‘It’s not at all chic to be denied your civil rights’: Performing sexual citizenship in Holly Hughes’s Preaching to the Perverted 1

Abstract

The following discussion examines processes of governmentality and regulation in the arts during the culture wars in the USA. Using performance artist, Holly Hughes’s, Preaching to the Perverted, as a case study, I examine this performance as resistant to cultural policy that attempts to constitute heteronormative citizens. I engage with the question of how a queer critique can rethink the possibilities of citizenship by arguing that performance art is a queer time and space in which American citizenship is contested and reconceptualized. The moral panic that ensues from cases such as this solicits the participation of the general public, wherein some citizens demand regulation often bringing closure to any serious debate about alternative responses to controversial issues. Debates about the politics of representation in the arts, and of government-subsidized production of particular kinds of citizen subjects are critical because they significantly impact on the formation of cultural policy.

Keywords

Citizenship sexuality cultural policy queer performance moral panic

So, did you hear the one about the group of queers who went to the WNBA game?

It’s a benefit for some queer cause

And we’re waiting for the game to start

And all of a sudden there’s this voice:

All rise for the national anthem

And damn it if they don’t do just that,

All these queers stand up to sing the Star Spangled Banner

And me, I get up too, but it’s to yell

What in the hell are you all doing?

Everybody, get down in the boat!

That’s not your flag! That is not your flag!

And you don’t have to salute it!

You don’t have to sing that song.

(Holly Hughes, 1999)

This excerpt from American performance artist Holly Hughes’s (1999) Preaching to the Perverted offers a critique of sexual and intimate citizenship in North America during the culture wars from the late 1980s into the 1990s. It portrays the unmarked training in ‘politicized intimacy’ (Berlant, 2007) citizens acquire through socio-cultural and institutional practices whereby political responses become both visceral and emotional. Hughes’s performance piece is a retelling of her defunding by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).² During this period, some performance and visual artists who had been recipients of government grants offered critiques of hegemonic representations of the American citizen – that is, citizens constructed as heterosexual, monogamous, white, and believers in middle-class family values. Hughes’s anecdote is structured like a joke in which queer citizens are assimilated into the ritual practices of the quintessential American citizen, without being able to access the privileges associated with heteronormative citizenship. The following discussion examines Hughes’s Preaching to the Perverted as a counter-hegemonic narrative resistant to cultural policy that attempts to constitute heteronormative citizens. I engage with the question of how a queer critique can rethink the possibilities of citizenship by arguing that performance art is a queer time and space in which American citizenship is contested and reconceptualized (Davies, 2008). This discussion also examines key themes in Hughes’s performance piece including: firstly, her critique of gendered and sexual citizens and the state’s role in regulating queer bodies by employing notions of ‘decency’; and secondly, the use of the image of the child and childhood innocence to regulate sexual subjects. Artists such as Hughes contested the production and consumption of a fixed, unitary, and normative citizen-body. Her performance work can be situated within a broader critique of sexual citizenship in the USA, with a particular focus on the role of cultural policy in shaping (sexual) citizens through a set of cultural norms considered preconditions of citizenship (Butler, 2009).

The processes of governmentality operating to both constitute and regulate what is considered ‘decent’ and accurate reflections of current community values continues to be a matter of controversy. In Australia, moral panic erupted when an image shot by contemporary art photographer, Bill Henson, featuring a nude 13-year-old girl circulated as the feature image for an invitation to the artist’s up-coming exhibition. The police seized the images perceived as controversial and the exhibition was shut down, while a ferocious media campaign ensued around art, children, censorship and paedophilia. Debates were polarized in the media, perpetuating the panic while more serious critical debate was largely marginalized and silenced. The result of this moral panic was tighter regulation: the Australia Council for the Arts developed protocols to address the depiction and employment of children in artworks, exhibitions, and publications that receive government funding, which applied to grants from January 1st, 2009. While the context and circumstances of this Australian example differ to those pertaining to NEA v. Finley, reflecting on the dynamics of the culture wars provides critical insight into the workings of moral panics and governmental processes that respond with regulation to ensure that normative values are reinscribed.

