…

After becoming the first woman ever to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, Eilnor Ostrom expressed hope that “the recognition…is helping” to increase the number of women in her discipline. This week, scientists at Oxford echoed Ostrom’s call—and her concerns.

In a conference titled “Scientific Research—is it different for women?”, three high-flying female academics reflected on their male-governed fields. Motherhood remained a key issue for all involved:  while Professor Ottoline Leyser emphasised that childcare responsibilities should be shared, Dr Blanca Rodriguez was expressly asked how she will cope when her child goes to school. Refreshingly, Dr Peggy Frith focused on gendered differences in perspective rather than pregnancy, suggesting that women see and use career opportunities in a more pragmatic way than their male counterparts.

Scant mention of disproportionate pay and employment rates left the general impression that success in the sciences is attainable across the gender divide. But while these women’s achievements underscored the opportunities for female scientists, they also stood out against “a numbers game”: only 12 women won a scientific Nobel Prize prior to this year, compared to 523 men.

Indeed, the real proof of persistent gender inequity lies in the existence of such “empowering” conferences, and in the need for resources explicitly dedicated to supporting women in science, such as the UKRC and the WISE campaign.  Professor Leyser maintained that passion for the job will carry women through their chosen career paths. She may be right, but one wonders how many men need to be told that.

Jenny Messenger is a second-year classics student at Worcester College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

James Davidson
The Greeks and Greek Love:
A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007
656 pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-0297819974

…

…

Warwick Classics scholar James Davidson’s The Greeks and Greek Love (2007) poses a radical challenge to prominent assumptions about same-sex love in ancient Greece. Countering the dominant conception whereby ancient Greek sexuality was defined by penetration, active and passive roles and pederasty, Davidson argues that same-sex love is especially “knotty”, diverse and contextual.

A number of classicists and cultural historians have welcomed Davidson’s book as an important and provocative study that will influence academic discussion. For others, notably Classics professor Thomas Hubbard of the University of Texas at Austin, Davidson’s alternative claims are too radical, misrepresentative of original texts, and even “sensational”. As Professor Simon Goldhill said in his Times Higher Education review, the book “will be read by many people, and I predict a riot”.

Davidson’s polemic is targeted at scholars who present an overly narrow conception of Greek love. In the latter half of the 20th century, an emphasis on the sexual nature of Greek love besieged classical scholarship in a phenomenon that Davidson calls “sodomania”. This obsession with eroticism was reflected in the academic language used to describe Greek relationships: the active, and usually older “subject” who desired sex is the erastes (“lover”), while the younger, passive “object” of the erastes is the eromenos (“beloved”; a linguistically tidy dualism since eromenos is formally a passive participle). Such scholarly language contributed to a picture of Greek sexual relations as essentially pederastic.

Who are the main culprits of such an approach to Greek love? Two ostensibly opposed thinkers: Sir Kenneth Dover, a Classical scholar concerned with detail and precision in revealing truth, and Michel Foucault, a poststructuralist philosopher keen to show that what we perceive as “truth” is in fact a disguised manifestation of power conditioned by historical discourses. Davidson makes the compelling—and no doubt controversial—claims that Foucault failed to see through Dover’s own “historicising” when he conceived of Greek love in terms of power, and that Foucault draws an uncharacteristically “Christian” distinction between love and sex. In this way, “the tragedy of M. Foucault” produces a bizarre conceptual alliance with Dover, for both scholars see the “truth” of Greek sex as its function as a vehicle for power.

For Davidson, this view reduces love to sex, thereby “trivialising” same-sex relationships. His attack here is sound and persuasive, based on a deft illustration of the diversity and richness of the language of love in ancient Greece. In contrast to notions of sex-crazed Greeks, Davidson argues for an understanding of ancient Greece in which same-sex relationships could include love. His point here is not to champion intimacy at the expense of sex—for that would be reductionism in another form—but rather, to explore how love and sex overlapped in complicated ways.

Davidson also challenges the idea that pederasty was universal in Greek sexual relationships (“pederasty” being a compound of pais, “boy”, and eran, “to love”). He notes the difficulty of measuring age precisely, arguing that in Athens the same word pais could be used for someone 18 or 19 and therefore “legal”, but also for someone under 18 and therefore “untouchable” by today’s standards. The uncertainty of these distinctions renders the term “pederasty” anachronistic: their pais and ours do not match up. Davidson, however, finds himself on shakier ground when he implies that it was universally forbidden for adults to sexually mingle with their youthful counterparts. Here the evidence seems to evade straightforward interpretation, and even if such laws were clearly defined, there were surely cases when citizens transgressed the laws and customs of their society.

Having mounted these objections to the predominant picture of sex in Greek love, Davidson devotes much of the book to expanding on neglected aspects of same-sex relationships: love, reciprocity and intimacy. He examines relationships in a wide range of contexts, from the myth of Zeus and Ganymede, to religious cults, to “men of war”, such as Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, along with an informative section of Sappho and female homoeroticism (about which evidence on the whole is regrettably thin). Davidson’s basic arguments here are actually less radical than they might seem, for this is by no means the first time that homoeroticism has been suggested for mythical pairs such as Achilles and Patroclus.

However, Davidson’s accounts of homophilic relationships are occasionally pushed too far and often raise more questions than they answer. Achilles and Patroclus’s relationship may well have been intimately homoerotic, but, as Oliver Taplin noted in his review for the Guardian, this reading must contend with book nine in the Iliad, where both heroes sleep with women. This complexity raises the issue of “sexuality”, which Davidson leaves rather ambiguous (were Achilles and Patroclus in any sense “bisexual”?). On the one hand, he is appropriately cautious in applying anachronistic terminology such as “homosexuality” to the ancients. On the other hand, his analysis implies that the notion of “sexuality” applies, at least in part, to ancient Greece, even though many have suggested that the idea of “sexuality” as we interpret it today arose in the modern era. Davidson is clearly critical of the claim that the Greeks had no conception of homosexuality, but he fails to elucidate and move beyond this provocative suggestion.

In the end, Davidson’s book is not the last word on any of these complex subjects. But it raises the tone of discussion of the “knotty” topic and provides many new, nuanced—not, as Hubbard would have, sensational—insights. Readers may quibble about Davidson’s more interpretative arguments or suggest that we cannot, ultimately, reconstruct ancient views of homophilia. While these concerns are justified, Davidson has succeeded in illustrating how easily fettered we are if we do not continue to challenge and refine our modern views of the ancients. This book shows that a broad approach which considers the Greeks on their own terms and allows for diversity is fruitful. We can no longer take dominant definitions of Greek sex for granted.

Chris M. Sheppard is reading for an MPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at Merton College, Oxford.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Traffic in Tel Aviv

◄ Back

Next ►

Picture 1 of 9

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Neve Sha’anan neighbourhood – In recent years, thousands of foreign women have been smuggled into Israel and sold into sexual slavery.

The women work shifts as long as 18 hours under conditions of virtual slavery. They are sold at auctions for $8,000 to $10,000 and say they are forced to have sex with up to 30 men per day. The women say they receive, on average, $5 for every $80 to $120 paid to pimps for their services.

There are between 5,000 and 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone. Together, those who profit from the brothels—smugglers, brothel owners and pimps—earn millions of dollars each year.

§

Eddie Gerald is a photographer based in Tel Aviv. He has received numerous awards for his long-term photographic projects. Eddie is represented by the German photo agency Laif.

…

Gus van Sant
Milk
Focus Features, 2008
128 minutes

…

…

…

…

When Brokeback Mountain (2005) hit theatres in the US, the newspaper Christianity Today began its review with a lengthy disclaimer: “After much discussion”, the magazine has “decided to review the film despite its controversial subject matter”. The editor emphasized, however, that the review was neither a “‘recommendation’ to see the film” nor a “rating of the ‘moral acceptability’ of homosexuality”.

The ambiguous, furtive sexuality of Brokeback contrasts with the militant pro-gay politics of Milk (2008), Gus van Sant’s biopic about the first openly gay elected official in the US. Thirty years after his death, Harvey Milk has become iconic—as an unapologetic organiser, as a vocal opponent of Anita Bryant’s anti-gay morality crusades, and later, after his assassination, as a martyr of the movement. But when Christianity Today reviewed Milk, there was no disclaimer or warning about the “controversial subject matter”. In fact, the magazine described the movie as “an inspiring tale of one man’s quest to legitimize his identity, to give hope to his community”.

With Brokeback, the question was whether America was ready for a blockbuster about queer relationships, however ambiguous. If the disclaimer from Christianity Today or the 2005 Best Picture award (which went to Crash over Brokeback) were any indication, the answer to that question remains unclear. With Milk, which won Academy Awards for best actor and best original screenplay last night, the question is whether America is ready for a truly robust queer politics. If the film’s warm reception from critics and pundits alike is any indication, the answer might finally be yes. Queer cinema, Brokeback included, has long been dominated by debates about who is depicted and how they are represented. But in Milk, the focus is on who is elected and how they agitate for change.

