Gender is the conspiracy

Sedgwick: “As in Sentimental Journey, too, it is the ideological imposition of the imaginary patriarchal Family on real, miscellaneous, shifting states of solitude, gregariousness, and various forms of material dependence, that rationalizes, reforms, and perpetuates, in the face of every kind of change, the unswerving exploitations of sex and of class” (117). As everywhere in BM, S uses a very Foucauldian framework here to show how the seemingly inevitable form of the patriarchal family obscures the uneven, messy forms of shared human life, connected a thousand different lines of kinship and friendship, but limited and constrained by the stark symmetry of man-woman-child. And as Sedgwick implies, it's the patriarchal family that intensifies and sharpens gender differences, and reinforces the homosocial authority bound into patriarchal culture.

“It is the very minimalness, the arbitrariness, of the differentiation between male heterosexuality and its ‘opposite’ that has lent this distinction its power to organize complicated, historical transactions of power, including power of or over women” (118).

The stability of homosocial bonds

Returning to Between Men, finding it a more brilliant and useful book than last time, particularly in its articulation of how male/male bonds work to uphold the social. Reading Shakespeare's sonnets, Sedgwick observes in the sonnets a volatile difference between male/male and male/female relationships: “Differently put, for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance” (45). Call me crazy, call me Ishmael, but this dynamic is at work in conspiracy-themed texts, from Libra (Oswald and Everett flee domesticity), to Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (English flees Leanora), to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar feels dissipated by women, but renewed by the life-struggle against the fúku; okay, there’s difference there, since Oscar frequently imagines saving the woman), to The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa sows dissolution and chaos everywhere she goes. Larger point: male-male relationships in the conspiracy paradigm are (relatively) stable; in these texts, when women enter them, things quickly become less stable.

Questions, then: what historical circumstances make domesticity fraught with peril during the postwar period? The charged state of gender relations, the destabilizing force of shifting economic conditions, the establishment of the suburban nuclear family as paradigmatic, the decreasing dislocation of said family from community and government.

No democracy, no freedom

In the latest issue of Theory and Event, Wendy Brown, one of my favorite political theorists, restates a Foucauldian truism to critique the idea of democratic freedom:

The simple idea that we and the social world are relentlessly constructed by powers beyond our ken and control immolates the liberal notion of self-legislation achieved through voting and consent.

She explicitly invokes the corporatization of government in the forms of slickly-managed elections, the "informed populace" farce of infotainment, and the many tendrils of privatization (prisons, schools, voting machines, universities, symbolized richly by the "Western" form of corruption--bidless contractors--that competes with old-school bribe taking in current Afghanistan), arguing, essentially, that democracy is a sheen for its opposite--the almost total control of public governance by private capital and its representatives/narratives/frameworks. What's worth remembering here, in terms of my project, is the degree to which conspiracy theory operates within the framework of fictional democracy, yet simultaneously struggles against the "relentless construction" decried by Brown. As Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and Jack Bratich have argued, there is a kernel of democratic utopianism in conspiracy theory. But perhaps it is the contradiction that Brown indicates--between the fiction of democratic freedom and the reality of external self-construction--that forces conspiracy theory into the relatively narrow narrative frameworks in which it operates, all of which, I argue, tend to reinforce masculine ways of being, and by extension, masculine limits to the social world. Perhaps, too, that masculine forms tend to emerge in concert with the nostalgia for democracy Brown theorizes. There's a limit to what anyone can imagine in terms of democracy, Brown implies, and it's not surprising that conspiracy theory operates within these (hegemonic) limits.

Private, individual resistance

Writing of the political potential of queer S/M practices, which, he argues, were valorized in the 80s and 90s, alongside poststructuralism, as premier sites of political resistance, critic David Savran theorizes that such practices hold appeal in part because of their limited scale. Teaching, bondage, criticism, theorizing the decline of the subject, all operate on an individualist and private scale, in direct contrast to the large-scale strikes and protests of the 1930s (or, to go back further, of the anticapitalist actions of the late 19th century). For Savran, it's telling that the privatization and individualization of resistance take place within a historical moment when anticapitalist struggle has all but died out (I note that Savran's book was published in 1998, a year before the Seattle protests brought antiglobalization to public view.) He's talking about the Left, of course, and particularly the Left under Reagan/Clinton; it's entirely possible that something different, if not precisely anticapitalist radical, has emerged in the recent confluence of MoveOn.org, antiglobalization, the recharged SEIU, and other Leftist organizations posing genuine questions about capitalism and capitalized war. Savran writes:

“Obsessed with locating and valorizing sites of transgression and resistance, both poststructuralism and the discourses of sexual dissidence tend to imagine resistant political practices not in the collectivist terms of the 1960s (or the 1930s, for that matter) but in strictly individualistic terms. For both, resistance has become a purely privatized affair, restricted to one’s scholarship, one’s teaching, one’s bedroom, one’s dungeon” (239) .

