I Found the Friendly Londoners. They were Hiding under London Bridge.

The past five days in London have been marvelous. The unusually glorious weather has continued. Our discussions of my beloved author Oscar Wilde were intriguing and the paintings of the National Gallery, several of which featured the recently discussed story of Salome, were breathtaking. Most notably, what have become known to us as the notoriously evil people of London, do not seem so evil any longer. In fact, over the last few days of our trip, several have proven to be amongst the most lovely, inviting people I have ever encountered.

I first discovered a heart in a Londoner on the train returning from our day trip to Brighton. After meeting such friendly, artsy shop vendors throughout the small beach town, several of us were despondent to go back to the grimacing residents of London. Whereas Brighton held strangers who actually complimented us (granted they may have been nice simply because we bought half the town), London overflowed with people who glared as we passed complimenting them. So when a stranger started speaking to me on the train ride back “home”, I nearly almost jumped! The young man in his thirties, who we later found out to be named Matt, began the conversation with just small chit chat, asking where we were from and how we were enjoying our stay, and just this small bantering was refreshing enough. But as we neared our stop to get off the train and switch to the underground, Matt invited us to go along with him to his brother’s pub and have a drink on him. Was this really happening? A resident of London spoke to me and then INVITED me somewhere, to have a drink on HIM? I couldn’t believe it. It was an opportunity we couldn’t turn down. So we stumbled along behind him to a pub outside London Bridge and wound up in the middle of his older brother’s Stag Do, a Bachelor’s party back in the states. Now yes I know that may sound quite dangerous, but what back home usually involves blackout drinking and strippers, actually here was only a gathering of family. This was the exact encounter with Londoners I had been dying to have. The people were so friendly, absolutely hilarious, and quite helpful. Matt marked up my map with all the cool places to shop, eat and dance, and when I was leaving his brother offered (unnecessarily but graciously) me his Oyster card to get home. The icing on the cake: the USA World Cup game was on. I was ecstatic. The scene felt as though it had been scripted from my book of London dreams.

I decided I must return home once the game ended, but upon an irresistible invite to come back tomorrow to watch the huge England vs. Germany soccer (football) game, I traveled to the pub again the next day. Joined by the fiancé of Matt’s brother and her girlfriends, this outing, in spite of England’s sad loss, was even more fun. Free drinks for me flowed continuously, and most importantly the ladies were absolutely wonderful. By the end of the night I was invited to go on a shopping tour with one and stay in Ireland the next weekend with another. Wary of me traveling home alone after drinking, Matt then escorted me back to our flat, serving as a tour guide along the way. Most appreciatively, Matt respected my privacy, and stopped at the corner of our street rather than in front of the flat in our arrival at my temporary London home.

The whole experience was delightful. In the heart of the city I found that there are actually people in London who have a heart. As much as I would like to take up the offer for the shopping trip, I did first meet Matt coming from a Brighton shopping trip that wiped out my wallet, so that probably will not happen. But I will let you know if I stumble across another good time with some old fashioned London Blokes : )

“But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting,” said Lord Henry in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I could not agree more. After the horrible first act of Love the Sinner, I would have been happy to leave, but hoped that the second half might redeem it. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The play must have been written when the writers were on strike, and the director must have told the actors that if they weren’t sure what to do, they should start yelling their lines. While the play definitely had potential, it never realized it, and my morals have been degraded because of it.

Earlier in the day, we went to an exhibit of photographs by the artist Wolfgang Tillmans. It was interesting, though not exactly to my taste. The pictures that stood out to me were one of a German biker glaring at the camera, and one of a seated man pulling a splinter from the bottom of his foot. I’m not sure what appealed to me about the picture of the biker, but it was probably his expression of obvious distrust of the photographer. As for the man with the splinter, being as obsessed as I am with Classical and Renaissance art, it makes sense that I’d appreciate an allusion to Spinario. I can’t say I really liked the rest of the photos, but our discussion of them was interesting and definitely made the experience worthwhile for me.

