This week I will attend to Eithne Luibhéid’s, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border and Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai’s “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” In engaging both of these works, I found myself considering Adrienne Rich’s (whose work we read prior to our first class) essay titled, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence.” These two readings, in particular, truly helped me further consider how compulsory heterosexuality and performance of gender (whether cis or trans) is a means of subordinating the woman and using her to serve the nation-state and its ideologies. In particular, these two texts have helped me more deeply understand this through a transnational lens which is so helpful to me as a queer, Third World woman and as someone who is interested in this scholarship. In Entry Denied, I find it particularly salient that, “Family reunification provisions constructed women’s sexuality not just as heterosexual but also as procreative within a patriarchal framework. Consequently, they reified women’s sexuality as a form of property that men owned, controlled, and competed over, and that was most appropriately channeled into marriage and reproduction” (3). This piece of gender and/or queer theory (I presume?) prompted me to consider Adrienne Rich’s theory on compulsory heterosexuality as it explains how women’s sexuality is something that was constructed and is produced by the nation-state, especially starting in 1981 when “federal immigration control was fully institutionalized” (1). Luibhéid writes that these family reunification provisions also went on to generate “a class of women who were excluded because they were deemed to directly threaten heteropatriarchy’s dominance… [thus,] the Page Law [of 1875] was primarily motivated not by concern for the Asian women involved but by fears that they threatened white heteropatriarchy” (5). I consider how lesbian women and non-binary and genderqueer lesbians directly threaten heteropatriarchy and the nation-state as well, simply because their existence and sexuality are not “procreative within a patriarchal framework,” as in they will not marry men nor reproduce with men. In fact, the basis of their sexual and romantic (and platonic) relationships is not (necessarily) the creation of a nuclear family. Queer and genderqueer relationships do not exist to serve the family unit that serves cisgender-heteropatriarchy which ultimately serves the nation-state and capitalism, as we have discussed a bit in class.
Furthermore, in her essay, Adrienne Rich writes that the authors of the four books she references fail to consider the “institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance. In none of them is the question ever raised, whether in a different context, or other things being equal, women would choose heterosexual coupling and marriage… In none of these books, which concern themselves with mothering, sex roles, relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, is compulsory heterosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully affecting all these; or the idea of “preference” or “innate orientation” even indirectly questioned.” When we consider the idea of compulsory heterosexuality through a transnational lens, as Entry Denied has enabled me to do, I believe the notion that women’s sexuality is male-dominated and tied to what the woman can do for the man, family, and nation can resonate more and reach more people. Women’s sexuality is constructed by the state and serves to reproduce the state and patriotic sentiments, and disseminating this information can create possibilities for rupturing this subordination and returning agency back to the woman and her sexuality.
Moreover, in reading “Monster, Terrorist” I was deeply compelled by the crucial idea that “the absolute power that produces and quarantines the monster finds its dispersal in techniques of normalization and discipline… [which enables] an analysis of monstrosity within a broader history of sexuality” (119). Puar and Rai go on to write that, “monsters and abnormals have always also been sexual deviants. Foucault tied monstrosity to sexuality through specific analyses of the deployment of gendered bodies, the regulation of proper desires, the manipulation of domestic spaces, and the taxonomy of sexual acts such as sodomy” (119). The question, “How are gender and sexuality central to the current ‘war on terrorism’?” is so striking to me because it, again, forces me to consider how this transnational approach to gender and sexuality discourse can serve to further illuminate some of Rich’s arguments so that they are able to resonate more (117). In “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Rich writes that through “The bias of compulsory heterosexuality… lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible.” I am interested in the implications the war on terrorism, stemming from 9/11, has on lesbians, especially those who are genderqueer and/or nonbinary. There was a point in my annotations where I wrote, “queerness as deviance?” in response to the notion that “The human monster combines the impossible and the forbidden” (119). I consider how queerness is impossible in the nation-state we live in today, and yet, it exists. So what does this mean for us? Again, I believe this means that there are so many possibilities for rupture.
