We could certainly think, as does Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that the tension between ‘‘universalizing’’ aspirations (that think of homosexuality as fitting into a continuum of sexual practices) and ‘‘minoritizing’’ aspirations (that, to the contrary, think of gay people as a distinct group) does e√ectively constitute the history of the gay movement, and, more generally, the history of twentieth-century homosexuality. We might also think that all the notions referred to by these currents (assimilation, integration, lack of notable dif-ferences, on the one hand; and a gay world, minority status, and fundamental di√erences on the other) have never shown themselves to be particularly stable, have sometimes shifted sides, and have taken on di√erent and contradictory meanings in di√erent cultural contexts. For the very same discourse can mean opposite things and can aim at di√erent ends in di√erent historical moments or in di√erent countries.
For instance, it makes no sense to imagine that on one side of the division we will find militant activists working to establish the claim that gays form a special minority, while on the other we will find politically unengaged people who only wish to blend into society and be accepted by it. The gay movement itself has been, from the outset, divided between these two tendencies. One and the same organization can harbor them both at the same moment, or move from one position to the other. One can see this in the case of the Mattachine Society in the United States, founded in 1948 by former members of the Communist Party who wanted to foster the growth of a self-conscious homosexual minority. They would soon be replaced at the head of the orga-
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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 nization by representatives of the opposing tendency, who were trying to advance an assimilationist agenda.∞∂ Yet was this not also already the case in Germany, at the very beginning of the century, when the ‘‘minoritizing’’
theory of a ‘‘third sex’’ as put forth by Magnus Hirschfeld was challenged by those who favored masculinist (and misogynist) theories whose aim was to integrate male homosexuality into the continuum of social relations between men, and which relied on the theme (one that would have a long life ahead of it) of an inborn bisexuality (inborn at least in men) rather than on the idea of a specifically homosexual minority?∞∑ Many of the revolutionary discourses of the 1970s spontaneously rediscovered these myths of bisexuality or polysexuality—but with the opposite political and ideological implications in mind. They dreamed of a new day after the revolution when gay people
would no longer be oppressed because they would have disappeared into a large new—‘‘transverse’’—form of sexual communication.∞∏ In the early 1970s there was a large group of available discourses (often mingling and borrowing from each other with little concern for coherence) that can be summarized schematically as involving a discourse of ‘‘identity’’ (there was something like a homosexual ‘‘identity’’ that had been repressed through various prohibitions and that needed to be liberated and to speak for itself ) and another discourse that claimed that the opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality was itself the product of nineteenth-century bourgeois society.
In order to make it even clearer that all the various ways of thinking about sexuality and all their various political connotations cannot credibly be reduced to oversimplified schemas (such as the opposition between assimilationists and separatists), we could note that in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, the conservative discourse of a homophile organization such as Arcadie tended rather toward the minoritizing point of view, considering homosexuals as a separate ‘‘people,’’ whereas the radical discourse that took its inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus tended toward ‘‘universalism.’’ Its aim was the abolition of the boundaries and dualisms that set up di√erent categories for individuals according to their sexualities. Arcadie’s discourse could therefore be described simultaneously as ‘‘separatist’’ and ‘‘assimilationist,’’ for it considered gay people as a group apart, yet sought recognition and integration for them from social norms and institutions. Whereas the discourse of the far left was, to the contrary, ‘‘antiseparatist,’’ but also ‘‘antiassimilationist.’’ It wanted to break down established values through the liberation of desire and through the notion of ‘‘deter-
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ritorialization’’ that was so important to Deleuze and that of ‘‘transversality,’’
so important to Guattari. This is why the queer movement in the United States, which places itself in opposition to a tendency within the gay movement to be both separatist and assimilationist, has wanted to resurrect the subversive inspiration of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to reclaim the possibilities of being antiseparatist and antiassimilationist. That this movement would find a friendly precursor in Guy Hocquenghem is easily understandable, even if it obviously chooses to leave behind (or perhaps it does not always do this) his utopian and revolutionary inspiration.∞π One might here wonder if ‘‘queer theory’’ is correct when it relates the thought of Hocquenghem to that of Foucault. For if it is Foucault’s intention to dissolve the notion of identity (not by saying that it does not exist, but by showing that it was forged by psychiatry), this is not in order to oppose to identity a theory of the liberation of desire and its ‘‘transversal’’ potentialities. Foucault’s critique is pointed quite directly at the idea that ‘‘sexuality’’ and
‘‘desire’’ could be the agents of subversion, given that they also need to be thought of as part of the deployment of the disciplinary technologies Foucault is subjecting to historical analysis. Seen in this light, Foucault’s La Volonté de savoir is as much a critique of the theory of desire as of the theory of identity, to the extent that theories of desire share with theories of identity the presupposition that sexuality defines the interior ‘‘truth’’ of an individual. Foucault, as we will see in the third part of this book, will later abandon this approach and return to something closer to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the minoritizing tradition. He will develop the idea of a ‘‘gay culture’’ that needs to be created, which amounts to saying that individuals, by way of their sexuality, weave among themselves forms of collective belonging, forms to which one can give a shape, a physiognomy, a content—all of which are forever being invented, and cannot be prescribed or defined in advance. But this minoritizing conception of Foucault’s, as we shall see, is neither separatist nor assimilationist. The ‘‘gay culture’’ that he would wish for is not assimilationist, for he conceives of it as something that will allow one to evade and thereby destabilize the institutions of the established order.
