Let's Get Physical:
A Quantum Look at the Queer Space-Time Continuum1
My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose--
Physiologist and Geneticist J.B.S. Haldane,
<1>Possible Worlds (1927)
In this essay, I'll be pointing out some parallels between concepts in physics and in queer
culture. I don't mean to suggest that in using such physical terms as space-time
continuum, quanta, quarks, and warps in the fabric of space-time that I am applying
the laws of physics to the study of folklore. Rather, I'm using them as metaphors.
Space and time are manifestations of the same phenomenon. In fact, we often describe
space in temporal terms: I live an hour north of Indianapolis. Tradition and continuity,
two of the basic notions in folklore, are temporal and spatial concepts. We expect folk
stuff to exhibit historical depth, geographical dispersion, or both. Contemporary legends
are temporally and spatially situated: space and time are part of the definition of that
genre. Performances occur in space and time.
In her extremely influential and distressingly jargony book Gender Trouble, Judith
Butler (following Beauvoir) proposes that gender is performative: "Gender is the
repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory
frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of
being" (p. 33). Gender, then, might be conceived of as a metaphor. And if gender is
performative, it is spatially and temporally determined.
Before going further, I must distinguish between space and place. Place, for my
purposes, refers to a physically bounded area. Space, on the other hand, describes a conceptual area that may not have physical boundaries, may consist of areas that are not
contiguous, or may have no physicality at all (e.g., cyberspace). Thus the space-time
continuum can refer to either a physical or a conceptual context--that is, either a place
or a notion of a space.
For example, Ellis Hanson, in "The Telephone and Its Queerness," writes, "Phone sex [for
gay men] may be an act of mourning for an idealized sexual freedom rumored to have
now disappeared; on the other hand, it may be a refusal to mourn and a challenge to the
validity of the loss itself. The telephone calls up an electrical space that becomes a queer
space, a new space of sexual play and sexual imagination" (44-45).
Our basic metaphor, as queer people, is spatial: "out of the closet" is a spatial metaphor.
We also use other spatial terms, phrases that are increasingly appearing in queer
literature with a new layer of meaning: out of order, out of place, out of time, out of bounds, the ins and outs, outside, outsider, left out, found out, not fitting in. And I'll propose another--inside-out, which aptly describes someone who is out in queer space but otherwise closeted.
Just as something that is inside-out is turned around, jumbled, and confused, so--very
often--is the inside-out queer. One such person might be "Q," an enigmatic, capricious
character in the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek:
Voyager." One wonders what "Q" stands for. The Q Continuum of which he is a part is
immortal and seemingly omnipotent. Q exhibits the power of being outside,
unconstrained by convention. Does Q represent fears of homosexuality? Q is whimsical
and irresponsible, threatening the stability of the heterosexual norm. His power is
manifested through creativity and violation of cultural expectations (stereotypical queer
behavior). And he seems to be infatuated with Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Inside-out queers have often found refuge in relatively obscure queer spaces.
Traditionally, gay bars were unmarked in an almost coded sort of way. To those who
were "wise," they were almost recognizable by their unmarked status, blending into the
background as if to become non-space. Their liminality was both visual and spatial. They
were marginally visible, and they were often situated on the fringes of business districts,
thus in economically and socially liminal zones.
The creation of queer space was originally a direct response to oppression--queer people
were not allowed to be themselves in other contexts. Thus queer space is for many a sort
of sacred space. We experience a sense of violation when outsiders--"tourists"--intrude.
Nevertheless, the academy--a queer sort of space in its own right--intruded extensively.
Researchers apparently were unable to see queer life in a straight context; unless one is
privy to coded messages, he or she cannot collect gay, lesbian, and bisexual folklore in
heterosexual space-time (Radner and Lanser). Therefore sociologists (primarily) had to
venture into the natives' territory to study gay men and their culture. These investigators
visited gay bars (Read), bathhouses (Weinberg and Williams), and tearooms (Humphries,
Delph). They even described "gay ghettoes" (Levine).
However, queer behavior involves foregrounding a liminal, stigmatized identity. To be publicly queer is to be radical, political, and confrontational--simply because one
chooses to ignore or violate heterosexist temporal and spatial boundaries. A common
chant at queer marches and demonstrations in recent years is, "We're here! We're queer!
Get used to it!" "We're here" is clearly spatial. "Get used to it" implies the passage of time.