In Entry Denied, we encounter how immigration policy was constructed overtime to control who comes in, which implicates and entangles race, gender, sexuality, and class. And in “Monster, Terrorist,” we encounter the production of docile patriots to control who lives here and who will serve the nation-state. These transnational encounters and theories surrounding gender and sexuality have urged me to consider how transnational approaches are necessary to understanding compulsory heterosexuality and how it is not something that exists in a vacuum. Similar to how race, class, gender, and culture are entangled with sexuality, nation is as well. Adrienne Rich helps us understand that a woman’s (hetero)sexuality is tied to and informed by their subordination by men, and larger society; Luibhéid and Puar and Rai help us understand that in addition to this, a woman’s (hetero)sexuality and gender performance is constructed and produced and reproduced to reify the nation-state and serve it.
I am in awe of this piece of writing. The connections you drew to Rich's work that we read help illuminate the points the authors made in our reading for this week. One thing I was left considering is if the ability to procreate was more available to non-heterosexual people, would their existence be less threatening? IVF is super expensive and access is stratified across class lines, and straight white couples are most likely to use it. If lesbians, or other non-heterosexual people/couples, were able to have children more easily, would this make them more acceptable in the heterosexual patriarchy because their procreation would serve capitalism in some sense? Maybe not, but also maybe?
ReplyDeleteI fullheartedly agree with Lilley, great work Jasselene! Thank you for that connection to Rich. In response to Lilley's thought provoking comment, I think that the possibility of a family unit helping these couples acceptance could be a strong one. We can't forget the possibility of adoption, and how expressing plans/desires to adopt and "start a family" might work similarly.
DeleteThe questions you raise here are really interesting and I think relate,sort of on the flipside, to Fassin's discussion of the regulation of international marriages, especially those between older women and younger men, which are unlikely to produce children, despite their heterosexuality. I think its very interesting that one of the ways the state attempts to prevent these unions is in addition to surveillance, drawing out bureaucratic processes which often result in these women financially supporting the men they love, destabilizing the heteropatriarchal assumptions about labor and gender and thereby destabilizing these relationships via a form of emasculation. By this I mean to say, here is another example of non-procreational couples being excluded from the privileges associated with heterosexuality.
DeleteI loved how you connected our two reeks reading. Thinking about Lilley's question, even if they have those reproductive abilities, it stills threatens more conservative Christian values. Which is to say that despite the separation of Church and State, it is difficult for lawmakers to ignore these values (whether they are their own or their constituents).
ReplyDeleteCassie, you are right, and this is an ongoing tension in America. There has to be a lot of dancing around between pro-business capitalism and the various Protestant churches regarding the inclusion/incorporation of queer and trans subjects. So, it is not a terribly dissimilar "assimilation" story than immigrants in some ways.
DeleteJasselene, maybe we can carry your question to the larger discussion in a minute, but for now I wanted to point out a couple of things: For one, in the Fassin reading we encounter the concept of "gray marriages" which shows that not all hetero-reproductive marriages are welcome. Sexuality is always racialized, and since the nation both wants reproduction (giving citizenship via marriage is a huge sign of that) and does not want racialized immigrant others and their "uncivilized" values and cultures, it has to keep creating stratified technologies of incentivizing some to get married and reproduced and discouraging or at times banning others from doing so.
ReplyDeleteRegarding reproductive homonormativity (this is Lisa Duggan's term), we are already seeing that more upper-middle and upper-class lesbians who have access to reproductive technologies are more and more incorporated into the nation. But this is only reflected in legal change and one's material standing influences access to this life as Lilley pointed out. Since class in the US (and many other places in the world) is also moralized, where working classes and poor are seen as less driven, lazier or undeserving in other ways, their reproduction is regulated both for moral and for material reasons.