[yourself ] as a homosexual.’’≤
Being true to oneself is doubtless easier for heterosexuals. This is not to claim that heterosexual lives have no rifts in them or that all heterosexuals are people who live with a happy sense of self-adequation. Yet, perhaps a certain stability is ensured by family life, along with the powerfully heteronormative context of professional life and, when you get right down to it, the entire sexual order that makes heterosexual behaviors seem legitimate and
‘‘normal.’’ That stability can allow one to feel at home with oneself, to feel that one coincides with established social roles and with well-known and accepted social identities that are themselves presented as normative models by and for heterosexuality. The norm and social institutions are themselves homophobic (as the refusal to allow gay men and lesbians to marry reminds
u n r e a l i z a b l e i d e n t i t y
∞∞∑
us, and as all the discourses that work to justify this prohibition often naively admit).
When I used the theory of performativity to define the power of insult, I recalled that among the examples Austin provides is the example of the words spoken to perform a marriage. The example recurs throughout his book almost like an obsession: ‘‘I do take this woman . . .’’ or ‘‘I now pronounce you. . . .’’≥ These statements are performative in that they perform the act that they announce. But the performative power of such statements is never the expression of an individual will. The person who says them must be authorized to say them, and the situation in which they are said must fulfill certain conventions. Therefore a performative utterance must have been said before. It is always a citation. An utterance is only performative if it is empowered by the social order or the law (even if it is only the law of repetition) that institutes it.∂ Now it is worth noting that the performative utterances of a wedding ceremony (and therefore of the entire structure of iteration and citation that support them) accomplish more than what they explicitly set out to do: they do e√ectively unite two people ‘‘in the bonds of matrimony’’ (taking for granted the entire set of all preceding marriages and also the institution of matrimony that allows such a ceremony to have any meaning at all), but beyond that they also exclude all those persons to whom the right to marry is refused. Every time a justice of the peace pronounces those words, he or she not only marries two people, he or she also reenacts all the rules (and the laws) of marriage—thereby reproducing the social and juridical exclusion of gay people. In this regard, marriage has a relation to what Pierre Bourdieu has labeled ‘‘rites of institution,’’ rites that produce two e√ects simultaneously: they perform the separation between those who have already been marked distinctively in a certain way and those who have not yet been marked (because they are too young); and they also separate those who have been distinguished in a certain way from those who may never be distinguished in that way. (For example, the ‘‘rites’’ that mark the entry of young men into adulthood by definition obviously exclude women.) Marriage performs this same double separation: most visibly between those who are married and those who are not, but also—less visibly but just as e√ectively—between those who have the right to marry and those who do not. Consider the argument put forth by the supporters of the various proposals for national domestic partnership legislation in France. They all stated that the goal is to o√er ‘‘a legal framework to those couples who do not wish to or who are not allowed to marry.’’∑ Clearly, this referred both to
∞∞∏
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f heterosexual couples who did not wish to be married yet wished to have access to some of the advantages associated with marriage and to same-sex couples, who had no access to marriage. A phrase like that is an e√ort to solve a problem without even noticing that it exists. For surely each time something like that is said, a question should occur to us: who are these couples who want to marry but are not allowed to? Again we see how the institution of matrimony works to perform exclusions. By the daily act of saying ‘‘I now declare you husband and wife,’’ the justice of the peace implicitly reminds all same-sex couples that no o≈cial will unite them in the bonds of matrimony, or, more explicitly, they are told that the bonds of matrimony are not meant for them. By uniting in marriage, the justice of the peace also performs an exclusion, recalls and perpetuates a system of inferiorization. Such an exclusion has an e√ect even on people who do not wish to get married. (Roland Barthes, for example, in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, describes his painful feeling of rejection at the hands of the social order upon seeing a marriage ceremony being conducted at the Église Saint-Sulpice.∏)
But marriage and the question of the legal recognition of couples are only one example of the ways institutions reject gay men and lesbians. (One would also have to speak of schools, the military, churches, the law, sports, and so on.) These institutions work to establish and to reproduce an un-crossable divide between the norm and homosexuality—and another form of self-division within a gay person.π Here we could have recourse to another Sartrian concept in order to say that gay identity is ‘‘unrealizable.’’ The notion of being ‘‘unrealizable’’ refers both to the fact that one can never coincide with oneself and that one must nevertheless pursue this very goal of self-coincidence.∫ A gay person must forever be replaying the moment in which he or she decided to be himself or herself, decided to be what he or she is. Such constant work on the self, far from ensuring stability, is perpetually unsettling. Perhaps we should not deplore this, even as we notice the ravaging e√ects such constitutive instability can have on individual minds—e√ects that provide a livelihood for psychoanalysts. This inadequation of self to self, this division within one’s own self, is most often experienced (especially by gay men and lesbians who are in the closet) as a painful and profound break within one’s own personality, within one’s own individual subjectivity. Such a division, when it is unchosen and unpleasant, can perpetuate all the e√ects of a ‘‘double life’’ or ‘‘double consciousness.’’ Yet one can assert that this same inadequation, this same division within the
u n r e a l i z a b l e i d e n t i t y
∞∞π
self, provides the possibility for a kind of existential and cultural richness.
