Feeling Historical: Homosexual Feelings and Historical Gay Politics

• In Event: Everyday Scenes and Affective Intensities

Abstract

Looking back, how are we to feel about the past of gay politics and youth? What are the affective legacies of panics over homosexuality, education, and the corruption of the young, and how have these panics structured feelings about anti-homophobic politics today? How has the disciplining conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia travelled across time and space, and what critical apparatuses do we have to apprehend its diverse punishing manifestations at different moments, not the least being the contemporary critical one?

To provide one version of a response to these questions, this paper takes Gayle Rubin’s accounts of the “Spring of 1977” and its attendant panics as its point of departure, reading it as “one of queer theory’s primal scenes” (to borrow a phrase from Annamarie Jagose, 12) (Rubin 2011, Jagose 2013). Drawing on work across queer theories of temporality, LGBTQ historical scholarship, affect studies and queer archive studies this paper uses recollections of that time in gay politics as an archive of political contests over homosexuality, education and youth.

Exploring the affective registers of panic, this paper investigates how the “primal scene” of 1977 might be seen, now, as bringing into focus a constellation of feelings that sustain a historical gay politics as a thing that can be retrospectively felt. Considering the ways in which panic has motored the production of these “homosexual feelings”, this paper queries what feelings are privileged in prevailing narratives of historical gay politics, and how affective histories of homosexual feelings can be oriented in relation to the material archive of 1977.

As a centerpiece of her discussion of the panics of 1977, Rubin discusses “a new wave” of “sexual repression” (141). Reflecting on the rhetorical device of the wave, this paper considers how the feelings that now make historical gay politics recognizable can be interpreted as products of unsteady accretions. As a repetition of sorts, this paper considers the panics over homosexuality, education and youth in the late 1970s in the US as an illustration of the performative production of feelings about/of/towards homosexuality more broadly.

Reflecting on the ongoing significance of the panics of the late 1970s, this paper considers the relationship between feelings about this historical gay political past and feelings about contemporary antihomophobic configurations of sexuality, education and youth. I theorize the relationship between the contemporary moment and a narrativised past by considering the contemporary in terms of what Lauren Berlant has called the “disturbed time” of the “historical present” (Berlant 2008)(5). Drawing on Berlant’s work, I re-narrate my archival case less as “an event but an emergent historical environment that can now be sensed atmospherically, collectively” (5). As Berlant argues, “to be forced into thought this way is to begin to formulate the event of feeling historical in the present” (Berlant 2008)(5). Through such a critical reflection on the historical production of homosexual feelings, particularly in relation to relevant contemporary contests in education, this paper concludes by drawing attention to the labile quality of relationships between panic, youth and homosexuality.

Author

• Daniel Marshall, Deakin University