Download `I went to bed with my own kind once`: the erasure of

Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom
‘I went to bed with my own kind once’:
the erasure of desire in the name of identity
David Valentine1
Sarah Lawrence College, 1 Mead Way, Bronxville, New York, NY 10708, USA
Abstract
This paper explores how some individuals’ talk about sexual desire is rendered as incomprehensible when those desires are not easily talked about through categories of sexual identity. Using data from an ‘alternative lifestyles’ support group in New York City, I argue that
paying attention to expressions of desire is vital for understanding what ‘sexuality’ has come
to mean in contemporary theoretical accounts. Moreover, such an approach enables a critical
view of both the political systems which underpin sexual identity as well as the relationships
among language, gender, sexuality, and desire.
# 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Keywords: Desire; Identity; Sexuality; Gender; Transgender; Politics
1. Introduction
What does it mean to talk about erotic desire? By this, I mean two inter-related
things: what does it mean to talk about desire in a scholarly context; and what does
it mean to talk about one’s own desires? In the contemporary USA, popular discussions of erotic desire are drawn inevitably into a discussion of ‘sexuality,’ one
which—again, inevitably—occurs against and invokes the binary of hetero/homosexual identity (troubled perhaps by the evidence of bisexuality, though even with
bisexuality, desire is seen to lie discretely within the bounds of an identity category,
namely ‘bisexual’). Within queer, feminist, and anthropological scholarship, Foucault’s famous point—that sexual identity has come to stand as the truth of who we
are (Foucault, 1990[1980], pp. 51–73)—has been utilized to show how, since the late
nineteenth century in the West, the erotic is not expressed as particular desires but,
1
E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Valentine).
David Valentine is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.
0271-5309/03/$ - see front matter # 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
PII: S0271-5309(02)00045-9
124
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
rather, as discrete identities. Foucault and others (e.g. Weeks, 1981; Katz, 1995)
have pointed to the power of identity categories to both proliferate discourses about,
and simultaneously restrain, talk of erotic desire as an experience which bears the
name ‘sexuality.’ Erotic desires which fall outside the trinary of heterosexuality,
homosexuality (either/or) and bisexuality (both/and), or which fail to make sense in
terms of their basic logic of binary gender, are rendered unintelligible. Such ‘unintelligible’ desires present a unique opportunity for scholars to investigate the complexity of erotic desire, its expression in practice (linguistic and otherwise), and its
relationship to identity categories.
Yet, despite the influence of Foucault, the troubling nature of desire-beyond-sexual identity has received relatively little attention. Since the early 1990s, many
anthropologists have indeed pointed out that Western sexual identities and identity
labels cannot make sense of—and indeed, are complicated by—non-Western sexual
practices and desires (e.g. Blackwood, 1995; Donham, 1998; Johnson, 1997; Kulick,
1998). However, there has been little corresponding work which looks explicitly at
the erratic connections between erotic desire and identity in US settings outside of
immigrant communities (e.g. Manalansan, 1997). Most anthropologists of sexuality
in the USA have tended to follow the basic anthropological tenet of using one’s
informants’ categories to describe them. Consequently, gay men and lesbians—the
usual subjects of discussions of ‘sexuality’ in the anthropological literature—are
usually discussed in terms of those categories of identity which are meaningful to
informants. As a result, the ontological assumptions which underpin these emic
categories are left unexamined (e.g. Lewin, 1993; Shokeid, 1995; Weston, 1991).
While attention to study subjects’ self-categorization is clearly central to the
anthropological enterprise, critical analyses of those categorizations is also vital to
analysis.
If anthropology (and other social sciences) has neglected the ontological underpinnings of desire, there has been even less work in linguistics and linguistic
anthropology which takes up the deeper implications of considering language and
desire. As Kulick (2000) points out, much of the work that takes on the relationship
between language and erotic desire has coalesced around a discussion of ‘sexuality,’
usually focusing on gay- and lesbian-identified (and occasionally transgender-identified) subjects. As with the studies I mentioned above, this work similarly depends
for its analysis on a close identification with study participants’ self-identity as gay
and lesbian. But, as Kulick points out, there is a central flaw in much of this work,
drawing as it does on a tautology: people who are lesbian and gay speak in a way
that is defined as ‘gay language’; and people who talk a ‘gay language’ are, thus, gay.
Kulick argues that such studies continuously capitulate to a sexuality=identity formula. To move beyond this dynamic, Kulick proposes a reorientation of ‘language
and sexuality’ studies from a focus on sexual identity to a focus on desire. He argues
that a focus on desire will both complicate understandings of what ‘sexuality’ is and
enable an examination of the relationship between linguistic practices and sexuality
that is not constrained by identity categories.
Central to Kulick’s argument is a critique of the essentialism implicit in much of
the work on language and sexuality. This critique draws on a central tenet of con-
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
125
temporary social theory: that essentialized categories of identity obscure the crosscutting nature of social experience and identification. Being ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ for
example, is experienced by different people in radically different ways depending on
their racial identification, location, age, social class, personal history, and so forth.