American advocates of ‘‘queer politics’’ have pointed to the potential freedom it could enable: if you are inadequate to your own identity, then you are inadequate as well to all the shackles that accompany various ways of stabilizing an identity.Ω Doubtless it is because a gay person must always be working on his or her self that Foucault spoke of the idea of a ‘‘homosexual ascesis,’’ which is to say, an ‘‘aesthetic of the self,’’ a self-fashioning which is nothing more than the coming to consciousness and deliberate assumption of this structure of inadequation that is at the heart of the daily life and consciousness of gays and lesbians.
This is not a new idea. We might recall that Oscar Wilde, using words that Foucault would spontaneously rediscover a century later, was already speaking of ‘‘making of one’s life a work of art.’’ In the second part of the present study, we will see that the idea of creating oneself was basically consubstantial with gay discourse from the very moment it emerged. One can understand, then, why Foucault would say that ‘‘homosexuality is not a form of desire but something desirable.’’ We should not be thinking of discovering some preexistent form of desire within ourselves: ‘‘We have to devote ourselves seriously to becoming homosexuals and not stubbornly limit ourselves to discovering that that is what we are.’’∞≠
Foucault clearly means to suggest that there is no natural, transhistorical truth to homosexuality waiting to be discovered once the prohibitions on it have been overcome. ‘‘Gay identity’’ is a historical construction, a product of history. Consequently, it can be modified through historical action, through individual and collective reinvention. Further, this implies that, to the extent that this identity is not a given, but so
mething made, something always being remade, we have to give up the illusion that we could someday achieve some kind of stable and definitive identity. Some people may like to think that, thanks to the victories of the gay and lesbian movement, it may become possible, simply by wanting to ‘‘be gay,’’ to achieve some kind of existential repose, something that would be both social and psychological, and that this repose will perhaps happen within the space of freedom known as the ‘‘gay world.’’ Or, if it does not happen there, then perhaps, to the contrary, it will happen with the achievement of full and equal rights, notably the right to marriage. No, identity will always be something that must be created. What we have on our hands is something that is essentially unfinished. Instead of looking for repose, instead of looking for some collective or individual ‘‘end of gay history’’ in the complete and full adequation to oneself, we had better
∞∞∫
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f accept the inevitably provisional unforeseeable character—on both the individual and collective levels—of what it means to be gay.
My intention is not to perpetuate the literary myth of the ‘‘gay outlaw,’’
whose very existence would be synonymous with political and cultural subversion. Leo Bersani has recently given us a masterly analysis of this mythology (an analysis that was also an eloquent defense of it, though a defense perhaps too strongly marked by a clear nostalgia for a form of literary transgression that we should not forget was made possible by all sorts of class allegiances and repressive social circumstances that were all presupposed by the literary transgression itself ).∞∞ Yet one might still think that there will always be a potential ‘‘pariah’’ in every gay person, even in the one who is most careful regarding his or her integration into the system of dominant values. This may only be for the simple reason that the world into which such a person would assimilate, into which he or she (sometimes) dreams of blending, is not interested and will reject, even violently, this request for integration, with the reminder that people like him or like her merely encourage the dissolution of society and its values. (Yet at the same time, that society will insist on ‘‘assimilation,’’ that is, insist on a gay person denying what he or she is, or at least refraining from displaying it.) The gay people who care most about ‘‘integration’’ thus must ‘‘disassimilate’’ themselves in order to advocate for ‘‘assimilation.’’ They must set themselves up as a specific group in order to ask that they be seen and treated as no di√erent from anyone else. Such demands will unleash reactions that both insist that they are di√erent and insist that they not ask to be treated as di√erent. That is to say, they are inevitably forced back to their point of departure: the perpetual choice between silence and ‘‘rebellion,’’ between returning to the closet and a≈rming who they are. This is how gay people remain torn between two di√erent levels of what is commonly referred to as
‘‘assimilation.’’ There is assimilation by way of invisibility—to be silent, not to exist as gay. And there is the assimilation a certain number aspire to, the assimilation that would come with achieving equal legal rights. Some no longer care for the first form and find the second violently refused to them by the homophobic majority. This is an insurmountable paradox.∞≤ Yet it is in this paradox that one finds all the political and cultural stakes of gay ‘‘resubjectification’’ today, whether it be individual or collective.
