Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s “Wild Bulges”

Abstract

Alfred J. Lopez Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s “Wild Bulges” i. I should clarify from the outset that I am not a Faulknerian by any stretch, and so am not interested in producing a reading of Faulkner’s novel that “solves” its many ambivalences and inconsistencies, its hints and feints toward a critique of race, class, and gender as repressed but active dis­ courses at work in the Jim Crow South. Such an analysis would lie beyond not only this essay but also my own expertise. Rather, I wish to use a particular character in a particular novel—the defrocked minister Gail Hightower, from Light in August—as a way of opening an inquiry into how current approaches to whiteness studies, especially those attuned to the ways in which gay and lesbian whites are somehow “marked” by their distance from heteronormative whiteness, may prove useful to the reading and interpretation of U.S. Southern literature generally, and Faulkner in particular. It is axiomatic in whiteness studies that whiteness derives much of its power paradoxically from its invisibility—the idea that whiteness is not a “race,” that it is in fact nothing at all—the “powerful position ... of being ‘just’ human,” as Richard Dyer deftly puts it (2). One result of the invisibility of whiteness as an ethnic, racial, or class position is that it assumes the role of a universal discourse of “civility” and even “humanness,” which then sits in judgment of the nonwhite world; thus other races, ethnicities, and sexualities exist as gradations of distance from the idealized, invisible norm of hetero­ normative bourgeois whiteness.1 As Dyer further explains, “White power . . . reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal” (10; emphasis mine). In such a model, as Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz among others have pointed out, regional categories within a larger hegemonic na­ tional identity, such as Southernness within a U.S. context, always already constitute a “mark” of difference, the damning mark of a regional difference that also represents an irreducible distance from the unspoken, invisible norms of whiteness.2 'For a more thorough explication of the assumptions of whiteness studies, see Dyer 1-40. 2See Wray and Newitz 1-15. 74 The FaulknerJournal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 75 Sexuality operates as one possible parameter of such difference, and thus distance, from heteronormative whiteness. As I have argued elsewhere, one sig­ nificant feature common to many colonial queer white texts, especially those with an element of Bildungsroman (but really any coming-into-self-knowledge narrative), is the protagonist’s burgeoning realization of desire for the racial Other, thus contradicting the official dictates and unofficial norms of both ra­ cial purity and heteronormativity. As Dyer explains, “[this desire] is the felt connection between gays and ethnic minorities, as much as romantic and sex­ ual encounters with non-white men” (6)—the idea of a shared condition of markedness in relation to heteronormative whiteness, rather than the fact of any sexual encounter itself—that overrides other considerations of transgression or taboo. I want to open the essay with the question of whether queer moments in U.S. Southern texts such as Light in August reveal precisely this kind of op­ positional cultural logic. Gail Hightower’s queerness represents a sort of thread of connectedness that runs through Light in August, one which aligns him with other marginalized whites (Byron Bunch, Lena Grove) and others of more am­ bivalent racial and sexual subject positions (Joe Christmas, who claims to be black, may be part Mexican, and slips in and out of active and passive sexual roles throughout the novel).3 More importantly, in chapter 20 of Faulkner’s novel, Hightower himself comes to a limited, incomplete reckoning with his long-suppressed sexuality, a reckoning that offers as intimate a portrait as one may find in U.S. Southern literature of the divided, repressed psyche of closeted gay whiteness in the Jim Crow South. One could in fact argue that Light in Au­ gust itself represents a sort of theoretical intervention, a reinscription of queer histories into modernization, into a neocolonial society trying to reinvent itself...