What is less clear, though, is that such categories of identity achieve a density of
meaning through their reiteration, even in scholarly work that attempts to disrupt
that meaning. By this I mean that even scholars who take a critical approach to
essentialized identities require some baseline understandings about bodies and
practices, about the relationship between signifier and signified, in order to mount a
critique in the first place.
To take the examples of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ once more, while we might accept that
very different kinds of people may use these categories in identifying themselves,
there are also some basic assumptions that flow from the organization of the categories themselves. Primary among these is that people who identify as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ are understood as unambiguously men or women, and that they direct their
desire to others who are, respectively, unambiguously men or women. That is, these
categories rest implicitly on the logic of binary gender which underpins the homo/
hetero identity structure, a structure which requires clearly gendered men and
women to desire one another (or each other).
For those people who are not unambiguously gendered, the category ‘transgender’
has, since the early 1990s, become ubiquitous (by people so identified and in scholarly texts) to encapsulate this experience. ‘Transgender’ has become both a powerful tool of activism and a convenient label for social scientific research in bringing
together a range of social and medicalized identities formerly seen as separate
including, but not limited to, transexuals, cross-dressers, drag queens2, and intersex
people. Indeed, the power of the category is that it is actively seen as a collective
term to gather in all non-normative expressions of gender, no matter how they are
labeled. Another central element of contemporary discourses of ‘transgender’ is that
transgender identities are seen to emanate from the experience of ‘gender,’ not
‘sexuality.’ In other words, transgender identities are conceptualized as quite distinct
from homosexual identities, which are seen to have their source in ‘sexuality.’
At the same time, it is important to note that even in discussions of transgenderidentified3 people, sexual desire is still generally encoded as either heterosexual or
homosexual (or, indeed, bisexual). That is, sexual identity is usually claimed by
transgender-identified people in accordance with their gender of identity. While
2
The inclusion of ‘drag queen’ in this list is a particular choice on my part, and not one that all
transgender-identified people —or drag queens —might agree with. Indeed, I include it here, somewhat
reluctantly, only because many of my informants do so in their explanations of what ‘transgender’
encompasses. As will become apparent later in this paper, ‘drag queen’ is a central category in thinking
about the relationship between identity and desire.
3
I use the construction ‘transgender-identified’ to mark the ways in which people both take on the
category transgender as something meaningful about themselves; as well as the sense of being identified by
others to fall into a category. This is a useful way of dealing with the conceptual mismatches I will be
talking about in this paper, but it also speaks to the ways that self identity and identification by others of
the self are not separate but complexly related phenomena.
126
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
most transgender-identified people insist on the differences between homosexuality
and transgender identity (a significant point I will return to), many also identify as
homosexual, based on their erotic and affective attraction to people who share the
same gender category with which they identify. However, to reiterate, in contemporary scholarship and activism these identities are seen to flow from distinct
kinds of ontological sources—transgender identity from ‘gender,’ and homosexual
or heterosexual identity from ‘sexuality.’
As such, this seems like a very neat system, which accounts both for gender identification and erotic desire within a double binary of homosexual/heterosexual and
masculinity/femininity, with their roots respectively in yet another binary: that of
sexuality and gender. But things are not always so clear cut, for frequently, as I will
show, erotic desires expressed in speech can conflate, confuse, and contradict this
neatness.
2. Language and desire
As I noted above, ‘talking about desire’ in this paper refers not only to scholarly
discussions of desire, but also points to the place where such an investigation might
begin. One of the problems in ‘talking about desire’ (in a scholarly sense) is defining
what ‘desire’ might mean; indeed there is a great difficulty in defining such an object,
particularly for anthropologists, leery of psychological and individualistic explanations for human action (see Kulick, 2000, 2003). Here, however, I propose that one
approach may be to simply listen to what people have to say about their desires
without trying to account for them only in terms of identity categories. Indeed, my
suggestion is to listen to talk-about-desire to see what that talk can tell us about
identity categories. In paying attention to expressed erotic desire—whether in the
intimacy of a particular encounter, reports of past experiences, or fantasies spoken
out loud—the contradictions produced by categories of self-identity can become
evident. By so doing, we may expose the complicated politics of the double binary
(that is, homosexual/heterosexual and masculinity/femininity), enable a critical
approach to the relationship between identity and desire, and a richer analysis of the
binary of gender/sexuality that underpins them.
