How Discourse Creates Homosexuality

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Popularity has a funny way of correcting or reversing itself, says journalist and film critic A.O. Scott. It's a weird and fickle index—never identical to quality, though it can coincide with it.Movies like Avatar that are capitalist consumer hits can fade over time. Meanwhile works that were initially passed over can be dredged out of forgotten corners to glory many years later.Moby Dick is an example of how critics can turn the tide of popularity, for better and for worse. First, critics dismissed Moby Dick and it was forgotten until a resurgence of interest by critics many years later. It's now a staple of American literature.

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A.O. SCOTT

A. O. Scott joined The New York Times as a film critic in January 2000, and was named a chief critic in 2004. Previously, Mr. Scott had been the lead Sunday book reviewer for Newsday and a frequent contributor to Slate, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.


Mr. Scott was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism in 2010, the same year he served as co-host (with Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune) on the last season of "At the Movies," the syndicated film-reviewing program started by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel.


A frequent presence on radio and television, Mr. Scott is Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University and the author of Better Living Through Criticism (2016, Penguin Press).




 


 

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TRANSCRIPT:

A. O. SCOTT: Popularity is a great question; it's just an intriguing question. I think especially now in the kind of consumer capitalist culture where taste and sometimes quality is being measured in dollars and in numbers and in ratings and box office and all of that. And sometimes popularity is just taken to be sufficient kind of judgment. It's like well everybody liked that and that movie made a ton of money. Everybody loved that movie. And sometimes those movies that everybody loved actually turn out to be really good or I think they're really good. Sometimes they're not. But the popularity has a funny way of correcting or reversing itself. It's always fascinating to me how when I was a kid every single person it seemed bought this album, "Frampton Comes Alive". And it was like the biggest selling album. I mean I'm dating myself. I'm a very old person, but it was on vinyl. And then like five years later you could not give a copy of that—like no used record store would take your copy of that in trade and just bins were full of it. Everyone was just like, "What? No." And you see that with popular music; you see that with movies.

I mean a few years ago, Avatar made a billion dollars and everyone was going to see it. It even showed up on the critic's top 10 lists. It was just this frenzy about Avatar and now nobody talks about it. It's not even that people hate it, people just don't care about it. So popularity is a weird and fickle kind of index of things. So it's never identical to quality, although sometimes it coincides with it. And I've been particularly fascinated with how judgments change over time and how things that were very popular fall by the wayside, but also how the opposite happens. How movies or books or paintings or music or whatever that was ignored or mocked or rejected at its own moment resurfaces and comes to seem so wonderful and to have such great value. I mean I write a little bit in the book about "Moby Dick", which is just one of my favorite examples of this. Herman Melville was a best-selling author of nautical adventures and he wrote this big philosophically ambitious novel about a whaling voyage and the critics at the time basically rejected it and it was forgotten. He was forgotten. It completely vanished. By the end of the 19th-century there was one copy of it in a library somewhere that was in like the fishing section of the library. And now everyone who studies American literature reads it and it's sort of, by consensus, one of the great masterpieces of the American literary imagination. How did that happen? What was the critical process?

And that is an example of what criticism is and how it works, both at its worst and its best that criticism it was critics who misjudged this book and cast it aside and said this is impossible; this is 800 pages of like philosophical gobbledygook and there's not really any great whale hunting in here until the very end and cast it aside. And then it was critics also who, so to speak, fished it up out of the deep, out of oblivion and put it back on everybody's shelf.

[geminicarole]

Your statement, "Back in the Stone Age, if someone was gay, they got killed."
How did you come to that conclusion? Anything to back it up? (this is not a challenge, but instead my curiosity). In some cultures a 'homosexual' was considered to be holy and was made into priest, shamans, men of council, etc.

[rokkankitten]

Title is incredibly misleading, please change that.

Although I think changing it to "How Discourse makes LGBT ways of life conceivable but does not determine sexualities" wouldn't work too well

[tlaniganschmidt]

there once was a college professor who couldn't have an Orgasm because there was no discourse in Academia that told her/him the word Orgasm.

[emikochan]

This needs to be longer, the title and most of the content is misleading from what Judith was trying to say...

