Queer-e Vol. 1. no. 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Copyright (c) 1995 by Author, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors of Queer-e (queer-e-approval@vector.casti.com). ------------------------------------------------ QUEER SEX HABITS (Oh, no! I mean) SIX QUEER HABITS: Some Talking Points These paragraphs emerged as part of the long thinking/planning process for a group show, "Queer Space," that opened at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in SoHo this June. A group that included Beatriz Colomina, Dennis Dollens, Shirin Neshat, Henry Urbach, Mark Wrigley, and a number of others interested in architecture, urban planning, and sexual representation met regularly to try and work out a conceptual basis for the show. In this context we proposed to move through the feminist conceptual frame of gender into one that more specifically focused on the spaces and practices that constitute sexualities and sexual identities: what we were calling "queer space." The word "queer," of course, itself means across--it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart. We used the label "queer" for this investigation, rather than offering a list of nominally distinct identities (gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, transsexual, celibate, etc.), because rather than presuming the coherence and distinctness of each of these, we wanted to attend to the transverse space of their production and performance; to the ways in which they are implicated with each other; to their relations with such other identity-implicating issues as race and class; and to the many practices that involve crossing between and among them. "Space" is, of course, a huge and inclusive term, itself requiring specification. Since this project was aimed at considering space in relation to both temporal practices and the formation of historical identities, I proposed to articulate the concept of space in terms of the spatialized layers of meaning that attach to the term "habit." (This wasn't, finally, a direction we took in the show or the accompanying material; it still seems worth exploring. I was trying to move a bit further with a point originally raised in "Epidemics of the Will," one of the essays in Tendencies.) "Habit" suggests ways of mediating back and forth between active and passive; between space and time; between the most intimate and the most public space; and also among the realms of static objects and places, movements, and behavior. (Note that "behavior" comes from the same root as "habit.") At the most intimate level, habit represents (1) an individual's "characteristic bodily or physical condition" (Random House Dictionary); her or his bodily habitus, individual carriage, musculature, movement. Including some of the most distinctive ways that queer people interact with ourselves and our environments. The machine-toned gym body, male and female, for one exampe; the cyborg system formed by the individual body and its machine, in the public/narcissistic space of the gym. . . . Or the various kinds of habitus involved in the complex semiotics of effeminacy. "Teddy bears" and "fats and fems." Androgyny (or rather androgynies). Etc., etc., etc. Moving outward from that, habit represents (2) clothing: the "garb of a particular rank, profession, religious order, etc." A lot of distinctive queer knowledge about space has to do with the relation between these first two levels of "habit": the relation of bodies and clothes. That knowledge includes the following: Clothes are not the inevitable expression of a "natural" body underneath. They accrue meaning and presence when they are at cross-purposes with important features of the body. Clothes are referential: they refer to other clothes, to other historical periods and international sites, to the economics of their production and consumption, to gender and sexual vernaculars. At the same time, clothes form and inflect the shape, motion, and self- perception of bodies (as in "body drag"). Clothes are also connected with the culture of the (denaturalized) "chosen" body (the gym body, the smooth body, the "fit" body). Clothes are a potent way of sculpting social space and can therefore be a form of activism. Then, as well, habit is (3) one's "customary practice or . . . . compulsive need, inclination, or use." Habit in this sense represents the repeated gestures or acts by which we and our environment inhabit each other and are impressed on each other, through such routes as substance ingestion and refusal, movement through space (strolling, dancing), "work habits," sexual habits, rituals of interaction and avoidance, consumer habits, etc. In the intersection among meanings (1), (2), and (3) would reside the topic one might call (borrowing from the writing of Cindy Patton) queer kinesthetics: forms of movement and kinesthetic proprioception as a function of queer identities and cultures. What does it mean, how does it occupy time and space, to "feel" or "act" butch? or queeny? or cruisy? clone-y? To vogue, get arrested (in a protest; in an entrapment), snap!, have attitude, play pool, march in a parade (St. Patrick's? Pride?), stand with the spectators? How do different kinds of dancing work? What does it mean to a well body to walk into a hospital? To a sick body? The body experienced as endangered: from inside, from outside. Kinesthetics of memory; of loss; of rage. Dignity, indignity, and movement in the self- experienced body. Whence, habit is (4) "a dominant or regular disposition or tendency; prevailing character or quality." Orientations; identies. No matter whether you think of them as inborn or constructed, they are steeped in a near-infinity of histories and interactions, along the same continuum from habitus to habitat. Then, habit is (5) habitation, "a place of residence; dwelling; abode." Our home (when we have one); what we make of it; what it makes of us. Real estate, decor, and more broadly, our construction and self- construction in terms of property-owning or - renting, nomadism, consumer choices. That the (very American) construction of identity in relation to ownership and consumption needn't by any means be a passive, acquiescent, or normalizing process is one of the lessons of New York-centered queer culture. It has offered an influential prototype for contemporary strategies of creative, sometimes subversive consumption in and of space. Pastiche, radical recontextualization, and the literal and metaphoric recycling of sites, buildings, objects, styles, cultural icons, and fragments of material vernaculars are among the ways that queer people most influentially create new value: value economic, aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, and political. At the same time, such processes are part of the larger economic and social ecology of urban life in which queer needs, people, communities are involved on both sides of conflicts around displacement, exclusion, and the quiet forms of violence that go with gentrification. And finally, habit is (6) habitat, "the kind of place that is natural for the life and growth of an animal or plant." Our environment as a whole, including the environment of cyberspace, media and fantasy; and its ambivalent relation to our "life and growth." What is it to be "an habitue" of a place? Media-space and glamour; media-space and violence; the space of the nation (that "imagined community") and its relation to apparently local issues of dignity, rights, habitation, pleasure, and violence. The concept of "habit," I was proposing, could function in this project as an image for the transmission of imprints of meaning back and forth among the levels of body, clothing, behavior, movement, character, buildings, streets, and environs. It could help us make vivid the distinctive junctures that have emerged from, and in turn shaped, gay/lesbian and queer cultures: and to envision how habitat, habitation, character, usage, clothing, bodies, nomadism, ownership, and fantasy might be brought into different, more transformative and revealing relation to one another. About the Author: Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick teaches Literature at Duke University. She is author of _Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire_ and _Epistemology of the Closet_. Her most recent publications include _Tendencies_ and _Fat Art/Thin Art_. (sedgwic@acpub.duke.edu)