Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
CINDY PATON
articulated only as mattes of political speech. some countries and agencies now un-
derstand antigay repression as a legitimate claim for refugee status; however, the re-
pression must be fank and acute. An American from a state in which sodomy is illegal
would have tremendous diffrculty claiming refugee status in canada; however, a gay
man fom a dictatorled regime might easily make such a claim.
8. The new poliry made it illegal for the military to ask about sexual orientation, but it
also forbade military personnel from announcing-in act or word-that they ae gay
or lesbian. This complicated policy refered to a series of contradictory decisions by the
Supreme court and lower courts that attempted to distinguish identity, speaking about
one's identity or acts, and engaging in acts-with or without gay identiry with or with-
out speaking. In effect, cases that tried to establish the right to announce one's orien-
tation under ftee speech laws (sexual identity here would be something like political
speech); were disregarded. The disruptive outcomes that might result ftom such speech
(or obvious acts that amounted to an announcement, therefore, speech) were consid-
ered potentially more dangerous than the limitation on free speech. In principle, a gay
man or lesbian who conducted a quiet relationship that never came to light would not
be in violation of the poliry. Although this removed the problem of being thrown out
of the military for lying about "having ever been,, a homosexual, a question asked
under the old poliry, one could still be thrown out for announcing---or having others
announce for you-that you are gay or lesbian. while this is a huge distinction in the
law, in practical terms, it meant that rumors of someone's sexuality could provoke (and
has provoked) the kind of public discussion of their sexuality that amounts to "telling."
The phrase "don't ask, don't tell" is now widely used in American popular speech not
just to refer to this absurd situation, but to indicate, more broadly, the kinds of statuses
in which one can only be what one is by not acknowledging
,,it.,,
9. Arthur Dong's 1997 documentary, Licensed to KilI, about eight men who commit
antigay murders, provides an excellent account of sgt. Kenneth Frank, a soldier sta-
tioned at Fort Bragg, North carolina. Shortly after the adoption of the "don't ask, don't
tell" poliry, Sgt. French became distraught that military discipline and national readi-
ness would decline if lesbians and, especially, gay men were allowed in the military.
one night he became extremely drunk and went to a local restaurant, chosen more for
its proximity to his home than for any association with the gay community. He ar-
rived, entered, and flred multiple rounds from his gun, yelling about
president
clin-
ton and gays in the military. He murdered four people and severely wounded seven
others. None, as far as we can tell, were gay. Indeed, in his interview with Mr. Dong
Sgt. French undescores the abstractness of his target. As the interview progresses,
French admits that he is still opposed to gays in the military indeed, does not like gay
214
S OF DESIRE
people, but he realizes now that shooting up a restaurant and killing people is not a
good way to exercise his political speech. Mr. Dong asks him what he would say to the
gay communiry who now live in fear because of his actions. In effect, Mr. Dong asks
Sgt. French to understand his act as terrorism against the gay community. Sgt. French
is stumped. He pauses and flnally says, "I've never really thought about it that way. I
guess I want them to know I'm not out to hurt them, I
'ust
wanted to make my point
about the policy."
10. As will become clearer, I'm not entirely happy with Raymond williams's elusive for-
mulation, and wish to augment as well Benedict Anderson's oblique reformulation of
it. However, the term for the moment suffrces to convey the way sociopolitically con-
structed sentiments are deployed as micro-politics of oppression. I will show later that
this affect is much more labile and more closely linked to supranational processes than
Williams's own use of the term suggested.
11. Blacks served with the British against the colonies in the American Revolution, as
well as serving for the colonies. Blacks also served in the union army during the civil
wa as well as every other maior war o minor skirmish in America's conquest of the
New wbrld and its later colonial possessions. It was only beginning with the American-
Korean War (inheritor of America's shifting position in relation to Sino-Soviet reposi-
tioning in the 1950s) that Blacks and whites served in the same troops and, though usu-
ally in rather different jobs, on the same ships.
