The Yale Women's Center

Posted by: yalewomenscenter-blog on 9 March 2014

Singing Subjects of Sexuality

Daniel Dangaran

After numerous conversations with Yale students and professors, I feel confident saying there is a widely held belief about all-male a capella groups: the men are viewed as predominantly, assumedly gay.  As a gay member of an all-male a capella group that currently (and contrarily) hosts only three of fourteen members who identify as gay, I thought this was an opportunity to turn a feminist lens onto this sub-community to shed some light on this false stereotypes, and to gain a better understanding of how these group members are subjectified in terms of sexual orientation.

For many, a capella is an outlet for the passion for performance that developed in high school. If some behaviors that we bring to audiences – singing, dancing, and remembering to smile – can be learned, practiced, and imitated, what else can be? Group behaviors such as “snapplause” –which is given from the audience during performances to praise a singer or set of singers without cheering and thereby drowning out the sound of the music – are not “taught” directly, like choreography, but they’re definitely a part of the culture of a capella. This action, too, should be seen as a “performance.”

Three arguments from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble have helped me to think about this in a feminist framework. First, the action of gender requires a repeated performance that is at once a reenactment and re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established. It is both the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. Second, these performative actions are public; even if individuals are enacting these forms of signification, they must be seen as collective because they particularly and strategically aim to maintain gender within a binary frame shared and understood by a larger community. Finally, because of the way gender is produced through acts, it is an unstable construction constituted in time. The appearance of substance or stability is itself a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment, which the mundane social audience (including the actors) comes to believe. The next logical step of that argument is that those actors start to perform in the mode of belief.

Is there a space for feminist critique of an all-male a capella group? Obviously, my answer is yes. In an all-male setting, gender and sexual orientation are both constructed frameworks in which individual members must navigate their own experiences. Applying Butler’s “gender performativity” to what I will call “sexual orientation performativity” in the community of my a capella group can make all Yale undergrads more aware of the way we participate in producing Yale-specific constructions that can too easily be taken for granted. Sometimes these constructions are assumed to be positive. For example, the widespread belief that a capella groups are safe spaces for gay young men seems like it would create nothing but an affirmative, open-minded, accepting subculture. However, such sweeping generalizations do not necessarily capture honest lived experiences.

In my group, there have been instantiations of homophobic comments delivered as self-aware jokes, and dismissive awkward silences or sideway glances in response to homosexual-desire-driven comments or anecdotes by gay members. Using a Foucauldian discourse analysis, this use of disciplinary power regulates what can be talked about openly. While heterosexist humor is condoned, if a comment or joke is at all homonormative, especially when made tongue-in-cheek by a heterosexual group member, some members will react strongly and pressure the humor to stop. This is a form of negative stigmatization of homosexuality, and normalization of the performance of heterosexuality. This forced disengagement of homosexually performative behavior clashes with the campus-wide assumption about a capella with which I opened this essay. Though explicitly anti-gay comments are rarely made, there is a clear disparity in the accepted discourse, which can have a long-lasting impact on the culture of this tightly knit community.

This analysis can serve as a reminder for everyone at Yale: we don’t live in a post-sexist, post-racial, post-homophobic, post-classist, or post-any-other-form-of-oppression society, even if we do live in a bubble. Yale’s reputation as the “gay Ivy,” and the popular belief that the a capella community is a gay-friendly enclave therein, can shroud whatever heterosexist behavior persists on this campus. We can make Yale a more authentic place by shooting down these stereotypes when they arise in daily conversation. Only then will we be able to have productive discussions about viewing our identities and behaviors through self-determination, and to strive to deconstruct the performativity of gender and sexual orientation alike.