Sara Russo

     Over 500 registered participants attended the University of Chicago’s recent Queer Studies conference, "The Future of the Queer Past." The conference, which ran from September 14-17, featured numerous scholars from the field of Queer Studies and fifty panels on an immense variety of topics, ranging from "The Changing Meaning of Sodomy and other ‘Unnatural Acts’" to "Rethinking Globalization: Problems in the Transnational Circulation of Homosexuality (and Queer Theory)."

     A great deal of activist fanfare attended the conference, much of which was obvious and deliberate. Performances at the conference included a show by Brian Freeman, the founder of the queer theatre troupe "Pomo Afro Homos," entitled "Civil Sex: The Life of Bayard Rustin," and a movie about a "100-year-old black lesbian," entitled "Living with Pride: Ruth @ 100."

     The official entertainment for the first night of the conference boasted lesbian artist Holly Hughes in a one-woman show entitled, Preaching to the Perverted. Hughes’ act centers around the loss of her NEA funding due to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the NEA could in fact withdraw its funding from artists whose work it deemed to be obscene.

     The author and performer of such works as "Well of Horniness," "Mystery Spot," "Lady Dick," "Clit Notes," and "Cat O’ Nine Tails," Hughes, along with fellow artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller and John Fleck, sued the federal government for recovery of the taxpayer dollars they had been receiving. Preaching to the Perverted consists mostly of Hughes’ venomous rages against the injustice of the federal government’s denial to fund her art, which, in the case of "Clit Notes," includes an extensive discourse on Holly measuring the size of her clitoris, as well as commentary on her girlfriend’s breasts.

     In the performance Hughes gave in Perverted, her diatribe centered on her experience with the Supreme Court. She made it clear that she hates everything about our nation’s highest judicial body, from its layout (the justices sit higher up than the lawyers and plaintiffs) to its refusal to accept her argument that the First Amendment protects her right to produce publicly-funded obscenity.

     Hughes also made a point of deriding the American flag in her narrative. At one point, after casting dozens of miniature American flags all over the floor, she exhibited a flag styled after the American stars-and-stripes, but decorated with the rainbow colors of the gay-pride movement, and rubbed it between her legs, as if drying her groin with a towel. Towards the end of her performance, she again launched a tirade against the flag, and stated definitively, for herself and other homosexuals, in front of the largely gay audience of Queer Studies scholars, "That is not our flag." Some may question the decision to include such a poor piece of theatre, likable only for its obvious bias, in a conference supposedly dedicated to serious scholarship.

     A more subtle form of activism haunted the conference in the attempts of gay and lesbian scholars to erase all forms of categorization of sexuality. Homosexuality, transgenderism, pederasty (sex between an adult man and an adolescent boy), and even bestiality were portrayed as merely differing behaviors along a vast sexual "spectrum" of identity in which no one sexual practice can be considered more normal or correct than any other. Several different speakers actually criticized the West for imposing upon other nations its view of society as containing a heterosexual majority and a homosexual minority.

     Roderick Ferguson, of UC San Diego, gave a presentation on the topic "Perverting Geneology: Queer Sociology and the Racialized Social Construction of Sexuality." His address focused on the factors that enabled sociologists and Queer Studies scholars to arrive at the conclusion that gender is socially constructed. Ferguson traces this scholastic achievement to debates over immigration in the early twentieth century.

     "Immigrants and native-born non-whites were racialized as the antithesis of heteropatriarchal ideals. In this context, sociologists and political officials formulated the conception of ethnicity that can situate European immigrants within the heteronormative idealization of the American state. As ethnicity and social construction were invented in the midst of immigration and migration, racial exclusion and ethnic assimilation, [this] provided the genealogical context for sociologists’ descriptions of race and sexuality as socially constructed," he claimed.

     Ferguson also drew a connection between immigration and "heteronormativity," the false conception of a society that holds that only heterosexuality is normal sexual behavior. He declared, "In an era in which race was associated with the normative attributes of national difference, miscegenation was symbolized by a nation of racialized heteronormativity…racial exclusion was designed to protect the heteronormativity of native-born whites."