In what follows I will examine: (a) the way erotic desire is expressed in speech, in
this case, reports of past experiences; (b) the ways that different kinds of desires are
differently adjudicated as valid or invalid; and (c) the historical and cultural conditions that allow such adjudication to take place. Paying attention to what people say
about their desire—and the ways such assertions are accepted or rejected—enables
us to investigate the power of identity categories to obscure particular desires both
in people’s lives and in scholarly discussion of them. Moreover, this focus also
points to a deeper epistemological issue, one which underpins both the question of
language and desire but also much contemporary social theory: the relationship
between gender and sexuality. In the data I present here, I want to show first that the
use of particular kinds of identity categories disable certain kinds of desires from
being validated. But second, I want to show that this process rests upon—and
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
127
reproduces—a central analytic and political proposition in contemporary queer and
feminist anthropology, as well as studies of language and sexuality: that those
human experiences we call ‘gender’ and for ‘sexuality’ are distinct arenas of social
practice, experience, and analysis (see Rubin, 1984). While the separation of gender
and sexuality has been a theoretically productive tool, I will argue here that—ironically—this separation implicitly underpins the identity labels that feminist and queer
scholars are at pains to deconstruct. Further, this theoretical framework, in which
gender and sexuality are seen as separable human experiences, has implications
beyond the study of gender and sexuality. My argument is that a progressive political and theoretical move to make a space for ‘sexuality’ as a field of investigation
and activism has unwittingly produced a system whereby those who are already
disenfranchised—through poverty and racism—cannot be fully accounted for in
contemporary theorizations about gender and sexuality.
A focus on ‘desire’—in the form of its expression through speech—enables us to
consider the politics of categorizing certain experiences as ‘sexual’ and others as
‘gendered.’ To do so, I focus on two aspects of talk: first, the use of identity categories themselves; but second, and equally importantly, what people say about their
erotic desires in ways that cannot be accounted for by these categories. The broader
question is, therefore: what does the expression—and adjudication—of desire in talk
tell us about the politics of sexual and gender identity in the contemporary USA?
3. The alternative lifestyles group: ‘someone like me’
The data I will discuss are drawn from an ‘alternative lifestyles’ support group at a
Lower East Side community project in New York City in the Fall of 1996. I attended this group over the course of that Fall, and on one occasion I was able to tape
record the proceedings.4 The participants were a group of friends and acquaintances
who came to the group weekly to talk about their experiences. As a group, they were
united primarily by the fact that they all were tenants in low-income housing, for
which this organization was a resource and gathering place. However, the core
group consisted of mostly young African American or Latina/o people who could be
described, or would describe themselves during the meeting as gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender (among other categories), even though, as I will show, these iden4
I had, initially, intended my fieldwork to revolve around a linguistic anthropological methodology,
and intended to record extensive periods of conversation and talk in a variety of settings to aid my analyses. However, it became clear to me from early in my project that the politics of taping among the
people with whom I conducted fieldwork was fraught. Given the nature of social scientific involvements
with transgender-identified people’s lives (see Valentine, 2003), many people were deeply suspicious of my
research goals, and refused to be taped, even when I had gained their trust. Group settings, such as the
one I describe here, were particularly difficult because of the number of people present and the fluidity of
the group over time. As such, the transcripts from the group meeting I have included here represent virtually the only taped conversation I was able to record in my 18 months of fieldwork; even during this
meeting, I had to turn the recorder off and on to accommodate the wishes of one participant. However,
the conclusions I draw from this material were confirmed frequently through my ethnographic research,
as I discuss elsewhere (Valentine, 2000).
128
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
tifications were far from stable for all participants. Others came in and out over the
weeks I was able to attend this group, and the one I describe here also included a
young African American woman whose brother had come out to her as gay (and
who was struggling to understand what this meant), as well as Sylvia, a very old
white woman in a wheelchair who appeared to attend every group meeting at the
center, whatever its topic.
The only outsiders in this group were myself—a white, gay-identified man—
and Nora. Nora is Latina, a self-identified heterosexual transexual woman, a
former drug user, and now a peer educator for several NYC social service
agencies. In conversation, Nora is explicit about her transexual history, but
refuses to accept that this makes her less of a woman. She has been in recovery
from drug addiction since the early 1990s, and part of that recovery and personal
growth has been working for social service agencies in New York. Through this
experience, Nora has developed an understanding of ‘transgender’ which has been
shaped in contexts of political and social service advocacy since the 1990s: that of a
collective category which gathers into it any kind of non-normative gender expression, and which is distinct from homosexuality. This is evident from her explanation
of what ‘transgender’ means to one of the group members early on in the meeting.
Transgender, she said, is an
umbrella term which includes [. . .] transexuals, pre-op, post-op, uh, transvestites, drag queens, female impersonators [. . .] you know, it makes it much easier
to define [. . .], a person or group or whatever.
Though Nora and the group participants shared common life experiences—
of poverty, racism, drug addiction, and non-normative gender or sexual identity—the
way they talked about themselves in this group was quite divergent, a difference
underpinned precisely by Nora’s experience in social service settings both as a client
and as a counselor where she has learnt this usage of ‘transgender.’ It is this difference, in particular, the escalation of Nora’s attempts to get one of the group
members to identify as either transgender or gay that I will focus on in the analysis
below.
