Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Next Wave: New Directions in Womens Studies)

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And, of course, despite the widespread lip service paid to the "intersectionality" of the various forms of oppression,2 it is the case that, in the United States, our political and institutional practices were in the s and remain now profoundly determined by a liberal discourse that consti- tutes subjects as analogous subjects of social identities who contend for "equal" representation and participation in "democratic" institutions with the white male bourgeois subjects who are the normative subjects of rights.

In our institu- tionalizing practices, then, we would seem to be forgetting our own scholarship. Most crucially, what is "forgotten" in our construction of identity- based academic programs is a critique of capitalism. According to Marx, the fetishization of commodities, the attribution to commodities an inherent value, is possible because1 value does not result from individual labor but from labor as part of a larger social process, a social process that it is difficult for individuals to perceive. So, for example, in our institution-building on behalf of women or gays and lesbians or people of color, we tend to forget that these identities do not have inherent autonomous value but are produced by us as we participate through our individual labor in social-production processes.

To "remember" the cri- tique of capitalism would be to locate and analyze our academic produc- tion within larger economic and political contexts and to see how, in pro- ducing identity-based knowledge and subjects, we participate in global capitalist processes. Focusing on the particularly complex case of the relationship between Women's Studies and lgb studies, I will argue that contemporary capital- ism is a context that is both enabling and disabling, both facilitating and co-opting our efforts. However, explaining the ways in which our work is facilitated and co-opted is only part of the story: Both Women's Studies and lgb studies are still seen as a threat—more of a threat to national formations than to global capital, but to national formations that are certainly not yet irrelevant to capital.

Atavistic social movements attack feminism Instead, in fact, she criticizes the view that "women's movements are symptoms of globalization, rather than the result of autonomous movements for female emancipation" Tax The mtimate ties between feminist movements and labor movements around the globe and in U. While explicating the complicity of feminism with modernization and globalization is a far too ambitious project for this essay, I do hope here to explore the complicity between contemporary capitalist discourse and the institutional formation of Women's Studies and lgb studies.

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The authorizing discourse for establishing discrete identity-based units sug- gests that we are attempting to serve particular students or to create legitimacy and attract resources for scholarly projects that are dismissed and neglected in conventional departments. Although it is certainly the case that such programs open a space for interventionist and emancipa- tory scholarship and activism, I would like to suggest, in addition, that the institutional structures of discrete programs and departments that we adopt are implicated in and determined by transformations in the global formation of capitalism in ways that undermine their emancipa- tory potential.

In arguing that our practices are complicit with capital, I state only the inevitable and obvious. There is nothing we do that is not deeply en- meshed in capitalism. At a recent National Women's Studies Association meeting, Gudrun Fonfa, speaking from the audience, described herself as a practicing lesbian separatist and said that she found the idea of queer studies as opposed to lesbian feminism to be as unthinkable as a Marxist-capitalist coalition.

I might say that it is my fondest hope to embody a queer Marxist-capitalist coalition. There is no pure outside, and attempts to produce such purity will almost certainly be oppressive. Rather than damning our practices as capitalist, what I mean to do in describing their location within capital is to make us aware of our own productivity so that we can understand the constraints on and conse- quences of our actions and make the possible interventions. Rubin's piece is in significant part an argument against a Marxism that would subsume feminism as a secondary super- structural issue. I do not mean here to invoke a vulgar economic de- terminism.

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Rather, as Spivak argues in "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" , I understand the discourses of gender, race, sexuality, and nation to supplement a discourse of economic value that is by itself "discontinuous. Rather than Miranda Joseph seeing race, class, gender, and sexuality as equivalent or analogous cate- gories, Spivak suggests that these discourses of domination support an international division of labor that allows capitalism a process of exploi- tation to function.

It thus "excludes the fields of force that make [each of] them heterogeneous, indeed discontinuous," and "it is to exclude those relationships between the[m] that are attribu- tive and supportive and not analogical" Spivak A critique of analogy will be central to my arguments. It has been important to the liberal pluralist discourse of the nation-state, as well. Following Spivak, I find supple- mentarity to be an important tool in this critique.

Supplementarity has been a crucial deconstructive lever in dealing with binary oppositions; it is also quite a useful lever in dealing with analogies, which, like binaries, presuppose that the objects under consideration are externally discrete and internally coherent. Reading supplementarity reverses that presup- position, showing that the objects are externally connected and internally incoherent.



