Knox Blog #2 - Signs of Queer?

Last night, my girlfriend and I rented the movie Albert Nobbs. Played by Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs is a 19^th-century Irish woman posing as a man in order to work in the service industry and save money in hopes of a better life, and even decides to take a wife to complete the cover. Close’s performance was fantastic, and though the movie was so-so, I think it’s an interesting look at a character (albeit not a present-day character) that would not and does not consider herself “queer” in the sense that we know it. This individual’s goal is to “pass,” but not because she wishes to live life as a man on its own merits, but because her society has forced her to “pass” to enjoy all of the same benefits that men in her society enjoy. In this sense, it is kind of a pseudo-feminism that drives Nobbs’s motives, and not a desire to “queer” society. Is this behavior, then, queer? Our class discussions point to an answer of “no,” and yet, the presence of this film in our modern society points to a representation of queer that relies on gender performativity.

Though (and perhaps because) Albert Nobbs does not identify as queer, I think Judith Butler would consider her (Nobbs’s) situation as the result of a gendered society that relies on discourse to display an exclusionary gender binary: “[…] the construction of gender operates through exclusionary means, such as the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation. […] These excluded sites come to bound the “human” as its constructive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation” (Bodies that Matter, 8). Thus, the very existence of Nobbs as a gendered subject illuminates the boundaries to which she has been forced to outside of, marginalized and therefore “erased” as a woman.

Jumping back in time a little (or forward, depending on how you’re looking at it) I also want to point out a 1961 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine called “The Children’s Hour;” not because this movie deconstructs gender (it doesn’t) but because it was rather courageous (if not melodramatic) in its presentation of lesbianism, though in a context of heteronormative institutions, as the two starring actors are portrayed as sympathetic and pitiable, wronged because of their presumptive sexualities. Also, it’s a really fantastic movie and I think everyone should watch it.