In context of US politics, it is easy to see why this change is happening now. Queer activists face a better chance of passing pro-gay legislation under the Obama Administration than they ever have in the past. In many ways, Milk’s victory in 1977 and the subsequent passage of San Francisco’s ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation foreshadowed the next three decades of queer politics.  Since then, the battles have been overwhelmingly fought at the state and local level, where even relatively modest demands for non-discrimination protections, the right to assemble and participate in public life, and benefits for same-sex partners have been won.

But the victories came only after countless setbacks. It was not until 1982 that the first statewide non-discrimination ordinance went into effect in Wisconsin, and it was not until 1989 that Massachusetts followed suit. Even today, 30 of the 50 US states still lack any such protections. The federal government has been even slower to change. Visitors suspected of being gay or lesbian could be barred at the US border until 1991; sodomy was not nationally decriminalised until 2003 in the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas; and as late as last November, it was still considered newsworthy when gay candidates were elected to any kind of public office.

Obama’s victory has to be understood in light of the series of setbacks for queer activists on the national scene. The hope that many activists placed in Bill Clinton after his election in 1992 quickly dissipated. His “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise meant that queer service members would be discharged if they acknowledged their sexuality. He also signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which defined “marriage” federally as “a legal union between one man and one woman”. George W. Bush, for his part, stalled legislation on hate crimes and employment discrimination.

In such a hostile political environment, the LGBT rights movement in the US rarely could make headlines by tackling substantive structural problems ingrained in law and policy. Instead, the movement turned much of its attention to the only front where it was routinely playing offence and winning—the politics of representation. If the presidential administration would not budge, organisations like the Human Rights Campaign could at least win symbolic victories, as in when Grey’s Anatomy ‘s Isaiah Washington was written out of the show after allegedly calling a co-star a “fag”, or when Human Rights Watch successfully pressured Mars to pull homophobic ads for Snickers.

But lately, the politics of representation seem to be going out of style. In the hyper-political climate of the recent presidential election, headline-grabbing superstars like Lindsay Lohan and Kanye West took a back seat to speculation about Nate Silver’s polling models and the width of the Bering Strait. In the end, the 2008 US election was not about being black—or female, or Latino, or Mormon, or a septuagenarian, or a hockey mom from Alaska or an average Joe from Scranton. Voters were motivated less by identity politics and more by the economy and a desire to break from the policies of the past. They wanted a candidate would improve their lives substantively in uncertain times.

The shift seems to have catalysed a strain of the LGBT movement that has been slowly amplifying its demands for actual, practicable policy change, rather than gunning for wins on the playing field of identity politics. Waves of protest swept the country after California passed the Proposition 8 same-sex marriage ban in a statewide referendum. Cities and counties across the country—including Salt Lake County, the home of the Mormon Church—have passed measures that extend health insurance to same-sex partners. States such as Wyoming, North Dakota, Kansas, Montana and Utah are all considering non-discrimination bills this year. Maine is contemplating civil unions. Vermont and New Hampshire, which already offer civil unions, are mulling over full marriage rights. LGBT community members seem to be emboldened to demand actual, practicable victories that would have symbolic and material changes in the lives of LGBT Americans.

The emboldening of the LGBT movement in the US is too easily chalked up to the presence of a sympathetic president and the wave of hopeful Obamania that has swept the left. It is more diffuse and pragmatic than that. It is fuelled just as much by the Democrats wresting control of the US Congress in 2006, by a series of victories at the state level that seem to be tipping the political scales in the movement’s favour, and by the newfound support of rising political stars like Jeff Merkley, Kirstin Gillibrand, Al Franken and even Arnold Schwarzenegger, who are rapidly recognising that the stranglehold of the religious right is weakening, and that championing gay rights is no longer a radical or career-killing move.  The movement is at a turning point, one that owes as much to the country’s backlash against social conservatism in the wake of the Bush Administration as it does to those activists whose perennial demands suddenly seemed moderate once the contentious issue of same-sex marriage became a prominent goal.

Issues of representation and identity politics are still valid concerns. But they are not the sum total of the movement’s goals, and they become particularly dangerous when they get in the way of larger kinds of cultural or structural change. The flare-up over Rick Warren, the controversial pastor of the Saddleback Church, is symptomatic of this type of politics. By asking Warren to give the convocation at the Inauguration, Obama attempted to reach out to the 26.3% of Americans who consider themselves evangelical Christians.

Of course, representation matters here. Allowing an evangelical who opposes same-sex marriage to give the invocation does little to challenge that sector’s monopoly on faith-based discourse. But it also offered an opportunity for progress that was overlooked in fits of rage-blindness. Instead of focusing on Rick Warren as a figurehead for the evangelical community and for the anti-gay marriage movement, activists could have stressed that Warren has been an outspoken advocate for HIV/AIDS funding, a supporter of non-discrimination laws and sympathetic to civil unions—all positions that put him squarely to the left of recent federal policy.

There is space for action if the movement is bold enough to seize it. Immediate goals include the passage of the Matthew Shepard Act, which would give federal “hate crime” protection to victims targeted based on their sexual orientation, the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and federal recognition for civil unions. But all of these are widely supported by the American public already, which has left a lingering sense that the movement could be demanding—and receiving—more. Stalwarts like the Human Rights Campaign, with its massive fundraising and lobbying capabilities, are at risk of becoming obsolete in the face of local pro-LGBT rights grassroots campaigns, such as the ones that popped up during the wave of protests in California against the passage of Proposition 8.

The seismic shift in queer activism that seems to be occurring is the recognition—by activists and LGBT people themselves, if not by the iconic organisations of the movement—that the movement no longer has to play defence, reacting to every homophobic salvo fired in its direction. Instead, there is a real opportunity to show what structural discrimination and violence look like and why they need to be addressed immediately.

Milk’s Oscar nods will predictably be seen as a victory for queer visibility, and another battle that has been won on the representation front of the culture wars. But it will also celebrate a politician whose stock phrase—“my name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you”—not only failed to confront stereotypes, but strategically and unapologetically embraced them and played into them for political gain. If there is any lesson to be learned from Milk in the post-election world, it is that it may be time for the movement to take a break from Hollywood and start demanding change from Washington.

Ryan Thoreson is reading for an MPhil in Social Anthropology at Hertford College, Oxford.

…
Hillary is history.

After dominating the political landscape for years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun the slow descent to headlines below the fold. The discussions that accompanied her presidential campaign have followed suit. For two years, the persistent gender inequity in US society received top billing—and in rare cases, critical reflection—as Americans engaged with the possibility of a female president. Today, there are still only 17 women in the US Senate, none of whom are women of colour. Women still make 75 cents to the male dollar, and the gender gap may rise in worsening economic conditions. Paid maternity leave is not standard among even the best US employers. But with Clinton gone from the centre stage of American domestic politics, so too is the one woman whose presence alone guaranteed a nationwide discussion of these issues.

Yet Hillary has still made history. Before the problems of gender inequality fade from popular discourse, we need to reconsider what happened to Hillary—and to history—in the past several years. When Barack Obama entered the race, the Democratic primary became a dramatic showdown to nominate either the first African-American or the first woman on a major US party ticket. As the battle between Clinton and Obama unfolded, the question of “who would go first”, a black man or a white woman, emerged as a central paradigm in the election coverage. The question divided feminists, splintered the Democratic Party and influenced voting patterns.

It also motivated deeply simplistic—and equally offensive—identity politics. Take the thinly veiled racism of Bill Clinton’s comparison between Obama’s candidacy and Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential run, or the suggestion that the late Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an African-American woman and outspoken Clinton supporter, was a traitor to her race. The immense import placed on “going first” in 2008 situated race against gender in a zero-sum political climate, often to the detriment of better judgment.

But rancour over the question of who should “go first”—African-Americans or women—has rich precedent in American history. In the 19th century, the first feminist movement stemmed from the ideas of abolitionism. Indeed, feminist pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met at an anti-slavery convention when they both were refused seats. Despite—or perhaps because of—the ideological parity between feminism and abolitionism, the promise of Reconstruction era progress quickly brought the problem of  “going first” to the fore.

In a decision that would divide their movement, prominent American feminists (including Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth) refused to support the 14th and 15th Amendments on the grounds that suffrage for African-American men should not precede—or proceed without—women’s right to vote. Truth defended her position in a speech at the 1867 American Equal Rights Association Convention, arguing that suffrage for black men would subordinate black women and stall growing support for women’s rights. As she famously explained: “I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.”

While her statements were controversial and her stance remains debatable, Truth recognised that advances in gender equality hinged on the timing of civil rights. The debate over black men’s suffrage derailed the nascent feminist movement. Popular support for women’s suffrage waned. Women would not secure the vote for another 50 years, and “going first” would carry deep meaning for the feminist movement over the next century.

