The Bonds of Choice more

B ooks i n Brief Anthologizing the Field Robert Azzarello Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. 410 pp. Because of their very nature, anthologies are difficult to write about — so many claims, so many perspectives, so many references to texts still unread, so many histories and projections for the future. In this sense, they mimic what actually happens in an academic field of study, the swirling together of ideas, at least for a moment, around a central post. The difficulty in charting an academic field, like that of reviewing an anthology, is all the more intensified in a book like Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire because its aim is to connect two fields of study, queer and environmental, two fields that historically have lacked much contact. Bringing together the perceptive insights of thirteen unique writers, the editors, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, a professor of environmental studies at York University, and Bruce Erickson, an environmental historian at Nipissing University, make a solid and sustained contribution to the coalescing of two fields that has been over a decade in the making. But what is the connection between queer studies and environmental studies? Because of their very different critical histories and rhetorical protocols — that is, the very different assumptions about the proper domains and political exigencies of their subjects — these two fields may seem very much at odds. One is seen as urban, the other as rural; one is concerned with culture, the other with nature; one tends toward a constructivist epistemology, the other toward objectivism; one studies people, the other studies plants and animals. Mortimer-Sandilands, Erickson, and the other contributors to the volume, however, insist that it is wrong to assume that the two fields are so categorically distinct after all. From the very beginning, queer studies and environmental studies have shared a set of concerns GLQ 18:1 © 2011 by Duke University Press 198 glQ: A JoURnAl oF leSBiAn And gAY StUdieS that often gets obscured in popular stereotypes of the fields and their practitioners. It is the task of Queer Ecologies to identify that set of concerns. The introductory chapter, coauthored by Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, includes several metatextual moments that highlight the central post around which the concerns of the field circulate. The premise is simple enough: “understandings of nature inform discourses of sexuality . . . understandings of sex inform discourses of nature” (2 – 3). The simplicity of the premise, however, quickly gets more complicated when one follows what the contributors to the volume mean by those elusive terms sex and nature and — perhaps even more importantly — that crucial verb inform. According to Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, their aim is twofold: first, to encourage “a sexual politics that more clearly includes considerations of the natural world and its biosocial constitution,” and second, to cultivate “an environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world” (5). The volume is rich with interesting writers making compelling arguments. To name just a few, Stacy Alaimo explores the problematics and pleasures in identifying animals as queer beings; Noël Sturgeon unpacks the importance of reproductive justice in terms of environmental activism; Giovanna Di Chiro identifies the relationships between toxic discourse and sex panic; Rachel Stein writes about the nature poetry of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt; Diane Chisholm presents a close reading of biophilia and evolutionary theory in Ellen Meloy, a nature writer of the American Southwest. Some of the essays are exceptional; everyone thinking about environmental rhetoric should read Ladelle McWhorter’s chapter “Enemy of the Species.” What unites all of these essays, besides an interest in all things queer and ecological, is a drive toward interdisciplinarity. The anthology on the whole, however, does seem specifically geared to the humanities and the theoretical social sciences. After reading all the pieces, one wonders how a professional ecologist would write about “queer ecology” and what kind of book Queer Ecologies would be if Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson had solicited the work of trained biologists — not as some sort of ultimate authority but as supplementary voice. Despite this last criticism, Queer Ecologies is a welcome addition to the critical scene, joining a handful of texts such as David Bell and Gill Valentine’s collection Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (1995) and Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird’s volume Queering the Non/Human (2008), that make concerted efforts to blur the boundaries between the two fields of study.1 There is also evidence that this type of work is becoming more popular. In a recent issue of PMLA, BooKS in BRieF 199 the great arbiter elegantiarum of literary-critical habits, Timothy Morton, has written a guest column called “Queer Ecology” (2010) in which he insists on inserting queer theory into environmental studies as an indispensable next step, both philosophically and politically. 