Performance art as queer time and space

While all theatre and performance intervenes in normative understandings of time and space by offering an audience an alternative reality, I argue that performance art, like queer theory, is frequently employed to deconstruct and denaturalize assumed allegiances between bodies and identities, spaces and practices, and norms and subjectivities. Artists can mobilize performance art as a genre of contestation to counteract moral panic in the media about issues perceived by the general populace as potentially controversial (e.g. sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and citizenship). Some artists employ performance art to create a space in which these issues can be debated and critiqued outside of the dynamics of the culture wars in which discussions frequently become polarized. Postmodernism, out of which performance art emerged, questions hegemonic narratives about subjectivity produced in the West, and decentres powerful constructions of knowledge and culture. Judith Halberstam (2005: 6) considers postmodernism as both crisis and opportunity – ‘a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethink the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate’. Halberstam (2005) argues that time and space is often embodied and occupied according to heteronormative and capitalist logics. In many contexts, performance art resists neoliberal governmental practices in which there is an expansion of market space and time. For example, in solo performance art, such as Hughes’s Preaching to the Perverted, performers are not easily substituted; performances are usually based around the cult of the performer, and their experience, physical ability, or personal critique, which structures the performance. Unlike the Broadway musical, opera, plays, and other genres that can be adapted globally (despite different interpretations), performance art generally resists transferability because of the specific skills and content offered by the performer.

Performance art often appeals to a niche audience, which can limit both the duration of the run of the performance, and also affect the choice of performance spaces, which are frequently smaller in audience capacity so as to increase intimacy between performer and audience (rather than to increase the size of the performance space, and thus enhance the potential for maximum financial returns). In Hughes’s case, the content of the performance was in tension with the establishment because she queers American citizenship. By this, I mean that Hughes employs a queer mode of engagement that ‘functions to designate a political persuasion, which aggressively challenges hegemonies, exclusions, norms and assumptions’ (Giffney and O’Rourke, 2009: 3). Through the mode of performance art, Hughes creates an alternative space and time in which socio-political and cultural norms around citizenship can be actively debated and challenged.

Intersections between cultural policy and constructions of heteronormative sexual citizenship

In simple terms, citizenship describes a set of rights and practices that indicate membership and belonging to a nation state. Through the discourse of nationhood, citizenship represents belonging, recognition, and participation within a national community. Benedict Anderson (2006) famously argues that nations are ‘imagined communities’ that we might understand as systems of cultural representation through which citizens imagine a shared experience of belonging to a particular community. Anderson also describes the nation as inspiring ‘love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love’ (2006: 141). This love is most obvious when citizens voluntarily risk their lives in times of war, and is more precarious when the state conscripts citizens to risk their lives to protect not just the state’s borders, but also the values and practices of the nation. Critically, Anderson also argues that the cultural products of nationalism (poetry, prose, fiction, music, and plastic arts) show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles, and comments that it is rare to find analogous cultural national products expressing fear and loathing (2006: 141–142). Hughes’s performance work, including Preaching to the Perverted, is an example of a critique of dominant American cultural beliefs and values, and therefore can be positioned by moral entrepreneurs as anti-nationalist, and a threat to American nationalism and hegemonic cultural production.

Cultural policy then, may be understood as a discourse facilitating the production of patriotic nationalism, and as producing citizens who ideally desire the nation state. Lisa Duggan (2003) isolates the domestically focused culture wars during the 1980s and 1990s, that is, attacks on public institutions and spaces for democratic public life, in alliance with religious moralists and racial nationalists, as a key component to the US construction of neoliberal hegemony. Through the formation of cultural policy and government-sponsored grants, the nation state selects its own objects of desire and endeavours to produce them as ideal citizens. Toby Miller and George Yúdice note that cultural policy is embodied in ‘systematic, regulatory guides to action that are adopted by organizations to achieve their goals’ (2002: 1). Cultural policy should therefore be understood as a technique of governmentality by which citizens are constituted and self-governance inculcated. Michel Foucault’s (1991) concept of governmentality refers to the organized practices, which are designed to govern the conduct of citizens within the context of the nation state’s desire to produce subjects that best reflect government ideologies and policies.

Holly Hughes became a vehicle through which the state selected and then rejected artists through a criterion that sought to produce normative (heteronormative and appropriately gendered) citizens. Arguing that the ‘promise of US citizenship to deliver sovereignty to all of its citizens has always been practiced unevenly’, Lauren Berlant (2007: 37) suggests that the ‘historical conditions of legal and social belonging have been manipulated to serve the concentration of economic, racial and sexual power in the society’s ruling blocs’. Hughes was not considered to be an appropriate citizen because her performances provided a critique of citizenship highlighting the inequities facing queer subjects and women more generally. Preaching to the Perverted is particularly significant to citizenship studies because Hughes publicly questions the sometimes blind love for a nation state by its citizens while socio-political and cultural inequities still exist for marginalized identities, especially for non-heterosexual subjects.