Examining this historical tension over timing can help make sense of the recent US Democratic primary. Sojourner Truth’s sentiments foretold not only the long wait for women’s suffrage, but also the disappointment and anger that Clinton supporters felt at her failure to secure the Democratic nomination.

But focusing on the significance of “going first” also obscures the interdependence of racial and gender equality. Despite moments of sharp discord, the American movements for civil and women’s rights have been intertwined inextricably at least since the 1790s, when Mary Wollstonecraft first drew comparisons between slavery and the coverture laws that gave a woman’s husband full control of her legal rights. In the Antebellum era, American feminists made crucial contributions to the abolition of slavery, and the first American movement for women’s wage equity in the 1920s grew out of the post-Civil War labour movement led by African-Americans. The National Organization for Women was founded on the model of civil rights organisations of the 1960s.

These parallels have not gone unnoticed. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the book often credited with igniting the Second Wave feminist movement, was hailed as a “woman’s Emancipation Proclamation” when it was released in 1966. Civil rights leaders from Frederick Douglass to SNCC activists Casey Hayden and Mary King have compared the treatment of women and African-Americans. In short, these two movements have been aligned philosophically, practically and discursively  throughout American history. The notion of  “going first” forces a sharp divide between racial and gender equality, but as history demonstrates—and African-American women illustrate rather obviously—race and gender are not so easily distilled. Each movement owes its victories, to some extent, to the other.

The question, then, is why “who goes first” continues to have relevance in contemporary movements for social equality. The conflict over black men’s suffrage established the import of “going first” in the US, but it also illustrated the debilitating consequences of putting stock in this concept, for it was, in large part, the subsequent schism between feminists that stunted women’s suffrage. So why focus on firsts?

From the start, the American movements for racial and gender equality have been united by the stark contrast between Constitutional guarantees and the realities of unequal life. Within this context, milestones have become a tangible way for these movements to realise and record progress toward the ideal. Milestones are signifiers of change and a powerful form of speech. The movements for civil and women’s rights represent unrealised rights and underrepresented voices in American culture, and it makes sense, then, that being “the first”—which is so often translated into “going first”—becomes symbolic and divisive at key moments in American political history.

Barack Obama knows all of this, which is one of the many reasons he rarely mentioned race in his two-year candidacy. The historic nature of Obama’s presidential bid was self-evident. The milestone did the talking for him.

Obama’s election is a feminist victory. His policies are feminist; a century of feminist activism helped make a black president possible; and, perhaps most importantly, race is a feminist issue. But this election is not a feminist milestone. Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency has passed, and as Secretary of State, she is largely excluded from the domestic policy agenda. The onus to articulate the need for gender equality within the US thus falls on Obama, for without a milestone to speak for them, feminist issues have already begun to fade from the limelight on the American stage.

It still remains unclear whether the Obama Administration will take a strong stance on gender issues. Obama has described himself as a feminist, and he made a point of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in his first days in office. He has appointed women to some of the highest positions in US government, and his wife, Michelle Obama, drew comparisons to Clinton yesterday when she took a public role in presidential policy.

But Obama also regularly emphasises his commitment “post-political” bipartisanship. Such rhetoric  often has anti-feminist implications. Obama made nary a mention of feminist issues in his inaugural address, invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation and quietly cut family planning funding from his stimulus package in response to Republican opposition. These actions may have been the products of political compromise, but if so, that only strengthens the need for Obama to rearticulate his dedication to gender equality.

History shows that women’s progress wanes without a determined and public discussion; actions alone do not suffice. Obama has gone first. But if he is consistent—and explicit—about his policies on gender equality, he can seize upon the opportunity to usher in an era when “who goes first” does not equate with who gets heard. Time will tell if he takes it.

Emma Kaufman is reading for an MSc in Criminology at New College, Oxford. She is a senior editor of the Oxonian Review.

Catherine MacKinnon
Are Women Human?
Harvard University Press, 2006
432 pages
ISBN 0674021878

For three decades feminist theory has been used by American scholar Catherine MacKinnon as a ‘club’ for ‘smashing up hierarchy.’ The turn of phrase is characteristically her own. Having begun her career as a righteous critic of the male bias of the ‘neutral’ liberal state as a graduate student at Yale in the 1970s, she made her career on the intellectual front lines of North America’s second wave feminist movement. MacKinnon represents for many a generation of feminists who are not well loved these days. Fellow self-styled feminist Camille Paglia calls MacKinnon ‘a totalitarian,’ a ‘wet blanket sermoniser,’ and the ‘mad-hatter of feminism.’ Meanwhile, those on the Right continue despise her; male colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford complain that she is ‘a bully.’

But at a moment when radical feminism is experiencing a serious crisis of popularity in North America, MacKinnon’s new book serves as reminder of all the work that feminist political theory has achieved in the past three decades. Are Women Human? presents MacKinnon’s theoretical legacy afresh, prompting us to assess the state of her ongoing project of winning justice for women through radical legal reform.

To misappropriate the Marxist adage, MacKinnon’s self-appointed task as a theorist has always been to change the world rather than remaining content describing it. She has certainly left her mark on Anglo-American law. Most notably, she has helped define what legal equality ought to mean for women as members of a socially subordinated group. Sexual harassment has been just one area in which MacKinnon and her colleagues and her colleagues began slowly to carve women’s experiences into the law of a state that was—as they argued—the property of men. With The Sexual Harassment of Working Women and the legal casework that it accompanied, MacKinnon argued that workplace harassment was a practice of discrimination against women as women—and hence a violation of their civil rights. In a retrospective assessment of her own work, MacKinnon notes that:

now when a woman is sexually harassed and speaks of it, she is not simply speaking in a different voice or narrating her subject experience of the situation. She is saying what happened to her. And what happened to her, when it happens, is now authoritatively recognized in law as inequality on the basis of sex …

Thus, critics on the Left and Right who blame MacKinnon for the moralistic hysteria around sexual harassment generally miss this point. The significance of sexual harassment laws lies less in what it has prevented men from doing, and more in what it has to enabled women to do: to speak about harassment—and to be taken seriously.

Understanding MacKinnon demands some attention to methodology. The distinctive perspective of feminist theorizing a la MacKinnon is that to make a difference to the reality of women’s lives, it also needs to be grounded in that reality. The terrifying prevalence of violence against women in their homes—the exploitation of women’s domestic work, the normality of abuse by colleagues, family and strangers—all needed to be ‘discovered,’ because existing conceptual and legal systems had protected and concealed them. And since notions of objectivity had been given from the perspective of men—in philosophy, law, political theory, etc—feminists’ controversial task was to draw on the experiences of women to construct new categories for bringing their women’s own ‘reality’ into public discourse.

In this, feminist theory and the grassroots women’s movement with its various practices of consciousness-raising were inseparable allies. ‘Our priority,’ as MacKinnon writes, ‘was gaining access to the reality of our collective experience in order to understand and change it for all of us in our own lifetimes.’

Are Women Human?, a collection of essays, law review articles and speeches written over the last decade, documents the extension of MacKinnon’s work to the international level. For women to be human under international law would mean that gender-specific violations (e.g. rape and sexual violence, human trafficking and female genital mutilation) be treated as equivalent to the human rights abuses currently encoded and enforced. Torture names a category of violation that is recognised as objectively defined, and sanctionable through international legal regimes. What would it take to make the types of violence that characterise women’s lives recognized in the same way? Again MacKinnon’s claims are controversial.

MacKinnon is confident that ‘Human rights in the real world are proving far less attached to their Enlightenment baggage’ of natural law ‘than are the intellectuals who guard its theory.’ (The baddies in this instance are conservative legal scholars and postmodern academic feminists alike.) Her case study is Kadic v. Karadzic, in which MacKinnon used the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act successfully to win more than half billion dollars in damages on behalf of Muslim and Croatian women raped under the Bosnian regime during the early 1990s. For the first time, the rape perpetrated against the female survivors was recognised as an act of genocide.

MacKinnon sees international law as leading the way towards redefining rape as something that happens to women as a part of a subordinate group. Regarding rape as akin to torture would establish it as an act perpetrated against both an individual and an entire group—a ‘systemic and systematic’ act of hatred. Recognition of women’s fundamental equality—an equality not based on sameness but on status—must follow, worldwide. Incorporating other gender-specific abuses into international human rights law will, according to MacKinnon, begin to give human rights a woman’s face, making these rights ‘worth our having.’

Yet the optimistic view of human rights law is as vehicle for gender justice is surprising (MacKinnon’s Kadic victory notwithstanding). Indeed, MacKinnon fails to provide a solid argument for it. In the entire collection there are but a few gestures along the way. The introduction to Are Women Human?, the author indicates breezily that the problems for women today are international in scope; states are losing their power and credibility as enforcers of law even within their borders anyway, and that the women’s movement is a global one.

