The geo-political ramifications of capital letters
In otherwise well-written fics the random capitalisation of 'Bi' (as in, bisexual) has been driving me crazy. Why do people feel the need to capitalise what is quite clearly not a proper noun? Those same people would baulk at capitalising 'gay' or 'straight'. They would be exceptionally uncomfortable if anyone around them were to capitalise 'homosexual'.
Whilst capitalisation rules are quite flexible and often depend on context, one useful rule of thumb is to check whether the word is a name or attached to a name. Obvious exceptions are 'I' and the beginning of sentences. To illustrate:
"I took a walk in the park with David."
vs.
"I took a walk in Walpole Park with Uncle David."
All very straightforward, you say. Why am I in such a huff over the mis-capitalisation of one word? We change that which we name. We change it from a thing-in-flux to a thing-defined. We change it from a multiplicity of specific references and actions to a drive towards one fixed identity. The act of sodomy does not make you gay. Being labelled 'homosexual' (by others or by yourself) makes you gay. When the 'homosexual as a species' was developed as a concept during the Victorian era, it was part and parcel of a drive towards translating that which could not be articulated into that which could be quantified. I'd argue that there can be no 'alternate' sexuality unless you have a 'dominant' sexuality. Which came first is a somewhat moot point in my view; the important thing is that these sexualities are extant and they now dictate our identities. The 'homosexual' was developed as a concept in order to affirm the supremacy of the 'heterosexual'. Sexualities itself was polarised, chopped up into little bits and labelled - one binary of heterosexual/homosexual, another of sadism/masochism, another of man/woman, active/passive - all these concepts were ultimately developed by the dominant part of the pairing to justify itself.
I will not be a victim. I will not be subjugated. To demonstrate power, I will generate an 'Other' who will embody all that which I must repress. This Other will be homosexual to my heterosexual, black to my white, passive to my active. Discourses of race and sexuality and gender will be developed to govern these binaries and conflate them until the power immanent in our relationship is hidden and made 'natural'.
In this way, the Victorian bourgeoisie generated sexuality and race discourses out of fear (fear of being the Other, of embodying that which they must define as Other in order to escape from it) and out of shame of that fear (because is it not unmanly to be afraid? Must a man not accumulate wealth and display strength and reject that which is weak and passive and genteel? Is it not proof of unmanliness that you are afraid of being unmanly?).
Here is where things get a little convoluted. It's all fine when you decide to categorise acts of sodomy as indicative of 'the homosexual as a species'. You equate unmanliness with these acts (effeminacy, weakness, impurity) and you gather together other signs of such unmanliness. This lets you identify 'homosexuals' more easily, and it is also affirmation that you are not yourself unmanly. If unmanliness is indicative of being a homosexual and you are quite clearly not a homosexual, you thus cannot be unmanly.
Unless you are afraid. Because you labelled people and you know the power immanent in names and you also know that it is not your power. You are terrified of losing this power. You are doubly terrified, because you know that you never possessed it in the first place. If it as arbitrary as it appears, what is to stop someone labelling you as the Other? Don't be afraid. Don't cry. It's unmanly to cry.
So there is a hierarchy of sexual acts in place. At the top, you have married, heterosexual intercourse. Then unmarried heterosexual intercourse. Then long-term committed homosexual relationships. At the very bottom, you have BDSM practitioners, transsexuals, homosexual intercourse outside of a committed relationship and all other 'deviants'. In this hierarchy, all those at the bottom of the pyramid had better justify their existance through numbers. £X million earned in brothels in Thailand; £X million earned through male escorts; £X million poured into ending child pornography; X million people will describe themselves as 'kinky'; £X billion into categorising, quantifying, testing, dissecting and otherwise chopping up and labelling that which is not 'normal' heterosexual intercourse. If you cannot include it in the dominant discourse of heterosexuality, you label it and turn it to numbers.