The Ethnicity/Culture of Gender Performance, or “Remember to Change your Gaydar to London Time"

One again, I am sitting in Russell Square, which has served as my blog-muse here in London, despite having to wander knee-deep through a gaggle of French children to find my own patch of grass. Thursday night’s outing to Edge (a gay bar here in London for which I have little context) left me wondering about the dangerously stereotype-steeped idea of gaydar as well as the cultural and ethnic attachments which our masculinities, femininities, and other gender performances posses.

I should begin this discussion by confessing that I am extraordinarily wary of the idea of gaydar; though I’m not sure I can dismiss its existence, I’ve always felt it to be problematic and downright medieval in the way it remains rooted in stereotypes. I found myself surveying the bar we were in (which, judging from the size of the bartenders’ biceps and the amount of gel which their hair contained, was certainly a queer establishment), and realizing that though I was taking the majority of the clientele to be gay, I had a hard time deciding which European men were certainly gay, which ones might be straight men stopping by for a particularly strong gin and tonic, and which might be most likely to break into choreographed Madonna dance.

I’ll admit, in fairness to my readers, that my own aversion to gaydar has been termed sour grapes by a number of people, which is to say that even in the States, I am a terrible discerner of gay men or women. I will stick up for my poor, malnourished Deviant Detection Device by saying that, even so, I am still usually able to pick out the queeniest among us in America.

On the one hand, it might seem quite obvious to expect, if gender is constructed socially, and perhaps as a cultural inscription of sex, that it might be established differently depending on cultural contexts and especially susceptible to shifts in culture. Culture is, after all, the medium by which gender manifests. Is seeing a shift in gender performance in another culture no more remarkable than finding that colors might manifest differently on a different type of painter’s canvases? Is the gender/culture relationship simply a relationship of mediums?

However, the idea that gender performances, in this case masculinities, might have ethnic strings attached to them quite disturbs me and seems to buttress the idea that sexual, gender, racial, and, economic troubles all reinforce and materialize each other. If I place myself in the mindset of the average (in this case American) xenophobic plumber from Western Ohio and presume that I have embraced the stereotype that French men are particularly effeminate, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that there is some element of homophobia bound up in my distaste for the French. Conversely, there seems to be a grain of Euro-phobia in my dislike of the (domestic) gay population. I wonder then, if this plumber persona (which is itself constructed from stereotyping) might be said, on some level, to dislike Europeans because they remind him of gay people and vice versa. Hopefully my ideas haven’t gotten too bogged down in the minutia of my example, but my questions are these: In what ways do existing stereotypes help form and inform the deployment of other stereotypes? What are the implications of the heterogeneous nature of “acceptable” gender performances? What does it mean that different cultural and ethnic identities sanction different masculinities and femininities while outlawing others?

As a short post script: Am I imagining it, or do British pigeons make much creepier noises than their Yankee counterparts? These two very sizeable rats-with-wings just decided that I had been writing for quite long enough and bum-rushed me, issuing a terrifying guttural sort of throat-warble. The bastards were quite successful in ousting me from my sitting spot, which leads me to conclude that these pigeons can smell fear…

Stupid American

It has already been a week since a dragged my broken suitcase out of the London airport, but I am still trying to remember the rules of the city: 1) Do not smile at the people whose glances accidentally stumble into yours; 2) Do not compliment women on their clothes unless you actually want the glares; and 3) Cars do have the right to nearly run you over if you are in the street even a millisecond after the light changes. In addition, every day I rediscover the fact that I am tragically and hopelessly directionally challenged. For instance, as I traipsed about London alone on our first free day, I went left when I was supposed to go right, north when I was supposed to go south, and found myself retracing my steps through semi-familiar loops in the winding alley-ways. I am the worst kind of English major-poet-girl; when my nose is not stuck in a book, it’s stuck in the clouds. I notice patches of sky instead of street signs, the cheeky swagger of citified pigeons instead of traffic lights, the occasional book store branded “G-A-Y Is the Word” (like the one I am sitting in now) instead of left and right turns; and today, I directionally challenged my way into a pub full of reveling World-Cup fans whose chant of cheers I had heard from half-way down the street.

