"Yep, I'm Gay" Sexuality Identity and Confession

In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Judith Butler explores the notion of sexuality, by stating that “compulsory heterosexuality sets itself up as the original, the true, the authentic” (Rivkin and Ryan 722). In 1987 the television sitcom “Ellen” starring Ellen Degeneres featured the character of Ellen Morgan. Morgan was a likable young woman struggling to define herself in many aspects of her life. The show regularly focused on social relationships and workplace experiences. One element featured in the show were the regular pressures the character faced to date, “find a good man,” and become involved in a romantic relationship. This sense of “compulsory heterosexuality” was resultant from societal and familial pressures upon the title character – but also from within herself. Butler’s assertion that sexuality is performative was reflected by the character’s earliest presentation in the series which featured her wearing make-up, a softer hairstyle and more feminine clothing choices.
Throughout the course of the show, Ellen Morgan became more frustrated with the challenge of trying to find a relationship, and more overwhelmed and by the constant pressure to meet up to societal ideals. Butler would argue that the Ellen’s attempt to fit into the heterosexual ideal “is always the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmic idealization of self-and failing” (Wexler 2) Ellen’s romantic relationships were bound to fail because she was not being true to herself, and was allowing socially constructed ideas of normative behavior to define her identity.
In History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault examined the different cultural perceptions of sexuality and how they were framed in both religious and scientific terms. Foucault discussed the notion of “unnatural” sexuality being sinful, and later the need to confess evolving out of a religious act into a need for processing identity through speech and self acknowledgement. In the following scene from season four, Ellen is recalling a dream she had in which the lesbian references and stereotypes are abundant. Her desire to conform is so strong that she is only able to access her true identity during a subconscious dream state. Though the scene is constructed in an entertaining way, Foucault would recognize this as Ellen’s desire to not only hide her true desires from society, but also – more poignantly, from herself.

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Several times during the scene Ellen is referred to as a gay woman or lesbian. As she begins to take on this identity, she is no longer described as simply a person or a woman, but as a gay woman or lesbian. Foucault wrote that those who assumed or declared their identity as anything disparate from the norm, became the other – “The ‘perverse’ became a group, instead of an attribute,” (Wexler 2) in fact, Foucault went so far as to say that these “others” were so separate that they were actually viewed as a separate “species.”
The scene concludes with Ellen turning to the mental health provider for clarification or validation of her obvious desires. Foucault believed that the science of sexuality was instituted as a way of ordering or regulating “other” sexual behavior. But in this process, the individual who struggles with their sexual identity may finally voice or confess their true desires, and in doing so, the dirty shameful secret of “other” sexuality loses its taboo and stigma.

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The notion that talking about sexuality causes it to lose its power is validated by the groundbreaking decision of the writers of the comedy series to confront the struggles of a featured character not only being gay, but inviting the viewer to accompany the character along on the search for identity. In 1987, homosexuality was rarely referenced on episodic television, and no regular featured characters were depicted as gay, and in little over twenty years it is easy to point to multiple examples of gay characters and exploration of homosexual issues on shows like Friends, Brothers and Sisters, Will and Grace and Grey’s Anatomy. This representation of homosexuality in a more personalized form helped many viewers to challenge their constructed views of lesbian and gay men as something more that "other", allowing them to challenge their own ideas about identity and sexuality.

Works cited - under construction.

Michel Foucault and Self Imprisonment in The Handmaid's Tale

Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish” provides an example of a city whose viability has been challenged by a natural disaster (plague). This situation, which could potentially result in chaos and disorder, offers agency for the government to assume total control of its populous – while acting in the guise of protector. This scenario is similar in many ways to the systemic domination and subjugation of the citizenry described in Margaret Atwood’s novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” In this story, governmental chaos and natural catastrophes serve as a catalyst for a group of extreme religious fundamentalists to overtake the United States government. The newly formed government then makes sweeping changes to law and effects societal conventions.
Foucault’s text examined the power structure in society. In his Panopticon example he outlined the necessary modalities for effecting individuals to become prisoners internally, monitored and controlled by their own sense of control and discipline. He described four practices –establishment of a power hierarchy segregation, training, and military surveillance which may be seen illustrated in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the novel, the citizenry is divided into hierarchical groups and labeled – Wives, Commanders, Guardians, Handmaids, etc. These characters are designated by title and also by specific wardrobe which serve as constant reminders of their position and power level in the society envisioned in the fictional Republic of Gilead. The handmaid, who serves as narrator in the novel, describes the practice of separating the segment of society to which she belongs – essentially alienating them. The women, proven childbearers, are culled and then taken to “Red Centers” where they are then indoctrinated into their new purpose. These practices provide “the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other” (Foucault 553). The handmaids are then subject to regular medical examinations and rituals which regularly reinforce their position in the new society and insinuate a global control over the lives of the handmaids. The handmaid’s are also aware of the ever-present “Eyes,” governmental spies, whose purpose is to reveal illicit behavior which is punishable by torture or death. This constant state of fear reaffirms the notion that “each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life…or punishment” (Foucault 551).
The layered control and loss of individuality by those who are controlled by such a power structure lose any sense of agency and therefore lose any internal drive to fight against the oppressive structure or control. Foucault wrote that “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power… becomes the principle of his own subjection.” This notion of inability to effect control can be seen in the character of handmaid Offred who has several opportunities to shape her outcome (by spying for the resistance movement, stealing a weapon and using it to defend herself or escape, etc.), but her sense of self and power has been so meticulously diminished that she becomes complicit in her subjugation.