The counter-discourse of homosexuality plays this game too. There are rules you follow to be part of the gay and lesbian community. For one thing, you have to be either gay or lesbian. Ideally, you should be in a committed relationship (because isn't gay marriage high on the agenda? Isn't that a major right to fight for? Isn't it imperative to be the equal of heterosexual couples?). At the very least, you should practice safe sex. So what does this mean if you practice bareback sex?
More to the point, what does it mean if you sleep with both men and women? The Victorians had an answer: bisexual. There was obviously something quite confusing about bisexuality, however, because it is hardly a species as 'the homosexual' is. Yet it fits quite neatly into the binary of heterosexual/homosexual/(optional third 'Other', where you dump all the things you weren't sure of). Like father/mother/child, this does not disrupt the binary; it reinforces it. It makes it seem natural. The power relation is hidden.
Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and all the other -alities are now something you are born as. You don't "wake up gay". You discover something in yourself you have known all along. There was even talk of a 'gay' gene, wasn't there? More 'proof' if any were needed, from numbers and categories. You 'get born gay' or 'are born straight', or... as 'Sex and the City' would have it, you take a detour along the way to RickyMartinVille.
Amidst lipstick lesbians and 'Queer Eye' presenters, the bisexual teen is the new 'big thing'. It's fashionable to experiment. Try something a little different, maybe you'll discover that you've been gay all along. Or maybe you'll decide that you're definitely straight. Take A New Sexuality Out For A Test Drive Today! There is never any implication that bisexuality is anything other than a transitional state, a thing to take you from one end of the spectrum to the other. At most, it is a fashionable new label to describe exactly how liberated you really are. After all, you wear 'ethnic' clothes and have some Native American (or whatever) blood in you, eight generations back, and you recycle, and you have adopted a Chinese baby, and you're bisexual! You are so much more liberated and empowered than anyone else, it's no wonder that you are a high-powered business woman who runs a household with ruthless efficiency and still gets to spinning class every Thursday.
To come back from this ramble through sexuality, I want to use a capitalised word at this point.
"Please indicate whether you are straight or a Homosexual."
"Look, Mummy, a Gay man!"
"It's a beautiful film, with a heart-warming and exquisitely scripted Homosexual relationship..."
The capital letter is offensive. The capital letter demarcates 'Homosexual' or 'Gay' from normal, from us, from you. The capital letter marks people out as a different race or sexuality or species. You are not defined by what you do or what you think, you are defined by what you are. You could be a happily married woman in Suriname, raising three children and having sex with your husband every day. If you have sex with your girlfriends, though, you are either a lesbian or bisexual. Except that Suriname has no word for 'homsoexual' or 'gay' or 'lesbian' or 'bisexuality'. Suriname calls this practice 'mati', and it is something that is perfectly normal. How can these binaries that we regard as 'natural' manifest so differently elsewhere? If 'hermaphrodite' does not exist as nature's mistake in India, why does it exist so over here? Why do we 'correct' babies at birth, then bow to their genered choices later on?
These labels trammel. They constrict. They fix you in place and they offer no way out. You must adhere to these rules to be part of the dominant discourse. If you do not - well, you must adhere to these rules to be part of the couter-discourse. If you do not, stay silent. Do not confess to whipping your wife, because consent is immaterial (not in rape cases, no, consent can acquit you, but in BDSM it is battery and wrongful imprisonment and if you consented to it you were obviously not in your right mind and your testimony will be stricken from the record). We have extended the 'Gay & Lesbian' society on campus to include bisexuality and transgendered persons, so you are fine. I'm sure that some day soon, we will find the right label for 'hermaphrodite' (that is, if we decide that it is not a mistake to be corrected at birth) and that can be added to our list of labels. Pick a label. Stick with it. You don't get to change your mind later and declare yourself in love with a man after coming out as a lesbian. It's not done.
It's not natural.