12. By "queer," I mean both the specic groups that have flown unde the names of
Queer Nation (now mostly defunct) and Grassroots
eueer
(an active
philadelphia
group with politics much closer to early gay liberation than to terminal
eueer Nation)
and the anti-but-quasi-identity
Queer that appears as much a style as a political state-
ment. Both organized and nonorganized
Qy'queers have criticized the most publicly
visible and latterly stages of the mainstream gay and lesbian civil rights movement for
attempting to make "queers" normal (by insisting that we,e
iust
like you except for our
small affective difference); consolidating a frxed and nanow identity that serves to reg-
ulate the limits of sexual deviancy; and creating an upscale maket out of the Gay
Lifestyle.
The attack on the consolidation of identity has been especially vocal and is what
has been most noted by those who have watched this political dispute ftom the van-
tage point of raiwan. while the most visually audacious queers have a very good point
to make about the mainstreaming of gay politics, the battle is most polarized between
young activists and the graying baby boomers who, now heads of maior gay organi_
zations, nevertheless carry the legary of the New Left. The role of informal queer dis-
dain for the hard wok and political success of clinton's age peers may have been as
215
CINDY PATTON
underestimated as the centrism of highly vocal gays in a few cities has been overesti-
mated. whatever the local alignments of gay infrghting, the unfortunate similarity in
rhetoric betlveen the anti-identity movement and the smear-the-queer game of the
right makes their
ioint
attack on "identity politics" misalign the former,s critique of
the utility of strategic essentialism with the latter's explicitly racist, sexist, and homo-
phobic attack on multiculturalism and tolerant pluralism. In contexts like Taiwan,
where personal identities are not much promoted, it is particularly ftaught to rub at-
tacks on "identity" up against nascent claims to "civil" or "human rights.,, The result
of these conflicts in Taiwan has been mainly to deride desire for gay identity as old-
fashioned or as mimicry, while fighting for political rights that ultimately disenftan-
chise "queers" because they are not visible. I'll suggest at the end of this essay that this
results from the structuring of sociopolitical space.
1 3. "Queer" ought to dispose of ideas of "nattral," even though in its English version,
the word itself implies an orthogonal relation to a regular or
,,straight',
object.
,.eueer,,
in English is an old-fashioned word that was remade into a nasty taunt and then re-
taken as a way of being-different-in-your-face. As I understand the term,s use, tong zhi,
by ptaying off of the communist usage, most closely picks up this kind of friction,
though perhaps with less specifically sexual-but more historically vital political-
connotation.
14. Anderson mentions this ear in the volume and then retums to it near the end of
the original version. The second and most wideiy available edition adds several chap-
ters that take the argument in a somewhat different, Foucauldian direction, obscuring
the affect argument. At the time of the book's initial popularity and through this sec-
ond edition, the idea of affect had largely dropped out of continental post-Marxist the-
ory or been dazzlingly transformed. It was, I suspect, retained in Anderson because of
the greater influence of Raymond Williams. The problem of why people are attached
to thei state and its "ideological" manifestations was treated through the concept of
interpellation by Althusse the elde and antagonist to many of the post-structuralist
authors in vogue through the 1980s. Post-structuralists viewed feeling or sentiment to
be a product of the Enlightenment proiect's construction of subjectivity and not a tran-
scendent human function. Fair enough. But the problem of how individuals become
willing to "lay down their lives" for an abstaction like nation still deserves to be an-
swered, and not through psychologization. Anderson comes very close, in my vieq to
describing the system of tropisms that force and reinfoce the nation-citizen complex.
I amend him in the remainder of this section.
15. As a passing note, let me comment here that in Confucian and Daoist govemmen-
tality, the ruler always rules at the behest of a balanced order in which the imperial seat
216
STEALTH BOMBERS OF DESIRE
and the people have a symbiotic relationship. In the Confucian model, it is the intelli-
gentsia, and especially students, who have the role of speaking out against imbalances
of power exerted by ruIers-
16. "suspect class" is an Ameican legal concept for a group of people who share a trait
and appear to be treated unfairly under the law due to that tait.