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Random, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 549-565

Marxism in The Hairy Ape

In the play, “The Hairy Ape,” Eugene O’Neill presents a sharp division among social classes, which he illustrates by presenting strong contrasts between the world of the ship workers (proletariat) and that of the cruise-goer (bourgeoisie). In Gundrisse, Karl Marx wrote of the necessity to fully understand the significance and impact of the class delineations, he posited that “classes, again are but an empty word unless we know what are the elements on which they are based, such as wage-labor, capital, etc.” (Grundisse, 650). All of the characters representative of wage earners are depicted as base and dirty and struggling with their identity in the shifting modernity of the world in which they find themselves. Initially the character of Yank glories in his role in society, though uneducated and unsophisticated, he realizes that the cruise goers (bourgeoisie) require his labor to continue their pleasure or artificially created world. He takes pride in his role in society and identifies with the material – steel – which gives him both his identity and his value, saying “ I’m de ting in gold dat makes it money! And I’m what makes iron into steel!....And I’m steel-steel-steel! I’m muscles in steel, de punch behind it! (Hairy, 1183) In this passage Yank is giving voice to Marx’s notion that the “the productive activity of the worker, the creative power whereby the worker not only replaces what he consumes, but gives to the accumulated labor a greater value than it previously possessed” (Wage, 663). O’Neill creates a dark and grimy world below the decks of the cruise ship which is portrayed as a prison where the workers are confined not by bars but by the steel that they make . Their workplace is likened to a prison or a cage (confining spaces generally made of steel) from which the workers are unable to escape.
Yank’s character is transformed by an encounter with a representative of the bourgeoise, Mildred Douglas. She represents the artificial, clean and smooth running world above the ship deck, which Yank’s labor benefits on two levels. Mildred literally profits from Yank’s labor while on the ship, but the reader also learns that the ship belongs to the company which Mildred’s family owns - and therefore she (by extension) owns Yank’s labor.
The position of the cruise goers is highly contrasted with against that of the laborer. A key figure representative of the bourgeoisie is Mildred Douglas. She expresses a need to tour the workings of the ship, and it is during Scene III that she (dressed in a clean white dress) descends to the ship’s bulks and encounters Yank and the barbarity of his conditions and role that her style of living necessitates. Her repulsion of the image of the laborer nearly causes her faint and she is quickly removed from the hellish stokehole. She is horrified by his animal like face, her reaction is shocking to hurtful to him and he lashes out at her angrily. As she is being taken away she likens him to a filthy beast. The final scene of the play reveals Yank at the zoo in front of the gorilla exhibit. He feels akin to these creatures who are brutish and wild and are confined because of the very characteristics which are essential to their identity. Yank concludes that he is truly like them, beast like -a “hairy ape” - who must be caged. Yank’s ideology of being bound by the characteristics of your identity is an ideology which “only need to be ‘interpreted’ to discover the reality of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology=illusion/allusion)” (Althusser, 693).
According to Marxist philosophy, Yank’s belief referenced early in the play, that “we run de whole woiks. All de rich guys dat tink dey’re somep’n, dey ain’t nothing!” would be viewed as partially true. Marx believed in the notion that there was a reciprocal relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeois, in which the worker produced for the benefit of the owner, but the owner gave the wage earner identity and value through their work. Marx would also argue that the worker would not be able to produce anything without the raw materials provided to him by the owner. The owner owned all of the laborers hourly production, the resources used in production and therefore was the sole beneficiary of the finished product. But Yank’s character grasped a fundamental Marxist ideal that the bourgeois class is only able to exisist because of the labor base which provides its wealth. Yank is correct in his belief that without the production and symbiosis of the relationship between the two classes, both fail.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 693-702

O’Neill, Eugene. “The Hairy Ape.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol. D. Ed. Lauter, Paul. Boston: Houghton, 2006. 1177-1208.

