The higher-brow and the not-quite-so-highbrow - a gay book club reads Joe Keenan

So now it's time for me to blog one of my own articles. It's called 'Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group' (DOI: http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1177/1367549410396002) and it appeared this month in European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 2. If your institution doesn't have a subscription, you can ask me for a copy.

It's an important paper for me, because it's on the cusp of so many things: balanced between my earlier interest in literary theory and my current interest in cultural sociology, my earlier commitment to a specific methodology for analysing qualitative data and my current frustration with the sheer pretentiousness of all methodologies for analysing qualitative data. (I don't care any more whether it's Discursive Psychology, Critical Discourse Analysis, or Grounded Theory... just tell me something you think you found out about the world. Positivist, me? Actually, no -- but that's another story.) Also, as the title makes clear, I have again found myself writing about sexuality: a topic that I have never set out to research, but which perennially springs up in the margins of whatever I'm doing. The fact that I didn't set out to research it is probably responsible for the unintended ambiguity of the title: the 'legitimacy' at issue in my article is not (as the non-specialist reader might expect) the legitimacy of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, but legitimacy as in 'legitimate' (ie. highbrow) culture. The reading group I focused on was of such interest to me not in the first instance because it was composed of gay people, but because its reading preferences were so extraordinarily poised between the highbrow and the not-quite-so-highbrow. Throughout the article, I focus in depth on its discussions of a single work of gay fiction, My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan. Some of the group members liked it, some of them didn't, but that's not really the point.

So what is it that I think I found out? First, that the group's gayness was in large part the explanation for its poise: it was formed to discuss books 'of gay interest' regardless of how intellectual those books might be. Second, that this did not mean that the group didn't care how intellectual the books it discussed actually were: group members debated the intellectuality of individual books in depth and with passion (and returned to earlier discussions on that point both when talking to one another and when interviewed by me). Third, that expressing appreciation for a book that other members deemed insufficiently intellectual had the potential to put group members in an awkward position, because of the necessary connection (if you'll forgive the theoretical abstraction) between one's own cultural capital and the cultural capital associated with the things one likes (see also Kathryn Grafton's PhD thesis, which I blogged earlier in the week). Fourth, that group members could validate their appreciation of a book of the not-quite-so-highbrow sort both by arguing that one should 'take it for what it is' (sociologists, recall Richard Peterson's omnivore thesis!) and by reading it against a body of specifically 'gay' cultural knowledge (ie. by displaying subcultural capital). Fifth, that perceptions of authorial intention can play a key role in discussions of the cultural legitimacy of books: not perceptions of the author's intention to communicate some particular meaning or other, but perceptions of the author's intention to write a 'serious' work of literature or (conversely) an entertaining piece of popular fiction.

I happen to think that this last point has significant implications for literary theory, but I haven't had the opportunity to spell them out yet. Cf. my earlier argument that the important kind of intention is the intention to produce an artefact of a particular kind (ie. genre) having socially acknowledged success and failure conditions - an argument that (speaking as an inveterate self-citer) I unaccountably forgot to cite in the current article. Ah well, there's always this blog!

English Studies and my own reception of Bourdieu and St Clair

I have in the past committed myself to a strongly 'discursive' (even linguistic) approach to reception study (see virtually all of my papers that have seen print to date). Despite that, it now seems clear to me that it is in extra-discursive conditions of the sort discussed in my last couple of posts that a great part of the explanation of reception (and indeed production) must be located. Circulation for one thing, but also circulation of the resources necessary for understanding. And this makes me wonder about my own reception of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of Gallic taste and William St Clair's economic history of British reading.

It is obvious to me now that these works have more to contribute to an understanding of reception than almost anything else that has yet been published. And yet when I encountered them as a PhD student, I missed so much of their significance. Is that because I encountered them within the context of English Studies? I'm thinking back on the use of schooled interpretive resources in appreciating Joss Whedon (blogged here), or the different interpretive resources various groups of professionals seem to have brought to bear on The Wire (blogged here).

Whether carried out from the point of view of language or of literature, English Studies as it currently manifests itself neither demands from its practitioners nor provides to its students the resources needed to investigate the production, circulation, and reception of texts - never mind an appreciation of its own disciplinary role in those processes - and thus perpetuates the mystification of its own objects of study.

So hard to know which box to think outside of, when encased in so many. I looked beyond 'the text', but not beyond linguistic codes (McGann 1991).