Queer Discourse and the Young Adult Novel: Repression and Power in Gay Male Adolescent Literature

Abstract

Queer Discourse and the Young Adult Novel:Repression and Power in Gay Male Adolescent Literature Roberta Seelinger Trites (bio) When I teach adolescent literature at the college level, my students often assume that problem novels will have a bibliotherapeutic effect on the teenage reader. Their assumptions especially apply to books that treat controversial sexual topics. After teaching Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat (1989), which depicts two boys in a committed relationship, I often receive comments on papers such as, "This book will really help gay teenagers" or "After reading this book, maybe more people will be more tolerant of the gay community." And indeed, books about gay male teenagers superficially seem to promise the reader freedom from past constraints, freedom from continued repression, freedom from narrow-minded discourse—but simultaneously, such books often undermine that alleged liberation, as if the very existence of the genre gay YA literature depended on repression. And indeed, the existence of the genre very well may depend on this double-voicedness, for mainstream YA publishing still acts as if it were threatened by the idea of homosexuality. As a result, in gay young adult literature, homosexuality seems at once enunciated and repressed. I feel that if I can help my students identify the mixed messages in books about gay male adolescents, I can help them become more nuanced readers who are aware of the intricacies of language as it positions the reader—and, more importantly, they will learn to identify the complexities inherent in social constructions of sexuality in general and of homosexuality specifically. Much of the problem can be defined in terms of the theories that French literary philosopher Michel Foucault espoused and for which he was in turn criticized. In contrast to "sex," which is a purely biological act, Foucault defines "sexuality" as a discursive construct (History 68-69), although his critics have decried the ways that this definition denies the pre-discursive physicality of human sexuality.1 Such YA novels about gay males as John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip. (1969), Sandra Scoppettone's Trying Hard to Hear You (1974), Aidan Chambers's Dance on My Grave (1982), and Block's Baby Be-Bop (1995) are very Foucauldian in their tendency to privilege the discourse of homosexuality over the physical sexual acts of gay men, defining homosexuality more rhetorically than physically. Themselves entirely discursive, these novels fall prey to the same chicken and egg dilemma that plagues Foucault's work: which comes first, the body or the word? In and of itself, this paradox would not necessarily be problematic except that all too often the rhetoric these texts employ to construct gay discourse is more repressive than it is liberating. Foucault's The History of Sexuality demonstrates that simultaneously repressing and liberating sexuality is central to the ways that Western cultures define themselves. He suggests that far from being on the verge of being liberated by discourses of sexuality, Western cultures are dependent on a definition of sexuality as repressed. Western discourses about sex are repressed, he argues, because any number of institutions from the Catholic Church to Freudian analysis have gone to ingenious lengths to create monumental rhetorical systems (such as confession as sacrament or psychoanalysis) that depend on people talking about sex. The result is a social obsession with sexuality: "What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (History 35). Foucault also thinks of human sexuality in terms of two things: discourse and power. He asserts that in Western culture, sexuality depends on a power/repression dynamic: sex is so powerful that it must be but cannot be controlled. In contrast to Eastern cultures that base their attitudes toward sexuality on notions of pleasure to create an ars sexualis, Western culture has developed an entire scientia sexualis founded upon the relationship between discourse and knowledge to increase the (forbidden) pleasure of sexuality, Fouault observes, and this "regime of power-knowledge-pleasure . . . sustains discourse on human sexuality in our part of the world" (History 11). This...