The variations of privacy and the closet

An fascinating story, as well as some tangential interesting comments by +Yonatan Zunger above it. We're undergoing a mass shift in privacy and society in terms of the Internet and social media.  The anonymity of the big city, and the selective blindness of the small town, are both models that are falling by the wayside as we become both neighbors of one another in terms of (electronic) access, and yet not connected by physical or traditional proximity.

Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger

There's an interesting review here of a recent book by Rachel Hope Cleves about a case of two women who married each other in the town of Weybridge, Vermont, in the early 1800's. What I find interesting here isn't the case itself, or any particular conclusions one can draw from it: instead, I wanted to note two interesting things that I spotted here which are worth thinking about some more.

The first comes from this quote from the book, which talks about the way that "the closet" works in small towns as being fundamentally different from the way it works in cities:

"Although it is commonly assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret… The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts… The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality."

This is a subject I've mentioned before, in the context of different social models of the meaning of "privacy" in small versus large communities: generally, complete lack of knowledge of other people's personal lives (enforced by custom prohibiting such inquiry) is workable in cities, which have evolved this as a cultural solution to the problem of a large number of very different people living in close proximity, with the possibility of true anonymity. On the other hand, in a small town it's impossible to keep secrets in such a fashion; instead, there the pressure is for people to find some way to work with each other, as everyone's joint efforts will likely be required to keep the town alive. There, we instead find a system of "open secrets," where things are generally known but never discussed, and a pressure for people to maintain an outward demeanor of conformance to the town's norms.

I note this with interest as we are presently entering a situation in which neither of these two adaptations works: our modern society gives us the proximity to very different people of cities, but the pervasive information of small towns, and so neither the solution of true anonymity nor the solution of conformity plus open secrets can adequately resolve people's needs to simply not be like their neighbors. As we watch the US and Europe, in particular, try to independently develop very different solutions to these questions, it's worth thinking about these historical examples in more depth to see what we can learn from them.

The second interesting item I found in this article was what the contemporary sources (on which this book is based) considered to be highly normative about Charity and Sylvia's relationship, which allowed them to fit it into their world as "just another marriage:" 

"One reason people viewed Charity and Sylvia’s relationship as marital was that the women divided their domestic and public roles according to the familiar pattern of husband and wife."

I find this interesting by comparison to this article by Tiffany Wayne, titled "Same-Sex Marriage Does Threaten 'Traditional' Marriage." (http://nursingclio.org/2013/04/02/same-sex-marriage-does-threaten-traditional-marriage/) Wayne's article argues that the reason that same-sex marriage is so controversial today is not the gender of the participants, but that the construction fundamentally threatens the concept of the gender-role-based marriage. I'm not certain that Wayne's thesis is correct, but this case provides an interesting connection to it: Cleves argues that this marriage was accepted, in no small part, because it was structured in a fashion which so closely paralleled the common gender-role-based marriage in its area that people could easily fit it into that picture, and Wayne argues that it's marriages which don't fit that model which are actually the source of contention today.

So while I can't offer you any firm conclusions whatsoever from this, I can at least offer you two interesting ideas to ponder.

h/t +Jennifer Ouellette for the link.