Reading Sexualities

Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies

Donald E. Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415367851
• eBook ISBN: 9781134208708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Sexualities confronts the reigning practices, priorities, and preoccupations of queer theory and sexuality studies. Looking at a range of texts, from novels to travel narratives to internet porn, Donald E. Hall deftly weaves the theoretical with the literary in order to:

• examine the vexed ethical, critical, and political questions arising from sexual consumerism and cross-cultural encounters
• read the changing landscape of sexual identity, finding great cause for optimism and enthusiastic engagement
• urge readers to embrace a far-reaching dialogic practice as a mechanism for furthering radical social change.

Reading Sexualities shows how our sexual desires and bases for identification are being widely challenged and changed. Drawing on hermeneutic theory and the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hall argues that by approaching sexual diversity with openness and humility, we become active participants in the politically urgent process of reading the self through the perspective of the other.

1 Sexual hermeneutics

A reading scene

I spent my adolescence in rural Alabama, surrounded by chicken farms and pine trees, after my father decided to flee the suburbs for small-town life in what he thought was a move to a safe, drug-free environment for his children to grow up in. Nothing could have been farther from the case since many of the bored teenagers in my junior high and high school were even more prone than suburban kids to taking the easy route of escape through indulging in angel dust, pills, and booze. In high school I tried alcohol and pot (which I didn’t like at all), but years earlier I had already found my personal drug of choice in reading. I was addicted to science-fiction novels from age twelve onward, sitting for hours daily, devouring every sci-fi and fantasy book I could get my hands on. It was an intense high that I got as I sat in my bedroom and lost myself in narratives of time travel, intergalactic conflict, swords, and sorcery—anything that would take me out of the dreary sameness of rural life. Reading denaturalized my Alabama existence in thrilling and seductive ways—moving from the inside of my bedroom to the outside of the alternate worlds represented in the novels, and then from the inside of those books to the outside of my schoolwork and few friends, with both dynamics complicated even further by television, movies, and music. I quickly became adept at using those extra-local points of reference to begin to imagine possible futures for myself that were not limited by the Alabama state line (which few in my family had ever moved across) or the trade fields (heating and air-conditioning repair, plumbing) that my father presented me with as appropriate and stable career paths. I imagined that I wanted to be an astronomer (“You mean like one of those fortune-tellers in the newspaper?” my dad asked) or a diplomat (“Have you ever met one of them? No one around here does that”) or a writer (“You don’t ever plan on writing stuff that’s not true, do you?”). My mother, every time I would announce that I had decided on a different career for myself, would hold her breath until I revealed it and then say, rather nervously, “Thank God, I was just sure you were going to say hairdresser this time.”

Her fears were not unfounded. After all, “hairdresser” was one of the few commonly available career narratives offered to gender-nonconforming males. I was an effeminate little boy, prone to theatrics, and also prone to intense, barely concealed crushes on other little boys. My school and home were not exceptionally homophobic or violent places, but I knew well to keep my burgeoning queer desires to myself as much as I could. Sci-fi allowed me, early on, to imagine that there might be other ways of being and understanding that would validate (or at least accommodate) my desire for other boys, though certainly it offered no concretes. Sure, television occasionally offered up an acid-tongued, eye-rolling queer character (Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly) as an unappealing role model, but mostly I had to hope somewhat blindly that one day I would find my way out of dreary Alabama and into a place or space where I could kiss and cavort as I wished, one that I hoped would not be a beauty salon. I was often depressed—not about who I was or what I wanted, which I accepted without anguish from about age twelve on (coinciding with and no doubt connected to the beginnings of my scifi binge)—but rather about whether or not I would ever find an accepting and exciting social context. I remember when my brothers and I, in a particularly morbid conversation when I was thirteen or so, started predicting how we each of us would eventually die (one predicted a car accident, another predicted a house fire). I announced that I would probably kill myself at a young age.