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In thinking about building political movements, the recogni- tion of external connections and internal incoherences is useful not only for revealing complicity, but also for revealing opportunities on which non-identitarian movements and institutions might be built. I hope in my discussion of Women's Studies and lgb studies to push through the analogic comparison between the two toward a constructive appropria- tion of their incoherencies and interconnections. Analogic Discourse, the Nation-State, and Capitalism The liberal nation-state has operated through the relentless interplay of binary exclusion and analogic inclusion.

Although it is at first imagined as the site of otherness, a classed, raced, sexualized, opium- infused culture that embodied the forbidden desires of a consolidating white bourgeoisie, Chinatown was then re-envisioned as a version of that bourgeoisie itself. This sequence of constructions allowed it to be viewed, in its second manifestation, as a lesser, always striving, instance of bour- geois culture that was still unequal to white culture. The controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts nea yields another example.

As I describe in my essay on the nea, "The Perfect Moment" , in argu- ing against the conservatives who saw the funding of gay art by the nea as the legitimation of a homosexuality that should be excluded from the nation, Senator Daniel Moynihan made an analogy between those artists now subject to censorship and the white ethnic groups, now included, who were once subject to censorship.

In urging the inclusion by analogy of a new set of groups, he also legitimates the hierarchical positioning of those new-comers as available for exploitation; they are cast as offering, through their difference their difference being their experience of suf- fering , an enrichment to the lives of the normative white, straight bour- geois subjects who are implicitly addressed in Moynihan's speech. The interplay of binary logic and analogy has operated in economic discourse, as well. Adam Smith and David Ricardo both describe a world of national economies that are comparable to each other on the basis of their wealth and productive abilities in various industries or soil quality.

But they also initiate a comparative dis- course that suggests that nations can be ranked in relation to one another and that some division of productive tasks will be to the advantage of all. Although the binary logic that establishes national boundaries was a particularly prominent narrative structure in the era of Fordist nation- based mass production and consumption, in our post-Fordist era of "globalization" and niched production and consumption, analogy has emerged as the dominant narrative structure though it has by no means fully displaced the discourse of national competitiveness. With regard to consumption, gays and lesbians are also just another form of family to whom advertisements for cars, dining- room tables, and other commodities can be addressed.

President Bill Clinton justified Inter- national Monetary Fund imp intervention in Indonesia by saying that Indonesians are like Mexicans previous subjects of imf intervention in being a potential market for "our" goods, and thus I suppose they are like gays and African Americans and Christians. As it did in the liberal plural- ist discourse of the nation-state, the deployment of analogy in the dis- course of globalization works to incorporate all sorts of subjects as equiv- alent but not equal producers and consumers.

Inevitably, the use of analogy elides both internal discontinuities, such as gender hierarchies within kinship-based communities of production, and exter- nal connections, such as the dependence of Sihcon Valley entrepreneurs on immigrant sweatshop workers who produce the chips they design.

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As Ricardo naturalized differences of national wealth in differences of soil quality, the deployment of analogy in globalization discourse legitimates differences of wealth and wage rates in cultural differences and elides the global processes by which various sites have been forcibly arranged on the ladder of so-called development or modernization or civilization. As Janet Jakobsen points out, citing Laclau and Mouffe , the articulation of equiva- lence among social struggles can make those struggles recognizable on the mainstream political landscape—and potential allies for one another Jakobsen [forthcoming].

However, Jakobsen argues, analogy also separates such movements and elides their connections with one another. It is crucial in thinking about analogy to recognize that it is relation- ships being compared and not objects themselves, so the sat analogy test takes the form of: A is to A's domain as X is to X's domain Robinson As Foucault says of the use of analogy in the sixteenth century, "Its power is immense, for the similitudes of which it treats are not the visible, substantial ones between things themselves; they need only be the more subtle resemblance of relations.

Disencumbered thus, it can extend, from a single given point, to an endless number of relationships" That it is relations being compared is also crucial in that it is the isolation of the objects in their own domains that renders each object autonomous internally continuous and externally discrete and thus rankable in relation to other objects. Judith Butler illustrates the use of analogy to elide connection in her essay, "Against Proper Objects" According to Butler, the introduction to the Reader asserts that the proper object of gay and les- bian studies is sexuality, while the proper object of feminist studies is gender.

