1. ELIT 10
Class 2

2. Agenda
 Teams
 Presentation:
 LGBTQQIA2 Theories
 A brief history lesson
 Vocabulary to know
 Discussion: QHQ: Tyson and “The Long Arm”
 Author/Text Introduction:
 Krafft-Ebbing and Cather

3. 1. We will use teams to earn
participation points. Your
teams can be made up of
between 3 and 5 people.
2. The teams will change on or near exam dates or
essay due dates.
3. You must change at least 50% of your team after
each project is completed.
4. You may never be on a team with the same person
more than twice.
5. You may never have a new team composed of more
than 50% of any prior team.

4. The first team competition starts today.
your first teams.
Get into
teams with a
few students
seated near
you. If you
have trouble
finding a
team, merely
raise your
hand, and I
will place you
on one.

5. Sit with
your team
members
in class to
facilitate
ease of
group
discussions
At the end of each
class, you will turn in a
point sheet with the
names of everyone in
your group and your
accumulated points for
the day.
It is your responsibility to
track the points and turn
in a tally sheet.

6. Points will be earned
for correct answers to
questions,
meaningful
contributions to the
discussion , and
provocative
questions.
Contributions to the
discussion via the
slide show also score
one point. Each
team will track their
own points, but
cheating leads to
death (or loss of 25
participation points).
Answers,
comments, and
questions must be
posed in a
manner that
promotes
learning. Those
who speak out of
turn or with
maliciousness will
not receive
points for their
teams.

7. Round 1:
Teams
 Point accumulation
starts today, so make
sure one of your
team members is
tracking points.
 Make sure your
name (first name,
last initial in
alphabetical order) is
on the team point
sheet.
 Total the points for
your team and write
the number at the
top of the page.

8. Lesbian, Gay, and Queer
Criticism
What is Literary Theory? Why
study LGBTQQI2 Theories?
 How are they different?

9. Lesbian Criticism
 Lesbian criticism is concerned with issues of personal
identity and politics analogous to those analyzed by
feminists (see chapter 4). However, while feminism
addresses issues related to sexism and the difficulties
involved in carving out a space for personal identity
and political action beyond the influence of sexist
ideologies, lesbian critics address issues related to
both sexism and heterosexism. In other words, lesbian
critics must deal with the psychological, social,
economic, and political oppression fostered not only
by patriarchal male privilege, but by heterosexual
privilege as well. (Tyson 322-23)

10. Gay Criticism
 The kinds of analyses that tend to engage the attention of
gay critics often fall under the heading of gay sensibility.
How does being gay influence the way one sees the world,
sees oneself and others, creates and responds to art and
music, creates and interprets literature, or experiences and
expresses emotion? Ina heterosexist culture such as the
one we inhabit at the turn of the twenty-first century in
America, gay sensibility includes an awareness of being
different, at least in certain ways, from the members of the
mainstream, dominant culture, and the complex feelings
that result from an implicit, ongoing social oppression. In
other words, part of seeing the world as a gay man includes
the ways in which one deals with being oppressed as a gay
man. Among others, three important domains of gay
sensibility, all of which involve responses to heterosexist
oppression, are drag, camp, and dealing with the issue of
AIDS.(Tyson 330)

11. Queer Theory
 For queer theory, categories of sexuality cannot be defined by
such simple oppositions as homosexual/heterosexual. Building
on deconstruction’s insights into human subjectivity (selfhood)
as a fluid, fragmented, dynamic collectivity of possible “selves,”
queer theory defines individual sexuality as a fluid, fragmented,
dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities. Our sexuality may be
different at different times over the course of our lives or even at
different times over the course of a week because sexuality is a
dynamic range of desire. Gay sexuality, lesbian sexuality,
bisexuality, and heterosexuality are, for all of us, possibilities
along a continuum of sexual possibilities. And what these
categories mean to different individuals will be influenced by
how they conceive their own racial and class identities as well.
Thus, sexuality is completely controlled neither by our biological
sex (male or female) nor by the way our culture translates
biological sex into gender roles(masculine or feminine). Sexuality
exceeds these definitions and has a will, a creativity, an
expressive need of its own. (Tyson 335)