2 What will be the long-term impact of this work on academic discourse, on queer persons, and on the environment remains to be seen, but Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson’s anthology will constitute essential reading for future debates on the subject. notes 1. David Bell and Gill Valentine, eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995); Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird, eds., Queering the Non/ Human (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125 (2010): 273 – 82. 2. Robert Azzarello is assistant professor of English at Southern University at New Orleans. DOI 10.1215/10642684-1422206 the BondS oF ChoiCe S. Pearl Brilmyer The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy David L. Eng Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv + 251 pp. In 1991 the anthropologist Kath Weston coined the phrase “families we choose” to describe queer forms of kinship fashioned as an alternative to the biological family. According to Weston, in gay and lesbian communities in 1980s San Francisco, “Kinship began to seem more like an effort and a choice than a permanent, 200 glQ: A JoURnAl oF leSBiAn And gAY StUdieS unshakable bond or a birthright.”1 Now that American notions of marriage and child rearing are shot through with the rhetoric of choice and self-making, does the mantra “families we choose” retain any radical power? Who has been eclipsed in the portrait of the queer family as a contractual unit with state-sanctioned rights to “privacy” and “intimacy”? Such questions motivate David L. Eng’s Feeling of Kinship, a critical perspective on the recent surge of appeals for marriage, custody, and inheritance rights from gays and lesbians in the United States. Drawing from a range of theoretical traditions, including legal theory and psychoanalysis, Eng’s work brings a transdisciplinary set of questions to bear on what Lisa Duggan has called “the new homonormativity . . . a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions, but upholds and sustains them.”2 As Eng argues, inclusionary appeals by gays and lesbians for the right to participate in normative social institutions present “a domesticated version of family and kinship, one predicated on the conjugal family and its Oedipal arrangements as the only legally recognizable and tenable household structure” (31). He calls this turn in queer politics to the petition for rights and recognition before the law “queer liberalism,” arguing that the consolidation of queer politics with the “liberal political norms of inclusion” forgets the racial genealogies of oppression and exploitation that made liberalism historically possible. Built on the legacies of slaves and colonized peoples, Eng shows, modern liberalism emerged in the distinction between public and private that rendered intimacy a kind of property — the right to which citizens were granted if they conformed to bourgeois notions of privacy and domesticity. The book’s central argument is this: the ideals of individual choice, economic selfdetermination, and the right to privacy driving queer politics of late rely on a rhetoric of colorblindness forgetful of the history and enduring present of racism. As Eng demonstrates, in its conception of citizens as abstract and equal subjects, queer liberalism relegates racial struggle to the historical past, casting the fight for sexual equality as the second round of a fight already won by people of color. Excavating these histories of “racial forgetting,” Eng draws on texts haunted by the feeling that the project of “racial liberation” is far from complete. As an affective historian, Eng gracefully archives the feelings of loss, displacement, and longing of those left behind in queer narratives of freedom and progress. Monique Truong’s acclaimed 2003 novel The Book of Salt proves the perfect example for Eng in this endeavor, chronicling the forgotten story of Bình, the imagined Vietnamese colonial and household chef of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Putting The Book of Salt in conversation with Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 BooKS in BRieF 201 film Happy Together, in chapter 2 Eng shows how in these texts the queer Asian migrant must perform the “art of waiting,” while the modern emerges around him in sync with the tempo of liberal progress and capitalist development. Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the films First Person Plural (2000) by Deann Borshay Liem and History and Memory (1991) by Rea Tajiri, developing a “poststructuralist account of kinship” that, while heavily indebted to Freudian psychology, theorizes lack in more “highly personalized and alternative forms” (16, 135). What stands out across the body of The Feeling of Kinship is Eng’s sustained attention to the issue of transnational adoption, a topic highly underresearched in queer studies, despite its increasing relevance for gay and lesbian parents. This issue proves exemplary for Eng in his attempt to theorize kinship as a structure of feeling between the “bonds” of biological relationships and the “effort or choice” of willed ones (to re-cite Weston) — as a network of affects unique to each person’s experience of love, loss, and reparation. Transnational adoption, addressed first in chapter 3 in relation to the film First Person Plural, forms the basis of chapter 4, a case history cowritten with the psychoanalyst Shinhee Han. These chapters make good on Eng’s commitment to “recognizing and responding to the diverse ways in which we now structure and live out our intimate lives” and serve as a call for more psychoanalytic work on the racial and diasporic ties failed by structures like the Oedipus complex (30). Eng’s most exciting contribution to queer studies, however, consists in his transformative reading of the landmark court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court case championed for its extension of “privacy” to gay “couples” (to use the words of Presiding Justice Kennedy). In chapter 1 Eng draws attention to the little-known racial backstory of Lawrence v. Texas, the case lauded as a victory for gays and lesbians for its overturning of the antisodomy ruling of Bowers v. Hardwick (1986). Critical of analogies that draw parallels between Lawrence and Loving v. Virginia — whose 1967 ruling overturned the antimiscegenation statute in Virginia — Eng shows how references within the queer community to Lawrence as “our Loving” erase the tale of racial trespass and infidelity that drew police to Lawrence’s home in the first place. If Loving had successfully awarded the right to privacy to interracial couples in 1967, Lawrence and his African American partner might not have attracted the police attention in 1998. As The Feeling of Kinship elegantly demonstrates, a queer liberalism that places faith in a future of legislated equality risks obscuring the present of those relegated to the waiting room of history. 202 glQ: A JoURnAl oF leSBiAn And gAY StUdieS notes 1. 2. Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xv. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 50. S. Pearl Brilmyer is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin. DOI 10.1215/10642684-1422215 FloCKing togetheR David Greven Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction Axel Nissen Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. x + 229 pp. Looking at works from authors both well-known (Henry James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells) and less familiar (Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, and, especially, Theodore Winthrop), Axel Nissen creates an inviting, enveloping world of “manly love” in the literature of the Gilded Age. Students and scholars of this era’s literary output with an interest in questions of queer sexuality will find much to value in Nissen’s study, especially its careful attention to heretofore obscure as well as more familiar texts. When he outlines the genre by discussing key, overlapping themes in the literature of romantic friendship, Nissen’s work really shines: on the one hand, trademarks include “the emphasis on the erotics of the hand, the allusion to ancient Greece, and the feminization and infantilization of the men involved in a homoerotic relationship” (142); on the other hand, a desire to “create kin” led men to innovative strategies such as marrying their beloved friend’s sister. Nissen BooKS in BRieF 203 is wonderfully alert and open to these period-specific customs and sensibilities, and his reading of such works as Harte’s story “Tennessee’s Partner,” Winthrop’s largely unknown novel Cecil Dreeme, Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend, and bestselling Confederate author Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo brims with insights into the different ways that Gilded Age individuals arranged their desiring and affectional lives. Nissen makes the valuable point that creating family ties was a paramount concern for nineteenth-century people, and those who principally desired someone of their own sex faced the challenge of creating kin through nonbiological means. In a rather, to my mind, dubious but nevertheless noteworthy accomplishment, Nissen makes works by more prominent authors such as James generically similar to the works by lesser lights in this tradition. I say “dubious” because what is particular and meaningful in James becomes, in Nissen’s treatment, much more generic. In Roderick Hudson, James’s first “claimed” and major novel, the relationship between two young men, the slightly older Rowland Mallet and the brash, younger titular artist whom he financially supports in Rome, seems uncannily evocative of a homosexual love affair. Of James’s startlingly modern treatment, Nissen asks, What are we to say, then, of a novel in which the characters that personify true womanhood and manhood