LGBTIQ - Queer Theory

                 Lesbian and Gay literary theory emerged as a distinct field only by the 1990s with the publication of ‘The Lesbian and Gay studies Reader’ in 1993 by Henry Abelove and others.  Actually Feminism, at the course of time marginalized or ignored lesbianism.  So the conflict between heterosexual feminists and lesbians opened up.  Thus lesbian feminism existed.  Adrienne Rich with her, “Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence”, introduced ‘Lesbian Continuum’.  Thus sexuality which was seen as something merely ‘natural’ and unchanging began to change as a construction or a subject to be changed.  In this way, the comprehensive term Queer theory entered.

            Teresa De Lauretis organized the first queer theory conference in 1990 at the University of California.  Queer theory is broadly associated with the study and theorization of gender and sexual practices that exist outside heterosexuality and which challenge the notion that heterosexual desire is normal.  The works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are often considered the founding texts of queer theory.

            Innovations in queer theory have made it evident that Performativity is a function of the choices that gay and lesbian individuals make every day and in all walks of life.  In this way, we can understand that Oscar Wild’s life experience is as valuable for queer theory as his literary works.

            The queer theory not only examines the communities surrounding the queer people, but also the communities they form.  Same sex living communities have significant priority in the formation of queer theories.  Deconstructing the binary opposition of Post-Structuralism too influenced queer theory.  The hierarchy in the pair of heterosexual and homosexual was also questioned, when the film star Rock Hudson a gay died of AIDS.  He was one among the early celebrities to have been diagnosed with AIDS in 1985.

            According to Eve Sedgwick gayness may be openly declared to family and friends but not to banks and Insurance companies, as everyone has the right for concealment and openness.  Here, both heterosexual and homosexual do not have any fixed essences.  So, the post modernist concept of identity should be availed to them.

            As far as the gay and lesbian texts are concerned, they may be written by a gay or lesbian or they may be written about gays or lesbians and sometimes they may express the ‘vision’ of gays and lesbians.  Similarly the lesbian and gay critics usually identify lesbian or gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as in the case of the relationship between Jane and Helen in ‘Jane Eyre’, is discussed.  Some other critics expose ‘homophobia’ of mainstream literature and criticism, where homosexual aspects are ignored purposefully as it happened to the love lyrics of W.H. Auden.  Some even setup or extended metaphorical sense of ‘lesbian and gay’ in their critical analysis so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary.  Actually such moments mirror the self identification as lesbian or gay that establishes certain norms and boundaries.

            However, strong homo-erotic tenderness is seen widely in the First World war poetry.  Mark Lilly points out that a frequent motif in the poems is to see ‘same-sex love as superior to men’s love for women’.  In ‘Passing the love of women’, written by Studdert Kennedy it is said,

                        ‘But I knows a Stronger love than theirs

                        And that is the love of men’

            Similarly, Lilly detects an element of ‘necrophilia’ in Herbert Read’s ‘My Company’

                        ‘A man of mine

                        Lies on the wire

                        And he will rot

                        And first his lips

                        The worm will eat

                        It is not thus I would hev him kissed

                        But with the warm passionate lips                   

                        Of his comrade here.’

            Similar poems of wound, hospitals are also there, by the 19^th century American poet Walt Whitman about the American Civil war.  The wound is erotically charged in First World War poetry because it allows tender physical contact between males.  Thus, the war became a ‘safe’ area in which feelings usually suppressed can be openly expressed.  Here Lilly also talks about the similar examples of foot ball field, where men kiss and embrace each other passionately in public.

            It is said the army itself exploited these feelings at the start of war with the settling up of ‘Pals’ regiments, in which large numbers of men from the same district enlisted and served in units together.  Thus, this kind of poetry has official sanction and gets access to publication in news papers and poetry journals.  The Continuum of feelings expressed in this poetry tends ultimately to ‘deconstruct’ the notion of gayness as a distinct one with a separate identity.

-------Thulasidharan V

ECO CRITICISM

 

ECO CRITICISM

 

            Eco Criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.  Actually it takes its literary bearings from three major 19^th C American writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).  They were the essayists and philosophers known collectively as the transcendentalists.  Emerson’s ‘Nature’ talks about the impact of nature upon him.  Fullers ‘Summer on the lakes, during 1843’, deals with her encounter with the American landscape at large.  Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is an account of his two-year stay from 1845, in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden Pond.  These three books can be considered as the foundational works of American ‘eco centered’ writing.

            However, the terms ‘eco criticism’ and ‘Green Studies’ were used to denote a critical approach in the USA in the late 1980’s and in the UK in the early 1990’s.  In the USA the acknowledged founder is Cheryl Glotfelty with her essay ‘The Eco criticism reader: Landmarks in literary Ecology’.  It was she who revived the term ‘eco criticism’ to refer the critical field that had previously been known as ‘The Study of Nature Writing’.  Similarly the UK version of eco criticism takes its bearings from the British Romanticism of 1790’s.  The founding figure on the British side is the critic Jonathan Bate who wrote ‘Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition’ in 1991.  However, both these American and British variants warn us of environmental threats emanating from governmental, industrial, commercial and neo-colonial forces.

