Feeling Backward

Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

“As long as homophobia continues to centrally structure queer life, we cannot afford to turn away from the past; instead, we have to risk the turn backward, even if it means opening ourselves to social and psychic realities we would rather forget” - Heather Love (29).

I read the introduction (1-31) and Chapter 4 on Radclyffe Hall (100-129)

In Feeling Backward, Love reveals a central paradox in queer politics: in order to move forward, the queer community must look back at past trauma. To be proud now is to make a distinction from the shame that came before (20). In Love’s words, “pride and visibility offer antidotes to shame and the legacy of the closet; they are made in the image of specific forms of degradation” (2). The very word “queer” invokes the dark past of queer representation and marginalization (2). Queer politics often erases this interdependent relationship between modes of looking and feeling, however, in its desire to erase the shame and pain of the past. Through this erasure, however, we also risk ignoring the shame and pain in the present in the queer community. As Love puts it, “Turning away from past degradation to a present or future affirmation means ignoring the past as past; it also makes it harder to see the persistence of the past in the present” (19). The idea among many queer critics is that shame, sadness, pain, anxiety etc. are “useless” feelings which do not lead to action; Love counters, drawing on Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, that feelings like shame can be the basis of a queer politics based on a shared experience of abjection (14).

As part of the suppression of the painful queer past, many literary critics from the gay and lesbian community have reacted to the depressing queer narratives of the past with anger, derision or dismissal, calling them homophobic and depressing (3). Love argues, however, that these bleaker texts offer a queer “archive of feeling, an account of the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia” (4). She thinks that these texts are valuable to queer studies: “My aim is to create an image repertoire of queer modernist melancholia in order to underline both the losses of queer modernity and the deeply ambivalent negotiation of these losses within the literature of the period” (5). She argues, drawing on Williams, that studying affect, as it is presented in literature, helps us to understand social situations like the effects of homophobia on both individuals and the queer community (12).

Love argues that Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, for example, (which she notes is the most read and most hated of lesbian novels) is richly emotional, and as such, it gives us language to describe the “destitutions and embarrassments of queer existence” (100, 107). The Well is “an important reminder of the losses of queer history and of the continuing difficulties of queer resistance” (104) and this is largely why is has struck such a sour cord with queer critics, who want to forget or push back the sadness of the past. She notes that “many readers understand the novel’s dark portrait of lesbian life as not only and effect but also a cause of our difficult history” (101). Queer critics may be, she suggest, repelled partly by their own necessary identification with the novel (102). This rejection, however, argues Love, closely resembles Stephen’s feeling, in The Well, of being both repelled by and identifying with the dejected army of inverts in the novel (104). Hall’s novel poses a challenge to critics because it doesn’t envision a happy future for the queer community. Stephen’s loneliness doesn’t come from being closeted, it comes from being alone, an exile (107-8). Her loneliness is internalized and corporeal, part of the very essence of her “inversion,” as she learns to call it. She inherits her this inversion -- instead of her semi-aristocratic land and title -- from God and from her family (114). As Love notes, “In adopting this medical model of difference, Hall was able to describe the way negative social experiences are somatized” (108). Stephen, though her very body and affect, represents social stigmatization (108).

Love critiques some trans approaches to The Well, noting that “Stephen cannot clear course between the masculine and the feminine: any attempt to resolve her sense of nonfit into a longing for either masculinity of femininity misses a crucial aspect of her experience” (119). She applies Butler’s theory of gender melancholia to Stephen, which argues that heterosexuals, in becoming heterosexual, have to foreclose same-sex attachments in order to adopt “normal” gender identifications, and that they are haunted by the loss this foreclosure entails. Hall’s Stephen experiences this melancholia as abject gender anxiety and and a feeling of failing to be normal (take on her father’s country gentleman role, or her mother’s femininity) (120). Love notes that although gender melancholia theoretically applies to cross-gender identification, Butler is reluctant to align gender deviants with melancholia, as they are already perceived as sad figures (120-1). Love argues, however, that “for queer subjects, the loss that is disavowed in heterosexual melancholia is lived as a real social and affective experience” (124) and suggests that the project of gender melancholia is incomplete without an account of queer melancholia as well.

In her introduction, Love suggests that the idea of modernity itself is all about looking backward, because in order to move forward, certain groups of people, must be pushed back (6). Queers, historically, she argues, have been presented as a “backwards race” (6) Works by queer and other marginal or “backwards” modernist writers make prominent the ambivalence about modernization which lies at the heart of all modernist literature (6). Love talks, furthermore, about the centrality of backwardness in queer literature, with traditions such as camp (this made me think of the camp in Lucky Jim’s ‘Merry England’ lecture.)

Love also suggests -- and this is particularly of interest to me -- that though she draws on psychoanalysis, diagnosis is not a useful reading practice, at least for her. Instead of using literature to “lift the veil” on social processes, she instead wants to use it to describe history through experiences (23). This is a similar approach to what I am trying to do when I talk about reading from a mad or counter-psychiatric/counter-psychological perspective rather than a psychoanalytic one.