Learning and unlearning historical sexual identities.

Several years ago I taught a senior writing-intensive seminar for English majors in which we read Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather in the contexts of historically constructed and contested categories of sex/gender and sexuality. While reading varied literary forms, we considered these writers' textual and historical engagements with, evasions of and resistances to identity categories such as woman and "lesbian." On the day that I was being observed by my department chair, in my second semester at Queens College, one student, in his presentation, began a discussion of "butch/femme" gender roles as a way of understanding the characters and the central relationship represented in Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Since no students in the class had identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (nor were any of the students legible as such to me), I was both surprised and impressed with his use of these gender terms, specific enough to lesbian and other queer cultures that I had not anticipated their introduction into our conversation unless I introduced them. Suddenly, another student exploded in anger at the use of these terms, apparently because he thought that he had access to more authentic knowledge: although he, like the other student, he seemed to assume, was "not gay," he "knew" more about these things because his mother, as he defensively stated, was a lesbian. By claiming an inside position based on someone else's perceived sexual identity, one apparently heterosexual male student attacked another apparently heterosexual male student as supposedly homophobic.

This was an uncomfortable moment, not only for me in my second semester with my chair observing me, but for the other students too. In my salvage attempt, I introduced explicitly a discussion of the contexts of naming, offering a brief history of the contest within women's history over "butch/femme" experiences, and making a case for understanding these gendered terms both as related to heterosexual gender terms and as a queer revision of those gender terms.

This difficult teaching moment, which I have narrated and discussed elsewhere, (1) crystallized for me what I, as a teacher of writing, rhetoric and literature, am aiming for in my teaching of sex/gender and sexuality: moments in which words and naming and their contexts take center stage in ways that matter to those participating in the conversation. These are also moments in which our learning about specific and historical identities also involves unlearning identities as fixed, a historical certainties. In this article, I want to suggest some specific classroom strategies for teaching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer (LGBTQ) identities (2) as rhetorical and political negotiations of historically changing sexual identities. In suggesting pedagogical and curricular strategies, however, I also want to put into question how our representations of sexual identities convey assumptions about identity itself as either a fluid and historical set of possibilities, or as a set of fixed names for coherent, unchanging types of people. In other words, what interests me, here, are the issues that came up in the classroom incident I narrate above, where one student's stable, coherent version of identity--e.g., "my mother is a lesbian,, -- effectively closed down another student's beginning explorations of how the language for articulating identities is necessarily negotiated in particular ways within different historical contexts.

Before discussing these more general strategies, I want to discuss briefly how issues of naming came up in our reading. In one of the texts we read in the course, Everybody's Autobiography, Stein describes how she wrote every day in an effort to find grammatical, syntactical and semantic forms that express subjectivity, without freezing it into identity:

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. (3)

In much of her work, through rigorous, strategic efforts to avoid the identifications from outside -- "what you or anybody else knows you are -- Stein attempts to claim a space of imaginative self-invention, of subjective process and not identity. Here, Stein chooses second-person pronouns that, while mimicking vernacular usage, address her reader and incorporate herself in a figure of representative experience. Her consistent vague abstraction, achieved with relentless avoidance of concrete substantives in favor of pronouns--"what you are set against "that thing"--represents the possibility of subjectivity as a practice of language. Stein understands, and her language play suggests, that, in one sense, we are whom we are named as, and, in another sense, we are whom we name ourselves. Since only specific contexts can provide referential meaning for pronouns, her language names a process of "finding out what you are" which achieves "living" through the simultaneity of "really not [knowing]" and being, a simult aneity that can end only with the end of living.