Marx, Karl. “Grundisse.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 650-652.

Marx, Karl. “Wage Labor and Capital” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Rivkin. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 659-664

Disrupted Formation of I: Deafening the World

Freud believed that the primary years were the most crucial to the normative development of an individual. He concluded that any interruption or disruption of this process would cause serious neurosis. An example of this of symptom manifestation would be the child whose discovery of the pleasure of the genitals might later become extremely repressive or alternately extremely promiscuous. Freud believed that children were sexual beings from birth and that these stages, oral, anal and genital, were necessary for normal development. Freud theorized that children initially identified with the mother(er) figure and that the child’s sense of identity was intertwined with this figure. The child typically finds their physical and emotional needs met by this figure in the earliest phases of development. Because the mother is attentive to the father the child may either fear the father, or in most cases the young male child will eventually shift their attention seeking to their father who they emulate. This theory is known as the Oedipal Complex and Freud believed that it was a rite of passage in development and a necessary segue to establishing an adult identity.

The song "Jeremy" by Pearl Jam explores the issues of Freud's Oedipal Complex and Lacan's theories of the formation of I by exploring the story of a child' whose passage through these stages has been disrupted. The lines: "Daddy didn’t give affection/And that boy was something mommy wouldn’t wear” speaks directly to ideas Freud posited in the Oedipal Complex. In the song, Jeremy seeks attention/physical comfort from the mother figure, but is rejected. Jeremy then tries to gain attention from his father who also rejects him. In Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalyses, Rivkin and Ryan document the importance of the creation of the identity by writing that “as each child grows and enters first family then society, he or she learns to repress those sexual impulses as well as an initially grandiose sense of self to the demands of life with others. (Rivkin 381).” This inability to bond appropriately with the parent figures in Freud’s proscribed stages causes an inability to relate and his eventual lashing (failure to repress sexual and aggressive impulses) out against society. The songs direct reference to the child’s action, “gnashed his teeth/and bit the recess lady’s breast” would indicate that the mother/child fractured or reached the ultimate disconnect resulting in the child’s oral fixation and misplaced sexual and aggressive impulses by way of gnashing the teeth and biting. The object of the biting further corroborates the idea that there is reaction formation in the very act of lashing out at the physical comfort of the breast which is what he ultimately desires.
Jeremy’s disrupted development is also apparent in his distorted, yet grandiose, image of himself as demonstrated by the child produced artwork – Jeremy’s artwork – self imagining himself as a victorious “King Jeremy” bathed in sunlight and master of all he surveys. In “The Mirror Stage” Lacan discusses the stagesof development for the perception of image – which begins as an extension of the motherer figure and gradually transforms from the specular I to the social I. Lacan states that the signifigance of the “moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an “abstract” which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation.” (Lacan, 445). Essentially Lacan argues that the child begins as a mirror image that mimics the mother, and morphs later into the Social I and later a Symbolic I figure. In the sogn Jeremy we can clearly see that the child’s development has been disrupted resulting in a fractured image or sense of identity. Socially Jeremy is viewed by peers as a “harmless little fuck” who has no ability to assert himself or makes needs and demands known. It is only when Jeremy is pushed through taunting and abuse into his symbolic vision of himself as “King Jeremy” regresses to the state of responding to the id exclusively, losing restraint and acting on primitive, instinctual desires and revealing the “madenss that deafens the world with its sound and fury” (Lacan, 445).

Works Cited


Rivkin, Julie and Ryan, Michael. "Introduction: Strangers to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.


Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytical Experience." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.



Title: Pearl Jam - Jeremy lyrics


At home
Drawing pictures
Of mountain tops
With him on top
Lemon yellow sun
Arms raised in a V
Dead lay in pools of maroon below
Daddy didn't give attention
To the fact that mommy didn't care
King Jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world
Jeremy spoke in class today
Jeremy spoke in class today
Clearly I remember
Pickin' on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth
And bit the recess lady's breast
How could i forget
He hit me with a surprise left
My jaw left hurtin
Dropped wide open
Just like the day
Like the day i heard
Daddy didn't give affection
And the boy was something mommy wouldn't wear
King jeremy the wicked
Ruled his world
Jeremy spoke in class today
Jeremy spoke in class today
Try to forget this...
Try to erase this...
From the blackboard.

