Author: bethrest

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4mSUU15O4

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault attempts to complicate the idea that confession is a way to achieve freedom or liberation, claiming that we only see it this way because we have internalized the “obligation to confess” so much that “we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us” (Foucault 60). According to him, confession is always attached to a power dynamic, where the person who speaks (or does the confessing) is in a subordinate position while the person who listens (or does the exonerating) is in a dominant position. It is within this power dynamic, he argues, that sex is turned into discourse.

After thinking further about our class discussion and the What’s Underneath Project video, I was reminded of this video, which was released by the Ad Council at the beginning of March and almost immediately went viral. The premise is simple—two or three individuals kiss behind an X-ray screen, appearing merely as amorphous skeletons to an audience, and then literally “come out” and reveal their “true identities” to the audience before them. As they stand before the crowd, phrases such as “love has no gender” and “love has no race” come up on screen.

Although we might not immediately define these “reveals” as confessions, we can think about how they function similarly to Foucault’s conceptualization of confession. In class, we discussed how confession is fraught in terms of liberation and repression. As Foucault says, “confession frees, but power reduces one to silence” (60). The form the performance in this video takes is a perfect example of this, because the audience’s and participants’ feelings of joy and liberation that come with their “confessions” rely on the fact that the participants are initially hidden. When the first two “skeletons” who kiss behind the screen walk out and the audience gasps in delight, it is because they recognize that something supposedly “transgressive” has come to the surface. This becomes the pattern of the entire performance.

Additionally, it is clear that the audience (in this case in the seeing position rather than the listening position) holds the “agency of domination” (Foucault 62). The success of the whole project—and the success of the confessions themselves—depends on the audience’s positive reaction, their acceptance of the “truth” they see coming to the surface. One can imagine that the meanings constructed around gender, sexuality, race, and disability, would be vastly different if the audience had reacted with anger, or had walked away, instead of smiling and clapping. But the audience does respond positively, which seems to be wrapped up in an implicit argument about how progressive and accepting mainstream America has become. Meanwhile, much like the critique many have made about the need for queer-identified folks to “come out,” we can look at this performance as yet another illusive way of disciplining the normative by making a spectacle out of the relationships still viewed by many as “other.”

 

In “The Queer Art of Failure,” Judith Halberstam frames failure in terms of “ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success” (2). Many of us have been conditioned to view failure as an endpoint; in other words, although it may come with important lessons to teach, the “purpose” of failure is ultimately to help set one back on the path toward success. But rather than looking at failure as a momentary misstep, Halberstam sees it as a potential way of life that can offer “more surprising ways of being in the world” (2). The show Lost reflects Halberstam’s ideas about what it means to fail, and how this failure can open up a new kind of optimism.

From the very first episode, Lost quibbles with the notion of existing in the world in a new way. After a plane crashes on a mysterious island, a group of survivors quickly realize that they should not be expecting rescue any time soon, and as a result, they must create entirely new ways of survival using the unfamiliar resources they have. In other words, they have no choice but to learn to “live life otherwise” (2). Not only must they deal with their physical separation from the “normal world” and its institutions/structures, but they also must push aside concepts of success that dictated their actions in a reality that now exists in the past. As a result, their lives on the island become a series of daily failures as they attempt to navigate a new way of existing, in a new space where the old “rules” simply do not apply.

In the show’s finale, the survivors of the plane crash—even those who died on the island—reunite in a utopic, after-life-like universe. The father of Jack (the main character of the show) appears as a ghostly presence to inform his son, “The most important part of your life was the time you spent with these people on that island…You needed all of them, and they needed you.” When Jack asks what they needed one another for, his father replies, “To remember, and to let go.” Ironically, the final insistence of the show, which has often presented mysteries of the island as if asking its characters (and its audience) to look for answers, is not on finding something but rather on letting go. This reflects Halberstam’s claim about the potential that comes with being open to “losing,” “unmaking,” and “undoing” (2). She argues, in the end, that we should not see failure as futile, but rather as a way of creating a new kind of optimism. Lost does exactly this. After spending years trying to negotiate their alternative lives on the islands with the baggage of their now alternate “realities,” Jack and the rest of the survivors of Flight 118 can only achieve happiness and be reunited with their loved ones once they “let go.” Their time on the island was not just about meeting their “soul mates,” but about learning to be okay with being lost.

“If a boy didn’t care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, ‘Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.’ You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn’t like sports” (Sedaris 5)

In this passage, the narrator of Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day ruminates about the strange power of the expectation that all boys will be invested in sports, something that he himself does not enjoy. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s discussion of how institutions come together and speak with “one voice” in order to create and reinforce meaning is useful in thinking through the narrator’s frustration with the connection between gender and sports in this part of the text.