The language through which citizenship is understood actively constitutes subjects through heteronormative discourses of sexual reproduction and familial bloodlines. Citizenship gained through naturalization – the legal process by which persons consensually acquire citizenship – is a self-consciously performative process that ‘takes place through speech acts (oaths and pledges of allegiance) adjudicated by the state’ (Somerville, 2005: 663). Performativity, as Judith Butler (1994) points out, has the capacity to produce what it names, with this production occurring through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. Isolating something very queer at the heart of naturalization, Siobhan Somerville views this process as ‘a performance whose very theatricality exposes the constructed nature of citizenship itself’ with the oath of allegiance bearing similarities to traditional vows of marriage (2005: 662). Both speech acts ‘transform the speaker’s legal status; both use the language of “fidelity” and “obligation”, and both establish an exclusive relationship to the other party’ (2005: 662). Consequently, each new citizen (and established citizens such as some school children who are required to repeat the oath of allegiance) articulates his or her citizenship through heteronormative discourse, therefore solidifying and institutionalizing the state’s desire for heterosexual citizens. Those citizens residing in the USA who do not fit within these terms, such as queer subjects, become partial citizens because they cannot access the rights and resources reserved for heterosexual citizens.

Regulating cultural expression and representation: NEA v. Finley

The regulation of cultural expression and representation through the process of governmentality experienced by Hughes and her colleagues, demonstrates the nation state’s desire to produce middle-class, white, heteronormative citizen-subjects who embody its hegemonic morals, beliefs and values. If communities and their practices are in part formed through governmental processes and regulations, then arts and cultural policy is one powerful mechanism through which citizenship is formed and constrained, and through which particular kinds of citizens and citizenship practices are endorsed. Lisa Duggan (2003: 3) argues that neoliberalism was ‘constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and cannot be undone by a movement without constituencies and analyses that respond directly to that fact’ (Duggan’s emphasis). Artists who critique the terms and conditions of citizenship engage in a dangerous practice, and they are left open to the charge of disloyalty, anti-nationalism, and in this particular case, anti-Americanism. Before the enactment of the ‘decency clause’, Hughes and her colleagues Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller, known in the media as the ‘NEA Four’, had applied to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for grants to fund future performances.³ Congress established the NEA in 1965 to support ‘excellence in the arts, both new and established’; to bring ‘the arts to all Americans; and [to provide] leadership in arts education’.⁴ Congress had authorized the NEA to provide grants-in-aid to ‘individuals of exceptional talent engaged in or concerned with the arts’.⁵ The Performance Artists Program Peer Review Panel, an advisory panel to the NEA, recommended approval of the grants applied for by Hughes and her colleagues but the National Council on the Arts recommended disapproval of these projects, and the artists were ultimately denied funding.⁶

The National Council on the Arts considered the work of these artists to be controversial for their engagement with issues such as religion, homosexuality, lesbianism, AIDS, race and ethnicity, and alcoholism. There is no doubt that this de-funding took place as a result of a moral panic manufactured by the New Right, and that this panic was orchestrated to prevent the representation and circulation of alternative narratives about gendered and sexual lives. In 1990, the artists filed suit in the United States District Court for the Central District of California against the NEA arguing that their First Amendment rights had been violated because their applications had been rejected on political grounds.⁷ Specifically, the NEA was accused of denying the applications on criteria not stipulated by the legislation, and not following mandated procedures.⁸ In addition, Hughes and her colleagues argued the NEA violated their right to privacy by releasing information within their grant applications without permission.⁹ After the ‘decency’ clause was enacted, the National Association of Artists’ Organizations joined as a plaintiff and the complaint was amended to challenge the clause for vagueness and a facial violation of the First Amendment.¹⁰ This meant that the plaintiffs alleged that the statute was unconstitutional and therefore void. This differs from an as-applied challenge, which alleges that the statute may, in part, be unconstitutional.

Central to the ‘decency’ clause was the implementation of policy amendments that were designed to ensure the representation, production and consumption of heteronormative American citizens. The ‘decency’ clause under discussion by the Supreme Court in NEA v. Finley became law months after the grants were denied to the performance artists.¹¹ During the intervening time, the NEA was battling to be reauthorized in Congress, while the media busied itself criticizing the Endowment, particularly with regard to the ‘NEA Four’.¹² At the time Congress enacted the ‘decency’ clause, it also changed the NEA enabling statutes to state that the NEA ‘is to provide that arts funding should contribute to public support and confidence in the use of taxpayer funds’, and that public funds must ‘ultimately serve public purposes the Congress defines’ (Frohnmayer, 1993: 233). Debates about cultural production in the arts during this time were largely polarized in the media and were expressed through a series of sustained ideological conflicts broadly relating to the production and consumption of diversity and difference in American culture. Rather than being viewed as an open field of contestation that is temporally dynamic, cultural production became the domain through which neo-conservatives sought to regulate representations of socio-cultural difference in an effort to homogenize and universalize the production of American culture on and offshore.