     Randolph Trumbach of Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, attempted to further elucidate the link between nation origin and attitudes toward sexuality in the presentation of a paper entitled, "The Global History of Modern Homosexuality: Western Models and Local Traditions."

     In his address, Trumbach expressed concern over the exportation of Western models of homosexuality, which, he claimed, had replaced the traditional pederastical models in such areas as Thailand, India, and much of South-East Asia.

     "Until 1900, Japan had a pederastical system…but between 1900 and 1950, this system was replaced by a modern system which divides the world into a homosexual minority and a heterosexual majority," Trumbach stated. "All that has happened is that the men who were socialized in the [pederastical] landscape have relabeled themselves as gay," he added. He also claims that in India, where, he says, a pederastical system was the prevailing mode of homosexuality until recently, most men still feel sexual passion for both women and boys.

     Trumbach’s failure to comment upon the possible moral implications of pederasty is striking. His vision of sexuality as morally neutral accords with the views of many of the other presenters at the conference, who actively promoted the idea that there is a vast "spectrum" or "continuum" of sexual behaviors and identities from which categories can be shaped only by self-definition.

     This view of sexuality as an undifferentiated continuum was further enforced by the conference participants’ constant use of academic jargon. In panel after panel, the word "heteronormative" was used to describe the prevailing culture that falsely views heterosexuality as ‘normal’ behavior and homosexuality as deviant.

     For some academics, even this breakdown of social classification was considered insufficient. In a reading of her paper, "Sister Acts: Medieval Nuns and their Perversions," Karma Lochrie of Indiana University attacked the idea that heterosexuality was ever considered normal behavior in pre-modern times when she asked, "Have we ever really had heteronormativity until now?"

     Lochrie’s answer to this question is decisively negative. Before an audience of about 100 scholars and students, she claimed, "Heteronormativity after all is the effect of normativity, or norms, and norms were not developed until the nineteenth century. So what does this mean? I think it means that heteros may have existed within our culture, but heteronormativity did not, because we had not yet made it quantifiable in terms of our systems of analysis. Without statistics there can be no norms, without norms, there is no normativity. Without normativity, there can be no heteronormativity."

     As evidence for this somewhat radical view, that heterosexuality wasn’t considered normal or correct behavior before (at least) the nineteenth century, Lochrie distributes a flyer with a quotation from a medieval moralist (presumably a cleric) that accuses nuns of committing various sins, including "intimacy among themselves or with unreasonable beasts, or creatures that bear no life." The cleric recommends that it may be better for them to marry than to sin in secret.

     Referring only to this single document as evidence for her view that heterosexuality was not considered normal in medieval times, Lochrie claimed that because nuns had been accused of being unable to control their sexual desires to perform other-than-heterosexual acts, heterosexuality could not have been considered normal behavior at this time. Lochrie thus concluded that our understanding that heterosexuality was viewed as the normal mode of sexual desire in the past has been distorted by Christianity. "What we inherit from the past in terms of sex is the morality of patriarchs and Klansmen, souped up with Christian hostility to the flesh, medieval chastity cults, virgin-whore complexes, and other contritus of ancient repression," she stated.

     Lochrie was not alone in attempting to disprove the prevailing view that heterosexuality was considered normal behavior in pre-modern times. In a presentation entitled, "Michel und Isolde: Courtly Love and the History of Sexuality," James Schultz of UCLA claimed that the concept of courtly love can be entirely divorced from heterosexual desire. It is not the sex of the other that attracts courtly lovers together, Schultz stated, but rather merely their recognition of each other’s nobility. Schultz termed this attraction, "aristophilia." As evidence for this view, he points to the epic love story of Tristan and Isolde, despite such lines in Gottfried von Strassburg’s (c. 1215) rendition of the story as "A man, a woman; a woman, a man: Tristan, Isolde, Isolde, Tristan."