Following the sudden unction to live the “full London experience” and add my body to the swarming human energy, I tentatively wandered in to watch the long anticipated England-Germany “football” game. It was standing room only, and my feet were tired from walking all day; but as I studied the movement of the ball from one cleated foot to the next like squares in a game of dot-to-dot, I quickly found myself immersed in the competition, cheering the red jerseys right along with the rest of them. In the middle of a commercial break, however, I spotted an empty chair, and asked the “bloke” in the seat next to it if it was taken. My Yankee accent must have pushed the wrong button, because he snapped at me, “Can’t you see it’s reserved?” with that piping up-then-down British intonation at the end of his exclamation. Noticing the inconspicuous “reserved” tag I had missed before, I apologized quite profusely only to hear him muttering “Stupid American” as I walked away. I realized with a start that this revelry was not mine to partake, that I was just as foreign here as the word “soccer.”

I felt disturbingly out of place, and as I watched the countries battle their quarrels on the green “football” field, I found myself pondering the question of nationalisms. What does it mean that the world is parceled into borders and flags that fence in our perceptions of humanness? What does it mean that language and sports – both of which are necessarily communal – have become means of division? In London, I can walk into a pub and hear Rihanna, I can traipse down the street to a Starbucks or McDonald's, I can catch a train and notice movie advertisements starring J.Lo and Adam Sandler; but because I think dollar instead of pound, “elevator” instead of “lift,” and the aforementioned “soccer” instead of “football,” the city is as strange as it is familiar. How is it, though, that a city so infatuated with imitating the foreign in its music and art and architecture, that hordes artifacts of the foreign in its world-renowned museums can somehow remain hostile to the foreigners themselves? Like the gay man we read about, the one who was denied asylum in England although he was nearly killed by a mob in Iran. Like the American student studying abroad in a class called Queer London, a class which necessarily involves her in a transatlantic conversation. Funny – as a less-than-patriotic, left-wing political activist, I proudly identify as queer, but I have never really identified as American before traveling away from it. Suddenly, however, my Americanisms make me queerer than ever, and I find myself reluctantly attaching to my national identity, even as I try to queer the notion of identity itself.

This Side of Paradise

Can it be we’ve now had eight days of warmth and sun in England? Yes, dear readers, it can! What a delight to be here, teaching this class, and to feel genuinely on holiday.

Aside from the weather, my especial pleasure through the last week has been watching the ideas of our class come together. Our readings of the queerness of classical sculpture – both through essays and in person at the British Museum – transitioned into a discussion of the ways Sir John Soane constructed a sense of self (at the turn of the nineteenth century) through architecture and the amassing of artifacts from the world over; such musings offered a perfect opening into the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, in all its orientalist grandeur and absurdity. Queerness here operates in ways that far exceed sexual orientation.

The first performance we attended as a class – the stunning National Theatre production of Terrance Rattigan’s 1939 After the Dance – likewise asked us to think about the ways we shape our selves in relation to others. Toward the end of the second act, not long before she throws herself, Tosca-like, from a balcony, Rattigan’s Joan admits she’d withheld emotion from her husband through twelve years of marriage because she thought that’s what he wanted. Their lives as socialites depend on the notion that most of the real world – including Hitler’s growing armies and the Great Depression – is such a bore.

But like Dorian Gray, who flirts with the accoutrements of culture but never quite lives a vital life (hence the portrait in the attic, more alive than the actual Dorian), Joan and her husband David present only shells of themselves – until feeling finally rushes in and it’s too late to make amends.

Michael and I head off today for Glyndebourne, the opera festival. We’re seeing Britten’s Billy Budd – a queer collaboration if ever there were one (based on the queer-as-pink-ink Melville novella, the libretto was composed by E. M. Forster). After last night’s magical recital – the mezzo Catherine Hopper at Wigmore Hall – and our sunny day in Brighton, I’m feeling lucky indeed.

