Opengender

This is a pre-publication draft of my book, Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters, that was published in the UK by Macmillan and in the US by St Martin’s Press in 2000. You can purchase a hardcopy of the finished book from Amazon. The book is a revised and expanded version of my PhD thesis, written at the University of Sussex under the supervision of Alan Sinfield between 1993 and 1997.

What I was trying to do with this research was to make sense of the underlying structures of female identification in gay male culture. These tendencies towards effeminacy and the worship of female icons, divas and goddesses have been well documented, so what I didn’t want to do was to catalogue the different objects of gay men’s camp affection. Rather, I wanted to try and understand why such identifications are important, and to consider the political implications of them.

The central argument pursues the still radical idea that queerness is more about negotiating gender identity than it is about the kind of genitals we like our playmates to have. The book takes a broadly Foucauldian, cultural materialist approach, and develops its central thread from a reading of Eve Sedgwick’s notion of homosociality. I introduce the concept of heterosocial bonds as a way of talking about the gender dissidence enacted by queers, and formulate a critique of the function of queerness in heterosexuality.

Fags, Hags and Queer Sisters offers a range of readings of plays, novels, films, TV shows and other popular cultural artefacts. It’s primary texts are Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, the US sitcom Roseanne, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But along the way it also considers the work of Derek Jarman, in particular his film Edward II, EM Forster’s novel Maurice, Tarantino’s movie Pulp Fiction, science fiction slash fiction, and Attitude magazine.

Titles of chapters below hyperlink to pdf files.

Introduction
The book begins by considering the significance of Judy Garland’s death in gay culture, and offers a reading of the late Nigel Finch’s wonderful film, Stonewall.

Chapter 1
From Pathology to Gender Dissent: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire
Chapter 1 deals with the recurring idea of authorial transvestism in the work of gay men, and undertakes a thorough analysis of the idea that Tennessee Williams’s marvellous heroines – Blanche DuBois, Maggie the Cat, the Princess Kosmonopolis – aren’t ‘really’ women at all, but dragged up fantasies of the playwright. The chapter then offers a sustained reading of A Streetcar Named Desire which suggests that what is culturally disturbing about the play isn’t Williams’s female identification, but its searing critique of heterosexuality from the perspective of a disenfranchised, aging southern belle.

Chapter 2
Heterosocial Tendencies
The second chapter outlines the theoretical issues implicated in the question of gay men’s identification with women by looking at the relationship between feminism and queer theory. It considers the work of Leo Bersani, Tania Modleski, Eve Sedgwick, Richard Dyer and Sue Ellen Case. The chapter includes two case studies, one that assesses the homosocial implications of Pulp Fiction, and the other which attacks the queer homosociality of UK critic Mark Simpson and UK gay lifestyle mag Attitude.

Chapter 3
Roseanne: Domestic Goddess as Fag Heroine?
This chapter looks at what happens when mainstream culture goes gay-friendly. It looks in detail at the deliberately queer-affirmative representations offered by the US sitcom Roseanne, which ran from 1988 to 1997, and offered early representations of lesbian chic, gay weddings and homophobia. It assesses the limitations of its eponymous star’s intentions, particularly in the context of heterosexual femininity.

Chapter 4
Pedro Almodóvar and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: The Heterosocial Spectator and Misogyny
The final chapter considers the role of queerness in liberal arts cultures, and considers the tensions between public and private in the appeal of transgression, and the limits of that transgression, particularly in the context of liberal democratic politics and the tyranny of the monogamous couple. The chapter offers a substantial reading of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in order to consider the slippage between queer sistership and misogyny.

Conclusion
The book concludes with a reflection on the idea of the fag hag in Robert Rodi’s novel, and considers the kinds of gender affiliations made by gay men, suggesting that more attention needs to be paid to political relations with lesbians and dyke culture. It finishes with a critique of the assimilationist tendencies in gay culture, and some suggestions for what forms gay gender dissidence might take.