I bring this up because this is one of the points I've long sought to make about conspiracy theory, that it offers the appeal of a privatized and individual resistance, at least in the post-Kennedy forms I critique (the widely-telegraphed conspiracy theories of a Hitler or Ahmadinedjad pose a different case). The researcher, alone in his bedroom with his facts, practices a resistance that is purely private. Here, I would differentiate 9/11 Truthers or Beck fans from anticapitalists (though obviously, Tea Partiers are not limited to private, individual acts). Savran provides, in this aside, a fine way to think about why this conspiracy theory model of masculinity fits this time frame, and also, how it carries forward to now. (progress, progress, progress).

Re-encountering David Savran

Savran’s argument in Taking it Like a Man is wide, but deep, and he employs the “reflexive masochism” idea to a diverse, but linked, set of ideas and examples. On the one hand, the self-injurious, rising-above-it, got-the-Right-Stuff-despite-the-sixties straight white man quite simply imagines himself as a victim, but sees in that victimhood a chance for transcendence. But beyond this, the straight white man, in a range of contexts that Savran originates with Mailer’s “White Negro,” frequently places himself in the position of one or more minorities themselves, as, variously, Native American spirit guide, White Aryan Resistance “new nigger,” mythopoetic African folk hero, Rambo native tracker, and so on—an extension of, but not a precise repetition of, the “man who lives with Indians” and/or the Modernist fetishization of the primitive as a source of power and renewal for a dead culture. The “desire to be the other,” though, quickly emerges as a “terror of the other,” as it does for the man who lives with Indians. This is a sometimes-muddled, but ambitious and largely-successful book.

From this: the conspiracy theorist obviously imagines himself (and his nation) as victimized, usually by a big Other of powerful, colluding men. This idea generates danger and terror—a fear of oblivion—but simultaneously, the possibility for transcending the danger, by linking oneself to and identifying with the conspirators (as, most clearly, does Oswald, Texe Marrs, Leonard English), reflexively, but in the manner of Patrick O’Donnell’s postmodern version of reflexivity. I’m not entirely sure this pushes past my original argument, but through Savran’s lens, it’s likely that some portion of the big Other is bound up in conceptions of dark-skinned, gay, or female Others who themselves are alleged to possess overwhelming powers (Red Chinese massing in the national parks, minorities overbreeding, the homosexual agenda, feminazis).

Starting thoughts on Glenn Beck

Limiting the scope

"Glenn Beck," of course, is an amalgam of texts: Beck's television and radio shows, his nonfiction books, his fictional work, the guests he has on his show (among them fiction writers): it is nearly impossible to limit or delineate the range of places where his ideas--and those of his audience--circulate. Of course, as literary theorists have argued for years, Diaz's text is similarly hard to limit, as it incorporates not just the some 400 pages of his novel, but also the interviews Diaz has given about the novel, the reviews published on the novel, Diaz's other work, the work of other Latin American writers, the documented lives of people like Oscar (whom Diaz has cited in interviews), the works influencing Diaz, and so on. "Glenn Beck" and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then, exist as texts with which to identify in complex, multifaceted ways. And if the identifications around Beck at first seem stronger than those around Diaz's novel, such an assumption likely underestimates the powerful role fiction--particularly Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction, and particularly ethnic fiction--plays in the lives of its readers, and shapes how these readers view themselves and their world.

Racism in the era of post-whiteness

It's difficult, in some ways, to frame Beck in the language of race and racism, since these charges have been endlessly circulated and defended against around the Tea Party movement. It's likely true that racism is simply too overdetermined in the case of an African American president, or that the present context is one of, in Mike Hill's words, after whiteness, where even the most regressive organizations must play lip service to egalitarianism, or, in an even more extended sense, where every organization, and every American, imagines themselves beyond racism by virtue of Obama's election. It's likely, too, that something similar has occurred with gender, that, like the Promise Keepers, Beck and his crew (hardly anti-woman, given the prominence of Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin) present themselves as beyond gender relations as well. Though hopefully my analysis here goes beyond simple questions of Beck's misogyny, any question of gender identity is complicated by the disavowals--and easy targets--presented by Beck and followers.

