I need a good reading response to the attached reading. Do not use any other sources just the reading itself. I need it done by October 2, 2023 at 6:30 PM my time.

I need a good reading response to the attached reading. Do not use any other sources just the reading itself. I need it done by October 2, 2023 at 6:30 PM my time.


Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History NAN ALAMILLA BOYD San Francisco State University THE TINY SUBFIELD Of U.S.gay,lesbian,andqueer history has evolved since the publication ofJohn D'Emilio's 1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Com­ munities into a fledgling discipline that has over time established an over­ arching set of research questions and an accepted set of research methods.1 With the exception of a few monographs, like Peter Boag's exhaustively researched Same­Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (2003), there are few works in this twenty­five­year­ old field that do not depend heavily on oral history methods. As George Chauncey observes in Gay New York, "early in my research it became clear that oral histories would be the single most important source of evidence concerning the internal working of the gay world."2 The use of oral history methods stems back to the field's social history moorings, where historians of the dispossessed found themselves lacking print sources and turned to live historical actors for information about the recent past. In practicing the craft, however, U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historians have been influenced by feminist ethnographers, whose methodology attempts to clarify the social, economic, and ideological differences that exist between researchers and their so­called subjects. Feminist researchers try to empower (rather than exploit) historical narrators by trusting their voices, positioning nar­ rators as historical experts, and interpreting narrators' voices alongside the ' I use the phrase "gay, lesbian, and queer" rather than the more familiar "gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender" as a shorthand that collapses bisexual and transgender projects into the umbrella category "queer." I do this because (while there are notable exceptions) most bisexual and transgendcr projects­and many gay and lesbian projects­interrogate the limits of identity politics in ways that produce a queer analysis, that is, an analysis of the social construction of identity that contests fixed categories of identification. However, there are still a number of projects that investigate "gay" and "lesbian" subjectivity exclusively, so it is important to retain these categories of historical investigation. 2 George Chauncey, Gay Neiv York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890­1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 370. Peter Boag, Same­Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific N11rthivest(Berkcley: University of California Press, 2003). Jo11rnal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 17, No. 2, May 2008 © 2008 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713­7819 177 178 NAN ALAMILLA BOYD narrators' interpretations of their own memories.3 Many gay, lesbian, and queer historians have followed suit. Drawing from the methods and methodology sections of a number of historical and anthropological monographs, this essay discusses how gay, lesbian, and queer history projects have used oral history and ethnography to frame their projects. Discourse analysis and queer theory's interrogation of subjectivity raise important questions about oral history methodologies, however. Do oral histories provide reliable representations of the past? What kind of truths do oral history methods reveal? This essay examines the evo­ lution of a discussion about oral history methods in U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historiography by analyzing how several key texts discuss historical methodology, particularly in relation to queer theory. Beyond the discursive clash between queer theory and oral history, however, I hope to raise larger questions about the history of sexuality and its methods: Does the history of sex, sexuality, and desire have a unique relationship to self­disclosure and, thus, to oral history methods? Are questions of method particularly vexed in queer projects because they discuss illegal or illicit desire? And is there something voyeuristically compelling about the way narrators (and researchers) create social meaning out of sexual desire? This essay analyzes the evolution of a distinct method in U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer historical research, and the texts I discuss have been chosen because they contribute significantly to that evolution. The follow­ ing is not an inclusive list of significant works in queer history but, rather, a selection of texts that, through their discussion of historical methods, have pushed methodological questions forward. The texts I discuss, in chronological order, include John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Com­ munities( 1983), Allan Berube's Coming Out under Fire (1990), Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993), George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994), and John Howard's Men like That (1999).4 I'll also offer some methodological comments on my own publication, Wide­Open Town (2003).5 This essay explores how researchers­mostly historians but also a few anthropologists­have grappled with the challenge queer theory poses to oral history in its dependence both on self­knowing­that is, that 3 Shulamit Reinhardt, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 4 John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Allan Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990); Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America1s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Chauncey, Gay New York; and John Howard, Men like Thtit: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 5 Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide­Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Queer Theory Meets Oral History 179 narrators will be able to articulate a coherent or consistent representation of themselves as historical actors­and on transparent subjectivity­that is, that historians can somehow come to know these "selves" through their self­descriptions. Why has sexual self­disclosure become so important to gay, lesbian, and queer historical research? And what does the dependence on oral history methods tell us about this fledgling field? Before I attempt to answer these questions, let me explain what I mean by "the challenge queer theory poses to oral history." Queer theory challenges a