Uncannily Queer Iberia: the Past and Present of
Imperial Panic Mary Gossy, Rutgers University
It often happens that neurotic men declare that they
feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This
unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim
[home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a
time and in the beginning. There is a joking saying that Love is
home-sickness; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says
to himself, while he is still dreaming: this place is familiar to me,
Ive been here before, we may interpret the place as being his
mothers genitals or her body. In this case too, then, the
unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix
un- is the token of repression.
(Sigmund Freud, The
Uncanny 245)
The introduction to the book that gives
this Symposium its name does a great job of drawing together the words
queer and Iberia, especially, I think, when it links
Américo Castros project with a deconstructive understanding of the
difference it takes as its subject: Castro and his school effected in
essence a queering of Iberian history by exposing the Semitic roots
of modern Spanish identity and by outing as the descendants of Jews or Muslims
such icons as Fernando el Católico, Teresa of Ávila,
and Cervantes (Hutcheson and Blackmore 3). The authors continue,
[i]t is in this sense that we might understand queerness, as that which
normativity (in this case a cultural normativity) must reject or conceal in
order to exist. There is much evidence supporting the logic of the
conscious or unconscious linkage of anti-semitism with homophobia. [T]hat
which is rejected or concealed is also feminized; it is in this respect,
too, that the queer is also uncanny. Freud says that the
uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar (220) - known and embodied, but repressed.
The queer is always palpable in the incongruities, excesses,
or anxieties of normative discourse, but it is only exceptionally given
expression [one might guess, when the internal pressure builds to an
intolerable level, or, conversely, when it seems safe or meaningless to do so],
and this only at the margins (Hutcheson and Blackmore 3).
The
collection amply and convincingly demonstrates the ways in which queerness is
embedded in the fiction that is the building and maintenance of empire. There
are some clarifications I would like to add to that statement, though. First,
although I know that the imperial is a fiction, I also know that it is a
fiction with real power of life and death over bodies of flesh and blood. The
queer can and does constantly point to the fictitiousness, the
constructed-ness, that is, the unnaturalness of empire. Queer and
empire can be read as binary oppositions, with empire
ever dependent on, and ever denying, its need for queer. My concern
for today has to do with advancing the project of Queer Iberia in this
context, which brings me to my second clarification. To what degree is queer
not only embedded in empire, but also in bed with empire?
If queerness
is what normativity must reject or conceal in order to exist, then
what does normative queerness disown? One would think that
normative and queer could never work as a pair, yet
millions of happily married straight couples sprint avidly to new
Almodóvar films. An essay like Greg Hutchesons on Álvaro de
Luna shows clearly how queer-baiting can help sustain myths of nation or
empire. But I am suggesting a next move: are we willing to analyze the
queer in Queer Iberia, now that the concept of a queer
Iberia has been normalized as a canonical text by a prestigious series at a
prestigious university press? (It even has a life-partner, Bergmann
and Smiths ¿Entiendes?)
In the past, we who study
Iberia have sometimes waited for scholars in other disciplines to do this kind
of work first, and then picked up their tools to do some groundbreaking in our
still definitely peculiar field. It is a fact that the literatures and
histories of Spain and Portugal are still largely unread and considered
inessential, even for the study of modern imperialism (to me a most telling
symptom of denial). This time, can we use our oddly privileged position -we can
see things from here that they cannot see from over there- in order to expand
the debate, to cultivate new understandings of queerness, not only for
ourselves, but for students in many fields?
I still think this is the
main challenge before scholars of Iberia. There is a reason why scholars in
other fields remain ignorant of our work. It is a choice, albeit probably an
unconscious one. What we have to say is too disturbing, hits too close to home.
It is uncanny. Nevertheless, it pervades the global visual culture of the
imperial pax Hollywoodiana. There is a reason why the pseudonym that
Russell Crowes character chooses in Gladiator is the
Spaniard. In that mishmosh blockbuster allegory of global corporate
capitalism (either that, or academia), Spain (in the Roman sense, Hispania,
Iberia) is the great disruptor, the unstoppable emissary who insists on
demonstrating that the emperor, empire itself, is a big cheater. People who
work in our field have some very interesting things to add to contemporary
debates, and the more familiar we are with the past, the more willing we are to
experience the uncanny, the better for our present. Our innovation will rest on
our capacity to engage questions like, What does queer reject or
conceal in order to exist?; How do we keep queering
queer?
Iberia is definitely queer, but that fact has not been
consciously engaged outside our small circle. Speaking from this location,
literally around the corner from the place where some of the foundational texts
of the US government were scratched onto paper, I wonder if it is too much to
say that the lessons communicated by medieval and renaissance Iberia could be
of use in our present situation of imperial panic. We can continue our honest
work, not by normalizing queer as yet another commodity in the
bizarrely overpriced academic marketplace, but rather by enjoying it as a tool
for untying the pleasures and truths of the cultures we study. Through reading,
teaching and writing, we can recognize our own flesh and blood in the
strangest, most uncanny of places.