Perfil energético de los consumidores

At the heart of the discourses of American history that have proven so unwelcoming (when not actively hostile) to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT)395 persons are a number of strategic rhetorics that patrol the borders of American identity and regulate the inclusion of marginalized groups within the wider culture. As we have already seen in this dissertation, strategic rhetorics of whiteness, maleness, and wealth are just some of those prominent, yet mostly invisible or unnoticed, strategic forces that have both constrained the ability of GLBT people to be represented in history by heterosexuals and that have limited the ways GLBT people are rendered visible when they are represented. This chapter continues the examination of the “strategic turn” within GLBT memory rhetorics, highlighting another form of strategic rhetoric at play within queer public memory with both benefits and problematic effects on GLBT representation in the past: American nationalism.

The study of nationalism has been a prominent part of twentieth-century historical, political, and cultural thought. Influential within this study, international studies scholar Benedict

395

Within this chapter, the terms “gay, lesbians, and bisexual” (or GLB) are differentiated by GLBT or GLBTQ primarily to reflect the texts and to delineate an evolution of thinking and inclusion on the part of later advocates. Thus, while early advocates only expressed gay, lesbian, and bisexual concerns in the early 1980s, advocates in the late 1990s and the new millennium broadened their outlook to include self-identified transgender persons and queers.

Anderson defines nationalism as “an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”396 By this, Anderson conceives of nationalism as the creative and productive (i.e., rhetorical) forces by which people come to “imagine” themselves as part of a large, contained group of persons, sharing a limited and specific set of characteristics and experiences, especially a shared past and/or culture. In his germinal work, Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson traces the development of nationalism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its subsequent circulation and alterations around the world in ways that highlight its rhetorical nature. As rhetorically invested phenomenon, studies of both history and public memory have been significantly influenced by work on nationalism, national identity, and national culture. The ways in which memory has been used rhetorically to construct national imaginings — through monuments and memorials, commemorative sites, flags, parades, heritage celebrations, and rituals — have been a key point of intersection in significant scholarship on public memory. Indeed, the construction of “American-ness” has been a formative dimension of interdisciplinary and rhetorical work in memory studies.397

While public and collective memory have often been the primary terms within discourses about nationalism during the last few decades, forgetting has come into its own right as a highly rhetorical force in shaping public understanding of the nation. As Christopher Castiglia so well points out in his quotation of Anderson: “All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesia…out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives.”398 The rearticulation of national identity is one such “change

396

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983, rpt. 2003) 6.

397

For instance, three prominent examples useful in completion of this chapter include Bodnar,

Remaking America; Kammen, The Mystic Chords of Memory; Gillis, Commemorations.

398

in consciousness” ripe with fruitful forgettings. Indeed, Anderson suggests that both forgetting and remembering are necessary for the successful imagining of a national community. Rhetoricians studying the rhetorical construction of the nation have echoed this dynamic. For instance, M. Lane Bruner suggests in his rhetorical analysis of national identity construction that “all forms of identification and the narratives that accompany them simultaneously create a field of absence, and Other, and/or forms of forgetfulness.”399 Bruner goes on to demonstrate these forgettings in the national contexts of Germany, Canada, and Russia in the late twentieth century. Likewise, Bradford Vivian forcefully argues that what he labels as “public forgetting” can free communities from troublesome or traumatic pasts, allowing them to “begin anew.” For Vivian, public forgetting is “an equally rhetorical phenomenon” to public memory that can “coin a novel public idiom with which the community’s relation to its past, present, and future would be configured anew, or at least in profoundly altered ways.”400 In these assessment, each articulation (or rather rearticulation) of national identity brings with it simultaneous erasures or forgettings that make these new articulations consistent, viable, and believable. In this way, we tend to insist upon stories of national identity that must maintain what Walter Fisher labels as “narrative rationality.” By this, Fisher suggests we judge the viability of our shared stories by whether they create a sense of probability through an internal coherence and whether they keep fidelity with other stories that are true in our lives.401 The narrative of American national identity is no exception.