12.  Finally, lesbian, gay, and queer criticism often rely on
similar kinds of textual evidence. For example, in
addition to the more obvious forms of textual cues—
such as homoerotic imagery and erotic encounters
between same-sex characters—there are rather
subtle textual cues that can create a homoerotic
atmosphere even in an otherwise heterosexual text,
as we saw in the examples of lesbian, gay, and queer
criticism provided earlier. No single textual cue can
stand on its own as evidence of a homoerotic
atmosphere in a text. Nor can a small number of such
cues support a lesbian, gay, or queer reading. But a
preponderance of these cues, especially if coupled
with other kinds of textual or biographical evidence,
can strengthen a lesbian, gay, or queer interpretation
even of an apparently heterosexual text. (Tyson 339)

13. Typical questions:
1. What are the politics (ideological agendas) of specific gay,
lesbian, or queer works, and how are those politics revealed
in...the work's thematic content or portrayals of its
characters?
2. What are the poetics (literary devices and strategies) of a
specific lesbian, gay, or queer works?
3. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer,
gay, or lesbian experience and history, including literary
history?
4. How is queer, gay, or lesbian experience coded in texts that
are by writers who are apparently homosexual?
5. How might the works of heterosexual writers be reread to
reveal an unspoken or unconscious lesbian, gay or queer
presence? That is, does the work have an unconscious
lesbian, gay or queer desire or conflict that it submerges?

14. More Questions
6. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially,
politically, psychologically) homophobic?
7. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of
sexuality and sexual "identity," that is the ways in which
human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate
categories defined by the words homosexual and
heterosexual?
8. What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the
perceived masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what
elements exhibit traits of both (bisexual)?
9. What elements of the text can be perceived as being
masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive,
marginalized) and how do the characters support these
traditional roles?
10. What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or
characters who question the masculine/feminine binary? What
happens to those elements/characters?

15. Discuss
In your groups: Discuss the vocabulary on
the next slide and your QHQs: Ten minutes!

16. Vocabulary to know
1. Homophobia
2. Internalized
homophobia
3. Heterosexism
4. Compulsory
heterosexuality
5. Heterocentrism
6. Essentialism
7. Biological
essentialism
8. Social
Constructionism
9. Homoerotic
10.Homosocial
11.Closeted
12.Canonized
13.Separatists
14.Coded
Lesbian/Homosex
ual
15.Drag
16.Drag queen
17.Butch
18.Camp
19.Sensibility

17. Perhaps a better way to define a lesbian, then,
is to say that she is a woman whose sexual
desire is directed toward women (Tyson 324).
 My initial question comes directly from the
text, which is, how does one define an
individual as a lesbian? Does creating,
redefining, expanding, or otherwise
changing labels actually assists in improving
the psyche of oppressed and minoritized
people? Furthermore, is it possible to be a
lesbian according to Tyson’s definition
without actually being attracted to women
in any way other than friendship?

18. Tyson goes on to discuss 19th C “Romantic Marriages:

19. Tyson identifies a theoretical definition of a lesbian as a
“Woman identified woman (324).

20. How important was it for women to become “separatists”?
Tyson explains Rich’s lesbian continuum (325)

21. If more women were to become “separatists”, would
patriarchy from heterosexual men be dominated?

22. QHQs Tyson:
If you see your question here, score 1 point for your team
1. How do the experiences of gay men and lesbian women
differ from each other? Why was it so difficult to recognize or
acknowledge lesbian women in the 19th century?
2. Is it even possible to avoid “internalized homophobia?” How
detrimental can internalized homophobia be? Would it be a
possible reason for suicide?
3. What makes homophobia, heterosexism or heterocentrism? If
[a person detests homosexuality without any reason, that
person can be explained by the view of essentialists], so are
homophobics born to hate homosexuality? Or do they just
happen to hate homosexuality because of their
background? If they are born to hate homosexuality, then
what should society do for them?