At the beginning of this meeting, as we sat gathered around a conference table in
an untidy meeting room, Nora introduced herself as follows: ‘I’m Nora, I’m transexual and I’m a woman and transexual is my alternative lifestyle.’ I introduced
myself as ‘a non-transgender gay man’ which got a conversation going about what
‘transgender’ means (from which I have excerpted Nora’s explanation, above).
However, not everyone in the room professed such stable identities as Nora and I
did. For example, when Ben, another core group member introduced himself, he
said: ‘I’m Ben, I’m just a male who enjoys. . . male companionship as well as female
companionship.’ Note that Ben did not refer to himself as ‘bisexual’ in this statement, though other group members did take on particular identity categories in
talking about themselves.
One of them was Miss Angel. We had not been talking long when she entered the
room, late as usual. Miss Angel—African American, a former drug user and sex
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
129
worker—was one of the central participants in the group, the acknowledged linchpin
of the core group of friends, who also worked as a chef at the community center.
Upon her arrival, everything stopped and we waited as she took her place, made her
observations, and came to rest. As she came in, so too did another participant, a
woman I had not met before. As such, I introduced myself and explained my presence (and my tape recorder). Ben took this as a sign that I hadn’t met Angel before,
and he told her to introduce herself to me.
Excerpt A
1
Angel: Introduce ourselves? To whom?
2
Ben: Do you all know each other? [i.e. do Angel and I know each other]
3
A: Yes! These homosexuals know each other up in here! They better!
This brief excerpt is significant, particularly for what follows. In noting that
we have met before, Angel grouped herself and me (identified to the group in
this and earlier meetings as a gay man), as ‘homosexuals.’ While Ben’s earlier
cited statement to the group is interesting because he avoided identity categories in talking about himself, Angel’s talk is notable because she did not: indeed
during the rest of the meeting, she used a plethora of identity categories about
herself, ‘homosexual’ being only the first. When Angel finally sat down and took
command of the meeting (as she was wont to do), the following exchange took
place:
Excerpt B
1
Angel: My name is Angel, I’m a pre-op transexual. I dunno what I am,
I’m a woman, simply. . ., OK? I’m HIV positive.
2
Nora: A genetic woman?
3
A: I’m a drug addict woman.
4
Interjection: Was!
5
Nora: Was or still are
6
Int: I hope!
7
A: No I was but I’m still, you know, they say you still supposed to say
you’re a drug addict.
8
Int: Well.
9
A: OK, still a drug addict.
10
N: It’s up to you if you want to say that, you know, if you don’t want to
I mean [you don’t have to].
11
A: Well whatever, look I’m telling the story right? Thank you. And I’m
31 years old and I’m a woman.
In this exchange, Angel makes several claims about herself—that she is a preoperative transexual, a woman, a (former) drug addict, HIV positive and, moreover,
that ‘I dunno what I am.’ In this support group, as indeed in many of this kind, the
divulging of personal information such as HIV status or substance abuse history is
not uncommon. Nora’s question (Excerpt B, line 2), which is meant as a joke, leads
130
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
Angel to provide another qualifier for ‘woman’: ‘drug addict’ (Excerpt B, line 3).
This results in a discussion of Angel’s history of drug addiction, and a discussion of
what you are ‘supposed’ or ‘don’t have to’ divulge about such details. In the end,
Angel asserts her right to say who she is, and says simply: ‘I’m 31 years old and I’m
a woman.’
Given the distinction made in most contemporary theory and activism between
homosexual and transgender/transexual identity, Angel’s claims to be (implicitly)
homosexual (Excerpt A, line 3) and a transexual woman (Excerpt B, line 1) are
somewhat confusing; certainly they were confusing to Nora (and to myself), as is
evident from an exchange that happened a few minutes later:
Excerpt C
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Angel: I had to get to know new friends when I turned gay and it’s
not easy being gay.
Nora: How was your experience when you became a woman, a
transexual woman?
A: I was 13 years old when I did everything.
N: Was it even harder?
A: Was it harder? No.
N: Did it go from bad to worse?
A: No [. . .] Um, when I was 13. It was hard, I went to schoolBen: With breasts.
A: The breasts.
This excerpt marks the first point in the conversation in which Nora attempts to
disaggregate Angel’s different self-identifications: as homosexual and as transgender/transexual. Nora’s questions to Angel above (Excerpt C, lines 2, 4, 6) are significant because Nora is implicitly proposing to Angel two different states of coming
out: as ‘gay’ when she was 13, and as a ‘transexual woman’ at a later date. Angel,
however, does not make this distinction: she was 13 when she did ‘everything.’
To return to the conceptualization of desire and identity in the contemporary
USA, the reason for this misunderstanding is, I would argue, based on different
conceptual notions of personhood and identity: Nora, schooled in the language of
‘transgender’ through her work in social service agencies, sees a necessary division
between experiences of being gay (the realm of ‘sexuality’) and experiences of being
transgender (the realm of ‘gender’: ‘how was your experience when you became a
woman, a transexual woman?’). Angel does not (’I was 13 years old when I did
everything.’)
