What's Queer about Europe?: Productive Encounters and Re-enchanting Paradigms

By Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta

What’s Queer about Europe? examines how queer theory helps us initiate disorienting conjunctions and counterintuitive encounters for imagining historical and contemporary Europe. This book queers Europe and Europeanizes queer, forcing a reconsideration of both. Its contributors study Europe relationally, asking not so much what Europe is but what we do when we attempt to define it.

The topics discussed include: gay marriage in Renaissance Rome, Russian anarchism and gender politics in early-twentieth-century Switzerland, colonialism and sexuality in Italy, queer masculinities in European popular culture, queer national identities in French cinema, and gender theories and activism. What these apparently disparate topics have in common is the urgency of the political, legal, and cultural issues they tackle. Asking what is queer about Europe means probing the blind spots that continue to structure the long and discrepant process of Europeanization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Feb 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823255375

Book preview

WHAT’S QUEER ABOUT EUROPE?

What’s Queer about Europe?

PRODUCTIVE ENCOUNTERS AND RE-ENCHANTING PARADIGMS

Edited by

MIREILLE ROSELLO AND SUDEEP DASGUPTA

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

What’s queer about Europe? : productive encounters and re-enchanting paradigms / edited by Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-5535-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-5536-8 (paper)

1. Queer theory—Europe.   2. Europe—Civilization.   I. Rosello, Mireille.   II. Dasgupta, Sudeep.

HQ76.3.E8W43 2014

306.7601094—dc23

2013016309

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14      5 4 3 2 1

First edition

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Queer and Europe: An Encounter

SUDEEP DASGUPTA AND MIREILLE ROSELLO

QUEER HISTORIES: IMAGINING OTHER EUROPEAN CONSTRUCTIONS

(Same-Sex) Marriage and the Making of Europe: Renaissance Rome Revisited

GARY FERGUSON

A Case of Mistaken Identity: Female Russian Social Revolutionaries in Early-Twentieth-Century Switzerland

DOMINIQUE GRISARD

Straight Migrants Queering European Man

NACIRA GUÉNIF

QUEERING EURO-GLOBAL POLITICS

Queering European Sexualities Through Italy’s Fascist Past: Colonialism, Homosexuality, and Masculinities

SANDRA PONZANESI

Queer, Republican France, and Its Euro-American Others

LUCILLE CAIRNS

FROM EUROPEAN GRAND NARRATIVES TO QUEER COUNTER-STORIES

Sick Man of Transl-Asia: Bruce Lee and Queer Cultural Translation

PAUL BOWMAN

What’s Queer about Remy, Ratatouille, and French Cuisine?

LAURE MURAT

Pathos as Queer Sociality in Contemporary European Visual Culture: François Ozon’s Time to Leave

EMMA WILSON

Queer/Euro Visions

CARL STYCHIN

Notes

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank our authors, who accepted a potentially challenging invitation to consider what is Queer about Europe. They generously accepted the challenge to tailor their current research and sent us thought-provoking and inspiring contributions.

The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam provided financial support and a stimulating research environment. Special thanks to the participants of the annual ASCA Theory Seminar.

The book developed as a sub-project of a research group that met under the aegis of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and the Institute for History and Culture. We thank the participants in the Europeanizing Spaces project for stimulating discussions.

We want to thank Mike Katzberg for his patience and meticulous editing of the manuscript.

The detailed and constructive reports of the two readers of the manuscript enriched the introduction and general structure of the book. We were touched by their collegiality and generosity.

We thank Helen Tartar and Tom Lay at Fordham University Press for their support and encouragement from the early stages of the project.

WHAT’S QUEER ABOUT EUROPE?

INTRODUCTION

Queer and Europe: An Encounter

Sudeep Dasgupta and Mireille Rosello

Neither American, nor Dutch, nor French, nor German, nor British, nor Swiss, we proclaim ourselves Queer Europeans. But unlike Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, the authors of the 1989 In Praise of Creoleness, we do not write in praise of Queer Europe.¹ Rather, we wish to interrogate the encounter between Queer and Europe.