For one, the issues MacKinnon flags are not entirely new. Trafficking and rape in war were ripe for debate at the League of Nations. Likewise, globalization has not diminished the importance of the domestic realm in combating ’sex tourism,’ or ‘cheap female labour.’ It remains unclear why remedies at the level of international human rights law would be the most efficacious, given the absence of credible international authorities. Mysteriously, MacKinnon even implies that human rights law may be an effective route for tackling gender hierarchy because there are no enforcement mechanisms:

International law—like women largely lacking access to legitimate force to compel adherence to its will—has had to develop a wider range of means to be effective. Not to valorise lack of enforcement, but force is not all there is to effectiveness or even to power.

But MacKinnon is quite wrong to suggest that states’ apparent ‘illegitimacy’ should mean that it is increasingly irrelevant to women. Indeed, the claim that it is not worthwhile for women to fight for the reform of the modern state is a dangerous—especially since she does not explain the alternatives to force on the international level to which she alludes. At least democratic nation-states are accountable in principle to their populations. As American feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it, ‘the state is the largest unit we know of so far that is decently accountable to people’s voices.’

But this preference for the international realm presents a more fundamental problem for MacKinnon—it strains her ‘bottom up’ credentials and her professed commitment to grounding feminist critique in women’s shared experiences. The international women’s movement, such as it currently is, must faces two obstacles in playing the role MacKinnon envisages. First, how can the realm of international politics offer ways for ‘the grassroots’ to be heard—let alone headed? Second, and related to this, how far may we consider the collection of NGOs and UN agencies campaigning for women on the international level today ‘the grassroots’?

In the end, one cannot help feeling that MacKinnon’s recent turn to international law has more to do with frustration with what the feminist movement has achieved in the US than with the theoretical justifications she provides. Noticeably absent from Are Women Human? is news of legal or constitutional gains for women within the US since the 1980s (though the three essays on the progress of sex equality law in India, Canada and Sweden are more inspiring, and are interesting in their own right). It seems clear that MacKinnon has her home country in mind when she writes:

if [women’s equality law] depends on goodwill and political commitment to work, its secular tendency will be to fail exactly for those people and at those times when the egalitarian spirit is lacking, which is just when it is needed the most. And that, in fact, is what has arguably happened. Sex equality laws exist nearly everywhere, and sex equality exists virtually nowhere.

Perhaps this ought to be a wake-up call for the American women’s movement which taught MacKinnon ‘everything she knows.’ One thing is certain: we cannot rely on a international grassroots movement in the absence of one at home.

Alix Rule is a graduate in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford. She lives in London.

Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
Based on a story by Annie Proulx
2005

Brokeback Mountain, the so-called ‘gay cowboy movie’ directed by Ang Lee, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and based on the novella by Annie E. Proulx (1997), has been lauded by critics and has won several major awards, including best picture at the Venice International Film Festival, and three Academy Awards. It would be hard to argue that the critical success of the film is unrelated to the current political climate of LGBT issues. As one of the few movies in mainstream American cinema featuring a romance between men, gay rights activists support it for revealing the brutality of homophobia, while religious groups protest the message it promotes. Given the political dimensions of this film, it is relevant to ask whether Brokeback Mountain represents homosexuality positively.

On the surface, the film tells a tragic love story in the naturalistic, minimalist style for which Ang Lee is known. While working one summer on the mountain from which the film takes its title, two men, Jack and Ennis, fall in love during an era of brutal homophobia in rural 1960s America, but abandon their relationship in favour of traditional family lives. Several years later, their romance is reignited and the majority of the film explores how their relationships with each other and with their families suffer as a result of the inhibiting society in which they live—as well as the internal homophobia from which both men suffer. Certainly, seen in this light, the film offers a bleak picture of the way things were and indeed still are for many homosexuals.

It is not surprising, then, that so many supporters of LGBT issues see Brokeback Mountain as a powerful call to end homophobia. To achieve this power, however, the film must entice audiences to care, not only for Jack and Ennis, but more importantly for the love they share. Ang Lee achieves this empathy, but not without compromising his depiction of homosexuality, something that most commentators so far have overlooked.

Despite the harm that Jack and Ennis cause their families and each other, Lee successfully persuades audiences to care for their relationship. Like countless tragic lovers before them, Jack and Ennis are victims of their time as well as their own inability to imagine an alternative to the constricting norms of the homophobic society of which they were a product. Yet our interest in their romance makes us forgive the harm they do others. As such, the movie has been applauded for taking homosexual love seriously: Brokeback Mountain does not relegate the love of gay characters to the margins of a film but rather argues that their love is a subject appropriate for a grand narrative. Certainly a movie that will carve into our collective minds the thought that love between two men can be as painful and meaningful as that between a man and a woman is sorely needed. However, we should be attentive to the characters to which the cinema has privileged this story line: two men who in all appearances are, essentially, straight. Brokeback Mountain may have managed to get audiences to fall in love with the romance of Jack and Ennis, but it does so by cleansing the lovers of any characteristics that would signify, in our Western society, that they are gay.

By this I am not saying Jack and Ennis should have behaved more camp or fem—indeed it was important to show how heteronormative behaviour was imposed on them by their community. Rather, I’m pointing out how the film aggressively exaggerates the outward heterosexuality of Jack and Ennis to make the viewer more comfortable with their relationship because of its overt ‘straight-ness.’ To achieve Jack and Ennis’s heterosexuality, the film appropriates the conventions of the cowboy and Western genre—one which celebrates heterosexual masculinity. This also distances Jack and Ennis from most urban audiences: it places them in a remote environment made mythic by early twentieth century Western films which many contemporary viewers find remotely primitive. As characters, Jack and Ennis are little more than archetypes lifted from this genre: Heath Ledger’s Ennis, though convincingly acted, is a John Wayne pastiche, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack could be any number of Wayne’s cinematic sidekicks—perhaps Jeffery Hunter, who played opposite Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers. In many ways Brokeback Mountain is a Modern Western. Here the gay proclivities of its characters have been appropriated to make the film edgier and sexier: a kind of fetishism. As such, the film is in actuality an exploration of the Western genre more than it is an investigation of genuine characters living with gay identities. Furthermore, by lifting their performance so carefully from the traditionally macho genre of the cowboy film, we are able to fall in love with Jack and Ennis’s romance without ever having to fear they might actually be gay.

Still, one of the most controversial aspects of the film is it displays graphic sexual encounters between men. But the one sex scene (though they do kiss at a couple of other key points) between them is in fact not graphic at all, and is rather brief. In truth, the only frontal nudity in the movie is female, and by far the most graphic sex in the film is between the men and their wives. The privileged place of heterosexual sex serves tacitly to sanctify the homosexual behaviour of Jack and Ennis, of which we catch only a glimpse. It emphasizes that, as far as social performance is concerned, they are as straight as any man, thus making their homosexual behaviour more palatable.

Even more revealing is the fact that much of the physical intimacy between the two men has a quality of brutality to it. Their first sexual encounter is almost a fist fight. In fact, later on in the movie, there is a physical fight between the two lovers which we see more graphically than we ever see their affection. Moreover, when they reunite after several years apart, their embrace is frantic and almost violent. These scenes, and the absence of nearly any others to counterbalance them, suggest that Ang Lee did not have confidence that audiences would care to see two men behave affectionately towards one another, or worse yet, it says that gay relationships are only interesting, sexy, and worthy of our attention when the performances of those involved most closely resembles the behaviour of that which classically signifies heterosexual masculinity. For gay men this sends a very dangerous message: internal homophobia lies deep within the gay community, even among those who have been out openly for many years, for whom the pressure to look and act straight is overwhelming.

Related to this point is the fact—much belaboured in the media—that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are straight. The public fascination with the contrast between their on- and off-screen sexuality is complex. The inclusion of straight actors would appear to speak of the audiences’ desire to see two straight men perform these roles, or perhaps their unwillingness to see it performed by anyone else. Is it more erotic to know while watching them perform the movements of gay men that they are actually straight? When they kiss, does the audience see both a symbolic representation of the characters of Jack and Ennis kissing, as well as the representation of the straight actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal kissing, thus transgressing their own sexual predilections?

The last insult to these gay characters occurs in the third act of the movie when one of the two men is killed by gay-bashers—without warning and seemingly without any explanation. It is as if to say: ‘well, I guess that’s what happened to gay men back then.’ One wonders, though, how many gay men, living straight lives (with wives and children at that) were in fact killed in Texas in the 80s for being gay, and whether this would justify the use of a gay-bashing assault as a plot device that requires no further explanation. To be sure, men have been killed for being gay. But, like Matthew Sheppard who was killed for this reason in Wyoming in 1998, this happens in exceptional circumstances which—if they are to be portrayed on film—deserve more explanation and attention than Brokeback Mountain is willing to offer. To throw this in at the end of a movie is at best melodrama and at worst reduces this important issue to a clever plot device. But it goes off in the movie without a hitch; few audience members would feel the need to question this occurrence. After all, so many gay people die at the end of movies it is beginning to seem unquestionable. Of course, the fact that gay characters all die of AIDS or are victims of violence is such a cinematic cliché (for a brief overview see The Celluloid Closet)that it is hard to imagine how this aspect of the film has not been criticised by movie reviewers.