This divergence in understandings became clearer still in a later exchange between
them, as they discussed Angel’s sexual history. Angel had informed us that she had
had sex with straight and gay men, and with women (with one of whom she had had
a child). However, all of Nora’s questions—her implicit attempts, as in Excerpt C
above, to elicit a stable identity from Angel—failed. A crucial point in the conversation occurred when Nora tried to pin Angel down on precisely how she labels
herself after Angel made a seemingly oblique statement:
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
Excerpt D
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
131
Angel: I went to bed with my own kind. I tried it once.
Ben: How was it?
A: How was it?
B: Uh huh.
Nora: Now what is your own kind mean by definition, because you’re
always telling usA: I’m a woman, well you know.
N: You’re a woman, transexual, you’re gay, you’re homosexual.
B: A man.
A: Look, me, like me, someone like me. Someone like me. . ..
Someone like me.
N: [who] changes sexuality5, uh huh
B: With breasts.
A: With breasts.
N: OK.
A: I went out with someone like me. Her name was Billie Jean, she
lives in Coney Island.
Here Nora finally tried to get Angel to define what her ‘own kind’ is. She listed the
identity categories that Angel had used about herself in this meeting (woman, gay,
homosexual, transexual) implying that she cannot be all of these things. To this,
Angel insisted: ‘look, me, like me, someone like me. Someone like me. . .. Someone
like me.’ In the end Ben offered: ‘with breasts’ to which Angel affirmed ‘with
breasts,’ and Nora left it there: ‘OK.’ However, while Nora’s ‘OK’ indicates she was
not willing to draw Angel any further on the topic, the import of her questions in
excerpts C and D is that she was attempting to get Angel to channel her expressions
(and experiences) of erotic desire—be it her desire for a woman, a man, or for
‘someone like her’—through identity categories that cannot, in the end, account for
them.
Both in excerpts C and D, Ben offers ‘with breasts’ by way of explanation of
Angel’s being, which Angel affirms (in Excerpt D, line 12). This reference to Angel’s
breasts—the result of hormone therapy—is the final word in both cases. The reference to her body is particularly instructive, for Angel’s changing body shifts her—in
contemporary progressive understandings—into the category of ‘transgender’ or
more specifically, ‘transexual,’ a category she indeed uses to describe herself. Yet,
as is clear from the preceding conversation, Angel does not always stick to this
definition of self. Indeed, Nora’s attempts to pin her down on this point relates
directly to the double binary I invoked earlier—Angel is conflating gendered and
sexual identities, recounting desires which cannot be accounted for in a system
which sees gender and sexuality as distinct.
5
Given my argument, one might imagine that Nora would have said ‘gender’ rather than ‘sexuality’
here. At the same time, however, her use of ‘sexuality’ indicates the slippage between these categories in
talk and practice, and points to the gaps produced by needing to talk about desire in discrete categories.
132
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
Perhaps in response to this questioning, Angel tried to summarize her theory of
sexuality and desire shortly after this exchange. She said:
‘When it comes down to sex, I don’t think. . . it’s two men going to bed with
each other, a man and a woman going to bed with it or pre-op or nothing
like that. I just think it’s just two people having sex, making love to each
other, enjoying each other’s company, enjoying each other’s time, when we’re
together.
Here Angel is proposing a fluidity to sexual identity that neatly encapsulates a
non-identitarian politics of sexual desire. A short while later, Nora made the following comment, which seems to support Angel’s theory of desire:
You label yourself what you want to label yourself. Other people don’t label
you, I mean unless you want to be labeled yourself, you know.
Yet Nora’s questioning throughout this meeting points to the ways that such
desires and passions are subject, always, to a rigorous system of labeling, whether or
not someone wants to be labeled. Those desires that cannot be labeled—or which
require different kinds of labels at different times—are produced as incoherent, or, at
the very least, the product of confusion.
Later in the group, Nora tells of her days of sex work when non-transgender men
who were her clients would ask her what their desire for her meant for their own
sexual identity:
Excerpt E
1
Nora: And they’re attracted to that [a feminine person with a penis] So they
would tell me, ‘well what am I?’ I said ‘well I can’t tell you what you are
unless you know and I can’t not tell you this is what you are and this is what
you’re gonna be, you know, because it’s not my life.’ My life, I know
what I am.
2
Angel: I’m a woman with a large clit.
[
3
N:
I know what I am.
In this excerpt, Nora states ‘I know what I am’ and her statements of self never
vary: she is a heterosexual transexual woman. Nora’s claim overlaps yet another
assertion by Miss Angel—this time that she is ‘a woman with a large clit’—which
joins the other categories she has taken on during the meeting: gay, homosexual, and
transexual. In contrast to Nora’s clear sense of knowing ‘what I am’ above, Angel
claims ‘I dunno what I am’ (Excerpt B, line 1), an observation that Nora implicitly
draws on in asking Angel to adhere to one of them.