Glenn Beck and Oscar Wao

How does one account for how grand narratives--like conspiracy theories--become part of one's identity? In particular, how does one account for how such narratives intersect with one's gendered identity--one's sense of oneself as a woman or man in real or imagined social space? (One way, perhaps, to define gender, though "woman" or "man" are of course limiting.) To start, one must examine how narratives--self-created, amalgamated from others', reworked--becomes part of one's identity. Literature, because it is always borrowing narratives and often concerns its own intertextuality, provides an excellent realm in which to interrogate these questions. Frequently, literature foregrounds how characters borrow from existing narratives, drawn from popular culture, literature (famously, Emma Bovary), spy movies (Oswald in DeLillo's Libra). In each of these cases, the text establishes an uneasy continuum between exterior narratives--those outside one's identity--and the narrative that the character tells herself. Such narratives frequently supplement, or even replace, the limited narrative that a character draws from her immediate circumstances.

To take one example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title character struggles with his masculinity: living in a heavily gendered Dominican-American context, Oscar is nearly unrecognizable as a man to himself, his family, his friends, or--most desparately--the women who Oscar desires. In the real, everyday world of the novel, Oscar's identity is badly limited. But in the imagined world of fantasy, which Diaz wraps around his characters, Oscar is a hero, an avenger, the family's last bulwark against the mystical, all-encompassing fuku--a global-grade curse with the same heft as a conspiracy. Oscar's masculinity, then, functions more effectively in this imagined realm than in the real world. But beyond this, Diaz continually demands that readers view the "fantasy" narrative and "real" narrative as inextricable from one another, because of the language his narrator uses to describe Oscar: at one point, Oscar is kidnapped by two police thugs that Yunior names Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, both names drawn from comic books. Because Yunior never calls the two anything but, the reader can't help but picture, at least momentarily, supervillains from the DC universe dragging Oscar into a cane field.

In the following post, I'm going to hazard that Oscar isn't alone, by comparing his case to the vastly different case of Glenn Beck and his followers--a set of texts that also rely heavily on an imagined realm to solidify their subjects' gender identities, though admittedly such gender identifications are more dispersed and less overt than that of Oscar. This comparison is rich with possibilities in its contrasts: both texts emerge in the same timeframe (Oscar Wao is published in 2007; Beck rises as a national figure in 2008 in connection with Obama's election), both texts traffic in conspiracy material; both feature protagonists who fuse their figures to the grand sweep of History, imagining such history in terms of great narrative arcs--the end of days, a curse, the Great Threat to Our Way of Life. Both figure themselves as beset minorities, both attempt to work out some grand wrong, first a wrong in History, in the grand sweep of government and mystic organizing forces, second a wrong in the personal, the self as it navigates the world, the latter struggle manifested, at least in part, in terms of gender. For Beck and crew, the masculine lack starkly visible in Oscar is less overt, since, of course, Beck doesn't focus on what he and his followers lack. Of course, Beck continually claim a position of loss--of some America slipping away (implicitly bound up, as countless commentators have shown, in both gender and race).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Diaz's postethnic, postpostmodern, pop-culture situated, Dominican-framed tale of Oscar and his family, their immigration and relationship dramas as they take shape under the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship. Real history, real struggle--but an imaginary curse. In contrast, Glenn Beck offers an imaginary history, an imaginary struggle--and, perhaps, a real curse, in the form of the cascading political and cultural fallout from the radical ideas expressed on his television and radio shows, books, blog, and speeches. Formally, Beck offers a diverse amalgam of infotainment, right-wing conspiracy theory, new male emotionalism. It emerges under the Obama administration, but is shaped by the conspiratorial tone of the Bush years, the widely-telegraphed sense of a country under siege, a rhetorical stance repeated throughout conservative history, but intensified by the events of 9/11. In many ways, of course, these two texts couldn't be different: one text is a literary novel, written by a Dominican-American author who teaches at MIT, and which concerns a poor Dominican family. As a novel, the text occupies a relatively "elite" space, and yet its subject matter is anything but elite. Beck's show, in contrast, is utterly populist (and regularly described as much) and yet its subject matter--the plight of rich white men--is implicitly elite. He works the same contradiction as circulates elsewhere on the Right: we're mainstream, the real America, and yet we're also the minority, those threatened with extinction.

