Queer Film and Performance

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313 of Lesbian and Gay Studies
A Journal
Book Review
QUEER FILM AND

PERFORMANCE
In Theory
Amy Villarejo
Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere

Eric Clarke
Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. 248 pp. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper
The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
Thomas Waugh
with a foreword by John Greyson
Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability
Patricia White
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 304 pp. $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper
Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement
B Ruby Rich
Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS
David Romn
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. 376 pp. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper
What does it mean to speak of something in theory and, taking queer for
the moment as a subset of a more general endeavor, to speak of something in
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Copyright 2001 by Duke University Press
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queer theory, more particularly? Need such an expression, for example, carry an
absent counterpart, in practice, and has this couplet itself become so haunted
by both anti-intellectualism and anti-Marxism as to frighten away the most stalwart thinkers? What are the effects of queering inquiry, of launching a field, of
creating a set of institutions ostensibly built upon a framework of queer theory?
And what is it, finally, to (in)corporate theory, to make theory part of the body of
ones self and ones own project, to speak in its language and in its name? Or to
speak outside it?
I offer here a set of readings in theory. That is to say, I shall look at what
in theory might mean, an itinerary that is already tautological insofar as theory (theoria) means precisely to look, to speculate. Theory, in other words, is
a procedure of speculation through abstraction. In the first part of this essay I
mark the economic resonances of that definition; I then move to some texts that
highlight the visual dimensions that many of us in so-called visual studies or in
film studies or in performance studies find powerful. The first part of the essay is,
I suppose, theoretical and the second part evaluative; in splitting it thus I hope not
to have made too awkward the leap between its stylistic differences.
To set the agenda more specifically: the first part of this essay visits some
of the elements of Michel Foucaults History of Sexuality project that have become
founding presuppositions of, or at the least requisite citations for, queer theory. I
try to think about how, throughout that incomplete project, Foucault is arguing
with a certain version of Marxism, a version he conjures implicitly as reductive,
and I try to suggest that a scheme of value, an economy, nonetheless underlies his
epistemology. One way to describe my reading, then, is to say that it asks after the
role of marxism (little m, a category as broad as possible) in queer theory: What
is, for example, the predication of the queer subject, if there is but one? How do
we, in theory, address capitalism, the public sphere, democracy? What is the relation between culture and politics, in theory, and what, more specifically, is the
relationship between the visual (as in film or theater) and the visible (as in political claims)? In the second part of the essay I read a number of recently published
books that (1) situate themselves in a lineage of queer theory begun with Foucaults project, and (2) argue, some more explicitly than others, that visual phenomena such as film, theater, and television are increasingly central to thinking
what it is to do queer work, to be queer, to see queerly, and to think queerly, in
theory. Following on the work of Eric Clarke, a literary scholar, I seek to open a
discussion beyond disciplinary boundaries (film studies, performance studies, or
literary analysis), but I am not delusional about the difficulties attending a truly
interdisciplinary discussion; I am trained in film and cultural studies, and my
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QUEER FILM AND PERFORMANCE
interests show. These academic books are, moreover, not meant to serve as a counterpart, the in practice section of the essay; rather, they challenge us, as Foucault does, to think the theory/practice doublet as an uneasy name for a real problematic, one in my view that ought to haunt us interminably.
Lending an Ear
Theory might be something less robust than a discourse of the philosophical concept and something rather more substantial than a critical procedure. It challenges
ingrained habits of reading learned in the disciplines (how a literary theorist
defines ontology sends philosophers into whatever fits of which philosophers are
capable); sometimes theory is nothing more than a mystification. But what makes
in theory a slightly different case from theory in general is, first, the way it functions to propose an ideal: to speak of something in theory is to provide an ideal
or hypothetical set of facts, principles or circumstances. Against this set we do
not quite juxtapose a coherent domain of practice, certainly not one of facts, but
rather a sense of doubt that, at least in my case, frequently looks like dread. We
might say, then, that while something in theory remains to be tested, its abstractions may very well not hold at all. The ideal may prove to be nothing but fancy,
and the labors of speculation may result in spectacular failure.
If a project undertaken in theory may result in a botched mess, however, it
might equally well succeed fantastically, but according to what principles of evaluation? How do we measure the achievement of such a foray, essay, or assay in theory? One answer is, obviously, the market. I do not claim that theory itself is marketable, even in the limited showcase that is academia, though I would urge us to
acknowledge its frequent reification there, its burden of false coherence, and its
occasional reduction to the already known sound bites of a few French intellectuals. Instead I do claim, and this is the second characteristic of the phrase, that
work in theory cannot escape an economic value determination. That is, to posit
an ideal set, whether of facts, principles, or circumstances, is to speculate, to theorize, with the hope of a benefit or return. A genealogy of theory that extends Paul
Bovs work on critical humanism would help us to pinpoint a moment and a context for theorys current form of appearance in the university,1 and a more precise
account of queer theorys particular emergence (not simply in toto from the heads
of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) would aid us in understanding its particular
investments. Lacking both, let us notice this: paradoxically, and scandalously, certain forms of speaking about sexuality in theory seem to profit from precisely the
same benefit as that which accrues to the thinker who relies on what Foucault in
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the first volume of the History of Sexuality famously calls the repressive hypothesis regarding sexuality: a sentence to disappear, but also an injunction to silence,
an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was
nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know.2 Defining
the relation between sex and power as repression, Foucault says, is gratifying
because it yields a speakers benefit (le bnfice du locuteur), and it even promises
a return on the investments of those listeners willing to lend an ear ( prter une
oreille).
