On Mikkola and Pickett

I have several major issues with Homosexuality by Brent Pickett. While Pickett’s article, along with Mari Mikkola’s Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender, is very thorough analysis of its topic, it contains some content that I take issue with, especially when he writes about queer theory as a counter to essentialism, saying:

 “queer does not marginalize those whose sexuality is outside the gay or lesbian norm, such as sado-masochists. Since specific conceptualizations of sexuality are avoided, and hence not put at the center of any definition of queer, it allows more freedom for self-identification for, say, black lesbians to identify as much or more with their race (or any other trait, such as involvement in  an S&M subculture) than with lesbianism” -(Pickett 19). 

While the interpretation here is sound on a basic level, there is a fundamental problem with it: while it mentions those who fall “outside the gay and lesbian norm,” it fails to specify those between the gay and straight norm, furthering the idea of the two as opposites rather than different sides of a spectrum. In doing this, Pickett is taking part in bisexual erasure. To be fair, he does acknowledge the problems of an exclusive, essentialist gay liberation movement, and the importance of self-identification by race, ethnicity, and/or fetish culture- he just fails to acknowledge any self-identification beyond this. This is a trend that can be seen in much discussion of sexuality today that I don’t approve of. I believe that sexuality is a spectrum, a continuum, and ignoring that is highly problematic.

Mari Mikkola’s article was decidedly less off-putting than Pickett’s for me as a reader. I truly admire the way in which she analyzes and synthesizes a wide variety of viewpoints that differ radically at times. One of my favorite quotes from the article is about “white solipsism,” which she describes as

“assum[ing] that all women share some ‘golden nugget of womanness’…and that the features consecutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender”- (Mikkola 13). 

Here Mikkola argues by way of Elizabeth Spelman that feminism is a very wide-ranging movement that goes beyond one color or one class, as opposed to the viewpoint put forth by Betty Freidan and others that feminism was one uniform block unaffected by race, ethnicity, class, creed or culture, and that this viewpoint had major flaws.

Overall, both of these articles were very informative, even though they did have their issues. I look forward to discussing them further in class and hearing other points of view students had about them.