It is disappointing that Brokeback Mountain is unable to redeem its failures by offering a new ending to a traditional story. And even more disappointing that many people have accepted this curious last minute plot twist, since it provides something that the movie sorely needs: a tragic conclusion to give the love of Jack and Ennis gravitas to secure the empathy of audience members. The movie resorts to killing one of its protagonists to ensure the audience’s empathy because it never really succeeds at showing us what the romance between these two men was all about. We hardly see them together talking or sharing something with one another, let alone having sex, nor do we learn what it was that made their bond so strong that they were willing to stay together for twenty years. In the meandering middle section of the movie, there is a lack of purpose, a purpose that is quickly regained with the tragedy of Jack’s death. But why couldn’t the movie have shown more of what their relationship was about instead of focussing on what it wasn’t?

One suspects it is because this would emasculate the characters, turning them into an embarrassment or something funny rather than a subject worthy of a film. The reality is, however, that love between two men looks funny to most people. Could anyone imagine a love film about two characters that were queens or camp? After all, who wants to see them fall in love? It would be a mistake, I believe, to see the avoidance of the queer stereotype as some sort of success or progress, as Daniel Mendelsohn suggests in the New York Review of Books. He argues that ‘there’s no such thing as a typical gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common.’

It is true that it is damaging that most gay characters in contemporary media conform to a certain stereotype. But the most offensive thing about this stereotype is surely that these characters do not participate in a broad range of life experiences, such as falling in love, building lives and families, realizing dreams. Rather, they live on the sidelines, dropping clever one-liners, being the best friend to the female lead. They are stereotypes for precisely this reason. Rarely do they ever fall in love like Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis and Jack. And even Ennis and Jack must continuously reaffirm their masculinity and demonstrate that they are ‘real’ men and that we should care about their love. Ultimately, though, it is a love that dare not show itself—not in 1960s Wyoming, and certainly not in contemporary mainstream cinema.

Steven Stowell is a DPhil student in the History of Art at Linacre College. His thesis is on the art theorists of the sixteenth century in Italy and their concept of allegory.

Allan Hollinghurst
The Line of Beauty
Picador, 2004
320 pages
ISBN 033048320X

‘What would Henry James have made of us?’, wonders an ambitious secretary to Gerald Fedden, the Tory MP whose house and family lies at the centre of The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst’s protagonist Nick Guest, an ardent follower of ‘the Master’, provides an answer that, one feels, the author’s own work modestly strives for:

He’d have been very kind to us, he’d have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he’d have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn’t have realized until just before the end that he’d seen right through us.

Henry James’ shade was a much-noted presence when the Booker shortlist was announced earlier this year—as Hollinghurst’s hero’s hero, the eponymous subject of Colm Toíbín’s The Master, and the subject of a notably absent longlister, David Lodge’s Author Author. While the latter two use James’ biography for their material, The Line of Beauty makes his influence felt in the texture of the prose itself: the third-person voice, filtered through Nick’s mind, is languid, at times complex, and beautiful. Hollinghurst avoids mere pastiche but is not ashamed to acknowledge the debt. Nick’s summary of The Spoils of Poynton which, late in the book, he is attempting rather non-committally to adapt for the screen, could serve Hollinghurst’s tale just as well. It is a ‘bleak’ comedy ‘about someone who loves things more than people’, and Nick is surrounded by characters who fit that description. Equally, Nick’s thesis on ‘style that hides things and reveals things at the same time’ informs the structure of the society and the novel in which he exists.

The exposure of privacy is at the heart of the novel, in two parallel and socially opposed worlds: the corruption of Thatcher’s revolution, figured in the ‘Tory sleaze’ which lurks in the background from the beginning of the book and finally explodes in Gerald Fedden’s face and Nick’s discovery of the hidden yet public gay scene of the 1980s, which leads him to a transition from chaste adoration of unattainable straight men to active sexual encounter. The latter has been something of a media fixation (culminating perhaps in the Daily Express’ bizarre headline ‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’), but in fact, Hollinghurst himself has admitted that in comparison to his previous works (including The Folding Star, nominated for the Booker in 1994), the sex scenes themselves are comparatively chaste. When Nick loses his virginity—perhaps the most explicit sexual description in the novel—he thinks to himself how he has ‘never seen it described in a book’, a tacit acknowledgement that a young man twenty years later could not say the same. Certainly there is, as Hollinghurst has acknowledged in interviews, less political and literary urgency in writing about gay sex in 2004. Instead, the interest lies in the context, the actual social and physical space, in which these encounters occur.

The first sexual experience takes place in a West London private garden, to which, as the Feddens’ guest, Nick holds a key. The line between private and public is blurred again and again over the course of the novel and is central to the map Hollinghurst outlines of gay London in the 1980s—a city where a tube station toilet is famous for having been cruised by Rudolf Nureyev. It is that same combination of promiscuity and enforced silence which leads to another masked presence in the text. Early on we hear of ‘illness’ but even when a friend of the Feddens’ dies of AIDS, the subject is quietly absorbed into that realm of the ‘vulgar and unsafe,’ a subject which the upper classes efface. Privacy, as a key Conservative ideal since the Victorian era from which Rachel Fedden’s wealth originates, is revealed to be both a privilege and a prison. Nick is allowed to remain in the house only on the unspoken assumption that his sexuality will remain closeted. The political disaster that strikes Fedden at the climax of the novel similarly turns upon the revelation of hidden transactions. A scandal involving insider trading is followed swiftly by the discovery of his affair with his secretary, but it is the gay Guest, the lover of a millionaire’s dying son, who becomes a scapegoat, sacrificed in order to allow the Fedden family to retreat back into the security of their unvoiced alliances.

The Feddens circle remains an impenetrably exclusive environment throughout. Hollinghurst’s satire of the 1980s cult of money cunningly positions (and helpfully labels) its hero as only a ‘Guest’ in the world of the fabulously wealthy. As such, he is at once fascinated by and excluded from that world and its mores. Nick’s first association with his hero Henry James is that he too can ‘stand a great deal of gilt’ (a clever play on words)—he loves ‘beautiful things’—but for much of the novel, and for the Feddens’ strata in general, this beauty is confined by possessions and wealth. As Hollinghurst has publicly explained, Nick is ‘not just looking on in horror, but is actually susceptible to the glamour of it all’. All of this—the brilliance and sparkle, a veneer for corruption and emptiness, the social whirl, and the gaze of the outsider-inside fascinated with the society he observes in one rather oblique young man (first Toby Fedden, then the young millionaire Wani Ouradi)—recalls another American novelist and another Nick, as if the narrator of The Great Gatsby has at last emerged from the closet. Hollinghurst’s novel, like Fitzgerald’s, traces the transition from old to new money, and similarly observes that behind the apparent difference between schooled, refined elegance and brash showiness is the same hollow love of ‘things more than people’. While in the earlier novel it is Gatsby who owns shelves of unread, uncut books, here it is an English lord who keeps uncut ‘classics’ in a ‘gilded cage’—he, of course, has read them elsewhere; his library is precious for the objects, not the words, it contains. Nick notes that the ‘new’ Lebanese millionaire Bertrand Ouradi’s art collection, which he regards with distaste, is a part of the ‘necessary trappings of his position’, sensing vulgarity in the disparity between class and money; however, the same might equally be said of the Feddens’ and their extended family’s possessions, from the gift of a Gauguin to a performance of classical music in their drawing room (one of several brilliant satirical set-pieces).

Nick’s social and sexual emergence—and subsequently his dramatic fall from grace—is foregrounded against and parallels directly the boom and bust, the promise and the disillusion of 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The satire hinges, like much of Henry James’ work, upon issues of class, which is ultimately at the root of Nick’s outsider status. As the son of an antiques dealer, whose intimacy with the interiors of stately homes has in the past been that of the clock-winder, not the guest, he is ‘a puzzle […] in many contexts – he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in’. The subject of money or class origin itself is occluded by the ‘upper-class economy’ of speech that Nick admires and imitates. Hollinghurst, like James, has a keen ear for the inflections and elisions of upper class social chatter, and an equally keen eye for the proprieties of the semi-rural middle class (again drawing parallels between 1890s and 1980s social convention). Pages of dialogue are sustained with the merest hint of intervention from the author. At other times, he throws out an off-the-cuff portrait in perfect miniature: witness the lady who wins ‘a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin’ at a village fête, ‘and laughed, and blushed violently, as if she’d already drunk it and disgraced herself’.

