Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana María Rodríguez

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780814762721
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: LGBT Studies

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Who’s Your Daddy? Queer Kinship and Perverse Domesticity 29 2. Sodomy, Sovereignty, and Other Utopian Longings 69 3. Gesture in Mambo Time 99 4. Latina Sexual Fantasies, the Remix 139 The Afterglow 183 Notes 189 Bibliography 213 Index 229 About the Author 245

1

Who’s Your Daddy?

Queer Kinship and Perverse Domesticity

In a text that focuses on sociality, futurity, politics, sex, and gesture, it seems fitting that I start with a consideration of kinship, the imagined site of our most intimate bonds. Our families of origin are repeatedly recounted as the place where the imprint of the disciplinary and expressive forces of sexuality, race, and gender assert their most vigorous intentions. Yet kinship bonds also transform across our life span, making and unmaking social worlds of meaning. While an analysis of kinship serves to highlight corporeal gestures, the intonations of our bodies that are inculcated through our innermost social networks, kinship also becomes a site where we see how the gestures of law and legibility are forcefully activated. Both forms of gesture—individual corporeal gestures and the collective political gestures of the body politic—register how the effects of the social are triggered. It is from our families that we first learn the social rules and significance that govern touch, eye contact, movement through space, and all other manner of seemingly mundane corporeal action. Before we come to spoken language, we learn to read gesture, arms reaching out to hold us or harm us. Through these reading practices we come to define what is familiar and familial and what must be relegated to the space of the strange and foreign, a distinction that becomes the basis of a politics that structures the limits of care. Kinship therefore functions as a switchpoint between the intimate and the social, the literal and the metaphoric articulations of gesture, the site where practices of recognition and nonrecognition become instantiated.

I begin this chapter on kinship and domesticity—the imagined private space of the familial—with the most public of queer venues, the annual ritual celebrated under many names and in multiple locations near and far: Queer Pride. As this event celebrates an artificial temporal marker for the “beginning” of the U.S. LGBT movement, it also serves as a curious way to register the pulse of the queer community.¹ I admit to being a longtime veteran of these lush, over-the-top spectacles, having marched, danced, chanted, and partied down the main thoroughfares of numerous towns and cities in celebration and protest. The corporeal gestures at Pride are of hedonism and rebellion: baring breasts, raising fists, screaming back, or dancing a raucous samba for the three-mile stretch up San Francisco’s Market Street.² For me, Queer Pride evokes memories of hookups and carnal excess, adventures in drugs, music, politics, and fashion that have evidenced a changing understanding of my queer self for more than three decades. And over the course of those decades, things have indeed changed. At the last Pride events I attended, strollers outnumber motorcycles, and SPF 30 sunscreen rather than condoms seem to be the preferred party favor thrown from the floats, twisting the idea of what “playing safe” at the parade might entail. Now, as part of these events in San Francisco, a large city playground is set aside for the kiddies to congregate away from the partying masses.³ The playground, complete with the trappings of childhood mayhem (drummers and magicians, monkey bars and Dora the Explorer balloons), proves almost as packed as any of the main stages. As the playground teems with children of all sizes and colors, it seems that the only element in short supply are fairy godmothers. And in the queer community’s most celebrated public manifestation of unity and pride, children and their families are given special consideration and protection: a sheltered space, closed off from the public. In fact, admission to this playground is strictly controlled by a border of sorts, where an attendant determines eligibility for entry. The criterion is simple: adults have to be accompanied by children.