Speaking about the way Christmas has become an institutionally constructed and enforced monolith tightly linked to the family, Sedgwick argues, “They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year” (6). Although the narrator does not reflect specifically on the way these institutions enforce the link between sports and masculinity, this passage reveals his frustration with the “sports/manhood” tautology; to borrow Sedgwick’s words, it is a monolith that he views with “unhappy eyes” (5). His recognition of the fact that desire for certain foods is seen merely as “personal taste” in a way that the lack of desire to participate in sports culture is not demonstrates his understanding that the “boys/sports” connection extends beyond the realm of the individual and is functioning on the level of institution.

Furthermore, the fact that the narrator can simply say “there were names for boys who didn’t like sports” without specifically providing those names only reinforces Sedgwick’s claim about institutions lining up and speaking with one voice; as readers, we are already familiar with the sorts of names the narrator is referring to, because we too have experienced the ways institutions discipline gender roles. The narrator asks for the sort of unpacking and “disarticulating” that Sedgwick calls for. He wants to live in a world where, “Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds” is the response he would receive if he opened up about his lack of interest in football. But this would require disengaging masculinity from the realm of sports, and an unpacking of the terms “boyhood” and “sports” in order to see why all their parts actually have multiple “possibilities” and “gaps” and “overlaps” (Sedgwick 8). Disarticulating monoliths in this way would open up the potential for the narrator’s (and everyone’s) relationship to sports to be seen merely as personal preference, no more linked to gender/sexuality than his relationship to “barbecued chicken or potato chips.”

“A pre-war sky. Before the first world war there were days and days like this; long English meadows, insect hum, innocence and blue sky” (161).

This passage occurs when the narrator is on a train to London, daydreaming (or, rather, creating fictions) about an idyllic day with Louise. The repetition of both the words “sky” and “days” creates a sense of infinity and/or endless time, even though our narrator is merely looking back on a moment that is constructed, a utopic fantasy. Meanwhile, the repetition of the word “war” seems to oppose this sense of serenity with its violent associations, but because the focus is on a time before war, the passage maintains its dreamy tone. Read aloud, the constant use of the ‘s’ sound (“insect hum, innocence”) further creates a feeling of warmth, sleepiness, and safety. In contrast with the novel’s opening, here nature connotes a return to happiness and peace.

Furthermore, the idea of “pre-war” suggests that war is inevitable, that this peaceful time has already ended. But the narrator’s ability to take nostalgic comfort in something rooted in the (fictional?) past demonstrates a blurring of the lines between past and present, and reveals that the narrator’s thoughts and memories are often the product of imagination. Despite the fact that this idyllic scene may exist in a realm far away from reality, the passage also implies that hope can be found in memory and in dreams. Whereas the narrator once constantly asked why the measure of love was loss, this idea of returning to the past (or returning to feelings from the past through fictional memory) has the potential to undercut the novel’s association between “love” and “loss,” because our narrator has not completely lost his/her grasp on Louise or those pre-war skies, even if they are both arguably his/her inventions. This passage, much like the end of the novel, leaves us wanting to know what is real and what is not real, but also asks us to see that perhaps that distinction is not so clear-cut, and that maybe “realness” is not even the point. Has our narrator fallen in love with a fiction? Is the past always a fictional place? Maybe love cannot be lost because love is always partly our own creation, never really entirely rooted in reality.

“Perhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?” (52).

This passage comes after the narrator and Louise have climbed up seemingly never-ending stairs to a “high wild room” (51) where the narrator hears children’s voices from below. The reference to Chaucer might at first be alienating, but even a reader unfamiliar with his work can grasp the idea that this “roof” extends across not only space but time as well, so old that Chaucer himself inhabited it. The narrator continues to paint this space as all encompassing through the (seemingly) contrasting ideas of “ending” and “repeating.” On the one hand, they ruminate that this is the space where all life ends, as if everything becomes trapped here. But the following focus on “repeating” and “redundancy” signifies that the narrator’s notion of “ending” is atypical. For them, “ending” refers to, for example, “voices collecting in the rafters,” rather than voices disappearing completely. To end is not to cease existing, but to stop ascending any further in space—to end is to stop progressing, to go in circles ad infinitum.

The line “energy cannot be lost only transformed” echoes this alternate idea of ending. Nothing in the world actually dissipates; things merely shift, collect, and repeat. Although the narrator was rooted in an actual physical space, the repetition of the word “perhaps” suggests we are now deep in the narrator’s headspace, and that these themes of “redundancy” and “repetition” extend beyond this room and this moment. As the rest of the novel has shown, the narrator often feels trapped in cycles they are complicit in perpetuating. The thought of transformation can be freeing but like a “roof” it is also limiting and even frightening, because (ironically) the narrator cannot see an end point—they do not know where to direct their energy, and seems anxious about the thought of words being out of their control.