filled with thorn like creepers. There are mirages at mid-day and the black nights give rise to nightmares. A rumor about a beast begins that becomes impossible to suppress or ignore and, in addition, fatigue over a pure diet of fruit--plus frustrated desires for leadership--begin to take their toll on group cohesion. Because the boys do not dedicate themselves to work, but also indulge in play, morale and discipline are compromised, and, increasingly, squalor and haphazardness dominate. The crisis occurs when a boat passes them and does not stop because, since the hunters are hunting, they have not tended to the fire, which has burned out. At this point, recrimination, public humiliation, despair, and fear begin to dominate the emotional landscape,, with predictable consequences. Jack, who has taken to wearing warpaint, forms a tribe of his own, dedicated to the "fun" of pig-hunting and, soon, the tribe begins to hunt down a boy named Simon (who discovers that the beast is the dead pilot whose parachute has caught in the trees), Piggy, an intellectual boy of immense intelligence and maturity, and Ralph, the former leader. Simon and Piggy are killed for sport, and Ralph is about to meet a similar violent fate when he literally runs into a British officer who has seen their fire and rescues them. He chastises Ralph for playing war and might or might not come to know the facts of what has transpired since the plane crash.

While I know that I am supposed to read larger messages here about the state of human nature and character, I was not able to rise to the level of sich generalizations. This was a story about boys and, while such events might transpire among critically demoralized adults, the chances are not all that likely.

"Lord of the Flies" is a dismal but engaging English boy school tale that transpires in a deserted tropical island.

What Would Sarah Do? Our Matriarch on Queer Acceptance

2011-10-17T01:07:00.001-04:00

Hello World! Here I am at home in New Haven with my bashert and bubelah--otherwise known as my beloved wife Pilar. She's been sitting on the couch in the living room of the third floor of our house playing a game called Dragon Age Origins. I like in an abstract fashion that the women characters (avatars?) in this game do not appear to be idiot door mats or compensatory fantasy goddesses, and you can tell that I have a nice marriage because my wife doesn't demand that I play these games with her and her friends. Earlier, I went grocery shopping (I'm good at this and can keep huge lists in my head for us and for the rest of our family) and Pilar made red lentil soup with coriander. I've fed our three cats (who live in the basement because I have a medium sized allergy) and can state, with pride and relief, that I have finished our taxes, done the monthly bills, and made a list of minor repairs around the house that I'll actually do over the weekend. Furthermore, my mother-in-law and father-in-law (hi, Linda! Hi, Ed!) adore us, as do my brother-in-law and sister-in-law (Hi, Eben! Hi, Kerry!)

So, this is my household. I must apologize if there is nothing here to arouse investigation or moral shock--unless you feel that one ceiling fixture in one rear stairwell in need of two fresh light bulbs is a case for the State Attorney's General's Office.

However, as I am aware that I live in a country in which a still sizable percentage of my fellow or sister citizens believe that I, as a queer, am an immoral miscreant, and that whether or not I am a Jew cannot matter because what in the name of Christendom is Judaism anyhow, I welcome you to this installment of What Would Sarah Do?
Recently, poring over Bereshit (Genesis) I asked our Matriarch advice on how to deal with the contradiction between the placid life I and my wife, family and household actually do lead and public perceptions of how "my kind" lead their lives. Sarah responded with the following words of wisdom, from one with plenty of experience negotiating between the perceptions of the locals and herself, her husband, and their train as the outsiders.

How to Promote Acceptance of Queers by Coming Out as a Traditional (Boring) Jewish Queer:

When asked about Sodom and Gomorrah, offer to share your favorite recipe for chicken matzo ball soup.
When asked if you were "born that way," look down modestly and reply that only your mother was present on that joyous occasion.
When asked if it isn't true that most queers are alcoholics, tell them the stock Jewish joke about kosher wine.
When asked if it isn't true that queers are a threat to family values, invite them over to your house for a traditional Jewish Shabbos dinner. After the sixth Zemirot they will never dare ask you that question again.
When asked what would your Jewish grandmother think of your queer identity, tell the following joke. A Jewish gay man decides to introduce his gay boyfriend to his Jewish grandmother. The boyfriend happens to be a goy. His Jewish grandmother takes her grandson aside and asks him, "What? You couldn't find a nice Jewish boy?"