It thus suggests that sexuality and gender are discrete domains. As Butler points out, this account of feminist scholarship is certainly a slight to the extensive work on sexuality that has been done under the rubric of feminism, even while it would seem to suggest that sexual difference is not a crucial issue for the study of sexuality. Likewise, in "The Ethics of Analogy," Robinson points out that the frequently de- ployed analogy between race and sexuality "segregates race and sexuality as objects of analytic and political attention" and "presumes the norma- tive whiteness of the gay subject" Although she is right to point to the problematic production of internal continuity through the use of analogy, I would suggest that the internal discontinuity she notes for lgb studies is not the feature that differentiates it from other "other" studies, which are also "unstable amalgamations" that have been produced through "complex conflu- ences.

Butler suggests that the analogic pairing of feminist studies and gay and lesbian studies, "a binary frame," excludes from consideration other relevant issues, such as race and class. I think she is actually wrong. Although analogy and binary logics do work in complicity, she conflates them too quickly. Binary logic is a discourse of exclusion, a simple deter- mination of us and them, a mode of self-definition by abjection. Ana- logics work in precisely the opposite fashion; analogies include, making the other known.

As Robinson argues, for instance, the analogy between race and sexuality implies that race is the known term by which we come to know and make familiar a second, unfamiliar terra. Although analogy most frequently might be used to compare two objects, it actu- ally generates a potentially open series of known and included objects. The implication of the analogic comparison of Women's Studies and gender and lgb studies and sexuality is not that race or class should not be considered but, rather, that they should be considered separately, under the rubric of "race studies" or "class studies.

It is quite telling that there is no analogically constituted study of class. Analogy and Complicity Jakobsen's essay addresses the common analogy between Jews and Queers. She argues that we need to move beyond an analogic under- standing to a recognition of complicity in the construction of the cate- gories.

She points out that the co-articulation of Jews and Queers in Cold War rhetoric posited them not merely as analogous but also as act- ing together to subvert America. This Cold War anti-Semitic and anti- homosexual discourse, she argues, played a crucial part in a postwar racist resurgence, consolidating white supremacy, rendering blacks the visible enemies in contrast to the invisible Jewish-Queer enemy.

She proposes that we might appropriate this complicity, this negative articu- lation of cooperation between Jews and Queers, as a positive site of alliance. The strategy she proposes—a positive appropriation of com- plicity rather than the elaboration of analogy—might be a useful strategy for thinking about the relationship between Women's Studies and lgb studies. Analogic Discourse, Women's Studies, and LGB Studies at the University of Arizona I will in this section take up a rather different discursive strategy and style to tell a story about the relationship between Women's Studies and lgb studies at the University of Arizona ua.

Although other institutions would provide different stories and, undoubtedly, others at ua would tell the story differently, I tell my own story here because it has shaped and been shaped by the theoretical perspective offered earlier. This story, I hope, reveals the impact and enactment of capitalist and nationalist dis- courses at the local level and disrupts the analogy between lgb studies and Women's Studies. At the same time, it founded the Lesbian Looks Film and Video series, which, under Beverly Seckinger's direction, has remained one of lgb studies' major programs.

The next few years, however, saw an increasing separation between Women's Studies and lgb studies—due both to Women's Stud- ies' efforts to push and my efforts to pull lgb studies out of Women's Studies. Why was the initially complex articulation be- tween the two projects unsustainable? This funding was not continued after the first year, during which year Arizona's governor Fife Symington launched an attack on a course about transgenderism taught by an unpaid graduate student at Northern Arizona University. Efforts to regain funding for an lgb coordinator had a peculiar outcome: Women's Studies agreed to use a line to hire in the field of sexuality studies but did not include the coordinatorship of lgb studies in the structure of the line.

In other words, the line which I fill , rathertiian being complexly articulated between Women's Studies and lgb studies, was fully incorporated within Women's Studies. The search process itself became a battle over candidates who were imagined to be more or less willing to subordinate sexuality to gender, more or less willing to participate in the norms of the Women's Studies community.