I would argue that Nora’s attempts to get Angel to pick just one of the definitions
of self that she has used during the meeting fail not because Angel cannot account
for ‘what she is,’ but rather because she can account for herself in many different
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
133
ways. Nora, as I have noted, shares much of Angel’s history and experience as a
former drug user, sex worker, and person of color. However, Nora differs from
Angel in that she has an understanding of gender and sexual identity gained through
her contact with the social service agencies she works for, and defined by a distinct
split between gay identities on the one hand and transgender identities on the other.
Angel has no such model of personhood, and these distinctions do not seem to signify much to her. All she can say when Nora requests a definition of what ‘my own
kind’ might mean is: ‘someone like me.’
At the end of the group, Nora said: ‘In the long run, as long as you know the truth
that’s really all that matters.’ But what is the truth? And what operations of
power—and requirements for asserting identity to make sense of one’s desire—make
some kinds of desires more true—and more coherent—than others? The ways these
different kinds of knowledge are assessed, within this group and within a broader
system of identity, complicates how such assertions of self and expressions of
desire—which are expected to be congruent with such identities—are seen as being
‘truthful.’ Nora’s inability to tell her former clients—or to ascertain about Angel—
’what’ they are points to the place where desires escape identity and become
unnameable and, consequently, unrepresentable.
4. Gender, sexuality, and the naming of desire
The interactions that occurred at the Alternative Lifestyles group and the conceptual mismatches they illustrate only make sense if one considers the history of the
last quarter of the twentieth century, in which gay and lesbian (and later, bisexual
and transgender) people made their mark in American society. By the end of the
1960s, when the now almost-mythical Stonewall rebellion was about to take place,
homosexuality had long been pathologized. But it was also differently conceptualized than it was in the late 1990s when this group meeting took place.
Homosexuality was seen in medical and popular understandings as a failure of gendered identity and desire, a phenomenon which produced homosexual men as feminine and homosexual women as masculine. That is, in the pre-Stonewall era, the
dominant understanding of homosexuality was that it was caused by—and was
manifested in—gender variance. In 1972, Esther Newton, could write that ‘[d]rag
and camp are the most representative and widely used symbols of homosexuality in
the English speaking world.’ (Newton, 1979[1972], p. 100).
Thirty years later, it would be harder to make such an argument. It is interesting
to note that Nora, in her description of ‘transgender’ on page 128, includes drag
queens in her list of identities that are captured by ‘transgender’ (as do I in my own
list on p. 125; see note 2). While images of drag still figure large in media representations of male homosexuality, nowadays it is far more likely to see both gay men
and lesbians in both news and entertainment media as gender normative professionals and citizens: lawyers, teachers, and even parents. These images are the result
of decades of gay and lesbian activism in which the link between homosexuality and
gender variance have been at least partly replaced by the image of gay men and
134
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
lesbians who adhere to time-honored white, middle-class American values. This
activism has gone hand-in-glove with a call for gay and lesbian civil rights, based on
the claim that gay and lesbian Americans are responsible citizens whose sexuality—
coded as private in American culture—should not be the purview of public scrutiny
or regulation. This schema opposes a still-powerful US American folk model of
homosexuality which sees it as a gendered inversion, and, in Urvashi Vaid’s words,
works to make a claim that ‘homosexual sexuality is merely the queer version of
heterosexuality’ (Vaid, 1995, p. 44). In particular, accommodationist gay and lesbian
politics has increasingly worked with a model of ‘gay’ which implicitly foregrounds
the similarity of gay and lesbian people to heterosexual people (and, implicitly, an
adherence to white middle class American-ness) while, at the same time, highlighting
its difference from gender variance. This accommodationist politics took the forefront in many public campaigns for civil rights in the late 1980s and 1990s, and was
articulated in high profile debates about homosexuals in the military, adoption, and
marriage rights (for the purest examples of this kind of accommodationist politics,
see the work of neo-conservative gay scholars and writers such as Andrew Sullivan,
1995, and Bruce Bawer, 1993).
During the same period, from the early 1990s, ‘transgender’ emerged in contexts
of activism and social service provision as a collective category to provide a voice for
those who were no longer capable of being accounted for in terms of ‘homosexuality.’ To be sure, the differences between gender-normative gay men and lesbians and those with variant expressions of gender are not new and the connection
between gender variance and homosexual desire has been contested for almost as
long as homosexuality has existed as a category (see Chauncey, 1994; Meyerowitz,
2002). However, the advent of gay and lesbian activism in the 1970s resulted in a
radical shift in medical and popular understandings of homosexuality, bringing the
gender-normative model of homosexuality to the fore. These understandings rest,
implicitly, on a theory of gender and sexuality that sees these two experiences as
distinct in the sense that one does not have to be—indeed, in the language of much
post-Stonewall gay activism, is not—gender variant just because one diverges from
the heterosexual norm. This insistence on distinguishing between gender and sexuality allowed for the emergence of a new category, ‘transgender’, in the 1990s which
rests precisely on this assumed distinction.6
So, in the past 30 years in the USA a newly emerging model of gender and sexuality
as distinct arenas of social experience and analysis has resulted in the inability of
Nora (representative here of larger institutional discourses and practices) to make
sense of Miss Angel’s expressed desires, because of the requirement that erotic desire
be made sense of through sexual identity categories that are distinct from gendered
identity categories.