23. A Quick History Review

24. The Gay Old Roman Times!
 27 BCE The Roman Empire begins with the reign of
Agustus. The first recorded same-sex marriages occur
during this period.
 130 CE Antinous was a member of the Roman Emperor
Hadrian’s entourage, to whom he was beloved. After
Antinous drowned in the Nile, the grief of the emperor knew
no bounds, causing the most extravagant respect to be paid to
his memory. Cities were founded in his name, medals struck
with his effigy, and statues erected to him in all parts of the
empire. Hadrian had Antinous deified.
 218 CE The emperor Elagabalus begins his reign. He married
a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna, in a lavish
public ceremony at Rome amid the rejoicings of the public.

25. The Party is Over in the Roman
Empire!
342 CE The first law against homosexual
marriage was promulgated by the Christian
emperor Constantius II.
529 CE The Christian emperor Justinian I
(527-565) blamed homosexuals for problems
such as “famines, earthquakes, and pestilences.

26. 1000 years later, things are still bad
for the LGBT people
 1290: First mention in English common law of a punishment for
homosexuality
 1300: Treatise in England prescribed that sodomites should be burned alive
 1327: The deposed King Edward II of England is killed, allegedly by
forcing a red-hot poker through his rectum. Edward II had a history of
conflict with the nobility, who repeatedly banished his former lover Piers
Gaveston, the Earl of Cornwall. Several contemporary sources criticized
his infatuation with Piers Gaveston, to the extent that Edward ignored and
humiliated his wife. Chroniclers called the relationship excessive,
immoderate, beyond measure and reason and criticized his desire for
wicked and forbidden sex.
 1533: King Henry VIII passes the Buggery Act 1533 making all male-male
sexual activity punishable by death.
 1649: The first known conviction for lesbian activity in North America
occurs in March when Sarah White Norman is charged with “Lewd
behavior each with other upon a bed” with Mary Vincent Hammon in
Plymouth, Massachusetts.

27. 1779-1867
 1779: Thomas Jefferson prepared a draft of Virginia’s criminal statute,
declaring that the punishment for sodomy should be castration. The bill
read: “Whosoever shall be guilty of rape, polygamy, or sodomy with a
man or woman, shall be punished; if a man, by castration, a woman, by
boring through the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch in
diameter at the least.”
 1832: Russia criminalizes homosexual acts making them punishable by
up to five years exile in Siberia.
 1836: The last known execution for homosexuality in Great Britain.
 1861: In England, the Offences Against the Person Act is amended to
remove the death sentence for “buggery.” The penalty became
imprisonment from 10 years to life.
 1867 Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs became the first self-proclaimed homosexual
to speak out publicly for homosexual rights when he pleaded at the
Congress of German Jurists in Munich for a resolution urging the repeal
of anti-homosexual laws. He wrote that a gay man “too, is a person. He,
too, therefore, has inalienable rights. His sexual orientation is a right
established by nature.” His books were confiscated and banned by police
in Saxony. Later the same thing happened in Berlin, and his works were
banned throughout Prussia.

28. 1869-1895
 1869: The term “homosexuality” appears in print for the first time
in a German-Hungarian pamphlet written by Karl-Maria Kertbeny.
 1885: Labouchere amendment, passed in the UK, created the
offense of ‘gross indecency’ and thus became the first specifically
anti-homosexual act. It became known as the ‘blackmailer’s
charter.’
 1892: The words “bisexual” and “heterosexual” are first used in
their current senses in Charles Gilbert Chaddock’s translation of
Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.
 1895: The trial of Oscar Wilde results in his being prosecuted
under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 for “gross
indecency” and sentenced to two years in prison. In British
legislation of the time, this term implied homosexual acts not
amounting to buggery (same-sex intercourse). His trial led to one
of the first major public discussions of homosexuality in England.
 1897: English edition of the book Sexual Inversion by Havelock
Ellis and John Addington Symonds is published. It is the first book
in English to treat homosexuality as neither a disease nor a crime,
maintaining that it was inborn and unchangeable.