Signs such as the one in figure 1.1 have become increasingly common in public playgrounds in San Francisco and elsewhere, intended to safeguard these spaces for appropriate use and deserving publics, intended to keep out those marked by racial, classed, and sexual impropriety: people cruising for sex or drugs, gang members, the homeless, and of course pedophiles. In the context of Queer Pride, this border performs a similar disciplinary gesture, demarcating a spatial divide between different kinds of bodies and the corporeal movements they are perceived to perform. On one side, adults covered in glitter and costumes of all sorts shake their bodies in unfettered abandon, and on the other side, children decorated with face paints and festively adorned likewise swing, jump, and run wild, both groups acting unconcerned if their underpants are showing. Despite the good intentions of parade organizers to create a haven for children and their caretakers complete with kid-only port-a-potties, the presence of such a border at Queer Pride also underscores pervasive discourses that continue to equate homosexuality with pedophilia and perversity.⁴ While it seems unlikely that “inappropriate” sexual touching could take place under the watchful eyes of hundreds of onlookers at this event, nevertheless, such a border policy is based on the assumption that for some people, simply watching children at play, exercising their young bodies in various forms of uncensored abandon, might provoke erotic arousal of the most titillating form. But what exactly are children being protected from? Actual physical abuse or the inappropriate erotic associations children might engender?⁵

Figure 1.1. Signs restricting adults from public playgrounds have become increasingly common, intended to keep out those marked by racial, classed, and sexual impropriety. Image courtesy of Julia LaChica.

This distinction between laws and public policies meant to protect actual children, and those meant to punish those who are sexually aroused by children was made apparent in the 2008 Supreme Court decision United States v. Williams (553 U.S. 285 (2008)). That decision upheld provisions of the 2003 PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today), which criminalizes “the possession and distribution of material pandered as child pornography, regardless of whether it actually was that” (U.S. v. Williams 1). In other words, it makes it a crime to offer or solicit sexually explicit images of children, even when those images are computer-generated, consist solely of digitally enhanced photographs of adults, or do not exist at all.⁶ In his dissent, endorsed by Justice Ginsberg, Justice Souter wrote, “If the Act can effectively eliminate the real-child requirement when a proposal relates to extant material, a class of protected speech will disappear” (U.S. v. Williams 12). Here the symbol of the child, rather than the presence of any real child, functions as the excuse for securitization policies in which some bodies are constructed as always potentially criminal, and others as always potentially victimized, even when they are not present at all. These are the state remedies and tools intended to end the exploitation and harm of children.

Importantly, what is being criminalized through the provisions of the 2003 PROTECT Act is no longer behavior, but fantasy.⁷ In Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–74, Foucault makes evident that disciplinary regimes of control operate well beyond the level of practice, or even discourse:

[T]here is a continuous pressure of this disciplinary power, which is not brought to bear on an offense or damage but on potential behavior. One must be able to spot an action even before it has been performed, and disciplinary power must intervene somehow before the actual manifestation of the behavior, before the body, the action, or the discourse, at the level of what is potential, disposition, will, at the level of the soul. (52)

Foucault focuses on the link between discursive practices of discipline and the imagined gestures that could potentially signal perverse behavior, those minute acts and telltale corporeal movements that might reveal the thought crimes lurking in the body and soul of the offender. The threat of potential harm then becomes marshaled to legitimize the state’s increased public surveillance of certain bodies who are depicted as always potentially dangerous. In the context of child protection policies, these increased surveillance measures emerge in a context of ever-shrinking public resources away from the investigation of actual exploitation and abuse of real children. Austerity budget policies decrease or eliminate funding for child welfare investigators, day care programs, community-based health clinics, homeless shelters, and social workers in public schools, programs that serve as available points of intervention for real children in crisis. The PROTECT Act’s elimination of the real-child requirement in the legal definition of violence against children dovetails with the elimination of the real-child requirement in efforts to actually protect real children or provide actual remedies for their care. Here the state performs a double gesture, claiming to protect children through heightened surveillance and punishment, while simultaneously inflicting its own abuse on children through the elimination of state support and resources.

So even at Pride, in the midst of the we-are-one carnivalesque revelry, there existed a policed border, complete with gates and guards: on one side, rainbow families creating a safe space for children, on the other side perverts, hedonists, and other pleasure-seeking bodies against whom such proactive security measures are deemed necessary, effective, and reassuring. This opening story highlights two key themes of this chapter: current attempts to assign gay and lesbian families state-recognized respectability in political discourse, and the persistent associations of queerness with perversity and pleasure—in other words, the antithesis of parenting.

