Me/No Lesbian: The Trouble with “Troubling
Lesbian Identities[1]”
Essay Review of Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality,
and Academic Practices in Higher Education, Susan Talburt (SUNY Series,
Identities in the Classroom).
Meno. And how will you
enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as
the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know
that this is the thing which you did not know?
Plato, Meno.
As one civilized person to another: Matthew Shepard
shouldn't have died. We should all burn with shame.
Tony Kushner (author of Angels
in America, from The Nation, 11 November 1998)
It has taken me just over a year to write
this review. The length of time this has taken me is,
in some significant measure, related directly to the challenges of doing
justice to an intellectually substantial book that is, in my view, deeply
problematic both politically and ethically. I
have struggled with Susan Talburt’s exemplary ethnographic study of three
lesbian faculty members not because of any specific intellectual or technical
limitations of her research, but because of the tensions between its
theoretical commitments to postmodernism and what I construe as its practical
and concomitant commitments to political ambivalence. I have endeavored to read between
Talburt’s sentences and to ask what kind of story is Subject to
Identity, and in particular, what are its ethical dimensions with respect
to ending homophobia and disrupting heteronormativity within the relentlessly
heterosexist and homophobic hallways, playgrounds, staffrooms and classrooms of
North America’s public educational institutions. I begin with an
autobiographical preamble as a way of locating myself as a particular kind of
reader of Talburt’s significant, and, at times, brilliant text.
As a public
and professional “homosexual”, I know what it is to experience
systemic discrimination. In my first year (1989) as a faculty member at a
major, publicly funded Canadian university, I asked the Faculty Association to
challenge the institution’s lack of access to spousal benefits for gay
and lesbian employees. Overnight I was publicly identified as a
"lesbian", despite never having made that claim myself, and was
presumed and constructed as "other" and as "deviant".
Overnight I went from “young and promising new kid on the block”
to, in the words of perhaps the most prominent feminist academic on campus, a
"political ass who wouldn't get tenure anywhere in North America". I
was marginalized in my department, I got hate mail, students confronted me in
classes and were sometimes downright hostile, and I got death threats on my
answering machine. When I asked my Dean to deal with the fact that homophobia
was profoundly affecting the quality of my work environment, she angrily
retorted by saying that since I couldn't prove it, she was under no obligation
to deal with it. After all, she said, there are other gay and lesbian faculty
who don't seem to experience any of these problems.
The "don't ask don't tell"
policy was working well here. I was the only "out" lesbian faculty
member- I was out on a limb and they were sawing it off. When my tenure review
rolled around, I began a year long bloody battle for my professional life.
Twice I was formally denied tenure. Formal accounts written about my
professional accomplishments characterized my work as unsubstantial and
included disparaging accusations about a lack of professionalism and unethical
conduct on my part. Resigned, I resigned. The university quickly accepted my
resignation. My career as an academic was, effectively, over. I wrote an
impassioned letter to the university president outlining the errors, omissions,
and just plain lies that littered my tenure file. A month later, I received a
phone call from the president’s office asking me to please pick up the
letter containing his recommendation.
A few weeks after delivering what I had thought then was my final
lecture-- a paper (Bryson & de Castell, 1993) about how being a lesbian in
a faculty of education constituted, paraphrasing Nicole Brossard, an
“un(tenur)able discursive posture”, I was awarded tenure.
A decade
later, the same university approved an undergraduate minor in “Lesbian
and Gay Studies”. The steering committee, made up of queer faculty, which
I had founded to consider curricular issues following the spousal benefits
victory, met at the last minute to discuss a proposed program name-change to
“Critical Studies in Sexuality”. The discussions that took place
around the name-change were highly charged, emotionally explosive, and tense.
