From: adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: 100 years of homosexuality
Date: 11 Oct 1992 03:17:24 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: mizar.usc.edu

In article <1992Oct10.164215.27548@spdcc.com> 
dyer@spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) writes:
> In article <1b5lkfINNnbr@mizar.usc.edu> 
> adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:
>
> >Halperin claims that Charles Gilbert Chaddock
> >is the inventor of homosexuality *itself*.  The opening sentence
> >of Halperin's silly 'One Hundred Years of Homosexuality':
> >[omitted]
> >That is one of the most absurd sentences I've ever read in any
> >essay with scholarly pretensions.
>
> If you want to read scholarly bitchiness of the highest order, even
> Pagliaphobics have to read her savage review of Halperin's _100YoH_ in
> the Spring 1991 copy of Arion.

Oh my, yes.  But, really, Halperin's book is too ridiculous.

>  It's also been reprinted for a wider
> readership in her latest collection of essays, _Sex, Art and American
> Culture_ (which I've bought but hadn't opened yet, but I figured there
> was _no way_ that essay could have been omitted, and checking the TOC,
> I was right.) 

I've flipped through it, looking to see if she'd written 
anything about Naomi Wolf.  (I've heard some of her nasty
gibes about Wolf and her stupid book and I was hoping there
was something substantive.)  Although there isn't an essay about 
Wolf, there is a bit in the transcript of her M.I.T. lecture 
that's quite funny.  She also skewers Diana Fuss, an English 
prof -- editor of _Inside/Out_, a collection of essays that
makes me lose my cool, as anyone who was around soc.motss
9 months ago will recall -- who's taken it into her head 
that she's an expert on fashion and fashion photography, 
and who's been traipsing around with her slide show for the 
last few years.  Fuss had a piece in one of the lit crit 
journals (Critical Inquiry, I think) recently in which she 
claims that fashion photography invariably makes women look 
like lesbian vampires.  (I think she means to be critical 
only of the vampire part of that, but it's kind of hard
to tell, what with all the talk about the Other and the 
Gaze and whatnot.)

> Its title is "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe
> in the Hour of the Wolf."  It's almost painful to read as she aims for
> the soft underbelly of his intellectual endeavors, meaning that it's
> also a lot of fun to read, if your name isn't Halperin.

Has Halperin ever responded to her attack?

> Now, I went back to Halperin's book after reading her review, and
> it wasn't quite as preposterous as she asserts; I mean he's a social
> constructionist to begin with, so you have a certain context in which
> to read it.  

I read Halperin's book before coming across Paglia's review, and
I was appalled by it.  I'm not entirely out of sympathy with
social constructionist ideas, mind you, but Halperin goes entirely
too far.  

> I didn't even think that Halperin's own interview with
> himself was dumb.

You have got to be kidding.

> But it is written in a turgid fake-scholarly style,
> over-footnoted and terribly insular.  For all I know, this is standard
> practice for papers in the humanities these days.

Over-footnoted is an understatement.  He's got footnotes scattered
about, and then he's got endnotes from hell.  And it's not just 
that he has so many of them, but that they're so random and 
unnecessary.

> He gave a lecture to Harvard gay groups a few years ago which Ron Rizzo
> and I attended, and he cuts a rather handsome and dashing figure in the
> lecture hall, which made his constructionist points just that much more
> palatable.

Yeah, well, I'll take your word for it.  His favorite ploy is
first to tell us that what he's writing about is ancient Greek
moral pronouncements about sex, not what individual ancient
Greeks really thought about sex, and then go off and tell us
that what ancient Greek men found so enticing about boys was 
their subordinate position in a heirarchy of structured inequality.  
Puh-leeze.  My guess is that ancient Greek men found boys enticing 
because teenaged Greek boys are *really* *sexy*.

> >Halperin's own second footnote
> >informs us that the word "homosexualitaet", which is what Chaddock
> >rendered in English as "homosexuality", first appeared in print
> >in 1869.  So what I want to know is this:  does something not
> >exist until there's a word for it *in* *English*?
>
> You eththenthialithtth are all alike.

Seriously, I'm curious to know how he can claim that homosexuality 
simply didn't exist until the word appeared in print in English.  
Were native speakers of German in the closet from 1869, when the 
word first appeared in print in their language, until 1892 when it 
appeared in print in English?  Or did the closet not exist until
Arthur Bell coined the term in the Village Voice in the mid 1970s?

Besides, Halperin talks about "the gays".

Arne