In this brittle and thrilling new world, the ‘line of beauty’—which might be variously figured in the novel as a bloodline, an aesthetic ideal, or a literary style—appropriately recalls the ritual of cocaine addiction as well. The drug becomes an integral part of Nick’s sex life, social life, and sense of self; that ritual, ‘all done with money’, as Wani observes, is linked explicitly to the enabling power of wealth, inducing the feeling that ‘everything had become possible’. Like the gilt-laden possessions of the first half of the novel, coke exerts a fascination for Nick that injects a certain glamour into his life. His intoxicated vision is handled with finesse by Hollinghurst, whose style takes on a hard quickness and boldness, narrowing his adjectival range to all that glitters, capturing the ‘gleaming’, ‘brilliant’, ‘bright’ surfaces which Nick fails to see beyond so that we too are caught up in a trick of the light… until it is all deflated by a characteristically piercing observation, the realisation that the drug is ‘pure compulsion, though it gave them the delusion of choice, and of wit in making it’.

As the second half of the novel progresses, Nick’s experience of ‘come-down’ increasingly dominates, and elegant, remote Wani Ouradi’s ‘love of corruption’ gradually erodes his glamour. The description of his flaccid, coke-fuelled porn marathons must surely rank among the most uncomfortable reading of recent years. Hollinghurst has a gift for observing those states of being which lack purity or grandeur. His range of emotional nuance, worthy of James himself, reveals an unrelenting honesty in the face of the pettiness, sordidness, meanness and self-absorption which accompany emotions of a supposedly grander scale. Later, when Wani is dying of AIDS, Nick feels himself somehow in possession of that story, so that it becomes ‘his own drama’; the notion of our responses as a performance which we watch ourselves enacting recurs throughout the novel and is, I think, among Hollinghurst’s most acute observations about human behaviour.

The novel as a whole, tracing the middle years of the decade, has a refined balance of structure that reflects Nick’s myriad invocations of the ‘line of beauty’ itself. Taking Hogarth’s sweeping curve and finding its most perfect example in the dip of a man’s spine, Nick mirrors the figure to make an ‘ogee’, the double curve of a window, door or angel’s wings, also paralleling the high and subsequent come-down of cocaine use and the classic rise-and-fall narrative in miniature. The two parts of the novel each accelerate towards a politically-charged party (first Toby’s twenty-first birthday, then the Feddens’ wedding anniversary) and then fall away; the novel begins and ends with Nick entering and leaving the empty Notting Hill house, in very different circumstances, but both entering and departing with nothing. On the level of syntax, for all the bite and sharpness of Hollinghurst’s prose, there is as much that is genuinely lovely, as when Nick, looking out over London from the privileged vantage point of a Notting Hill balcony, feels that ‘he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there’. Like the thrill of Fitzgerald’s Long Island evenings, this description succeeds in transcending the world of property so that we read on poised with Nick at the start of a new decade, full of promise. Hollinghurst’s achievement, at the last, mirrors Nick’s own: he retains a sense of the beautiful, and asserts its possibility, against and within a world of deceptively brilliant surfaces.

Amy Sackville has just completed an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford. Her thesis focused on James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. She has recently published work in the James Joyce Broadsheet.

Unless the ruling Federal Liberal government is swept from office this summer, or capriciously changes its position – and neither occurrence is by any means impossible, unprecedented, or even unlikely – Canada will soon be among the few nations in the world to legalise gay and lesbian marriage. It’s an outcome Canada has slowly been approaching, one small legal step at a time. Indeed, ever since the Supreme Court of Canada interpreted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation in 1995, the extension of full equality to gays and lesbians, including partnership rights, has seemed to many observers a foregone conclusion.

The next year, the Federal government, taking its cue in part from the Supreme Court, amended the Canadian Human Rights Act to explicitly prohibit orientation-based discrimination. Equal partnership benefits for Federal employees followed soon after. The coup de grâce was the 2000 omnibus Act to Modernize Benefits and Obligations, which provided common law relationships, both opposite- and same-sex, with virtually all the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual married couples.

Whether they remain partnerships, or acquire some other title, the legal difference between same-sex partnerships and heterosexual marriages is now largely a question of semantics.

But, in Canada as anywhere else, it is a question that in most countries, the question of gay marriage elicits strong opinions. A great many LGBT¹ persons are concerned about the social, cultural and moral message implicit in calling their partnerships something less than marriages. What is being sought through the politico -legal quest for semantic equivalence, and what makes it so objectionable to its opponents, is a clear message from the powers that be, affirming that LGBT partnerships can be just as legitimate and just as deserving of full legal and social recognition as heterosexual marriages and official affirmation of the soci al, legal, and moral equivalence of LGBT and heterosexual marrirages. And with Courts in the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario refusing to uphold the heterosexual definition of marriage on constitutional grounds, and the Supreme Court of Canada now poised to strike down once and for all the Federal law defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman as early as 2005, this long-awaited and hard-won affirmation seems just within reach.²

For socially liberal, queer-positive Canadians, this achievement is, by and large, a cause for both pride and smugness to feel both proud and smug: pr oud ide that Canada is taking a stand on the liberal democratic principle of equality, and smug ness that we’ve outdone the World’s Greatest Democracy ™ down south, or at least the overwhelming majority of its states.³ For socially conservative Canadians, who see it as yet another example of a liberal-dominated judiciary running roughshod over the democratic process and ignoring the voice of social conservatism, it’s a cause for concern. What it hasn’t been, though, to everyone’s surprise, is a cause over which Canada’s two major political parties (the Conservatives and the Liberals) have lined up and faced off made into a central election issue. Much like the anti-abortion lobby, the anti-gay marriage lobby in Canada is homeless, with neither major political party willing to give it open support. Why is gay marriage not an election issue of any priority in Canada, the way it seems likely to be in the United States this November? Why has Canada opted for this different way forward?

In order to give even tentative answers this question, it’s important to consider what’s distinctive, and what’s disappointing, about the conflict over gay marriage as it has played out in Canada. A comparison with the US is productive here because it shows the extent to which equality for gays and lesbians, with gay marriage as that project’s latest objective, has been pursued in Canada through legal rather than overtly political avenues.

The re are no question is hardly susceptible to simple answers to any questions in this debate. However, recent work by an Oxford University graduate student , Andrew Park , has demonstrated that the most significant difference between the Canadian and American situations is the absence of an organised, politically salient Christian conservative bloc in Canada. In the United States, the opposition to gay marriage is led largely by Christian conservative groups which routinely outspend the proponents of gay marriage by huge margins in their efforts to make their messages heard. But the comparatively limited prominence of faith-based opposition to gay marriage in Canada can only be part of the explanation. After all, Canada’s largest LGBT rights advocacy group, EGALE (Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere), has a budget of less than C$400,000, and correspondingly limited access to political decision-makers. It is not as though a well-financed, highly organised and politically connected pro-gay lobby on the left is simply out-manoeuvering its disorganised rivals on the socially conservative right. So what else might account for the difference?

Disputes about gay marriage in Canada are often more apparent in the courts and the media than parliament. Since its inception, the gay rights movement in Canada has been intensely dependent on constitutional litigation, a strategy encouraged by a spate of late 1980s Supreme Court jurisprudence establishing sexual orientation as an actionable ground for discrimination under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada’s manifesto of its supreme principles of political equality and justice. By carefully grooming a pattern of Charter-based protections against discrimination, gay partnership activists have managed to pre-empt legislative initiative, establishing a clear directive from the Supreme Court that discriminatory legislation will not survive.

As a result, major advancements for gay partnership rights have come, by and large, not from the legislature, but from the courts. This highly successful litigation-based strategy has forced gay marriage’s opponents to frame their arguments in Charter language, a discourse already highly favourable towards individual freedoms, including those concerning intimate relations, and in which discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is already anathema. And, since marriage is largely a Federal responsibility in Canada, individual local legislatures, no matter how opposed to gay marriage, cannot create customised local statu tes to protect the heterosexual definition of marriage within their own borders.

By contrast, in the United States, where jurisprudence on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is more equivocal , and where marriage is the responsibility of individual states, such a strategy would have been comparatively fruitless. But in Canada, litigation concerning gay marriage constantly pre-empts legislation on the same issue.