After a bloody battle, I emerged as the compromise candidate and arrived at a department riven with tension over the relationship between Wom- en's Studies and lgb studies. Although I was not committed in an a priori way to institutional sepa- ration between lgb studies and Women's Studies, my own scholarly identity was transformed when I was processed through the identity- Analogy and Complicity political job market and took up a job within the identitarian structure of academic programs at ua. Rather than finding a job in which I could practice the poststructuralist, post-Marxist approach to culture and so- ciety in which I had been trained in the Modem Thought and literature Program at Stanford University, a cultural studies program, at least dur- ing my time there , I was hired into a Women's Studies department as "the lesbian," was expected to and did become the head of lgb studies,17 and, to satisfy my own interests, also affiliated with ccls.

Never having previously thought of myself as doing Women's Studies or lgb studies, as being a "Marxist," 1 now do Women's Studies and lgb studies, I am a Marxist, and I have become one of the Big Dykes on Campus, which is to say a highly visible and surveilled representative of lesbianism. This transformation has not, of course, been seamless, and my own efforts to separate lgb studies from Women's Studies were largely due to my discomfort with my location in Women's Studies.

Founded in , my department in was still '"70s feminist," in the sense that straight white bourgeois women dominated the agenda and the faculty of the department and in the sense that the ethos of the department was very much about communality and familiality. As Myra Dinnerstein de- scribes in her essay on her experience as the founding director of the program, "A Political Education" , a sense of community, of mu- tual support, understanding, and pleasure, along with a sense of being on a mission on behalf of women, were the central motivations and rewards experienced by the group of women who founded the program.

For me, and I think for the large cohort of junior faculty who joined the department in the mids, this ethos of communality felt like a nor- mative imposition. But, of course, we had not shared in the struggles that had been bonding experiences for the founders. Although many are quick to interpret my alienation as "generational," I find the generational narrative too progressive and self- congratulatory. As Linda Garber rightly argues at every opportunity, feminism in the s was not exclusively or even primarily '"70s feminism" in the sense in which I have used the term Miranda Joseph here, nor do all those who were feminists in the '70s share the same views and desires now.

However, it is the case that the particular history of my department produced a stark division between senior and junior faculty—a division that has happily been disrupted by recent senior hires. The Pull In this context, lgb studies appeared as an opportunity, as a space in which I could act independently of my department to elaborate a profes- sional, intellectual, and social subjectivity that was not supported by my department.

As for the founders of Women's Studies, the role of desire for a variety of forms of professional and political sociality in the devel- opment of lgb studies at ua cannot be underestimated; the birth and dramatic growth of lgb studies at ua has clearly been due to what Spivak would call "affective desire for labor.

But in large part due to the work done by the Women's Studies founders, our desires were quite different from theirs; rather than looking from the margins of the academy for the comfort of local community, Jakobsen and I have had the privilege of working from tenure-line positions in Women's Studies toward participation in national scholarly networks. Although the notion of representing and serving an identity-based con- stituency certainly comes into play in our fund-raising activities, we have generally been quite explicit between ourselves that we are creating a space intended to facilitate our own intellectual and professional develop- ment.

Conveniently misunderstanding the existing relationship between the two units and encouraged by the senior Women's Studies faculty, I have disarticulated lgb studies from Women's Studies and ultimately formally relocated lgb studies within ccls. It nevertheless continues to be the case that much of the lgb studies labor is provided by faculty whose lines are in Women's Studies. The fact that this "opportunity" took the form of yet another identity- political unit is no accident: The eagerness of the institution various deans, departments, the ua Diversity Action Council, etc.

On one hand, this money rewarded sheer Analogy and Complicity productivity, in relation to which the content of our work was irrelevant, and a large portion of the monies "given" to us were seen by the "givers" as venture capital, money that we would use to bring in more money from outside sources through grant-writing.

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In The University in Ruins , Bill Readings argues that the project of the universities for much of the twentieth century has been to produce national subjects through the study of, and training of students in, na- tional cultures and histories. He suggests, however, that the university has undergone a significant transformation in conjunction with the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism, a shift that entails a decentering and disempowering of the nation-state. He argues that the success of the critiques of traditional disciplines, the emergence of interdisciplinary studies across the university a development that probably finds its legiti- mating impetus in the sciences , and the proliferation of "other" studies programs show that the role of the universities in subject and object formation has shifted.