Brighton

I just got back from spending a fantastic day in Brighton. The Royal Pavilion was breathtaking, the shopping was fun, and the people were charming.
We arrived at the train station on time and looking beautiful (see, we can manage to do both sometimes), and set out for Brighton. When we got there, we went to the Royal Pavilion. The Pavilion is a stunning building inspired by Indian architecture, with the inside decorated in a dramatic mixture of styles from the exotic Chinese and Indian to the more typical classical style.
While looking at all the ornate rooms, complete with dragons on top of the chandeliers, snakes around curtains, and various objects from China, I was reminded of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The lavishness of the Royal Pavilion was the epitome of the aestheticism that Dorian so loved. While walking through such luxury, surrounded by beautiful things, and listening to descriptions of how the rooms were originally used, it was easy for me to imagine leading such a decadent lifestyle.
After the splendor of the Pavilion, we decided to wander around and go to some of the many shops. As we were walking down one of the streets, we saw a store with a rainbow and a scantily clad pretty girl on its sign. This seemed like a promising little shop, so we went in. After looking around for a while, we were a little confused. With a sign covered in a rainbow and a girl, we had thought that it would be a lesbian store, but it seemed just like any other sex shop. We started talking to the girl working there, and asked her about it. Apparently, the shop was originally a lesbian bookstore, but wasn’t really anymore. There were a few books in a corner, but not many, and certainly not many lesbian ones. The girl said that when they had really been a lesbian store, there were so many straight couples that came in, that it didn’t make sense not to cater to them as well. Unfortunately, the straight part of the store seems to have taken over.
We made up for our disappointing attempt at finding a gay store by just going shopping instead. This was very successful and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the Batman dress didn’t fit.

London, it May be many literary tours but should not be confused with the Pursuit of Happiness tour.

I woke up this morning “unhappy.” Yes, I know that seems blasphemous to say that I woke up this miraculously once again sunny Friday morning in London, a morning that succeeded dancing to my favorite Lady Gaga tunes into the wee hours of the night in a club outside Soho Square, anything other than elated (my mother would die if she knew that her Friday paycheck financing this excursion, the one thing for which she woke up this morning on the other side of the pond, was going towards a less than ecstatic child), but it’s true. Terribly vivid, stressful dreams plagued my mind throughout the night, rendering it a restless sleep and a somber morning. I stepped into the shower hoping to rinse away the negative thoughts and perspiration from imitating the Fame Monster cooer that stemmed from the prior night. Yet as I pulled on my robe of bright pink polka dotted terry cloth, I was disappointed to find that while the cheerful scent of my tangerine sunshine body wash now replaced my former stench from the Soho night club, the equally jubilant disposition for which I so desired did not supplant my dismal mood, and the gloom most typical of a London skyline remained.

Along with my despondency, now set in guilt. How could I possibly be in London stressed, having nightmares? How, this morning, after seeing Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, touring literary Bloomsbury and the British Museum, philosophizing with great intellectuals of this city, (and did I forget about the dancing to Gaga), could I not find happiness? I must enroll in therapy as soon as I return to the states I began to think to myself! However, the perfect solace came to me much sooner than my expected return to the U.S. It came to me that very morning in the form of a lunch at the Wagamama noodle chain with Sarah Ahmed, queer theorist and professor in race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Author of The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sarah spoke on exactly the subject presently troubling my mind: my happiness, or lack thereof. Sarah focused on the etiology of the word, reflecting that “hap” means by chance, and powerfully proposed that happiness is not a guarantee of action but an occurrence of chance. She asserted that historically society, incorrectly, has made us to feel that we have the ultimate power and responsibility to control happiness, that in the words of Michael, “if you do all these things and you’re not happy, boy you’re fucked.” This notion against the conventional thoughts on the attainment of happiness was the most uplifting philosophy I have heard in ages. No longer was I steeped in remorse for my lack of glee. Now, it was a sense of freedom to let my joy “happen” that overwhelmed me. Sarah Ahmed transformed my Wagamama seat into a shrink’s couch, and unlike the costly, most often uninsurable, session with a psychologist, this beautiful conversation with the renowned philosopher was priceless.

