In the course of perusing every video essay on YouTube tangentially related to content I love, a part of me has always lingered with one written by Ruby Seals, a transgender woman who created the channel Codex Entry to discuss the creative media she is most passionate about. The video essay format is often presented as an unpolished and semi-professional article of love from its publisher, however, and Sealsβs are no exception. Really, one of the essays that has lingered with me has largely because of its argument and the anecdotal evidence she uses to support it, presented after breaking βcharacterβ via the guise of professionality. In particular, there is a moment during that 15-minute section of the video in which she considers:
Any diehard fan of one story or another will tell you that, when you spend enough time with a narrative you love, you start to ask some really niche questions about it that result in you coming up with explanations which you begin to just quietly accept as true. (Codex Entry, 2022)
There is a tendency when consuming and enjoying popular media to project oneβs own experiences and biases onto its story. When someone loves a work and wants to connect with it further, they hypothesize and assume details in the cavities the author left behind. They explain their attachment towards it by citing personal experiences: the memories they made consuming it, the retrospection they had for it in the aftermath, and the derivative work they make in the longer run. It is something I have done online, acknowledge doing, and surely will continue to do with similar games and works.
But the vocal majority of online and offline humans draw the line in the sand there. The projection is intended to end where other humans and histories come into the picture. The assumption of intention from an author towards their work is accepted; the assumption of experience of an author outside of it is not. The texts in weeks two through six of this course on LGBTQ+ studies give academic life to the refusal of real-life projection: the concept is dubbed as βperverse presentism,β and its usage becomes an entry point to understanding the foundations and tenets of LGBTQ+ studies today.
Perverse presentism, as coined by Jack Halberstram (1998), is the projection of contemporary structures and concepts onto figures in history. When an event of the past and surrounding evidence appears anomalous to the modern eye, the solution is not to discuss it from a modern lens. Contemporary terminologies are often incompatible with history because their definitions are based on contemporary cultural experience. Lesbian, a common identity label today, first labeled what originated from the island of Lesbos; labels such as dyke and queer have been reclaimed by their users from their derogatory origins, while others like transvestite have been contended (Meem et al., 2023).
Halberstram (1998) and Meem et al. (2023) both stress the importance of consciously considering perverse presentism, challenging its presence in othersβ analyses, and avoiding it coloring our own. Countless analyses in the academic and professional libraries witness behavior anomalous to the history of male-female sexuality and debate them through perverse presentism. A literature teacher may contend with answering, decidedly for their trusting students, whether Shakespeareβs homoerotic poetry suggests he is gay, at least a hundred years before homosexuality was written in text (Charles, 1998; Meem et al., 2023). A museum may consider (though in this case, the Dickinson museum chose against it) retelling Emily Dickinsonβs affectionate letters to her sister-in-law as the predecessors to contemporary sapphicism, though they were published in an era of widespread βromantic friendshipsβ for women of Dickinsonβs class (Lowe, 2015; Meem et al., 2023). These analyses are flawed for their presentism, but in a similar holistic approach to Halberstramβs of perverse presentism, we should reflect on their origins similarly.
The scenarios presented in the previous paragraph illustrate a growing desire to name and depict the anomaly of non-male-female sexuality and binary identity. Each text succeeds the exponential growth of lesbian and gay activism and their corresponding collegiate studies which began in the 1970s (Amory et al., 2022). Lesbian and gay studies identified historic anomalies as a secret trail of homosexuality: a view of sexuality that did not culminate in, but persisted in identical form to the definitions of lesbianism and gay homosexuality of the 1970s. Lesbian and gay scholars saw those definitions as the contours of βa fixed and innate sexual identity that was both universal and transhistoricalβ (Amory et al., 2022). But perverse presentism, debuting nearly twenty years later and in the same year that Charles debated the homosexual interpretation of Shakespeareβs sonnets, followed the alternate line of thought put forward by authors such as Michel Foucault. They argued for constructivism: to approach historical identities by the cultures of their eras and to define them by values unique to their time over our own. In constructivism and perverse presentism, culture and community are shape-shifters: Shakespeare, Dickinson, and many others cannot be considered contemporaneously heterosexual or homosexual, but as painters of human sexuality in their time.
Further, note that one cannot even assume Shakespeare or Dickinson to be any equivalent to heterosexual; not only is the definition of heterosexuality exclusive to our recent definitions, but to assume heterosexuality in the absence of sexual deviance surrenders to Western heteronormativity. Again, remember that to reflect on historical analyses and to understand the errors we strive to avoid is to consider the origins of their errors holistically. We see evidence of variation in how societies interpret gender and sexuality on a national and global scale, from hijras in South Asia to the identities of precolonial tribes in Africa and the United States, and we see evidence that they were coined before Western terminology grew in popularity. Why do we assumeβor expect, as Deloria (2004) phrasesβsomething normalized in our culture to be universally true? And why specifically do we interpret an anomaly as what it is? Deloria contextually refers to the anomaly of Native Americans in Western culture, but his analysis can be applied identically to other perceived differences in society of gender and sexuality. Ultimately, to assume heterosexuality as the default stems from our own innate bias, which in turn stems from the cultural beliefs which have shaped us. In order to study queer theory and global history on critical and academic grounds, we need to dispel our preexisting cultural views and study history with a clean slate. Otherwise, we will fail to observe the nuances of histories and cultures, and we will never be able to expand our own understandings of queerness.
Ruby Sealsβs discussion of the assumptions we project onto our favorite fictional media comes to mind; in this paper, for the final time. By nature, without the necessity to analyze a piece critically and comprehensively, we are likely to imprint our own views: narrow by the scope of what we alone know, and limited to the culture and context that shaped us. For a contemporary world in which much of this work is chronologically recent, we may not even be far off from the true context of the work. The concepts of constructivism and essentialism do not superimpose onto recent fiction as neatly as they do for our own historiesβand our own histories are innately messy. There is an entire other analysis to be made about the assumption of sexuality and identity in contemporary media, and even why this, as well as the identifying work of lesbian and gay studies, matters. But now that contemporary identities have been outlined and globalized,Β a different approach is necessary. To analyze the full histories and lives of real people across the globe requires understanding the nuances of perverse presentism. To understand the foundation of queer theory requires the context of how and why perverse presentism came to be defined, and the many ways it colors our views of the recent past and of today. Only then can we study queer theory for all that Teresa de Laurentis and countless scholarsΒ who popularized queer theory intended it to propose.
References
- Amory, D. P., Massey, S. G., Miller, J., & Brown, A.P. (2022). Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach. State University of New York Press. https://milnepublishing.geneseo.edu/introlgbtqstudies/
- Charles, C. (1998). Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy. College Literature, 25(3), 35β51. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112402
- Codex Entry (2022, November 20). Pathologic: The Marble Nest, For Those Who Will Never Play It (Summary & Analysis) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8SI_JIZfh0
- Deloria, P. J. (2004). Indians in Unexpected Places. University Press of Kansas.
- Halberstam, J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cwb00
- Lowe, H. I. (2015). Dwelling in Possibility: Revisiting Narrative in the Historic House Museum. The Public Historian, 37(2), 42β60. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2015.37.2.42
- Deborah T. Meem, Jonathan Alexander, Key Beck, & Michelle A. Gibson. (2023). Finding Outβ―: An Introduction to LGBTQ Studies: Vol. Fourth edition. SAGE Publications, Inc.