But I did not, and while I do not want to state that any one encounter or occurrence “saved my life,” I do know that I started the journey from depressed young queer to fully self-assured proto-queer-rights activist when, at age fourteen, I happened upon and covertly read a copy of The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander that my mother had secreted away in her bedroom nightstand. By sheer happenstance, Hollander provided a sex- and gay-positive voice that took me on a journey outside of the normal routines and values of early 1970s Alabama life. Glancing recently at the thirtieth-anniversary edition of the book (which was the first time since that early encounter that I re-read it) I can see why it had such a profound impact on me. Hollander recounts with unbounded enthusiasm her adolescent bisexual experiences and her later joy in hanging out at Dutch resorts with gay friends, as well as her admiration for their sex-positive attitudes. She also condemns explicitly the discrimination against gays and lesbians that she witnesses in Johannesburg while living there briefly. Most famously, of course, she revels in her work as a hooker and madam in New York where she accommodates without moral judgment her clients’ diverse desires, as long as they do not involve harm to others. My identity-political consciousness was raised significantly.

For my purposes in this and upcoming chapters I want to isolate two dynamics that the encounter above engendered within me. One mirrors that provided by science fiction. My reading was the occasion for an encounter between the circumscribed and oppressive micro-context of my life, with its few available narratives (air-conditioning repairman, plumber, or beautician), and a broader international and cosmopolitan worldview and more expansive set of narratives. By reading Hollander I was also able to read my life and my desires differently. Hollander further denaturalized the norms of my Alabama existence, and demonstrated that the world that I saw around me was only a small fragment of a diverse and exhilarating (both intellectually and sexually) world culture and conversation. As was the case with my encounter with science fiction, I was able to live a version of a hermeneutic circle, by which I partially glimpsed, partially imagined a broad and complex text and then returned to my small location in it with an adjusted and complicated understanding of it. Even more than with the fictional imaginings of sci-fi, Hollander’s autobiography demonstrated to me that what I saw before me did not have to be, that one day, if I persevered, I too might travel the world, meet other people with desires like mine, find a fulfilling niche for myself, and even perhaps cross paths with Xaviera (whom I finally did meet a few years ago at a conference when I was able to thank her for the role she played in my life). The Happy Hooker allowed me to imagine a narrative for my own life that did not end in an Alabama beauty parlor and/or in suicide.

The other dynamic, connected intimately to the above, was political and utopian, though not simplistically so. By the time I read The Happy Hooker, I had read hundreds of novels, from Asimov to LeGuin to Zelazny. “Utopia” has long been a critically engaged concept in science fiction, and while characters existing in oppressive circumstances desperately need to imagine a “better” future for themselves, they rarely adopt visions of a perfect or conflict-free state (or if they do and achieve it, it turns out to be a dystopia of enforced homogeneity and totalitarianism). However, characters who resist effectively often depend on placeholders or provisional utopias that operate as motivational devices and tactically adopted blueprints for change. The Happy Hooker served that function for me in the realm of sexuality. The memoir certainly did not recount a problem-free existence of sexual liberation and unshackled pleasure-fulfillment. Hollander details acts of violence, blackmail, duplicitous treatment by loved ones, and unscrupulous business practices, ones that would not simply disappear if prostitution were legalized, as she advocates. Yet she certainly imagines a better future for herself if laws were altered. I too developed an identity politics, motivated partly by her vision of pleasant, relatively uninhibited sexual encounters and a supportive community of like-minded friends and partners. This projected, better future—a critically adopted, provisional utopia—was necessary for me to sustain a life in the midst of oppression, even as I knew that I was attaching myself to a projected life narrative that was only tentative and perhaps impossible. Provisionality is not a difficult meta-concept for a teenager to understand and embrace, though it is one we often forget or come to deride as we are called upon to make and defend decisions in our lives. Hollander well equipped me to begin strategizing about something concrete: how I could move to an urban area where I would find sympathetic companions and connect myself to a larger political movement that would work toward respect for sexual diversity. Hollander’s world, as complicated and imperfect as it was, served as my placeholder, my provisional utopia.

