Berlant & Warner readings for Feeling Theory

Intimacy is a more troubling idea than Sex in Public. Within an intersectional analysis, it seems that sex and public seem to get some folks in trouble more than others. In referring to the Time Magazine piece on the future of the race/races, the writers offer this point: "But more than exploitation and racism are forgotten in this whirl of projection and suppression. Central to the transfiguration of the immigrant into a nostalgic image to shore up core national culture and allay white fears of minoritization is something that cannot speak its name, though its signature is everywhere: national heterosexuality" (549)

"...intimacy is publicly mediated..." (553)

Berlant and Warner provocatively theorize against the notion that there is private sexuality/identities. Their ideas were lucid, but, somehow, I felt astonished and unsettled by what their argument implied. I do not position myself differently, really, because what they say about heteronormativity and entitlement to space, ideas, identity, and privilege are absolutely the truth. Heteronormativity cannot be linked to whiteness in some oversimplified way but it functions the way whiteness does in mainstream. It is invisible, private, individual, untainted by generalizations. It goes unracialized and unproblematicized. Critical studies in whiteness might be useful to our conversation because at the same time that Roediger and Lipsitz and others ask us to challenge whiteness and a privilege and a possession, the power of whiteness only seems to get more consolidated. Heteronormativity needs to be interrogated by those who benefit from it as well as those who seek to challenge it. Normal is not desired or sought after by the writers in so far as norms /normative connote conforming to dominate ideologies which regulate bodies, ideas and police our desires, our behaviors, our "moralities". Biddy Martin is very nice and cool, but she is also very LIBERAL. That is to say, all gays and lesbians do not want to challenge all social structures within a capitalist framework--some queer folks want to stop those structures that seem to just infringe on their rights (a false notion). It's the NIMBY attitude toward many issues. As long as I can prevent my house from burning down and my neighbors (since they jeopardize my house/safety/property), then I have done my civic duty. Heterosexuality as policy, praxis, assumption is equally insidious as assumptions about white privilege and might be more difficult to 'root out' since it is the scaffolding and the building (interior and exterior, private and public): how do we burn it down without all bodies flying out the windows?

source: Special issue of Critical Inquiry (winter 1998) on Intimacy volume 24: 2