And the alternative version concludes with another spatial reference: "We're here! We're
queer! And we're not going shopping!" Another common cry is, "We are everywhere!",
which is a subversive, revolutionary spatial assertion.
The homophobic stereotype of gay men as voracious, rapacious, sex fiends, which
attempts to control our behavior through oppression, is based almost solely on a spatial
notion of where we put our genitals when engaging in sex acts. "Legitimate" sexuality is
assigned to a space defined by bedroom walls and to a spatial relationship between
"complementary" sex organs.
Remember the old line, "I don't care what they are (or what they do in their bedrooms),
as long as they don't flaunt it"? Queer behavior, by definition, is flaunted; it could be
considered to be unconstrained by time and space, since it is radical and revolutionary.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that spatialization is a form of exercising
control. But by inverting their marginality and ghettoization, by flaunting their behavior,
queers have reclaimed some control. When queers determine the spaces, they seize
power.
The notion of queer space is fairly obvious. But what about queer time? In her
prize-winning paper "Driving Ms. Thang: Queer Stories and Space in Los Angeles,"
Elizabeth Tarpley Adams quotes a man she calls Sebastian: "It's interesting, that play
between space and time. Because the time creates the space" (8). In her paper, Adams
points out that "people understand the city and their place within it through
storytelling" (2). Similarly, in another prize-winning essay, "Sunburned Nipples, or 'We
All Come from the Goddess': Bodylore at Womyn's Festivals," Lisa L. Higgins describes
lesbians' use of personal experience narratives about body images in specific times and
places--womyn's festivals and lesbian communities.
There are, then, "appropriate times" for gay, lesbian, and bisexual behavior. When queer
acts occur outside these times, conflict can result. These violations of propriety might be
described as queer time. Gay-lesbian-bisexual time used to be equated, at least primarily,
with leisure time. (Thus in this sense, the Industrial Revolution and the development of
leisure for the masses may have contributed to the rise of gay culture.) But such is no
longer the case as people are increasingly spending work, "family," and other "times" in
queer space-time.
Time frames behavior; that is, behavior is time-bound. As a conceptual product, so is
space: it exists only when thought. A frame is a marker or code that sets off certain
behaviors from "normal" life. A frame keeps something in, like a fence; it also keeps
everything else out. The frame identifies a space as a performance space, making the
statement, "What's inside this frame is 'art,' not 'life.'" In this way, frames are a
manifestation of space-time.
Queer space frames queer time, and queer space-time frames queer behavior. In that, it is
analogous to festival. (And it certainly can be festive!) Festivals are generally temporal
entities--they are often associated with specific dates or seasons. Yet festival time
defines its own space. Attributes of festival include inversion, crossdressing, and reversal
of the relationships between the sacred and the profane. Behaviors that are normally
disdained or avoided are encouraged for public display. People tolerate performances
that they would normally abhor. We see all of these strategies at play in queer
space-time. In fact, in queer space-time, the profane becomes sacred; it is elevated and
celebrated. Festivals also play with liminality, bringing the margins to the center. In
queer space-time, a marginal group assumes center stage.
Craig Miller's outstanding presentation at the 1993 American Folklore Society meeting,
"Gay Rodeo: A Celebration of Rural Heritage and Gay Culture," documents one
particularly queer festival. Another, Halloween, might be called the foremost public
queer festival in America.
As one of the most popular holidays among homosexual men, Halloween, or Queers'
Christmas as it is sometimes called, offers opportunities for men to appear publicly in
drag or other costumes and to behave with a license normally not afforded them. The
celebration allows gay men to take off the "masks" they normally wear to hide their
sexuality. Through the transforming power of festival, homosexual men can "pretend" to
be the people they really are. (Mardi Gras serves much the same purpose.)
Festivals also encourage a blurring of the distinctions between private and public. Thus
at Halloween, behavior that normally is kept hidden from the heterosexual world is
paraded in the streets of some larger cities. And because festivals, like humor, are
considered to be "play," one is not expected to take seriously the actions one witnesses.
This unspoken rule allows gays to publicly play with gender roles and sexuality on
Halloween. With costumes that range from drag to g-strings, men can flaunt their
homosexuality and with impunity rebel against the constraints imposed upon them by
the heterosexual majority. In doing so, they present a theatrical version of gay life, what
the world expects to see, playing with and exaggerating the stereotypes normally used
to oppress queer people. Thus many gay men experience Halloween as a time when they
can take off their masks and be themselves. In other words, they can for a time stop
performing the role of the heterosexual male; they can be openly gay, comfortable in the
assumption that most people will consider the gay behavior to be the performance. In a
most fabulous way, our lives are art.
