Keith Vaughan DISS notes: Is there are a solution to the categorisation issues raised by and in ‘queer history’? Reading Lewis, B. (Ed.) (2013a) British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press.
These are notes towards a problem raised in writing an MA dissertation on Keith Vaughan. The initial problem is the categorisation I am aiming to use of ‘gay male artist’ to describe Vaughan.
Queer theory has raised the problem of categorization in rejecting the gay/straight and homo/hetero-sexual binaries to describe the world. Such binaries deal with a problem of categorisation that aims to make the ‘objective’ world more knowable but may NOT in themselves be ontologically valid. They do not name ‘beings’ in the world but only the words we use to know and think about them as beings. Hence even ‘coming out’ is problematic in the world of queer theory since it does not establish what I am but only the terms to begin to know what I might be. Hence the title of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet. The closet is a sign of the binary in which one term (that contained by the closet) is deemed ‘abnormal’ by the other term, dressed as the latter is in the identifying signs of the norm. To all appearances the abnormal, though present, is hidden or occluded. It explains the relegation of the abnormal to a position of required invisibility and invalidity but it is otherwise no different to the norm we conceive to be outside the closet – that into which we come out – which still distinguishes (but now more evidently and clearly) between homosexual and heterosexual.
The end result is that the clear distinction in this binary merely reinforces what we knew, the normality of the ‘heterosexual’, heteronormativity and the relegation of the homosexual, if not to the abnormal then to the status as a minority or in other way less than the heterosexual. This was always difficult for people who had accepted the notion of gay identity. Such identities felt liberating to us subjectively speaking. In fact queer theory told us that they locked us into an epistemology that meant we were always a secondary factor to either a norm or a majority or a fact of biological chance, a probability of difference.
This problem is addressed in Lewis’ anthology. Central to its forthright uncertainty is the opposition between ‘queerness as being’ and ‘queerness as method’ as elaborated by Laura Doan (Lewis 2013b:7). One puzzles about identity and identity politics, accepting knowable and assumed identities as valid categories of description, even if these categories are potentially infinite in number rather than binaries – the LGBTQI+ conundrum. The other assumes that ‘identity’ itself is a fundamentally unknowable, unstable and unreliable descriptor other than for a category which may be in the process of historical emergence or decay. When describing how to think ‘queerly’ about the ‘heterosexual’ Doan quotes Halperin (1964):
- To recuperate the strangeness of the modern sexual past, we cannot forget that in Britain straightness – like queerness – did not always exist ‘as an identity’; more ‘a state of becoming rather than as the referent for an actually existing form of life’. [1]
Houlbrook attempts to describe such strangeness in terms of the biographies of Londoners between the wars in which discourse of class and status were often ‘situated in deceptive practices commonly associated with the fleeting traces of same-sex desire’.[2] Historical social practices and cultural objects enabled for participants ‘particular identifications for very specific social worlds – calling into being temporary provisional affiliations’. In such a scenario we can only suspend ‘both our own categories of sexual identity and the notion of identity itself.’ [3]
This is where I think we can intervene in describing the post-war situation of Vaughan as artist, writer and social agent. We cannot assume, sometimes with him and/or contemporary commentary, an established gay identity but rather a set of provisional identities that emerge through different specific practices, not least in painting but also in his continual inability to think self-interestedly about his class and gender interests, unlike Lehmann whose parties Vaughan attended, as a bourgeois male. In such situations intentions matter less than interpretive potentials.
Of greatest help to me in this anthology is an essay by Chris Waters. He investigates how a notion of ‘group (homosexual) identity’ became potentiated between 1945 and 1968. The potential originated in discourses of homosexuality as a ‘social problem’ but led to the identification of ‘the homosexual group’, seen variously as problem to be addressed (and sometimes eradicated) and sometimes as a group to be nurtured as part of a publically accepted, and thenceforward possibly participatory in defining group homosexual or gay identity. These identities were multiple and fractured bit-parts looked at from a perspective in our present but could threw up useful roles with which some people (mainly but not only men) may profitably take on as ‘identities’. Vaughan I would say is part of a process described by Waters very excellently here. Unlike the sociologist Schofield however he tends to allow his discourse to get broken so that the fractures of ‘self’ become as evident as the temporary legitimacy established for him by his visual art and public/private writings and utterances:
- … Schofield’s 1952 study is suggestive of an ‘uneasy collusion’ between professionals ‘and certain groups of bourgeois queer men’. … (And) articulated a particular image of respectable homosexuality. In this respect, the turn to the social in early post-war writing about homosexuality was as much a product of the desires of queer men to explore and legitimate the actual world they inhabited as it was of experts to map its contours.[4]
Vaughan’s issue was often with that ‘particular image of respectable homosexuality’. It would create a great art out of the ‘dissensual’ (to use Rancière’s term) characteristics of the assembly that won’t (however you attempt to control it), stay consensual and harmonious.
Steve’s note: There is a lot to say before this last bit becomes available for clear statement though!
[1] Doan (2013:103)
[2] Houlbrook (2013:136)
[3] Ibid: 141.
[4] Waters (2013:206). My elisions.
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