The move toward government regulation to abate further controversy may be understood through the technologies and practices of neoliberalism through which subsidies are redirected toward broad-based provision of key growth areas and infrastructure investment. In the face of attacks based on moral panic during these culture wars, Gordon Shockley and Gordon McNeely (2009) point out that the NEA changed its administrative philosophy, operational procedures and operating practices in order to survive. The most controversial of these changes was restructuring grant-giving procedures in 1995 from discipline-based categories, into broad-based thematic categories including Creation and Presentation, Education and Access, Heritage and Preservation, and Planning and Stabilization. This meant that that the NEA no longer directly supported individual artists’ projects in the performing and visual arts – the categories through which artists (Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Tim Miller and John Fleck) had been associated with controversy. The NEA only offered grants to individual artists through Literature Fellowships, American Jazz Master Fellowships, and National Heritage Fellowships, or by funding arts related projects and organizations. The NEA’s restructure was directly connected to the controversy associated with individual performing and visual artists such as Hughes, who were no longer in a position to apply for a grant to fund a new project as an individual artist. This process of denying individual (performing and visual) artists access to funds enforced new forms of policing and regulation across government funding for the arts.

Critiquing citizenship: Preaching to the Perverted by Holly Hughes

In her performance, Preaching to the Perverted, commissioned by Dixon Place in New York City in 1999, Holly Hughes provides an account of her experience of the Supreme Court Case NEA v. Finley and the moral panic leading to the culture wars more broadly.¹³ She decided to perform an account of her defunding, so that her audience could see her narrative in relation to broader events ‘like the calls for censorship on rap music, the attacks on sexually explicit AIDS education, and the ongoing struggles over reproductive rights and civil rights’ (Hughes, 1996: 20). As part of this account, she offers a critique of American sexual and gendered citizenship (Berlant, 1997, 2007; Berlant and Warner 1998; Burns and Davies 2009; Canaday 2009; Cott 2000; Davies and Burns, in press; Kaplan 1997; Lister 1997, 2003; Phelan 2001; Plummer 2003; Richardson 1998, 2000; Weeks 1989, 2003, 2007), that is, the ongoing struggle to gain full legal rights for gendered and sexual minorities. Hughes’s critique also addresses the embodied and intimate practices of everyday citizenship, and the role of these practices within a neoliberal regime of governance. Hughes’s work also moves beyond sexual citizenship as a rights discourse, and gestures to citizenship not simply as a normative ideal, but rather a technology of governance (Cossman, 2007), and a set of embodied and intimate practices. She ‘wasn’t the least bit surprised’ when she received news that then Chairman of the NEA, John Frohnmayer, had vetoed her grant because controversy had developed ‘around public funding of arts that addresses the body, especially the body that’s either queer, female, of color, or some combination of those’ (Hughes, 1996: 19).

Born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1955, Holly Hughes graduated from Kalamazoo College and moved to New York a few years later. In 1983, she discovered WOW Café Theatre – a women's theatre collective in New York City’s East Village, which promotes the empowerment of women through the performing arts.¹⁴ Hughes was committed to WOW because ‘there was an unspoken but shared vision of making theater that made community’ (Hughes, 1996: 18). By 1986, after having written Dress Suits to Hire for Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Hughes started performing at PS 122, a not-for-profit arts centre serving the New York City dance and performance community since 1979.¹⁵ Weaver, Shaw and Deb Margolin founded Split Britches in 1980 – a lesbian and feminist theatre company transforming the landscape of queer performance by employing satire and vaudeville to comment on popular culture.¹⁶ Hughes (1996) suggests that increased queer visibility born of the AIDS epidemic made queer communities a better target for right-wing hatred. She comments: ‘They were talking about us. I thought it was time we stopped talking behind their backs; I wanted to talk back’ (Hughes, 1996: 19). For Hughes, performance art offered a mode of engagement – specifically, a queer space and time – in which marginalized citizen-subjects could engage in a dialogue with the general public about current socio-political issues.