Nor is it separatist, for it will produce social and cultural changes that will be as relevant to heterosexuals burdened by the yoke of normalcy as to gay people.
16
Perturbations
The idea that some kind of sexual ‘‘subversion’’ would necessarily be linked to politically progressive attitudes is an idea that needs to be abandoned. Just as an avant-garde painter might have quite traditional taste in music or literature or reactionary political beliefs, so one can be (more or less) ‘‘subversive’’ as regards sexuality and (more or less) conservative politically speaking. One has only to think of Jean Cocteau or Gertrude Stein, whose right-wing political opinions existed comfortably alongside radically subversive behavior as regards sexual codes. It is clear, then, that we have to proceed on a case-by-case basis, always inquiring into the true content of what is called ‘‘subversion,’’ inquiring as to what is to be subverted, and why, and even if there is anything whatsoever being subverted at all.
Consider, for example, some of the ‘‘assimilationist’’ demands that one finds being made by gay and lesbian movements in many countries around the globe. Leo Bersani has described them quite cruelly (but justly) as revealing a ‘‘desire to demonstrate that we too can be good soldiers, good parents, good priests.’’∞
Are such demands not necessarily shaped from the inside by the ‘‘unrealizable’’ quality of gay identity? That quality of gay identity—
however it is conceived—introduces a slippage into any assimilationist project, any project that has as a goal to allow one to inhabit the social order. For no gay person will ever be accepted according to the established set of values into whose sanctum he or she may sometimes entertain the silly illusion of being admitted. This is shown, as we have seen, in all of the baroque arguments adduced by all the social and cultural agents of homophobia against the manifest desire of gay men and lesbians to be granted normal rights and normal forms of institutional recognition. These agents and their agencies repetitively reproduce a violent discourse that asserts on every occasion that gay people represent a great danger to society and to civilization. They
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thereby at least perform the service of reminding anyone worried about the
‘‘conformism’’ of assimilationist programs, that even those very programs contain the capacity to induce a kind of social and cultural instability—one that homosexuality will always carry with it—in the institutions that, some day or other, are going to have to make a place for it.
The panic evinced by the guardians of the heterosexual order when confronted by this programmatic destabilization has taken on many forms in recent times. One of the more notable among them has been the argument one can hear not only from the defenders of a certain Christian order, but also from those who preach the faith of psychoanalysis as well as both people of the far right and even the socialist or Catholic left, all of whom wish to defend ‘‘the-right-of-children-to-have-both-a-father-and-a-mother.’’ No matter how ridiculous such an assertion should seem in the world of today—a world in which so many children are being raised by a single parent or by two parents of the same sex—it gives expression to the horror felt by homophobic people of all political or philosophical persuasions when faced with the power of innovation and invention that homosexuality exhibits. Such a horror can be felt even when the gay or lesbian people involved claim—as many of them do—that what they most wish for is to fit in with everyone else as normally as possible. But for gay people, to integrate themselves into the norm is doubtless more di≈cult than to remain marginalized. One might think here of the half-serious, half-ironical comments Michel Foucault made in speaking about the organization Arcadie, at the moment when that organization’s founder had decided to close it down: ‘‘It is in the very nature of such a movement to wish to gain acceptance for homosexuality from the arbiters of established values, to find a way to include it in existing institutional frameworks. But once you have thought about it, such a project seems infinitely more di≈cult, and crazier [ plus folle], than the project of creating spaces of freedom that exist outside established institutions. For after all, these kinds of spaces have always existed.’’≤
We should not conclude from these remarks that Foucault considered
this ‘‘crazy’’ [ folle] project to have more legitimacy than the project of creating free spaces. It seems rather that he wanted to insist that such a project was fundamentally doomed to failure and that the free spaces represented the only real possibility for gay people to be able to live out their lives and invent themselves. Throughout all the battles gay people have led for that institutional recognition so regularly refused to them, it seems true that only partial successes have been possible, successes that are also fragile and
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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 ephemeral. Still, it should go without saying that these partial successes do not only gain for many gays and lesbians rights that they need or long for.
They also greatly perturb those institutions that are ever so slowly forced to recognize these ‘‘peculiar situations,’’ situations whose concrete existence has now been brought to the attention of even the most obtusely homophobic individuals.