It's Oscar, though, who's really threatened with extinction--or at least his species is threatened. Oscar is failed, obscure, unsuccessful by his chosen measure--getting laid, which is what is appears to be, but also, as Diaz explains in an interview, about much more--a sense of rootedness and home which is the diasporic subject's continual desire. Oscar is cast in obscurity, meaningless, alone in his room with his role-playing games and fantasy novels--pop culture profferences of meaning, a place to locate himself as beseiged postapocalyptic survivor, the only one who can save Maria (she with the coke dealer boyfriend) from the Grand Forces threatening her. Oscar fails in the everyday world; he is unable to achieve mastery over the forces shaping his life; he is unable to be legible as a man in his cultural context. How much Trujillo, or immigration-shaped poverty--has to do with Oscar's plight is never quite clear. But what is clear is that his life is not wondrous without a layer of the imagination, without framing his experience in terms of the fuku.

And here's where he has something in common with Beck's presumed viewers, who also grasp hold of an imagined grand narrative to make sense of themselves in the world, to see themselves as successful--though threatened--in their cultural context, as white men after whiteness, who perceive that the culture no longer automatically grants them phallic power, that phallic power is something granted to others (perhaps others with darker skin, perhaps others who embrace the contemporary world).

Fantasy saturates both worlds. Both texts draw, it seems, on pop cultural forms for heft and shape: Diaz on fantasy, comic books, scifi, hiphop, Beck on political thrillers. Beck has not only repeatedly interviewed thriller authors, he's authored one himself (a thriller he refers to--as if to drive home the point--as "faction," a mix between fiction and fact). The thrillers tend to share a theme: a small, dangerous group seeks to take over the United States, and only a few, brave, patriotic souls have the wherewithal to stop them. This story, fictional, repeatedly crosses over into Beck's nonfiction political analysis, which itself often sounds like a political thriller, wherein Obama and Acorn, Obama and Marxists, Obama and the Left are plotting to take over the country and impose fascist rule. I'm less interested in what Beck is saying, though, then the way he's saying it--the thriller, conspiracy-tinged narratives on which he draws, narratives which assert a particular identity, or at least frame a set of stakes for identity, in gendered terms. Arguably, Beck uses thrillers in the same way Oscar uses scifi and comic books, as a way to organize, condense, and rearrange his world, so that people like him are validated, and people not like him (for Oscar, brutally masculine men; for Beck women, minorities, leftists) are invalidated.

In Oscar Wao, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that gender is the conspiracy. The book is rooted in Oscar's life, of course, and Oscar's main problem is that he can't get laid--though as Diaz emphasizes, getting laid is a synecdoche for having a home, for feeling secure, for feeling rooted despite one's diasporic existence. So for Oscar, to get laid is to have a legible self. Moreover, nearly all of the family's tragic trajectory results from the choices of violent, domineering, patriarchal men, from Trujillo himself, who imprisons and destroys Oscar's grandfather, to The Gangster, who causes Beli to be nearly killed and then exiled, to the police captain who ultimately kills Oscar. In each case, too, the brutality stems from these males' violent sexual conquests, their imperial gaze suffused over the women of the book (The Gangster's brutality is augmented by his wife; still, one could argue that she herself engages in an imperially masculine brutality). Evil, in Oscar Wao, stems from the brutal carelessness of male desire (arguably, this is the lesson that Yunior needs to learn by the book's close). There is no de Leon family tragedy without the possessive desire of men for unlimited sexual conquest. It's not power, not greed, not unexamined privilege that forms the root of the problem here (as it does in other conspiracy novels): it's a destructive form of masculinity run rampant. Incidentally, this nicely intersects with Sedgwick's argument in Between Men: that power accrues to men, who use people like Oscar and the female de Leons as symbolic trophies of conquest.

Back to Beck, then, and the next question for my research: is it possible that some form of gender identity shapes his paranoia--his sense of how power operates in the world? One thing that I've begun to track re: Beck--and Rachel Maddow tore up the Right on this topic recently--is that much of Beck's Obama-paranoia seems to take shape around racial issues: Van Jones is black and worked on behalf of poor blacks, Acorn is nearly all minority and works on behalf of poor minorities, and, of course, the Shirley Sherrod NCAAP dustup. More widely, the underlying tone of "they're taking it from me" is frequently manifested as "minorities are getting my money," a statement that likely translates into "minorities are supplanting me," in an echo of the struggles over Alan Bakke, busing, and welfare that occurred in the late seventies and early eighties. There's an interesting symmetry, then, between Oscar Wao and Beck: one is a minority who re-imagines himself as significant via conspiracy, the other who uses conspiracy to imagine himself as insignificant, as somehow detached from the multiplying privileges of whiteness.