institutional homophobia of discursive inertia:
a queerly theoretic case study


Middlebury College is a stimulating place to study queer theory since being abjected, Otherized as abomination (albeit done with white gloves to maintain the respectability of the abjectors), is starkly tangible here: no queer culture exists to counter the suffocating heteronormativity. As a lesbigayer colleague remarked last fall, the question is whether to slit one's wrists today or to put it off til next weekend.


Georgia O'Keeffe captured well in the picture above (Birch Trees at Dawn on Lake George, 1926) the only writhing (bed)fellows (Duberman, 1989) to be found here. She was living at Lake George, a short distance southwest of Middlebury and she left this clime to live in the sunny open west, Sante Fe (and then Taos), New Mexico which "had become a mecca for women who wanted to live openly with other women. During the 1920s and 1930s, Sante Fe and Taos were to American lesbians what Capri was to British [lesbigays] at the same time - a place away from the constraints of organized society, which discouraged [lesbigay relations]." (Hogrefe, 1992: 143) Is there a lesson for us at MIDD in her trans-location?

This essay uses queer theory to conjecture about what makes the culture at Middlebury so toxic, so disabling for many of us much of the time, so that we dare not attend events, dare not speak, nay, dare not even think many thoughts which flow so easily in different climes. This is the second of a two part introduction to queer theory. Here I take my institutional home as the basis for a case study applying queer theory and in Part I, "A primer on queer theory for economists interested in social identities," (1998) I sketched ideas in queer theory which are relevant to political economy. This extends a three page study of Middlebury College in "deconstructing silence: the queer political economy of the social articulation of desire" (1997).

In the fifteen years I have pushed and shoved to queer some social space here, there has been a dent for those willing and able to seek respectability based on liberal heteronormativity (e.g., taking "individuals" as the social atom for political concepts and taking "couples" as the social atom for erotic articulations, giving ethical priority to the dichotomies of monogamous/promiscuous and private/public, going to church, wearing jeans revealing little - especially if you are male since men are not "supposed" to be openly viewed as sex objects). But for anyone seeking queer sociality, there has been no change, a cultural stasis I attribute to the inertial power here of discursive structures, a concept which is central to queer theory. By discursive structures, Foucault's (1966: 13, 45, 89; 1972: 191) épistémè, I mean the codes, the neural networks, which evolve socially and then grow and become "hard-wired" in our individual brains and which serve as the (socially shared) linguistic channels within which we form connotations and thoughts. The discursive structures within which much thinking here is done often seem remarkably unchanged from the culture dominating this country forty five years ago at the height of this country's queer panic.

The power of these discursive structures can be illustrated by picking from a long list of micro-institutional examples in which I have been involved and which seem more insightful than do stories hypostatizing the centrality in political economy of the issue of more versus less centralized (governmental) power (e.g., how President Clinton amplifies the culture of hypocrisy or how the temporary absence of a presiding Catholic Bishop in Vermont enabled passage of a state law adding sexual orientation to nondiscrimination statutes).

In step with other colleges and universities, Middlebury College has adopted employee benefits for domestic partners (both lesbigay and straight) and has added sexual orientation to the list of criteria it will not use to distinguish among employees. This liberal, do-the-right-thing approach culminated a ten-year effort and is cause for applause and approval of the College's well-intentioned leadership. But this "success" hides the linguistic structures which continue to position queer as unthinkable among alumni and Trustees and which make queer notions as incomprehensible as an alien language for most lesbigayers as well as for most straights on campus.

Lesbigayer issues are, de facto, confined to lower levels of student services and to the arena designated by the College's Trustees for the exercise of "academic freedom." Adding sexual orientation to the College's Nondiscrimination Statement was initially alleged to require formal Trustee approval. The faculty requested this approval, but the President declined offers of information or assistance in preparing for such discussion ("No time to do this for the upcoming meeting of Trustees") and then reported that the Trustees had rejected the idea after "it just happened to come up" at an opening dinner discussion. Eight years later, the succeeding President, under pressure on a number of other issues, demurred from having this discussed by the Trustees through offering to simply make, on his own, the addition of the words "sexual orientation" to the list of institutionally nondiscernible traits. These overt erasures of queer from discourse with the "owners-controllers" of the College has a longer history, of course, including deletion by a Dean of part of a report to (followed by a meeting with) the Trustees by the Human Relations Committee on its activities which included creating a racial harassment code as well as education about homophobia at a time when anxiety over the College's image about its success at dealing with racism was significant.

Announcement of benefits for domestic partners of employees also followed the stealth policy of avoiding discussion in larger Middlebury circles by squelching well-advanced plans to include a description of the College's decision in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In view of the stringency of the conditions imposed on any lesbigay couple, forcing them to fit the mold of a synthetic heterosexual "marriage" in order to receive full domestic partner benefits, if this policy had been in place, would we have avoided the unseemly controversy arising from the Library's denial of a library card to a well known filmmaker who was the partner of a visiting member of the faculty (a controversy which immediately preceded the College's bestowal of these employee benefits)?

These liberal policies based on equal treatment of different social identities (nondiscrimination, domestic partner benefits and prohibition of homophobic harrassment) have failed utterly to encourage faculty to be openly lesbigay here given the suffocating dominance of heteronormativity at Middlebury. This reflects the weakness of 1950s-1960s era white-liberal civil rights thinking in American culture the creaking inadequacies of which have often simply been denied by liberals. This ostrich-like position seems to arise from failing to see that "identities" are encoded in our (largely unconscious) discursive structures. The rest of this essay looks at how the articulation of social identities leads liberal policy-makers to look at only the visible tips of the largely submerged social icebergs of linguistic norms and how this articulation also leads many to unconsciously subvert laws and rules which prohibit denial of "civil rights" due to mere "identities". Queer theory queers simple notions of identities!

