Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice: Legalising Compulsory Heterosexuality in Boston and New Yorks Annual St Patrick Day ParadesSally R. Munt & Katherine ODonnellSally R Munt is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. She has published several books in cultural, gender, and queer studies, her most recent project is Queer Feelings: Sex, Class & Emotion in Contemporary Culture to be published by Ashgate.Katherine ODonnell is Lecturer in Womens Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published widely in literary history, queer studies and feminism, her forthcoming monograph is entitled Edmund Burkes Irish Accent.AddressesProfessor Sally R. Munt, Department of Media and Film, School of Humanities, University of Sussex, Sussex House, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK.For mailing use home address: 15 Herbert Road, BRIGHTON BN1 6PB, UKEmail: s.r.muntsussex.ac.ukDr Katherine ODonnell, WERRC (Womens Education, Research & Resource Centre), School of Social Justice, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington Building, University College DublinBelfield, Dublin 4, IRELANDEmail: Katherine.ODonnellUCD.ie, Ph: 353-1-716-8581, Fax: 353-1-716-1195AbstractThis article discusses the vicious territorial disputes surrounding the tradition of St Patricks Day Parades through the city streets of New York and Boston, USA. It documents the legal arguments mounted successfully to exclude Irish lesbian, gay and transgender participants from the march, exploring what ideologies of nation-space and public space underpin them. It argues that the progression through urban space of the marches enforces compulsory heterosexuality, through actual and semiotic exclusion. Irish-American nationalism can be read as illustrative of the heterosexualisation of nationalism. It was the unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish that provided the fundamental premise from which it was logically and successfully argued in the US courts: that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. By contrast, the article holds up the Parades in Cork and Dublin as designated inclusive and multicultural events, the nation-space of the Irish Republic economically liberated and wishing to communicate modernity to its citizens.KeywordsNation space, nationalism, St Patricks Day Parades, street marches, heterosexuality.Word Count7,779 Endnotes 1,546Pride and Prejudice: Legalising Compulsory Heterosexuality in Boston and New Yorks Annual St Patrick Day Parades This paper relies on the Irish Lesbian and Gay Archive: IQA, which has a comprehensive news clippings archive (over 250,000 clips from Irish national and regional media, spanning over three decades. We owe a debt to the meticulous archive of one of the founder members of ILGO, Anne Maguire, which is deposited at the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, New York and on her, as yet, unpublished monograph entitled When All the World is Bright and Gay. One of the authors of this article, Katherine ODonnell, was one of the organisers of the lesbian float in Corks St Patricks Day Parade in 1992 and was one of a number of lesbians and gays sent by that community to New York in solidarity with ILGO in 1993. She marched in St Patricks Day Parade in Boston in 1993 and also marched as part of an ILGO San Francisco contingent in the St Patricks Day Parade in later years. ODonnell was part of the large contingent of lesbians and gays from Ireland who protested and was arrested and detained in prison at the tenth anniversary of ILGOs exclusion from the parade in 2001. There is currently legal action being taken by US Human Rights lawyers who are protesting that this detention of the ILGO protestors was unlawful, of which she is a co-plaintiff.When the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization ILGO applied to march in the New York St. Patricks Day Parade of 1991, they were told that there was no room by the organisers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. ILGOs on-going struggle for inclusion in the worlds largest celebration of Irish ethnicity became a major news item that rumbled on seasonally for a number of years across the USA, in Ireland, in the international gay community and amongst the international Irish diaspora. Fourteen years after its first application to join the parade, ILGO is not only still prohibited from marching - remarkably, in the land of the brave and the free - ILGO is even legally prohibited from holding a protest at its own exclusion.This article makes a number of arguments, chiefly being that it was the unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish that provided the fundamental premise from which it was logically and successfully argued in the US courts, that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. The marches in New York and also in Boston exposed aspects of nationalistic sentiment that emphatically rendered its nostalgic, phantasmatic quality. Irish-American nationalism can be read as illustrative of the heterosexualisation of nationalism, a move illustrating the disjunction between the homogenised, idealised semiotic nation, and the complex, heterogenous lived experience of its natives. The Ireland being celebrated in the parades is a historical sentiment, a nation made static in the minds of its ethnic descendants by nostalgia and loss. What identity-based marches such as the Annual St Patricks Day make abundantly clear is that the traditional segmentation of the urban space, visualised and auralised through the compartments of the march with flags, banners, and bands, is not so much a sign of strategic inclusion, as a very moving and vital force of exclusion.Nations and NationalismIn 1882 Ernest Renan gave his now famous lecture “What Is A Nation?” in which he observed:. the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.RENAN Ernest “What is a Nation?” reprinted in BHABHA op cit. pp8-22p.11Nationalism is defined by Ernest Gellner as primarily “a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent”Ibid p.1.Nations as a natural God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent.political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.GELLNER Ernest Nations and Nationalism Blackwell, Oxford,1983:48-9.However, there are fissures within nationalism, as Eric Hobsbawm points out:First, official ideologies of states and movements