Preaching to the Perverted is richly intertextual, alluding to politics, popular culture, and to other Supreme Court cases, and weaving around these allusions a framework of cleverly chosen personal anecdote. Her performance is structured by two powerful conceits: she equates NEA v. Finley with a theatrical event, and she casts the Supreme Court as a parental structure infantilizing the citizen body. The performance begins with a commanding voice that emanates from the loud speaker on stage: ‘Ms. Hughes is the author of several pieces, but no doubt is best known as one of the NEA Four’. Like a record stuck on a crack, the disembodied voice continues: ‘best known as one of the NEA Four, NEA Four, NEA Four’ until Hughes draws her pistol, and shoots the PA system. Accused in the media of being ‘anti-American’ because she dared to question the status of queer American citizens in her performance work, Hughes (1999: 3) deconstructs the meaning the American flag had for her as a child:

I loved our flag.

Not all flags. Just ours.

To me, she wasn't a symbol,

She wasn't a representation of something abstract.

To me she was a thing,

The most beautiful thing we owned.

The red was completely without orange, the kind of red Michigan tomatoes can only Dream of.

The blue was the fearless eye of the lake after she woke up from winter,

And the white was

Just a color.

It was nothing to be ashamed of.

Personifying the flag as female, Hughes reads this symbol of the USA through the lens of her Michigan childhood, focusing on the natural environment. Remembering her apprehension of the flag, Hughes makes the flag’s material beauty resonate with the Michigan landscape, but she also pushes the double meaning of her home state’s (and her nation’s) ‘whiteness’: ‘just a color. Nothing to be ashamed of.’

Continuing with her image of whiteness, Hughes (1999: 8) gestures toward her analysis of sexuality, and the state’s role in regulating queer bodies, by turning her focus to iconic structures in Washington:

The Supreme Court appears to be constructed of a type of material

Used to construct the other Big White Things

For which our nation’s capitol is so famous …

It appears to be made of marble.

But marble turns pink in the rain

And this was not the effect the Court was going for.

The builders wanted something that would stay

Cold and white no matter what.

Preaching to the Perverted becomes a queer space and time through which Hughes reads iconic structures in the nation’s capital through a queer lens. She describes how the white marble of the Supreme Court is compromised by wet weather – it turns a curious shade of pink – a colour that has come to signify lesbian and gay identity. The pink dollar is a phrase used to capture the purchasing power of LGBT communities within the context of capitalism, while the pink triangle was used as a symbol to identify homosexuals in Nazi Germany. The idealized natural landscape of Hughes’s Michigan childhood, which she associates with her American flag, contrasts with the purpose-built iconic buildings such as the Supreme Court in Washington. The overwhelming size, rigidity and coldness (or ‘chilling effect’) of the Supreme Court serves as a metaphor for what Hughes will encounter in the administration of law in NEA v. Finley. In constitutional law, the ‘chilling effect’ refers to any practice or law that has the effect of seriously dissuading the exercise of a constitutional right, such as the freedom of speech offered in the First Amendment.

In NEA v. Finley, the Supreme Court interpreted the ‘decency’ clause as merely a Congressional request that the NEA at least think about whether works of art are indecent or disrespectful before funding them to have artistic merit.¹⁷ This interpretation differed to the lower courts, which understood the clause as a Congressional mandate that the NEA may not deem works of art to have artistic merit if it finds they are indecent or disrespectful.¹⁸ Although the differences in interpretation were subtle, the effects of these interpretations were dramatically different. While the lower courts were concerned about the chilling effect of the clause and its prohibitive directive toward funding controversial work, the Supreme Court understood the clause as an expression of Congressional concern that left the NEA with total discretion to fund any work of art it believed had artistic merit. Inserting her own narrative (specifically the result in NEA v. Finley) within a wider context of freedom of speech under the First Amendment, Hughes refers to the protection of symbolic speech applied to non-verbal communication including desecrating the American flag:

The Supreme Court has ruled you can burn the American flag

That laws prohibiting flag burning are unconstitutional

Because flag burning is symbolic speech

Protected speech

It’s protected by the First Amendment

The Supreme Court has also ruled you can burn the cross

Specifically that you can burn a cross in the front yard

Of an African American Family

That is not vandalism

It’s speech, symbolic speech. Protected by the First Amendment.

(Hughes, 1999)

The Supreme Court has held that this form of communication (flag burning) is entitled to the protection of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.¹⁹ Despite Congress having made seven (1990, 1995, 1997, 1999–2000, 2001, 2003, 2005–2006) attempts to overrule the US Supreme Court by passing a constitutional amendment making an exception to the First Amendment in order to allow the government to ban flag desecration, these attempts failed in the Senate. While Hughes is a firm supporter of freedom of expression, she weighs up exactly what kinds of acts, and whose freedom, is protected when opinions are represented in the public sphere. Hughes employs both performance art and queer critique to denaturalize assumed allegiances between citizens and the nation state in order to reflect on the consequences of interpretations of the First Amendment.