However, while forgetting may indeed be a vital part of how nations are constructed, central to the process is who is doing the remembering and the forgetting. In the case of gays,

399

Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance, 7.

400

Vivian, Public Forgetting, 13.

401

Walter R. Fisher, “Narrative as Human Communication Paradigm,” Communication

lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons the fact that strategic memory and forgetting has almost exclusively been within the purview of heterosexuals is extremely consequential for the way they are understood within contemporary society. Indeed, returning to Fisher’s narrative rationality, the story or narrative of the American nation told by heterosexual culture would put much unquestioned privilege at risk by acknowledging the full extent to which same-sex desire, homosexuality, and homosexuals have been an important part of the past. In particular, in regards to history’s narrative fidelity, Fisher suggests “questions of consequence” may emerge which highlight the benefits that would accrue to people who adhered to that telling of the story.402 Heterosexual history is ripe with heterosexual adherents whose many privileges are made possible (consciously and unconsciously) by the forgetting of homosexuals from historical narratives. These privileges include: financial and material rewards for heterosexual couples based upon the assumption that heterosexual married relationships are and have always been the norm; privileges of leadership and power that can easily dispatch with challengers whom might identify otherwise; feelings of moral superiority and religious piety when homosexuals are marginalized as a few passing sinners; permission to assault and even kill sexual non- conformists that might threaten the logic of heterosexuality; and security that one’s own sexual practices and identity are stable and secure. This list does not exhaust the privileges afforded to public heterosexuals by the forgetting of homosexuals in memory, but they point to just how dangerous and threatening disrupting this already existing narrative might be.

Given such overwhelming benefit to heterosexuals in controlling the levers of public memory and forgetting — which they often characterize wrongly as objective history — gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who have sought to represent themselves in heterosexual renderings of

402

Walter R. Fisher, Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason,

the past have faced significant roadblocks to doing so — often forcing them to select among a variety of highly constrained and sometimes compromised rhetorical choices or face oblivion. This is not surprising given the way in which gays, lesbians, and other marginalized groups are positioned within hegemonic culture, as Lester Olson points out in his analysis of traumatic styles:

Advocates exemplifying traumatic styles [like gays, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people] have made risky decisions in negotiating multiple double binds understood as lose-lose options…Whichever “choice” speakers and their audiences may make in response to unwelcome messages concerning yet another sexual assault, yet another violent act, yet another of the homicides affecting one of “us” — however “us” is understood — the decision entails significant losses.403

This chapter examines some of the choices — some tactical, some strategic, and some combining both — and their attendant losses made by an evolving coalition of gay, lesbian, and bisexual advocates in California over the last thirty years to counter heterosexual culture’s strategic forgetting (the recognition of transgender and queer concerns among this group would emerge in time). The texts in this effort were public school textbooks and curriculums and how they could be reformed to represent gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Rhetoricians studying

403

Lester C. Olson, “Traumatic Styles in Public Address: Audre Lorde’s Discourse as Exemplar,” in Morris, Queering Public Address, 254.

nationalism have largely overlooked these primary texts. Nonetheless, they remain a vital arena for constructing nationalism that is both highly rhetorical and critically important to explaining how gays, lesbians, and bisexuals do or do not enter the national imaginary. Indeed, as rhetorician Michael Calvin McGee has noted, from an ideological perspective, “grammar school history” may be the most “truly influential manifestation” of popular ideographs like nationalism.404

It is important to note that, despite this dissertation’s focus on public memory, the focus of the advocates in this chapter seems to be on the distinctly different issue of history. As already discussed in the introduction, drawing the line between history and memory has been a difficult task for scholars. However, one of the most influential characterizations of the two by Pierre Nora suggests that memory reflects the lived and embodied ritual way of being present in the everyday lives of people while history is a constructed narrative used by society to compensate for the increasing loss of memory: “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. ... History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.”405 As such, an examination of history textbooks in public schools would suggest memory has little place. However, it is because history is so “problematic and incomplete” that memory’s role becomes entirely necessary. While the gaps in history can, at times, result from limitations in access, archives, and understanding, I would argue that many of history’s absences (generally and within public school textbooks) are also a result of intentional erasures, misrepresentations, and strategic forgettings in favor of supporting the privileges of

404

Michael Calvin McGee, “The Ideograph: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” Quarterly

Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 11-12; while Anderson is loathe to label nationalism an ideology, he tends

to characterize ideologies in blatant political terms like liberalism or fascism. Defined more broadly, nationalism could certainly qualify as ideological in the way McGee describes. See Anderson, Imagined

Communities, 5.