are not guides to what is in the minds of even the most loyal citizens or supporters. Second, and more specifically, we cannot assume that for most people national identification - when it exists - excludes or is always or ever superior to, the remainder of the set of identifications which constitute the social being. In fact it is always combined with identifications of another kind, even when it is felt to be superior to them. Thirdly, national identification and what it is believed to imply, can change and shift in time, even in the course of quite short periods.HOBSBAWM Eric J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 Cambridge University Press,1990:11.For a nationalist ideology to form there must be some general functional prerequisites: firstly there must be an emergent “specialised clerical class”, as Gellner called it, “a clerisy”GELLNER op cit. p.8., which forms an intellectual culture. Education is key to this development, producing a shared culture and technological skills of communication, depending on the establishment of a common culture, one that is then proselytised by the middle class. This culture is one appropriated in the name of the “folk”, i.e. the putative working class, its symbolism draws heavily from a selective and idealised representation of the working class or, as in Irelands case the peasant folk. It is repackaged and delivered back to “the people” in a stylised and romanticised summons to authenticity. Secondly, despite the fact that nationalism preaches a historical continuity with the past, paying homage to the “folk culture” it has bowdlerised, it operates using a form of nostalgia, which is intrinsically new and commensurate with the demands to amalgamate and reformulate “the nation” according to contemporary criteria. In its “narcissism of self-generation”BHABHA Homi K. Nation and Narration Routledge, London,1990:1., “its self-image and its true nature are inversely related”GELLNER op cit. p.125.; nationalism is an homogenising process. Ernest Gellner defines nationalism as a sentiment produced when the political and national unit is incongruent: the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of the principle, or the feeling of satisfaction aroused by its fulfilment. A nationalist movement is one actuated by a sentiment of this kind.Ibid. p.1.If we understand nationalism as a sentiment, then, as a feeling of exclusion which is articulated as a protest for inclusion, we must necessarily examine that feeling and the ways in which it is echoed and reproduced as an act of language, becoming in Foucaults words a “discursive formation”, a political structure, inventing the “nation” where one previously did not exist. We also need to conceive of how nationalism appears as a narrative, a story, which inscribes its readers through a mechanism of identification, through interpolating sentiment. Nations are imaginary constructs that depend on a range of cultural fictions to maintain their mythic existence. Geoffrey Bennington highlights this connection:. we undoubtedly find narration at the centre of nation: stories of national origins, myths of founding fathers, genealogies of heroes. At the origin of the nation, we find a story of the nations origin. Which should be enough to inspire suspicion.BENNINGTON Geoffrey “Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation” in BHABHA ibid. pp121-137, p.121.He continues to stress, “the idea of the nation is inseparable from its narration”Ibid. p.132. Nation SpaceIt seems axiomatic to claim that “nation” is a spatial metaphor. The borders of a nation are best perceived as membranes, permeable boundaries, which permit communication with and sometimes infusion by, the other. The nation has to have something to delineate itself against: meaning is created by a process of differentiation, and “nation” as a concept contains its own degeneration, as those boundaries bleed. In considering the nation as a space from the point of view of the Other, the most cogent theorisation appears in Homi Bhabhas work, specifically in his essay “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”BHABHA Homi “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” in The Location of Culture Routledge, London, 1994:139-170., from which we wish to procure some significant premises. Firstly, Bhabha speaks movingly of the gathering of scattered peoples:The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor.Here we have the sense of nation as an expression of grief for something that has been lost, and is consequently longed for. Interestingly, the nation is for Bhabha what heterosexuality is for Butler - the site of loss and melancholiaThank you to Sarah Chinn for this connection. See BUTLER Judith Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Routledge, London, 1990. The nation also embodies the desire of the exile - Bhabha lyrically invokes us to realise “how fully the shadow of the nation falls on the condition of exile”BHABHA Homi “Dissemination” op cit. 1994:141. The nation from this perspective is not “here”, but “there”, a desired object, representing a projected yearning for a perfectly consolidated self, paradoxically beyond the self. Perhaps we might think of this nation as externalising a dream of pre-Oedipal integration. Interestingly, the profundity of this yearning can only be revealed metaphorically, in that sense linguistic expression is itself displaced, in a “figure of speech”. So, the grief of unbelonging, of migrancy, is fixated by its own antithesis, a fantasy of transcendence, and immanence.Bhabba argues that “from the liminal movement of the culture of the nation. minority discourse emerges. minority discourses that speak betwixt and between times and places”Ibid. p.155/158. A nation is ineluctably comprised and shaped by what it defines itself against from its own inside. The imagined nation of nationalism is fantasised as intact, impregnable, unitary, constant and monolithic; as a material entity the nation space is ruptured, it is mutable, temporal, limited, and precarious, haunted by its own division. Thus we need to approach any examination of the occasion of nationalist sentiment, typically manifest in the annual Irish St Patricks Day Parades with the tools of narrative analysis, to see how nations, as fictions, involve the curiosity and evoke the commitment of a reader, and asking why this particular story captures her/his