Group 3: Layla, Iquo, Elizabeth

Group 4: Alanna, Matt, Kiersten, Meggie

Caitlin's Set

Caitlin missed class on Wednesday - but subsequently went to the addresses we searched for and took some stellar photos. Here is her link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/likeatvset/sets/72157607412387364/

Meggie & Alanna Article | Transsexual Wins Lawsuit

Meggie and Alanna sent me a link to a CNN article they thought relevant to the class. We are going to discuss their thoughts and the article tomorrow in class (Monday, September 22).

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/09/19/transsexual.discrimination/index.html

Nightwood Chapter 3 | Night Watch

Chapter Summary

The chapter opens with a description of Nora and her salon in America. Nora and Robin both attend the Denckman circus in 1923 and meet each other there. They leave together and Robin follows Nora home and they stay in the United States for a time and then travel the cities of Europe together, eventually arriving in Paris and staying. Robin buys an apartment on the rue du Cherche-Midi. Their existence there is tortured by their unsustainable, violent love. Robin's nights are spent wandering the streets, cafés and bars of Paris. Nora's nights are tormented by her lover severed from her. One night, Nora stands at the window of their apartment and sees the silhouette of her lover with another woman, cowering - this sight a major breach in their relationship.

How would you describe Nora? What passages specifically would you choose to illustrate how you imagine her?


"those who love a city, in its profoundest sense, become the shame of that city, the détraques": (p. 47) deranged people

The Seventh-day Adventist Church (p. 47): observes its Sabbath on Saturday, the original seventh day of the Judeo-Christian week.

There was no ignominy in her: (p. 48) disgrace, dishonor.

On the rue du Cherche-Midi, did you find the, "fountain figure, a tall granite woman bending forward with lifted head, one hand held over the pelvic round as if to warn a child who goes incautiously."? (p. 50)

Nightwood: Chapter 2 | La Somnambule

(Note: please bring this book with you to each class - particularly when we are working on creating our maps)

The chapter opens with the doctor, who lives near St. Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement. He brings Felix (both have returned to Paris from Vienna at this point) to the Café de la Mairie de VIe. The doctor is summoned to attend to a woman who has fainted in a nearby hotel. They go to the hotel and find Robin, laying on the floor of the room, unresponsive. Almost in the same instant as the doctor has managed to rouse her, he subsequently steals a one-hundred franc note from her bed (to Felix's astonishment).

Felix is immediately infatuated with Robin and pursues her. They spend time together in Paris - walking in gardens and museums. They marry and he takes her to Vienna to instill in her his ideas of grandeur and old society. Robin becomes pregnant and goes wandering - haunting the churches of Paris and beyond. Robin delivers a boy and feels nothing for the child. The chapter ends with her abandoning Felix and her son.

Chapter Notes:

Neurasthenia (p. 29): condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, impotence, neuralgia and depressed mood.

Pitt the younger (p. 30): was a British politician of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783.

the douanier Rousseau (p. 29): Henri Rousseau, painter (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910).


(Rousseau - “Le Rêve”, 1910)

dompteur: (p. 29)

(Painting: Juliette Gréco by Robert Humblot - Musée Carnavalet)

Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving

Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving
_Audre Lorde

"Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.

Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.

Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.

Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one's own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.

The above forms of human blindness stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals." (p. 45)

Invisible Women

Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-class Culture in France, 1880-1930
_ Francesca Canade Sautman

This article speaks "of but not for voices that have been traditionally ignored, silenced, or distorted from all sides because they were at the same time the voices of women, lesbians and working-class people." (p. 177)

How does the author use the term "Sapphist"? "Tribade"?

"It has been claimed that [during this time period] lesbianism was not taken very seriously. Men supposedly thought it was 'charming,' nonthreatening, presenting no obstacle to their interest in women...It may have been true if the lesbians were affluent, refined ladies, but this assessment is called into question by the images of poorer lesbians, who were often painted in the most abject and misogynous colors." (p. 180)

"The conditions of women in the labor force changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century." (p. 181)

How did these conditions shift during this time period?