Hermeneutic theories

In coming chapters I will explore how those two dynamics of change—a hermeneutics of expanded and complicated understanding and one of projected, provisional utopias—are keys to meeting the challenges of sexuality studies today. However, it is important to note initially that hermeneutic theory has never been referenced regularly in queer theory or other contemporary cultural theory, and there are several reasons for that omission. Part of the explanation may be timing. As Kathleen Wright has argued, Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, was published in 1960 but first translated into English in 1975, and was “eclipsed right from the start by the intensity of the discussion about the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida” (Wright 2003: 40). But beyond that unfortunate coincidence of translation dates, practitioners of what came to be called “cultural studies” were already suspicious of anything called “hermeneutics.” Its most famous early theorist, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), was a theologian whose interest in understanding texts was inextricably connected to his Christianity. Hermeneutics, in its long relationship to biblical exegesis, has always carried with it a vague association with religious conservatism, hardly a cause compatible with queer, feminist, and other identity political theorization. As we will see in examining Gadamer, even later hermeneutic theorists remain deeply interested in tradition, which seems, on the surface, wholly discordant with the iconoclastic principles of queer theory especially, devoted as it is to a radical engagement with the traditional reference systems delineating normality from abnormality.

Hermeneutics was tainted further with another of Schleiermacher’s agendas: establishing authorial intent as the fundamental grounding for readers’ understanding. For this reason, culturally and methodologically conservative critics in the mid-to late twentieth century (E. D. Hirsch, for example) occasionally still referenced Schleiermacher approvingly; he seems to offer an author-centered mode of interpretation that removes a text from questions of inherent ambiguity, linguistic and referential instability, and political tendentiousness. That too is inconsistent with the principles underlying cultural studies and identity political work. Cultural critics have long argued that “intent” provides no valid basis for interpretation, since reception and cultural usage is much more important in assessing the ways texts operate as cultural currency and conveyers of meaning. As we will see, Gadamer actually agrees wholly with that latter point.

Finally, hermeneutics became associated with a move to stabilize and systematize the process of interpretation, with its preeminent nineteenth century theorist, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), serving as a major advocate for making the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences) as rigorous as the natural sciences and as capable of rendering interpretive judgments with certainty. At the moment when Friedrich Nietzsche was calling for overturning systems of knowledge, Dilthey went in precisely the opposite direction, seeking to expand the systemization of knowledge bases. Dilthey’s efforts were in vain, and later hermeneutic theory acknowledged that fact and repudiated the quest for systemization. Unfortunately, we today in cultural studies—anti-systemizers par excellence—seem to gravitate toward such a limited group of theorists and theoretical touchstones in constructing our arguments that we achieve in practice the systemization that Dilthey desired. The small corpus of widely cited theorists in queer studies—Foucault, Lacan, and, to a far lesser extent, Deleuze and Guattari—provide an even more static and predictable system to queer work today than one would find in most other fields.

In all of these ways and more, hermeneutics was anathema to much twentieth-century critical theory and certainly to the field of queer theory. As criticism generally moved toward an aggressive engagement with the political resonances of texts and the ways texts (and human expressions generally) are marked with traces of power relationships and a variety of unfinished social and psychological processes, hermeneutics seemed old-fashioned and politically retrograde. However, hermeneutics took turns after Dilthey that have barely registered among critics and theorists in Britain and the USA and that should make it of particular interest to those of us working in sexuality studies. Philosophical hermeneutics, the field originating in the work of Gadamer, departs significantly from the totalizing and methodologically conservative work of Schleiermacher and Dilthey. While both of those theorists were on a search for a static and definable “truth,” Gadamer in Truth and Method foregrounds that word in a subversive way. There is no one, stable, enduring truth, according to Gadamer; there are methods of understanding that lead to our own localized versions of truth, ones that may be real to us, but that can never be captured with quasi-scientific precision (as Dilthey might have wished). In the words of Kurt Müller-Vollmer:

Like his predecessors, Gadamer ascribes primary importance to the concept of understanding. But in contradistinction to Schleiermacher [and others] who conceived of understanding as a means of overcoming the historical distance between the interpreter and the historical phenomenon, Gadamer maintains the historical nature of understanding itself. Any interpretations of the past, whether they were performed by an historian, philosopher, linguist, or literary scholar, are as much a creature of the interpreter’s own time and place as the phenomenon under investigation was of its own period in history.

(Müller-Vollmer 2006: 38)

Gadamer embraces a form of historical relativism that disconnects a text or phenomenon from any essential “meaning,” acknowledging instead that meanings are always socially constructed (though he never uses that precise phrasing). For Gadamer, that relativism does not forestall a search for “truth” in understanding, rather he sees that search as fundamental to human being in the world, even if “truth” as a static entity can never be pinned down.