            Eco criticism deals with how environmental issues, cultural issues concerning the environment and attitudes are presented and analyzed.  This has gained a lot of attention during recent years due to higher social emphasis on environmental destruction and increased technology.  Thus it has become a broad one that includes green studies, eco feminism; eco poetics, deep ecology and bio-politics.  As there was earlier a utilitarian attitude towards nature, nature was for human needs.  However, after the 18^th C, there emerged a demand to revaluate the relationship between man and the environment.

            Arne Naess (1912-2009) a Norwegian philosopher developed the notion of ‘Deep ecology’ that emphasizes the basic interconnectedness of all life forms and natural features and presented a symbiotic and holistic worldview rather than an anthropocentric (human-centered) one.  Similarly, Eco poetics extended the art of poetry with the intention of foregrounding an investigation into ecology.  It is actually a new form of phenomenology as it tries to locate the human in the world.  Its approach is totally different from the Romantic and aestheticizing approaches of nature. 

            Apart from these ‘Ecofeminism’ was coined by Françoise d' Eaubonne (1920-2005).  The Ecofeminists argue that a relationship always exists between the oppression of women and the degradation of nature.  Moreover, in post-colonial studies of native and indigenous communities, ecocriticism took up a lead role.  The critics of imperialist expansion involve an ecocritical understanding of land rights and issues of ownership.  Thus Biopolitics, the intersectionality between racism and land occupation, that takes the administration of life and a locality’s population too has become a thing to be considered in ecocriticism.

            While ecocritics began to study literature written throughout history and analyze its relationship to the environment, the British and American literature of the 19^th and 20^th centuries had a lot in it to be focused.  It happened because, American and British Romantic writers took great interest in nature as a subject.  The Victorian realists wrote about industrialization that was changing the natural landscape.  Moreover, 19^th century American naturalists and explorers are actually credited here by ecocritics for their initiation of the conservation movement through their scientific descriptions and speculations about nature.

            William Wordsworth celebrates the beauty and mystery of nature in his ‘Michael’, ‘The Excursion’ and ‘The Prelude’.  The poetry of S.T. Coleridge John Keats, Byron and Shelley too has their contributions to it.  The Victorian essayists John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle too were there to lament the destruction of the environment due to industrialization.  The two great American naturalists, according to the ecocritics are John Burrough and John Muir.  John Burrough’s ‘Wake-Robin’ and ‘Birds and poets’ actually influenced Whitman a lot.  Muir, apart from writing, worked to prevent the destruction of the environment.  It was he, who is responsible for preserving the Yosemite Valley in California, the very second national park in the United States.

            An ecocritical reading of a literary text is, actually an approach with a new alertness to a dimension that has perhaps always hovered about the text, but without ever receiving our full attention earlier.  Let’s take Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809-1849) well known tale ‘The Fall of the House of usher.  In the tale, Rod-crick Usher and his sister Madeline, undergo a kind of voluntary imprisonment in the ancient, crumbling isolated house of Usher that stands next to an evil-looking lake.  When the sister suffers from a strange wasting disease, Usher is afflicted by ‘A Morbid Acuteness of the senses’, which makes him unable to bear any contact with the natural world.  It is said, ‘The odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even faint light’.  His only contacts with the world beyond himself were books and musical instruments.  The tale is usually read and analyzed with the focus on the morbid psychology of Usher.

            The ecocentered reading of this tale focuses outside, on the house and its environs, rather than inside, on the owner and his psychology.  It uses ideas of energy, negative energy that causes breakdown and symbiosis the ‘living together’ that denotes mutual sustaining and co-existing systems.  The house has no symbiotic connections with the broader biosphere.  The house breathes in the atmosphere of its own decay.  The stagnant lake reflects the house’s own unmoving image.  These all led them to a gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls.  So, Usher is ‘Photophobic’ (hyper sensitive to light) and prefers the represented light in paintings.  As he cannot bear natural sounds he hears only the ‘processed sound’ of music.  So, what is imagined here is on eco-system damaged beyond repair and cut off from any possible sources of renewal.  On this reading, the centre of the story is not a dark night of the soul, but the permanent night of willfully-courted ecological disorder or solar exhaustion.  The aloofness turns the house into a kind of black hole into which its energies are sucked and destroyed as it is said the black lake into which the house collapses and disappears at the end.  Thus, the ecocentered reading makes this tale a more frightening one.

            When other literary theories examine the relationships between the writer texts and the world with the social sphere, Ecocriticism expands the notion of the world to include the entire ecosphere.  Thus this ecologically oriented criticism is an inevitable response to the urgent issues of the day.  As critics have pointed out, one of the reasons that ecocriticism continues to grow as an important one is the continued global environmental crisis.  Its aim is also to show how the work of the writers considering environment can play important roles in solving ecological problems and environmental issues.

----Thulasidharan V