"Unveiling lesbian culture within any segment of the working class may seem like a hopeless enterprise, because the discussion of women's sexuality within working-class culture is seriously hindered by the presupposition of repugnance for homosexuality and of hegemonic aggressive heterosexuality among workers." (p. 182)

Lesbians and the Sex Industry

"Invisible and visible at once: Such was the paradoxical subsumed existence of lesbian sex workers. While the day-to-day lives of these early lesbians seldom reach us, 'lesbian acts' fantasized or even invented by the broader culture were made quite visible and even enjoyed widespread popularity." (p. 187)

"The lesbian life of sex workers inside brothels is well known...They show that amorous and romantic relationships, 'households,' between women, were as important as the possibility of sex between them." (p. 189)

Lesbians in Jail Culture

Sex workers, as well as many other women from the working class, spent a considerable amount of time in jail, for uncontrolled prostitution, various types of theft, abortion, infanticide, and occasionally, homicide. By the early 19th century, crowded jail conditions were held responsible...for promoting the 'ravages of lesbianism'. Same-sex sexual activity and relationships were as frequent among women in jails as in brothels." (p. 193)

For women of these days, it was all too easy to slip from the working class into the underclass. Job scarcity and professional limits kept young working-class girls out of many trades, and unions even participated in this exclusion. Workers' political parties inveighed against the destruction of the family by the bourgeois industrial machine and extolled traditional roles for women, and the absence of independent means of support made it difficult for many women to face life alone. For working-class women who wanted to live same-sex loves, the imperatives of economic survival were overwhelming." (p. 195)

Compare the examples the author uses of Lorrain and Guérin and Madeleine Pelletier. What do you see? What are the differences in their experiences (at the same moment in time) and why?

St. Sulpice | Class, Wednesday, September 17

For class on Wednesday, September 17, we will meet at l'église Saint-Sulpice in the 6th arrondissement (as usual, at 10:30am | Please be on time). To be more precise, Place Saint-Sulpice, 75006 at the fountain. Here is how you get there.



You will need your cameras and other means of documenting what we find. Before going, we will discuss in class on Monday, September 15 more in depth what we will be doing there.

A History of Homosexuality in Europe | Tamagne

A History of Homosexuality in Europe:
Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939
_Florence Tamagne

"The homosexual identity, unlike the homosexual act, is a historical phenomenon. It is not universal, but temporal; it is not induced, but constructed. Therefore, it supposes the creation of a specific environment and an awareness that enabled homosexuals to define themselves as a group." (p. 207)

At what moment can one say that a person recognizes himself as a homosexual? (p. 207)

Is it simply that time when he accepts his sexual preferences, when he calls himself 'homosexual,' or is it only when he asserts his membership in a homosexual community, as a political statement?
(p. 207)

The notion of 'homosexuality' still takes many forms cross-culturally and continues to be disputed: When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran) spoke to students at Columbia University this year, he claimed: "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country"

When does Tamagne date the emergence of 'homosexuality' in European countries?

The Medical Model: Discourse
(using Foucault's version of the term)

"The homosexual identity was built around different definitions of homosexuality, arising from the abundant turn-of-the-century medical literature...While it may have been studied first as a demonstration of hysteria, it soon spilled over into the realm of mental illness and came to form its own distinct category, with its own characteristics, internal classifications and symptoms." (p. 209, 210)

"Carl Westphal, a young Berlin neurologist and the first psychiatrist to study inversion on a scientific basis, asserted that homosexualtiy was a congenital disease and not a vice." (p. 211)

"Only Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, himself a homosexual and the inventor of the concept of uranism ("the heart of a woman in the body of a man"), stood out. He...asserted that homosexuality was not a disease but a simple sexual variation which was of no more consequence than the color of one's hair." (p. 211)

Homosexuality as a disease to be 'cured:'
"Steinach...deduced that it was possible to cure homosexuality by a surgical operation on the testicles." (p. 214)

Dr. Otto Emsmann thought "homosexuality could be cured either by implanting healthy sexual glands, by the transplantation of healthy testicles, or by hypnosis." (p. 214)

The 'third sex' theory: (those who felt feminine, "the heart of a woman in the body of a man") was a counterpoint to other existing discourses of the time.

Quoting Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, "It is a curious thing to have a feminine soul captive in a man's body, but it seems that this is my case." (p. 215)

Another discourse: Psychoanalysis and Freud

"...the homosexual is neither a criminal nor a congenital mental patient, he is a neurotic: the predisposition to homosexuality arises in a man from the discovery that the woman does not have a penis. If he cannot give up the penis as the essential sexual object, he will inevitably be turned off by a woman. She may even represent a threat, if the absence of the penis is perceived as the result of mutilation (castration anxiety)." (p. 218)

"As regards female homosexuality, Freud paid it relatively little attention; later, he filled in with several psychoanalytical cases. The genesis of female homosexuality is symmetrical to the male; castration anxiety still plays an essential role, for, if the girl does not accept her lack of penis, she will struggle to assert her masculinity." (p. 219)

"Inverts go through an intense phase of fixation on their mothers during childhood, and then, identifying with her, they take themselves as sexual objects (in the narcissistic way of young boys, they seek someone similar to themselves whom they will love as their mother loved them)." (p. 219)

Freud insisted that "Psychoanalysis is not going to solve the problem of homosexuality. It must be satisfied to reveal the psychic mechanisms which lead to the decisions governing the choice of the object and to trace how these mechanisms relate to instinctual desires." (p. 219)

What did Freud contribute to the study of homosexuality?