Hughes also refers to a 1992 US Supreme Court case – R.A.V v. St Paul – that overturned the conviction of a white teenager for burning a cross on the lawn belonging to an African American family.²⁰ The teenager was originally charged under the 1990 St Paul City Council ordinance, but the trial court dismissed the charge, before the Minnesota state Supreme Court reinstated it.²¹ The defence argued that the burning of the cross in front of the African American family’s home was to be construed as an example of protected speech (Butler, 1997). Under question was whether the ordinance was ‘substantially overbroad and impermissably content based’²² The US Supreme Court reversed the state Supreme Court decision ‘asserting its state-sanctioned linguistic power to determine what will and will not count as “speech”’, and in the process, enacted ‘a potentially injurious form of juridical speech’ (Butler, 1997: 53). Matsuda and Lawrence (1993) argue that the reality of ongoing racism and exclusion is erased and bigotry is redefined as majoritarian condemnation of racist views. In her performance, Hughes attempts to unpack the evacuation of logic that acknowledges a racist history of violence toward African Americans – particularly, an act that suggests further violence to those targeted. By raising this example, Hughes draws attention to the ethically questionable decision employed by the Supreme Court justices who erase a history of racist violence while upholding the freedom of speech.

Hughes raises another example in which financial contributions to an election campaign cannot be restricted because campaign contributions are understood as speech. Through this political lens, Hughes comments on the discursive production of homophobic speech by Republican politicians – speech funded by American citizens:

The Supreme Court has ruled

You cannot place limits on campaign contributions

Because campaign contributions are speech.

I am not saying we don't have publicly funded speech

About homosexuality in this country

Jesse Helms. He doesn't talk about very much else.

Trent Lott.

Think about every state legislature except for Vermont

And we pay their salaries

So we have plenty of publicly funded speech about homosexuality

Publicly funded homophobic speech

(Hughes, 1999: 25).

Hughes’s critique provides a queer space and time in which an audience is positioned to reflect on governmental policies and practices that condone hatred for minority groups, regardless of their citizenship rights. Her analysis questions the discursive production of homosexuality, and the institutional authorization of those discourses. Alluding to the inconsistencies of government funded speech, Hughes implies that political and legal discourses invest the speaker with incomprehensible narrative power. Hughes’s critique attends to the power of political discourses that invest the speaker with public sanction to produce homophobic speech to increase their political profile and the size of their following. For example, Jesse Helms, a Republican Senator from North Carolina, led the movement in Congress to impose content restrictions on the grant criteria of the NEA, introducing the ‘Helms Amendment’ which preceded the ‘decency clause’.²³ Passed quickly on a voice vote, Helms’s homophobic amendment was struck down by a California district court in Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation v. Frohnmayer, which asserted that the certification requirement would have a chilling effect on artistic expression.²⁴ Hughes draws attention to the double standard in operation wherein senators in public office are able to express homophobic views with little consequence, while artists are denied government funding for expressing an alternative viewpoint about sexuality.

Similarly, Trent Lott a former Republican Senator from Mississippi served in numerous leadership positions in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. On meeting John Frohnmayer (1993: 52–53), former Chair of the NEA, Lott stated: ‘Filthy art. Waste of taxpayers’ money. Totally out of control’, and demanded that rednecks were put on the Endowment selection panels, commenting: ‘I’m a redneck, and I want representation.’ Frohnmayer (1993: 54) comments that Lott ‘voted against us [NEA] on every issue, and during the next few years he and I communicated on a regular basis over outrages that his constituent Donald Wildmon brought to his attention’. Wildmon is a United Methodist minister and founder and chairman of the American Family Association and American Family Radio. Hughes’s critique draws attention to the genre of political speech, which as Butler (1997: 51) argues, ‘accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practices’ (Butler’s emphasis). While Hughes and other artists must have their speech vetted by the panels reviewing their applications for funding, Helms’s and Lotts’s speech seem to have no limits placed upon them.

