In the project, I formulate a conception which I call ‘queer hospitality.’ I situate ‘queer’ as: 1. an active and constantly changing disruption of the normative/dominant 2. a disruption that cannot be delimited in advance and 3. a disruption that has political implications. This employment of ‘queer’ comes, in part, from the work of Butler (and other contemporary queer theorists). I understand ‘hospitality’ through 1. subjective processes of role-making (hosts-guests) 2. intersubjective social practices and 3. the incalculability/risk within those processes/practices. Throughout the work, I explore what ‘queer’ does for ‘hospitality’ and what ‘hospitality’ does for ‘queer’ and how those concepts might come together productively. The objects of the project include the autobiographical work of Samuel R. Delany in relation to pre-1995 New York City Times Square and present-day lesbian and trans-folk bathhouse events in Canada.
So far in the project, I have suggested that by understanding ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality’ as briefly outlined above, it is possible to read the two concepts together; I argue that ‘queer’ adds an element of politics to ‘hospitality’ while ‘hospitality’ adds an element of ethics to ‘queer.’ In the thesis, I outline the political resistance facets of ‘queer’ and the ethical ‘sharing the world’(via Luce Irigaray) facets of hospitality. Together the two establish an ethico-political mechanism which I use to explore particular spaces.
Beyond ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality’, I add one more theoretical problematic to the analysis and ask how the traditional divide between the public and the private depletes a working conception of ‘queer hospitality.’ So, in other words, questions like, ‘what or who is a public?’ and ‘what is considered dominantly private or public?’ and ‘what constitutes a counterpublic?’ set the stage to intervene in existing, intersecting and opposing discussions of ‘queer’ and ‘hospitality.’ For me, public-ness and private-ness are both loaded with ethico-political dimensions which correspond with the ethico-political dimensions of ‘queer hospitality.’ Throughout the chapters, I attempt to determine what a public-private amalgamation instead of a public/private distinction does for both the constitution and formulation of a ‘queer hospitality.’
Both Precarious Life and Excitable Speech touch on a number of ideas that are related to my own work. At the very beginning of the Precarious Life, for example, Butler writes,
To decide what views will count as reasonable within the public domain, however, is to decide what will and will not count as the public sphere of debate. And if someone holds views that are not in line with the nationalist norm, that person comes to lack credibility as a speaking person . . . The foreclosure of critique empties the public domain of debate and democratic contestation itself, so that debate becomes the exchange of views among the like-minded, and criticism, which ought to be central to any democracy, becomes a fugitive and suspect activity (PL xx).
Although here Butler refers specifically to nationalist norms, this passage relates to the public/private discussion present in my own work. Instead of ‘nationalist norms’ my thesis focuses on heteronormative codes and urban gentrification norms. In my second chapter, for example, I examine the gentrification measures taken by New York City’s redevelopment project through the autobiographical work of Samuel R. Delany. Delany, in outlining an interclass contact model, echoes Butler’s argument regarding the foreclosure of democratic contestation. He suggests that when Times Square was redeveloped, it increasingly became less intersectional and thus facilitated ‘deliberation’ among a vast amount of like-minded people. This ‘deliberation’, was in fact, not a deliberation at all; like Butler argues above, it ‘becomes a fugitive and suspect activity.’ For Delany, if what counts as reasonable within the public domain is expanded to include myriad intersectional perspectives, then, the deliberative processes have the potential to mirror real democratic contestation.
In an extension to Giving an Account of Oneself, PL contains a passage which has allowed me to think more carefully about the ‘hospitality’ element of my research. Butler writes,
I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. I am not fully known to myself, because part of what I am is the enigmatic traces of others. In this sense, I cannot know myself perfectly or know my ‘difference’ from others in an irreducible way. This unknowingness may seem, from a given perspective, a problem for ethics and politics. Don’t I need to know myself in order to act responsibly in social relations? Surely, to a certain extent, yes. But is there an ethical valence to my unknowingness? I am wounded, and I find that the wound itself testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the Other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames the problem of responsibility from the start (PL 46).