Perspectives

André Gide on his own homosexuality: "No, I do not believe by any means that my particular tastes could have been transmitted by heredity: [these are] acquired characteristics, non-transmissible. I am this way because I was thwarted in my instincts by my education, and the circumstances...what I imagine, you see, is that I must have inherited an inordinately demanding sexuality, which was thwarted, repressed voluntarily by several generations of ascetics, and of which, to some extent, I am now subjected to built-up pressure." (p. 223)

Maurice Sachs speaks of his experience, "I passionately wished to be a girl, ans I was so unaware of how grand it was to be a man that I went so far as to piss sitting down. Even better! I refused to go to sleep before Suze [his nanny] had sworn to me that I would wake up to find my sex had been changed...As this occurred when I was about four years old, one would have to believe that since my earliest childhood I had inclinations which very especially predisposed me toward homosexuality." (p. 227)

Conflicting cultural discourses have made the lived experience of homosexuals often unreconcilable: Hans Henny Jahnn met Gottlieb Harms, his great love, at the age of fourteen in 1908...He fought his sexuality until 1913. After their 'wedding,' in July of that year, they still could not reconcile their physical desires with their spiritual aspirations: "We talked it over. He told me that having lain together with me made him insane...He perceived me, my man, as if I were a prostitute sick with desire. He felt disgust for my body and my soul...Now, I am dirty and sinful, and he is, too. And we cannot purify ourselves." (p. 228)

Quentin Crisp



Quentin Crisp is the best representative of the flamboyant homosexual and his course throughout England in the 1920s and 2930s is rather unique. He recalls his youth in his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant (1968), which is as impertent and funny as he was himself. He said, "I became not only a confirmed homosexual, but a blatant homosexual. That is, I submitted my case not only to the people who knew me but to those who were completely foreign, as well. It was not hard to do. I wore make-up at a time when, even on women, eye shadow was a sin." (p. 233)

The Naked Civil Servant was made into a film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F03UUdslBY

An interview with Quentin Crisp: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpL_-r4y9EA&feature=related
(4 min in)

The official Quentin Crisp website: http://quentincrisp.com/bio/QCbyQC.html

The Birth of a Homosexual Community

Was there any homosexual community to speak of, in the 1920s?

"Between the wars, the foundation for a homosexual community was laid in the establishment of common references. Literature was one of the most fertile fields for developing the essence of the homosexual culture." (p. 265)

And a useful reference to our reading in Nightwood:

"Another emblematic figure of the time was Barbette, the transvestite trapeze artist who fascinated the crowd, and in particular Maurice Sachs, who was a spectator in 1926: 'I may never have seen anything more graceful than this girl dressed in feathers who sprang so boldly from the trapeze, did a somersault and caught herself in full flight by a foot, and then, taking a bow, pulled a big curly wig off her head and revealed that she was a young man! This little American appears at the Variety under the name of Barbette; I went to see him at the Daunou Hotel where he is staying [in Paris], and found him lying completely naked on his bed, his face covered with a thick layer of black pomade. Bisexual on the stage and bi-colored at home." (p. 273)

Judith Butler | Gender Trouble

One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.
- Simone de Beauvoir

Strictly speaking, "women" cannot be said to exist.
- Julia Kristeva

Woman does not have a sex.
- Luce Irigaray

The deployment of sexuality...established this notion of sex.
- Michel Foucault

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.
- Monique Wittig

The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms.
- Judith Butler

"It is not enough to inquire how women might become more fully represented in language and politics. [Or homosexuals for that matter]. Feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of 'women,' the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought." (p. 2)

What does Butler mean when she speaks of the "ontological integrity of the subject before the law?" (p. 3)

"Am I That Name?" (homosexual? lesbian? woman? p. 3): A question produced by the very possibility of the name's multiple significations.