An odd bifurcation emerged in the arguments of the group in favor of the name
change. Intellectually sophisticated expositions of postmodern “identity
as performance” and “identity as discourse”, which I want to
argue are actually anti-identity theories, were juxtaposed with seemingly pragmatic
concerns that potential donors to this program as well as prospective students
might be put off by a necessary association with the words
“Lesbian” and “Gay”. In a moment that, several years
later, still makes me nauseous, I found myself locked in a losing battle where
the most sophisticated theoretical constructs of the day were being used to
shore up what looked to me like a homophobic and discriminatory name change
– a change that put “lesbian” and “gay” back in
the closet, cloaked in shame, ridiculed as “essentialist” and
“old-school”, and disposable, because identity politics was bad for
business. “Lesbian and Gay” – never for a minute did I
somehow fail to understand the intellectual significance of theoretical
anti-essentialist arguments against a simple representationalist ontology.
Rather, it seemed that if simply being identified “as one” could
still, like Matthew Shepard, get you killed, then institutionalized ambivalence
about laying claim to this label was a choice with ethical consequences that I
simply could not accept.
Emancipatory ideals have been a
critical part of the liberal social justice project of public education in
North America for more than a century. A late-arrival on the institutional
anti-discrimination agenda has been homophobia, and the
implementation of proactive equity policies to address the specific needs of
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) members of educational
institutions. At school (as elsewhere), few LGBT persons, whether teachers or
students, find themselves in environments where it is either safe, or
considered appropriate, to identify publicly as such (Khayatt, 1994; Smith
& Smith, 1998). And publicly-funded schools, whether elementary or
post-secondary, have dragged their feet and given voice to a significant chorus
of nay-sayers dead-set against addressing the equity needs of LGBT community
members, let alone to undertake as a serious intellectual project the goal of
considering the epistemological, curricular and pedagogical consequences of the
systemic exclusion of LGBT topics, themes and contributions from the canon.
Subject to Identity: Knowledge,
Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education by Susan Talburt,
engages the reader critically with the difference being a lesbian faculty
member might make to business-as-usual at Liberal U, described as a North
American research university. Reciprocally, this research also tackles the ways
in which, as a significant “modifier”, academic might
distinctively inflect the meanings of lesbian when juxtaposed
in the realm of higher education. Talburt’s research consists of
ethnographic case studies of three women, Olivia, a white associate professor
of English, Julie, a white full professor of religious studies, and Carol, an
African-American assistant professor of journalism. And there is more to this
project than a carefully crafted ethnographic account of academic culture and
the lives of three lesbian faculty members.
Subject to Identity does a
lot of its best work on the theoretical plane, engaging with great scholarly
rigor (a) contemporary debates about the increasingly corporate state of higher
education as read through the lens of the late Bill Readings’ (1996)
“The University in Ruins”, (b) performative models of
identity, agency, and difference, that challenge the monologic character of
identity politics, and enrich and expand profitably on de Certeau’s
(1984) “Practice of Everyday life”, and (c) the complex and
shifting relationships between alterity and pedagogical authority by means of
fine-grained fieldwork that exposes what Talburt refers to as the “local
renegotiations of the social and academic in the professional lives of Carol,
Olivia, and Julie.” (74).
As a way of getting into
Talburt’s story about lesbian academics, let’s start by taking a
close look at the teller of this tale, how Talburt constitutes her authorial
identity vis a vis her subject/s, and, equally as crucial, to consider the
significance of the make-up of her research sample – who are her main
characters, and just what kind of lesbian academics are they? Threaded through
both Talburt’s own identity-disclosure statements, and her description of
the three women chosen for this project, is an over-arching ambivalence
concerning the significance of being lesbian to one’s various
engagements with/in higher education. In the introduction to the book, Talburt
distances herself from the subject/s of her inquiry, referring to lesbians as
“they”, and makes the following enigmatic claim:
I began with lesbian at the center of
my inquiry. To invoke the category locates me, I suspect, as a person who has
benefited from participation in social, political and intellectual projects
undertaken by lesbians, despite my ambivalences. (4)
Since, up to this point in the text, lesbians have been
invoked as a category of persons who actually exist in the world (as opposed to
a convenient discursive fiction), and have been Othered pronominally by being
referred to as they (e.g.,
“Implicit in my thinking were beliefs that there may be something
“different” in the work of lesbian-identified academics, that their
“voices” are not canonized, and that they may have
identifiably different relations to students or knowledges because they
are lesbian”
(underlining added, 3), the reader is left not knowing what, other than a kind
of detached scholarly interest, would motivate an apparently non-lesbian academic to, as Talburt puts
it, “disturb habits of thinking about the points of intersection of lesbian and academic.” (1) This research asks,
“What if “lesbian” isn’t a salient lens? Or a personal
identity?” (23) Talburt asks, pointedly, “What does it mean to
conduct an empirical study of lesbian academics if lesbian does not carry stable meanings?”