This phenomenon has worried many Canadians, not all of them opponents of gay marriage. As social conservatives and others in Canada emphatically point out, there’s something deeply unsatisfying about contentious moral debates, such as the one over gay marriage , being , mere fodder for Charter litigation initiated by special interest groups with a hold on the courts. Something seems lost when such issues are taken out of the purview of the elected legislature, and placed before unelected judges. This is what makes Canada’s litigious lumbering towards equality not only distinctive, but a little disappointing as well. As embarrassed as we are about our low voter turnout (fewer than six out of ten eligible Canadians tend to vote in national elections), it seems unfortunate, and even indicative of a democratic deficit, that an issue which excites and provokes so many Canadians is beyond even their indirect control through their elected members of parliament.⁴

But with so many Canadians outraged about judicial activism vis à a vis issues such as gay marriage, it seems baffling that neither the incumbent Liberal Party nor the rival Conservatives are eager to score political points and win over these disenchanted voters by promising boldly and consistently making election promises to resolve the issue central to their campaigns , once and for all, in an open vote in Parliament. For its part, the Conservative Party’s refusal to address make gay marriage a decisive election issue may be part of an effort to court social liberals who are attracted by the p Party’s fiscal policies. It may also be an effort to define the Conservatives as a more moderate party and thus, as one pollster put it, to “move into the same ideological space” as the incumbent Liberals. But it is intriguing that the Liberals, whose present leader, Prime Minister Paul Martin, not that long ago proudly and loudly declared that his government would not oppose gay marriage, are generally keeping quiet on the topic.

Or at least its leadership is. For a a number of Liberal MPs have made no bones about attempt to hide their opposition to gay marriage. Those representing socially conservative ridings, for instance, know that open support for gay marriage may cost them their seats in the upcoming election, and many of them resent the previous Liberal leader Jean Chrétien, who retired in 2003, for jeopardising their positions in an effort to promote his own moral agenda in the “legacy-making” days at the end of his tenure as Prime Minister. So it may be that the Liberal leadership is setting the tone in this election by keeping quiet on gay marriage not just to appeal to the Canadian voter, but to prevent a divisive and devastating revolt from within its own ranks. It will be interesting to see whether or not the Conservative Party is able to use this simmering conflict within its rival party to its own advantage in the upcoming election, and whether Martin will be able to keep a lid on his dissident candidates.

What is distinctive about the conflict over gay marriage in Canada? The progressive role that the courts have played; the way the pro-gay marriage lobby has, in the process, shaped the way anti-discrimination litigation can be used by minority groups to assert their interests; and the fact that so divisive a moral issue has failed to materialise as an election issue, at least in early June as this article was written. And what’s disappointing about the conflict? According to some observers, the answers to the second question are the same as those to the first: the meddling of the courts; the way special interests have pre-empted legislative debate by going through the courts; and the fact that neither of the two major rival parties is taking a clear stand on making a decisive election issue out of a subject an issue that matters to a great many Canadians. Ultimately, one thing is clear: the fact that gay marriage is a foregone conclusion in Canada is hardly proof of its widespread acceptance or, indeed, its permanence. Which means that, as proud as we socially liberal, queer-positive Canadians are about it, we may have more, and different, struggles ahead – struggles that may not become apparent until well after this election. the national election in late June.

Thom Ringer graduated from Trinity College in Toronto, Canada in 2003, and is now an MPhil candidate in politics at Balliol College, Oxford. His current research considers the responsibilities corporations owe to the communities they inhabit, particularly in politically unstable nations.

Notes

1. Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgendered. Unless the context indicates a specific meaning, I will use the terms LGBT, queer and gay interchangeably hereafter.
2. In Canada, Federal law defines who can marry, while provincial law governs various technical aspects of marriage, e.g. who can perform marriage celebrations. The B.C. and Ontario Superior Court decisions create a confusing, but temporary, jurisdictional mess. They effectively invalidate as unconstitutional the opposite-sex requirement for marriage across Canada. However, these court decisions cannot force other provinces to actually provide marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as the directives contained in these decisions don’t apply to provinces which weren’t named in the litigation. Thus, only a spate of individual lawsuits in the remaining provinces or a decision from the Supreme Court striking down the Federal marriage law will provide for uniform access to marriage rights by gays and lesbians across the country.
3. In the United States, as of 2004, same-sex marriage is recognised only in the S State of Massachusetts. Vermont grants civil unions to same-sex couples as well. A number of localities, notably San Francisco, have started issuing marriage licences, but these actions clearly run counter to state law.
4. Social conservatives – or, perhaps, many others who find their views for the moment unrepresented by unelected judges – tend to see this as cause for belly-aching about judicial activism. But this emphasis on the wrongness of courts “making law” misses a crucial point: courts only make law where legislatures have either failed to make law, or failed to make it clear. The corollary of a hyperactive judiciary is often an indolent legislature, one which too eagerly abdicates from taking a stand on morally contentious issues by allowing courts to assume responsibility for them. Thus, castigating the courts for interfering in what seems rightfully the job of the legislature only makes sense when one is also castigating the legislature for not doing its job in the very first place.

The Dreamers
(starring Eva Green, Michael Pitt & Louis Garrel)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
2003

Gilbert Adair
The Holy Innocents
Heinemann, 1998
154 pages

Gilbert Adair
The Dreamers
Faber & Faber, 2003
193 pages

Gilbart Adair
Buenas Noches Buenos Aires
Faber & Faber, 2003
151 pages

If you listen closely, you can hear the weary sighs of the intelligentsia each time a film is released that is purportedly based on a novel. Reviewers tend to be shocked by creative differences which really ought to be considered par for the course; of course the film is going to seem different from the novel. But what happens when the author not only writes the screenplay and stays on the set for the duration of filming, but also publishes not a novelisation of the film but rather a revised version of his own novel? Gilbert Adair’s first novel The Holy Innocents came out in 1988. Fifteen years on, Bernardo Bertolucci released his film of Adair’s novel, which he called The Dreamers (2003). Renewed interest in Adair’s novel was inevitable, but rather than republish The Holy Innocents, Adair insisted that he rewrite the novel and put out this revised text as The Dreamers. As a result, Adair and Bertolucci have given us three versions of Paris in the summer of ’68, three variations on a ménage a trois that develops between French twins and a visiting student from San Diego, Matthew.

It all becomes even more sticky when one realises that Adair is on the verge of being identified as a gay writer and that the primary difference between his novels and Bertolucci’s film is the sex: in Adair’s novels, we encounter a genuine ménage a trois, but in Bertolucci’s film, it only takes two to really tango. What is Adair’s game then, if it is clear that the gay sex in The Holy Innocents is not window dressing? In changing the sexual arrangements of the characters, Bertolucci ends up making a film that is comprehensively different in both spirit and letter. These complications are exacerbated by Adair’s latest novel, Buenas Noches Buenos Aires (2003), which charts the homosexual exploits of a young man called Gideon in Paris at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Not surprisingly, Faber & Faber delayed publication of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires till after the release of The Dreamers. ‘They thought it might confuse the issue’, Adair says.

The Holy Innocents starts out unabashedly celebrating film. Rather than be swept up in the student protests of the time, the three young cinéphiles in The Holy Innocents prefer to withdraw to the twins’ apartment (sans Mama and Papa) and develop a game of filmic charades, ‘Home Movies’, for which the forfeits of failure become increasingly sexually explicit. The novel then turns to examine incest, bisexuality, humiliation and a relationship between the three in which the young American, Matthew, is the true innocent, manipulated and degraded by the young French twins. The twins have been lovers for many years, and Matthew has sex with each of them. Instances of humiliation become frequent. Weakened by hunger (they run out of food and the will to cash their parents’ cheques), they resort to eating three cans of cat food in the pantry and fall violently ill. Having passed out, Matthew wakes up to find the twins shaving his pubic hair. The next time we see him, he is sitting cross-legged, catatonic, with abstract symbols drawn on his face and body in human excrement.

Adair was never happy with The Holy Innocents. The book’s ending is clichéd and unsatisfying; the mutually assured emotional destruction the novel has been working toward is passed over in favour of a sudden dash by the three to ‘catch up with history’ in a simplistic and overly grandiose fashion. Leaving their apartment after a rock is thrown through the window, Matthew is killed on the barricades. Adair’s reservations about The Holy Innocents meant that he refused to sell the film rights to any director – refused, that is, until 2001, when Bernardo Bertolucci made an offer. It is obvious why Bertolucci would appeal to Adair as a director. He is highly ciné-literate and has earned a reputation for depicting sexual transgression and emotional one-upmanship. This is the director who, in Last Tango in Paris (1972), has one character sodomise another using butter as a lubricant. However, in The Dreamers, aside from a few longing glances between Matthew and Theo and a suggestion of autoerotic asphyxiation between the two that is halted before it has begun, the film focuses upon the relationship the two boys form with Isabelle. The equilateral love triangle has turned isosceles. In an interview with the Guardian, Bertolucci commented:

The gay sex was in the first script, but I had a feeling that it was just too much stuff. It became redundant. I told Gilbert: ‘Please don’t feel betrayed, but when a book becomes a movie, it becomes a whole new conception’. And he told me: ‘Be totally unfaithful’. So I think that I’ve been faithful to the spirit of the book but not the letter. I had to make it mine.