If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and
silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he
upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom. . . .
What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is
doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter
truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation and
manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of
knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the
garden of earthly delights. This is perhaps what also explains the market
value [la valeur marchande] attributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who
would eliminate the effects of repression. (1:6 7)
Such speech may, in fact, be what Pat Buchanan had in mind on the presidential
campaign trail at Bob Jones University when he referred to homosexuality as the
love that wont shut up. The queering of Bugs Bunny, a popular topic in cinema
studies, certainly belongs to this speech. In any case its fervor, its determination,
its longing, its eagerness, its promise, and its pleasure pay off for speaker and for
listener; the relative asceticism of Foucaults own prose (and I say relative because
he does seem to have a fondness for the thick description of aspects of the dietetic,
of vomit, for example) in subsequent volumes may be due in large measure to his
reluctance to reap such a benefit, in other words, to profit from a false hypothesis.3
For Foucault, as we know, to speak in theory about the history of sexuality
is to take a risk, to gamble: the risk of being curious in such a way as literally to
depart from oneself. I suspect that there are those among the readers of this essay
who will have read the introduction to The Use of Pleasure, the second volume,
with the eyes of a skeptic, but I get choked up still over Foucaults heartfelt defense
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of the swerve in his thinking from the first volume to the second, from those four
figures (the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and
the perverse adult) to the formation of the ethical subject:
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes
of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity the only
kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of
obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what is proper for one
to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what
would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to
the extent possible, in the knowers straying afield of himself? There are
times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than
one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary
if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.4
I am well aware that I need to defend my enthusiasm for this passage (maybe it is
a certain empathy for midlife?), since it is possible to read Foucaults shift in
emphasis to the formation of the ethical subject as an exercise (a long and tentative exercise or a philosophical exercise [2:9]) and one, moreover, that lends
Foucault himself, as he says, a certain theoretical advantage (2:7). But by exercise Foucault means a practice of philosophy as ascesis, as askesis: the exercise of
oneself in the activity of thought. His procedure of testing what he himself already
knows is neither rote nor academic in the pejorative sense but is instead a vital
necessity. And elsewhere he has reiterated the need for risk: Has anyone ever
seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it not be otherwise, given
that here the interlocutors are incited, not to advance, not to take more and more
risks in what they say?5
We need not agree that Foucault is being, for example, sincere about his
curiosity. The question I want to pose about Foucaults essay, exercise, or risk
requires only a reading of the avowed terms of his own question: how do we measure the value of a passion for knowledge, even or especially when it is no longer
an issue of a subject who thinks but thought itself thinking differently, sight itself
seeing differently? The answer, in part, seems clear from his text: one calculates
the value of the abstraction not by its instrumentality or utility but by whether it
allows one to free oneself from oneself, to shed the already known and quantifiable
domain of knowledgeableness in order to stray afield. But what could possibly be
the predication of value in this force field in which thought thinks, bodies are reg-
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ulated, ethical subjects are produced, texts are encountered, and archives are constituted? That is to say, out of what scheme in theory can value emerge as an
abstraction?
This question, the question of value that is also the question of the role of
the social, in theory, has been if not the driving question of contemporary queer
theory then certainly a crucial one for some time now. It is Foucaults question in
at least the first volume. Simply put, it is the question of the relation between sexuality and economy or, to put it slightly differently, the question of queernesss production under capitalism. It is instructive to dwell for a moment on the relationship between sexuality and the social in Foucaults three volumes, not because
they prescriptively provide a model queer theory ought to follow, but because
these volumes are widely seen as foundational to the so-called field of queer theory (I shall cite some examples of theorists relying especially on the first volume
as foundational). What I suggest is that it is precisely Foucaults suspension of a
decidable relationship between the two, between a domain of sexuality (that banal
invention of the nineteenth century as well as that domain of sexual practices, the
aphrodisia, of the second volume) and the social, that makes subsequent work in
queer theory falter in its quest for a decision. I want to demonstrate how Foucault
founders in naming that relationship and how queer theory has generally displaced that undecidable question into the domain of the visual.
For Foucault the relationship between male sexuality and sociality in the
fourth century B.C.E. (or B.C., Foucaults own terminology) in ancient Greece, as he
investigates it in the second volume, is either understood through analogy or
through isomorphism: Sexual relations always conceived in terms of the model
act of penetration, assuming a polarity that opposed activity and passivity were
seen as being of the same type as the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, an individual who dominates and one who is dominated, one who commands and one who complies, one who vanquishes and one who is vanquished
(2:215; my italics). According to his model, between sexual practices and social
hierarchies one sees only analogues: in structures, oppositions, differentiations,
and yes, values attributed to the respective roles of the partners (2:215). Sexual
value is social value, pure and simple; there is no disjunction, no imposition of a
structural necessity (capitalisms need, for example, for a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative, as the repressive model would have
it for the nineteenth-century counterpart).
