Lesbian jokes as challenging strict categorization
July 19th, 2005
One significant aspect of homophobia is that it requires a clear division between the orientations of homosexuality and heterosexuality. One aspect of lesbian jokes is that they destabilize this homo/hetero opposition and show it to be a fiction. This fiction, circulated through the media is anything but harmless; it is a means of politically barring gays and lesbians from attaining full social rights. In the United States it is still the case that most lesbians have no protection at work and can lose their jobs or even their lives simply by being identifiable as lesbian. Although most leading psychological and medical institutions no longer regard lesbianism as a deviant orientation, it was in fact the notion of disease that gave ontological distinction to the category “lesbian,” an invention by medical specialists of the 19th century who sought to classify and categorize deviant social types. Despite post-Stonewall advances,2 the category has retained its association with illness and deviance to the extent that some state courts have felt justified in taking children away from lesbian mothers, as in the 1993 case Bottoms vs. Bottoms in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
This routine by Robin Tyler cleverly deconstructs this underlying assumption of essential differences.
(7) “If homosexuality is a disease, let’s all call in queer to work.
“‘Hello, can’t work today. Still queer.’”
The joke suggests ways in which queers might use sanctioned homophobia against itself in a manner consistent with De Certeau’s (1974) notion of poaching, or the everyday tactic by which workers beat the system at its own rules for their own enjoyment. What’s funny about the joke, of course, is that everyone–gay or straight–has probably at least one time called in sick for work when in fact he or she was not sick. The twist, however, is that Clinton highlights the absurdity of the idea of homosexuality as “sickness” by taking to an extreme the illogic inherent in that assumption. Indeed, being “queer” is a condition that one does not recuperate from after a day or two of bed rest and plenty of liquids. Clinton’s humor turns the marginalization and discrimination that gays and lesbians often encounter within the labor system against that very system.
Although “lesbian” was originally defined as deviance, clearly lesbians do not recognize themselves in the definitions or names imposed from the outside. Lesbian jokes are often jokes that implicitly ask: Am I that name? By positioning lesbian identity and community simultaneously inside and outside the expectations of a dominant culture, these jokes create a cultural self-awareness not unlike W.E.B. DuBois’s (2002) famous “double consciousness” of the African American, or the “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of the other, and measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Lesbian jokes both reflect and resist the dominant cultural definitions and they suggest a self-awareness that is far more mobile, decentered, and contradictory than is generally assumed.