We are concerned that Europe as a project and an embattled reality, and Queer as a paradigm and discipline, are often met with skepticism. A sense of being fraught, perhaps increasingly irrelevant, even passé, makes both Europe and Queer appear not very urgent as issues to be thought through, let alone brought into an encounter. But precisely this seeming lack of urgency and relevance is what the book explores. The urgency of producing this encounter thus stems from a critique of the rhetoric of disenchantment that both paradigms sometimes invoke. The book is an urgent call for rethinking and reframing these two terms as interventions in our present. It is in this sense that we are in search for Queer Europeans.

Our objective is to examine the connection between Queer and Europe and the politicized affects or values that get attached to the ideas of the old, the obsolete, the new, and the brand new. A quick sketch of some of those features might be in order. In the midst of the ongoing economic crises, with failing European economies and inter-European paralysis on how to handle the politics of this economic meltdown, anti-Europeanists have been given plentiful reasons for fueling chauvinist, rightwing, and nationalist agendas.² When, in 2005, the Dutch and the French refused to ratify the proposed Constitution of the European Union, these rejections were framed through cultural and economic nationalism. These Eurocritics on the Right are not our primary concern. Euro-skeptics on the Left, however, with their reliance on populist invocations of the people, responsiveness to grassroots activism, hostility to the bureaucracy in Brussels, and urgent anti-capitalist criticism, prove a far more challenging set of interlocutors given our desire in this book to revisit and productively provoke an encounter between these two disillusioned paradigms.

For example, when Europe is equated with the European Union’s bureaucracy, Brussels is accused of micro-managing member states and of coming up with policies that are either irrelevant to the local populations or downright harmful to their way of life. The core of the supranational entity is perceived as a centralizing supra-state from which citizens are more and more alienated. Elie Barnavi laments the fact that Europe is frigid (Barnavi 2008), and both Rosi Braidotti (an Italian feminist based in the Netherlands) and Orhan Pamuk (a Turkish Nobel-Prize author) have deplored the fact that Europe no longer makes us dream (Pamuk 2011, Braidotti 2003, Andrijasevic 2003).

Analysts who take into account the history of the formation of the European Union suggest that contemporary Europe may be the victim of its success: Originally conceived as the solution to recurring conflicts between nation states, Europe as a political and economic entity has reached an objective that is no longer perceived as an exciting goal. As Thomas Ferenczi puts it:

Europe used to be a challenge, to represent hope. Now it is self-evident, banal. For the younger generations who have not been involved in postwar controversies, Europe is life as usual. The dream has come true. As a result, even if rare are those who reject the European project, enthusiasm is no longer to be expected. Routine has replaced adventure.³

Reconciliation within Europe is no longer an issue, intra-European peace has become something of a reality, so that the main reason that led the founding fathers of Europe to embark on a political adventure seems to have lost its relevance and urgency, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The original desire to make sure that no conflict would erupt within Europe is no longer a priority even if the dream can be perceived, in retrospect, as the limited ambition to reconcile those nations involved in the first and second world wars. Recent events such as the war in Yugoslavia, as Edgar Morin argues, do not threaten the myth of an internally peaceful Europe (Morin 1996). The philosopher regrets Europe’s political powerlessness and the fact that no awareness of a desire for a common destiny is emerging (Morin 1987).

Europe’s international politics is equally fraught. Europe polices its internal and external borders (Gunduz 2010, Taras 2009) while distressed activists and thinkers can’t help noticing the relentless rise of xenophobia and Islamophobia. A new myth has emerged: that of Fortress Europe. The process of enlargement only reinforces the exclusionary borders, which are geographically displaced and are not redefined. As the borders between states become invisible or transparent for some, the supranational border turns into a redoubtable obstacle for those who encounter it both inside and outside of Europe.

