Privilege, Access, Shunning: Familial Homophobia and Its Representations in the Works of Sarah Schulman

In her book Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009) Sarah Schulman explores the way in which heterosexual privilege interacts with the institution of family, and criticizes its destructive impact on familial relationships. According to her theory, the basis of homophobia is a pleasure principle inscribed in the image of family which encourages every privileged family member to enact their dominance on the excluded. Although Schulman has expressed this idea in clear theoretical terms much later, I argue that it has been a visible element of her writing since the 1980s. This paper demonstrates how the author expressed this idea in the past using diverse sociocultural contexts, and how numerous plots from her oeuvre serve as examples to mechanisms of familial homophobia discussed in Ties That Bind.

Losing Real Life: James Baldwin and the Ethics of Trauma

This essay proposes that we turn to James Baldwin’s work to assess the cost of, and think alternatives to, the cultures of traumatization whose proliferation one witnesses in contemporary U.S. academia. Beginning with some recent examples, the essay briefly places these cultures into a genealogy of onto-ethics whose contemporary forms arose with the reconfiguration of diasporic histories in the idioms of psychoanalysis and deconstructive philosophy in 1990s trauma theory. Baldwin speaks to the contemporary moment as he considers the outcome of trauma’s perpetuation in an autobiographical scene from “Notes of a Native Son.” In this scene—which restages Bigger Thomas’s murderous compulsion in Native Son—he warns us against embracing one’s traumatization as a mode of negotiating the world. In foregoing what Sarah Schulman has recently called the “duty of repair,” such traumatized engagement prevents all search for the kind of “commonness” whose early articulation can be found in Aristotle’s query after “the common good” (to koinon agathon). With Baldwin, the present essay suggests the urgency of returning to the question of “the common good”: while mindful of past critiques, which have observed in this concept’s deployment a sleight-of-hand by which hegemonic positions universalize their interests, we should work to actualize the unfinished potential of Aristotle’s idea. Baldwin’s work on diasporic modernity provides an indispensable archive for this effort.

L’ethnicité comme pièce rapportée et ravaudage du moi dans le roman juif-lesbien américain

Cet article cherche à rendre compte de l'ethnicité à l'oeuvre dans le roman juif-lesbien-américain. À partir de Stone Butch Blues de Leslie Feinberg et d' Empathy de Sarah Schulman, nous analyserons l'articulation du lesbianisme à la judéité afin de parvenir à mieux définir ce que peut être l'appartenance « fictionnelle » à la communauté ou à l'histoire juive lorsque le roman se propose comme lieu d'avènement aux États-Unis d'une double marginalité. La question qui sous-tend le travail est celle de la différence entre le sentiment d'appartenance et le sentiment d'identité.