Occupy Wall Street Protest New Haven, Connecticut

2011-10-16T13:21:00.001-04:00

On Saturday, October 15, on New Haven's historic green, there was a well-attended protest started by the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has now spread across the United States, to Canada, and to Europe.

Review of Edith Wharton's "Summer"

2011-10-15T10:00:00.003-04:00

Summer by Edith Wharton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Charity Royall is a beautiful, limited, petulant, and yearning young woman trapped in the New England town of North Dormer, Massachusetts, and literally expiring from boredom. She is the orphaned ward of an elderly lawyer in town who manages to squash plans for her to receive a formal education. That lack of education, coupled with boredom, sets the stage for the sexual tragedy that occurs one summer when she meets the visiting young architect, Lucius Harney. Charity falls in love and gets pregnant simultaneously, and in the backdrop is a gorgeous, sun-drenched, opulent summer in which she plots meetings with Harney. When she gets pregnant, Chiarity's sense that she has no part in Lucius' real life, and her fear of displacement and alienation, throw her into the waiting arms of the lawyer, who has long wished to marry her. As Charity herself is the product of a single mother from the disreputable mountain country surrounding North Dormer, history repeats itself--without benefit of intervening culture or education to refine the powerful urges of sexual desire.

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Review of Stein's Q.E.D. and Three Lives

2011-10-13T22:17:00.003-04:00

Three Lives: AND Q. E. D. by Gertrude Stein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This Norton Critical edition does an excellent job historically situating these two brilliant instances of the earlier (lesbian) works of Gertrude Stein. Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum--or what is to be demonstrated) is a highly readable, semi-autobiographical novella detailing Stein's reaction to her burgeoning lesbianism while she was a medical student at Johns Hopkins University. Stein falls in love with a woman named May Bookstaver, but their relationship is stymied by their differing moral codes, their backgrounds, and their reactions to Mabel Neathe, a competing suitor who attempts to win over May with expensive gifts and trips and who, like May, does not view her putative sexual orientation as something more than a "passing phase," to be put away after college by marriage and motherhood. Stein, for her part, resists May's sexual seductions because she regards sex without marriage (or monogamous commitment) as immoral, and contrary to the bourgeois moral principles with which she has been raised. Hence, both are frustrated and, finally, break off, with Stein, through her character Adele remarking that they are "mistimed." The story shows great success in handling the theme of triangulated love, and is a treasure for those wishing to gain insight into earlier twentieth century lesbian love, and its connections to women's newly won rights to attend college. "Three Lives" constitutes three portraits that were, as Stein attests, influenced by Cezanne and her growing friendship with Pablo Picasso. The most famous of these portraits is "Melanchta," which constitutes an original artistic rewriting of the material in the autobiographical novella, Q.E.D. Melanctha Herbert is a half white, half black, bisexual woman who sometimes wants to kill herself because she "feels blue." She has an unloving mother and an overbearing father, and as she grows into a young woman, rejected by her "vague" mother, she has adventures, and eventually meets Jane Harden, a hard drinking near white lesbian teacher who teaches Melanctha "what power is and what to do with it when she had it." Melanctha, once she learns the lessons of power, deserts Jane in her "need," and takes up with a young Negro doctor named Jeff Campbell. In their relationship many of the miscommunications and frustrations that had bedeviled the relationship between Stein and May Bookstaver are represented, and they eventually drift apart. Melanchta eventually winds up living with a "coarse" black woman named Rose Johnson, who, unlike Melanctha, has a very secure and unproblematic racial, sexual, and gendered identity and who is not always "wandering" and "getting into trouble." However, Melanctha dies of consumption after Rose ejects her from her house because she suspects Melanctha of flirting with her husband. This extraordinary story is written inn a pattern of repetition within variation that underscores the theme and meaning, and adds much to the meaning as to the humor.