"If one "is" a woman [or a man, or a homosexual], that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered 'person' transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities." (p. 3)

"Is the construction of the category of women [or homosexuals] as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations?" (p. 5)

Is this contradictory to emancipatory aims?

"Perhaps a coalition needs to acknowledge its contradictions and take action with those contradictions intact. Perhaps also part of what dialogic understanding entails is the acceptance of divergence, breakage, splinter, and fragmentation as part of the often tortuous process of democratization." (p. 14)

"An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences an divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure." (p. 16)

"To what extent do regulatory practices of gender formation and division constitute identity, the internal coherence of the subject, indeed, the self-identical status of the person?" (p. 16)

"To what extent is 'identity' a normative ideal rather than a descriptive feature of experience?" (p. 16)

"The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between "feminine" and "masculine," where these are understood as expressive attributes of "male" and "female." (p. 17)

Butler quotes Wittig saying, "The lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex." (p. 19)

Why does Wittig make this claim?

Foucault uses the example of Herculine (the hermaphrodite): why?

"Gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender, proves to be performative - that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing." (p. 25)

"The 'presence' of so-called heterosexual conventions within homosexual contexts as well as the proliferation of specifically gay discourses of sexual difference, as in the case of 'butch' and 'femme' as historical identities of sexual style, cannot be explained as chimerical representations of originally heterosexual identity. The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non-heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so-called heterosexual origin. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to the original, but, rather, as copy is to copy." (p. 31)

"To claim that gender is constructed is not to assert its illusoriness or artificiality, where those terms are understood to reside within a binary that counterposes the 'real' and 'authentic' as oppositional. As a genealogy of gender ontology, this inquiry seeks to understand the discursive production of the plausibility of that binary relation and to suggest that certain cultural configurations of gender take the place of 'the real' and consolidate and augment their hegemony through that felicitous self-naturalization." (p. 33)

Nightwood Reading Guide | Chapter 1 Bow Down

(NOTE: page numbers have been updated and now correspond with your copy of the novel)

House of Hapsburg (p. 1): the ruling Houses of Austria (and the Austrian Empire and its successors) where the dynasty reigned for over six centuries.

“Then walking in the Prater...” (p. 2): The Prater is a large public park in Vienna's 2nd district Leopoldstadt

"Then walking in the Prater he had been seen carrying in a conspicuously clenched fist the exquisite handkerchief of yellow and black linen that cried aloud of the ordinance of 1468, issued by one Pietro Barbo..." (p. 4): Pope Paul II, born Pietro Barbo, was Pope from 1464 until his death in 1471. "He decreed that Jews were to walk around the Roman Corso with a rope around their necks in order to amuse the Christian population" (taken fromThe Practice of Cultural Analysis Bal, Gonzales p. 153). This event highlights the historical persecution of the Jews. Felix is "heavy with impermissible blood" (p. 2)

Genuflexion (p. 2): the act of bending the knees in worship or reverence.

"Over the fireplace hung impressive copies of the Medici shield and, beside them the Austrian bird." (p. 5) The Medicis were a powerful and influential Florentine family from the 13th to 17th century.



The Medici shield

Heraldry (p. 5): Heraldry in its most general sense encompasses all matters relating to the duties and responsibilities of officers of arms. To most, though, heraldry is the practice of designing, displaying, describing, and recording coats of arms and badges.

Circumulocution (p.8 ): Using many words to describe something simple.

Loquacity (p. 8): the quality of being very talkative; garrulous.

"His rooms were taken because a Bourbon had been carried from them to death." (p. 9) The House of Bourbon was an important European royal house, a branch of the Capetian dynasty. Bourbon kings first ruled Navarre and France in the 16th century.

Madame de Sévigné (p. 9) was a French aristocrat, remembered for her letter-writing. Most of her letters, celebrated for their wit and vividness, were addressed to her daughter.

Goethe (p. 9) was a German writer (1800s).

Loyola (p. 9): Ignatius of Loyola was the principal founder and first Superior General of the Society of Jesus (16th century).

Brantôme (p. 9) was a French historian during the 16th century.

Ribaldry (p. 9): a genre of sexual entertainment.

Goy (p. 9): A Hebrew word for "nation" or "people".

Unexpurgated (p. 14): (of a piece of writing) not censored by having allegedly offensive passages removed.

Ameublement (p. 14): furnishings.

Jansenism (p. 15): The theological principles of Cornelis Jansen, which emphasize predestination, deny free will, and maintain that human nature is incapable of good. They were condemned as heretical by the Roman Catholic Church.