6
This argument does not intend to draw away from the organizing and advocacy engaged in by
transgender-identified people in claiming this category; nor is it intended to contest the political gains
achieved under this category. My goal here is to point to a particular cultural logic that underpins contemporary understandings of both gender variance and homosexuality in order to consider the deeper
implications of these politics.
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
135
This is not to say that this system is absolute. For one, the folk model of gender
and sexuality which see gender and sexuality as intrinsically linked is far from dead.
Moreover, activists and scholars have challenged the politics of neo-conservative
writers and groups (e.g. Vaid, 1995; Warner, 1999); and feminist and queer scholars
continue to query the relationships between ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ (e.g. Wieringa
and Blackwood, 1999; Jolly and Manderson, 1997). Yet at the same time, the
explanatory force of this heuristic separation has gained institutional force in the
very use of identity category labels—underpinned by that separation—to talk about
sexual desire. That is, as ‘transgender’ becomes a category of personhood but also of
activism, politics, and in academic debates, the theoretical distinction between gender and sexuality becomes solidified as fact in every iteration of that category (and
the category to which it is opposed: homosexuality). And as such, Miss Angel’s
voice and her desires are rendered as nonsensical.
Miss Angel’s claim to be ‘gay,’ ‘transexual’ and ‘transvestite’ may be seen, by
people like Nora and others (e.g. see Plummer, 1992) to hark back to an earlier (and
implicitly, outmoded and false) model of homosexuality which conflated sexuality
and gender. Yet, Angel’s professions of identity and desire are not unique. Among
many African American and Latino communities in NYC, such claims are frequently made. In the communities in which I did fieldwork where primarily young,
poor, people of color predominated—drag balls, bars, sex work strolls—the category of ‘transgender’ is rarely used. Rather, categories such as ‘fem queen’ (another
category Angel sometimes used about herself), ‘butch queen’ (a category that I—as a
non-transgender identified gay man—was frequently classed under), and ‘butches’
(masculine female-bodied people), as well as a range of others, were all seen as united by the overarching category of ‘gay.’ While the borders between these identity
categories were strictly monitored in these communities, as categories generally are,
the source of their commonality was never denied, and was seen to flow from a
complex nexus between those experiences which, in contemporary social theory, we
call ‘gender and sexuality.’
In other words, to be ‘gay’ in these contexts is not necessarily marked by gender
normativity. Rather, in those communities, it is the difference from heteronormativity—rather than the difference between ‘gay’ and ‘transgender’—which
underpins the organization of gender and sexuality. Yet, their unity as ‘gay’ people,
defined by another set of characteristics—the conjunction of their disenfranchisement in terms of both class and racial memberships and their non-normative genders/sexualities—precludes them from membership in the contemporary mainstream
understanding of ‘gay.’
As such, these desires and senses of self which cannot be made to fit into certain
identity categories are confusing. Early on in the meeting, Angel had demanded her
right to tell her own story (’ look I’m telling the story right?’ Excerpt A, line 11), but
she also recognized the power of institutions to form what one should say about
oneself (’they say you still supposed to say you’re a drug addict.’ Excerpt A, line 7).
In the end, Nora cannot push Angel to use a unitary category that makes sense in
Nora’s conceptualization of gendered and sexual identity, so Angel does get to tell
her own story in her own words. But Angel’s words, like many of her peers’, are also
136
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
subject to discourses and practices which produce those stories as incoherent. In a
conversation with one social worker to whom I related the conversation I discuss
here, she argued that Angel was a victim of ‘false consciousness’ and that she should
be educated into a more enlightened understanding of identity. In other words, to
paraphrase Miss Angel, ‘they say you supposed to say you’re transgender.’
For this social worker, and for many other social service providers, activists, and
scholars, a model of gender and sexuality as separate experiences underpinning discrete identities is implicitly a truth, and no longer simply an analytic or an activist
move. Yet ironically, as I have tried to show here, the practices and politics that
have resulted from this shift have, in part, reproduced a set of social relationships
whereby those who arguably have the most need for a progressive politics of sexuality and gender are excluded from its explanatory purview by being made to seem
confusing and confused.