Sorry couldn't embed the video because it had been disabled, but it can be viewed here:

Our group presentation topic is Formalism. I attempted to contact others in my group through the WebCT, but received no response. I tracked down my fellow group members and found that due to schedule conflicts it was going to be very difficult to get together. I encouraged our group to try to communicate via phone and email. Our presentation date was fast approaching and I was getting nervous. We spoke briefly and arranged a day and time to meet to prepare, but the night before we were to meet I received an email letting me know that the other members of the group were not able to meet because various situations had arisen. There was some exchange of email, but we were having trouble all getting on the same page. We had two very brief meetings after class, that were not wholly productive. I was very uncomfortable with the lack of communication and attempt to organize our presentation. We had some ideas but they didn’t seem to be very fluid or concise. At one point it was suggested that we should just all do our own thing, but I didn’t feel that this was in the spirit of the assignment of collaborating as a group.

We arranged another meeting, everyone was notified but only Tara and I were able to meet. We did We were able to sit down and discuss some ideas about our presentation and an actual activity. We decided I would do a brief introduction, and then we would assign character personas to six of our classmates. Tara was very interested in the idea of carnival and we thought that this might be a way of incorporating and exploring the idea. We would have the students participants take on their persona, and halfway through the demonstration switch their persona to the companion persona, ie from veterinarian to dog trainer. We decided that we could demonstrate three ideas in this manner. Our classmates would be designated as opposing characters like monarch/bum (extremes in social class), scientist/child (extremes in knowledge/education) and veterinarian/animal . These would show different perspectives and the various stratification of language. We would demonstrate the Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, expressing the author’s intent in a different way – a double typed discourse, by offering a statement (authorial intent) and having them demonstrate the different ways that their characters might phrase that same idea in different words. I also suggested that we could use our class participants to help show Schlovsky’s defamiliarization of an object. As in the description of the text, the object will be obscured from the class’s view, and the participants will be asked not to use the name of the object or typical labels to describe the object(s). Then the class could guess what the object is.
We are due to present tomorrow and I must admit that I have some apprehension and uncertainty about our presentation.

Saussure and the world of Competitive Skating

In “Course in General Linguistics,” Ferdinand Saussure described language as a social institution, emphasizing that how we speak and write are influenced by our psychological perceptions of that word (sign), which describes an object or person. In his system of semiotics he designated the sign as the written character which represents a verbal utterance or thought, and the signified as the mental concept which that sign represents. Signifiers are characteristics which we associate with the sign/signified.
Consider the sign “Tanya Harding.” In the 1990’s the world of Olympic Skating was rocked when skater Tanya Harding became implicated on a vicious attack on a fellow American teammate to improve her own chances in the competition. Saussure believed that signs are arbitrary – they can change as our perceptions change or as situations evolve, etc. So pre-attack signifiers for Tanya Harding might have been underdog, competitive, hopeful, and motivated. Signifiers pertaining to Tanya Harding after the attack would cause people to associate the sign Tanya Harding with more negative signifiers: vicious, poor-sport, mean, heartless, criminal, aggressive, competitive, sociopathic, and selfish.
Saussure did not intend language simply to be a system of nomenclature or labeling. He aded that the value and the signification are not the same thing. Signification is a descriptive terminology applied to the object or person. But while signs are arbitrary, and subject to change they are generally agreed upon, he writes that these are “associations which bear the stamp of collective approval” (Saussure, 60) To help imbue a sense of value, there must be two components which help build value for the signifiers that we attach to sign. Saussure believed that we must have dissimilar things to compare the sign with, such as Nancy Kerrigan – the victim in the attack who was deemed as: sympathetic, graceful, competitive, victim, beautiful, charming, role model. Additionally, a similar thing that can be compared to the sign further reinforces the value of the sign. If you consider another figure, like Christi Yamaguchi, you may note that all three characters have some similar signifiers such as, drive, motivation, competitiveness and skill, but Yamaguchi’s signifiers like admirable and team player mark her as something quite different to Harding, and offer a stark contrast for both the signs and signifiers. Even today, almost 20 years later if you mention the name Tanya Harding those mental concepts of negativity are forever connected to that name.

What do you think you know?

The image shows a person framed against white horizontal blinds covering two windows directly behind him. The man has cropped dark hair and a light beard. The man has a slight smile on his face. He is disrobed from the waist up. The photograph shows him placing both hands on his abdominal region which is swollen in pregnancy. He wears a plain wedding band on his left hand. The figure has a deep scar approximately 6 inches long on the left side of his chest. He is wearing a necklace.

On first examination this photograph seems to provoke our beliefs about who can become pregnant. But upon further knowledge we learn that the person pictured is not in fact a man pregnant with a child but a woman who appears to be a man. This “deregulartization” of our perceived gender stereotypes causes us to see the person with typically male characteristics such as short hair, facial hair, and a flat chest to assume that the person shown must be a man…even when it is obvious that the person is pregnant (a characteristic exclusive to female humans) which goes against our empirical knowledge and sensibilities.