I should clarify that, even as my course's curriculum points toward the opportunities that may emerge from avoiding naming, I also understand--as did Gertrude Stein in her own way--the value of what Diana Fuss and others have called "strategic essentialism." (4) We need to organize within the very categories of identity that we also need to destroy or destabilize so that we may become free of their limitations. We need the category "woman," for instance, to organize those whose historical (personal and political) experience is defined by sex/gender. How else, for example, can we imagine articulating issues of sexual violence or of economic equity? At the same time, being penned into such categories can be terrible on the level of subjectivity, and certainly, as Denise Riley has argued so persuasively in "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History, the history of feminism can be read as a struggle over definitions of "woman" and "women." Riley articulates the crucial question: "Can anyon e fully inhabit a gender [let me add here, a sexuality] without a degree of horror? How could someone 'be a woman' [or gay] through and through, make a final home in that classification without suffering claustrophobia?" (5)

My experience suggests that many people (perhaps especially the young adults and youth who are in most college and high school classrooms) can understand this sort of claustrophobia of identity categories. My students generally grasp fairly easily the notion that we are multiple and that our ways of naming our identities are inadequate to our experiences of living as human subjects. We discuss, for example, the wisdom of vernacular idioms such as "Part of me feels [fill in the blank], while part of me feels [again, fill in the blank] ." We spend time discussing how we lack ways of talking about identity that represent our subjective experiences both of not feeling "at home" in available names and of experiencing moments of historical revision of those names. Think, for example, of how a word like "girl" or "lady" should now sound archaic when applied to an adult woman. Certainly, the sort of flexibility with naming our identities that we discuss is not immediately applicable for most of my students to the, fo r them, naturalized categories of sex/gender or the, often for them, pathologized categories of sexuality Grasping the general idea that much of our language cannot adequately represent our experiences of identity, however, opens up a space within which our historical and theoretical reading about sex/gender and sexuality identities becomes understandable, important and relevant.

Interestingly, though, it is in common language--the vernacular idioms we discuss--that my students and I begin to explore and to invent language that might represent multiple, rather than coherent, subjective experiences. In teaching the concept of historical identities, I always try to draw on how our vernacular language might be understood as articulating aspects of our experiences of identity that our more official language denies. We also discuss how the pressures of self-articulation, of identity-articulation, often position us institutionally and politically in ways that don't speak accurately of our more vernacular, or commonplace, senses of identity multiplicity and change. Think, for example, of how identities are necessarily named in nondiscrimination policies, or, perhaps less necessarily, in multi-cultural curricula and syllabi. This is, of course, what my earlier quotation from Stein is about, and it is what the course I'm describing is about. That is, Stein does want to have it both ways: "real ly not to know what you are and yet to be that thing"; allowing one's language and self-representations not to limit one's multiple, subjective experience with any single name, even as one lives one's relatively coherent historical identity; resisting identifications, coming from earlier, external contexts, in the interest of discovering subjective possibilities within ones experience. My students become deeply interested, for example, in how both our vernaculars (common language/common sense) for the experiences of identity and many of the literary strategies that we are considering in Stein and Gather know identity and subjectivity differently. That is, we explore how these writers produce, through their evasions and indirections, different articulations of subjective experience and different identity positions that take up commonly available and recognizable identifications (e.g., woman, lesbian), while complicating them rhetorically and poetically to the point that they become unrecognizable (i.e., uncomm on).

In what follows, I want to describe four pedagogical strategies that I'm calling "rhetorical interventions." I use that term because it raises in its most obvious sense questions about how we, as teachers, choose to talk about sexual identities, about how our rhetoric intervenes in normative heterosexuality, and about whether or not our language choices simply reinforce simple understandings of difference. I use the term "rhetorical intervention" also because it begins to suggest the need to intervene in our society's possible rhetorics of identity, to introduce and to develop with our students self-consciously double ways of speaking about identity both as a real and really consequential part of historical experience and as an historically mutable and, to some extent, politically revisable set of possibilities. In my tide, this is what I mean by both learning and unlearning historical sexual identities. Here is a real historical and ideological challenge for all of us: to be able to introduce the "real" hist orical experiences of gays, lesbians, etc. (and, of course, the "etc. is always of interest) and to work toward a sort of respect for difference which depends upon some kind of acceptance of identities different from one's conception of one's self, but to do these things is ways that don't lie about the historical experience of identities that change even as we claim them, that are not in our control even as we attempt to use them to signify or to express "ourselves."