In the spirit of chance, the theme of happiness ensued throughout the night. All dressed to the nines, we attended the play After the Dance at the National Theatre. Set in the time period directly proceeding World War II, the play focused on a rambunctious, drunken crowd of riches and lavishness, all of whom are masquerading in an act of happiness yet none actually achieving such. The main character David’s false pursuit of happiness sparks the tragedies of the narrative. After finding that her husband will soon divorce her for a younger woman, the wife of the protagonist, Joan, commits suicide at the very party she hosts. The play ends with David deciding to drink himself to death. Exploiting the notion that a life dedicated to only the search for happiness is a vapid and destructive one, the play was enlightening, the perfect fit to follow the morning’s discussion with Sarah, and as I rose from my theatre chair, I once again felt as though I was departing the comfy, lavish sofa of a therapist.

Last summer, in the scorching hot months of the states, the Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness album lyrics were the words by which I lived. This summer it will be the quite contrary philosophy of Sarah Ahmed to not pursue, but stumble upon, happiness. Today granted me the freedom to release the guilt for my own emotions, to let “happiness happen.” So in the words of Joan when asked how does she feel, I can gladly boast “I don’t know yet.”

(Note to reader: the moment of unhappiness of which I speak was very very transient. London is absolutely wonderful! And after my ridiculous shopping in the delightful beach town of Brighton, unhappiness may no longer be in my vocabulary.... until I see my bank statement that is)

It Seems Doubtful that London has Ever Been Queerer

For the purposes of crafting this blog post, I have taken my laptop out into Bloomsbury Park and am currently lounging in a grassy patch of London soil thinking about Foucaultian sexual politics, reading Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal and people watching. My life has certainly been in worse shape (and probably will be again once my credit card bill arrives). So far my time in London has been overwhelmingly fantastic. Two days ago, we went on a literary tour of Bloomsbury, home to Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury group and the site of Ted Hughes’ marriage to Sylvia Plath (runners up for the Grammy Award for “Stormiest Marriage of the 20th Century,” losing out narrowly to Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston). We also saw the house that Hughes and Plath first lived in following their honeymoon, on which the poem “18 Rugby Street” is based. I cannot find a link to the poem online, but if anyone knows of one, lemme know. Today’s discussion with Christina Perry was fascinating in the insight it provided into the English government, particularly with respect to the politics of LGBT legislature. I find the British legal system to be quite a bit more nuanced than our own and perhaps more complicated (partially due to my unfamiliarity with the system).

Michael Snediker was robbed at a Glam Poetry Slam, which I can only presume means that said Slam had little to do with either glam or poetry. Pictures are forthcoming, and we can probably promise that the Queen’s University provost won’t receive them in an anonymous email. I wonder if the wig category (which has never been more exciting) has ever seen a published professor before. Though the poetry was sub par, the Slam itself was actually quite a blast, even if Suzaana let Michael down...

I would like to return briefly to Tuesday’s conversation about Foucault, particularly with regard to the politics of sexual discourse. In this discussion, we explored the compression of sex into discourse, paying particular attention to the ways in which this compression is a method of concretizing and controlling sex, a way of wrapping a fist around sex, as it were. Our discussion seemed to paint this phenomenon as a largely negative occurrence; power acts through sex-turned-discourse to materialize other economic and racial constructs in what we seem to have construed as a largely repressive event. I wonder, however, if the discussion is somewhat more complicated than that.

Though sexual discourse allows outsiders (perhaps vaguely termed “Power”) to reach their fingers around our sexualities, substantiating sex in such a way also seems to grant us the ability to direct our own sexualities and identities; discourse seems to grant power over sexuality indiscriminately, offering control to outsiders and ourselves. To this end, agency (which is perhaps inextricably linked to power in a number of complicated ways) seems an important factor in the sex/discourse/power conversation rather than answers. For better or worse, at this point in the conversation, I seem only able to provide questions. Do we always possess agency over our sexualities? Is discourse a friend or foe in the quest for sexual autonomy, unavoidable though it is? Is our exchange with discourse one sided, or do we perhaps exert power over discourse at the same time it does work on us; are we in “discourse” with discourse? (That last one turned out a little more convoluted than I might have liked)

Edit: The people watching in London gay bars is fantastic and Lady Gaga sounds the same in every country, which is to say, significantly underwhelming. Perhaps Gaga is the great unifying mediocrity.

