Pheoby's Queer Quietness in Their Eyes Were Watching God

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• Pheoby’s Queer Quietness in Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Benjamin Bagocius

Pheoby Watson in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a figure who speaks up for, listens to, and invites queer discourse, or narrations of the sexual that nuance givens about desire by unsettling normative cisheterosexual storylines. In doing so, Pheoby models leadership in creating queer possibility, or ways to enjoy, express, and reimagine desires that dwell outside sexual standardization.¹ When Pheoby’s close friend Janie Crawford returns to the town of Eatonville after a prolonged absence, most townspeople watching her arrival presume to know what sexuality is, especially women’s sexuality. Unlike Pheoby, the townspeople tend to be heteronormative apologists. They want Janie’s erotic experience to conclude in a predictable way, and then they judge her for her supposed failures at normative heterosexuality: “[W]e all know how she went ’way from here and us sho seen her come back,” one townsperson asserts (Their Eyes 3). They would rather presume and judge than listen “to be surprised” (Tippett 29).² “’Tain’t no use in your tryin’ to cloak no ole woman lak Janie Starks” (Their Eyes 3) assert the townspeople, who “sat in judgment” [End Page 405] (1) holding foregone conclusions “’bout dese ole women,” apparently like Janie, “runnin’ after young boys” (3). Hurston associates their pronouncements about a woman’s sexuality with “mass cruelty” (2). In contrast, Pheoby approaches matters of sexuality as realms of the inconclusive. The first time Pheoby speaks, she introduces discursive space for sexual indeterminacy and queer story(telling): “Well, nobody don’t know if it’s anything to tell or not. Me, Ah’m her best friend, and Ah don’t know” (3).

Pheoby inserts the language of not knowing (“nobody don’t know” and “Ah don’t know”), conditionality and alternative (“if”), and not disclosing (“tell or not”) in conversations that presume sexual determinability and disclosure. Pheoby thus serves as a queer agent because she neither makes assumptions about women’s sexuality nor expects women’s confession about it, what Phoeby calls the porch sitters’ notions that Janie should “speak tuh suit ’em” (5). Pheoby’s outlook aligns with a foundation of queer thought: to invite non-knowability rather than seek consensus about what sexuality looks, sounds, or behaves like. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick posits in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), a foundational text for queer literary studies, queer thought unsettles givens about sexuality and finds in the sexual an indefinite, perhaps not fully knowable or agreed upon phenomenon. Sedgwick suggests scholars should resist critical pressure “[t]o crack a code and enjoy the reassuring exhilarations of knowing[]” what sexuality presumably is. For Sedgwick, scholars can too easily “buy into the specific formula ‘We Know What That Means’” and thus miss noticing sexuality’s nuances (204). The townspeople in Hurston’s novel make this mistake when they announce “we all know” Janie’s erotic story when, it turns out, they do not. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson extend Sedgwick’s work to Black queer studies, finding Black queer sexuality “creative, necessarily undisciplined, and ‘misbehavedly’ liberatory” (14), welcoming of “unpredictable nuances” and “signification of a plurality of dissident sexualities” that “destabilize a monolithic understanding of such labels/categories as gay, heterosexual, or queer” (13, 14, 8). Sedgwick, Johnson, and Henderson encourage thinkers and writers to question definitional consensus on what exactly sexuality is or should be, and to let literary art and cultural artifacts surprise scholars into new imaginings about it.

Pheoby’s character aligns with Sedgwick’s, Johnson’s, and Henderson’s queer approach to sexuality because she expresses misbehavior in [End Page 406] sexual discussions, welcomes a plurality of dissident sexualities instead of only the one that “we all know,” and is open to hearing stories of sexual nuance. Pheoby is the first character in the novel to challenge discourse that squashes women’s sexual agency rather than expands it into possibility. When the townspeople stereotype Janie as one of “dese ole women runnin’ after young boys,” Pheoby subtly but dynamically un-types Janie. She “hitched her rocking chair forward before...