The Ethics of Framing

This winter Sharon Marcus came to campus to give a lecture celebrating the publication of her book. While her comments certainly focused on the details of her research and her argument, she was careful and clear to emphasize, as she does in the text of her book, the importance of the intervention that she hopes her work will make outside of the field of interest in the Victorian. In a manner that impressed me equally in her essay “Queer Theory for Everyone,” which is a tour de force that I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t checked it out yet, she displays a depth of knowledge on the development of a range of theoretical constructs that have shaped queer theory and sexuality studies. And she points out the way in which these theories have kept us from being able to see certain phenomena of the social because of they way they structure our inquiries. In art history we talk a lot about the frame. Not just the frame of the image, but the frame of our methodological approaches to objects, the way in which how we approach things, the questions we ask, shape our possible answers. This always fascinates me, so it’s what I’d like to focus on with Marcus. Save the literature for people who know more about it, and since we didn’t read the pictures chapter…

Marcus specifically points to the ways in which theory-to-date has shaped our field of vision so that the varied and complex relationships she investigates have been outside of our purview. She points to the gap in theorists from Freud to Butler who block a full consideration of female subjectivity by way of their insistence on constructing masculine and feminine, heterosexual and homosexual, as mutually constitutive and simultaneously rigidly opposite binaries whose terms inexorably interpolate the others. Having internalized this structure, of significance here that “contemporary definitions of femininity presume that heterosexuality and lesbianism are opposed and mutually exclusive positions,” (18) Marcus notes, she had “assumed that all relationships between women had to refer to lesbianism and be external to male-female desire. As a result, I sought to define relationships between women solely in relation to sexual desire, the glue that binds masculine to feminine in the heterosexual matrix.” (19) This is the frame that kept her from being able to address the terms, and the significances, of the varieties of female subjectivities that are present in the Victorian. But once she sees her way around that, oh the places she’ll go.

I think that the model of paying very close attention to our frames is an important one, and timely, given where many of us are in our graduate careers. If we can train ourselves to think critically about how we think, given the range of approaches that we have available to us to approach objects, then we can be more sensitive to the methodologies that both our questions but also our objects demand. And we can also think through the way in which they keep us from seeing other answers, even though we might not be able to think through what those answers might be, or might not help us make any kind of logical sense of them. Though I also appreciate Marcus’ call that maybe we shouldn’t always try and come up with tidy answers.

It seems to me like the example of scholarship she provides (outside of an exhausting attention to a huge archive!) is one of careful attention to open reading, what she calls ‘just’ reading. Whether by just she means only or justice, or both, I’m not entirely sure. I’m leaning to both, though certainly only is funnier, given our discussion on Thursday about paranoid reading and recuperative reading. She says, “Rather than focus on what texts do not or cannot say, I use a method I call “just reading,” which attends to what texts make manifest on their surface.” (3) This just reading seems to have been enabled by her interrogation of her frame – she is able to see certain things manifest on the surface of the text because she approaches them differently, without the assumption of femininity as non-masculine and heterosexual.

I wonder if just reading can also be thought of as reading without analyzing. Because by reading without analyzing I think we can be more open to the text, and we can approach it on its terms and see what it has to point out rather than make it fit into our model. That seemed to be a complaint against Sedgwick last week, that she plopped triangles down everywhere, even in the sonnets where she herself points out the 4 participants in the narrative. The other thing that Marcus does not do that Sedgwick does, though, is define a structure, per se. There is no triangle for Marcus, though she maintains Sedgwick’s commitment to enabling non-normative subjectivity within normative spaces. Marcus would argue that this precisely is blocked by an insistence upon subversion and the subcultural within queer theory. She explains, “Queer theory often accentuates the subversive dimensions of lesbian, gay, and transgender acts and identities. The focus on secrecy, shame, oppression, and transgression in queer studies has led theorists, historians, and literary critics alike to downplay or refuse the equally powerful ways that same-sex bonds have been acknowledged by the bourgeois liberal public sphere.” (13)

I wonder what to make of this given the path of outsider exemplarity that we have traced in cultural criticism since Carlyle. While I am still not entirely sure I understand the ethics and aesthetics debate that keeps recurring in class, I think that I might understand how to apply it here, with the ethics of Marcus’ object choice. She makes the point that she is not saying that all Victorian women were lesbians, but rather that the homoerotic was a significant part of the construction of normative femininity in the Victorian era. What is the significance of this? She talks about the acceptance of female marriage, the erotic tone of female friendship, and the circles of female desire surrounding fashion, which was contemporary with a complete rejection of French Sapphic literature. Her point with this is that the female same sex-sexuality was not the issue, but rather the rejection of the bourgeois ideal of the family. She locates the primary site of ideology, the method of its policing, and its significance, which is one of the main aims of cultural criticism as I understand it. Her particular contribution seems to lie in the fact that her locating is distinct from others’, who rely on the construction of femininity as the object, rather than the subject, of erotic desire. (12)

Within her text feminine subjectivities are multiple and at times quite acceptably masculine. This matters to people who might not care exactly about Great Expectations or cross-generational dominance and submission narratives (who’s that?) because it posits a way to theorize identity that is “not reducible to sex, power, or difference.” (14) What this enables us to do is to theorize away from binaries. Which is hard to do, and I’m not entirely sure Marcus is successful at it throughout her book, but is a model that is important because of the way in which it enables us to think about the interstices, rather than the absolute oppositions, of the social that structure our movements through our environments and our interactions with others. The ethics here are that she proposes and models a way to think about subjectivities while also thinking about ourselves as scholars and the ways in which how we conceive of subjectivity itself limits the possibilities of the field of identity. Through her object choice Marcus is able to both make a historically specific point and also demonstrate a sensitivity to circumstance that could be helpful in our contemporary moment that is trying to find a way to build community in a context that is trying its damnedest to enforce post-identity. She allows for fluidity and ambiguity while still engaging positive scholarship. I look forward to discussing this book in class. I quite enjoyed this second engagement with it, and would recommend if nothing else a quick gander at the booby and crotch grabbing fashion plates, for those that didn’t read the second section.

VA