[nilogic]

Conversation doesn't make people gay. Discourse can produce situations that make it easier for people to recognise themselves as gay. You could say this is because "discourse" describes a broader concept of communication than "conversation". Discourse is a set of relationships between ideas, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that form the way people understand themselves, others, and the world around them. So, in this sense, discourse makes it possible for people to identify as gay.

[micson]

The title of this video is so much the exact opposite of what she is saying. 
Big think - change the word 'creates', please!

[andrewgonzales]

I studied gender studies for years and found her convoluted...

[PevertLafayette]

I was raised under a christian and intolerant education, I learned that homosexuality was a filthy and sinful "behavior" *BUT* nonetheless, I am a homosexual. My sexuality never changed and will never change, it's intrinsec. Nothing "creates" homosexuality. It doesn't matter how acceptable is the society, people will not "become" gay, that's impossible. The only difference is that people will be free to express their sexuality. Unfortunately, that is not a reality in our intolerant society.

As she said, "They don't produce homosexuals".

[Dhhtyu]

Can’t help but feel like Judith and Judith followers live in an academia echo chamber

[silentbob]

That's just so postmodernist: say that A holds, then "not A", then confuse all the matters further. One of the critical requirements in scientific theory is that there's a potential combination of data that rejects the theory. Butler's theories are deliberately made in such vague and unfalsifiable ways as to enable her to weasel out of whatever she says at the moment, and contradict herself later without having to admit she did. In this way, Butler is anti-scientific.

[pseudogenesis]

"Nothing is moral about scratching bug bites, therefore scratching bug bites is immoral."

Just because something isn't moral doesn't mean it's IMmoral.

And homosexuality was prevalent in ancient Greek society, which is regarded as one of the most brilliant and progressive eras of civilization. Besides, correlation does not equal causation. All immoral activities involve humans. Does that mean humans are inherently immoral?

[Ndo]

@ScreamingInTheCalle I think she said it makes it "more possible", it doesn't actually make someone gay. In terms of producing, it only allows self-doubters to come out of their shell more easily. That's why she said that she feels as though the nature of desired fantasy is "partially unconscious or not fully realizable", meaning we don't know what we really want, but exposure to it might help us decide.

[Kaaotikock]

the title of the video is in contradiction to the description!

[thomasroll]

1. 0:36 "The discourse of homosexuality as it becomes more popular, makes it more possible to become gay or lesbian."

2. 0:52" Although certain kinds of cultural movements might make it possible to lead a lesbian or gay life, they don't determine that. They don't produce homosexuals."


These two sentences seem contradictory to me. In the first sentence Butler claims that as the popularity of the homosexual discourse increases, more people can become gay or lesbian. On the second sentence she claims that homosexual movements don't determine homosexuality but help the homosexuals to live their sexuality. Does the discourse of homosexuality now determine homosexuality or not? And if not, what are in her eyes the factors that determine homosexuality? I'm sure that Butler wouldn't argue biologically (based on genetics for example).

[drunkenmuse]

You could also say;
"The growing acceptance through discourse enables people to easier live our their sexuality - no matter what that sexuality may be"

..and not complicate it unnecessarily.

[marcadams]

Contradicted herself within the same paragraph. That's hard to do so well done.

[MrShazaamm]

In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is someone who posts inflammatory, [1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[3] The noun troll may also refer to the provocative message itself, as in: "That was an excellent troll you posted."

[joaodecarvalho]

I was watching a course about Butler and Foucault, and I was impressed about how behavioral biology and scientific psychology are ignored. Science and Butler are like two different languages.

[JediNiyte]

Is it just me, or is she making the distinction between what I call "gay culture" and innate sexuality?  I'm a gay man myself, but I'm about as cis-gendered as a male can possibly be without living a life of "Hulk, Smash".

My husband and I are both boring old guys.  We' live in Mississippi and are out; our entire neighborhood knows we're gay and we're fortunate to have awesome neighbors.  But neither one of us can wrap our heads around gay culture.  On the rare occasion that we switch the TV to the Logo Channel, we're both looking at one another going "who in the world are these people, and what's their target audience".

We're not critical, we just don't get it.  Which is why I'm asking if Judith Butler is talking about gay culture as defined by media.  I guess I feel the same way about this phenomenon that straight folks would feel about Hollywood.  It's glamorous and all, but it seems like a fantasy.

[Bizud]

I think we will all benefit from a deeper understanding of human behaviour.