Queer theory, by positing the lingual construction and enforcement of "identities," brings out the historical contingency (or in economic jargon, the path dependence) of social identities. Many of us in the late 1980s and early 1990s were seduced by the oxymoronic notion of embracing a "queer identity" (e.g., Queer Nation [1]), but this led us to experience the bitter artifice of such confections - yes, identities are as tempting as chocolate truffles, since they promise social security in placing ourselves and others on our cognitive maps of sociality. This temptation to use "queer" as an identity can be linguistically mitigated by giving priority to using - to trying the substitution of - "queer" as a verb rather than as an adjective. [2]

This contingency of identities is captured well by Andy Warhol's ironical exaggeration of markers of celebrity and gender. He illustrated the power as well as the shallowness and artifice of identities, refusing an assimilationist pose of denying difference and also refusing an activist pose asserting rigidly essentialistic ("natural") difference. [3] This stance contributes to queer theorists' interest in Warhol. He articulated this explicitly, as, for example (Warhol & Hackett, 1980: 222-223):
: Naturally, the Factory had fags; ... What I mean is, there was no hypocrisy at the Factory, and I think the reason we were attacked so much and so vehemently was because we refused to play along and be hypocritical and covert. That really incensed a lot of people who wanted the old stereotypes to stay around. ... And there were a lot of sexually straight people around the Factory, too ... As one straight kid said to me, "It's nice not to be trapped into something, even it that's what you are." For example, if a man sees two guys having sex, he finds out one of two things: either he's turned on or he's turned off - so then he knows where he stands in life. ... Whatever else it did, the Factory definitely helped a lot of people decide.

Queer scholars seek to grapple with this contingency of identities, with the confusion this causes and with the social institutions which amplify identity differences and make them appear "natural." [4] Efforts to engage top-level discussion at the College of the challenges facing queer scholarship here have so far been deflected by avoiding this issue, by offering vigorous complements on secondary achievements, by seeing lesbian and gay studies as a minor part of gender studies, by engaging in earnest one-on-one smiling talk while, like two Federal Presidents in the 1980s, never for the public record (especially if this "record" appears in the New York or Boston areas) saying the words gay, lesbian or homophobia; i.e., never acknowledging publicly the killing effect on all academic imaginations here of isolation in an ocean of heteronormativity. [5]

Almost everyone else here also walks very far around this issue, silencing any discussion of how deadly it is here to be isolated in an ocean of heteronormativity. Thus six months after pleading with my colleagues to give me reactions - any kind of reactions - to this piece when it was on my webpage since it was a "work-in-progress" at that point, I had gotten only the reply from one gay colleague that he required a dictionary to understand it. NONE of my colleagues in my designated institutional home, my academic Department, offered any response and neither did those on the Faculty Council who were asked to take these issues to the College's Trustees nor did the Dean of the Faculty despite his having said he would talk to me about them in the slack season of the summer as an alternative to taking these issues to the Trustees and despite his having offered me personal bonafides of his interest in and support of lesbigay issues some years ago.

The hegemony of this queer aporia - this "not knowing where to go" - with its death-dealing impossibility (Derrida, 1993: 12-13) reflects Foucault's notion that power (the power to enforce heteronormativity) is everywhere: it is not just the leadership of this small college (where allegedly "everybody knows everybody") which encourages silence about homophobia. One small example of how the convention that "we are all friends" because we share a small community serves as a hypocritical fig leaf hiding homophobic social institutions: I had a colleague with whom I interacted almost every day and developed a good friendship. We enjoyed discussing our respective kids, houses, and other details of living here and shared a number of particular concerns. After a spate of front page news stories of savage beatings, stabbings and shootings of gaymen in Vermont, it occurred to me that this person never indicated any awareness that these events might be meaningful (painful) for me, even though I had been out to everyone here for years. When I asked why this person, being a close friend, never commented on these events, this led to a discussion of sexual orientations which was ended by this colleague (who is a serious Catholic) saying "Well, we can agree to disagree." My mind went blank at the obtuseness of this remark. I later realized that it is similar to a Nazi running into a Jew with whom he had been a good friend before the advent of Hitler and saying, in response to the Jew's expression of disappointment that the Nazi never expressed to the Jew any understanding of the Jew's concern about rumors about what was being done to Jews: "Well, we can agree to disagree."

This commonplace expression is the vernacular of Stigler-Becker's (1977) de gustibus non est disputandum. It trivializes the issue of whether there is social space for me to live here; I certainly do not agree to disagree about this question, just as I do not agree to disagree when it is articulated not by a "respectable," church-based person but rather by a thief holding a gun to my head. Friendship based on this premise serves as a fig leaf hiding the dominant attitudes promoting extreme abjection of and, thus, brutal violence against lesbigayers in Vermont. I find that I can no longer enjoyably take part in College events which promote this veneer of politesse, of courteous, but sham, friendships.