(14)
Much like the Socratic conundrum that philosophers refer to
as “Meno’s Paradox”, or, the “Paradox of Inquiry”
(Cohen, 2000) an important question for researchers, and that is raised by Subject
to Identity, is: How can you inquire into something about which you know
nothing that is empirically verifiable, objective, or finite? This is also a
paradigmatic puzzle for researchers working “with/in the
postmodern” (Lather, 1991).
In Plato’s (1953) Meno dialogue, Socrates shows Meno
through an elaborate, and, Higgins (1994) argues, arrogant and arbitrary language
game, that nothing Meno thought he knew about virtue (arete) holds. Truth dissolves into
language, or discourse, we might say, today (see Butler, 1997; Derrida, 1978;
and for incisive critiques, Brodribb, 1992; Smith, 1999).
Critical motivational and concomitant ethical and political
questions must be asked concerning the destabilizing inquirer role played by Socrates in the Meno,
and Talburt in Subject to Identity. It is commonly assumed that
relentless inquiry is motivated by a desire for knowledge, insight, and that
its purported educative effects are either benign, or positive. However, as
Jackson (2001) notes, “After all his attempts at defining
"arete" have been dismissed, an exasperated Meno claims that
Socrates’ interrogation has "stunned" him as would the shock of
the torpedo fish. The effect of the interrogation has not illuminated Meno's
knowledge of what "arete" is but robbed him of that knowledge.”
A persistent question that haunted my reading of Subject
to Identity was: What are the ethical implications of conducting research
that aims to destabilize lesbian
identity? What does it mean to carry out a deconstructive ontological project
within a realm that looks, to me, like a battlefield littered with wounded
bodies and peopled with proud men and women who have put their lives, careers,
family affiliations and the like on the line just for the right to lay claim,
and proudly, to lesbian or gay identity? As Braidotti (1987) argues: “In order to announce the death of the subject, one must first
have gained to right to speak as one.”
If Talburt’s research focus is lesbian academics, why choose Julie, Olivia, and
Carol as case-study subjects? What salient characteristics inflect and skew
this tiny sample? Well, it is probably of greatest salience to this reader
that, like Talburt, all three women are, paradoxically, given the
project’s ostensive goal, deeply ambivalent about being lesbians. As Talburt notes,
“Lesbian identity” was not central to the women’s
understanding of self or the constitution of their department
positionings.” (139). She affirms, in even more unambiguous terms, that,
“Julie, Olivia, and Carol do not seek agency through voice and visibility
as lesbians but in the domain of their intellectual lives.” (220)
In fact, Talburt’s interviews, and
fieldnotes from classroom observations, indicate that all three have
intentionally shaped their pedagogical and other professional practices in
relation to the topic of (homo)sexuality so as to assure for themselves
classroom and departmental spaces of non-disclosure and non-identification as
“lesbian”. As Julie puts it, “All it [self-disclosure as a
lesbian] would do to those poor little freshmen sitting in my Introduction to
Christianity class would just make them all upset.” (103) Olivia is
described as “an academic “star” whose intellectual project
is to debunk the category lesbian…” (27). Drawing on an interview
with Olivia, Talburt reports on “…her rejection of self-announcing
her sexual orientation, and her dissatisfaction with lesbian communities and
political activism.” (28) Carol, Talburt writes, “defines her roles
as faculty member…primarily in relation to her race and gender…Her
race obscures her lesbianism…” (29) On the topic of self-disclosure,
Carol argues, “I don’t have to reveal my sexuality to teach about
it any more than a straight person. … I want my sexuality to be
ambiguous…. Even better if they think I am a straight black woman who
raises the subject because it is crucial to our understanding of whatever we’re
talking about.” (96)
And I must add, here, that
Talburt’s description of Carol, gleaned from her fieldnotes written just
after their first meeting, seems bizarre, redolent with practices of
stigmatization, and racist, despite the author’s weak rhetorical strategy
of distancing herself from the account by framing it as “imagining
colleagues’ responses to her”.