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Review of "Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies"

2011-10-12T16:28:00.001-04:00

Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies by Patrick E. Horrigan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this work, which combines autobiography with film and queer criticism, Patrick Horrigan represents how films such as "Hello, Dolly," "The Sound of Music," "Dog Day Afternoon," "The Wiz," and "Funny Girl" (among others) shape and are shaped by his queer boyhood. A self-proclaimed sissy from a large Catholic family that makes well enough good on its pretenses to be a happy and supportive family, Horrigan endures bullying, isolation, and the anxious tolerance of his mother and father for ways of his that are clearly "gay." In response, Horrigan develops an elaborate and active fandom for musicals, figures like Barbra Streisand, and becomes an accomplished pianist who learns the arts of conversation and inquiry from his memorable piano teacher. Throughout the book, however, one continues to wonder about the implications and the consequences of the fact that LGBT youth do not have entertainments directed towards them and thus must invent a place for themselves in entertainments that have different subject matters and agendas. On the one hand, it is remarkable to what extent queer culture has managed to make movies like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Funny Girl" their own; on the other, one cannot help but wonder if the bullying and isolation would be ameliorated if we lived in a culture in which LGBT children and adolescents could see themselves on the cultural mirror.

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Review of How Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl

2011-10-11T23:42:00.000-04:00

This compelling, disturbing, humane book forms a segment within a larger history of medical sexology stemming from Richard von Krafft Ebing and Sigmund Freud to Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson to John Money and Richard Diamond. In brief, a surgical mishap turns into a titanic disaster because of theories of human sexuality and gender identity that have no empirical or scientific basis, but, rather, reflect the ego, the ambitions, and the self-delusion of the physician involved.
Bruce Reimer has, as an infant, a condition that makes it painful to urinate and so the doctors decide to give him a circumcision, which is a perfectly reasonable decision and routine procedure. However, in a freak accident, the circumcision is botched, and Bruce's penis destroyed. The Reimers are told that their son "must live a life apart," never get married and never expect the ordinary social comforts and connections as other people. This reaction gives an absolute primacy to the possession of the penis and the remainder of the book goes on to explore how misguided such views are. The parents are desperate and enlist the assistance of Dr. John Money after they see him on television. His proferred solution? Turn the botched boy into a normal girl, and rename Bruce Brenda. The surgeries must be done as soon as possible, and the hormone therapies begun on schedule--for Dr. Money's theory is that gender identity becomes "imprinted" around the age of 2 1/2 and becomes increasingly difficult to alter after that window of time. Brenda undergoes a surgery to remove her testicles, which eliminates permanently the chance for reproduction. However, although the Reimers do their best to raise what had been their boy as a girl, the experiment fails miserably, and Brenda behaves like an aggressive, self-assertive boy who is nonetheless a ridiculed outsider who is held back in school. Despite these facts, Dr. Money reports in his research that the "twins experiment" (Brenda has a brother) has been a great success that shows that gender identity is not biologically determined but, rather, socially constructed and malleable. Indeed, Dr. Money writes several notorious books on the basis of what he and other regard as his great success in this famous case. Among other things, Dr. Money lauds consensual incest (whatever that could possibly mean), parents walking around naked in front of their children, children's sexual role play in preparation for adulthood, and so forth, including sympathetic treatments of rather repugnant perversions. Throughout, however, Dr. Money remains an adamant and unwavering homophobe, who sees homosexuality, as he sees gender identity, as socially acquired as opposed to biologically imprinted and, therefore, natural. David is rescued by a woman psychiatrist with whom he creates an anti-Dr. Money group and upon the insistence of this noble psychiatrist, under whom "patients actually got well," the parents tell Brenda of his actual past. At this point, Brenda changes his name to David, stops taking hormone therapy, and, eventually, gets married and becomes a father to the children of his wife. Sigmund Freud had been the first to posit the primacy of the penis in constructing sexual and gender identity, and one cannot imagine a more devastating rebuke of his theories than this book, which reduces the Oedipus Complex into an idle theory proferred by someone who did not have the means to know what he was talking about and therefore relied on prejudice and inspired best guesses. It is refreshing to hear that the field of pediatric medicine has advanced greatly since the time that the events in this book took place, but it is also sad that David, following his brother Brian, committed suicide.