At Middlebury College, the "thought police" are the vast majority who decry "political correctness," but who enforce the severest political correctness (i.e., heteronormativity):
who, between 4 and 5 AM, destroy the art installation, "The Closet,"
which had been built on the green in front of the Student Center for Coming Out Week and which made tangible what living in the closet can mean, such as brutal isolation, addiction and silencing;
who efface the bulletin board recently erected in the student Mailroom
by moqa (Middlebury Open Queer Alliance);
who send a "gift" (the German meaning of Gift is appropriate here)
to a lesbian faculty person and then spread widely reports of their hilarious deed among those who are the "same" as themselves, namely, Euro-male "humanities" professors so even I, upstairs in the Economics Department, get regaled with this vicious humor - this Vermischung of misogyny and homophobia dominates the discursive structures at Middlebury;
who whimper repeatedly year after year in the student newspaper
over their loss of "freedom" - the freedom to wear jeans without taint of being faggot/dyke - when, during Coming Out Week, Gay Jeans Day is declared; needless to say, most of the whiners are doe-eyed males freshly wakened as adults and still wearing their naive heteronormative belief that the male body is sacredly, astrally distant from being an overt sex object. They join the popular reaction to the queering of the male body which has been done in the past twenty years by several gay clothing designers, a homophobic reaction which seems to have contributed most profitably to Dockers' wear-khakis campaign; [6]
who react with startle-turns-to-disgust/anger/avoidance
followed by small-group-tittering in what damn well ought to be safe-for-heteromale homosociality until a blatantly queer man comes where he is not wanted - of course, this social configuration is effective: it often prompts such gaymen to recall their well-learned shame and self-disgust and to leave the Fitness Center;
who leave homophobic notes on queer dorm/office doors;
who shout homophobic taunts to any overtly queer professor or student
walking along South Main on a party weekend;
who scribble notes at appropriate places around town promoting danger
to specific body parts of specific queers (including their home phone numbers);
who, on seeing two men walking and holding hands,
generate a stream of verbal bigotry from their passing car windows having a median frequency of one taunt every 30 seconds - in maintaining this homophobic flow, these members of the College "community" (a sad bit of hypocrisy there) do get help from non-College people also;
who, sharing the sidewalk in front of the Ben Franklin store with a male couple so
blatantly rejecting heteronormativity, take the appropriate action of throwing punches at the couple;
who leave the note "colon cowboy"
on my car's windshield after a workshop for fraternity men who were being coercively encouraged to rethink an egregious display of misogyny at an end-of-spring-term party by building lists of "names" for people in groups other than straight white men to contrast with the dearth of such labels for said men.

That not one of these enforcers of heteronormativity has ever been "caught" demonstrates the power of a College President's pledge to severely discipline any perpetrator of homophobic harassment. This also reveals the outdatedness of the Lockean-liberal notion of "criminal individuals" when conceptualizing (speech) acts injurious to social identities. As for the more realistic and important Presidential action of articulating clearly and credibly (e.g., by appointing a "Presidential Task Force on Lesbigay Issues") the damage which is done to an intellectual institution by heteronormativity enforced by homophobic harassment, will we ever see this happen? Several leading universities have made such positive speech acts in thoughtful and effective ways, but Middlebury College is committed to staying well behind the leading institutions in academia.

It is important to be clear that the power of heteronormativity comes from the primely pungent connotation of shame associated with violations of this code. [7] This connotation is an unconscious part of the discursive structures guiding much thinking here; it is what makes Middlebury's culture so toxic. And publicly unacknowledgeable grieving for the life within which is lost due to the power through guilt of heteronormativity can make one suicidal. As Butler (1997b: 183-184) notes: "forms of social power emerge that regulate what losses will and will not be grieved; in the social foreclosure of grief we might find what fuels the internal violence of conscience. The violence of social regulation is not to be found in its unilateral action, but in the circuitous route by which the psyche accuses itself of its own worthlessness." [8]

Lesbigayers are tolerated now by liberals if this connotation of odor, of shame, is masked by wearing the costume of synthetic straights. All discussion at Middlebury of the (homo)sexuality of people is still done so as to "guard...that Open Secret which is still the mode of producing, transmitting, and receiving most discourse around homosexuality, the knowledge that plays dumb is exactly what permits the abuses of an ignorance that in fact knows full well what it is doing." (Miller, 1992: 16-17) [9]

Thus rumors were initiated that someone "outed" a person whose position would, indeed, have been compromised if she were out and these rumors fed on the righteous indignation and titillation over the "practice" of outing. Those spreading such rumors "see no reason to mediate their [practice] through articulation or even acknowledgment of the gender aporia that makes the social symbolic space allotted to gay men as impossible, as impassable, as perspective in Escher." (Miller, 1992: 17)

But at Middlebury, this delicious quote from D. A. Miller must be modified to note that the social aporia here through which gender is constrained to be articulated not only lead to clever, though dangerous, proposals to incorporate both Women's Studies and LBGTQ Studies into Gender Studies (dangerous since key, fragile distinctions may be lost in the misogynistic culture here), but, more significantly, have made the social space allotted to lesbians so impassable that no lesbian faculty have made the journey across the private/public boundary of liberal respectability. [10] For a professor, respectability is very precious and very fragile; if it is lost for a teacher in a classroom vis a vis the students in that room, the teacher is reduced to complete ineffectiveness. Her/his teaching evaluations by students will ensure that her/his contract is not renewed, that s/he does not get tenure. As Chair of my department, I saw this happen occasionally to newly hired, typically "adjunct" male faculty.

For a female professor, this threat of being forced down the verbal plank of ridicule is VERY tangible. This gender asymmetry was made memorable for me by a woman who rose from Assistant Professor, to tenured Associate Professor of Chemistry and then, quickly, to Dean of the Faculty (the only such Dean I have ever respected in my twenty one years here) and, finally for Middlebury, a year later to another school as College President. She said that early in her teaching here she learned that to succeed in the classroom - to gain student respect - she had to adopt a male persona, to act like a stereotypically aggressive man. Repeatedly offering carefully wrought scholarly answers to questions which waffled on whether case A. or B. was "TRUE" means this scholar will not survive long in a Middlebury classroom. Further, this risk seems greater for women than for men.