She
strikes me as an ‘acceptable black’. She is well-spoken,
articulate, uses ‘standard English’ and doesn’t slip into
jargon or threatening dialects…. She’s not scary in appearance,
either as black or as lesbian – autonomous body movement but not dykey.
(31)
One of the strengths of Talburt’s
research as it is reported in Subject to Identity consists in its
careful attention via extensive microgenetic fieldwork, including multiple
in-depth interviews and classroom observations, to the ways in which particular
actions undertaken by Carol, Olivia and Julie are both constitutive of their
identities in practice, and constituted by what Dorothy Smith (1999) refers to
as the “ruling relations” that give shape to power as it operates
in institutional contexts. Talburt describes this as “Julie’s
Olivia’s and Carol’s enactments of intellectual in academic
practice” (67) and as “the construction of Olivia’s,
Carol’s, and Julie’s pedagogical uses of existing norms relating to
knowledge and identity as articulations of their intellectual lives, yet
mediated by institutional and social structures.” (74)
The most trenchant questions I am
left with after my multiple readings of Subject to Identity are as
follows:
First, what is the role of data
collection when the research sample so clearly is skewed in the direction of
creating apparently authoritative empirical support for Talburt’s
theoretical bent – that “lesbian isn’t a salient lens”?
How might Talburt’s story have changed had she included in her sample (a)
successful lesbian academics who, unlike Carol, Julie, and Olivia, are
unabashedly “queer, out, and proud” in their various roles as
university-based intellectuals, (b) lesbian academics whose careers have been
threaded through with institutionally and personally mediated gay-bashing, and
(c) women who have been fired from their academic jobs because of homophobic
responses to their determination to be unambiguously and publicly
“lesbian”? And by this, I most emphatically do not mean academics
who are partial to a simple, identity politics notion of “lesbian”
as constitutive of some kind of unproblematic ontological category.
In a discussion of the complexities
involved in teaching a lesbian studies course with Suzanne de Castell (Bryson
& de Castell, 1993), we argued that the tensions between postmodern
challenges to identity politics and the material struggles of people identified
as gay or lesbian constitute a starting-point for inquiry, and not an argument
for dispensing with identity, as follows:
Invariably, speaking as a lesbian, one is
the discursive outsider – firmly entrenched in a marginal essentialized
identity that, ironically, we have to participate in by naming our difference-
this is rather like having to dig one’s own ontological grave….
Reading the Concise Oxford English Dictionary one dis/covers:
Queer: verb- to spoil, put out of
order, to put into an embarrassing or disadvantageous situation.
It seems that a worthwhile avenue for the
elucidation of a queer praxis might be explored here by considering the value
of an actively que(e)rying pedagogy- of queering its technics and scribbling
graffiti over its texts, of coloring outside of the lines so as to deliberately
take the wrong route on the way to school-- going in an altogether different
direction than that specified by a monologic destination? This seems a
promising approach indeed for refashioning pedagogy in the face of the myriad
institutionally-sanctioned “diversity management” (Mohanty, 1990)
programs that, today, threaten to crowd out and silence most opportunities for
radical emancipatory praxis.