Prince Arthur Tudor (p. 15) was the first son of King Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York, and therefore, heir to the throne of England and Wales.

King Henry VII (p. 15), King of England, Lord of Ireland, born Henry Tudor (Welsh Harri Tudur), was the first monarch of the Tudor dynasty.

Chamberlain (p. 15) is the officer in charge of managing the household of a sovereign or other noble figure.

Rutebeuf (p. 17) was a 13th century French writer.

Mountebank (p.17) is any charlatan or quack.

"...nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse..." (p. 17): Salome was an icon of dangerous female seductiveness. Salome dancing before Herod or with the head of the Baptist on a charger have provided inspiration for Christian artists.

Leo X (p. 19), born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici (December 11, 1475 – December 1, 1521) was Pope from 1513 to his death.

Gymnosophist (p. 20): any of a sect of ascetics in ancient India who went naked and practiced meditation.

Breton (p. 20) refers to Brittany.

Ponte Vecchio (p.23) is a Medieval bridge over the Arno River, in Florence, Italy, noted for still having shops built along it, as was once common.

The Arno (p. 23) is a river in the Tuscany region of Italy.

Norse Vessel (p. 24) is a Viking ship.

The Wittelsbach (p. 24) family is a European royal family and a German dynasty from Bavaria.

City of Dark Nights

"Perhaps the greatest enigma of Paris literary life between the wars was, and remains, Djuna Barnes. Men and women of all persuasions found her irresistible, falling for her considerable beauty, glamour, intelligence and sharp wit. Today, darker and more disturbing qualities than these continue to attract readers and scholars to her life and work...

Born in 1892, Djuna Barnes grew up in a 'bohemian' household which included not only her grandmother, parents and their three children, but one of her father's several mistresses and her various children. This family has been called sexually unconventional but is perhaps more aptly described as exploitative and sexually abusive...

In 1910, at the age of 18, Djuna started publishing poetry. Two years later she moved to Greenwich Village, began art studies...and found a reporting job...thus embarking on a journalistic career that would continue intermittently for 25 years."

Djuna came to Paris in 1919. Djuna, like many others, had a brief affair with Natalie Barney, the quintessential lesbian of Paris at the time. Djuna met the love of her life, Thelma Wood, an American silverpoint artist and sculptor in 1920.

"The first few years with Thelma Wood were genuinely joyful ones. From 1922, the two women lived together on the Left Bank, first at 173 Boulevard Saint-Germain and later at 9 rue Saint-Romain."

"Before the city of light became a city of dark nights for Djuna Barnes, she was an integral part of the vibrant female artistic community which congregated at Natalie Barney's Friday salon." In 1928, Barnes published Ladies' Almanack, it "quickly became the talk of the town, with much speculation as to who was who." The illustrated book was a satire of Natalie Barney's lesbian soirées and salon.

Barnes was a serious member of Modernist community in Paris. "The intrepid Djuna Barnes not only was on first-name basis with T.S. Eliot, but was also the only person allowed to call James Joyce 'Jim' - something that even Hemmingway didn't dare."



A sketch of James Joyce by Djuna Barnes

"In the writing of Nightwood, her greatest work, she began closest to home, with her relationship with Thelma - which by now was not ordinary by any standards - and over the years kept re-writing and transforming her novel towards the extraordinary, the fantastic and the bizarre...The initial relationship between Nora and Robin in Nightwood clearly recalls the early, idyllic days between Djuna and Thelma. But by 1924 or early 1925, the romance between Djuna and Thelma began to turn increasingly volatile, strained by their excessive drinking and Thelma's promiscuity...

A desire for revenge, an attempt to exorcise her personal demons, and those magical, inexplicable motives for which writers write, even in their darkest hours, were forces which combined to propel Djuna Barnes into the voracious writing project she engaged in for over eight years, from 1927 to 1935, which eventually became Nightwood."

Barnes: "Suffering is the decay of the heart. In the beginning, after Robin went away to America, I searched for her in the ports. I sought Robin in Marseille, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do what she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become 'debauched,' to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her nightlife; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover."

"Ultimately Nightwood is much more than a road map to the disintegration of a tortured love affair. It has been considered a visionary allegorical tale of the rising tide of fascism across Europe...Some have read it as a feminist reworking of Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the price paid for personal and sexual freedom is judgement and damnation; others have claimed it is a lesbian rage against the clergy."