"Remember Us"

“The very air breathed with antiquity”: these were the opening words of our first reading for the day, “A Woman’s View of the Greek Question”; and as I walked into the Greek mausoleum of the British Museum, these are the words that shivered down my body like a bird of goose bumps. The headless marble torsos of Zeus, Dionysus, and Aries with their chiseled pecks and muscled abdomens seemed to mock the empty air where their legs used to be, almost laughing at Time who had left her teeth marks in the dismembered stone. Because even castrated and defaced, they held our attentions captive. Weathered frieze after weathered frieze lined the museum walls, the materialization of the stories we had read aloud in literature classes, scribbling hurried notes as our teachers lectured on their significance. They were all there – the kings of Assyria, the Gods of Olympus, the Roman warriors, the slaughtered women and children of their conquered lands. It was as if, as in our Harrison readings, Themis, “the spirit of assembly incarnate” the embodiment of “collective conscience,” had summoned the memories and stories of all peoples and gathered them together for one last banquet for which we too were being invited to take part. Vicki, forgive me, but it was a very spiritual experience as I marveled at the meticulous detail of each chiseled curl of hair, each engraved symbol – the kind of explicit detail that would have taken ages to create without our modern mediums and mechanized instruments. We had spent the morning queering ancient philosophy and dissecting Tipping the Velvet with Churnjeet (our brilliant visiting scholar), and my head was heavy with her words as she spoke of Waters’ use of synesthesia, her articulation of the sensual “allowing us to touch the text” thereby aesthetically queering our perception of a temporally distant narrative. And here in the museum, even in a space of marble columns and rigid ancient sculptures, I was still touching a text, touching a story that was not my story. I was queering time, because the past was the present in these rooms filled with Egyptian mummies and Olympian gods. I was deeply struck with the sense that they wanted us to know they had been here; I could almost hear them saying, “Remember us.”

Sign of the Four

Our class is off to a good start: two days of walking the city and discussing everything from sexual topographies and Victorian lamp-posts to E. M. Forster and Michel Foucault. In the category of personal achievements, I think I've now figured out the London bus system, which had always eluded me. Dinner at a French bistro capped off our first day together, much deserved by this jet-lagged and foot-sore but still enthusiastic crew.

We now turn the blog over to our students, who'll take turns reporting on our adventures. Expectations are high.

Tamarind

We’ve arrived. Aside from not having hot water, we’re delighted with our flat at Endsleigh Court, Bloomsbury. New mobile phone in hand, we ventured out to a restaurant reputed to be the most popular Indian joint in town: Tamarind. Our verdict: “popular” seems appropriate only with an accompanying qualifier: “among people who don’t really like Indian food.” From the rose-water martini to scallops and sea bass, we were first disappointed, then disgusted that a Michelin-starred establishment could be such a sell-out to mediocre palates: bland, bland, bland. We imagine vats of tomato paste as the base to most of what emerges from the kitchen, each dish nearly indistinguishable from the last. Shame on you, New York Times, for leading us astray on our first night in London.

Putting aside culinary disappointments, we’ve already swooned to London in the summer, catching glimpses in shop windows, light refracted over rooftops: signs of more good things to come. Early morning tomorrow to pick up our class from Heathrow….

Nearly Ready

Never having posted on a blog, I thought it'd be a good idea to experiment at least once before actually hitting the ground in London. Michael and I will be arriving Sunday, and our students follow Monday morning. Until then we're busily checking off to-do lists, cleaning house, and fervently hoping Iceland's volcanoes keep their ash to themselves.

For those of you interested, here's a link to our syllabus. You might also take a peak at the brewing transatlantic political storm we all may find ourselves navigating in the coming weeks. Wish us luck! We'll be posting more, and more regularly, from abroad.