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, I contradict myself,
(I am large; I contain multitudes.)"
--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, (51)
We find the interplay between freedom and constraint even at the subatomic level.
Quanta are "the basic stuff from which the entire universe is made" (Talbot, 34). They
exist simultaneously as waves and particles. They are both/and, not either/or. Michael
Talbot goes so far as to describe electrons as being "like some shapeshifter out of
folklore" (33). One of the more fascinating and bizarre aspects of quantum particles is
that observation instantly forces them to assume one state. Under scrutiny, they are
forced to conform to narrow expectations. Unobserved, they are free to be any and all
possibilities.
This concept--that observation affects the observed--has been familiar to folklore
fieldworkers for decades. It is also implied in Butler's argument that gender is
performative and thus, by extension, set or determined by observation. And social
constructionist arguments seem to suggest that gay and lesbian culture did not exist
until homosexuality was acknowledged and named (read, "observed") in the
mid-nineteenth century.
Quarks are particles that carry fractional electric charges. Although physicists had
predicted six different "flavors" of quarks, only five had been discovered until recently:
up, down, and bottom (all spatial terms), as well as charm and strange. Are these names
queer or what? Finally, in 1995, scientists announced their discovery of the last elusive
quark: top. It is surprising that the discovery took so long. After all, doesn't everyone
claim to be a top?
It turns out that top is 35,000 times heavier than up and down. On March 2, 1995,
chubby chasers at Fermilab announced that they had at last found one. The
World-Wide Web page from which I gathered this information, by the way, offered me
the opportunity to, quote, "Look at a real top event." (Believe me, I was tempted, but I
was afraid to follow that link because of the Communications Decency Act.)2
Quoting again: "The fifth and six quarks were originally called truth and beauty"--I'm
not making any of this up. Talk about an obsession with faggy stereotypes of the
importance of sex roles and physical appearance: "No, I really am a top! That's the truth!
And you're beautiful!"
Since the top quark is so heavy, it seems appropriate to point out that gravity can warp
the fabric of space-time. This principle underlies the "warp engines" that allow star ships
to exceed the speed of light in the "Star Trek" programs. Needless to say, homophobic
types would consider queers to be warped as well. (Given my several references to "Star
Trek," I would be remiss in failing to note Linda Pershing's queer reading of the "Star
Trek" canon in her 1993 American Folklore Society paper, "To Boldly Go Where No One
Has Gone Before: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Star Trek.")
You've probably believed for years that one object cannot be in two places at once. Not
any more! Recently, scientists have managed to force a beryllium atom to remain in two
places simultaneously (Winters 1996). Similarly, through coding, ambiguity, etc., queer
space-time can occupy the same physical space-time as heterosexual space-time. That is,
queers can simultaneously occupy both "normal" space-time and a different conceptual
space-time through the use of their esoteric knowledge. This notion is similar to my
discussions elsewhere of multiple perceptions of context (Goodwin 1989). Our dual
nature (queer but raised hetero- or asexual, wave and particle, strange and charm, here
and there) provides us with the required interpretive framework to "crossread" texts.
In times past, coding enabled gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to discover hidden
queerness in texts. Now we read queerness even when it is not intentional. That is, we
can read queer messages into texts that don't necessarily contain them objectively. My
comments on Q from "Star Trek" and on quarks--in fact, this entire essay--are examples
of queer readings of non-queer data. And queer readings of queer-coded texts offer
greater depth than in the past, as is evident in Michèle Aina Barale's explication of Ann
Bannon's 1962 lesbian classic Beebo Brinker as a doubly coded tale subversively
designed to lure in heterosexual male readers.
In Out in Culture, Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty offer a great example of crossreading a classic movie, a queer favorite, describing it as if it were set in queer
space-time: "To take a privileged example from camp's (counter) canon, MGM's
wholesome children's fantasy The Wizard of Oz and its child star Judy Garland, could be
elaborated in terms of their camp functions: The Wizard of Oz is a story in which
everyone lives in two very different worlds, and in which most of its characters live two
very different lives, while its emotionally confused and oppressed teenaged heroine
longs for a world in which her inner desires can be expressed freely and fully. Dorothy
finds this world in a Technicolor land 'over the rainbow' inhabited by a sissy lion, an
artificial man who cannot stop crying, and a butch-femme couple of witches. This is a
reading of the film that sees the film's fantastic excesses (color, costume, song,
performance, etc.) as expressing the hidden lives of many of its most devoted viewers,
who identified themselves as 'friends of Dorothy'" (3).