Much of the mainstream LGBT press, national organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and hundreds of local gay and lesbian organizations across the United States and many around the world have declared gay marriage the civil rights issue of the moment. In both visual advertisements featuring same-sex couples and their children (in which children of color play a dominant role) and public statements recounting the need for state recognition of same-sex unions, one of the repeated refrains deployed is that state-sanctioned marriage is needed to protect the children of gay and lesbian families. These children are imagined as needing not just legal protection, but protection from the social stigma of illegitimacy, itself a racialized marker of familial impropriety and perversity, a stigma that only state-recognized marriage can erase (Murray). In her essay “Scenes of Misrecognition,” Ann Anagnost connects this racialized rhetoric of respectability to the decision to parent, linking both to the very processes by which we become legitimated as worthwhile and productive citizens of the nation:

[T]he position of parent, for white middle-class subjects, has become increasingly marked as a measure of value, self-worth, and citizenship in ways that beg an analysis of its specific formations in the context of late-twentieth-century capitalism, which, not incidentally, fuel the desire for adoption as a necessary “completion” for becoming a fully realized subject in American life. (392)

If parenting has become “a measure of value, self-worth, and citizenship,” it is not surprising then that many LGBT organizations have turned to parenting as a means to seek social validation and recognition from a society that has excluded them, framing their arguments for social legitimacy precisely through the language of the sacrosanct rights of parents, the need to protect children, and the state’s promotion of family. As these organizations seek legal recognition from the state through a discourse of social respectability, images of gay and lesbian couples with children nestled between them serve as the visual antidote to images of leathermen in chaps pressed together dancing atop floats at Queer Pride.

Color Me a Rainbow

That openly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are actively choosing to create, raise, nurture, and cohabit with children has raised anxieties in both conservative political corners and progressive queer circles. The crisis this has produced in conservative quarters seems more easily articulated: LGBT folks with children in tow are now regularly popping up at peewee soccer leagues, PTA meetings, church socials, and school boards, infiltrating the very core of respectable white middle-American society. The anxieties and unease evidenced in progressive queer communities, however, remains more difficult to articulate, with many queers openly objecting to a national LGBT agenda that attempts to make queers palatable to these same middle-American enclaves through a reappropriation of family values discourse and political platforms focused on same-sex marriage and homonormative formulations of family life. Some queers object more privately and in hushed tones to a perceived sense of entitlement performed by newly minted LGBT parents and emerging from a neoliberal discourse that positions parents as more valued and worthy members of civil society because they have taken on the task of the primary care of another. Others see queers who parent as the embodiment of homonormative demands for assimilation, as having succumbed to the hail of reproductive futurity.

