W4D2

 Afsaneh Najmabadi asks us to question whether gender and sexuality are useful categories of analysis and invites us to consider the “or what” of gender and sexuality, beyond types and acts. She and Dennis Altman both raise questions around the transnationalization and historicization of gender and sexuality that do not yield easy answers. In “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?” Najmabadi illustrates the instability of these categories when she poses the question, “Were there any women in medieval Europe?” (Najmabadi, 18). This question responds to the question “were there any lesbians (or lesbian-like women) in medieval Europe?” which presupposes “the naturalness of woman; that there have always been women” (Najmabadi, 18). Although these questions are difficult to answer in the context of a WGSS seminar some slightly less self conscious voices have been attempting to answer them. I refer here to filmmakers in the genre of lesbian historical drama, a film category which blurs lines between academia and entertainment and stands in contrast to the gay coming of age drama, a less intellectualized and more explicitly capitalized style of film. In the first category are critically acclaimed, Oscar nominated, and usually depressing films such as The Favourite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, My Queen, Ammonite, and Carol. In the second category I place Alex Strangelove, The Way He Looks, Love Simon, and its companion television show, Love Victor. These categories are by no means absolute and are certainly not exhaustive of queer film as a whole but I hope that they illuminate how “the overall narrative effect of (Najmabadi’s) book had put woman in a position to carry the burden of gender and man that of sexuality” (Najmabadi, 15) as well as the way in which films in these two categories illustrate a divide between gender as tradition and sexuality as modernity. Quoting one critic of her book, Najmabadi asks, “Where is any account or analysis of women’s homoeroticism? This writing of history, which questions heteronormative narratives by centering men as those who desire and are the objects of desire, becomes complicit with discourses that see sexuality and eroticism as the exclusive domains of men when it ignores traces of women’s desire (same-sex or otherwise). . .” (Najmabadi, 15). Lesbian historical dramas as creative rather than ethnographic, often take as their project, an attempt to rectify this disparity in historiographical intervention, expanding or inventing lesbian histories where historical records leave only traces. Najmabadi asks, “How does one explain that while alternative masculinities can be retrieved from historical memory (though with much embarrassment and pain), alternative femininities have remained seemingly nameless” (Najmabadi, 15). Although works in this genre of film are inconsistent in quality, often rampant with fetishization, and glaringly white, they grapple (clumsily) with this quandary. Dennis Altman, in "Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities" writes that “as one (anonymous) survey of homosexuality in Pakistan put it: "'Gay implies a legitimation of a relationship that runs counter to family, and therefore gay life does not exist in Pakistan in general, or in Karachi in particular. From a practical standpoint, two lovers would find themselves without a social context....” (Altman, 83). Lesbian historical dramas have elevated this situation into the realm of a trope. In many of these films, the leading women are defined by their familial relationships and sexual desires between them are illegible to the people around them, only becoming perceptible, as well as threatening, in moments of sexual action at the film’s climax. That tropes have begun to emerge in these films problematizes their role as “representation” and stymies their potential for exploring or inventing alternative femininities. Beyond plot tropes, there are also consistencies in casting white women that imply that either women or people of color can be written into the historical narrative, but not both. In direct contrast to these tropes, the gay coming of age movie incorporates tropes of both family and racial diversity. Rather than offer historical intervention, these films supply vision for the future. They are marketed to much younger audiences, are lighter in tone, and happier in ending. They are not deconstructing the past, but rather, constructing (or prescribing) the future. Altman asks, “Is there, in other words, a universal gay identity linked to modernity?” and questions “the extent to which the forces of globalization (both economic and cultural) can be said to produce a common consciousness and identity based on homosexuality” (Altman, 86). Like the gay American tourists in Gregory Mitchell’s “TurboConsumers in Paradise”, these film studios sure hope so. Altman goes on to discuss the precursors to the development of these modern forms of sexual identity and specifically names the economic shifts which have “weakened and certainly changed their relations to their families” (Altman, 86). The coming of age trope, in addition to associating queerness with youthfulness tropes heterosexual parents and implies modernization from “traditional heterosexuality” to modern homosexuality. When the films themselves, or their source material begins to seem dated, or not diverse enough, they adapt, as is exemplified by the shift from Love Simon to Love Victor that replaced a white American with a Puerto Rican and Colombian-American protagonist without changing very much else. Altman brings up several issues with this type of representation writing that “Western romanticism about the apparent tolerance of homoeroticism in many non-Western cultures disguises the reality of persecution, discrimination, and violence, which sometimes occurs in unfamiliar forms” (Altman, 80) and asks if it is “to be understood as the oppressed demanding to be heard or as a new stage of internalized imperialism?” (Altman, 85). The children (teens) in these movies represent a sexually liberated, multicultural future made possible by the conflation of their romantic desires and their therefore inherently liberal identities. Altman’s asserts that “What was once accomplished by gunships and conquest is now achieved via shopping malls and cable television” (Altman, 87) and this is certainly apt but I think the grouping of shopping malls with television somewhat oversimplifies the role of filmed media in constructing, deconstructing and questioning categories of gender and sexuality. Lest I oversimplify the multifaceted edifice that is queer film, I invite readers to consider television like Dickinson, which names and thereby complicates its lesbian history tropes and Grace and Frankie, which problematizes the association of queerness with youth. Both, in turn generate their own complex complications bringing the medium closer to “bringing out as many possible directions of meaning (which) can illuminate the complex node at which notions of gender and sexuality are worked out” (Najmabadi, 28). Awareness of the tropes that are working in film to gender, sexualize, and subjectify, allows content creators the scope necessary for their subversion, an intricate and perilous project of its own.