"Coming out" is often misconstrued by liberals as a simple choice, a choice to be "honest" about your "true self." This liberalism sees "power" and "oppression" as overt coercion, like that by "tyrant kings" or "the state" which, indeed, gave birth to liberalism (see ch. 3, pp. 100-146 in Elshtain, 1993). But what has evolved over the past several centuries are forms "of governmentality [which] actually require citizens to be free, so that citizens can assume from the state the burden of some of its former regulatory functions and impose on themselves - of their own accord - rules of conduct and mechanisms of control." (Halperin, 1995: 18) To the extent that our inner selves, our cognitive structures, are shaped by such linguistically normative processes, there is no "true self" to discover within. [11] Indeed, the emergence of "the self" (interpellation of the subject) occurs in response to, and as part of, speech acts of power ("declaration of guilt," "judgment of worthlessness," "verdict of reality"). "The 'institution' of the ego cannot fully overcome its social residue, given that its 'voice' is from the start a recasting of a social 'plaint' as psychic self-judgment. ... the fictive [metaphorical] redoubling necessary to become a self rules out the possibility of strict identity." (Butler 1997b: 197-198)

The somewhat arbitrary, socially contingent appearance of our "selves" is captured by Darieck Scott (1995: 183):: my selves multiply like flies. ... I come crossing boundaries,; hurdling over barriers. I come, and when I am through; we shall scarcely be able to tell the one from the other ...; I collect and acquire your vision for my own purposes.; Gathering you up, I learn to speak in the many voices you insist are not my own.

Or, another way of seeing this (Winterson, 1995: 69):: There is no such thing as autobiography there's only art and lies
which echoes Virginia Woolf's "biography," Orlando (1928 :192): To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it - the poets and the novelists - can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where truth does not exist.
This notion of linguistic normalization goes back to the parent of queer theory, Michel Foucault (1979: 182-184), who argued that "normalization" was "the art of punishing ... [which] brings five quite distinct operations into play: it refers individual actions to a whole that is at once a field of comparison, a space of differentiation and the principle of a rule to be followed. It differentiates individuals from one another, ... It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the 'nature' of individuals. It introduces, through this 'value-giving' measure, the constraint of a conformity that must be achieved. Lastly, it traces the limit that will define difference in relation to all other differences, the external frontier of the abnormal. ... [It] compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes. ... The power of the Norm appears through the disciplines. ... [T]he power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialities and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another."

This is what heteronormativity accomplishes; it disciplines through the unspoken terror of being abject Other, of being ultimate Abnormal. It relies on the terror it evokes of being seen as Sexually Deviant. Those who blindly reinforce heteronormativity by reiterating it (e.g., by saying, without thought, "that's normal," making normalization, respectabilization, a performative speech act) are "terrorists." This process is especially strong at Middlebury since most are so blind to it. Bombs are not used for this terrorism, linguistic norms, "injurious speech acts," suffice. Such speech injurs by creating "the sense of putting its addressee out of control. . . . [or] 'put in one's place' by such speech, but such a place may be no place." (Butler, 1997a: 4)

This heteronormative terrorism is what leads many lesbigayers at Middlebury to only be able to think and act straight. It can make us brittle, swimming in tears of despair even as we apparently function "normally" in our assigned tasks; it can make us unable to function in many more positive ways we would prefer. As you walk swimming in your own thoughts, you are repeatedly startled by nonverbal, though more primely powerful, semiotic expressions of disgust, of contempt and of the laughability of your "right" to coexist in this "safe" town being articulated by: elderly gentlemen dressed in their Sunday best passing by on the sidewalk; teenagers in disheveled chic drinking sodas in front of Baba's; tourists visiting boutiquey shops in "safely" pretty Middlebury; a good-looking young father holding his baby son who, in the midst of talking to his wife, a checkout clerk at Greg's Market, suddenly looks up and spots me just as I first spot him while I am checking out - his look of startled panic at decoding my "threatening appearance" speaks loudly. Or this message is transported via the verbal taunt, "Boy George," shouted by two male students driving by as I head off to teach about Lagrangeans to a microeconomic theory class. It is hard to resist thinking that, indeed, you do not belong here.

Despite Vermont's Hate Crimes Law which elevates crimes to felonies when based on sexual orientation and despite the "education" of town police in this new approach, local cops can also be especially potent enforcers of heteronormativity. As I walked home around 6 PM through the "historic" Marbleworks mall last spring, as I do most every evening in my standard costume of bleached top of head, black backpack, black Levi jacket, button-down shirt and tie and close-fitting Levis (with one fly button ajar, of course), a town cop cruised by me very slowly and then a few blocks later multiple cop cars approached escorting Lieutenant Bolduc who boldly pulled his unmarked car abruptly in front of me on the sidewalk and ordered me to stop and identify myself. After producing a Middlebury College Id and talking relatively coherently, Mr. Bolduc decided he did not have to arrest me, but the communication of the "fact" that I was a threat to greater Middlebury ("suspicious profile" was the term he used) was clear and effective. It is so effective because there is no queer culture here to provide sustenance to resist and survive this heteronormative terrorism.

This reiteration of veiled bigotry-of-inference by police is similar to that experienced by one of my best-ever students in my introductory economics class who, with several friends in a College car had gone to the University of Vermont in Burlington (35 miles north of Middlebury) and then went to a popular club where musicians often perform live (e.g., Bob Mould, recently). When he came out with his friends, they found their car surrounded by several city police cars and police with guns drawn. This was all because the police had received a report that these young men were starting a riot. This report had evidently received credibility only because these young men were all African American. Once they produced their Middlebury Id's, they were released from overt suspicion.

Thus "coming out" is falsely conceived by liberals as liberation from the oppressive yoke of a tyrant. In fact, coming out is quite different: it means you expose yourself "to a different set of dangers and constraints, . . . make [yourself] into a convenient screen onto which straight people can project all the fantasies they routinely entertain about [lesbi]gay people, and to suffer one's every gesture, statement, expression, and opinion to be totally and irrevocably marked by the overwhelming social significance of one's openly acknowledged homosexual identity. . . . Coming out is an act of freedom, then, not in the sense of liberation but in the sense of resistance." (Halperin, 1995: 30) Coming out only frees one to resist heteronormativity openly. Since logic often gets distorted by such blatancy as queerness, it may not be redundant to note that one need not be lesbigay to practice this resistance: queerly straight folks can also resist heteronormativity - but then, of course, they will be charged with being lesbigayer. Ask Eve Sedgwick (Duggan and Hunter, 1995: 182)!