Q, quanta, quarks--you know, seeing the parallels between the queer space-time
continuum and the realities of quantum physics, I must conclude that being queer is the
natural state of the universe. And with that, I am out of time.
Notes
1. I originally presented this paper at the American Folklore Society meeting in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 18, 1996.
2. The Communications Decency Act was an attempt by some members of the United
States Congress to control or eliminate "cyberpornography." Passed in 1996, the act was essentially overturned in 1997 when the Supreme Court ruled that all of its provisions were unconstitutional.
Bibliography
Adams, Elizabeth T. (1994). "Driving Ms. Thang: Queer Stories and Space in Los
Angeles." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society,
Milwaukee.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1968). Rabelais and His World. Helene Iswolsky, trans. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.
Barale, Michèle Aina (1993). "When Jack Blinks: Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannon's Beebo Brinker," in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 604-15.
Bohr, Niels (1958 [1938]). "Natural Philosophy and Human Cultures." In Niels Bohr,
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 23-31.
Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Contemporary Physics Education Project and Particle Data Group (1996). "The Top
Quark." http://www-pdg.lbl.gov/cpep/top_quark.html.
Creekmur, Corey K., and Alexander Doty (1995). Introduction. Out in Culture: Gay,
Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture. Durham, North Carolina: Duke
University Press, 1-11.
Delph, Edward William (1978). The Silent Community: Public Homosexual Encounters. Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications.
Dynes, Wayne R. (1990). "Social Construction Approach." In Wayne R. Dynes, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
Fillingham, Lydia Alix (1993). Foucault for Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc.
Foucault, Michel (1977). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Robert Hurley, trans. New York: Pantheon.
Georges, Robert A., and Michael O. Jones (1980). People Studying People: The Human
Element in Fieldwork. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Goffman, Erving (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.
------ (1963a). Behavior in Public Places. London: Collier-MacMillan, Ltd., The Free Press of Glencoe.
------ (1963b). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
------ (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Goodwin, Joseph P. (1989). More Man Than You'll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and
Acculturation in Middle America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hanson, Ellis (1995). "The Telephone and Its Queerness." In Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett,
and Susan Leigh Foster, eds., Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the
Representation of Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 34-58.
Higgins, Lisa L. (1995). "Sunburned Nipples, or 'We All Come from the Goddess':
Bodylore at Womyn's Festivals." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, Lafayette, Louisiana.
Humphreys, Laud (1970). Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Chicago: Aldine.
Levine, Martin P. (1979). "Gay Ghetto." In Martin P. Levine, ed., Gay Men: The
Sociology of Male Homosexuality. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 182-204.
Miller, Craig R. (1993). "Gay Rodeo: A Celebration of Rural Heritage and Gay Culture."
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, Eugene,
Oregon.
Pershing, Linda (1993). "To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before: Lesbians, Gays,
Bisexuals, and Star Trek." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American
Folklore Society, Eugene, Oregon.
Plummer, Kenneth (1975). Sexual Stigma: An Interactionist Account. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Radner, Jo, and Susan Lanser (1993). "Gay Talk in Straight Company: Strategies of
Complicit Coding by Lesbians and Gay Men." Paper presented at the annual meeting of
the American Folklore Society, Eugene, Oregon.
Read, Kenneth E. (1980). Other Voices: The Style of a Male Homosexual Tavern.
Novato, California: Chandler & Sharp Publishers, Inc.
Ritchie, Michael S. (1993). "'Are Bert and Ernie Gay?': Subversive Interpretation of
Popular Culture." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Folklore
Society, Eugene, Oregon.
Talbot, Michael (1991). The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers.
Weinberg, Martin S., and Colin J. Williams (1979). "Gay Baths and the Social
Organization of Impersonal Sex." In Martin P. Levine, ed., Gay Men: The Sociology of
Male Homosexuality. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 164-81.
Winters, Jeffrey (1996). "Quantum Cat Tricks." Discover, October 1996, 26.
Newfolk :: NDiF :: Archive :: Issue 4.1 :: Page 1 ::
|