Gadamer follows his mentor Martin Heidegger in starting from the principle that human beings are thrown into the world of phenomena and negotiate their everyday life and pursue their most cherished projects through processes of interpretation. In a dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, Gadamer states that Heidegger taught him “that interpretation doesn’t occur as an activity in the course of life, but is the form of human life” (Ricoeur 1991a: 220). Behind that activity lies an injunction:

I think Heidegger demonstrated that, behind the whole activity of human life, seeking its points of orientation as In-der-Welt-Sein, is this mysterious openness to being which is inseparably connected with our finitude; an openness to questioning, an openness which lays the constant charge upon our human living to break through the illusions of our self-sufficiency.

(Ricoeur 1991a: 220)

The charge that he articulates there—to break from the debilitating and destructive belief in self-sufficiency—will resonate through the coming pages and chapters. Gadamer (in his refinement of Heidegger and in clear distinction to some current trends in queer theory) demands from us an intellectual humility and outward engagement that counters dogmatism, defeatism, and cynicism. From earlier hermeneutic theorists, Gadamer appropriates the model of a hermeneutic circle to theorize how such expanded and always renewed understanding is possible, though he also embraces the fact that this process is conducted always in language, with full recognition of the imperfect, changing, and inherently unstable nature of that medium.

Gadamer’s revisions to earlier models are significant. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the hermeneutic circle was a way of imagining how expanded or enhanced understanding might be achieved. In his musings on the field of historical research and historiography, the German thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) suggested that historical occurrences could never be understood in isolation, that only through a consideration of a longer narrative of succession could the meaning of any one event be understood. Humboldt theorized the specific task of the historian as one of creating a narrative for readers that captured “truth.” That stance (one might even say professional narrative for historians) held sway for generations, though Gadamer and most of us today would recognize immediately that historical narrative-writing is always biased and culturally limited. We write and narrate out of our own subject positions.

For Humboldt, that macro can be defined authoritatively by the historian, but we today, who admit and live with far deeper uncertainties, commonly work in more nuanced fashion by acknowledging that our understanding of the whole is also under constant revision as we revisit the micro or individual. Both are fluid but both are necessary for textual interpretation and for political action. As I read a novel, I place each sentence and action revealed therein into the context of my emerging understanding of the narrative. As I come to see myself as a politicized being, I place my individual experiences and needs into the context of an identity political group and that group into a broader ideological context of other social aggregates, distinct and overlapping, all with projected purposes that I imagine I understand (however imperfectly). In both instances, I am responsible for shifting my understanding and revising my perspective as new information and other voices present themselves. Hermeneutics has something to tell us about how we live as context-interpreting, intellectually flexible, political beings.

But Gadamer’s revision of the idea of the hermeneutic circle is even more thorough than that. For Gadamer, our projective understanding of the whole must be subject to revision because it depends on prejudices and traditions that inhabit us and that we inhabit (and must come to modify). In Gadamer’s words:

The circle, then, is not formal in nature. It is neither subjective nor objective, but describes understanding as the interplay of the movement of tradition and the movement of the interpreter. The anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding of a text is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the commonality that binds us to the tradition. But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves.

(Gadamer 2003: 293)

This long quotation bears extended consideration because it indicates Gadamer’s complicated relationship to the idea of any historical and contextual determination of the individual as well as the agency, and therefore responsibility, that the individual retains over and above any determination.

To understand the power of “tradition” it is first necessary to explore the Gadamerian notion of “prejudice.” Though the English translation of Truth and Method consistently uses the word “prejudice” as the equivalent of the German Vorurteil, the better translation is “prejudgment.” The word “prejudice,” we might even say, prejudices us against Gadamer, who is neither an apologist for racial stereotyping nor for homophobia (though he has rightly been criticized for remaining silent on most identity political issues beyond his excoriations of antisemitism and the Nazi regime). Instead, he point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sexual hermeneutics
• 2 Desirably queer futures
• 3 Transcending the self
• 4 Global conversations
• 5 Radical sexuality and ethical responsibility
• Conclusion: How sex changes
• Bibliography
• Index