Re: Satchels and Caps

Rocke, I think, is looking for differences, while Malcolm is looking for continuities. Did the transition from pederasty to faggotry (to appropriate SR's characterizations) represent a disjunction (Trumbach, Foucault, Edmund) or a development (Malcolm, Norton, Phaino)? This is not, imho, a question of fact. There are always both continuities and discontinuities. The question of which deserve emphasis is a political question, depending on where we are as a society at the moment compared with where we need to get to, and how we can get there. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), used the terms "minoritizing" and "universalizing" to describe two contrasting approaches, suggesting these terms might be more helpful than the usual dichotomy of essentialism versus social constructionism. I take the "minoritizing" approach to emphasize continuities (for example, arguing that pederasty and faggotry are fundamentally the same), while the "universalizing" approach emphasizes discontinuities (pederasty and faggotry are fundamentally different). Sedgwick, I think, denies that one approach is right and the other wrong, though in her book she adopts a universalizing perspective. Rather, which approach one prefers depends upon one's political goals. As I wrote in a previous discussion with Edmund (linked below), "emphasizing continuity tends to discount the potential for change, while emphasizing discontinuity tends to promote it." Thus, if you like the way things are, you may emphasize continuities to guard against losing what you see as gains (e.g., the current LGBTQ+ movement). But if you think the way things are now is bad and radical change is needed (as Sedgwick did, at least in that book), you emphasize discontinuities to demonstrate the degree to which things tend to change. Of course, change doesn't imply change for the better. If we think the transition from pederasty to faggotry was a bad thing, maybe the universalizing approach loses some of the appeal Sedgwick (and queer theory, which she helped to found) saw in it. There's a natural tendency to think the solution is to reverse this transition, to somehow get back to pederasty, which after all more or less flourished, at least in comparison to present conditions, for millennia, up until the last century or three. Even a few decades ago, some tell us, it was easy to find a boy happy to get a blow job, and in some places yet untouched by the current youth sex panic maybe it still is. But I think the universalizing approach has value for us. Going back to the pederasty that flourished in Florence is probably not possible and maybe not even desirable (desiring it likely involves idealizing something that was inextricably a product of social conditions -- such as the social and political isolation of women under the supervision and control of male guardians -- we should hesitate to wish revived). In her 1993 essay "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys," Sedgwick makes the point that the minoritizing approach merely says, about gays, leave us alone, what we do is not your business. The universalizing approach instead says value us, it is important to you that we exist. While I am not aware that Paglia ever invoked Sedgwick's categories, she did warn that "born this way," however useful it proved in advancing the rights of gays as a stigmatized minority, involved risks by emphasizing our inherent difference. Wouldn't everyone be better off then, if nobody was born gay? In her 1993 essay, Sedgwick points out how easily, in the hands of psychologists, this segues into a philosophy of cure. As a population already widely targeted for extermination, we should be even more wary than gays of a minoritizing "born this way" strategy. We will never be accepted until we are valued. hugzu ;-p (Boychat.org link) Re: A battle of sorts