Sappho was arguably the most famous poet of her era and (shock, shock) had a daughter named Cleis. She speaks now, 2600 years later, in Jeanette Winterson's Art & Lies, (1995: 51, 149) capturing well the way in which what in psychology is called a "central trait" can blind us to a person's other characteristics:: I am a Sexualist. In flagrante delicto. The end-stop of the universe.; Say my name and you say sex. Say my name and you say white sand; under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.

A political perspective on the role of discursive structures [12] is offered by Halperin (1995: 32-33): "[W]hat we are up against . . . is not only . . . specific agents of oppression, such as gay-bashers or the police, nor formal, explicit interdictions, such as sodomy laws, nor even particular, hostile institutions, . . . but rather pervasive and multiform strategies of homophobia that shape public and private discourses, saturate the entire field of cultural representation, and, like Foucault's formulation, are everywhere. The discourses of homophobia, moreover, cannot be refuted by means of rational argument (although many of the individual propositions that constitute them are easily falsifiable); they can only be resisted. That is because homophobic discourses are not reducible to a set of statements with a specifiable truth-content that can be rationally tested. Rather, homophobic discourses function as part of more general and systematic strategies of delegitimation. ... [They] contain no fixed propositional content. They are composed of a potentially infinite number of different but functionally interchangeable assertions, such that whenever any one assertion is falsified or disqualified another one - even one with a content exactly contrary to the original one - can be neatly and effectively substituted for it." And as Butler (1997a: 38) has noted as another example of liberal-head-in-the-sand thinking: "The liberal capacity to refer [the] terms [of hate speech] as if one were merely mentioning them, not making use of them, can support the structure of disavowal that permits for their hurtful circulation."

So how are homophobic discourses resisted? As Teresa de Lauretis (in the piece giving queer theory its name) said (1991: iii): "homosexuality is no longer to be seen simply as marginal ... no longer to be seen either as merely transgressive or deviant vis-à-vis a proper, natural sexuality ... or as just another, optional 'lifestyle,' according to the model of contemporary North American pluralism. Instead, male and female homosexualities ... may be reconceptualized as social and cultural forms in their own right, albeit emergent ones and thus still fuzzily defined, undercoded, or discursively dependent on more established forms. ... gay and lesbian sexualities may be understood and imaged as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of the subject in culture" (emph. added). This resistence to cultural homogenization may be driven most powerfully by what Genet has termed a "poetic or artistic revolution" which is not to be confused with a political revolution (Fichte 1978: 76). These artistic revolutions offer "a new way of feeling the world and expressing it" (Genet as quoted by Fichte 1978: 77); they are linguistic phenomena: they take effect through the often unconscious actions of their agents as they infect a culture's common pool of connotations and concepts available for the articulation of "ideas." Thus Genet's metaphor of bastard as Queer Other has been powerfully reiterated by Dorothy Allison and his metaphors of crucifixes and bouquets of flowers are reiterated by Steven Arnold (Lust: The Body Politic. 1991: 81-85) as bouquets of male bodies.

This type of "resistance to [heteronormative] cultural homogenization," this queering of culture, any "reconceptualization" of "male and female homosexualities as social and cultural forms in their own right," would seem to require a (perhaps, small) community (i.e., where repeated, automatic interaction occurs) of lesbigayer people with diverse interests and occupations. The town and College of Middlebury seem too small to have such a community without affirmative action to nurture it. Instead, analogous to Miller's (1989) individualistic notion of "homophobia of omission," there seems to be an institutional homophobia of discursive inertia due to a linguistic evolution so reserved, so stiff, so slow that it is, in fact, costive. Middlebury College is a prototype of this institutional homophobia: the College's discursive inertia inhibits any queering of liberal, heteronormative discursive structures here despite the College having adopted the pledge to be blind-as-a-good-liberal to "sexual orientation."

Thus a few years ago a Dean of Students at Middlebury was unable to support the strong recommendation of his Human Relations Committee that workshops be organized to address homophobia among faculty and students. A recent lesbigayer studies "symposium" at Middlebury consisted mostly of "feel-good" events for LBGTQ students and presented no leading queer studies faculty from other institutions to demonstrate to faculty here that there have been queer advances of which they might want to be aware. This occurred despite the person controlling the budget used to organize this event having initially, in face-to-face talking, having agreed enthusiastically on the need to bring in outstanding faculty to speak here. This individual has no independent, ex officio, authority of his own; he serves entirely at the pleasure of the College's President and there is no apparent lesbigayer constituency to support him if he were to take a position resisted by the President.

Despite a few such blatant examples where a decision is made by a clearly identifiable individual who appears to have acted to promote this institutional homophobia as a result of having carried out her/his own individual "cost-benefit" calculation, the power of institutional homophobia of discursive inertia would seem to come much more from its unconsious promotion through sheer obliviousness - obtuseness - to the consequences of heteronormativity. First a non-College example of how obliviousness to heteronormativity and its associated effects leads well intentioned people to accept foolish rationales: In "Not if you were the last junkie on earth," on the CD, The Dandy Warhols Come Down, with which The Dandy Warhols first achieved widespread success, they sing:
I never thought you'd be a junkie because heroin is so passé ... if you think that I don't know about depression and emotional pain, you're insane ... I always knew that you were insane with the pain ... never thought you'd get addicted, just be cooler in an obvious way ... you got a couple piercings and decided maybe that you were gay ... heroin is so passé
This treats coming out as a fashion statement - a few piercings, OK, if must do it, for Christ sake, kiss a guy, but what's the big deal? We ALL have depression and emotional pain in our lives - we are all EQUAL in the pain category. It certainly is no way to justify such a passé thing as heroin - cocaine might be different, but not heroin. Despite Courtney Taylor's breaking some of heteronormativity's strictures on celebrating his bare, phallic body on their webpage and despite their overt homage to Lou Reed and Andy Warhol, they follow Reed in appreciating only the ease that mouthing somewhat queer sentiments gives them in tweaking mainstream thinking, in appearing to "walk on the wild[e] side." Queer is no more than lesbian chic, no more than a convenient flavor of the moment. Treating suicidal pressures as mere whims, mere tastes, is a type of ultimate obliviousness.