intricate social imagination, at this specific fork in history. Historians remark on the fact that the narratives of identity of the Irish of east coast America differ from the Irish diaspora who went to Chicago, St Louis, Cinncinnati and the other new cities of the American west. OCONNOR, THOMAS H. The Boston Irish: A Political History Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995: 61. While Irish-Americans story of origin is one of enforced exile, due to English greed and misrule and solace in and fidelity to their Catholic religion and Irish culture and allegiance to America, the land of open economic opportunity, the identity of the Irish-Americans in the major cities of the east coast USA, such as Boston and New York, has an added dimension. The memory of surviving systematic severe sectarian oppression, enacted by the ultra Protestant Nativists or Know Nothing gangs of those cities, is fundamental to the formation of the identity of these east coast Irish-Americans. The Irish-Americans of the east coast US remember how employment advertisements routinely closed with the phrase: “No Irish need apply”. Though as Theodore Allen points out these notices have been “ more effective in discrediting anti-Irish bigotry than in reducing the entry of Irish workers into domestic service employment.” ALLEN, THEODORE W. The Invention of the White Race Vol. 1 : Racial Oppression and Social Control Verso, London & New York, 1994:139See also DOOLEY, BRIAN Black and Green: The Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland & Black America Pluto Press, 1998. Irish-American ethnicity in New York was characterised as obedient to the Catholic clergy and maintaining an organised Irish labour brotherhood kept in place by their block vote for the local and national Democratic party, allied to a sense of surviving systematic persecution by the English in Ireland and the Ultra-Protestants of the USA. The persistence of this characterisation is remarkable in surviving for so long, but the stigmatised stereotype has also persisted of the Irish-American man as a violent, slovenly, maudlin, racist, drunk, tied to the political corruption of city politics. The Ancient Order of Hibernians, the organisation that runs the New York St Patricks Day Parade is a fraternal men and boys only organisation who claim origin from the sixteenth century when the members were needed, in the words of their official historian: “to protect the lives of priests who risked immediate death to keep the Catholic Faith alive in occupied Ireland after the reign of Englands King Henry VIII”. The evidence of the existence and impact of this Ancient Order in Ireland is slight to say the least, but the AOH was founded in America in 1836 at New Yorks St. James Church, to protect the clergy, and church Property from the Know Nothings and their followers. While its origins in the USA lay in “the purpose of defending Gaelic values, and protecting Church and clergy”, its role became crystalised with the influx of Irish immigration following the famines of the 1840s when it sought “to aid the newly arrived Irish, both socially and politically”. It is now the largest Irish society in the USA and, as its website declares it sees its role as welcoming “new Irish Americans”, fostering and preserving Irish culture, and being at: “the political forefront for issues concerning the Irish, such as; Immigration Reform; economic incentives both here and in Ireland; the human rights issues addressed in the MacBride Legislation; Right-To-Life; and a peaceful and just solution to the issues that divide Ireland.” At the forefront of the activities of the AOH is the organisation of The New York St Patricks Day Parade. While St Patricks Day in Ireland tends to be marked by wearing fresh shamrock pinned to your coat, going to Mass, having a break from the Lenten fast, braving the showers to watch a local parade and certain sporting fixtures, it is a tame affair indeed to St Patricks Day celebrations in the USA. St Patricks Day falls neatly halfway through the American college students second semester, and is beloved by generations of American students as a riotous, drink-fest. The commercialisation of the day is long established in America: green beer; maudlin songs; the traditional fare of corned beef, cabbage and potatoes, gaudy green decorations for the body, the ubiquity of “Kiss Me, Im Irish” buttons, plastic leprechauns and made-in-china shamrock further increases its appeal as a national party day on the streets. Even by the summer of 2005 there were nearly 120 St Patricks Day Parades advertised to take place across the USA in March 2006 on the website SaintPatricksDayP. In the memory of the AOH their New York St Patricks Day Parade still bears the hallmarks of its roots in the troubled 1850s. By 1854 the Irish were on red alert from violent attacks by the Know Nothings and as the AOHs Deputy National Historian, Gerry Curran puts it, the St Patricks Day Parade of that year contained an:unusually large number of Irish units of the state militiaProtection of their community in general, and of the marchers in particular, motivated these men (many of whom were AOH members). Their demeanor stood in striking contrast to the proverbial Irish faults of violence, indolence, and intemperance with which the popular media of the time portrayed them. The inclusion of these military units helped transform the St. Patricks Day procession into the parade we recognize today. CURRAN, Gerry Saint Patricks Day and the AOH website.Curran goes on to describe how in 1856 the AOH president led the Father Mathew Total Abstinence and Benevolent Society in the parade: “This famous Irish temperance organization helped bring a new dimension of order to the line of march and deflated the myth that the Irish were, as suggested by Henry Cabot Lodge: .a hard-drinking, idle, quarrelsome, and disorderly class, always at odds with the government.” The association of St Patricks Day with drunken debauchery clearly embarrasses the AOH officials, as they suffer from the stigmatised identification of Irish Americans with alcoholism. The AOH has been the prime organiser of the New York parade since this time. The parade quickly grew in size and the AOH spread rapidly in the cities where the Irish were to be found and soon both the AOH and St Patricks Day parades became a feature of every substantial North American city. So th