Foucault does not give us, however, reason to think that such massive
analogies and equivalences are sustained throughout all time, and we do see the
model bending in the third volume, where in the absence of the coherent and sta-
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bilizing structure of the ancients city-state, our poor Romans seem a bit confused
about where power is being exercised and, despite the analogies, power does seem
more diffuse. Foucaults project was never completed, and specious readings of its
argumentative direction are not useful here. But there is a strong sense in the published works that when Foucault looks for the social, he sees the sexual (or he
sees, in the third volume, how the aphrodisia are tidily problematized in social
analogues), and vice versa, and when he looks for structural relationships, he sees
equivalence, one-to-one correspondence, similarity, and correlation. Even in the
section The Perverse Implantation in the first volume, the manifold sexualities
. . . all form the correlate of exact procedures of power (1:47; my emphasis).
Would it be possible to say that the theoretical advantage he has gained has come
through a loan?
I am speaking, of course, of the word he lends ( prte) to a complex
strategical situation in a particular society: power. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks reading of the History of Sexuality, in More on Power/Knowledge, emphasizes this loan in the context of her discussion of Foucaults nominalism.6 It is not
my task to summarize her wide-ranging discussion here, but it is of crucial importance to her argument that we take seriously the consequences of the necessity of
lending (and not attributing, as the English text translated by Robert Hurley has
it) the name power to a play of forces, a force field. Indeed the condition of possibility of power is a moving base of force relations that, by their inequality, incessantly induce states of power. In both power and moving base Spivak reads catachreses, metaphors, or concept-metaphors without adequate referents. As names,
because they are names, they are misfits, but they are more than that, too. They are
names used to describe generalities inaccessible to intended descriptions; thus
these words run the risk of being wrested from that to which they properly belong
(emphasis from the Oxford English Dictionary definition of catachresis).
Her reading of power as a catachresis permits us to understand how both
power and force belong to an attempt to think in a general sense of powers condition of possibility, yet the terms are nonetheless constrained by paleonymy, by
the history shimmering behind words that determines the narrow sense in which
we understand them. The play between the general sense and the narrow sense is
thus unavoidable. We cannot help thinking of power, for example, as electric, as
oscillating between poles of positivity and negativity. The relation between the
general and narrow senses is never clear-cut; it is always active and is, in fact,
what makes for the necessary lack of fit between discourse and example, the necessary crisis between theory and practice, that marks deconstruction (28). Such
a crisis would also, I suppose, mark any endeavors to deconstruct sexual rhetoric
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such that the formal procedures of a queer reading would be normed by practice,
challenged by the domain of the empirical; also and more important, the sexual is
subject to a variety of determinations, in theory, that activate the general/narrow
divide. Spivak urges us to read the misfit between theory and practice, between
general sense and narrow sense, in Foucault as enabling, as the very desirable
slippage that wards off the confusion of theory for practice, of a critical for a dogmatic philosophy. Realigning a discussion of the History of Sexuality project in
terms of a wider discussion of poststructuralist itineraries, differentiating between
the projects of Foucault (through this discussion of nominalism) and Jacques Derrida (whose positing of a founding violence sets the general and narrow senses in
motion) in order to bring them into conversation,7 Spivak helps us to read Foucault
in a context often occluded by queer readings: as a thinker in an enormously broad
context, whose work has been read (and misread) by feminists, philosophers, sociologists, political theorists, historians, and literary critics. Asking us to situate
Foucaults work and to read it (rather than simply citing it), Spivak fends off a certain kind of reduction that diminishes the stakes of his project.8
It also wards off the imposition of already known categories onto Foucaults
attempt to grasp something crucial that is prior to reasons systematizing (Spivaks
editors seem to have confused preontic with preontological), such as Richard
Rortys claim (cited by Spivak) that Foucault sloppily and stubbornly refuses to
separate the public and the private spheres (29). As if, were one to do so, all good
would follow: pragmatism triumphs. But what would happen if Foucaults analysis
of the discourse of sexuality were, in fact, put to a more sympathetic test of considering the public sphere politically, addressing its constitutive contradictions in
the face of its incorporation of disenfranchised groups? Rather than take the distinction between the public and the private sphere as the goal, is it not more pressing to understand the precariously ideal nature of the two and movements between
them? Jrgen Habermass ideal of rational distributive justice is, after all, predicated on the notion of inclusion, on the translation of oppressed and/or minoritized concerns into issues of public interest (5) or the translation of private vices
into public virtues. Citing Habermas here, Eric Clarkes recent book, Virtuous
Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere, provides a stunning model through
which to consider the contradictions inherent in such processes of translation, in
their principles and their effects.
Clarke, associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, uses
precisely the analytic and political force of the category of value in Western Marxist thought: Value, he argues, provides an important analytic mode for grasping
the mediations by which inequalities are preserved under the cover of equality
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(6). Clarkes argument, in brief, is that the justice conferred by public sphere
inclusion involves value relations that at the very least tend to produce a heteronormative sanitation of queer life (6). Rather than attribute such sanitation to
prudery (though this is certainly a factor), he suggests that it is, rather, due to
what he calls the subjunctive mood of bourgeois publicity: because the public
sphere as an ideal rests on universalist principles (such as equal representation,
participation, and access to rational discussion), it has an irreducibly counterfactual aspect. As universal ideals, precisely as ideals in theory, that is, they may be
approximated, but never fully realized (7). One consequence of this subjunctive
mood is that the public sphere demands that one act as if its material practices
and organizations unproblematically embody the ideals of democratic publicness:
In terms of homoerotic representation, publicitys subjunctive mood requires that
one act as if equal representation, participation and access are achieved through
homogenized proxies lesbians and gay men who are just like everyone else. . . .