That one capital letter - Bisexual, Bi, Bisexuality - is another shackle. It is complicit in the creation of the Bisexual as a species, as a movement, as another counter-discourse. It fixes me - me, as a person, as an individual - within what is and isn't perceived 'normal' for bisexuality. For instance, bisexuality means that you can fall in love with people of either sex not that you can fuck couples in their own homes and let them make you breakfast afterwards.. Bisexuality means developing a theory of bisexuality that positions you as something different from simply unsure whether you are gay or straight not that you can pick and choose as you like throughout your life, resisting any way you know how.
That innocuous capital letter fixes me, temporally and spatially. It makes me a Bisexual, genus, sub-genus, quick-of-the-genes, brainwave activity, point A to point B to point C, an endless teleogical progression of logic and 'fact'. It positions me against those not-me (or, rather, it makes me not-them). Bisexual persons are frequently subject to abuse in Gay Pride marches. Now, why is that?
You - out of my sandbox.
Get the fuck out.
Define yourself how you like. I don't care. Define yourself as Bisexual, as Mixed-Race (now position that against white/White. Which would you choose to be called? Would you choose White, with the implications of cohesion, of a movement, of race? Or simply: white. Something so completely irrelevant as your height or shoe size.) as Woman (but do you fit the definition of Woman? Are you a married WASP with three children who isn't on the Pill?), as anything you like. I don't care.
What really makes me angry is the implication that you know better than me what I think and feel from day to day because you have a handy capitalised word that encapsulates my entire existence.
Maybe it's not done consciously. Maybe it just slips out. Shove it back in. Otherwise I shall have to try calling you Special. Now, how does that feel?
*
READING OF INTEREST
Michel Foucault, "History of Sexuality", esp. 'We Other Historians' and 'Method'.
Michael Kimmel, "Masculinity as Homophobia"
Susan Faludi, "Stiffed: Betrayal of the Modern Man"
Gayle Rubin, "The Trafficking in Women"
Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble"
Theweleit, "Male Fantasies"
Yeah, OK, no actual sausages were included. I just needed to rant a little. I somehow couldn't focus myself on my theory exam and turned in quite possibly the most superficial piece of tripe I have ever written. Woe. Ah, well, another exam on Tuesday. I'm sure that the prospect of the funding networks of Al-Qaeda and genocidal rape will inspire me.
Whilst capitalisation rules are quite flexible and often depend on context, one useful rule of thumb is to check whether the word is a name or attached to a name. Obvious exceptions are 'I' and the beginning of sentences. To illustrate:
"I took a walk in the park with David."
vs.
"I took a walk in Walpole Park with Uncle David."
All very straightforward, you say. Why am I in such a huff over the mis-capitalisation of one word? We change that which we name. We change it from a thing-in-flux to a thing-defined. We change it from a multiplicity of specific references and actions to a drive towards one fixed identity. The act of sodomy does not make you gay. Being labelled 'homosexual' (by others or by yourself) makes you gay. When the 'homosexual as a species' was developed as a concept during the Victorian era, it was part and parcel of a drive towards translating that which could not be articulated into that which could be quantified. I'd argue that there can be no 'alternate' sexuality unless you have a 'dominant' sexuality. Which came first is a somewhat moot point in my view; the important thing is that these sexualities are extant and they now dictate our identities. The 'homosexual' was developed as a concept in order to affirm the supremacy of the 'heterosexual'. Sexualities itself was polarised, chopped up into little bits and labelled - one binary of heterosexual/homosexual, another of sadism/masochism, another of man/woman, active/passive - all these concepts were ultimately developed by the dominant part of the pairing to justify itself.
I will not be a victim. I will not be subjugated. To demonstrate power, I will generate an 'Other' who will embody all that which I must repress. This Other will be homosexual to my heterosexual, black to my white, passive to my active. Discourses of race and sexuality and gender will be developed to govern these binaries and conflate them until the power immanent in our relationship is hidden and made 'natural'.
In this way, the Victorian bourgeoisie generated sexuality and race discourses out of fear (fear of being the Other, of embodying that which they must define as Other in order to escape from it) and out of shame of that fear (because is it not unmanly to be afraid? Must a man not accumulate wealth and display strength and reject that which is weak and passive and genteel? Is it not proof of unmanliness that you are afraid of being unmanly?).