405

dominant culture; those, incidentally, usually doing the history writing. Thus, in certain key ideological zones within culture (like schools), history’s incompleteness is a rhetorical choice, not a disciplinary necessity. If this is true, it is possible that memories can be used to complete or at least supplement the already incomplete history we teach our children. This is what gay, lesbian, and bisexual advocates in California have done for three decades: attempt to state in public their shared memories of GLBT people both to draw attention to the strategic forgettings foisted upon public school children and to ameliorate history’s incompleteness with a different way of imaging of the past.

Given the way history is presented within ideological texts like textbooks, including GLBT people into that history is not just an act of historical correction, but also brings with it cultural consequences. While some public heterosexuals have vigorously contested these consequences, gay, lesbian, and bisexual advocates have suggested the inclusion of their public memories within textbooks would have life enhancing effects for both the GLBT community and heterosexual communities alike. Among these benefits, described across several decades have been increased self-confidence in gay and lesbian youth, broader appreciation for diversity and greater understanding by heterosexual students, a more accurate historical image, a decrease in bullying and harassment of gay and lesbian students, decreased number of perpetrated hate crimes, increased support for same sex-marriage, reductions in the always high teen suicide rate among gays and lesbians, and a more just and equitable culture.406

406

For instance, see Jessea Greenman, “Statement to the State of California Curriculum Commission,” July 18, 1990, Project 21, GLAAD/SFBA Records, GLBT Historical Society Collection, GLC17, Box 1, Folder 43, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library; Gil Kaufman, “California Senate Passes Bill Requiring Gay History Education,” MTV News, May 12, 2006, http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1531648/20060512/story.jhtml (accessed March 24, 2011); Wyatt Buchanan and Greg Lucas, “Bill Would Include Gays in Public School Texts,” San Francisco Chronicle,

In pursuit of these goals, this essay assesses different elements of the wider movement for GLBT inclusion within the California public school curriculum, examining their rhetorical imaginings and performances and investigating the consequences of their tactical and strategic choices on queer public memory. To study these rhetorics, I examine fragments of discourse collected from the archives, public speeches, statements, press releases, publications, media coverage, and image events of the movements. While representational claims might be more ideally described by examining the textbooks and curriculums that resulted from this advocacy movement, it is important to note that no part of the movement has been fully successful in winning substantial changes to the point that such texts have been created. Nonetheless, the rich discourse reconstituted here represents the rhetorical imaginings of different voices in this effort in ways that telegraph their shared and divergent rhetorical wishes sufficiently for critical analysis.

Given this orientation to the California textbook debates, this chapter proceeds as follows. First, I will quickly outline the rhetorical dimensions of textbooks and how they function to shape the rhetorical imaginings of nationalism in general and American nationalism in particular. Second, I detail how gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorities — when remembered in American history — have regularly been defined as anti-national figures, primarily as scapegoats for public heterosexuals in pursuit of divergent and often inconsistent efforts to secure heterosexual privilege. Next, I will trace two of the most prominent rhetorical efforts undertaken to reimagine the GLB (and later T and Q) past and their relationship to American nationalism, each using a thoughtful both/and approach towards rhetorical tactics and strategies to make their cases. In each case, I will suggest both the virtues and disadvantages

April 16, 2006, http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-04-16/bay-area/17289654_1_sexual-orientation-gay-pride-

posed by attempting to reimagine the past in these ways. I will conclude with some reflections on these choices by GLB(TQ) advocates and their consequences for public understanding of the past generally.