Even as excluded groups are brought into the fold, so to speak, the homogenization
of interests and representations demanded by inclusion also indicates that it
requires deferred and demonized remainders: queer persons and interests that
would doubtless seem slightly out of place on a city council or in an Ikea commercial (7).
To continue Clarkes argument, the public spheres subjunctive mood thus
can be characterized by two interrelated contradictions. First is that between the
ideal and the historical reality of the norms defining publicity (7). The ideals of
the public sphere have historically been attached to a quite particular subject, one
we know well, the white Euro-American, educated, presumptively heterosexual,
middle-class male who owns property (8). The distance between the ideal and
the historical is mediated, in Habermass thinking, by a structural rule of limitless
self-correction: There is no exclusion rule without a proviso for its abolishment
(Habermas, cited in Clarke, 8) Without rehearsing Clarkes argument regarding
the extent to which Habermass basis for publicity in Immanuel Kant relies on a
bourgeois, property-owning subject, I will cut to the first contradiction to which
Clarke points: the positing of such a capacity for self-correction requires, on one
hand, that the public sphere functions as always already counterfactual (never
reaching its ideals of inclusion, only ever approaching asymptotically any consistency with these ideals) and requiring one to act as if it werent (9) counterfactual, thereby disabling critique.
The second contradiction follows on the first: even if one were to grant the
public sphere an infinite capacity for self-correction, the processes of bringing disenfranchised groups within the public sphere entail fundamental transformations
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in a groups self-identified interests (9). To achieve integration within forms of

public discourse, excluded groups must appear to conform to the standards of the
normal citizen by which they were excluded to begin with (9). These processes
of transformation are charted, for example, in the language of positive images of
gays and lesbians (or African Americans or working-class people or people with
AIDS) in the media, often, however, without noticing the underside (the structural
determinations) of their conformism. Clarke helpfully suggests that, for Habermass later work, the pragmatically universal norms of discourse ethics embody
the procedural means by which the historical exclusions of the public sphere can
be overcome (81).
As you might suspect, Clarke relies on Foucaults argument in the first volume of the History of Sexuality to challenge Habermass faith in discourse ethics
and rational deliberative justice, and yet, surprisingly, what Clarke finds in Foucault resembles what he distrusts in Habermas. Reading, alas, only a brief passage from the first volume, Clarke understands power as a distributive principle
of exchange (89), on the basis of Foucaults suggestion that the regulatory discourses of homosexuality produce reverse discourses of homosexual legitimacy,
without changing their form (cited in Clarke, 89). The most significant consequence of this suggestion in Clarkes reading is that the discourse/reverse discourse relation becomes, in his view, paradigmatic of the interrelated dynamic
between power and discourse in general. Clarke thus makes the structural equivalence of discourses into Foucaults paradigm, seeing in it the dangers of reduction, of ahistoricism, of an indifference of form to content, and of setting homosexuality out of the reach of other discourses and thereby reproducing rather than
challenging the problem of formal equivalence. This reading of Foucault diminishes the power of Clarkes otherwise impassioned championing of contradiction,
specificity, historical determination, and suspension (the as if of the subjunctive
mode), since the Foucault against whom Clarke argues is, in fact, the same person
who would insist on reevaluating the utopian possibilities mainstream lesbian
and gay organizations seem to think inclusion would bring (90). To render a
name into a paradigm (power into a distributive principle of exchange) is to ignore
the mobility of the force field Foucault is at pains to designate precisely in order to
challenge these forms of utopian speech. Were Clarke instead to ride the oscillations between the narrow and general senses of power I mentioned above in relation to Spivaks argument rather than decide on equivalence, he might have found
the nuances of the forms of power at work in the perverse implantation.
Clarkes argument is otherwise enormously compelling, ranging as it does
from mainstream commercial media to Percy Shelley, from Kant to Ellen (which I
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wish he had read more carefully and at some greater length). He provides forceful
evidence, moreover, for taking the commercial media seriously, even if in this volume he concentrates his analysis on literary texts: This confusion [between traditionally disparate representational arenas] is what we might call a real fiction;
insofar as marketing efforts and commercial media now perform the labor of political progress, we must therefore come to terms with, rather than simply decry, the
politicized functions that commercial spheres of representation have taken (31).
Like Foucault, Clarke makes no claims to present his argument as the work of a
historian. Instead he suggests that in practice a significant transformation
has occurred within the past thirty-odd years in which the commercial medias
production of social identity and the division of social groups into market segments have become more definitive practices of the public sphere. In theory we
must invest attention in the corresponding lesbian and gay politics of visibility
while remaining committed to what he calls indeterminate erotic expression,
which is Clarkes descriptive and polemical reference to sexual practices not
tied to monogamous, contractual marriage or its semblance (102). (I understand,
by the way, Clarkes insistence on a commitment to indeterminate erotic expression not as a prescription to dissolve monogamous relationships in order to have
anonymous sex but, instead, as a name for the resistance to moralizing universalism.)
To examine contemporary politics of visibility is also to elucidate practices
of representation that are particularly tied to the media of the past half-century,
and it is here that we must therefore inaugurate a conversation with something like
visual studies, or at least we must summon the second set of reverberations tied to
theory that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay: the specific language of
visuality, not simply visibility, aligned with the shift in practice Clarke remarks.