Here is where things get a little convoluted. It's all fine when you decide to categorise acts of sodomy as indicative of 'the homosexual as a species'. You equate unmanliness with these acts (effeminacy, weakness, impurity) and you gather together other signs of such unmanliness. This lets you identify 'homosexuals' more easily, and it is also affirmation that you are not yourself unmanly. If unmanliness is indicative of being a homosexual and you are quite clearly not a homosexual, you thus cannot be unmanly.
Unless you are afraid. Because you labelled people and you know the power immanent in names and you also know that it is not your power. You are terrified of losing this power. You are doubly terrified, because you know that you never possessed it in the first place. If it as arbitrary as it appears, what is to stop someone labelling you as the Other? Don't be afraid. Don't cry. It's unmanly to cry.
So there is a hierarchy of sexual acts in place. At the top, you have married, heterosexual intercourse. Then unmarried heterosexual intercourse. Then long-term committed homosexual relationships. At the very bottom, you have BDSM practitioners, transsexuals, homosexual intercourse outside of a committed relationship and all other 'deviants'. In this hierarchy, all those at the bottom of the pyramid had better justify their existance through numbers. £X million earned in brothels in Thailand; £X million earned through male escorts; £X million poured into ending child pornography; X million people will describe themselves as 'kinky'; £X billion into categorising, quantifying, testing, dissecting and otherwise chopping up and labelling that which is not 'normal' heterosexual intercourse. If you cannot include it in the dominant discourse of heterosexuality, you label it and turn it to numbers.
The counter-discourse of homosexuality plays this game too. There are rules you follow to be part of the gay and lesbian community. For one thing, you have to be either gay or lesbian. Ideally, you should be in a committed relationship (because isn't gay marriage high on the agenda? Isn't that a major right to fight for? Isn't it imperative to be the equal of heterosexual couples?). At the very least, you should practice safe sex. So what does this mean if you practice bareback sex?
More to the point, what does it mean if you sleep with both men and women? The Victorians had an answer: bisexual. There was obviously something quite confusing about bisexuality, however, because it is hardly a species as 'the homosexual' is. Yet it fits quite neatly into the binary of heterosexual/homosexual/(optional third 'Other', where you dump all the things you weren't sure of). Like father/mother/child, this does not disrupt the binary; it reinforces it. It makes it seem natural. The power relation is hidden.
Heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality and all the other -alities are now something you are born as. You don't "wake up gay". You discover something in yourself you have known all along. There was even talk of a 'gay' gene, wasn't there? More 'proof' if any were needed, from numbers and categories. You 'get born gay' or 'are born straight', or... as 'Sex and the City' would have it, you take a detour along the way to RickyMartinVille.
Amidst lipstick lesbians and 'Queer Eye' presenters, the bisexual teen is the new 'big thing'. It's fashionable to experiment. Try something a little different, maybe you'll discover that you've been gay all along. Or maybe you'll decide that you're definitely straight. Take A New Sexuality Out For A Test Drive Today! There is never any implication that bisexuality is anything other than a transitional state, a thing to take you from one end of the spectrum to the other. At most, it is a fashionable new label to describe exactly how liberated you really are. After all, you wear 'ethnic' clothes and have some Native American (or whatever) blood in you, eight generations back, and you recycle, and you have adopted a Chinese baby, and you're bisexual! You are so much more liberated and empowered than anyone else, it's no wonder that you are a high-powered business woman who runs a household with ruthless efficiency and still gets to spinning class every Thursday.
To come back from this ramble through sexuality, I want to use a capitalised word at this point.
"Please indicate whether you are straight or a Homosexual."
"Look, Mummy, a Gay man!"
"It's a beautiful film, with a heart-warming and exquisitely scripted Homosexual relationship..."