Images of childhood innocence and the regulation of sexual subjects

A powerful trope throughout Hughes’s performance is her analysis of the ways in which the image of the child and constructions of childhood innocence are often used to regulate queer sexual citizenship. Hegemonic discourses of childhood incorporate the notion that the child is innocent, vulnerable, naïve, and in need of adult protection (Berlant 1997; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Davies and Robinson 2010; Gittins 1998; Kincaid 1998; Robinson, 2002, 2008; Robinson and Davies, 2008a, 2008b, 2010). Within this discourse, children are presumed to be heterosexual, a presumption reflected in socio-cultural and political life. Robinson (2002: 419) argues that children ‘are perceived to be asexual, innocent and “too young” to be capable of understanding or dealing with such “adult” concepts as sexuality’. The perception of childhood innocence is intimately linked with dominant religious and moral values within the social order. Within her performance, Hughes addresses the panic associated with queer sexuality and the image of the child, an image frequently mobilized as a political strategy to regulate and censor the representation, production and consumption of queer sexual expression. In particular, Hughes critiques the hegemonic discourse of childhood innocence and its use in regulating adult behaviours and practices.

The institutionalization of childhood innocence (from early childhood settings to the US Supreme Court) is a favoured operation of those wishing to uphold the status quo, particularly around heteronormative citizenship practices. Commenting on the regulation of the image of the child and its relation to sexuality, Berlant (1995: 390) recasts obscenity law ‘within an assembly of parental gestures in which adult citizens are protected’ in the same way that children are ‘from representations of violence and sex and violent sex, for fear that those representations’ are ‘understood as doctrine or as documentary fantasy’. She argues that American adults have been infantilized, primarily through the construction of the image of the ‘little girl whose morals, mind, acts, body, and identity would certainly be corrupted by contact with adult immorality’.²⁵ Retelling events at the Supreme Court as NEA v. Finley unfolds, Hughes (1999: 25) describes the way in which the image of the innocent child is used to police the representation of queer sexuality:

David Cole tries to say something about the First Amendment but the Supremes Aren't buying it. What about the kids? Suddenly art that is responsive to common Standards of decency has come to mean art that three-year-olds like. We're not even Talking macramé or charades, lesbian mime. We're talking Barney.

And I think, what’s the cut off point?

What about the sensibilities of the unborn?

Why not just say that all federally funded art

Has to be appropriate for viewing by audiences in utero?

And I realize that I don't actually hate children.

I hate the way they are used to wreck everything.

It’s what's done in the name of kids I hate.

Something hot throbbing glistening oh baby oh baby wet hard yes yes yes pushing Sliding sucking faster yes baby yes …

Hughes refers to her attorney, David Cole, who is interrupted by Justice Stephen Breyer – a Clinton appointment in 1994 – who employs the image of the innocent child in an effort to regulate representations of queer sexuality. Using satire, she comments on the reduction of representation and image production to suit young children at the expense of the desires of an adult audience. Like Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (2004), Hughes considers this inscription of the child as metaphor, a kind of ground zero for the edifice that is adult life and around which narratives of sexuality get organized. Ironically, while the Supreme Court is attempting to ‘protect’ children from representations of homosexuality (and the Court's unnamed, but inferred connection with paedophilia), Hughes gestures to an erotic sexual engagement in which, historically, the female has been relabelled and infantilized as ‘babe’ or ‘baby’. In this context, the image of the child has been used to sexualize the adult woman.

Hughes employs an established and easily recognizable hyperbolic narrative of sexual expression revealing one way in which language is resignified and remapped. In the foregoing example, the adult woman is infantilized making her apparently more sexually desirable. Hughes parallels this sexualized image with Barney, a television show aimed at an audience of three-year-olds. She critiques America's anxiety and obsession with the myth of childhood innocence drawing particular attention to the censorship of adults, while emphasizing heteronormative discourses that re-sexualize the innocent child. ‘One reflex of our obsessive focus on protection’, James Kincaid (1998: 101) argues, ‘is to saturate children with a sexual discourse that inevitably links children, sexuality and erotic appeal’. The Supreme Court also links homosexuality with children, because historically homophobic discourse has collapsed homosexuality with paedophilia. This is still evident in the circulation of false narratives describing some of Hughes's performances.²⁶

On entering the Supreme Court, Hughes (1999) had waited in line to go through security. When the contents of her bag were examined, a beanie baby²⁷ fell out:

Everyone sees the beanie baby.

And I mean everybody.

They are looking at the small, limp collectible and back at me

And I know that they are looking at me

And I know what they are thinking

Because after all I am a homosexual

Which means I have an enlarged hypothalamus

Which secrete special rights

Causing me to have a heightened sense

Of when everyone is staring at me

As well as giving me the power to read the minds

Of those who are doing the staring.