To speak more plainly, the more one wants to argue that in practice the world is
increasingly dominated by images, by the production of visible signs of political
engagement or participation, by the visible codes of social belonging, or by the
visible codes of social transgression (or whatever), the more one needs to have a
critical language of the visual at the ready. Conversely, the more that visual fields
(art, performance, cinema, and analog and digital media) are seen in theory as
vitally imbricated with political and social functions and effects, the more the
study of the visual requires the critical languages of sociality, including those of
sexuality (as in Clarkes powerful use of the abstraction value).
But when I suggested at the beginning of this essay that I sought to remark
the visual dimensions of theory as an activity of sight, I also wanted to indicate
how important film, photography, and performance have been to the emerging field
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of queer theory, whether as practices or as metaphors or as examples remains

uncertain. Think, to take the most obvious example, about the tremendous slippage in the critical literature between performance (which is of course not limited
to the theater but is understood as a domain to be distinguished at least in theory
from the practices of everyday life, and only then to throw both into some productive crisis) and performativity (from J. L. Austin and Derrida through to Butler and
her many readers). Or think, again to invoke a commonplace example, of the
remarkable attention to drag, from the Judiths, Butler, and Halberstam, to a number of Hollywood films of the 1990s. Or think about those about to leap onto the
Boys Dont Cry bandwagon. I, for one, have already leaped. To notice how important visual media have been to a critical project is not, however, to explain why,
and neither is it to claim that we should hand over queer theory to film or performance scholars; to paraphrase what a wise person once said of music, images are
too important to leave to the specialists. In the closing section of this essay, then,
I want to touch briefly on some recent studies of queer film and performance and
the versions of the visual they challenge us to see in theory: Thomas Waughs The
Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema, with a foreword by John
Greyson; B Ruby Richs Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film
Movement; David Romns Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and
AIDS; and Patricia Whites Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian
Representability.
Looking for a Few Good Books?

I selected these works as much for their relative importance within their fields and
for us in queer theory as for their ability to raise questions germane to our discussion of (the) value in theory. I also selected them because all of the authors balance academic work with other investments: in alternative media, in activism, and
in avant-garde performance. As Foucaults work with prisoners informs his theoretical writings, the commitments of these four queer thinkers to oppositional
practices structure their own books. Rich and Waugh provide examples with which
to begin, with the caveat that I have tried my hardest not to romanticize writing
outside or alongside academia but instead to ask after the domains in which each
writer situates his or her work. I read Waugh and Rich, in fact, as I read star
biographies; I think they were made for the genre.
I was a Film Critic for the Gay Revolution (247) quips Thomas Waugh
after sifting through stacks of film reviews he has written since the mid-1970s.
The retrospective observation is neither a delusion of grandeur nor, on the other
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hand, a weary confession to remaining on the periphery of great events. Quite to

the contrary, Waugh and B Ruby Rich were the film critics of the North American
gay and lesbian revolution, a revolution, inasmuch as it might be said to be over,
that in large measure congealed precisely around images (those of Judy Garland
notoriously among them). This gay and lesbian revolution spawned a quartercentury of erotic portraits, representations of dissent, and narratives of normative
and contestatory social organization, and it is to this gay revolution that Clarke
refers in annexing the preceding thirty years as crucial to the production of visibility. Among its progeny were the first gay and lesbian film festivals, the first
made-for-television gay and lesbian melodramas, inaugural battles over the image
repertoires of AIDS discourse (the purview of Acts of Intervention), gay liberation
documentaries, and so on. Waugh and Rich at times differently and at times in
the same alternative media publication, Jump Cut stumbled upon and/or manufactured a public for these firsts and sought to make sense of them for us. For
them, writing is a production of alternative public spheres. They sculpted genuinely new voices for popular commentary and simply reviewed the hell out of the
documents they encountered of the gay and lesbian revolution (and, for Rich, the
documents of feminist film culture of roughly the same period). And thank God: in
their hands, the reviews are likely much better than the events themselves ever
were. As bonus gifts, in Waughs book we get pictures; in Richs book, we get dish
on every major intellectual in the history of cinefeminism, on exclusive conferences, and on all of Richs boy- and then girlfriends.
There is a danger, however, that audiences for Waugh and Rich will fall
lazily into identity camps: Waugh for gay men and Rich for lesbians; Waugh for
Canadians and Rich for, well, those who usually make Canadian jokes. Waugh
does focus primarily on gay cinema (as Rich does on its underfunded lesbian
counterpart), and he also maneuvers between Anglophone and Francophone Canadian gay cinema and its filmmakers with astonishing political insight and care.
But his project as it has been throughout his publications is expansive,
appealing, coalition building, and unabashedly specific as much as it is searingly
witty, Maoist in its self-critical urges, and intellectually alive to change. If everyone (across whatever identity spectrum) ought to read one book of ostensibly gay
male cultural criticism, it must be the one with these essays: A Fag-Spotters
Guide to Eisenstein, Murnau: The Films behind the Man, Patty Duke and
Tasteful Dykes, Sex beyond Neon: Third World Gay Films? and Were Talking
Vulva, or My Body Is Not a Metaphor.