There are two related theoretical points which can be drawn from this analysis,
which map onto the questions I asked at the outset: what does it mean to talk about
desire, both in scholarly contexts and in talking about one’s own desire? First, I have
suggested that the use of identity labels, conceptualized through a binary understanding of ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender,’ reproduce a system where desires that span
these experiences—and are narrated as such—are difficult to make sense of, or can
be dismissed as a kind of ‘false consciousness.’ Secondly, though, paying attention
to such desires, rather than dismissing them, gives us a way of focusing on the
practices and desires which underpin the complex lives of human beings, unrestrained as they are experientially by how such desires come to be accounted for. As
such, a focus on desire expressed in talk enables a complication of the categories that
have gained such force and power in academic, activist, and increasingly, popular
understandings of what counts as ‘sexuality.’
Looking at what people say about what they desire, who they desire, and how
they act upon those desires can highlight for us the political nature of desire and the
ways such yearnings are shaped by the identity categories through which they are
forced to speak if they wish to get a hearing. Such a focus can enable us to look
more closely at the seemingly neutral categories of ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality,’ and
complicate the relationship between them. And, most usefully, it requires us to not
simply assume that desire is self evidently explained by the categories ‘gender’ and
‘sexuality’ in using them to talk about the complexity of erotic lives.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Nora, Miss Angel, Ben, and the other members of the Alternative
Lifestyles group for allowing me to tape record and make use of their words in this
paper. Thanks also to Don Kulick for his comments and suggestions on this paper.
Finally, thanks are due to a core group of readers—Bambi Schieffelin, Henry
Goldschmidt, and Ben Chesluk—whose comments are always supremely helpful. I
am also indebted to Dr. Barbara Warren and Rosalyne Blumenstein for facilitating
my research. The research upon which this paper is based was assisted by a fellow-
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
137
ship from the Sexuality Research Fellowship Program from the Social Science
Research Council with funds provided by the Ford Foundation.
References
Bawer, B., 1993. A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. Poseidon Press, New
York.
Blackwood, E., 1995. Falling in love with an-Other lesbian: reflections on identity in fieldwork. In: Kulick,
D., Willson, M. (Eds.), Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork.
Routledge, New York, pp. 51–75.
Chauncey, G., 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World.
Basic Books, New York.
Donham, Donald L., 1998. Freeing South African: the ‘modernization’ of male-male sexuality in Soweto.
Cultural Anthropology 13 (1), 3–21.
Foucault, M., 1990 [1980]. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: an Introduction [trans. by Robert Hurley]. Vintage, New York.
Johnson, M., 1997. Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern
Philippines. Berg, New York.
Jolly, M., Manderson, L., 1997. Introduction: sites of desire/economies of pleasure in Asia and the Pacific.
In: Manderson, L., Jolly, M. (Eds.), Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the
Pacific. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 1–26.
Katz, J.N., 1995. The Invention of Heterosexuality. Dutton, New York.
Kulick, D., 1998. Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Kulick, D., 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29, 243–285.
Kulick, D., 2003. Language and desire. In: Holmes, J., Meyerhoff, M. (Eds.), The Handbook of Language
and Gender. Blackwell, Oxford.
Lewin, E., 1993. Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture. Cornell University Press,
Ithaca, NY.
Manalansan, M.F., 1997. In the shadows of Stonewall: examining gay transnational politics and the diasporic dilemma. In: Lowe, L., Lloyd, D. (Eds.), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Duke
University Press, Durham, pp. 485–505.
Meyerowitz, J., 2002. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Harvard
University Press, Cambridge.
Newton, E., 1979 [1972]. Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America. University of Chicago Press,
Chicago.
Plummer, K., 1992. Speaking its name: inventing a lesbian and gay studies. In: Plummer, K. (Ed.),
Modern Homosexualities: Fragments of Gay and Lesbian Experiences. Routledge, New York, pp. 3–
25.
Rubin, G., 1984. Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In: Vance, C. (Ed.),
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Harper Collins, New York, pp. 267–319.
Shokeid, M., 1995. A Gay Synagogue in New York. Columbia University Press, New York.
Sullivan, A., 1995. Virtually Normal: an Argument About Homosexuality. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Vaid, U., 1995. Virtual Equality: the Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. Doubleday, New
York.
Valentine, D. ‘The calculus of pain’: violence, anthropological ethics, and the category transgender. Ethnos 66(2) (in press).
Valentine, D., 2000. ‘I Know What I Am’: the Category ‘Transgender’ in the Construction of Contemporary US American Conceptions of Gender and Sexuality. PhD dissertation, Department of
Anthropology, New York University.
Warner, M., 1999. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. The Free Press,
New York.
138
D. Valentine / Language & Communication 23 (2003) 123–138
Weeks, J., 1981. Sex, Politics, and Society: the Regulation of Sexuality since 1800. Longman, London.
Weston, K., 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. Columbia University Press, New York.
Wieringa, S., Blackwood, E., 1999. Introduction. In: Blackwood, E., Wieringa, S. (Eds.), Female Desires:
Same-sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures. Columbia University Press, New York,
pp. 1–38.