So I can see that everyone can tell I am ‘The Lesbian’

And I can see them doing the math in their heads

‘The Lesbian’ plus beanie baby equals child molester … You wanna say I’m anti-Family and un-American,

Be my guest! But I’m no pedophile!

The truth is I am a pedophobe

There are some children I do like

But I have to take it on a case by case basis

And they have to make the first move

But of course I can’t speak so

This light keeps flashing over my head:

‘Child molester! Child molester!’

Hughes refers to the medicalization of the queer body through psychological, psychiatric and biological discourses (Foucault, 1978), parodying the notion that her hypothalamus, which regulates hormone production, is enlarged thus affecting both her sexual orientation, and heightening paranoia. In addition to the medicalization of the queer body, Margot Canaday (2009: 4) argues that homosexuality is also a legal category as much as a medical or psychiatric one that is forged through the ‘bureaucratization of homosexuality – something forged, in short, through legal and administrative processes’. By framing the beanie baby within the context of the moral panic around queer sexuality, and given the stereotypical collapse of discourses of homosexuality with paedophilia, Hughes is concerned that onlookers will understand her as a paedophile. Intervening in this predictable discourse by employing humour, Hughes turns this assumption and potential accusation around by identifying as a paedophobe – someone afraid of children.

Hughes’s sentiments seem to reflect those of Lee Edelman who reads the construction of the child as anti-queer, resisting the ‘coherence and reason of liberal political discourse’ (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xiv). Edelman (2004) suggests that we need to ‘embrace the negativity of queerness, not the heterosexual narrativity of liberalism and its commitment to reproduction as the basis of social continuity’ (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xiv). Hughes’s narratives of resistance point to alternative imaginings of gendered and sexual lives, providing counter-discourses to what Berlant and Warner term national heterosexuality. National heterosexuality is that ‘mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behaviors, a space of pure citizenship’ (Berlant and Warner, 1998: 549). Hughes’s performance art offers a critique of national hegemonic constructions of the typical American citizen, and provides a context for the emergence of the queer sexual citizen who not only demands inclusion, but who also poses questions about the ways in which citizenship – by its very nature – functions through a politics of exclusion.

Conclusion

To what extent the state should regulate and control bodies and practices is a critical question in contemporary society. While current debates have focused on regulation and censorship of online environments, these governmental processes also regulate textual production and consumption in the performing and visual arts. The general public often only become aware of these regulations when there has been a transgression of (hetero)normative values, beliefs and practices. The moral panic that ensues from cases such as this, solicits the participation of the general public, wherein some citizens demand regulation, which often brings closure to any serious debate about alternative responses to controversial issues. Moral entrepreneurs often employ hegemonic constructions of childhood innocence to fuel moral panic, to regulate adult behaviours and practices, and to reinscribe normative family values that underpin citizenship. Hughes’s Preaching to the Perverted provides a queer time and space in which a reconceptualization of citizenship and its relationship to cultural policy is possible. Debates about the politics of representation in the arts, and of government-subsidized production of particular kinds of citizen subjects, were so critical because they significantly impacted on the formation of cultural policy. Given that the culture wars during this time were characterized by moral panic, these changes to cultural policy were realized through more stringent regulation. Hughes and her colleagues’ defunding was also an attempt to shut down public debate about sexual and intimate citizenship in the USA and the effects of exclusion, or partial citizenship for some of its subjects. This defunding, after a peer-review panel had recommended their work receive financial support, was not only a response to a moral panic around the production and consumption of gendered and sexual subjectivities, but also a deliberate attempt to constitute American citizenship as heteronormative. As Judith Butler (2000) argues, defunding ‘is a way to drain the debate of its institutional basis’, and defies the precept that institutions have a responsibility to undertake or represent challenging cultural work. She suggests that ‘articulating such moments of social disarticulation, when we recognize the public itself as fractured or syncretically melded in ways that are disturbing and not always predictable’ are the very ways through which we practice our citizenship within a democracy (Butler, 2000). It is precisely the staging of these debates in the public sphere that points to the diversity of the lives we share as gendered and sexual citizens. Holly Hughes employs performance art, not just to entertain her audiences, but also to open up dialogue so as to effect socio-political change.

Footnotes

Notes

Cristyn Davies is an experienced researcher, writer, editor and tertiary educator. Her current research interests include the culture wars, literature and new media and the intersections between gendered and sexual subjectivities with citizenship, childhood and youth studies, and mediated environments. Cristyn has collaborated with academics, writers, performance artists, and digital and new media artists on a range of projects.

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