Obliviousness at this College to the connotations of heteronormativity fosters an intellectual costiveness which is manifested for our students daily:
a French professor, in the midst of a literature class on Gide,
en français, bien sûr, refuses, without any discussion, to consider whether Gide's being gay might have any relevance to his work (can't let authorial intent be mentioned!);
the majority of students in the one regular-term queer studies
class at Middlebury report having been asked by their advisors and/or peers why they are wasting time taking this class;
when I was arranging for a reading by Melvin Dixon
and seeking contributions from various Departments to supplement the resources from my seminar account, the head of Creative Writing at Middlebury said he was sorry to be unable to contribute even a token hundred dollars, as was customary, since he had never heard of this poet - it just happened that this gay, African American writer was at that very time (November 1991) featured on the cover and in the lead story in The American Poetry Review though this was unlikely to be pointed out to most students studying creative writing at Middlebury; similarly steadfast ignorance in the History Department inhibited adequate funding for lectures by John Boswell and Martin Duberman here;
when Sarah Schulman gave a reading in the fall of 1997,
only one straight professor deigned to attend; three gay profess-ors (a major fraction of the out gaymale faculty here!) gave bodily witness of her importance as an author.

Will any leading faculty person or academic College officer ever address the poisoning of Middlebury's curriculum which is caused by its being so thoroughly saturated with heteronormativity?

Could it be that this intellectual costiveness pervading Middlebury's culture also fosters the whiff of anti-theory, anti-cleanly-mathematical thinking here? Does this intellectually weak environment lead a disconcerting fraction of our brightest students (say, comparable to getting about 1600 on the SATs) to try to leave or just to drop out, frustrated at getting too many classes offering barely adequate explorations in how to theorize?

Lesbigayers also often act to support this homophobic discursive inertia. When a commentary was published by the Campus newspaper asserting that Middlebury was a hostile community for some lesbigays to live and work in, one of the "founding" members of GLEAM (Gay/Lesbian Employees At Middlebury - now quiescent) submitted a commentary savagely criticizing such an extremist distortion of the atmosphere at Middlebury - despite having been sent a copy of the commentary well ahead of publication and having been asked for suggestions for revision. This savory controversy evoked a call for a "forum" to discuss the alleged hostile atmosphere. Attendance was a command performance for the authors; its discourse produced strong witness to how open-minded MIDD people are (by those whose attendance clearly proved they were "open-minded" - they could even mouth the words "lesbian" and "gay" - yet they blanche - and are titillated - at any gossip of "promiscuity" or any other infringement of the axioms of heteronormativity). Indeed, its one-sided avowal of open-mindedness turned it into a show-trial of which the Red Guards would have been proud. As the trials of "witches" at Salem and of Commie-perverts in Washington, D. C. a bit more recently indicate, such exercises in the "culture of hypocrisy" are not the exclusive prerogative of totalitarian societies (Elster 1989); however, in such societies it is easier to see the falseness of the spectacles than in "free" societies which are dominated by "the conceit of voluntarist mastery designated by the subject in language." (Butler, 1993: 231; see also 1997b, ch. 4, esp. 117-118) This linguistically induced illusion of "free choice" by the "individual" appears to be the inner defensive wall protecting the keep of heteronormativity.

The Campus commentary mentioned above also prompted a suggestion by another member of GLEAM not to use ACTUP as an example of a recent positive institutional innovation by lesbigays since "ACTUP is so extremist." Such condemnations of "extremists" and "activists" serve to protect the image that Middlebury is sophisticated, even cool, adopting the pose of being nonhomophobic even while dismissing serious rethinking of heteronormativity - echoes of Lillian Faderman's account of Greenwich Village in the 1920s where "as a good bohemian [one] pretended . . . to regard homosexuality in a blasé manner," yet Edna St. Vincent Millay found that "to have chosen to live as a lesbian, even in the world of Greenwich Village, was too problematic for her, despite her history of love for other women." (1991: 86-87) These denunciations of activist lesbigayers have echoes for others on racial and feminist margins at Middlebury. This, of course, is how linguistic norms operate. (Butler, 1993: 22, 187)

Thus this discursive inertia leads to a blindly heteronormative, even homophobic, curriculum at the core of this institution. This reduces meetings about lesbigayer issues at lower levels dealing with student life, which, in their own right, might be useful, to serving as fig leaves diverting attention from this core homophobia. It also makes offensive the pose of being well intentioned since this pose often gives up any vision of the homophobic structures at the core of the institution through its focus on small progress on peripheral issues. This discursive inertia seems to lie behind the erasure of acknowledgment of heteronormativity by the many well intentioned people here and to treating articulations of homophobia as isolated actions by errant individuals.

Making this heteronormative core apparent to the faculty and students of Middlebury appears to require "affirmative action" by the College's leadership; it certainly requires much more than merely tolerating the occasional, curricularly pointless course in queer theory taught to a handful of students by one institutionally isolated professor. [13] This would seem to be the first step required for any meaningful change, the first step before the various Deans could start being pro-active rather than re-active, the first step required before the Office of the Dean of Students can stop being mere academic cops for the faculty and can return to being advocates for students - indeed, required for this Office to get past pasting smiley faces on those wounded by felo de se (treating the "individual" as the felon) so that the Dean of Students is once again at the heart, not the periphery, of Middlebury College.

