Re: Bursting the Gay Cloud part 3

[Brian Dillard <dillardb@pilot.msu.edu>]

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Mark Wegner:
"I could come back at you and quote a number of references to
homosexuality in Kate's work and theorize how Kate is making fun of
homosexuality, but i will not. And is Kate homophobic?  Of course not. "

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My sincerest thanks for your attempt to spare my feelings, but actually
I must disagree with you. I have always found Kate's relationship to
homosexuality quite problemmatic. First of all, there's the issue of
positionality. Kate is, after all, the songwriter who has "become" (that
is, assumed the first-person narrative voice of) a sex-obsessed
Victorian nanny, a pregnant goddess, a Vietcong soldier, heck, even a
Mule. But she's never "become" queer. In "Queen Eddie," "Wow" and
"Kashka from Baghdad," the queer folk are always talked about or to,
never _as._ Kate as narrator is the subject of the song, and the queer
folks are objects to be addressed or commented on.

Then there's the actual text of the lyrics, which are polysemous, like
much of Kate's work. In "Wow," is Kate critiquing the homophobia and
double standards of the theater world, or is she blaming diva-obsessed
queers for the egos and attitudes on display? The whole "he's too busy
hitting the vaseline" passage could be interpreted a number of ways. The
narrator could be saying, "Everyone knows the theater's full of queers,
but if you're open about it you won't be seen as masculine and you'll
never be a star, only a chorus boy." Or she could be saying, "The
theater is a world of double talk and backstabbing, and you queers, with
your history of duplicitous codes and secret truths, are the cause of
that." The text of the song raises questions of sexual identity in
relation to artistic production and the star system. But it never
answers those questions in a reassuring way. That's why it's such a
great song.

"Queen Eddie" is similarly open to interpretation. Is the narrator's
stance condemning or consoling? I don't have the lyrics at hand so
forgive me if I distort things, but it seems to me that the narrator's
statement that Eddie's much too young to be a queen weeping could be
seen in at least two ways: "Don't become a caricature of wounded
faggotry, be young, strong, queer and proud." OR: "If you weren't a
dirtly little fudgepacker you wouldn't be so miserable. Get a hanky and
be a man, dammit."

Given this diversity of interpretive space--and I in no way belive that
the above is the last word on Kate's narrative or personal stance on
homosexuality--it's strange that the Love-Hounds have, ensemble, decided
that the party line should be that Kate "likes" gay folks. Of course,
there's her friendship with the flamboyant Lindsay Kemp, her theater
background, and her yummy, artistic, bachelor brother to consider. And
then there's "Kashka from Baghdad."

There's no arguing that the narrator of the song has positive feelings
toward her queer objects of fantasy. But does that mean the song is
liberatory? There is the question of "eating the Other." I mean, we have
a lily-white British girl eroticizing and idealizing the passion played
out in shadows between a dark foreigner and his same-sex lover. As
progressive African American feminist cultural critics bell hooks points
out in inumerable essays, including several in "Art on My Mind: Visual
Politics," white folks are always trying to redefine themselves in
relation to Blackness, making what could be liberatory and
counterhegemonic--an up-close encounter with members of another
racial/sexual group--instead become an act of consumption. Personally, I
can take great pleasure in listening to "Kashka" as a queer text even as
I question the way race is used in the lyrics to add to the aura of
mystery and romance. Kate's most explicitly queer-_friendly_ text, then,
is still problemmatic once one rejects narrow identity politics and
interrogates wider areas of representation and cultural identity.

So as you can see, I am no self-loathing, affirmation-seeking homosexual
seeking validation in any artistic mirror I can find, no matter how
unlikely. I don't need Kate to tell me fags are OK and that "she likes
me, she really likes me." I am a student and critic of art and culture
who prefers to grapple with the many nuances of interpretation. That
means I see the ambiguity in Kate's lyrics, questioning their multiple,
overlapping messages. And it means that I refuse to stand by without
comment while some listmembers attempt to bully and invalidate the
opinions of other queer folks on the list using outmoded assumptions
about the nature of art and cultural production as their justification.
The traditional model of genius artist and passive consumer is simply
not descriptive of how cultural production is actually played out. And
it certainly shouldn't be prescriptive of how people _should_ engage
art.

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Mark Wegner:
"certain songs were written with certain themes in mind"
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That's right, and certain songs are listened to with certain themes in
mind by certain listeners. Some listeners -- like you, obviously -- 
choose to listen to Cloudbusting while thinking of interviews Kate's
done, books Kate (and perhaps you) have read, and the like. Others
choose to bring more of _their_ personal histories and less of Kate's
and Peter Reich's to the listening experience, which means
"Cloudbusting" becomes everything from a eulogy for a long-lost pet to a
meditation on father-son relationships in general to a powerful reminder
of the melancholy joy of finally emerging from the closet.

That's the whole point of counterhegemonic modes of discourse about the
relationship of artist to art to art consumer--to topple simple dualisms
of right and wrong interpretation, to highlight the positionality of the
artist and the viewer/listener/reader as a determinant of
interpretation, to deprivilige the role of the Western artist as the
originator and conducter of discourse and question the role of "plain
folks" as mere passive receptors of "divine" meaning. The artist ain't
God. Heck, according to Focault, the artist doesn't even exist--hasn't
since sometime in the mid-'70s. Which means that any text is a diverse
interpretive space wherein multiple meanings, contradictory OR
complementary, can coexist. And in the case of "Cloudbusting," that
interpretive space is NOT bounded by Kate's intentions!
 
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Mark Wegner:
" maybe this is just over my head, and Kate lied, and just you and a few
select others are intuitive enough to figure these songs out "
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Tacit in that statement is the assumption that Kate created these songs
expressly so people could figure them out, and figure them out in a
single correct way. No dice, buddy. Even artists who _do_ think they're
privileged originators of meaning simply ain't. The only strategy of
resistance to the barrage of media messages and images in contemporary
society is to develop a critical and oppositional relationship to
cultural production, one that allows one to "read" with or against or
parallel to the grain but always to question who is creating a message,
for what ends, and how--and to reclaim potentially damaging or
irrelevant texts through personal interpretation (my "Melrose Place"
example from yesterday).

I blame our conflict not only on your refusal to stop clinging to
Eurocentric, Renaissance-era paradigms of knowing. I blame it also on
the elitism of academic poststructuralists--myself included--who
theorize off in their ivory towers without putting their theory into
practice in the popular press and in the rest of the real world. That's
why, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I take to the 'Net so
spiritedly, spouting derrida and attempting to mix such academic
discourse up with vernacular speech and discussion of popular culture.
If it weren't for the elitism of acadmic critics, perhaps some of these
decades-old ideas would have become more widely disseminated, discussed
and understood by now.

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Mark Wegner:
if you want to make up your own meaning to the song to fit your own
personal lifestyle I have no problem with that ... don't shove your off
the wall theory down my throat
-------------------------

Maybe, just maybe, if you were interested in _chewing and digesting_
some of the ideas you encountered on this smorgasboard of kate
criticism, you wouldn't feel that things were being "shoved" down your
throat. maybe you wouldn't be so obsessed with using metaphors of
coersion and domination in discussing art. But I guess that's just us
fags, always trying to shove something unpalatable down people's
throats--if not an appendage, then an idea. So sorry.
 
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Brian J. Dillard     dillardb@pilot.msu.edu
773.348.9319    http://pilot.msu.edu/user/dillardb/
+++ "State of emergency ... that's where I want to be."  --Bjork +++
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