The capital letter is offensive. The capital letter demarcates 'Homosexual' or 'Gay' from normal, from us, from you. The capital letter marks people out as a different race or sexuality or species. You are not defined by what you do or what you think, you are defined by what you are. You could be a happily married woman in Suriname, raising three children and having sex with your husband every day. If you have sex with your girlfriends, though, you are either a lesbian or bisexual. Except that Suriname has no word for 'homsoexual' or 'gay' or 'lesbian' or 'bisexuality'. Suriname calls this practice 'mati', and it is something that is perfectly normal. How can these binaries that we regard as 'natural' manifest so differently elsewhere? If 'hermaphrodite' does not exist as nature's mistake in India, why does it exist so over here? Why do we 'correct' babies at birth, then bow to their genered choices later on?
These labels trammel. They constrict. They fix you in place and they offer no way out. You must adhere to these rules to be part of the dominant discourse. If you do not - well, you must adhere to these rules to be part of the couter-discourse. If you do not, stay silent. Do not confess to whipping your wife, because consent is immaterial (not in rape cases, no, consent can acquit you, but in BDSM it is battery and wrongful imprisonment and if you consented to it you were obviously not in your right mind and your testimony will be stricken from the record). We have extended the 'Gay & Lesbian' society on campus to include bisexuality and transgendered persons, so you are fine. I'm sure that some day soon, we will find the right label for 'hermaphrodite' (that is, if we decide that it is not a mistake to be corrected at birth) and that can be added to our list of labels. Pick a label. Stick with it. You don't get to change your mind later and declare yourself in love with a man after coming out as a lesbian. It's not done.
It's not natural.
That one capital letter - Bisexual, Bi, Bisexuality - is another shackle. It is complicit in the creation of the Bisexual as a species, as a movement, as another counter-discourse. It fixes me - me, as a person, as an individual - within what is and isn't perceived 'normal' for bisexuality. For instance, bisexuality means that you can fall in love with people of either sex not that you can fuck couples in their own homes and let them make you breakfast afterwards.. Bisexuality means developing a theory of bisexuality that positions you as something different from simply unsure whether you are gay or straight not that you can pick and choose as you like throughout your life, resisting any way you know how.
That innocuous capital letter fixes me, temporally and spatially. It makes me a Bisexual, genus, sub-genus, quick-of-the-genes, brainwave activity, point A to point B to point C, an endless teleogical progression of logic and 'fact'. It positions me against those not-me (or, rather, it makes me not-them). Bisexual persons are frequently subject to abuse in Gay Pride marches. Now, why is that?
You - out of my sandbox.
Get the fuck out.
Define yourself how you like. I don't care. Define yourself as Bisexual, as Mixed-Race (now position that against white/White. Which would you choose to be called? Would you choose White, with the implications of cohesion, of a movement, of race? Or simply: white. Something so completely irrelevant as your height or shoe size.) as Woman (but do you fit the definition of Woman? Are you a married WASP with three children who isn't on the Pill?), as anything you like. I don't care.
What really makes me angry is the implication that you know better than me what I think and feel from day to day because you have a handy capitalised word that encapsulates my entire existence.
Maybe it's not done consciously. Maybe it just slips out. Shove it back in. Otherwise I shall have to try calling you Special. Now, how does that feel?
*
READING OF INTEREST
Michel Foucault, "History of Sexuality", esp. 'We Other Historians' and 'Method'.
Michael Kimmel, "Masculinity as Homophobia"
Susan Faludi, "Stiffed: Betrayal of the Modern Man"
Gayle Rubin, "The Trafficking in Women"
Judith Butler, "Gender Trouble"
Theweleit, "Male Fantasies"
Yeah, OK, no actual sausages were included. I just needed to rant a little. I somehow couldn't focus myself on my theory exam and turned in quite possibly the most superficial piece of tripe I have ever written. Woe. Ah, well, another exam on Tuesday. I'm sure that the prospect of the funding networks of Al-Qaeda and genocidal rape will inspire me.