The university, he says, is now the "university of excellence," where quantity rather than quality of knowledge production is key, and where the subjectivity produced can be fragmentary and par- ticularized as long as it is also homogeneously productive, as long as the subjects produced bear analogous relations to capital, to production and consumption. Readings's story is too neat in a number of respects.

Certainly, the nationalist university was never the idealized Habermasian bourgeois public sphere for which he seerris to yearn; nor was the nation ever as bounded and coherent as he seems to imagine it. Mean- while, we are not quite done with the nation, as the ongoing exclusionary work of cultural conservatives clearly demonstrates. As Lowe points out, contemporary racial conflicts in the United States are the "material leg- acy of America's imperial past Lowe argues that immi- gration policy has been an ongoing attempt to resolve contradictions Miranda Joseph between the nation-state and the global economy.

We might likewise see debates over public educational policy and ideology—struggles over "aca- demic standards" that code discussions of open admissions, affirmative action, canon reform, and the emergence of Women's Studies, ethnic studies, and lgb studies—as attempts to deal with contradictions be- tween nationalism and economic globalization. However, we might read these debates as revealing not a contradiction but a complex strategy in which the binary exclusionary discourse of nationalism supplements the analogic inclusionary discourse of globalization to produce a hierarchy of political and economic subjects.

Although he dispenses with the nation rather too quickly, Readings's analysis of capital is oddly dated in focusing only on capitalism's produc- tion of equivalence. Capitalism has always produced and depended on cultural difference to constitute an international division of labor, but the narrative articulating Fordist mass production and consumption econo- mies did emphasize the erasure of difference and the production of equivalence within the nation.

The discourse of post-Fordist capitalism is, by contrast, explicit about its need for and production of "diversity. Readings's argument suggests that both the university and capital are indifferent to the qualities of the subjects and objects being produced and consumed, and although this production of equivalence certainly is one side of the process of capital expansion, the other side is the pro- duction of meaningful differences that allow subjects to be slotted into particular roles within the process of exploitation.

Contemporary inclu- sionary educational policy, including the institutionalization of identity political programs and departments, has to be understood as simul- taneously homogenizing an increasingly heterogeneous student pop- ulation for the market economy Lowe In our Wom- en's Studies and lgb studies practices, in producing both subjects and ob- jects of knowledge, we simultaneously produce commodities for identity- based consumption and the subjects of identity who will produce in niched industries and consume niche-marketed commodities.

Before I can begin to deconstruct gender, I first must construct gender, must persuade the diverse array of general-education students who find their way into my classroom that women are op- pressed, a fact I don't believe in facts that they find hard to believe. Not so jokingly, my pet name for the course is "bad things that happen to women. My task in the "Introduc- tion to Sexuality Studies" class is equally peculiar. Faced with non-urban general-education students who have little conception of the contempo- rary urban gay and lesbian community, culture, and history that orga- nizes my own identity and scholarship—most do not know what Stone- wall is—I find myself trying to produce for them this object only in order to try to take it apart as a social construction.

Again, I am inviting them to participate in a narrative of identity and community that I actually find deeply problematic. What is it that they will, at best, do with these narratives of identity? Purchase the long-distance phone services or credit cards addressed to those identities?

Sign the petition supporting American Airlines for its gay-friendly policies that has circulated so relentlessly on e-mail listservs? Become Women's Studies majors? Become feminist or gay "activists," which now means working at a nongovernmental organization? The emphasis in Women's Studies in particular on "practice" is often mani- fested as internship programs that slot our students into exploitative labor in nonprofit organizations.

Given the predominance of women in nonprofit administration, I might very well argue, in the narrowest Althusserean sense, that we act as an ideological apparatus generating particularized subjects for the workforce. The Push Having failed in the search process to hire someone who would see sexuality as subordinate to gender, the senior faculty in Women's Studies began to articulate lgb studies as costly to Women's Studies.

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The costs that were named at various times included not only my teaching and service labor, but also my loyalty. So, for instance, I found myself ex- plicitly asked to prove my loyalty to Women's Studies by "choosing" to teach "Introduction to Women's Studies" instead of "Introduction to Sexuality Studies. While at some level this accounting seems rational, it is based on a set of highly problematic zero-sum presup- positions.