It seems that for Bertolucci in The Dreamers, ‘making it mine’ means making it the actors’. As Adair puts it, ‘at the end of a film you often see in the credits the sign ‘No animal has been harmed in the making of this film’. Well, no young actor was demeaned or degraded in this film’. This is a far cry from Last Tango in Paris, in which the principal actress, Maria Schneider, was reputedly hysterical for much of the filming. In our interview, Adair recalled the necessity of ensuring that the actors were confident about the film’s nudity and sexuality and claimed that even a suggestion of an actor’s discomfort would have been a ‘calamity’ for The Dreamers: ‘The film was about sexual liberation [and] you can’t force people to be liberated’.

However, the impact of such ‘principled’ filming on the overall direction of the film is considerable. The result is that each actor’s set of personal peccadilloes about privacy shifts the film’s focus from a ménage à trois to a series of heterosexual plays for Isabelle’s affections. Though the three are hungry, there is no sight of cat food, only burnt ratatouille. The effect of these changes becomes absolutely clear when Isabelle and Theo (with razor and shaving cream) corner Matthew in the bathroom. Matthew is not covered in excrement and is stoned rather than catatonic. The twins argue that his acquiescence to their shaving him would prove his love for them. Matthew refuses this test; instead, he insists that Isabelle come out on a date with him, without Theo. Thus, the humiliations of the novel are reduced to a gesture, a childlike perversity that is summarily dismissed. Matthew is not degraded; rather, he is liberated.

Another critical shift occurs after Theo insists that Isabelle and Matthew have sex as a forfeit, at which point Isabelle is revealed to be a virgin. This is not the case in the novel; Theo and Isabelle have clearly had sex for quite some time before Matthew arrives. Given that Stealing Beauty (1996), Bertolucci’s previous film, has as its lead a 19-year old girl who is also a virgin (and whose preoccupation is to lose this status as the film progresses), one can’t help but suspect that there is a Bertolucci signature effect in Isabelle being a born-again virgin. Again, Adair insists, this was not due to Bertolucci, but due to the actress Eva Green’s insistence that her character be a virgin, ‘and we thought, well, maybe she knows the character better than we do’. Giving the actors such an extensive say in the development of the film’s themes is, to Adair, a result of Bertolucci’s wider belief in the value of change at the expense of perfection or fidelity to a script. The film was edited concurrently with shooting and, as a result, developed along its own distinct lines away from the novel, as, in Adair’s words, the actors ‘appropriated’ the film. However, rather than complicate matters emotional and sexual, the film suggests that Bertolucci has preferred to simplify. It becomes unclear how The Dreamers will mean more than Threesome (1994) to teenagers who’ll hire it from the video store.

There is one aspect of The Dreamers that might save it from this fate. The original films that Isabelle, Theo and Matthew quote and re-enact for each other have been spliced into their games in the film, and the result of this extremely deft editing is marvellous. At one point we watch a scene from Blonde Venus (1932), with Marlene Dietrich removing the hands, one by one, then the head, of her gorilla costume, set against Isabelle’s repeated refusals to Theo’s pleas that she provide clues to the identity of the film. (‘The director’s name…The number of words in the title…The first letter of the first word?’) One favourable outcome of watching The Dreamers would be for some viewers to come away from it with a mental list of films to hire. At least this might please Adair, who despairs of the fact that ‘for a lot of kids film history begins with Pulp Fiction and for the more ciné-literate begins with Raging Bull’.

These filmic references mean that The Dreamers’ departure from matters homosexual doesn’t make it a bad film, but it is disappointing when you examine the career of Gilbert Adair. Despite considerable literary output, critical praise, a fairly large readership, and two novels already having been made into films, Adair has not made it to the pantheon of British novelists called for comment in G2 and has not been within striking distance of prizes like the Booker. In an interview I recently held with him on this subject, Adair puts it down to the lack of ‘The One’: ‘all it takes is one, just one. I’ve never had that one novel by which everything else is defined’. According to Adair, ‘The One’ has to be longer than the small books he tends to write. ‘Size matters – and I’m not a size queen’.

However, this doesn’t seem to be the whole story. Reading his novels and non-fiction, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that many of them deal with the issue of sexuality, or more specifically, homosexual desire. Adair has been fascinated by Thomas Mann’s short story ‘Death in Venice’, rewriting the story as Love and Death on Long Island (1990) and publishing a short history of Mann’s object of infatuation, The Real Tadzio (2001). His novel A Closed Book (1999) also focuses upon the idea of obsession at a distance, but in a decidedly negative tenor. In our own discussion, Adair recalled an interview for A Closed Book in which the interviewer tentatively stated that he had a ‘certain following among a particular type of man’ and suggested that ‘these people would be so delighted if instead of just brushing against a particular subject, you would actually confront this head on’. For Adair, his treatment of homosexuality in his novels has been a knight’s move in chess: ‘two steps forward, one to the side. You never make that third step forward that would actually clarify matters and remove all ambiguity’. Rather than being another knight’s move, Buenas Noches Buenos Aires takes three firm steps forward in one direction only. When I suggest that the novel is at least a castling, he checks my suggestion with another: ‘I see it more like the queen. Only in the sense that the queen can go anywhere’.

Though there have been many laudatory reviews of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, a note of outrage has sounded amongst a few reviewers at the immorality of the protagonist Gideon’s decision to continue in his promiscuous ways despite his knowledge that he has contracted a communicable disease. This is by no means an unusual response to Adair’s novels. Reviewing The Holy Innocents, Mansel Stimpson in the TLS suggests that ‘the embarrassing dedication hints at an authorial fantasy’. Given that he considers the central section of the book ‘pornographic’, Stimpson gives Adair little space to manoeuvre in. When I ask him about this ad hominem tendency of reviewers and Buenas Noches Buenos Aires, Adair insists that the novel was never meant to be a manifesto or a handbook for gay solidarity. The key observation might be that, in relation to Adair’s work as a whole, as he comments himself, ‘It’s all really happening inside someone’s head and I’ve heard that this is not a legitimate response to tragedy’. All of Adair’s novels (bar The Dreamers) are written in the first person and most play thematically with the consequences of either self-delusion or deception. A Closed Book sets out the deception of a blind man; as the text is a transcription of his ‘verbatim’ conversations, the reader is effectively blind also and cannot see the deception coming until he is told of it. In Love and Death on Long Island, it is clear that the main character is deceiving himself as to the likelihood of his sexual conquest of a young B-movie male heartthrob.

Given the proviso that Adair’s texts tend to be monologues of self-absorption, Buenas Noches Buenos Aires works well. The denouement is unexpected enough to be satisfying. The narrative voice bears up well under the stylistic constraint of the testimonial form. The language is rococo camp with high misogyny at times (on a woman’s rejection of a man’s advances: ‘Just what were these cunts waiting for?’). What seems to provoke dissatisfaction is the lack of character development in terms of the narrator’s relationships with other characters. None of Adair’s narrators develops a ‘genuine’ relationship with any other. In a curious sense, Adair’s novels bring new light to the term ‘self-centered’: very few of his narrators actually change as a result of the novel. They may come to decisions they did not make before, but they are never regretful, nor self-reflective in the way a frustrated reader cries out for them to be, especially if the reader disagrees with their moral decisions. (Interestingly enough, similar comments have been made about the characters in the film The Dreamers.)

The mixed reviews of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires have had a considerable impact on Adair. He is, to use his word, ‘discombobulated’: ‘I don’t recognise my novel in the reviews…I don’t know what to do. I’m so lost. I really am. Most of the time I know better than anyone else what’s wrong with my novels, and now I’m discombobulated, I really don’t know right from wrong… I can’t start a new novel now…for the first time the perception of other people has actually invaded my sense of self, which it never did’. It is worth wondering whether Buenas Noches Buenos Aires is the sole cause of Adair’s disaffection, or whether his participation in The Dreamers (and Bertolucci and his actors’ appropriation of the novel’s events) has had its own discombobulating effect. Yet it seems that if his latest novel can provoke this unexpected divergence of opinion, it also has the energy to avoid the derisory calls of ‘Pastiche!’ or ‘Dilettante!’ which have been heard before. Bertolucci would never make a film of Buenas Noches Buenos Aires; perhaps, this is to this novel’s credit.

Jenni Quilter is reading for a DPhil in English at St Johns College, Oxford, and writing on John Ashbery.

Notes

1. Guardian 5 February 2004.
2. Peter Tatchell, reviewing the book, is disapproving: ‘Typical of many middle-class queers, he [Gideon] benefits from the campaigns of others but contributes nothing to the collective efforts that help secure a better life for gay people’. London Evening Standard 19 February 2004.
3. Mansel Stimpson ‘Enfants horribles’ Times Literary Supplement 9 September 1988: 983.
4. For instance, see the review of The Dreamers on www.tiscali.co.uk