booknotes: nearly-vacation round-up

Once again I've managed to pile up a whole stack of books that handwriting's on the wall I won't make the time to properly review. Either I don't have enough to say about them, or the thoughts are too disparate to form a coherent narrative, or I've had to return them to the library, etc. And so as Hanna and I are gathering ourselves for a trip to Michigan next week, I thought I'd pull together another list of not-quite-booknotes for stuff I've been reading.

Bright, Susie and Rachel Kramer Bussel, eds. | Best Sex Writing 2012 (Cleis Press, 2012). Susie Bright frames this year's anthology in the following way: "On one side of the current sex news we have the orgasm guru, the pleasure benefactor, the inspirational bohemian ... the writers of these pieces describe an erotic identity unfettered by shame, a marvel in all its variety, the authentic glue that keeps us going, both literally and philosophically ... [on the other side] fearmongers of our 21st-century Gilded Age are fanatical about social control through sex, largely using women and young children as bait" (viii). So, you know, she obviously has a perspective! But it's Susie Bright, so what did you expect, and for the most part I'm on board with that perspective, so I'm willing to hop on for the ride. It was a good collection, but in a lot of ways made me sad about how unable we are as a culture to talk about and appreciate human sexuality. You can check out the anthology's full table of contents, read Rachel Kramer Bussel's introduction, and watch a web video book trailer over at the book website.

Clarke, Ted | Brookline, Allston-Brighton, and the Renewal of Boston (The History Press, 2010). Growing up and living in the same town for twenty-seven years, I took for granted knowing the basic contours of local history. I've lived here in Boston since 2007 -- working at the Massachusetts Historical Society no less! -- and what with one thing and another still know relatively little about the history of the Boston metropolitan area. But I've been working on a research project recently that's actually pushed me to delve a bit more into local history. More on that eventually, when I've got the paper written, but in the meantime it was fun to spend an afternoon reading Ted Clarke's brief overview of Boston and its relationship to Brookline and Allston-Brighton, both of which I spend a lot of time in. Lack of footnotes and a bibliography make me take Clarke's historical narrative with a grain of salt, but reading his book has prompted me to consider more deeply the history of the area I now call home.


Michaelson, Jay | God vs. Gay?: The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon Press, 2011). Part of the Queer Action/Queer Ideas series edited by Michael Bronski, Michaelson's God vs. Gay, as the subtitle suggests, makes a "religious case" for recognizing queer sexuality as part of the variety of God's creation. An observant Jew with a background in New Testament scholarship, Michaelson admits up-front that he'll focus on Judeo-Christian tradition. What I like best about this slim volume is its emphasis not so much on how homophobic interpretations of scripture are incorrect and ahistorical (though he covers that), but about the religious injunctions toward lovingkindness for humanity. "Loneliness is the first problem of creation," Michaelson writes, "and love comes to solve it" (6). While this book is not likely to convince the Biblical literalist, it may give sex-positive religious folks some new, and possibly more effective, language to talk about why human sex, gender, and sexual diversity can be part of religious life rather than a departure from it.

Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth | Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children (Yale U.P., 2012). I picked up psychoanalyst Young-Bruehl's book hoping for a good systemic analysis of the social marginalization (and simultaneous idealization/objectification) of young people in our culture. Indeed, Young-Bruehl's goal in writing the book was to introduce the term "childism" as something equivalent to "sexism" or "racism" that would help us identify the patterns of age-based prejudice and stereotyping which lead to age-segregation, intolerance, and inequality. Frustratingly, this is not that book. As a therapist and theorist whose work focused primarily on children who were subject to physical and emotional abuse, Young-Bruehl's narrative actually works against her desire to convince her audience that age-based prejudice against young people is a thing in the world. Her examples are so obvious and horrific (children who were sexually abused by family members, gross neglect, etc.) that readers not already thinking in terms of inequality will say, "Yes, of course that's wrong! Children should be protected!" but likely fail to examine their own every-day prejudices about children's ability to participate in society. In addition, her rhetoric and examples are, for obvious reasons, wrapped up in psychoanalytic language and often in response to very specific developments within the professional fields in which she practiced. Hopefully, this book will speak to her fellow practitioners and shift the debate in healthy directions. However, to the non-specialized reader she comes off out of touch with the parents and activists who have been speaking out regularly on this issue consistently in online spaces and through real-world actions (like protests against the freak-outs over breastfeeding in public). For an introduction to the concept of age-based prejudice, I'd recommend Helping Teens Stop Violence, Build Community, and Stand For Justice.

Younge, Gary | Who Are We -- and Should It Matter in the Twenty-First Century? (Nation Books, 2011). English-born journalist Gary Younge explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of our identities, politicized and otherwise. I admit that I was a bit wary, given the title of this book, that Younge's thesis would be reduced to a call for the end to "identity politics" -- but Who Are We is much more than that. Even though the text wanders at times, I found his thoughtful treatment of the many ways in which we invoke our many-layered identities (and society invokes them for us, sometimes contrary to our own self-understanding) to be extremely nuanced and articulate. Growing up black and working-class in England during the 1970s, Younge has a clear understanding of how inequality shapes self-awareness: "Those who feel without identity [the powerful] do not see the need to meet people halfway and thereby fail to recognize that everyone else is doing all the traveling" (45). He eloquently treats such thorny subjects as the present-day use of the term "political correctness," questions of intersectionality (how pitting "African-American" against "woman" in the oppression olympics ignores the existence of people who are both), and the importance of honoring self-definition: "We should honor self-definition not to humor the subject but because it is infinitely preferable to allowing anyone to be defined by others" (84). I'd highly recommend this book for anyone interested in how our self-identities and community affiliations become politicized -- and how those politics can both support and detract from the quest for equality.