Barnes' writing is not easy to follow. Janet Flanner (American journalist and writer in Paris) recounted, "Djuna had written a play that she showed to T.S. Elliot; he told her that it contained the most splendid archaic language he had ever had the pleasure of reading but that, frankly, he couldn't make head or tail of its drama. She gave it to me to read, and I told her, with equal candor, that it was the most sonorous vocabulary I had ever read but that I did not understand jot or title of what it was saying. With withering scorn, she said, 'I never expected to find that you were as stupid as Tom Eliot.' I thanked her for the only compliment she had ever given me."

_Andrea Weiss
Paris Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank
(Excerpts taken from Chapter 4: City of Dark Nights, pp. 142-173)

The Gay Triangle in the Marais

"Within a triangle whose points are formed by the Centre Georges-Pompidou, the Saint-Paul metro, and the Picasso Museum, Parisian homosexual life begins anew every evening."

_Frédéric Martel
The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968








Musée Picasso: 5 rue du Thorigny

We will start at Au Coeur Couronné, on rue de la Ferronnerie. "This street is a promise: it announces the Marais and leads us into it."



Leaving Les Halles and taking rue de la Reynie, then rue Saint-Merri, we arrive at Beaubourg.





The main artery of the Marais is rue Saint-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie.



We will continue down rue Saint-Croix and at the intersection of rue Vieille-du-Temple is the bookstore Les Mots à la Bouche.



Not far, at 49 rue Blancs-Manteaux was the gay piano bar Le Piano Zinc, which opened in 1981.



Today, Le Gai Moulin, at 10 rue Saint-Merri, revives the spirit of the original, Le Piano Zinc.



The tour will culminate with the new LGBT Center, at 63, rue Beaubourg.

Foucault and Queer Theory

Tamsin Spargo

Questions to Think About:
- What do the terms ‘queer’ and ‘tolerance’ signify to you?
- How does homosexuality challenge our most basic assumptions of sexuality?
- Was the sexual revolution of the 1960’s the impetus for ‘freeing’ us sexually? What would Foucault think?
- What is constructivism? Essentialism?
- What are the problems with basing politics on identity?
- What are identity politics?
- If homosexuality is (as Foucault asserted) a cultural product, then, what is heterosexuality?
- And why is it viewed as the natural, normal sexuality?

- How do we privilege heterosexuality in discussions about homosexuality?
- What is an identity? What is an essential identity?

Highlights from the reading:
“The realm of sexuality has its own internal politics, inequities and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behaviour, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political manoeuvring, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” – Anthropologist Gayle Rubin (p. 5)

- What does Rubin mean when she says that 'sex is always political' in this quotation?
- Do you think we may, in fact, be in a historical period where sex is being renegotiated, as Rubin suggests?

Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
- Poststructuralist (philosopher)
- Focused on power/discourse
- A homosexual who died of AIDS 1984
- Point of departure for queer theory/theorists
- According to Foucault: sexuality is not a natural feature or fact of human life but a constructed category of experience which has historical, social and cultural, rather than biological origins (p. 12).
- Foucault was less concerned with what ‘sexuality’ is, than with how it functions in society (p. 13).
- ‘Truth’ is knowledge that exists within a particular discourse and is bound up with power (p. 15).
- ‘Power’ is a matter of complex relationships and not property inherent in certain classes or individuals
- According to Foucault, modern homosexuality is of recent origin. For him, homosexuality is a constructed category – not a discovered identity. (This does not mean that sexual relations between men and between women did not happen before this time period p. 17).
- In his words: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior and androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” (p. 20).
- Thus, homosexuality became pathologised as perverse and deviant (to be treated).

Queer Theory
- ‘Queer’ is defined as against the normative.
- Queer Theory: a collection of intellectual engagements with the relations between sex, gender and sexual desire.
- The view of ‘self’ shifts in queer theory: the individual is not seen as atomistic, or as a holder of objective knowledge or an essential identity. The self is a socially constructed fiction (p. 50).

Judith Butler
- Foucault’s analysis was almost exclusively male focused.
- She agrees with Foucault: sexuality is discursively produced and she also claims that gender is a product of culture.
- Gender, for Butler, is performance .“It is through the stylized repetition of particular bodily acts, gestures and movements that the effect of gender is created as ‘social temporality. We do not behave in certain ways because of our gender identity, we attain that identity through those behavioral patterns, which sustain gender norms’”(p. 53).
- We are, according to Butler, identities without essences, subjects in process.