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman articulates how the child, imagined as the future subject of the nation, becomes a symbolic site through which the state harnesses repressive disciplinary power in the name of present sacrifice and future promise. But by ignoring race, Edelman fails to consider how children of color function as the co-constitutive symbolic nightmare of our nation’s future. Rather than signifying reproductive futurity, African American male children represent racialized fears of criminality, violence, and sexual danger. Similarly, Latin@ reproduction, projected through the discourse of Mexican “anchor babies,” serves as the ever-present threat against which Anglo-American whiteness must assert its disciplinary mechanisms. These children are never the imagined future subjects of the nation, and the forms of disciplinary power these children inspire operate differentially not only at the level of the symbolic, but also at the level of the material and the juridical. Historically, the “American grammar” of slavery in the United States, in which enslaved children belong to neither mothers, fathers, nor the national imaginary, undoes constructions of psychoanalysis predicated on white heteronormative kinship (Spiller).⁸ This legacy of slavery and colonial dominance, in which black and brown children were traded, mutilated, and murdered with impunity, endures in the racialized differences in the juridical protection of children, and is again often linked to securing avenues of national wealth. Take for example U.S. child labor laws that regulate agriculture: in contrast to other industries, in agriculture children as young as eight can work in the fields legally, and there are no restrictions on the number of hours worked in a day, as long as they are performed outside school hours.⁹ Racialized differences in the legal protections afforded to children in the United State are also glaringly evident in the sentencing practices and incarceration rates for black, Latin@, and Native American youth (Alexander, New Jim Crow). These contemporary policies and practices never specifically mention race, yet they disproportionally harm children of color. The child as political symbol, legal subject, or social player in psychoanalytic dramas is therefore always already constituted by race. Today, norms, taboos, conventions, or protections designed to assert a protected status to children and their families, including LGBT families, may appear to be color-blind, but they are never race-neutral.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed describes the ways that critiques of homonormativity are used to legitimate some forms of queerness over others, and reminds us that “assimilation and transgression are not choices available to individuals, but are effects of how subjects can and cannot inhabit social norms and ideals” (153). So while queers who parent are called upon by legal and social mandates to renounce gestures that would make us appear childish, irresponsible, and perverse (dancing atop floats or showing off our panties), assimilation into normative middle-class adulthood is not always available. For many queer parents and caregivers, particularly those who are poor, institutionalized, gender-nonconforming, disabled, in alternative domestic relationships, or marginalized by their race or immigration status, assimilation into homonormativity is simply not an available option. In his essay “For ‘the Children’: Dancing the Beloved Community,” Jafari S. Allen makes the racial implications even clearer: “while it is true that for many the price of citizenship is costly and valu[able], since normative family accrues only with tremendous sacrifice, for others the unruliness of excessive Blackness precludes this altogether” (314). Proper reproductive adulthood is already marked by race and class and works to exclude multigenerational extended families who cohabit because of economic need, cultural conventions, or their own desires; families whose social and sexual networks extend beyond one couple or one household; “unstable” households that are in a state of flux with people entering and exiting as space, money, and need dictate; or families that are denied the ability to live together due to immigration policies, economic need, or practices of institutionalization. These nonnormative, “queer” families fall outside the model of proper adulthood, even as they also fall out of the political agendas of mainstream LGBT activists. In other words, simply being hailed by the assimilationist allure of respectable reproductive futurity is itself an indicator of privilege that is denied to those marked by “the unruly excessiveness” of difference. How these differences are embodied and perceived informs every encounter for those who must maneuver the vexing social positions they are forced to occupy in order to secure basic entitlements of health, housing, and education for children under their care.

Even as some progressive queers, including parents made vulnerable by their own precarious ability to advocate for their children, may see the need for state-sanctioned protection for the complex relations that make up queer kinship, it is also evident that the current attempt to publicly normalize queers through a discourse of familial protection has had troubling consequences. Instead of a radical rethinking of sexuality and queerness and its relationship to domestic relations, or heightened efforts to demand increased social investments in services available to children and their caretakers, under the logic of neoliberalism the mainstream LGBT movement attempts to secure individual rights through the valorization of normative kinship.¹⁰ This strategy has served to further stigmatize those individuals and families that fall outside recognizable structures of care. Rather than merely offering a critique of the existing forms under which queer kinship is organized, Ahmed invites us to “stay open to different ways of doing queer” and, echoing Allen, she affirms that “[q]ueer lives involve issues of power, responsibility, work and inequalities and, importantly, do not and cannot transcend the social relations of global capitalism” (Ahmed, Cultural 154, 153). As in all other areas of queer life, racial and class differences abound, and the inequalities they reveal are illuminated through an analysis of family and kinship.

In both political campaigns and popular culture representing gay and lesbian families, race plays a key role. In The L Word (2004–2009, Showtime), the principal characters, Bette Porter and Tina Kennard, are a black-white interracial couple who conceive a child through assisted reproduction. They choose an African American donor to inseminate the white woman, Tina, provoking a temporary crisis in which Tina wonders whether she is equipped to raise an African American child. In Six Feet Under (2001–2005, HBO), another interracial black-white couple, David Fisher and Keith Charles, vacillate between surrogacy and adoptio...