During the fun-filled days of kindergarten, my homework-less afternoons were packed with a variety of activities. English classes, ballet classes, folklore classes, origami classes… everything that the private schools offered and my mother accepted on my behalf. Since I was an only child, she was always afraid that I would somehow be missing on things, lacking interaction with my peers and turning into an old soul. Not that being an old soul (or as we say in Macedonian: a child reared with grandmothers around) was something to be ashamed of, or even to be discouraged. I think that she just wanted me to have fun with kids my age, before having fun with my grandparents in the evenings.
Out of all the activities that I attended in those pre-school (and early primary school) days, the one that I enjoyed the least was ballet. I still get the chills as I visualize the gruesome point-shoes and tightly rounded hair in an unfashionable bun with a flowery twist. You see, I was a tomboy growing up, and would soon ditch the crepe satin for the basketball jersey. But, there was this boy in my class who loved it all, the smell of talc, the dressing room fret, the leaps, the music, the lights, and the parents’ applause. His name was Bojan and he made it seem all too difficult for the rest of us, the ungracious ones. He continued with the lessons and enrolled at the academy, graduating first in his class. I haven’t seen him lately, except on stage (yes, I do enjoy the ballet from a spectator’s position nowadays), but as I read between the lines of the exciting reviews he receives, he is not doing all too well, personally speaking. Why would someone as talented as he is be suffering from a severe case of melancholy? Well, for starters, he is a man in a woman’s profession without the feminine characteristics. Or as sturdy Macedonian men would say, “A guy who’s not gay and dances in tights, give me a break, can’t be true.” So what is someone like Bojan to do, being such an “oddball” in his community, which, in turn, would seem happier with his talents and his professional orientation if he simply matched their expectations for his sexuality? He said in one of his many interviews that he wanted to be remembered for his dancing, for he was first and foremost, a dancer.
I am constantly reminded of Bojan and his wish for professionalism from his audience and his neighbors, as I read Sherri Tucker’s essay, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” . Even though her subjects are spatially and temporarily removed from the case of the Macedonian dancer, there is at least one important reference that applies to all of them. Tucker’s subjects, the women musicians in the all-woman big jazz and swing bands during World War II, and my childhood acquaintance, the dancer Bojan, insist on their identities as artists, as real musicians and as a legitimate dancer. Every other identity through which they realize their lives is not up for public debate. And once again, the reasons why they choose to do so (or better are forced to choose so by the dominant culture’s stand), is what keeps on baffling us as readers, as scholars, as friends.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tucker’s essay on her coming to terms with her project’s goals and her subjects’ obstinacy in helping her accomplish those goals, mostly for its pulsating and vibrant style. Rarely do we come across (in academia) an article that is both valuable for its text and context. Instead of retreating to one’s shell after a rather unpredicted brush with one’s ego, Professor Tucker emerges as a virulent scholarly voice by asking the questions rather than supplying the expected answers. Her asking “What is revealed, when is it revealed, and why? When do silences fall, and what purposes do they serve?” is applicable to any present-day attempt at studying humanity, its make-up, its choices, its discourse.
How do we, then, study humanity in a segmented world, through the now distinctive categories of race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, which stand to represent our furthering apart rather than coming together as one, one great world of plenty? Do we celebrate the differences or the universality of out traits? Do we allow for a comparative approach? Do we work within a specialized field, and from time to time compare notes with the other teams? Do we generalize based on a number of case studies? Do we allow for an interdisciplinary approach, and if we do, do we give the right of way to the social sciences? Do we question the categories themselves as they are being defined or reshaped by our findings? Do we allow for a fluidity of dialogue between them?
America has long been perceived by the outside world as a human “melting pot”, a place where different races, ethnic groups, are to experience a liberated life in a constant pursuit of private and communal happiness. However, the solidification of this myth has been challenged by a more recent image of America as “the salad bowl”, where the diverse races and ethnic groups do pursue a life of dreams, but are not always greeted with the same outcome, the desired dream, due to their “otherness”, in a community where such a difference is not celebrated or praised. Nonetheless, America does exhibit the demographics of a fairly rounded representation of the world’s races, ethnicities, classes (to an extent), gender and sexuality variants. And it provides the perfect battle-field ground for their redefinition and refiguration, especially when the categories of gender and sexuality are at hand.
Another essay, i.e., other two essays by historian Joan W. Scott, question the post-modernist conception of gender, as one of the more recently added categories of social discourse. In “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”, Scott takes us on a consciously bumpy ride through the panoramic viewing of gender as a latter-day social category, treating it as a way to examine the organization of the relationship between the sexes. She begins by looking closely at the approaches most historians use when dealing with gender, the descriptive and the casual approach. She also examines the various theoretical positions that historians elicit when working from one or the other mentioned approach within their studies. Needless to say, Scott is unsatisfied with the way her predecessors and some of her peers have been ‘working’ within and without this social category. She is mostly unsatisfied with the shortcomings of their methods, being either too expansive and all-encompassing or too rigid and limiting.