This passage has posed a slight problem for me in conceptualizing what I mean by ‘hospitality.’ As mentioned above, I understand ‘hospitality’ through the work of Irigaray and the general ‘problem’ of approaching the Other. What is particularly confusing for me is the way Butler seems to be using ‘ethics’, ‘politics’ and ‘responsibility’ interchangeably in both this passage and the pages which surround it in the text. The confusion enters because in the thesis I have begun to set up this initial difference between ethics and politics. As mentioned above, it is this play between queer politics and hospitable ethics that come together to form a productive mechanism with which to analyze particular spaces (the project’s objects). Does this mean, I also use the terms interchangeably? I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on this? Does it seem, to you, that maybe Butler does assume that ethics/politics/responsibility all mean something very similar? Do you think it is irresponsible of me to create an opposition between the two concepts only to bring them back together again? In other words, what is the danger in thinking ethics and politics separately? Or, is there an obligation to always think the two together?
I am in the process of organizing my third chapter which brings into dialogue some of the discourses surrounding lesbian and trans-folk bathhouses in Canada and this ethico-political conception of ‘queer hospitality.’ Presumably, the chapter will look to the bathhouse door policy, the research conducted by one ethnographer, and the legal limitations the events have faced to date. The problem of identity and particular subject-positions Butler refers to in PL have offered me a few ways of thinking about these discourses. In the last session, Tim mentioned the following distinction made by Butler; she writes, “Perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about” (PL 25). In the last post I mentioned Butler’s idea of the necessary error of identity (we discussed this idea as ‘the persistence of identity’ in class). For Butler, it is true that often we must occupy particular subject-positions to legally afford ourselves rights. However, for her, there is a sharp difference between who we are (in the legal sense) and ‘what we are about.’ This ‘what we are about’ idea resonates with the argument that subject-positions outside the recourse to rights perpetually shift and occur in never-ending processes.
This sentiment has helped me immensely in thinking about the door-policy at the bathhouse events. The ethnographer to which I referred above takes a completely different approach to these ideas. The ethnographer argues that through her interviews and observations of the events she was able to assess participants’ subjectivities. At the end of the section of PL we read for last session Butler brings in this idea of cultural translation. She proposes a way to rethink international coalitions in ways different from assuming “that we are all fixed and frozen in our various locations and ‘subject-positions’” (PL 47). Although in the context of international politics, this idea that we are neither fixed in location nor identity certainly lends itself to further queries regarding who gets in at the door, what does it mean to identify as queer, and how can we ethically approach the other. Changeability and unforeseeability both continue to be important concepts in the third and second chapter of my thesis.
Perhaps the part of Excitable Speech that interests me most in terms of my thesis work is this idea of revaluation. Butler writes,
The revaluation of terms such as ‘queer’ suggest that speech can be ‘returned’ to its speaker in a different form, that it can be cited against its originary purposes, and perform a reversal of effects. More generally, then, this suggests that the changeable power of such terms marks a kind of discursive performativity that is not a discrete series of speech acts, but a ritual chain of resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable. In this sense, an ‘act’ is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions. The possibility for a speech act to resignify a prior context depends, in part, upon the gap between the originating context or intention by which an utterance is animated and the effects it produces (ES 14).
I posed this question in class regarding the ‘gap’ because my thesis deals with self-proclaimed subject-positions that are often contentious in other contexts (i.e. dyke, girl-fag, queer). In terms of political projects of resistance (those that resist heteronormative codes and carve out spaces to (semi)publicly enjoy non-normative sexual practices like the former Times Square neighbourhood and the bathhouse events in Canada), I wonder how big the gap needs to be for revaluation to actually occur.
More importantly, if the gap is never closed how much does the unclosed gap risk alienating demographics who don’t adhere to the re-valued term. I am thinking here, as an example, of a lesbian woman, who exclusively identifies as lesbian in regards to her sexuality; the woman enters a bathhouse event to meet someone new, and the woman behind the counter says “well aren’t you a pretty dyke!” The lesbian woman leaves immediately; for her the speech is injurious (the use of the word dyke) and conjures violent slurs from her childhood. So what happens in these political resistance processes when women can ride on motorcycles in Gay Pride parades as ‘Dykes on Bikes’, while other lesbian or queer women find that language morally reprehensible? I understand Butler’s arguments regarding iteration and citations, but is this the part where we “have to accept the array of sometimes incommensurable epistemological and political beliefs and modes and means of agency that bring us into activism?” (PL 48). Or is injurious speech different from incommensurable political beliefs? I have the sense, that in this context, speech that has the potential to be injurious (like dyke) is already veiled in some sort of politics. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Are we to accept our political differences, even if those differences are injurious? Who closes the gap and who, in subaltern resistance groups, has the power of ‘proper’ citation?
“Keeping such terms unsaid and unsayable can also work to lock them in place, preserving their power to injure, and arresting the possibility of a reworking that might shift their context and purpose” (ES 38).
