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≥∏Ω
cosmologies founded on the opposition between the ‘‘masculine’’ principle and the
‘‘feminine,’’ see Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, especially the pages devoted to an ethnology of Kabylia. See also the study called ‘‘Irresistible Analogy’’ in The Logic of Practice, 200–70, and also, in the same book, the appendix titled ‘‘The Kabyle House or the World Reversed,’’ 271–83.
7. See Grand-Carteret, Derrière ‘‘Lui.’’
8. See the helpful commentary by Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 219–20.
9. Prieur, Mema’s House, Mexico City.
10. See Mendes-Leité, Bisexualité, le dernier tabou.
11. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, 146. See also Masculine Domination, 5√.
13. Subjectivity and Private Life
1. Isay, Being Homosexual, 137.
2. Cocteau, The White Book, 21.
3. Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 3.
4. Genet, from an interview in Playboy, April 1964. Cited in Pucciani, ‘‘Le ‘Dialogue infernal’ de Genet et Sartre,’’ 87. The bbc interview is cited in Pucciani, 88.
5. Monette, Becoming a Man, 61.
6. Go√man, Stigma, 88.
7. See ibid., 100–102.
8. See Bartlett, Who Was That Man: ‘‘Our first experience of talking as gay men is the experience of lying’’ (84).
9. See, on this point, Go√man, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
10. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 296–97.
11. See Adam’s analyses in The Survival of Domination, 96.
12. See the classic analysis of MacKinnon, ‘‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State,’’ 515–44.
13. Dunning, ‘‘Sport as a Male Preserve,’’ 274–75.
14. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 186, and Between Men, 88–89.
15. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 20.
16. Ibid., 50.
17. Go√man, Stigma, 128–29.
18. See Halperin, Saint Foucault.
19. On ‘‘theatricality,’’ see Butler, ‘‘Critically Queer,’’ in Bodies That Matter, 232.
She presents theatricality as a way to expose ‘‘the homophobic ‘law’ that can no longer control the terms of its own abjecting strategies.’’
20. See also Sedgwick, ‘‘Queer Performativity,’’ 5. Along with the escape from shame, there may be another closely related factor to consider when trying to understand the reasons for this play with self-presentation: the feeling of being
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‘‘separate’’ or ‘‘di√erent’’ and the isolation that implies create for many gay men an imaginary life filled with images and fantasies (drawn from books, magazines, films, people observed in the world, and so on) that can then be exteriorized in their own gestures, their own personal theater, once they have decided to reveal the secret that previously had caused them to play at discretion and the imitation of heterosexual models.
14. Existence Precedes Essence
1. Pollak, Les Homosexuels et le sida. Such a finding leads us back to the issue of the over-representation of college-educated people in the spontaneously produced samples often used in sociological studies. But this, in turn, should not lead us to neglect the important phenomenon of upward mobility. Together, these two issues might lead us to a more complex vision of the causality Pollak lays out: it will not be su≈cient to say that it is only gays with a higher degree of cultural capital who are best positioned to self-identify as gay. Rather, prior to that, it is the impulse to be able to self-identify as gay (in whatever way that might be, even by way of a temporary refusal of one’s self ) that leads one (but how exactly?) to pursue education even to advanced levels.
2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 219–20.
3. Consider, for example, the character Daniel in the series of novels called The Roads to Freedom. For Sartre’s homophobia, one can also consult the text in which he described those men who collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War as ‘‘cowardly,’’ that is to say, ‘‘feminine,’’ that is to say, ‘‘homosexual.’’ As corroboration of his opinions, he noted that ‘‘Parisian homosexual circles provided many brilliant recruits to the collaboration’’ (Sartre, ‘‘Qu’est-ce qu’un collaborateur?’’ 58). We see here the traditional topos of the gay man as traitor to the nation (Sartre would certainly have known that people had frequently invoked it in attacking Gide), a topos we find Sartre using again when we see Daniel cheering the arrival of German troops in Paris. (Charlus, in Proust’s Time Regained, proves to be another Germanophile, revealing a certain consistency across time in the representation of gay men.) On Simone de Beauvoir’s homophobia, see her correspondence with Nelson Algren, in which she jokes endlessly about ‘‘fairies’’ and ‘‘pansies’’
(Beauvoir, A Transatlantic Love A√air ).
4. See his interview with the gay magazine Gai Pied Hebdo. In that interview he states that ‘‘I think that for the moment, homosexuality is obliged to remain fairly isolated, to be a group within a prudish society, a marginal group that cannot be integrated into society. It must reject that society and even, in a certain way, hate it.
Homosexuals are obliged to refuse that society, and the only thing that they can
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 1 5
≥π∞
hope for at the present time is, in certain states, a sort of free space where they can find each other, as happens in the United States, for example.’’
5. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 69.