As civil rights law has emerged in the past two decades, a number of different-and
sometimes conflicting-uses have emerged: affirmative action, nondiscrimination but
not active minodty recruitment, compensation programs (especially in
iob
training
and housing, to redress past educational disadvantage and segregation in housing)- In
addition, the "right to privacy" emerged alongside it, but out of diffelent case law- Free-
dom of speech has also sometimes dovetailed with more conventional civil rights legal
strategies: the rights to wear "ethnic" clothes, criticize
Sovernment
policies regarding
racer or say one is " gay" have all been asseted under First Amendment law. At present,
sexuality-related cases based on the Iight to privacy and the freedom of speech, as well
as class discrimination in employment and housing, have won at the state level in sev-
eral places in the United States. However, federal Supreme Cout decisions in related
but not identical cases have had opposite findings. In addition, even the "victories"
propose diffeent defrnitions and statuses for homosexuality; see Janet
Halley (1993).
17. As has been true in the United States and elsewhele, the relationship between gen-
der and sexuality is complex, and, by extension, the capacity of queers and feminists
to align is unstable. In 1998, in part due to debates about the legal status of plostitu-
tion and youth feedoms in Taipei City, a split in the women's rnovement between pro-
gressive feminists and state feminists was accompanied by a realignment of queels with
progressive feminists, continuing more or less autonomously.
Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Chang, Hsiao-hung. 1998. "Taiwan Queer
Valentines." In Traiectories: Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, ed. Kuan-Hsing Chen, 283-98. London: Routledge.
Chang, Sung-Sheng Yvonne. 1993. "Yuan Qiongqiong
and the Rage for Eileen Zhang
among Taiwan's Feminine Writers." ln Gender Politics in Modem Chna: Writing and
Femnsm, ed. Tani E. Barlow 215-37 - Durham: Duke University Press.
Chao Yengning. t996. "Embodying the Invisible Body: Politics in Constructing Con-
temporary Taiwanese Lesbian Identities." Ph.D. diss', Cornell University.
Ding, Naifei, and Liu Jen-peng.
1998. "Reticent Politics, Quee
Politics"
[Wangliang
Wenying: Hanxu Meixue Yu Kue Zhengluel, Xngbie Yaniiu 3 (4) (October 1998).
217
CINDY PATTON
Chengli, Taiwan: Center for the Study of Sexualities, National Central University.
English version, unpublished manuscript.
Halley,
Janet
E. 1993. "The Construction of Heterosexuality." In Fear of a
Queer
Planet:
Queer
Politcs and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Harvey, David. 1998. "\Alhat's Green and Makes the Environment Go Round?" In Cul-
tures of Globalzaton, ed. Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, 327-55. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Jameson,
Fredric. 1998. "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue." In Cultures
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Jameson
and Masao Miyoshi, 54-80. Durham: Duke
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Jameson
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Masao Miyosh, 164-90. Durham: Duke University Press.
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Patton, Cindy. 1996. "Queer Space/God's Space: Counting Down to the Apocallryse."
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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet Berkeley: University of Cali-
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Sklair, Leslie. 1998. "Social Movements and Global Capitalism." ln Cultures of GIobaI-
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Watner, Michael. 1990. Letters of the Republic: Publicaton and the Public Sphere in Eigh-
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Sexual Citizenship and the Politics of Public Transportation
in Apartheid Cape Town
Williom L. Leop
218
,7" "strangers on a Train"
Prologue: On Familiarity and lts Dangers
"Homosexuality" as we know it in today's South rica is closely tied to the re-
cent history of apartheid. As the following discussion will show, the technologies
of apartheid--discrimination, displacement, enclosure, removal-regulated geog-
raphies and identities of male-centered, same-sex desire,
lust
as they did for ge-
ographies and identities associated with other domains of veryday experience.
At the same time, South African "homosexuality" has also been influenced by in-
temational media and other communication, by travel and tourism, and by
forms of sexualized globalization discussed elsewhere in this volume. Even dur-
ing the periods of greatest restriction, North Atlantic understandings of male
same-sex desie and identity circulated widely within and across South African
boundaries of color, race, and class, such that today's visitors to Cape Town, Dur-
ban, orJohannesburg will find much in the South African "urban gay scene" and
in associated South African narratives of urban gay history that seems pleasantly
familiar.
To be sure, these details of global familiarity need to be documented, and so
do their basis in transnational circulations ol for example, sexual citizenship
and sexual subjectivity. But reading South Afican "homosexuality" entirely in
terms of such external influences is unwise, because it essentializes, and thereby
219