Introduction

Abstract

INTRODUCTION ROBERT K. M ARTIN Université de Montréal T wenty-five years after Stonewall, twenty-three years after the first is­ sue of The Body Politic, twenty years after the founding of the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the MLA, what does/do lesbian and gay studies in Canada look like? However important that first wave of gay politics and theory two decades ago, it no longer plays a central role—hardly surprising, since many of the authors in this issue were children then. We have achieved academic respectability, as witnessed by numerous conferences, publications, and even, in a few cases, jobs. Some of us continue to feel that those gains have been purchased at too great a cost. The birth and development of lesbian and gay studies coincided with the academic domination of literary studies by deconstruction, and although these two approaches have on occasion found a way to a modus vivendi, it has not been accomplished without mutual suspicions. What would be most striking to a reader of this issue who had been absent from the world for the last twenty years is the disappearance of the author, and hence the apparent elimination of lesbian and gay sub­ jectivity, if not of lesbians and gays. Essays are, to be sure, still written on individual authors—we have essays on Chaucer, Spenser, and Austen, to name the most canonical—but their concern is no longer with the author’s self as revealed in the text (not of course that Chaucer studies ever were). Instead we seem to be concerned most with what Jim Ellis felicitously calls “scenes and signs of desire.” If our political sense is weaker, our sense of eros is surely more complex and supple. If many of our essays identify themselves as “about” authors, their con­ cern is primarily for theory. Twenty-five years ago, writing an essay on Jane Austen in a collection of this kind would have provoked questions such as, “Surely you don’t think Jane Austen was a lesbian?” Asking such a question now would produce the reply, “You really don’t get it, do you?” It is not only that Foucault has warned us of the danger of applying criteria of the twentieth century to earlier texts, but more importantly that we no longer know what a “lesbian” is. (Saying this in some older circles will of course produce howls of rage!) As terms such as lesbian and gay give way to queer, as Eric Savoy so deftly shows, specificity is traded in for the indeterminate. Glenn Burger makes a strong case for “queer” in deconstructive terms; for 125 him “the term ‘queer’would resist nominalization” “in contrast to the stabi­ lizing categories of identity politics.” Whether queer theory will really avoid a self-definition as queer seems to me doubtful. However necessary it was to create a lesbian and gay studies agenda that could end the silence that allowed homophobia to flourish, we must now recognize that we created an­ other dichotomy, one capable of inflicting pain on individual lives that could not be contained within the either/or terms. The intention to create a new space for sexual différance ended up providing only sexual difference. Three particular points recur inthese essays and should perhaps be stressed here: a continuum of desire if not of identity, a concern for gender instead of sexuality, and an attention to friendship. Many of the essays speak elo­ quently about the difficult if necessary connections between lesbian and gay studies and feminism. As Ellis puts it, “feminist theory [is] the condition, both historically and politically, of their [gay studies’] possibility.” For him, and for many others of our contributors, the bonds between men are by no means subversive of structures of power, indeed are fully consistent with, if not constitutive of, them. It was Eve Sedgwick’s recognition of this that made her first book such a turning point in gay studies. Writing as a straight woman, (or should I say performing a straight woman?) she made it clear that a feminist analysis saw male relations as part of a system of the ex­ change of women. At the same time, by...