6. After having remarked that Zionism is in a certain sense a ‘‘counterideology’’
to antisemitic ideology, Arendt adds, ‘‘This, incidentally, is not to say that Jewish self-consciousness was ever a mere creation of antisemitism; even a cursory knowledge of Jewish history, whose central concern since the Bablyonian exile has always been the survival of the people against the overwhelming odds of dispersion, should be enough to dispel this latest myth in these matters, a myth that has become somewhat fashionable in intellectual circles after Sartre’s ‘existentialist’
interpretation of the Jew as someone who is regarded and defined as a Jew by others’’ (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, xv). This criticism (based on a naive reading of Sartre’s text) does not really seem pertinent, for Sartre is obviously not trying to say that there is no Jewish cultural tradition, but rather that there is no
‘‘nature,’’ no ‘‘essence,’’ to ‘‘being Jewish.’’ Consequently, to be Jewish is to be defined as such within a given society. Sartre did, of course, later (in an interview in 1966) recognize that he should have included historical specifics in his argument.
Yet in the same interview he insists that in his own eyes the description he had given of the structural opposition between ‘‘authenticity’’ and ‘‘inauthenticity’’ remained perfectly valid (cited in Contat and Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre, 140).
7. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 67.
8. Ibid., 93. He also writes: ‘‘Many inauthentic Jews play at not being Jews’’ (96).
That might recall for us the definition of ‘‘bad faith’’ given in Being and Nothingness:
‘‘The first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee, to flee what it is’’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 115).
9. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 108.
10. Sartre, ‘‘Textes politiques,’’ 23.
11. David Halperin has also written of ‘‘an identity without an essence’’ in Saint Foucault.
12. Bech, When Men Meet, 97. See also Halperin, Saint Foucault.
15. Unrealizable Identity
1. See the comments by Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet, 68.
2. Bech, When Men Meet, 96.
3. Shoshana Felman has pointed this
out in The Literary Speech Act.
4. See Derrida, ‘‘Signature Event Context’’: ‘‘Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a
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marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a ‘citation’?’’ (18).
5. [Translator’s note: Domestic partnership legislation (the pacs, Pacte civil de solidarité) was adopted in France in fall 1998. The first French edition of this book was published in spring 1999.]
6. See Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
7. Sports are obviously a location where homosexuality is forbidden (and unspeakable). It is sometimes o√ered as a reproach to organizers of the Gay Games or of other gay and lesbian sports organizations that such a form of separatism is incomprehensible. Sports are neither gay nor straight, it is said. Such critics choose to forget or to ignore that sports are deeply heterosexual and that a self-declared gay man or lesbian would only with di≈culty be able to continue as a member of a team. (There is an exemplary case of an English soccer player who was slowly pushed out of the professional circuit. One could also think of the scandal that broke out when Martina Navratilova came out, an act she could permit herself, already being at the top of her sport. That did not, however, prevent hate-filled reactions from other players.) It is not di≈cult to understand the pleasure that is involved in being able to be openly gay or lesbian within an athletic context, and we might also recall that these organizations and their competitions are open to bisexuals, transsexuals, and heterosexuals as well as to people of all ages.
8. See Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 675–80. I use this notion somewhat freely here, straying a bit from the precise meaning given to it by Sartre.
9. See Halperin, ‘‘The Queer Politics of Michel Foucault,’’ in Saint Foucault, 15–
126.
10. Foucault, ‘‘Friendship as a Way of Life,’’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 136, translation modified. This volume will hereafter be cited as Ethics. I will return to this text and others in the third part of this book.
11. Bersani, Homos.
12. Joan Scott has analyzed this insurmountable paradox in the context of the feminist movement in Only Paradoxes to O√er.
13. One could think here of the elitist circle of Stefan Georg in Germany in the 1920s or the ‘‘masculinist’’ wing of the German homosexual movement of the same moment.
14. On the Mattachine Society, see D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, especially chapter 4, ‘‘Radical Beginnings of the Mattachine Society’’ (57–74) and chapter 5, ‘‘Retreat to Respectability’’ (75–91). See also the biography of Harry Hay, the founder of this movement, by Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay; see also the anthology of writings by Hay, Radically Gay.
15. See Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, 22–69.
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 1 6
≥π≥
16. See Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation; and Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire. This theme can also be found in the book that had so much influence on Hocquenghem: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
17. On the queer movement, see Sedgwick, ‘‘Construire des significations queer,’’
109–16. On the importance of Guy Hocquenghem, see Moon’s introduction to Homosexual Desire.
16. Perturbations
1. Bersani, ‘‘Trahisons gaies,’’ 67.
2. Foucault, ‘‘Le Départ du prophète,’’ cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 280–81. My aim is not to present Arcadie as more subversive than the fhar. Far from it! But it does seem to me that ‘‘subversion’’ is always relative, always historically, culturally, and politically situated. It must always be thought of in relation to that situation.
3. See Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. For a look at a more specific period, see Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940.