29. “The Long Arm” 1895
Mary Wilkins Freeman
For centuries, lesbians had flown under the radar,
relatively free to maintain their private
“friendships” without judgment. Part of this
freedom was because women were not seen as
sexual beings. After lesbians were identified by
the sexologists as being as common as
homosexual men, people began to resist them.
This resistance worsened when they began to
assert themselves in the public realm, an area
dominated by men. During this time, lesbians,
particularly masculine or assertive women are
portrayed as criminals or predators.

30. Applying Theory: “The Long Arm”: QHQs
If you see your question here, score 1 point for your team
1. Was Phoebe Dole in love with Maria Woods? Was
Maria aware of Phoebe’s feelings towards her?
2. Did Maria Woods pressure Phoebe to turn herself in
because she suspected Phoebe loved her and
told her that was the only way she could forgive
her?
3. Was Phoebe Dole’s literal “long arm” a symbol for
anything else?

31. Henry and Sarah
1. How did Henry Ellis feel about Sarah’s
father being opposed to their
engagement?
2. Was there an intentional irony in
Phoebe’s actions allowing for a
previously forbidden marriage to occur?

32. “The fact that I was a girl never
damaged my ambitions to be a
pope or an emperor.”
Author/Text Introduction:
Krafft-Ebbing and Cather
Willa Cather 1873-1947

33. Richard von Krafft-Ebing
 One of the most influential figures in the history of human sexuality,
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing was the first scientist to
undertake a major study of sexual perversity in its varied forms.
 Krafft-Ebing found that, among the many manifestations of
psychopathia, sexual deviance was routinely unexplored and merely
dismissed as insanity. He launched a lifelong endeavor to demystify
this form of mental illness by approaching the topic objectively and
without shrinking from its more distasteful forms. The first volume
of Psychopathia Sexualis was published in 1886 (first American
edition was 1892). Beyond Krafft-Ebing's careful categorization and
discussion of various forms of sexual perversity, it contained 45 case
histories, a few that you will read tonight.
 You will find a twelve-page excerpt from Psychopathia Sexualis
listed under “Primary Texts” on our website.

34. Willa Cather
 Cather is probably best known for writing about the vast landscape of the
American heartland and those who immigrated and settled there in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1883, the Cather family moved to
Nebraska, where she lived until a year after graduating from the University of
Nebraska in 1895. The Nebraska landscape had a profound effect on her
writing, especially her fascination for detail. This is most vividly expressed in
her two most famous novels, O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), the
latter winning critical acclaim in the US and Europe.
 Cather commented that art was something not extraneous to life, but ‘must
spring out of the very stuff that life is made of’. Yet the ‘stuff’ of her own life,
and those for whom she felt the ‘deepest affection’ both in her life and in her
work, have traditionally been ignored or overridden. This tension between
same-sex desire and growing awareness of the building momentum of
homophobia in the early twentieth century is evident not only in Cather’s public
rebuke of Oscar Wilde in one of her columns in 1895, but also in her short story
‘Paul’s Case’ (1905), one of her most often republished and frequently taught
stories. You will find this eleven-page story under “Primary Texts.”
 By concealing her relationships with the women she loved, including Louise
Pound, McClung (whose later marriage devastated Cather) and Edith Lewis,
with whom she shared a 40-year relationship, Cather also concealed, as Lillian
Faderman notes, the ways in which these women contributed to and nourished
her creative abilities.

35. Read:
“From Psychopathia
Sexualis” Krafft-
Ebbing 7th edition
1894 (12 pages) and
“Paul’s Case” by Willa
Cather 1905 (11
pages)
 Post #2: Choose one
1. Compare or contrast a case study from Krafft-Ebbing to another
reading we have done thus far.
2. Answer one question from the “Toward a Critical Reading” list
of questions. You will find this list as a subset of the story
“Paul’s Case” on the website. If you choose to respond to a
question someone has already undertaken, comment on his
or her initial post. This will ensure that our discussions are
more interesting than repetitive.