Some Europeans experience the loosening of border controls as an increasing lack of insecurity, as demonstrated by the recent controversies around free movement within the Schengen countries. Europe does not protect them from what they see as the unstoppable flow of migrants whose ethnic, religious, or economic identity is perceived as a threat to their way of life. Other Europeans fear that Europe’s underexplored colonial past is re-emerging in the center of globalized urban zones (Balibar 2001, 38–42). The narrative of reconciliation, which may have seemed to bear the promise of a generous form of postnationalism (Habermas 2001), has been replaced by postcolonial melancholia, national or even regional retrenchment, and a rhetoric of fear and suspicion about those non-Europeans who represent a generalized threat to European values. Others live in fear of terrorism or of religious fundamentalism, and of losing their national or cultural identity. They are unwilling to hear Derrida’s plea that Europe find or become the other heading: As long as Europe constructs the stranger and foreigner (inside and outside) as threatening, it cannot work through the double imperative of remembering itself as present and past while opening up to that non-European otherness that already constitutes its present and past (Derrida 1992, 13–14).

The present weariness and suspicion of Europe has its historical precedents, some of which presciently foresaw the forked path that confronted any imagining of Europe’s future journey. In the Vienna address of May 1935, Edmund Husserl mapped either a downfall or a rebirth in the context of what he called the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission of humanity (Husserl 1970, 7). Today, the twin discourses of rebirth and despair are encountered in many quarters while the West’s mission of humanity has gained a new lease on life in the context of the so-called war on terror. A resurgent Europe follows the same dialectic of despair and rejuvenation in a dramatically different geopolitical order. In Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe, Caitlin Smith notices that the inner heart of the text [is] . . . the problem of evil (Smith 2006, 29). Like rebirth and death, Evil emerges as the other face of Reason, regarded in the 1930s as one of the crowning achievements of European science. The politics of science and the morality of its deployment frame much of the sympathetic and critical discourses on Europe. It manifests in the tracking of illegals through high-tech surveillance, and the war on terror throughout Europe. The uncertain line between Reason and Evil re-emerges.

It is in this context that an engagement with queer perspectives becomes productive. We argue that both queer politics and queer theory might have reached a turning point in terms of their urgency, efficacy, and usefulness. The disappointment with the possible future of Europe is not dissimilar to the ongoing critique and rhetoric of disillusionment among queers.

Queer movements have very quickly become the victim of the relative success that Queer Theory has enjoyed in academic circles in the United States. It may be hard to remember that the original pairing between queer and theory was provocative when Teresa de Lauretis coined the phrase in 1991. The echo that university structures were able to generate led to rapid institutionalization. Queer theory was both new and recognizable by scholars involved in poststructuralism and theorists interested in going beyond the identity politics of LGBT and feminist discourses. Now, what used to sound like an oxymoron has lost its incongruity: As a quasi discipline, Queer Theory is not immune to instrumentalization.

Yet Queer Theory contains its own critique and is quite capable of articulating its own historicization and to ask What’s Queer about Queer studies now?⁴ Queer discourses question the way in which queer objects are conceptualized and articulated. For, contrary to what readers who are not familiar with the field may think, Queer Theory has never been reducible to sexuality let alone to the sexual politics of gays and lesbians. Reflecting on what Queer Theory has found or finds relevant is part of a debate that goes on in many disciplines. For some Queer critics, the decade during which North American activists and scholars mobilized against the American state’s indifference to AIDS constitutes the most authentic or quintessential queer moment. Others disagree. In the United States, many regret that Queers now concentrate on the wrong object when they argue in favor of gay marriage or the presence of gays in the military. Yet this (sometimes strategic) simplification ignores that queer discourses are internally divided. The lack of intersectionality between sexual and racial politics, which exaggerates the role of white middle class English-speaking gay men has always been critiqued from within queer discourses (Muñoz 1999). The fear of queer commodification exists within queer communities (Velázquez 2010) and the United States does not hold a monopoly on Queer.