RHETORICAL INTERVENTION #1

The first rhetorical intervention that I am suggesting is teaching the historical contests over categories of identity, over queer names. Most of my students are invariably surprised that I am asking them to consider Stein and Gather as lesbian writers and as women writers, at the same time as I am asking them to consider why and how these two writers strenuously avoided being seen or labeled as the first--lesbian--and to a lesser extent as the latter--woman-- in their own historical period. We look, that is, at the historical emergence of new names for sexual identities and at the literary evasive representations of what we can now see as Stein and Gather's "lesbian" experiences. Rather than simply placing them and their work under the rubric "lesbian writers, we query their own acts of representation and self-representation right at the moment when new names for non-normative sexuality are becoming available, albeit initially in the pathologizing discourses of medicine and the criminalizing discourses of la w. I aim to move class discussions toward a complex ability to discuss what becomes available for us as readers of Stein and Gather if we think of them as "lesbian writers," while not simply and a historically applying postStonewall understandings that inevitably render them as not "out" lesbians, as "closeted." (6)

My point, here, is that our curricula our pedagogies might be energized by the unwieldiness, the ungainliness, of both our current and our earlier historical names, and by our necessary historical revisions of those names. Our efforts to name ourselves and our provisional solutions are centrally constitutive of our larger efforts to organize intellectually, institutionally, politically and pedagogically. Rather than bemoan the length of time such a discussion of naming might take and rather than apologize when others find humorous our long LGBTQ list, we might understand its necessity and its value. As I mentioned earlier, Riley makes a similar point about "the category of 'women' in history." She suggests that "`women' is indeed an unstable category, that this instability has a historical foundation, and that feminism is the site of the systematic fighting-out of that instability--which need not worry us." (7) For Riley, feminism, sometimes seemingly paralyzed by necessary resistance to and rearticulations o f the category "women," might be conceived as the space where this contest over names or categories is engaged in the interests of equality and freedom. Pedagogy, analogically, offers opportunities to foreground the perils and opportunities of taxonomy and to foreground our historical, strategic and provisional acts of naming in what and how we teach.

Not surprisingly, for oppressed groups--for those marked by "difference," marked as "different"--with our peculiar painful and celebratory relations to names, naming opens a contested border between our personal and historical experiences of being assaulted and limited by name-calling and our personal and historical and differing experiences of naming ourselves, of reclaiming and revising names. I am thinking here, for example, of the poetic and rhetorical border between uses of "queer." Once and still for many a painful stigmatizing weapon, it now serves for many of us a new sign of post-Stonewall identities being invented against the limitations of compulsory heterosexuality, and the limitations of self-identifying representations like "lesbian," "gay" or "bisexual." (8) I am suggesting, in other words, that we teach the complexity of our acts of naming and our self-identifications.

Our current names for ourselves--lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Queer--are names that invoke an historically particular set of identities tied to the late-twentieth century, and mostly to North American and Western European and to white and middle-class experiences. Moreover, those acts of naming, especially when we are articulated or articulate ourselves as just another minority group, may actually obscure our efforts to understand and to challenge larger systemic relations--such as "the regime of heterosexuality" (the phrase comes from Monique Wittig), or heterosexuality as an ideology and institution. For me, rather than articulating ourselves as merely a minority analogue ("we're just like you" and "we merely want the rights that others have"), naming and deconstructing the seemingly natural category of "the heterosexual" holds more liberatory potential, as I will suggest below.