The richness of argument in Leo Bersani’s Homos lies for me not so much in the way he seeks to recover the subversive potential of certain writers but in his wonderful demonstration of how, within the history of gay culture, even in the case of an individual author, a tradition of conformism and a tradition of subversion can coexist to the point of being indissociable, even indistinguishable, from one another. The two are one. It is perhaps even the very inextricability of the two traditions that defines what we call gay culture.
This would apply equally in the case of women or men.≥ It would also apply to transsexuals, as one can see by reading the interviews given by the Israeli singer Dana International. Given the scandal she created in her country, and given the way in which she has become a symbol of the revolt against the moral and religious order that certain groups wish to impose there, it might seem paradoxical to read the statements in which she describes her ideal of a life that seems to come straight out of the pages of a romance novel or to correspond to the fantasy of a little house with a white picket fence.∂ It would be a serious error to make fun of these dreams of normalcy. It is clear that what we see here is not so much the existence of transsexuality provoking the fury of the guardians of the norm as it is the unshakable will of a transsexual to a≈rm that she is a person like anyone else, that her tastes are more or less like anyone else’s, and that she can even represent her country in international competitions. This is a particularly intense example of the mixture of a will to integration with subversive potential, in which the interaction between the two is also very clear. One easily imagines the uproar that would ensue were she to demand the right to marry.
Subversion is always partial and localized. Those who forget that run the risk of being trapped in the narcissistic pleasure of assuming poses from which to emit radical discourses that are perfectly empty of content. If subversion does not subvert something specific at a specific moment, it does nothing at all. Thus one always needs to ask what the aim of subversion is, and what it is destabilizing. In every di√erent situation one has to consider
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what would be more subversive. One thereby realizes that in certain situations conformist aspirations are more destabilizing and can turn out to be more subversive than any number of revolutionary proclamations. It can be seen today that those who defend the social (or the ‘‘symbolic’’) order against the campaign to establish the right to gay marriage are perfectly capable of letting slip by all sorts of soi-disant subversive behaviors. The more liberal of those defenders might even appreciate or encourage those ‘‘subversive’’ behaviors for the way they help construct an exotic elsewhere in which gay men and lesbians could be locked away—and from which they would no longer clamor for access to equal rights. Gay men and lesbians are free to go on being ‘‘subversive’’ as long as they limit themselves to that. One might therefore tend to the idea that what would be truly subversive today would be to refuse the social role to which one is assigned. The obsessive need in France at the beginning of the 1990s to denounce identity politics (that is to say, the creation of the free spaces Foucault was speaking of ) has given way to the relentless denunciation of the ‘‘universalist’’ struggle to claim the right to marriage. Evidently such a claim (a claim on institutional recognition, the kind Foucault referred to as ‘‘crazy’’) is seen as more critical to the defenders of the established order. One even sees the two forms of denunciation (of identity politics and of universalist e√orts respectively) incoherently and illogically inhabiting the same discourses, as if gay people should always be denounced for something, as if they can never be right about anything.
We should add that if ‘‘subversion’’ is always partial, this is partly because a subject’s position within relations of domination is never simple. There are always multiple hierarchizations, sometimes contradictory among themselves: a gay man may be in a dominated and vulnerable position within the hierarchy of sexualities while
being well positioned to dominate in terms of his sex, his class, his ethnicity—that is, he could be a man, a well-to-do man, a white man, and so on. To take another example, a black woman will
perhaps feel more oppressed because she is black than because she is a woman and may therefore feel more solidarity with black men than with white women—and thus more inclined to struggle against racial domination and racism than against masculine domination and sexism. We need to try to conceive of the ensemble of systems of domination and oppression together as a totality, to think of these systems in their multiplicity and with all of their articulations. Yet clearly, in the context of a political action or an act of
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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 cultural subversion, any given person will have a tendency to emphasize this or that aspect of the multiple forms of oppression that concern her or him.
And we could go on to add that the fact of belonging to one oppressed category has never stopped anyone from contributing to a di√erent form of oppression. (To be the victim of racism does not stop someone from being racist or homophobic; to be gay does not stop someone from being racist or politically conservative, or reactionary, or even fascist.)∑ As Go√man puts it,
‘‘In many cases he who is stigmatized in one regard nicely exhibits all the normal prejudices held toward those who are stigmatized in another regard.’’∏ One should not have any preconceived ideas regarding solidarity between oppressed or dominated peoples. Such solidarity must be constructed and acquired, often despite prejudices that structure the ways of thinking of the dominated themselves.
Even if he is socially dominant, the gay man is always dominated as a homosexual. Just as women, as Bourdieu puts it in Masculine Domination, no matter how they are positioned in the social hierarchy, are always, within the particular social space to which they belong, in an inferior relation to men—
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 19