Paradoxically, the increasing (if uneven) recognition of sexual minority rights within nation states and at the European level produces new challenges for queer politics. Rather than simply seeing the (ambiguous) state recognition of sexual minority rights as an unequivocal gain, queer politics faces the new challenge of how this supra-state European incorporation of such rights reproduces existing class and race hierarchies, and sometimes explicitly furthers xenophobia. What we identify as political, cultural, or theoretical changes revolve around issues of who will be included or excluded by the reconfiguration of Queer and of Europe. The articulation of migration and sexual politics and its urgent European component is precisely what queer discourse helps us with. The politics of asylum, refugees, immigration politics, and sexual rights constitute one nexus where this reconfiguration of Queer and Europe is urgently needed (see Guénif in this volume, Cervulle and Rees 2010, Butler 2009, Puar 2007).

It is therefore important to examine the conditions of emergence of what are or appear to be new, forward-looking, and progressive critical moves. No discourse on Queer or Europe is going to be credible otherwise. The ability to evolve and reassess one’s own parameters has always been a given within Queer Theory. As early as 1993, Judith Butler writes, in Bodies That Matter:

And if identity is a necessary error, then the assertion of queer will be necessary as a term of affiliation, but it will not fully describe those it purports to represent. As a result, it will be necessary to affirm the contingency of the term to let it be vanquished by those who are excluded by the term but who justifiably expect representation by it, to let it take on meanings that cannot now be anticipated by a younger generation whose political vocabulary may well carry a very different set of investments. (Butler 1993, 230)

But once the principle of change is accepted, the issue arises of which change is deemed desirable. How can we, while evolving, remain faithful to something that remains politically and ethically precious even if it becomes, for a while, unrecognizable and illegible?

What Exactly Is Queer about Queer Europe?

Could it then be that one of the ways of nurturing what is politically and culturally desirable is to split Queer and Europe into very specific units of meaning that focus on what exactly in each of the two paradigms is still, today, relevant and productive?

Queer analysts have already provided us with useful critiques of what they see as the most problematic aspects of queer discourses. Asked to comment on the relationship between globalization and queer, David Halperin and Dennis Altman both reflect upon which aspects of queer discourses are likely to gain or lose their critical edge. In 1996 (and perhaps we should write as early as 1996), Altman writes:

I would argue that queer is an enormously useful term for aesthetic criticism; a film like Orlando or The Crying Game can be described as queer, meaning precisely that they unsettle assumptions and preconceptions about sexuality and gender and their inter-relationship. I am less convinced that the term provides us with a useful political strategy or even a way of understanding power relations. (Altman 1996)

And in his response to Altman, Halperin implicitly focuses on queer in academic discourse when he suggests that the word has lost some of its original force:

Of course there remains much to worry about in the current hegemony of queer theory—not least that its institutionalisation, its consolidation into an academic discipline, constitutes a betrayal of its radical origins. . . . Even the scandalous term queer became respectable through its association with Theory . . . Once conjoined with theory, then, queer loses its offensive, vilifying tonality and subsides into a harmless generic qualifier, designating one of the multiple departments of academic theory. (Halperin 1996)

On the other hand, the splitting of queer into very specific and self-contained bundles of meaning risks following a quasi disciplinary logic that ignores the constant contamination between various definitions of the words Queer and Europe. From Altman’s and Halperin’s perspective, it obviously makes sense to concentrate exclusively on one specific period and context (in this case, the coining of queer by Teresa de Lauretis as a critical response to gay and lesbian studies and the embedding of queer theory in North American academic circles [de Lauretis 1991]). Distancing themselves from some of the incarnations of the queer movement, they are able to express loyalty to its original goals and avoid critical complacency.

Europeanists who are disillusioned by what Europe is (not) becoming are likely to adopt the same strategy. Choosing a limited definition of which aspects of Queer and Europe we focus on would solve one of the potential problems of our attempt to pair two words that may at first seem disparate and unconnected: Emphasizing what is queer about Europe could mean celebrating dissidence or progressive practices and thought in Europe. This is not, however, the strategy that we have adopted. Instead, we chose not to decide, at this point, which facets of Queer and Europe are our specific objects of study and therefore the static recipients of our critical gaze. The encounter between Queer and Europe turns them into theoretical engines that organize our way of analyzing and reading.

