HANDOUT ON QUEER THEORY: MARJORIE GARBER
Assignment for next time
Marjorie Garber, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995): "Introduction," "Bisexuality and Celebrity," and "Return to Biology." (on reserve as photocopy)
Study questions and discussion topics
1. Garber is reluctant to ask whether a person is "really straight" or "really gay"? Why? And what makes her think that bisexuality "puts in question the very concept of sexual identity" (15)?
2. Garber says that in recent years bisexuality has (once again) become "chic" (18). What does Garber make of this development? Does she think it's a good thing, a bad thing, or a good and bad thing? Do you agree with her basic premise? Do you see signs that bisexuality is (once again) "chic"? And--one last question, please--do you see why she's so concnered with saying that this is not the first time bisexuality has been "chic"?
3. In the introduction, and indeed throughout these readings, Garber often returns to issues of visibility and invisibility. The issues come up when she's talking about the student crossing the bridge (25) and again, in a different way, when she's talking about the Kinsey scale and the Klein grid (28-30). Why are such issues so important to her? What's up here?
4. What does Garber seem to make of the common (or at least fairly common) belief that "everyone is bisexual"? Would she like to see that belief become even more widespread than it is now? Or would she prefer to replace it with some other notion or conception of sexuality?
5. Garber starts out by explaining that no literary form could appear "less postmodern" than celebrity biographies (137), but by the end she's saying that the biographies really are postmodern after all (149). Why? What is so po-mo about these books?
6. What does Garber have in mind when she says that "all great stars are bisexual in the performative mode" (140)? Can you think of any contemporary stars about whom this is (or isn't) true?
7. What does Freud seem to think about homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality? And what Garber seem to think about Freud? Is she pissing on him, sucking up to him, or what? (Her subtitle riffs on one of Freud's titles, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Is her riff respectful, disrespectful, both, neither--what??)
8. Garber, like Butler, seems compelled to put words like "is" or "am" or "are" in quotation marks. Why this compulsion? What might happen if those words aren't put in quotes?
9. Do you agree that "biology is back" (271)? And if it is, is there anything we humanists and theory-heads do about it? Do we have to let scientists push us around--or can we push back? What would Derrida or Foucault do if confronted by an obnoxious scientist? (And by the way, I do realize that not all scientists are obnoxious.) What, finally, does Garber do? How does she try to get the better of the scientists?
10. What does Garber have to say about the research conducted by scientists like Simon LeVay and Dean Hamer? Why does she think that bisexuality presents a challenge to their kind of research, their kind of thinking?
11. Garber, like many of the people we're now reading, has some real trouble with "identity politics." What, first of all, is identity politics? What exactly makes it so problematic? If it is true, as Garber implies, that we should question "rights-based arguments linked to the concept of fixed identity" (282), where would we go and what would we do after raising those questions? In other words, how do we work for gay, lesbian, and/or bi rights if the whole notion of gay, lesbian, bi, and straight identity is intellectually suspect?
What next?