In a similar vein Richs book is required reading, first as history and
specifically as a history of what she calls cinefeminism, that discipline that
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began as a movement, a broad field of feminism and film that began in the seventies with the flourishing of film festivals and the simultaneous invention of theoretical approaches to classic Hollywood representations of women, eventually
expanding to other films as well (1). Speaking to the impasse that feminist cultural work has encountered in the decade of the nineties, Rich intends Chick
Flicks to jumpstart a feminist film culture, revitalized and retrofit(5) for the new
millennium, providing as the collection of essays does a number of routes worth
reexploring or paving anew. Not only has Rich written on virtually everything and
everyone in feminist film culture worth writing on, she has written the definitive
essay on Mdchen in Uniform (dir. Sagan, 1931), that German girls school lesbian
classic. Richs essay From Repressive Tolerance to Erotic Liberation (1979)
counters the then-conventional (and normalizing) reading of the films lesbian plot
as really a cover for the films antifascism. In its place Rich provides an eloquent
assertion of the films argument against sexual repression within the historical context of Weimar culture and within the theoretical context of complex models of culture and society (among them debates on the New German Cinema and the critical milieu fostered by New German Critique). Her knowledge of Cuban cinema;
of feminist auteurs such as Chantal Ackerman, Sally Potter, and Michelle Citron;
of documentary; you name it is never austere but rather urgently enlisted in a
task of understanding how particular films make meaning, yes, but also how film
and the study of film are socially located how, in short, to think about film in
theory.
Rich provides more, however, than intellectual and cinematic history. In
the prefaces to each of the previously published essays that make up this book,
she, in more extensive fashion than Waugh, offers a kind of autobiographical prose
cum critical inventory, to borrow Antonio Gramscis phrase. Remaining suspicious of the language of transparent self-revelation, she nonetheless combines the
urgency of remembering with its pleasures. One senses, in fact, a project very similar to Foucaults declared task of evacuating the already known, emptying the self
of its certainties and its determinations in order to get some purchase on the
moment that will produce new insight. If recirculating the original essays performs
a service for those of us who refer to them frequently, the real gift of Chick Flicks
lies in these introductions, wherein we can relish something of the person teaching us, and wherein we learn something of the political struggles for alternative
pedagogies.
Rich does not offer, nor would I want to endorse, a paean to Real Politics.
Waughs book offers an example of the contradictions of these fights too, in that
many of the pieces collected in The Fruit Machine appeared initially in a Toronto-
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based gay newspaper, now defunct, called The Body Politic. As Waugh tells us,
this exemplary community political newspaper . . . succumbed not to the hate
campaign of the Tory government and the Toronto police but to burnout and the
forces of the marketplace (156). Other collectively run community-based media
organizations yielded to these forces, yet clearly The Body Politic nurtured an
audience for gay film, especially independent film that challenged the censorship
(active and tacit) of the Canadian National Film Board and its productions.
Waughs commentaries for the newspaper over a span of ten years straddle wildly
varying forms and methodologies: academic analysis, pure dish, pedagogy,
hermeneutics, film festival report, eulogy, and evaluative review. Differently positioned in relation to the university, Rich and Waugh both produce a critical commentary on feminist and queer cultural practices. Both extraordinary writers, they
test habits and commonplaces of form and style, and yet neither is precious or
indulgent. Both enlist the readers attention by virtue of the overwhelming knowledge each brings to the task of talking about film. In short, they know a lot, and
they write wonderfully about what they know, which is not only the formal language of cinema but its history, its modes of analysis, and its paratexts (including
theoretical texts). And yet while the question is playful, it is nonetheless crucial;
Waugh asks, Why was I doing all these reviews when I was supposed to be accumulating scholarly publications for my tenure file? (91).
David Romn and Patricia White also straddle academic sites and other
spheres of cultural work and critical engagement (AIDS activism and performance, for Romn, and independent womens and queer media, for White), and I
suppose that were they in the rhythm of retrospection of Waugh and Rich, they
would be in tune to ask the same question. They are among the most outstanding
younger scholars in queer performance and film, and both have now published first
books. Both bring to their books passionate and committed involvement; it is not,
moreover, necessary for me to invoke biography to know something of their motivations. Says Romn, now associate professor of English at the University of
Southern California, for example,
I end my book in 1996 for a number of reasons, the most practical of them
being that I simply needed to stop writing. Throughout my writing process
these past six years, I have struggled with the need to continually update
my research and historicize specific modes of activism and performance. I
have also attempted to contextualize more clearly such emotions as hope
and rage in relation to the AIDS crisis, feelings which are a little more difficult to pin down since they emanate so unpredictably from within our own
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individual selves and our dynamic and diverse communal worlds. The
challenge for me throughout this book has been to attend to the immediate
historical impulses of the activism and performance under question and to
allow my own investments in those practices to remain visible. (xxxii)
He closes his introduction on a note of insomniac vigilance, keeping watch, one
presumes, on the lives, practices, and performances marked by AIDS, and he thus
opens Acts of Intervention as a document of witness. In my brief reading of it here,
I want to focus on how this extraordinarily valuable language of witness in the
most general sense proximate, vital, cautious, and vigilant pushes against the
more strained idiom of traditional scholarship in the book, as well as rougher passages into theory.
