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.