One should not believe that a glorious future is looming on the horizon,
u n r e a l i z a b l e i d e n t i t y
∞∞Ω
one in which homosexuality will be considered as ‘‘normal’’ as heterosexuality, one in which homophobia will have disappeared along with the
stigma attached to the category of homosexuality, one in which there will be merely a continuum of practices and behaviors, each as normal as all the others. Such a utopia—one no one really believes in—is a chimera whose only function is as part of an e√ort to cause the gay movement to lay down its arms, to turn to a kind of self-e√acement—the only form of ‘‘assimilation’’
allowable today, and one endlessly called for.
Homosexuality is perpetually disturbing. It causes worry and perturbation. It produces rejection and hatred. Still, that idea developed by gay movements in the 1970s, according to which there would be a strong link between homosexuality and revolution or, in the lingo of today, between homosexuality and ‘‘subversion,’’ seems merely a pipe dream or a silly article of faith.
Such ways of thinking and speaking had a considerable importance in creating the gay and lesbian movement, but they have more to do with wishful thinking than with analysis, or with a firm grasp on reality. For obviously there is neither a direct nor a unique way of linking sexuality and politics.
One need not even enter into a discussion of the personal opinions of gay people past or present (opinions that certainly cover the same political spectrum as those of the general population and probably are distributed according to the same social and cultural criteria and determinants). It su≈ces to mention a few of the more famous gay people of the twentieth century or to recall the political attitudes of a certain number of movements and organizations from the same period to show not only that homosexuality can happily dwell hand in hand with a whole range of conservative, reactionary, elitist, and nationalist ideologies, but even that it can count as one of their primary justifications or founding principles.∞≥ One should doubtless confront head-on the opposite question, considered forcefully by Leo Bersani in Homos, according to which there might be a continuity between, on the one hand, gay male desire and the fantasies associated with a desire oriented toward the most obvious signs of masculinity and, on the other hand, the phallic structures of political and social oppression.
Still, whatever kind of fantasmatic inscription of homosexual desire there may be for this or that gay person, whatever his or her political positions may be, however socially or politically conformist he or she may be, however willing to submit to dominant values, established norms, and the institutions that reproduce them, however great his or her desire may be to dissociate himself from any other gay person who creates a ‘‘bad image’’ or makes
∞≤≠
i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f social acceptance more di≈cult, it nonetheless remains the case that the world to which that gay man or that lesbian would assimilate is the world of insult. It is a world in which that person has been called or might potentially be called a ‘‘stinking faggot’’ or a ‘‘dyke’’ and in which he or she will consequently always be, in one way or another, marginalized or ostracized.
This cannot fail to have psychological consequences. (Among them might be a reinforced desire to adhere to the social order, a redoubled e√ort at conformism, so that by way of this will to assimilation, one might achieve recognition from social institutions. Or, in inverse fashion, we might observe the realization being made that such assimilation is an impossible project, a trap gay people set for themselves, and that one’s time is better spent turning one’s back on the kinds of claims whose aim would be to integrate gay people to the social order and, instead, learning to enjoy the benefits of marginality.)
Doubtless we should be calling radically into question this whole series of oppositions between integration and subversion, between assimilation and separatism—between these and a whole similar range of notions constantly reproduced by lazy habits of thought. For, in the first place, these are notions that are never analyzed and that fail to stand up to the most cursory examination. What, for example, could ‘‘assimilation’’ really mean for gay people? They are not immigrants who may have to integrate into a new
culture but, in large majority, people who work, pay taxes, vote, participate in cultural life, and so on. Should they be learning to integrate as gay people?
But can they? Integrate by pretending not to be gay? Indeed! Further, what could something like �
��‘separatism’’ really mean, when the idea seems to apply only to those people who (only during certain hours of the week) spend their time in neighborhoods or locales understood to be gay, yet who also have jobs, go out to dinner, go to the movies, and do any number of other things that can hardly be thought of as separatist? Certainly there are also plenty of gays who speak in favor of assimilation and yet spend a lot of their time in gay bars, whereas there are others who speak all the time about subversion and yet would never set foot in such a place for fear of being snared by capitalism or of participating in the increasing commercialization of the gay community. All these false oppositions can be left to careless essayists or to journalists who have a hard time locating the truly important social debates of our time (such as the profoundly homophobic opposition—
present in so many French discussions—between ‘‘separatism’’ or identity
u n r e a l i z a b l e i d e n t i t y
∞≤∞
politics and ‘‘universalism,’’ an opposition whose only purpose seems to be to deny gay people the right to speak in the first person).
Rather than trying to establish one’s position vis-à-vis these oppositions, rather than choosing one term over another, it would be more worthwhile to take the oppositions themselves as objects for analysis. For it would seem that the entire history of homosexuality, at least in the twentieth century, has been divided between these two poles: there is on the one hand all the work that has been done to establish a ‘‘gay world’’ that belongs to a specific
‘‘minority’’ (although there is not an exact correspondence between that world and that minority), and there is on the other all the work that has been done to allow gay people to be considered individuals like any other, whose sexuality should not matter. Is it not the interaction between these opposing aspirations that has been the basis of what we call the gay movement or gay culture?
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 18