are not irresistibly drawn to each other, choosing rather to attach themselves to the dissipated and the sensual? Where the women turn out to be manly and the men womanly? Where daughters do not necessarily love their mothers and men do not necessarily love the traits in other men that are most manly? Where four characters battle for the role of the heroine of the tale and only two of them are biologically female? Where none of the protagonists are finally united in anything remotely resembling Duffey’s ideal of marriage? (100 – 101)1 These are salient questions indeed. But Nissen’s answer is that James conforms to the generic constraints of the romantic friendship tradition, rather than that, perhaps, James’s own complexity as a novelist and thinker may have contributed to his resistant depiction of sexual matters. Nissen’s treatment of the James novel is characteristic. While he is astutely attentive to the novel’s unconventional social dynamics — which in his treatment come to seem quite conventional in the end — he is not a particularly convincing critic of the novel itself. For one thing, his presentation of Mallet, a disquietingly blank character whose control over the artist Roderick Hudson has a disturbing 204 glQ: A JoURnAl oF leSBiAn And gAY StUdieS relentlessness, blunts the critical edge of James’s depiction. To my mind, James’s subject here is how those who can perceive and admire talent in others but cannot share in it themselves sometimes do their best to sabotage the object of their awe. Moreover, this is a novel about failed relationships and intimacies rather than romantic friendship, despite Nissen’s determined attempt to place it in that generic tradition. Overall, Nissen presents the romantic friendship tradition as one he has unearthed, and in many ways this makes sense, as many of the texts here will be unfamiliar to readers. I know that I will be referring to his scrupulous delineation of the romantic friendship tradition as I research and teach these topics. But a discussion of romantic nineteenth-century friendships — which, it should be added, developed out of the ardent cult of romantic friendship in the eighteenth century — has been under way for quite some time, undergirding, as it does, Leslie Fiedler’s thesis of “innocent homosexuality.” From the 1970s (Carroll SmithRosenberg) to the 1980s (Robert K. Martin’s study of Herman Melville) and to the present, a sense of the primacy of same-sex relationships in the period has become broadly established. Nissen alternately ignores and overlooks a great deal of the work in this area that has preceded his own. Most troublingly of all, Nissen (though he is hardly alone) has created a vision of the nineteenth century as a time in which same-gender love, though not sex (which plays a minor role in his account), could flourish without the impediments of sexual classification imposed by the emergent power of psychoanalysis and other “sciences” of sexuality. As a historicist account of nineteenth-century American literature generally has taken hold (and despite Nissen’s attempts to problematize historicism, his work falls squarely within its purview), it has been increasingly informed by a shared, broad, hazy, Foucauldian understanding of same-sex desire as a phenomenon that was radically reshaped by the new sexual taxonomies of the late nineteenth century. This view has cast psychoanalysis and “sexuality” as the end point of nineteenth-century romantic friendship and the beginning of a new era of sexual normativity and classifications. Yet the idea that men and women should form close ties, at least before marriage, was quite a compulsory and prevailing notion in the nineteenth century. The compulsory nature of same-sex ties makes their ardent manifestation in romantic fiction somewhat less utopian than Nissen would have it. Moreover, the competitiveness of American life that became only increasingly intense in the Gilded Age needs to be taken into account when we consider the visible erosion of homoaffectionalism in American culture. Indeed, this market competitiveness as well as the development of muscular Christianity and the ever-more prominent emergence of the United States as a BooKS in BRieF 205 imperialistic world superpower in the latter half of the nineteenth century — and all of the attendant transformations of the gendered identity of American citizens — makes nary an impression on Nissen’s ultimately anodyne argument. For all of its considerable strengths, the poignant and appealing Manly Love takes the study of same-sex love in the nineteenth century a step backward even as it opens up promising new ground. note 1. Nissen refers here to Eliza Duffey, whose book The Relations of the Sexes (1876) was an attempt, he describes, to “save married and unmarried women alike from the undesirable, even life-threatening sexual passion of husbands and bachelors” (98 – 99). david greven is associate professor of English and chair of the literatures in english department at Connecticut College. DOI 10.1215/10642684-1422224