Rather than pleading "we [the Deans] cannot find the perpetrators" of the hateful bashing of the lesbigayer student creation, "The Closet," during Coming Out Week, as if that let the Deans off the hook of responsibility, they could creatively initiate campus-wide dialogue on the homophobic thinking which often lies behind the "we're-all-polite" facade of conscious articulations by people at this institution. Seeking "individuals" as culprits, as "perpetrators;" i.e. as a kind of social scapegoat so the status quo leadership avoids "blame," seems to stem from the in-need-of-updating liberal conception of society as consisting only of "individuals" and of the "State/Monarch." Rather than seeking culprits, the first step is to orchestrate multiple, repeated College-wide discussions of how homophobic connotations adhere to many lingual usages and how superficially innocent reiterations of these usages act to maintain the force of these connotations. This role of discursive structures is, at present, largely unknown here. [14] For College administrators to take any role in initiating such College-wide discussions, The College's Trustees must support the President in backing such efforts. This support has been conspicuously and repeatedly absent at Middlebury College.

It is not enough to treat "alliances" of those who are collectively abjected by our white, Protestant-spired institutions-on-the-hill as mere "clubs" or "houses" merely ensuring that there is a superficially "level playing field" for the Middlebury Open Queer Alliance, the African American Alliance or the Organización Latinarmericana y Española to seek resources to bring in one speaker per term to the campus in the same way the Rugby Club or the men's singing group, The Dissipated 8, could bring a speaker/performer or hold a dance/concert/party, if they wanted to. Individual members of the LBGTQ student group must, on their own time, in addition to dealing with the psychic load of being isolated in diverse ways as queer, arrange to bring Sarah Schulman to campus (pick her up at the airport, arrange for accommodation, meals, auditorium, seating, etc.). There is no queerly knowledgeable paid-staff assistance dedicated to helping these students. This shows a profound ignorance of the social psychology of abjection, an ignorance which nurtures abundant cynicism towards this College.
The robustness of 1950s thinking here as the year 2000 approaches recalls the resilience of aversively racist thinking (Gaertner and Dovidio, 1986) being shown now as the Hopwood v. Texas decision reversing the 1978 Bakke decision is played out. As Malcolm Lavergne, who is the first post-Hopwood African American to have accepted admission to the University of Texas Law School and who, after learning he would be the only African American there, then decided to go to Cornell instead of Texas, despite being "a Texas boy ... [whose] heart's in going to Texas," said in explaining his reversal: "it would be like going to a country club there." (Applebome, 1997) For someone whose mind has been queerly warped by growing up in America of the 1940s-1990s, despite being born in Middlebury to an alum of this school and to a father born and raised in Middlebury whose father, in turn, taught in the Department of Political Economy here, Middlebury College in the 1990s appears to be a heteronormative country club stuck in the 1950s.

Since this institution caters to the segment of the market for higher education consisting of people who are culturally rather narrowly experienced (deprived?) but have well above medial incomes, there is no pressure from the buyers of our services to queer our curriculum. Although this is no longer such a small place that everyone knows everyone, there is near unanimity in the value placed on heteronormative respectability. And this college is an orchestra which the leadership plays with skill, singing the song of well-intentioned liberal heteronormativity. [15] The futility of efforts here to open faculty and top-level administrative minds to queer theory, when combined with the relative unattractiveness of this campus, isolated in the fell gulag of heteronormativity that is Vermont, to LBGTQ faculty who are seeking a teaching position, leads to some pessimism about whether Middlebury will soon get past its outdated discursive structures - a situation which is a bit ironic for an institution priding itself on its national leadership in language pedagogy. [16] The price for this linguistic costiveness will be more wrist slashing. [17]