transhistorical and cross­cultural interpretation of history that conflates same­sex behavior with the ipso facto existence of sexual identities. Michel Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality that the discursive or cultural construction of the sexual self emerged at the same time as the rise of the modern nation­state and is linked to modern notions of citizenship.6 In other words, broad categories of national or cultural belonging (citizenship) have become dependent on meanings attached to sexual behavior (good/bad, moral/immoral, legal/criminal) and have produced the concept of sexual identity (heterosexual/homosexual). Queer theory also relies on Foucault's claim that the truth of one's self came to be embedded in the sexed body through modern medical science.7 Biological and psychological theories of normative bodies and behavior, codified through nineteenth­century West­ ern European intellectual history, mapped a knowable self on a binary of normative heterosexuality and its nonnormative counterpart, homosexuality. Following these insights, David Halperin argued in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality that modern identities, like heterosexualityand homosexuality, should not be superimposed on historical subjects, like those who engaged in same­sex practices in ancient Greece, where sexual behaviors carried dif­ ferent meanings.8 More recently, Judith Butler has argued that self­knowing and self­disclosure­that is, claiming a sexual identity­function to reiter­ ate, through language and practice, the very terms upon which the ideas of normative and nonnormative sexualities are constructed.9 Queer theory's challenge to oral history methods is multiple. When re­ searchers depend on the voices of historical actors to narrate the history of sexual identities, that is, how individuals understood their sexual selves in relation to larger social forces, the meaning of their self­disclosure is always constructed around historically specific norms and meanings. As a speaking subject, it is nearly impossible for oral history or ethnographic narrators to 6 Michel Foucault, The History of Sex11ality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978). 7 Michel Foucault, introduction to Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Mem­ oirs of a Nineteenth­Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 8 David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1989). 9 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" ( New York: Routledge, 1991). 180 NAN ALAMILLA BOYD use language outside the parameters of modern sexual identities. Narrators cannot remove themselves from the discursive practices that create stable sub­ ject positions. The narrators' voices must, therefore, be read as texts, open to interpretation, and their disclosures should be understood as part of a larger process of reiteration, where identities are constantly reconstructed around very limited sets of meanings. Moreover, along with queer theory's investi­ gation of the history of sexuality and the socialization of sexual beings into discrete and knowable subjectivities came an implicit critique of self­knowing and self­telling. How can we ever really know ourselves when the idea of self is a discursive product of modernity that remains dependent on the idea of not­ self, that is, other? Given this, how can we rely on historical narrators as coinvestigators or interpretive agents? Aren't they always already enmeshed in the social conditions that produce their own articulations of self through desire? Or is there something special about articulations of desire that enables some kind of greater collaboration between historian and narrator? D 'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities set the foundation for the production of historical narrative in U.S. gay, lesbian, and queer history.10 In it he draws from at least sixteen tape­recorded interviews and a host of "private conversations" to make an argument about the politicization and organization oflesbian and gay communities in the pre­Stonewall era. D'Emilio interviewed many of the key players in San Francisco's and New York's early lesbian and gay history, figures like Hal Call, Dorr Legg, Don Lucas, Del Martin, Frank Kameny, George Mendenhall, and Larry Littlejohn. His capacity to tell the story of the homophile movement's early history is at times entirely dependent on his oral history data, but D'Emilio does not problematize his oral history methods. In fact, he makes no mention of the interviews he conducted in his introduction or throughout the text. The challenge posed by queer theory, and the concept of oral history as a problematic method emerged after D'Emilio published his important manuscript. Nonetheless, methodologically, D'Emilio's book paved the way for future histories to be written. His use of oral histories offered a blueprint for the kind of research methods that were perhaps necessary for the production of gay and lesbian community histories. Published almost a decade later, Berube's Coming Out under Fire is heav­ ily dependent on oral history methods. Berube's text was published around the time queer theory emerged as an important analytical tool, but Berube calls his study of U.S. gays and lesbians during World War II a grassroots history project. There is no mention of "method" or "methodology" in the introduction, but he explains that his research was enabled by a "traveling slideshow" during which he would screen developing drafts of his work in various communities and, innovatively, cull information from the crowd to '°Fora review of the impact of D'Emilio's 1983 text on the production of U.S. gay and lesbian history see Marc Stein, "Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making ofU .S. LGBT Historiography," GLQll, no. 4 (2005): 605­25. Queer Theory Meets Oral History 181 further his analysis. He notes that his traveling slideshow enabled an "ongo­ ing public dialog with the communities whose history I was documenting and to which I belonged."11 Led by audience participation and public enthusiasm, the people who at­ tended his slideshows often "agreed to be interviewed [and even] collected funds to pay for research expenses."12 In the process, Berube notes, more than one hundred gay men and lesbians volunteered to be interviewed about their experience during World War II, and he formally interviewed seventy­ one World War II veterans. He calls these documents "personal stories" instead of oral histories, and they enabled him "to see military policies from the points of view of the people they directly affected."13 Berube transcribed and archived many of these stories, and he was vividJy aware of their role as historical documents