In this book, Queer and Europe are the names of two powerful but ill-defined paradigms or constellations of trans-disciplinary discourses and practices. In the case of Europe, we do not feel bound to strict distinctions between the European Union and the idea of Europe, between old or new Europe: Prematurely accepting such distinctions would pre-empt an analysis of the conditions that create them. Similarly, we refrain from immediately distinguishing between Queer Theory and queer activism, queer subjects and queer practices, North American queer discourses and its others. The essays themselves, in their conjunctural modes of figuring Europe and Queer, produce what the two terms might mean, rather than each essay being an example of some already formulated paradigm. Put differently, the essays produce Queer and Europe at the nexus of the specific concerns they bring up and then analyze. In this sense, Queer would mean precisely skewing received perspectives on what Queer and Europe mean and have meant.

Keeping Queer and Europe as broad as possible is not meant to downplay the significance of critics who have focused on the difference between aesthetic or political contexts. And we are well aware that Europe functions differently if it is looked at within specific fields of study (Europe as a historical concept, Europe as a continent that geographers map differently according to their own parameters, Europe as a mythological narrative of a kidnapped woman). Each conceptualization of the words casts a long ideological shadow on all the other contexts in which Queer and Europe are used.

Our objective is not to reach a better definition of each of the terms. Instead, our hypothesis is that the encounter between a chaotic set of discourses that form the Queer and European constellation will constitute a mutual critique of some of the parameters that organized them as cultural discourses, and empower or disempower those cultural agents who work as (non)Queers or (non)Europeans.

Encounters are both threats whose consequences may be neutralized or carried out, and opportunities that reveal ideological investments. By framing the collection of essays as an encounter between two disillusioned paradigms, our aim is to exacerbate rather than conceal the destabilizing consequences of conjoining Queer and Europe. The essays in this book in very different ways reveal the threats posed, and the productive consequences produced by an encounter between the two paradigms. The book as a whole produces a constellation of perspectives that construct a not-yet recognizable encounter between Queer and Europe.

All normativity, heteronormativity included, involves some structural framing of the threat posed by encounters (Sedgwick 2003; Butler 1997; Herdt 2009). Encounters, whether personal, world-historical, intellectual, aesthetic, or mundane and accidental threaten some notion of stability of those doing the encountering. Querying the attempts through which these frames ward off the threat of encounters could be understood as a form of queering. In "Queering Buen Amor, Gregory Hutcheson suggests that both literature and literary studies continue to be crucial in establishing (hetero-)normativity (Hutcheson 2006). The encounter with a literary text, and the discourses generated by critics on these texts, becomes a kind of crisis-management experience where the right kind of interpretations foreclose wrong ones. At stake in Hutcheson’s essay is the construction of Hispanic culture as integral to European" culture. The threats posed, and ushered away in this context, are the Moorish influences and sexual ambiguities that the text contains. Queering Buen Amor involves two things. First, by underlining the centrality of both Moorish influences and of non-normative sexuality, Hutcheson queers the text. The effect is to make Europe rotate on a broken axis with Spain producing the break through an encounter with non-normative sexualities and the Moors. More important than just including the Arabic and homosexual elements integral to the text, Hutcheson’s argument links the intellectual labor of critics to the struggle over the framing of European culture and its components. His essay labors at chipping away the presumed location of Hispanic literature and by consequence the solidity of Europe’s self-image produced by normative critics.