My Historical House

2011-10-08T10:53:00.001-04:00

163 Dwight Street New Haven CT, originally uploaded by corinneblackmer.

My historical home in New Haven, Connecticut

Review of W. G. Sebold's Auserlitz

2011-10-04T22:18:00.001-04:00

It is hard to tell whether Austerlitz is a memoir, a biography, an autobiography, an excursion into a nearly lost world of 19^th century European architecture, a philosophical meditation on memory, trauma, and historical disorientation in relation to the Holocaust, or, at last, an historical novel in which any effort to “novelistically historicize” the past is sternly resisted. In brief, Austerlitz is an original novel that repels our usual generic assumptions

In this work of post-Holocaust witness literature Jacques Austerlitz, an academic historian of European architecture, tells his story to an unnamed narrator. This patient narrator might—or might not—be Sebold himself. Through this narrative form, Sebold explores traumatic aversions and inconclusive historical engagements of second generation Holocaust survivors. In doing so, the narrator gives voice to Jacque Austerlitz’s (and Sebold’s) profound concerns about a contemporary Europe that in its commercial aspirations, architectural monumentalism, and increasingly homogeneous culture attempts feverishly to forget its grim past and historical legacies. In attempting to forget the past, Europe stands in danger of repeating its lessons in a novel fashion—perhaps this time by becoming an irrelevant provincial backwater.

Jacques Austerlitz was four years old when his mother arranged for him to escape through a kindertransport to England, where he is adopted by a melancholic Welsh minister and his wife, and knows himself only as Dafydd Elias. He learns his true name at boarding school, but Austerlitz does not begin the process of unearthing his past until the latter portion of his life, overwhelmed by what he will find and the inconclusive misery his memories will bring him. As he says, “It was obviously of little use that I had discovered the sources of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed.”

Austerlitz finally remembers himself as a young boy standing on a train platform in London, having been separated from his Jewish family in Prague. Shortly before this event, he burns all the notes he has long accumulated on a work of the influence of capitalism on 19^th century European architecture, which he literally cannot write. However, his work as an architectural historian is not in vain—for it enables him to understand the very material structures that fail in their intended missions, portend the cataclysm of the Holocaust, or, in the present, obstruct the work of remembrance.

Austerlitz speaks of elaborate fortifications built and re-built despite their proven uselessness in defending against aggressors—including the Nazis. Indeed, their chief function has been to serve as prisons and to consign prisoners to near unimaginable slave labor in constructing them. The great train station in Antwerp where the narrator first meets Austerlitz is a monument to the destructive colonial aspirations of Belgium. A work he reads about the setting up of the Theresiestadt ghetto has “in its almost futuristic deformation of social life something incomprehensible and unreal about it.” However, the most important architectural observations—in tracking the history of European responses to the Holocaust and its own histories—occurs in Austerlitz’s experiences in the old and new Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The old library had been a place for readers and, while it struck Austerlitz as a cross between a penal colony and an isle of the blest, he felt at home there. The new Bibliotheque Nationale, however, has disrupted the readers that had once haunted the old library and stands as a contemporary idol to the will to suppress memory and erect a monumental fortification against memory that shall prove as ineffectual as the earthen works of Belgium. Built to honor the memory of a late French president, the Bibliotheque has been built over (and near) an old Nazi camp, “in its outer appearance and inner constitution” it is “inimical to human beings” and the “requirements of any true reader.” An artificial garden of transplanted trees surrounds the heavily secured public reading room and, periodically, birds, confused by the presence of the trees, accidentally smash into the glass and fall to their death. This serves as a comment on the fact that in all his researches in the new Bibliotheque Nationale Austerlitz has yet to succeed in finding any trace of his father. Indeed, one day as the reading room is emptying out, Austerlitz has a conversation with his friend Lemoine, “about the dissolution, in line with the inexorable spread of processed data, of our capacity to remember” and the “collapse” that Lemoine already sees the Bibliotheque Nationale undergoing. Austerlitz does not lead a failed life, despite the fact that he fails to find traces of his father perhaps buried beneath the Bibliotheque Nationale. Had he not been in a kindertransport he might have, as one critic has noted, been little more than a backwater Welch farmer. Rather, his life, transmitted in a work that transcends our generic classifications, becomes a testament to the sufferings and struggles of second generation Holocaust survivors and, not the less, the creation of new architectural structures that, in their quest for perfection, are, as Austerlitz says, “an official manifestation of the increasingly importunate urge to break with everything which still had some living connection to the past.”

W. G. Sebold died, suddenly, in 2001, as the result of an automobile accident.