Let me offer an example of that turbulence, a quite long sentence that is
one version of Romns thesis: Insofar as performance entails a deliberate enactment of social ritual, one could feasibly argue that all gay male social responses to
AIDS are a type of performance, that many of these social performances are
attempts to intervene in our understanding of AIDS as it takes its form and is sustained by the governing institutions of the dominating center of power, and that
these performances acts of intervention, really contribute immeasurably and
in ways impossible to register effectively, to the continual cultural negotiations
over AIDS, sexuality and citizenship in the local, regional and national spheres
(8). Within this thesis are a number of complicated arguments: that all (gay male)
social responses to AIDS are both rituals and performances, that power operates
from a center composed of institutions, and that the central object of the books
inquiry will be processes of intervention (akin to performances) and negotiation. Romn suggests, through the latter terms, that AIDS performances come
between (the meaning of intervene) gay communities and dominant conceptions of
AIDS circulated by commercial media and by medical discourse. These performances frequently arise locally (and have therefore been dismissed as insignificant), but they have a political function in larger domains. Although Romn tends
frequently to use intervention and negotiation as synonyms, his book has provoked
me to think about the differences between coming between (the sense of putting
ones body between fighters) and negotiating, a word with a difficult etymology (literally, against leisure) and the resonance of navigating difference. Whatever the
process, though, Romn is keen to demonstrate the effects of AIDS performance in
the spheres of political and cultural warfare to which he has been witness.
Invaluable is Romns contribution to history, the brief history of AIDS theater and performance from the early 1980s to 1996, and he constructs this history
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from the inside. He knows these guys (and the occasional gal): from the candlelight vigils and memorial services of the early years of the AIDS epidemic (the
subject of the first chapter), to the early plays (One, Warren, The AIDS Show), to
the more well-known plays such as As Is and The Normal Heart, to the camp performances of Lypsinka and the cast of AIDS! The Musical! to Ron Vawters tour de
force solo performance of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, to the more collective work of the
Pomo Afro Homos and Teatro Viva, all the way up to Tony Kushners Angels in
America (and Jeffrey, the play, and Rent). He argues passionately and convincingly
against the widely held dual assumptions that, first, there was no AIDS activism
before ACT UP in 1987 and, second, there was no AIDS theater before the 1985
productions in New York of As Is and The Normal Heart. There was, he says; let it
be known. He shows us that gay men produced a sense of collectivity and a forum
for political organizing through fund-raisers, benefits, vigils, and memorials; he
offers a survey of early plays about AIDS that both opened routes for future works
and constrained the repertoire of significations around AIDS (realist plays about
individual white men) until later challenges.
At one level Romn is insisting simply that among the social responses to
AIDS are performances, and the performances are thereby social practices with
important effects. What he is struggling further and more significantly to articulate, it seems to me, has to do with the exciting, moving, mobilizing, galvanizing,
therapeutic, politicizing, and collective-producing experiences he has had (one of
which, the opening night of Angels in America, he narrates in chapter 7) in the theater or in performance spaces in a span of thirteen years marked by AIDS. For
Romn, while the documentation of performance (through written accounts such
as his) is an act of translation, live theater is an act of exchange: of need, of desire,
of immeasurable and ineffable emotion. Though one cannot name it, one can circle around it until it appears to be captured, in a sentence such as this: Performance is about shared intimacy and its collective negotiation and exchange;
it sets into motion the circulation of mostly invisible energies between and
among the performers and the audience (82). His is a knowledge from the inside
out.
We have the most to gain from that knowledge: production histories to
which mere textual analyses remain blind (such as the tidbit Romn shares about
Ron Vawter using Jack Smiths literal ashes mixed in his makeup for Roy
Cohn/Jack Smith); ways of contextualizing AIDS within the history of medicines
account of venereal disease; popular psychological takes on responses to AIDS;
activist history; the production history of AIDS benefits; and on and on. And while
Romn reads well the work of those theorists whose work informs his own (Dou-
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glas Crimp, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Kobena Mercer, Chela Sandoval),
he runs quickly from one to another in order to cover a massive amount of material
and, more important, to strike a tone that sounds authoritatively theoretical. Would
we not be better prepared to listen to David Romn were we to examine more
closely what we write when we write in theory, what we teach when we teach our
students to speak, in theory?
I for one would very much like to attend a performance with Romn in
order to benefit from his proximity and his critical energies, and I will be waiting
for his next book to address the many questions that linger not only after 1996 but
in the present volume, especially the connections between these performances and
other venues of AIDS performance, namely film and video. So too would I like to
watch the entire Agnes Moorehead oeuvre with Patricia White, whose Uninvited
bears the mark of a similar personal and political investment in queer film and
video beyond the bounds of the academic study of classical Hollywood cinema. As
with Romns book, I am more indebted to White when she speaks, as it were,
from the archive rather than from the abstractions produced by others (especially
those central to what she calls straight feminist theory or straight feminist film
theory).
Whites text seeks ambitiously and with tremendous success to account for
both the pleasure classical Hollywood films continue to give contemporary lesbian spectators and the ways in which those films and the social technology of Hollywood have constructed our very psychosocial identities and possibilities of selfrepresentation (xvii). Throughout Uninvited White, associate professor of English
at Swarthmore College, is concerned with films produced under Hollywoods notorious Production Code, a period bookended by two equally notorious lesbian
films: Queen Christina (dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1933) and The Killing of Sister
George (dir. Robert Aldrich, 1968). The challenge of reading films produced under
the code is at least twofold: to understand censorship, as she puts it, as much
more than a one-time no (24) and to see how it, in Foucaultian fashion,
worked with other discourses, including the consumerist, romantic, and domestic discourses of a feminized mass culture, to define lesbianism even as it sought
to repress its representation (2). Whites project, however, is not simply a decoding of those repressions; as she remarks toward the end, it is as much an act of
retrospectatorship, wherein the epistemological project of lesbian and gay
readings of dominant films is not simply a decoding process, the revelation of
queer subject matter, the restoration of coherence and meaning. Rather, it is an
encoding process, a textual re-vision with the reader-critic as subject of its fantasy (205).