She offers a remedy, though, in the second part of her essay, outlining the main postulates she as a historian attributes to the social category of gender. Rejecting the fixed and stagnant quality of the man/woman binary opposition when treating gender in social terms, she goes on to define gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and … as a primary way of signifying relationships of power.” In reference to the two main parts of her definition, she provides the readers with a few subsets, namely specifying four interrelated elements, regarding the existing differences between the sexes. As far as the second part of her definition of gender goes, Scott maintains (by strong argumentation and a few examples) that the unique position of gender as a social category “provides a way to decode meaning and to understand the complex connections among various forms of human interaction.” All things considered, her rescripting of the way the category of gender is to be perceived by historians and to be used in their analyses of human interaction, bridges the gap between the American Marxist feminists and the Anglo-American school working within the terms of theories of object-relations, as well as the French school working within the terms of theories of language.
In the second essay by Scott, titled 'Experience', the gender category is viewed through one of it significant components, the subject of experience, i.e., Scott examines the way social historians can usefully implement the authority of experience when dealing with race, class, gender representations. She once again positions herself against her predecessors’ and her peers’ rendition of the role experience plays in historical analysis, to conclude that experience and language are not to be separated and looked at in isolation from one another. Since “subjects are constituted discursively, experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established meanings), but neither is it confined to affixed order of meaning.” As a linguist, I very much agree with her turn at examining the validity of a subject’s experience in connection to the subject’s “life in language”. Therefore, in order to understand and incorporate the everydayness of a subject’s life, a historian cannot go past the experience of that everydayness as imbedded in the language of that everydayness. For, “what counts as an experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political.”
Bearing in mind Scott’s understanding of the link between the subject’s experience and the subject’s language, we may extrapolate the impetus behind George Chauncey’s attempt at shedding light on the gay male world in New York City between 1890 and 1940, and its remarkable impact on the establishing of the recent, almost “irreplaceable” dichotomy, homosexual/heterosexual, in contemporary culture. Chauncey sets out to question the old dogma that the gay male world was initially a middle-class phenomenon, something that only the middle class’s resources could conjure, or for that matter that it was solely a product of the elite medical journals. He does so by concentrating his case study’s focus on three distinct New York City’s neighborhoods, mostly populated by gay men, in the fifty years preceding the Second World War, before “the decline of the fairy and the rise of the closet.”
By reconstructing the topography of the gay meeting places, and examining the importance of that topography for the social milieu of the gay world and the homosexual relations in it, as well as tracing the boundaries of this world at a time when a large portion of its participants (homosexually active men, as defined in contemporary terms) would not identify themselves as “fairy” or “queer”, Chauncey manages to produce an ethnographic study of class and gender identities amidst a dominant culture’s parameters for their acquisition and construction, incorporating the power of language as a denominator and identity policing factor.
Unlike Chauncey’s thousands of nameless protagonists, the members of the Combahee River Collective forge their feminine and lesbian identities in print, without mediators, since present day circumstances allow for such an act of celebration and actualization. In their collective statement, they share with the readers the origins of their organization, their beliefs, together with the problems they face as a collective of Black feminists and lesbians, touching on their issues and current projects. I applaud the strength of their individual and collective identities as members of a distinct race, class, gender, and sexuality; however, in reference to their statement that once Black women were free, everyone else in the world would be also free, since theirs is the freedom that would “necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” , I would like to add that no matter how invigorating such a statement may be to the party claiming it, there is to consider a rather large population of Islamic women (disregarding the denominator of race or class) trapped in life without the prospects of freedom. I would say that once this population was free, we might make claims of a more colorful world for us all.
Last but not least, (pardon the conventionality of a closing paragraph), we have to consider Ann Schofield’s contribution to the understanding of American identity as it is viewed through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Establishing an essential simultaneity between the discourse of history and the discourse of fictional representation in the story of Lizzie Borden, Professor Schofield accounts for the impact of Lizzie Borden’s story on American culture (itself a two-part celebration of the fictional and the historical in this story’s discursiveness), points towards the complex nature of American identity as seen through the fictional representation of one “American myth”.
Within Lizzie Borden’s fictional testimonials, Professor Schofield finds the quintessentially American theme and the un-American heroine, to an extent. According to Professor Schofield, the gendered nature of Lizzie as a subject for fictional re-telling of tragic romances and/or feminist quests makes her a useful analytic tool, even more so, because of the complexity and the contradictions that one such (gendered) nature brings forward to the discussion table. And I agree; it is the subject’s gendered (this should not only refer to the attributes of the female sex) nature that questions the foundations of the social categories of race, class, ethnicity, and recently sexuality. Whether this pattern of paradigm questioning and restructuring, now in vogue, within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies is going to continue in the following years, with the same energy flux as it is proposing now, depends largely on the state of affairs in the American way of life. The optimist in me would like to see this great country of good people surpass, in the near future, the age-old stale arguments of racial superiority, class advantages, biological determinism, and a hegemonic sexual regime. The realist in me hopes that the scholars in American Studies will continue to be on the forefront of American cultural identity, signifying its diversity, complexity, and unquestioning beauty, especially when balancing between the categories of gender and sexuality.
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