     The idea that heterosexuality should not be considered more normal than other sexual behaviors was reinforced by one scholar who portrayed bestiality as being understandable in certain times and places.

     In a presentation titled "From Sinner to Citizen: Bestiality, Masturbation, and Homosexuality in Sweden, 1880-1950," Jens Rydstrom of Stockholm University claimed, "For those who remained in the country [in rural Sweden], one way of having sex with another living being who couldn’t tell on you was to make it with an animal…in a context in which people lived closer to animals and before the hygienic revolution…the idea of sex with an animal may have seemed less repugnant than it does today."

     Rydstrom also read a passage from the autobiography of a man who had grown up in Stolkholm in the 1920’s to demonstrate "the temptation that large, warm animals can exert on a desperate boy who was shy and rejected by the girls in the village." The passage read, in part, "We had two cows and a young heifer one or two years old…I cautiously caressed her, and the animal lifted its tail as if trying to make it easier for me to get to her. The well of desire opened before me."

     Another feature of the conference was a large number of papers presented on various aspects of homosexual life, concentrating especially on homosexuals living in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Critics contend that such papers focus on marginal topics that are irrelevant to scholarship, and present their findings in an unscholarly manner.

     One such cultural presentation was given by Greta Rensenbrink of the University of Chicago on the topic of "Fat Bodies and Parthenogenesis." Parthenogenesis, she explained, "caught the attention of different groups of women, most of them some form of lesbian separtists, in the 1970’s and into the next decade." It was understood by these women to be "a form of spontaneous pregnancy in which a woman’s egg develops into a fetus without the assistance of a male sperm."

     Rensenbrink’s talk focused on the reasons why these separtists were so adamant that parthenogenesis could be achieved. She noted, "If parthenogenesis could be proved and controlled, it suggested a solution to the problem in feminist visions of a sustainable alter-male world" because it promised to produce only female children. Thus, Rensenbrink explained, many women began writing about their "magic powers" as "godesses" and went off into the desert in search of "parthenogenetic lizards."

     Another presentation given by Robert Reynolds of the University of Sydney focused on the interrelationship between psychotherapy and "fist-fucking." Reynolds attempted to mitigate between the conflicting views of therapists who view "fist-fucking" as a form of psychosis, or, in the words of one practitioner as "belonging to the perverse sublime" and the gay community’s view of it as an innovative sexual behavior. Referring to the homosexuals, Reynolds stated, "For these people, the invention of the art of fist-fucking is a procedural achievement" because it is "the only sexual practice invented in this century."

     Other topics addressed at the conference included, "Women’s Music Festivals as an Era of Lesbian Culture," "Representing African Sodomy in the Missionary Position," "A Hard Left Fist: Queer Masculinities and the Decline of Paternal Authority," "Eat Meat: Queer Cannibalism in Antebellum America," and "All Cats are Grey in the Dark: Sex in Prison, 1898-1974."

     At the concluding session of the conference, participants were given the opportunity to present their opinion of its success to the audience. Nearly every person that came forward expressed their unqualified enjoyment of the proceedings, and their wish to see similar conferences in the future. "I thought perhaps the most provocative and interesting session I attended was the one on [the] transgendered, transexuals, and transvestites, that really exploded the complexity of identities and possibilities at the margins," commented one participant.

     The key negative point that was raised during the final assembly was the lack of jobs in Queer Studies. The scholars believed that college and university history departments should be ashamed of not leaping to offer them positions. Together, the crowd began to brainstorm ways to pressure university history departments into accepting Queer Studies scholars.

     One scholar suggested composing a "dirty dozen" list of schools that have failed to hire Queer Studies specialists, pointing out that such a list had been instrumental in "forcing a number of the major law schools to finally hire Latino law professors."

     Johnathan Katz of SUNY Stoneybrook, a major figure in the field, concurred: "I would advocate that we begin to really seriously think about various forms of frankly old-fashioned pressure-group tactics to force the academy to take us seriously."