August 9, 2006
Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Perverse Modernities Ser. Ed. Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005.
M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred is a collection of essays, each of which in some way addresses–as primary critical focus or as implicit methodology–one or several aspects of transnational feminism. Alexander writes on subjects as varied as the criminalization of gay sex in the Bahamas; the neocolonial marketing of white gay tourism; the relationship between the academy and the political mobilization of female factory workers; the connection between fiscal and curricular conservatism in the academy; the connection between colonialism, neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism and the way each is configured according to a logic of heteropatriarchy; the benefits of memory as a means of fighting the effects of domination; and the role of the Sacred as a politically efficacious model for rethinking the self outside frameworks such as secular postmodern alienation. Alexander’s topics–or sites, as she would say–span several geopolitical borders, cross time, and address texts as assorted as legal discourse, feminist theory, literary fiction, and personal narrative. She titles her book Pedagogies of Crossing in order to bring the “central metaphor” of the Middle Passage to bear on “the imperative of making the world in which we live intelligible to ourselves and to each other,” or the act of “teaching ourselves” (6). The pedagogies offered in this text are ones that themselves cross borders: classroom to factory, personal to political, writer to reader. The declared theoretical nature of Alexander’s pedagogies draws attention to one of the predominant theoretical focuses in her text, namely transnational feminism. Indeed, like pedagogies themselves, transnational feminism operates variously here as object of inquiry, as methodology, and, in revised form, as suggestive potential.
The analytic foundation of Alexander’s argument in her fifth chapter on “Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State,” for example, is the relationship between transnational feminism and sexuality studies, and the ways “transnational” is (mis)read as always culturally relative. Using as examples the Feminist Majority’s implication in imperial ventures and the reception of “Third World” texts in feminist classrooms as “absolute alterity,” Alexander reveals two of the many uses to which the category of “transnational” has been put (183). Her turn to the three national sites and systems of domination which heteropatriarchy serves–indigenous American colonization, Anglophone Caribbean neocolonialism, and United States neo-imperialism–is itself, then, a recovery of transnational feminism from its relativist connotations, and a blending of this analytic frame with sexuality studies. In this move from treating transnational feminism as object of analytic critique to method through which to critique heteropatriarchy and the states it supports, Alexander demonstrates the ways in which categories can become processes–a shift that has much more troubling consequences in the case of heterosexuality itself.
Heterosexuality, Alexander clarifies, is “neither a stable ontological identity nor a fixed process,” and this instability between identity and process evokes in it a sense of anxiety (207). Pointing to, among other examples, the Military Working Group’s decision that homosexuality is incompatable with the military, Alexander uses the group’s sexual taxonomy to show how the drive to define the homosexual serves the formation of heterosexual identity as well as the state itself:
“Homosexuality was ‘the quality, condition, or fact of being homosexual,’ while sexual orientation was defined as ‘a sexual attraction to individuals or a particular gender.’ Within this bounded system that turns inward on itself, particularly in its definitions of acts and conduct, sex (by which is meant sodomy), sexual desire, and sexual attraction turns into homosexual persons. They become, in Janet Halley’s terms, ‘metonyms of one another.’” (201)
Using the working group’s language of definition here, Alexander reveals the way identity categories such as “homosexual” are caught up in a circular logic that produces identity as sex acts itself. The result of this metonymic slide is that by identifying homosexuality with sexual desire in this totalizing way, there seems to be nothing left in the identity of the homosexual outside of sex. One of the military’s problems with this is that, being defined as so totally at one with sexual desire, the homosexual is therefore perceived as not being able to follow the military chain of command–as not being able to follow two masters. This threatens not only national security (the borders of the state) but heterosexuality itself through another metonymic slide in which the state becomes synonymous with heterosexuality (by way of a logic of tradition and parent-child inheritance of national values). “Heterosexual anxiety seems bent on continuing to be imprisoned in this violent geneaology,” Alexander writes: her return to transnational feminism at the end of the chapter suggests ways that indeterminacy and flux between category and process need not always evoke anxiety and imperialism (205). Calling for interdisciplinarity and work that crosses gender, sexual, and nation borders, Alexander closes her chapter with the suggestion that the transnationl not lose its historical situatedness. The category of transnational feminism is thus implicitly revised here, understood as one of several frameworks that, together with queer studies, can challenge rather than support the cohesion between sexuality and political economy.
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