References

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_____. 1997a. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative.: New York: Routledge.
_____. 1997b. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.: Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cornwall, Richard R. 1997. "deconstructing silence: the queer political economy: of the social articulation of desire." Review of Radical Political Economics. 29(1): 1-130.
_____. 1998. A primer on queer theory for economists interested in: social identities. Feminist Economics. forthcoming.
Duberman, Martin. 1989. "Writhing bedfellows" in antebellum South: Carolina: historical interpretation and the politics of evidence. pp. 153-168 in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncey, Jr. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: Meridian (Penguin).
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Elster, Jon. 1989. The Cement of Society - A Study of Social Order.: New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando: A Biography.: New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.; Endnotes
1."Oxymoronic" because of queer theory's birth in Foucault's: (1979: 182-184) characterization of the arbitrary, socially constructed nature of identities through the process of normalization as described below. See Duggan and Hunter (1995) for more on this inconsistency between formulating queer as an identity, a "nationality," and queer theory.
2. David McInerney helped me overcome some of my cognitive hurdles: to redeploying "queer" this way.
3. Warhol's graphic language about celebrity, about the: social construction of difference and identity, mirrors the contemporaneous analysis by Foucault (1966: 62-64, 68) on the evolution in Western thinking of this role of language. Foucault uses Cervantes's Don Quixote appearing in two installments - the first in 1605 and the second, "an autobiography inhabiting the biography," appearing in 1615 - as a marker for this evolution of the lingual construction of identities. Like Quixote's adventures, Warhol's art, from his soup cans to his Marilyn series, "narrate[s] . . . the very life they brought into being. . . . [For] Warhol . . . the discovery of a self-image in the portrait, of an autobiography inhabiting the biography, also involved an unconscious projection . . . of guilt." (David E. James 1996: 33, 47)
4. This ties our efforts to similar pursuits in race and feminist theory.
5. Does this reluctance of the College's leaders to publicly: acknowledge the scholarly and personal toxicity engendered by the overwhelming dominance of liberal heteronormativity here reflect their fear of confronting homophobic thinking by some who are a major part of this school's funding base given the somewhat parallel recent experiences of similarly expensive schools? The possibility of this type of social contamination of the allegedly pristine ivory tower would not be unfamiliar to those on other margins of respectable sociality.
6. Gladwell (1997: 54) offers an amusing description of Dockers ads: as "one of the most successful fashion-advertising campaigns in history." Of course, since this story must appear in the hetero-dominated New Yorker, Gladwell and his editors can embellish this with abundantly queer graphics but cannot overtly acknowledge heteronormativity.
7. Oscar Wilde (AKA Sebastian Melmouth) came to iconically em-body: queer shame and articulated it in Ballad of Reading Gaol, the theme from which, "for each man kills the thing he loves," is then reiterated by Rainer Faßbinder in his version of Jean Genet's Querelle. Eve Sedgwick (1996) sketches well some of the ties between the construction of queer and of shame; Simon Watney (1996: 22, 27) makes tangible how shame was "induced" in, indeed, how it "constituted" Andy Warhol/Andrew Warhola.
8. After interacting even briefly but repeatedly with people: from the monolithic stream of heteronormative minds at this College, the sense of ugliness-of-self often grows so much that swallowing a bullet seems sweet compared to remaining here. See Butler (1997b: 148) for a similar example of suicidal rage driven by AIDS deaths.
9. See also Jennifer Doyle (1996: 193) for good examples of: similar production by art critics who abjected Andy Warhol by linking him misogynistically to "prostitution and sexual deviance (for example drag) [using these] as metaphors for Warhol's production of art" even while striving to avoid soiling their hands by never making explicit Warhol's wonderfully flaming faggotiness or their disapproval of this.
10. See Weeks (1991: 41) and references cited there on "[t]he: role of sexual respectability in helping cement the dominant power bloc in the nineteenth century ... in Britain."
11. See Adam Phillips in Butler (1997b: 151-152) who offers a: clinical view of this Freudian notion and ties it to Butler's work.
12. A more academic example of the role of discursive structures: which is especially relevant to economics: When I make so bold as to note that a colleague has urbanely committed a homophobic blindness/omission, s/he will maintain the pose of being well intentioned by responding: "I meant no harm." Of course, this response trivializes homophobia (when someone accidentally pulls a trigger with the consequence of killing someone else, the conventionally reduced charge of manslaughter is typically not equivalent to innocence), but this response also suggests that this colleague might well have tried to avoid this homophobic bigotry, if s/he had been aware of its implication. This well intentioned colleague is claiming that his choice was made unconsciously, not as a self-interested, strategic choice (unspoken: "I am not bigoted"). Even well intentioned economists will plead this defense, but these same economists are reluctant to admit models of actors making nonrational (i.e., non-self-interested, non-utility-maximizing) choices of the type that seem so common in language games. Perhaps this reflection on my colleagues' queer omissions suggests that an actor's "choice" of an épistémè might be modeled differently from an actor's choice of how much Coke or Pepsi to buy. This suggests it might be fruitful to construct linguistic models of political economy.
13. Of course, the dominance of (and blindness to this dominance): of a liberally Lockean emphasis on individualism leads this isolation to be attributed to the eccentricity of the "individual" rather than to the hegemonic social structures: "It's his own damn fault!"
14. For example, the women's basketball team recently advertised: at the College Fitness Center a pair of games it had coming up by pointing to how amazingly aggressive, "board crashin', butt-kickin', stylin', 'who you callin' a PANSY' " they are. In scoffing at being thought of as pansies, they presumably did not want to make any overtly homophobic assertion; they merely wanted to assert they were not weak, they wanted to claim a stereotypically masculine type of aggressiveness (yet another example of this desire/pressure on women at Middlebury). The irony of a women's team employing a usage coined at the end of the last century to misogynistically enforce the newly evolving male gender role was lost on the team and, apparently, on its female coach and on the female Dean of Students. They seemed unable to grasp - they were oblivious to the fact - that the boldly enlarged use of the word PANSY on their poster drew its force from the homophobic connotations of this word and that by invoking these connotations they were (unwittingly) reinforcing them in the discursive structures dominating on this campus. The team's brief letter of "formal apology" in the Campus newspaper merely asserted their innocence of intent to offend anyone. This is the usual heteronormative ploy of seeking to have their cake (i.e., gaining attention by using such a homophobically charged word) and eating it too (i.e., claiming innocence, obliviousness to, homophobic injury resulting from that usage).
15. See Piore (1995: 176) for the useful idea of a process of orchestration: in political economy. As with the liberal notion of "liberation" as noted above in citing Halperin's reinterpretation of the meaning of "coming out," there can be no pat formula for instituting a nonhomophobic culture. As Piore (1995: 184) notes in a broader context: "Getting there is not a problem that can be solved. It is a process that can, at best, be guided in the desirable direction. The key instruments for guiding it are narrative and orchestration." It is the "guid[ing] in the desirable direction" that is lacking in this College's leadership.
16. Will the recently created "Center for Educational Technology": at Middlebury College (as part of the Mellon Foundation's Project 2001 which is aimed at helping liberal arts colleges in their development of technology-enhanced language instruction) facilitate seeing language learners as something more than individualistic (computer-like) processors of syntactical systems?
17. A typical response from heteronormative Middleburyeans: to this articulation of how precarious it is to live here has been: "Surely you exaggerate." This arrogance is based on blindness, on not being able to see and experience the soul-killing effects of growing up and living in homophobically enforced heteronormativity. How can this be communicated? Even felo de se fails to penetrate this cognitive veil (this head-in-the-mud mental process); it is simply treated as a random, inexplicable act by an individual which requires no revision of one's thinking and so is quickly forgotten.

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institutional homophobia of discursive inertia: a queerly theoretic case study

institutional homophobia of discursive inertia:
a queerly theoretic case study