Nestle, Joan | A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings (Cleis Press, 1998). A Fragile Union brings together a series of fiction and non-fiction pieces by lesbian activist Joan Nestle, one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (one of the largest community-based archives chronicling queer women's history in the world \o/). Published over a decade ago, when Nestle was with colon cancer, this work stands as a fractured memoir, bringing together pieces reflecting back into her mid-twentieth-century adolescence, the early years of gay liberation, and feminist activism, and forward into the future of queer identities and practices. Given my reading list over the past few months, I particularly appreciated the moments at which Nestle's experiences overlap and converse with the work of others in her cohort, such as Gayle Rubin and Pat Califia. And for obvious reasons, I hold a special place in my heart for the anyone who has done as much as Nestle to ensure the survival of primary source materials on queer women's lives for future generations to plunder for story-telling, history-making potential.

Cross-posted at The Pursuit of Harpyness.

booknotes: deviations

find table of contents here

For the past couple of months I've been making my way through Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke University Press, 2011), an anthology of writings by anthropologist and feminist theorist Gayle S. Rubin whom I'm ashamed to admit I didn't actually know anything about before I stumbled upon the advance review galleys of this book. Rubin  is a cultural anthropologist whose research delves into the history and culture of urban sexual subcultures, particularly BDSM communities. As a newly-out lesbian in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she designed her own Women's Studies major at the University of Michigan and became active in the Women's Movement and also the Gay Liberation Movement. In the late 70s and early 80s -- in part because of her academic research into BDSM -- she drew the ire of anti-porn feminist activists for her insistence that (wait for it) not all pornographic materials are inherently degrading to women. Yeah, I know. The more I read about it, the more it seems like the early 80s must have been a really weird time to be a self-identified feminist. Not to mention one who was also a lesbian and open about her s/M desires and practices.

Deviations is arranged in chronological order, beginning with Rubin's first attempt to construct a theory of gender relations rooted in anthropological methodology -- "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," written and revised between the late 60s and early 70s and first published in 1975. It is very much an artifact of its time and to be honest I bogged in this piece for the better part of a month after joyfully burning my way through the eminently readable introduction. Perhaps recognizing the opacity of "Traffic," Rubin includes a piece reflecting back on the writing and reception of the original piece and includes it in the anthology -- something she does several times throughout the book to great effect. After "Traffic" and its contextual essay comes a much more accessible piece on the English author Renee Vivien, originally written as an introduction and afterward to a new edition of Vivien's A Woman Appeared Before Me, which is a fictionalized account of her tumultuous relationship with fellow author and outspoken lesbian-feminist Natalie Barney.

By the late 70s, Rubin was deep into the ethnographic research for her dissertation on the gay male leather bars of San Francisco, for which she received her PhD in 1994 from the University of Michigan. The majority of pieces in Deviations, therefore, wrestle not with the politics of gender or specifically lesbian-feminist history, but the politics of sexual practices, sexual subcultures, and the relationship between feminist theory and practice and human sexuality. As someone who is, like Rubin, committed to understanding the world through both a feminist and queer lens, I really appreciate her determination to remain engaged in feminist thinking and activism even as she was reviled by certain segments of the feminist movement for her "deviations" in sexual practice, and her openness to thinking about sexual subcultures that -- for many in our culture, even many self-identified feminists -- elicit feelings of disgust and generate sex panics. While the "porn wars" of the 1980s are largely a thing of the past, feminists continue to find sexuality, sexual desires, sexual practices, and sexual fantasy (whether private or shared via erotica/porn of whatever medium) incredibly difficult to speak about. Rubin calls upon us to think with greater clarity about the politics of sex, and how we police other peoples' sexual activities, many of them consensual, simply because we find them distasteful.

Particularly controversial, I imagine, are Rubin's writings on cross-generational sexual activities and children's sexuality. Coming out of the BDSM framework, Rubin foregrounds the basic ethic of consent and argues that children have just as much right to consent to sexual activities as adults. Furthermore, within the framework of 1980s anti-pornography legislation, she emphasizes the difference between fantasy/desire and reality/action (that is: depiction of non-consensual sex in the context of a fantasy does not equal non-consensual sex and shouldn't be treated in the same fashion). This leads her to speak up in defense of adults who express sexual desire for young people (but don't act on that desire), and also to suggest that not all instances of underage/overage sexual intimacy should be treated as sexual abuse or assault. Read in tandem with Rubin's insistence that we take children seriously as human beings with the right to sexual knowledge, this advocacy is clearly not a call to minimize the trauma of sexual violence (at whatever age) or a glossing over of age-related power dynamics. "The notion that sex per se is harmful to the young has been chiseled into extensive social and legal structures," she writes, "designed to insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience" (159). Like Judith Levine in Harmful to Minors (2002), Rubin argues that our cultural insistence on keeping young people separated from sexuality and sensuality -- with a vigilance that often spills over into panic and hysteria -- does little to protect them from sexual violence and exploitation while cutting them off from the means to conduct their own (safe, consensual) sexual explorations or name and resist the violence and exploitation that may come their way. Sexting panics anyone? The Purity Myth?

Overall, I highly recommend Deviations to anyone interested in the development of feminist and sexual political theory and practice over the last forty years -- if nothing else, Rubin's bibliography has already given me a handful of other thinkers whose books and articles I wish to pursue.

Cross-posted at the feminist librarian and The Pursuit of Harpyness.