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White, as such a reader-critic, thus speaks in a number of voices: the personal (meaning an I with preferences, crushes on stars, attachments to specific
films and moments within them, fantasies, and identifications); the film-critical
(engaging in a dialogue with a number of film critics and theorists, prominent
among them Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski,
Chon Noriega, Richard Dyer, and Jackie Stacey); and the critical-theoretical. (She
also admirably resists profiting from the speakers benefit to which Foucault
alludes, only once resorting to provocation, and in French no less [50].) I have
made the mistake of referring publicly to Whites methodology as quasi-psychoanalytic, a modified description I would like here to take back and to substitute
in its place a list of emphases: on pleasure, on reading carefully, on speaking
clearly, and on moving slowly. Unlike some projects driven by an interest in reception and spectatorship, White retains an interest in and focus on something of the
stubborn libidinal pull of cinema that psychoanalytic theorizing illuminated (30),
and yet unlike many projects driven by psychoanalytic abstractions, White at the
same time retains a level of specificity that is historically grounded. To sustain this
balancing act is quite a task; to do so as elegantly and eloquently as does White is
a rare achievement. Only once, in this readers opinion, does she cop out, and she
does so in the name of the fetish: We may not have to make a decision between
the seductions of isolated images and the subversion of plots, between purely stylistic and conventionally narrative codes, between the stars and the moon, in theorizing a lesbian relation to classical Hollywood cinema. Like the fetishist, we
might have it both ways (53). Otherwise, in the course of chapters on ghost
movies (Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter), maternal melodramas (Films
for Girls: Lesbian Sentiment and the Maternal Melodrama), and supporting
actresses (Supporting Characters ), White manages to see how lesbianism has
been desexualized through a series of cultural references (spinster, old maid,
nurse, and mother) or displaced through other social forms of marginality, especially race; such structures and displacements do not, however, prohibit lesbian
readings, but they necessitate or produce them.
White is thus justified in taking to task a number of straight feminist
readings that, when confronted with lesbian desire, see only maternity, or preOedipality: If popular forms give expression to ideological contradiction, womens
genres that struggle to resolve themselves in favor of female heterosexuality
inevitably put female homosexuality into play (99). It is necessary to wrangle
with how it is put into play rather than deny its force or presence, and White
proposes a number of reading strategies (emphasizing extra- and intertextuality as
well as visual coding, typology, and the role of supporting characters) that enlarge
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her repertoire beyond readings through genre and narrative. If ever we required
justification for performing a series of close readings of films, White provides it,
and it is precisely because she refuses formalist constraint (which is not the same
thing as saying that she does not read rhetorically or depend on formal language).
Instead her readings illuminate others (including mine of Queen Christina) and
incorporate new approaches and information. Among my personal favorites is this
footnote about Sam Goldwyn regarding the filming of Lillian Hellmans hit play,
The Childrens Hour: In a widely told story, Goldwyn purportedly responded to
studio personnel who told him the play couldnt be filmed because the women
were lesbians with: All right, well make them Albanians! (221). To have White
lead us on this tour of the studio archives as well as through readings of some of
the most significant films of the past three quarters of a century is a treat indeed.
Onward, Albanians: let us continue our intellectual work together.
Let us do so, in theory, with many spirits: of playfulness, risk, responsibility, discovery, insistence, rigor, attentiveness, witness, and just plain wit. Let us
depart from the already known into the domain of abstractions as Foucault urges,
but let us also insist that these abstractions do some work for us in thinking things
queerly. What Romn asks us to do in the name of critical generosity, to intervene in the limited perspectives we currently employ to understand and discuss
AIDS theater and performance by looking beyond conventional forms of analysis
(xxvi), starts to get at it. Let us work at each term, build slowly, invoke each other,
read each other, and thank each other.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Paul Bov, Intellectuals and Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 4. The volume originally appeared as Histoire de la
sexualit, vol. 1, La volont de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Thanks to Lisa Patti for commenting on this aspect of Foucaults prose in my seminar
on sexuality and the politics of representation.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 1986), 8.
Michel Foucault, Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations, in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, More on Power/Knowledge, in Outside in the Teaching
Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 25 52.
Slashing them, as in Derrida/Foucault: To speak of that impossible double name
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8.
Derrida/Foucault is not to be able to speak for it, to give you anything in that
name. But perhaps one might yet be able to give in to both, however asymmetrically
(ibid., 26). In communities of fans who write fiction about film or television characters
(such as those on Star Trek), the practice of slashing proper names, such as
Kirk/Spock, indicates a fantasized love relationship between the two.
I have not spent enough time with the argument in the fourth chapter of Spivaks Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) to know
precisely how to respond to her suggestion that we read culture in the current discussions of, for example, postmodernism as we read power in Foucault. Raymond
Williams, of course, validates the move: The complex of senses [of the word culture]
indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development
and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and
intelligence (Keywords [New York: Oxford University Press, 1983], 91).
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GLQ 7.

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