On another level, my taxonomical preferences arise out of my own personal trajectory with and through names. "Coming out," in the 1970s into "gay liberation" with its radical in-your-face politics and its claim on a "liberation" inclusive of but larger than "gay rights" led to an assertive and relentless battle over the cultural ground represented by names. I am thinking of struggles with dominant media and government to force them to use the words "gay" and "lesbian," rather than "homosexual" or worse; of coalition efforts with other movements such as varied feminisms, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-war movements and working people's organizations where our agenda had to include getting named with our chosen names; and of efforts to reclaim, to disseminate and to produce our own cultures (e.g., book stores, film and theater festivals, lesbian and gay pride day).

However, for me, that earlier struggle shifted as "gay" gradually became a name that may be used as often in the interests of selling commodities to gay consumers or by enemies like the cultural conservative William Bennett. My earlier political positioning under the name of "gay" developed into a much more ambivalent and contradictory positioning both in and against radically differing uses of the name "gay." What had been a way of signifying cultural challenge became increasingly a way of advocating what I take to be an assimilationist politics that distances itself from radical challenges to compulsory heterosexuality in the hope of "equality" for sexual minorities or in the name of our supposed power as consumers. AT&T advertises itself as lesbian and gay friendly in mailings (perhaps distributed only to certain mailing lists) and some components of corporate capitalism are all too ready to appropriate our self-articulations and our homemade cultures in the interests of selling products (look at any issue of Out magazine). Gertrude Stein herself, still challenging enough to the literary enterprise of masterful interpretation to be read infrequently in English departments, nevertheless has been used as figure or allusion to advertise Absolut vodka, Barnes and Nobles, and a credit card--with her name imprinted next to Alice Toklas's on the familiar VISA card. "Really not to know what you are," indeed!

Not accidentally, while I was reinventing my personal political response to gay, I was beginning to shape an intellectual focus, in my graduate study of literature and culture, on modern American lesbian writers--such as Stein, Gather, and Elizabeth Bishop--who evade, resist and cover the names "lesbian" and "woman." I found, in other words, a way of thinking about my own personal political trajectory through names in my analogous study of writers who found reasons--albeit often politically conservative reasons--to resist both long-term categories of sex/gender and newly emergent categories of sexuality, especially in order to be writers. Some of all this historical (and, at times, deeply personal) complexity of naming needs to become available in our LGBTQ curricula and pedagogy; inclusion of simply and ahistorically defined "lesbian" and "gay" people that doesn't also question the historical emergence of identities in relation to power will not do it.

RHETORICAL INTERVENTION #2

My second suggested rhetorical intervention is a relatively small, but consistently significant (i.e., meaningful), rhetorical practice: naming heterosexuality. "Simply" using descriptive phrases such as "the heterosexual romance plot in this narrative" or this representation of heterosexual desire" subtly destabilizes the assumption that all romance plots are heterosexual or that all desire is somehow by definition heterosexual. Naming heterosexuality lifts it out of its status as taken for granted, as not requiring naming. Using the adjective "heterosexual" queers normative heterosexuality and seems ultimately more disruptive of heterosexuality as a norm than mere inclusion of lesbian and gay identities in our curricula, as necessary as that also is. I remember the 1970s gay liberation button: "How dare you presume I'm heterosexual?," a question that gestures toward, without naming, the large possibilities beyond normative heterosexuality. Simply using the word begins to make the assumed natural category of "heterosexual" a historical category, rather than an unchangeable identity that queer differences emerge in relation to. (9)

RHETORICAL INTERVENTION #3

My third suggestion for rhetorica] intervention emerges in the new language, articulations and understandings of transgender experiences and identities. The effectiveness of examining this language for experiences of identity arises precisely because it is so newly emergent, so obviously a recent possibility and so obviously challenging to many people, including many gay and lesbian people. For example what happens to our senses of sex/gender and sexuality identities with self-identification as transgender all but replacing the historically earlier self-identification as transexual, and the frequency with which transgender people no longer, to paraphrase Riley again, make a "final home" in claustrophobic identities of "man" and woman"? What happens to one's sense of knowing what lesbian, gay, woman or man mean if suddenly we are talking about a ftm (female-to-male) transgender person who identifies as gay? Or, if we are talking about a mtf (male-to-female) transgender person whose lovers are women? Transgende r people are opening up new and different articulations of sex/gender and sexuality and of the relations between sex/gender and sexuality. (10)