Secondly, what benefits are likely
accrued, and for whom, from making one’s lesbianism ambiguous and a site
of performed ambivalence? A fundamental question not addressed in
Talburt’s work is whether it is the same thing to be ambivalent about
lesbianism as it is about heterosexuality? Or to put it another way: is
ambivalence about one’s heterosexual identity simply the status quo
(which has its own politics) and self-admitted and self-conscious ambivalence
about one’s lesbian identity a form of political quietism?
One might reasonably conclude that
Talburt enlisted the voices of these three women in particular so as to
recount, and lend authority to, a very specific kind of tale about how to be a successful lesbian academic
– a “good” lesbian whose ambivalent performance of her
lesbianism ensures continuity for the predominantly heterosexist discursive
economy of Liberal U. As Talburt
notes, Liberal U is not a safe-haven for gays and lesbians, “While some
undergraduate and graduate students are “out” on campus, few gay
and lesbian faculty are open about their sexuality.” (52) And Talburt
explains further, that the active construction of silences concerning
homosexuality, otherwise referred to as “Don’t ask, don’t
tell” is connected to tacit expectations of who faculty are and what they
do, playing itself out in definitions of acceptable or unacceptable
behavior.” (70). And so, it seems to this reader, unacceptable that a
very important question raised in Subject to Identity remains
fundamentally unexamined and unanswered, concerning the validity of
Talburt’s argument, that
“Ambiguity as well can combat heterosexism and homophobia.”
(96)
My third and final question is
related to the first two, and gestures both to the difficulties, and the ethical
implications for researchers of, as Talburt puts it, “invoking a category
whose meanings at once seem overdetermined and at other moments elusive.”
(34) Talburt concludes, “By centering much of my inquiry on intellectual,
personal, and professional meanings of “lesbian” … I have
invoked a category that can obscure more than it reveals.“(191). I
disagree vehemently with this conclusion and want to suggest, in its place,
that it is only by conducting research that initially, sought out a totalizing
answer to the question, “What/Who is a lesbian academic?” that one
could then conclude that an invocation of the category produces obscurity and
over-determined meanings.
In essence, what seems most
productive about Subject to Identity is that by means of elegantly
executed fieldwork, Talburt has produced a compelling portrait of the practices
that both constitute, and are constituted by, successful female academics who
are ambivalent about taking up lesbian identity in their professional culture.
A conclusion inspired by Goffman’s (1963) work on the “identity
management strategies” of the stigmatized might be to say that successful
lesbian academics work diligently and intentionally to reduce the impact of
homophobia. To put forward “lesbian” as an ontological category
– a category of being – whose meaning/s are amenable to
elucidation and explication by means of empirical research methods, and then
systematically destabilized by deconstructive inquiry, is, like Socrates in the
Meno, to be implicated in a ‘language game’ inevitably
doomed to produce aporia – the limits of what can be known, and doubt
concerning what once seemed like commonsensical constructs.
We don’t and can’t know
what ‘lesbian’ means, where lesbian refers to an
ontological category that is always-already over-determined by culturally and
historically specific discursive formations. We do, however, know about the
practices of the ideology of homophobia – including its insistence on
lesbian silence and ambivalence – and therefore have to pay very close
critical attention to any project that prioritizes and appears to give value to
– normativizes- ambivalence about lesbian identity especially as it
really does nothing to deal with what we do know about, which is systemic
discrimination against those identified as lesbian or gay. As Monique Wittig
(1995, personal communication) argued during a discussion about the ethical
implications of postmodernism/s for lesbian and gay studies– “The
real question about lesbians is not, ‘Who are we?’, but, ‘How
have we survived?’.”
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[1] Subject to Identity is based on Talburt’s (1996) dissertation research, entitled, Troubling lesbian identities: intellectual voice and visibility in academia.
[2] Correspondence regarding this article can be sent to: Mary Bryson, Faculty of Education: ECPS, 2125 Main Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z4. Email: brys@unixg.ubc.ca