Daniel J. Flynn

Close to 9,000 professors and graduate students convened in Toronto from December 27-30 for the 113th annual conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA). Known for its panels with attention-grabbing titles, the event featured the presentation of papers on such topics as "He’s Got a Hot Ass: Leonardo da Vinci and Duchamp’s Homosexing of Mona Lisa" and "Tennis Balls: Masculinity and Henry V; or According to the OED, Shakespeare Doesn’t Have Any Balls."

Ostensibly a conference on literature and language, the MLA’s most recent gathering was once again dominated by the politicized themes of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

The MLA conference featured more than 700 sessions on a milieu of topics. Thousands of papers were read to audiences numbering from as small as a handful to as large as several hundred.

A Female Mike Tyson?

"There’s something so obvious about female masculinity," explained UC-San Diego Professor Judith Halberstam, "and yet something so completely rigid about our refusal to recognize it, celebrate, and accept it."

Halberstam, a self-described "drag-king," delivered a paper entitled, "Raging Bull-Dyke." Sporting a brown sport-coat and tie, a man’s watch, and a Sinead O’Connor-style haircut, the transvestite academic argued that white men have prevented women from becoming successful in boxing.

"Until 1977 women were not allowed to box in the United States," complained Halberstam. "American whites," she attested, "prevented all women from asserting a claim to the heavyweight championship."

"Indeed," she declared, "the suppression of the black female prizefighter repeats itself in another location: the suppression of female masculinity itself, and demands that we think carefully about the intersection of race and class within alternative constructions of female masculinity in order not to now simply champion a white female masculinity."

"Raging Bull-Dyke" was part of the larger session, "Embattled Masculinities in Popular Culture." The conference featured scores of feminist-inspired panels, including "Between Men: The ‘Lesbian’ in the Colony" and "Chicana Feminist Representations."

‘Attention! Honkies, Sexists, and Straights’

"Are whiteness and heterosexuality playing for the same team?" asked Skidmore College’s Mason Stokes. Stokes’ "Attention! Honkies, Sexists, and Straights" was presented within the "Whiteness and Heterosexuality" session.

Whiteness studies is the latest in a long line of academic disciplines that seek to compartmentalize literature, individuals, history, etc., on the basis of politicized categories, e.g., gender, race, and class. As evidenced by the large number of addresses delivered on "whiteness" at the most recent MLA gathering, the field is rapidly emerging as an area of study that is taken very seriously within academic circles.

"Perhaps no single word currently signifies the conjunction of heterosexuality and whiteness than ‘septuplets,’" alleged UC-Irvine’s Robyn Wiegman. Referring to the recent birth of seven children to a white Iowa couple, Wiegman opined that multiple births among black couples are often ignored while those among whites are given great attention. American society, insisted Wiegman, feels "an anxiety, momentarily converted to relief, about the potential failure of whiteness to reproduce itself."

Examining the recent Sports Illustrated article "Whatever Happened to the White Athlete," she noted with a hint of conspiracy that the piece ends with the words, "black blood."

The UC-Irvine professor blasted those who label whiteness studies a fad. The "third generation" of whiteness scholars are at work now, she contended. "I am interested in the social construction of whiteness studies, as a formation of knowledge and more than generating the discursive and material ground of an emerging field, with course offerings, dissertation projects, monographs, anthologies, and conferences all articulated under its name," declared Wiegman.

‘Scratch a Child…Find a Queer’

"Face it: scratch a child, and you’ll find a queer," pronounced Kathryn Bond Stockton of the University of Utah. In her talk, "The Queer Child: The Pedagogue, the Pedophile, and the Masochist," Stockton explains, "The child from the standpoint of all adults is always queer—either homosexual or not yet straight."

Stockton’s presentation was part of "The Queer Child," a session that focused on "queerness" in children’s literature and "queer" children in adult literature. Among topics discussed in this panel centered on children were masochism, pedophilia, fetishism, and homosexual sex.

Fellow panelist David Eng examined "compulsory heterosexuality," "hegemonic whiteness," and "the crossing of queerness and race in Asian American childhood." The Columbia University instructor informed the audience, "within the Asian American canon there are multiple stories of queer childhood."

Kathryn Kent of Williams College confessed that as a child she was "a poster child for girl scouting, and by extension, the right-wing." Her talk discussed a book about a girl who loses her virginity to an older female camp leader. She explains that lesbianism is "the logical and inevitable outcome of scouting."

Panels such as "Queering Brecht," "Chaucer’s Queer Nation," and "Queer Shakespeare" held that characters once thought to be straight in works by classic authors are actually "gay." By reading "gay" issues into the literary canon, claimed Richard Zeikowitz, "male\male friendships are not only strengthened but eroticized." "Homosocial" relationships—where two men compete for the same woman—argued the City University of New York professor, are actually manifestations of homosexual feelings between male characters.

Sessions on homosexual issues exponentially outnumbered those devoted to Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Marlowe combined.

A Wide Ranging Influence

As the largest and oldest gathering of its kind, the MLA conference features talks by academics from hundreds of schools including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Critics of the MLA point out that the ideas presented at the group’s annual convention are hardly confined to an obscure group of academics. Inevitably, they say, such ideas are passed on to students.

Greater than a third of all literature courses at Yale, for instance, focus on the narrow politicized topics of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Harvard’s "Fetishism," Brown’s "Multicultural Coming-of-Age Narratives," and Dartmouth’s "Queer Theory, Queer Texts" are typical of Ivy League literature courses. Less prestigious schools often attempt to play follow-the-leader and imitate the course offerings of highly ranked institutions.

"It’s clear that sexual and gender ideologies have greater priority at the MLA than the study of literature," observes literary critic Hilton Kramer. An editor of the Manhattan based New Criterion, Kramer explained to Campus Report that, "in so far as literature is studied at all in these MLA sessions, it is as an adjunct to the sexual politics that is the prevailing interest."