In the course that I have been discussing, we ask how we might use newly emergent and, hence, contemporary "trans" understandings to consider earlier "trans" articulations_such as Stein's and Cather's self-representations as masculine, Gather's frequent masculine narrator, or Stein's erotic poems use of "husband," "wife," or "Caesar." How might new ways of articulating gender, itself, as a flexible area of transformation and transgression make legible some of the very aspects of Gather and Stein that became particularly hard to understand within the gender frames of some of 1970s and 1980s feminist literary and cultural criticism's rush "to re-discover," to include, and to celebrate "women"? If Gather's and Stein's supposed "masculine" identifications have proven problematic for a feminism articulated relatively uncritically around and in the interests of the categories "woman" and "women," how might they be re-read both in terms of contemporary claims on "female masculinity," as Judith Halberstram puts it, a nd on "butch" lesbian histories, and in terms of transgender understandings of gender articulations and embodiments? (11)

RHETORICAL INTERVENTION #4

The fourth rhetorical intervention I suggest is an explicit discussion of how little control we have over how identity categories will be read or interpreted when we use them. In as much as identity categories exist outside of our self-representations (the problem that Stein worries about in the earlier quotation), we can hardly predict how those who listen to us or read us will interpret our language or our other expressive acts. We are, in other words, represented through others' understandings of our expressive acts, as much as our self-representations come from our "inside" sense of ourselves or our self-owned identities. Our self-representations, our bodies (our forms of embodiment), our names for ourselves--these are all necessarily taken up and interpreted by others, using the understandings they have available.

These problems of expression and being interpreted were, of course, enacted in the conversational meltdown that occurred in the anecdote with which I began, where one well-meaning, presumably heterosexual, male student attempted to use the language of "butch/femme," only to be taken as homophobic by another presumably heterosexual male student whose authority claim came from his mother being a lesbian. This anecdote illustrates the lack of control we immediately have once we start to engage a language of identity. Despite my voice of authority in this classroom moment, I was also under supervision as a "junior" faculty member. Moreover, the students involved had different claims on the material (i.e., authority claims which one can't always predict), like the student whose self-claimed authority and investment came from having a lesbian mother. This teaching moment suggests the possibility that queer subjects and approaches might take as their central learning goal an understanding that identities and our lan guage for identities are not stable over time and context. Consequently, it's really a matter of describing identities and our language for identities through history, across cultural differences and in dialogue.

This queer pedagogical goal--teaching this delicate rhetorical, and political, negotiation of historically contingent "names," or categories

of sex/gender and sexuality identities--seems, to some extent, to be at odds with efforts merely to include representations of and texts by lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, or transgender people. Moreover, communicating identity to others must necessarily complicate what teachers think they are doing when they "come out" in their classrooms. I've had many discussions with other LGBTQ teachers over the years about the need to "come out," and I would never deny that young adults and youth, especially LGBTQ young adults and youth, need visible LGBTQ faculty. However, I find it more useful not to employ a conventional "coming out" moment in my classrooms, finding it more provocative not to stabilize any particular readings of me (and, also, not to make myself the replacement for the texts we are considering). Yet, even as I don't really come out as anything particular in my cla ssrooms, I do obviously position myself outside of heterosexuality by naming it as such and I do obviously position myself inside some kind of queerness because of what I teach and the particular or local language and knowledge that comes easily to me.