The present volume takes its bearings around queerness precisely in those terms. It produces readings that produce neither an accretive logic through which Europe needs to be understood as the sum of non-acknowledged encounters (the recovery of lost histories paradigm), nor a replacement logic whereby one paradigm must be substituted by another (queer) one. Queer stands for a theoretical, historical, and empirical acknowledgement of the messy, threatening, threateningly productive, and productively provocative character of encounters. Reading these essays is one example of such encounters. What is not at stake in queerness is a theoretical replacement-logic that would parallel a historical logic of replacement (Straight Europe is actually Queer Europe). The theoretical thrust of the anthology is not to produce paradigms such as deconstruction, hybridity, liminality, and alterity. The risk posed by such paradigms is that at a meta-level they reinstate the solidity of one normative paradigm by another: the queer one itself becomes normative. Queering is a permanent process that undermines normativity at the same time that it wards off the paradoxical threat of reinstating non-normativity as a desired and stable program. To that extent, queering possesses the perpetual uncertainty of a negative dialectical habit of mind without hypostasizing and reifying litanies of in-betweenness or the interval. The essays in this collection are productive interruptions that generate intellectual and political queries into both normative and non-normative programs that are on their way to becoming normative. Eschewing vanguardist proposals of paradigm changes, the essays produce particular prismatic perspectives of multiple encounters between Queer and Europe. The essays welcome rather than avoid the threats posed by the encounter between these two paradigms, opening them up to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations . . . less as a technique for closing the text off and for repressing aleatory or ‘aberrant readings’ and senses, than as a mechanism for preparing such a text for further ideological investment (Jameson, 1981, 29–30).

Post-Queer Europe?

Another strategy could be a radical repudiation of queer altogether. Why not simply give up on queer, declare it an obsolete label and hang on to what the word represents? One option would be to find a new word for what Queer stood for, and what still needs to be done.

To say that Queer is obsolete risks imposing a definition of old and new that presupposes a certain type of temporality based on a linear teleology. This from old to new narrative is also the basis of Western grand narratives of progress. To uncritically adopt such implicit definitions of what a supposedly universal and a-historical Time does to old and new would mean reproducing those paradigms that are questioned by scholars who work on queer temporalities (Halberstam 2005). Queer, like Europe, is caught up in a complex dialectical tension between old and new and between discourses that seek to either celebrate or condemn old or new without examining the reasons why each adjective is alternatively presented as the preferred pole of the binary opposition.

When Léon Gontran Damas, Leopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire introduced Negritude, they sought to reappropriate, rather than move away from, blackness and the derogatory associations attached to black skins. And in spite of the many critiques that the movement has generated, their efforts have successfully displaced the hegemony of discourses that naturalize whiteness as the equivalent of modernity, culture, and civilization. Strategically, this type of affirmative rhetoric presupposes a form of unlearning, a form of forgetting of the current associations behind a concept. The dissociation between blackness and negative connotations is a decolonization of the mind that both whites and their non-white others must share for the concept to do its cultural work. The change of paradigm involves, at least at some level, a series of felicitous speech acts that allow emergent concepts to lose their radicality and acquire a familiarity that makes them function as shared references among communities who may not even agree with the details of anti-racist or anti-discriminatory agendas.

The word queer has gone through a comparable cultural journey so that some of those who proudly assert, in the twenty-first century, I am queer never had to unlearn that the word referring to homosexuals originally comes from the old continent: Sedgwick takes the trouble to trace the word back to its many roots when she writes that queer "comes from Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart" (Sedgwick 1991, xii).

Like Queer, however, Negritude has always been criticized from what may appear to be the inside of the movement. Even anticolonialist thinkers were quick to express doubts about what they saw as Negritude’s romanticism and essentialism or political limits. Frantz Fanon was suspicious of Negritude’s idealization of a constructed black irrationality or sense of rhythm and feared that it constituted a misguided appeal to the white world (Fanon 120–5).

And yet, it is the same Fanon who strongly objected when Sartre suggested that Negritude was a minor moment in a dialectic progression, that it was a means towards an end (Fanon 135). Negritude’s objective is to disappear when its work is done. It wants to destroy itself.⁵ Today, we could argue that Sartre was right and that Negritude has not survived a given historical moment. In 2013, no self-respecting critic would find it palatable to claim Negritude as a