is "fag hag" empowering? and the "colonizing" mother

i presented a paper at the children's literature association's international conference this month and (like most conferences that i go to and present at) i either love what i hear or hate it...a binary i know but i very rarely find gray areas at these events.

for the record i am not specializing in children's literature...my ethos to this field is through english studies via rhetoric...i am transdiscipinary which means that i feel a certain amount of responsibility to verse myself (if only incidentally) to the major intersections of critical discourse where text and culture intersect.

with this said i listened to two papers that were absolutely horrible if not disturbing. one paper was given on a panel that i was chairing. the panel was devoted to issues of colonization and (to some extent) the future of postcolonial studies.

one of the papers (given by a recently graduated "master's" student) analyzed the relationship between illustrations in a picture book and the words on the page. although i am all for cross pollinating concepts in order to parse through dense theoretical connections i sat there wondering what any of this had to do with colonization? i mean, i was making connections in my mind but as far as listening to the direction of this person's paper i was coming up short in constructing some kind of intellectual relevance. then she started talking about colonization.

the picture book being analyzed is entitled _the water tower_. essentially it is about two white boys who are around 9 to 10 years of age. the speaker then proceeded to talk about how these two boys were colonized by their mothers. or more accurately, how one boy was colonized because he had a mother and the other wasn't because his mother was absent. i suppose in her theoretical context fathers are unable to or just don't 'colonize' their spawn? i was dumbfounded. what did the speaker mean by colonization? acts of discipline imposed from one body onto another? althusserian interpellation? i am not persuaded. in fact this is what happens when students (and i am still a student) are given carte blanche to any half baked idea and consequently thinking that they are being "original" or "subversive". this student's mentor (a supposedly "big name" in this field) was there as well...and i kept on thinking to myself that this "mentor" approved this garbage and that she should know better.

the paper was not only terrible, it was dangerous. this paper is dangerous indeed because it downplayed the very real material presence of colonization (and its after-effects). colonization is local but it is also cultural...it deals with hegemony and the violence of the hegemonic struggle in a very "real" sense. it is traumatic and violent and it reifies this trauma on bodies and cultures mimetically (even after this said colonization or the colonizing agent has extracted itself from the cultural landscape). the power of discipline from a mother (or parent) to a child is many things. for instance, it creates subjectivity...it proves itself problematic insofar as insuring the proliferation of white male heteronormative power (in western society) is kept in place. many, many theorists have written about this power dynamic (adrienne rich or jessica benjamin, for instance) but in no way does this process even mimic a colonizing process. if anything this student's analysis downplays colonization...giving it license to hide itself in an irresponsible analysis.

furthermore, this student talked about the image of the water tower itself within the narrative structure of the book. she surmised that the water tower was/is a matriarchal (and colonizing) figure in the story. how so? well this student says that the boys went swimming in the water tower. the water tower was round (womb-like) and it contained water. my brain almost exploded. what about the shape of the water tower? is it not in some way a phallus? the fact that this womb was housed inside a phallus was absent from this critique therefore actively ignoring at least 50 years of feminist scholarship that addresses this very issue. what kind of work does this ignorance or short-sightedness do? could it be that the figure of the mother as womb is created within phallogocentrism? this student's problematic paper displaced the point of critique from the oppressive dominance of white male heteronormativity onto the body of the woman as mother using a non sequitor of colonization.

also, another alarming aspect to this student's talk was her use of "marriage". she constantly reiterated a marriage between the image and the text; marriage between oppression and the body. yet again, i am reminded of how very pervasive white male heteronormative dominance can be in that it manipulates and hence reifies itself under a rubric of a critique that supposedly does the opposite. meaning, her paper was not a critique but an excurses based upon a very well hidden apology from the dominated to the status quo.

the second paper that i had the "privilege" to listen to was given by a new master’s student. if not for the fact that i had to read my paper right after her, i would have left the room. she proposed through her paper that the term "fag hag" is empowering. she used an adolescent text to make her point. in this text a young woman finds out her boyfriend is gay (through, i am assuming, his disclosure). they break up. this break up does not lead to animosity but rather to friendship...this young woman becomes in this text a "fag hag." the reader of this paper then tries to say that this is empowering...that fag hag is not what it used to be but it is something different. she also used several examples from pop culture to illustrate her point (seinfeld, will and grace, and sex and the city, etc.). i kept on thinking to myself (while biting my tongue and trying to keep blood from shooting out of my nose): really....Really.....REALLY???????? not once did she theorize the term. not once did she rely on any of the critical feminist and queer theory scholarship that challenges this term. furthermore, she didn't even historicize the label as a pejorative.

i am all for reclaiming a name...i do this with 'queer.' but unlike this reader i try to always question the terms and the work that 'queer' does. queer in my lexical and theoretical usage is grounded in strangeness...it functions on ontological, phenomenological, and ultimately epistemological registers. queer looks at race, gender, ability, sex, and class in terms (and not despite) of normativity (in a juridical foucauldian sense). however, i must never forget what this word still can do. i must always remember that it functions for many as and only a pejorative. it still does work that i critique against. this word is still rhetorically VIOLENT. i must never forget this. the same goes with "fag hag."

never once was the question raised by this student...can "fag" ever be empowering? what about "hag"? both have very long histories. both have been critiqued together and separately through countless pages of scholarship. i am not persuaded that these terms can ever be empowering...maybe i'm wrong but unlike queer this term was created solely for very specific reasons. it is a raced term...it is gender specific and points to a solid demographic (self identified straight white women who hang around white gay men). "fag" in this sense is being used as a label by white gay men to lay claim to the "hag" or, more specifically, the body of the straight, white woman. therefore, "fag" is a term of empowerment and melancholy for white gay men over white straight women. it is a move that signifies not only a claim to bodies but a claim to power. so my question is who is being empowered by this term? how is the term "hag" functioning? is it empowering? for whom?

during the q & a time i tried to bring these questions to the fore. i attempted to get people discussing the inherently misogynistic work this term is still "doing" within culture...is will and grace subversive...what about sex and the city? what specific images are being attached to the term? how is this term working? no one wanted to talk about race or class or gender in this way. they just wanted to sit around and talk about how "fag hag" is empowering. this, like the previous paper, is dangerous. the term is still used as a pejorative...unnuanced and under theorized by the people who want to claim it as an excuse for doing "cutting edge" work.

i have said this before and i will say it again (even though it is problematic). anytime (white) straight people/scholars attempt to discuss the lesbian/gay/transgendered/transsexual bodies within culture and cultures through what they think is substantive critique they (9 times out of 10) fuck it up. thus "open minded" and/or liberal/progressive self identified straight (white) people are always reassuring their listeners through their words that they as normative bodies are still the unquestioned paradigm and thus, unintentionally, admitting that although normativity should be questioned it is only questioned insofar as their fear of implication allows them to go.