In concluding, I note, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that "the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.., all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead." (12) In other words, we might ask where do we want to travel and how--by what means--rather than what makes a comfortable home, or what Riley rejects as a claustrophobic "final home." What names will carry us--and which of us--along, up to and perhaps across what borders? I want to have it both ways: we need to be seen or visible, and not simply seen. Historical experience as LGBTQ people needs to be seen and honored, and needs to be seen as historical, that is, as changing and revisable. We need to be "out," but as what?; "out" but not the representation of "lesbian," "gay," or even "queer"; secure and safe as LGBTQ, but also not simply reducible to those names, especially in their minoritizing and assimilationist discourses : "it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing." And, yet, that difficulty--understanding it as a difficulty, while learning the historical names for sexual identities, while unlearning them as ahistorical certainties--seems to be the very goal of teaching queerly.

1 See "Difficulty for Whom?: Teachers' Discourse About Difficult Students" in Learning As We Teach: Writing Instructors Discuss "Difficult Situations" in the Composition Classroom. Ed. Matthew Parfitt and Dawn Skorczewski. (Boynton-Cook, forthcoming).

2 And, yes, I do think that this long, unwieldy list is necessary in our contemporary moment if we are to honor the multiple forms of self- identification occurring among LGBTQ people.

3 Gertrude Stein. Everybody's Autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993. 94.

4 Diana Fuss. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. N.Y: Routledge, 1989.

5 Denise Riley. "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1988. 6.

6 Willa Cather (1873-1947) and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) are almost exactly contemporary, both coming of age in the late 19th century when sexual categories (e.g., homosexuality, heterosexuality, female and male inversion, etc.) were beginning to emerge as pathologies and as criminality, that is, as initially articulated in medicine and law. The category, "lesbian," doesn't enter common usage until the 1920s when Cather and Stein are both well into mid-life. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The New Woman as Androgyne: Sociaal Disorder and Gender Crisis 1870-1936." Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985. 245-296.); George Chauncey Jr. "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance." (Salmagundi 8-59 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983): 114-146.); and Esther Newton, "The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman." (The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs. Ed. Estelle B. Freedman et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 7-25.).

7 Ibid. 5.

8 I am thinking both of recent political and generational differences over the use of "queer" and of older struggles over using or not using the category "bisexual." Put simply, many lesbian and gay people, hearing the slur and not the reclaiming, feel hurt by our use of "queer," while many of us find in it much less claustrophobia than we do in lesbian or gay. While "bisexual" has certainly worked differently for women, as a formerly "gay," and now "queer," man in my mid-40s, I can remember in the 1970s (the days of "gay liberation") thinking that "bisexual" was really only another name for the closet. Yes, my attitude has changed, and largely because of my sense of changing uses of "bisexual" among queer people younger than I.

9 My students, when they read Jonathan Ned Katz's "The Heterosexual Comes Out: From Doctor Discourse to Mass Media" in The Invention of Heterosexuality (N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1996. 83-112.), are regularly surprised to discover that heterosexuality is also an historically changing identity and that it emerges, like homosexuality, first as a perversion in medical discourses.

10 Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (Routledge, 1994); Leslie Feinberg, Tram Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (Beacon, 1999); Minnie Bruce Pratt, S/he (Firebrand, 1995).

11 Judith Halberstrom, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1999).

12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," Essays and Lectures (Ed. Joel Porte. N.Y.: Library of America, 1983.) 463.

HUGH ENGLISH is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of College Writing Programs (Writing Across the Curriculum Coordinator) at Queens College-CUNY In addition to his work in the WAC Program, Curriculum and Faculty Development, Hugh regularly teaches College Writing (or First-year Composition), Introduction to Poetry, Modern American Literature courses, and, at the Masters level, Composition Theory and Literacy Studies. His current research includes revision of his manuscript, "By Being Outside: Gertrude Stein's Imaginative Claim on America"; ongoing work on a textbook project, "URBAN CONSTRUCTIONS: Reading and Writing for Contemporary College Students"; and several essaysin-progress on rhetorical subjectivity; on Stein's student readers, and on our figures for the work of writing program administration.