4. See ‘‘Dana International, la Queen de Sabbat,’’ Libération, June 8, 1998. Jennie Livingston’s film, Paris Is Burning, about drag balls in Harlem, could lead to the same kind of reflections: the ideal that the participants in the contests that take place at these balls strive to imitate is that of a well-to-do white woman. Further, even those competitors who live day-to-day as transvestites, such as the wonderful Xtravaganza, have as their ideal to find a husband and set up house. The same aspirations can be found in the Mexican transvestites interviewed by Annick Prieur in Mema’s House.
5. A Jew can be racist; a black person can be antisemitic; a gay person can be racist and antisemitic, and so on. The paradigm of this absence of solidarity among the oppressed can be found in the attitudes of August von Platen and Heinrich Heine. The former denounced the latter as a Jew. The latter mocked the former for his homosexuality. See Mayer, Les Marginaux, 220–37.
6. Go√man, Stigma, 138.
7. Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, 93.
8. Bell and Weinberg, Homosexualities, 157.
9. Adam, The Survival of Domination.
10. Pierre Herbart said of Gide: ‘‘As for that anarchical force that he harbored, and that occasionally makes an appearance in his work—a body of work that is, for those with the eyes to see it, imbued with that very force—he only knew how to make good use of it in his life, due to a shadowy struggle that our ‘morals’ helped him to undertake.’’ (Herbart, ‘‘André Gide,’’ 78).
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11. On Gide’s proximity to the Action Française, see Hanna, ‘‘What Did André Gide See in the Action Française?’’ 1–22. On his evolution toward the left, see Lucey, Gide’s Bent.
17. The Individual and the Group
1. rtp, 2:639–40. The entire passage is worth reading in this regard.
2. For Proust, ‘‘race’’ does not always carry a biological meaning. If he sometimes describes homosexuality in quasi-physiological terms as an error of nature in placing a woman’s soul in a man’s body, he also uses the notion of race as a metaphor to describe the ‘‘collective’’ that gay men form despite themselves as a historical product, a product of the social hostility that they face and that has determined them: ‘‘brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a perscution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race . . .’’ (rtp, 2:638; my emphasis). In the first draft of this passage, the historicization of the notion of race was even clearer: ‘‘Other apologists of their race sing its praises back to its origins . . . similar to those Jews who insist that ‘Jesus Christ was a Jew,’ without realizing that sin, even original sin, has a historical origin and that it is reprobation that produces shame’’ ( Recherche, 3:933; my emphasis). Or again: ‘‘In the end, given the shared opprobrium of an undeserved abjection, they took on common characteristics, the look of a race’’ ( Recherche, 3:924).
3. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. It is obviously not my intention here to reconstruct all the complexities of Sartre’s thought on this question, and notably on all the di√erent levels of ‘‘groups’’ that he is at pains to define. My goal is simply to see how the general idea of the passage from ‘‘seriality’’ to a ‘‘group’’ can be useful in thinking of the ‘‘gay question.’’
4. Sartre, ‘‘Textes politiques,’’ 43.
5. Ibid., 79.
6. Ibid., 43. These articles by Sartre, with titles such as ‘‘Maoists in France’’ or
‘‘Elections: Fool’s Gold,’’ are profoundly marked by the problematics and the vocabulary of the far left of the early 1970s. Yet it is striking to wh
at an extent, once they are stripped of their far-left rhetoric, they seem to be written as a response to the questions posed by the political and cultural organizing of today. It is true that Sartre does not speak only of workers in these texts, but of ‘‘struggles’’ in general.
Indeed, one finds in the text from 1971 on the Burgos trial and the Basque question, extremely interesting comments on the opposition between ‘‘abstract universalism’’ and a concrete and ‘‘singular universal.’’ See 21–37, esp. 24–25.
7. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 676.
8. See s t g, 54–55, 58.
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9. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 62. Franz Fanon critiqued rather severely this Hegelian idea of a stage of revolt leading to an ideal society, a process that apparently proceeds by way of the laws of some historical necessity that would impose some preexisting meaning on the origins of these movements of revolt: ‘‘And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, preexisting, waiting for me. . . . The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. . . . I am not a potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am. . . . My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack.
It is. It is its own follower’’ ( Black Skin, White Masks, 134–35).
10. Sartre, Black Orpheus, 61. He says more or less the same thing at the end of Anti-Semite and Jew, where he writes that ‘‘the authentic Jew who thinks of himself as a Jew’’ is not hostile to assimilation. He ‘‘simply renounces for himself an assimilation that is today impossible; he awaits the radical liquidation of anti-Semitism for his sons.’’ The ‘‘access of consciousness’’ of the Jew as Jew and the ‘‘war’’ he must wage are nothing other than a step toward that ‘‘radical liquidation of antiSemitism’’ that will be produced by the ‘‘socialist revolution’’ (150).
11. Sartre, The Words, 255.
12. Hirshman, Bonheur privé, actions publiques.
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