Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Read online

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  herit, Jacques Derrida has said, is to choose.∞∂ A selection must be made between what it is possible to keep and what must clearly be rejected. After all, however important the figure of Wilde has been, nothing could be more detestable than his elitism, his aristocratic aestheticism. Yet how could we do without his praise of self-fashioning: the idea that one could create oneself, make of one’s life a work of art?

  The evocation of this very theme calls to mind immediately the name of Michel Foucault. In a whole series of texts, Foucault o√ered numerous reflections on the gay question. He insists, for example, on the idea that a process of self-fashioning must proceed by way of the invention of new kinds of relations between individuals and by the development of what he called a ‘‘gay culture.’’ It has seemed to me that often he was simply reproducing, in modern garb, discourses that had preceded him—those I have just mentioned, that must be critically sifted through before they can be reappropriated. I have therefore tried to engage with Foucault’s arguments—

  not always perfectly coherent ones—in order to clarify both their promise and their limitations.

  Foucault’s name is inevitably associated, as regards the questions we are dealing with here, with the radical dissolution of the notion of homosexuality that he undertook in La Volonté de savoir, the first volume of his History of Sexuality. ∞∑ In that volume he describes the invention by psychiatric discourse—toward the end of the nineteenth century—of the ‘‘personage’’ of the

  ‘‘homosexual.’’ Before that time, he says, there were only condemnable

  ‘‘acts’’; after that time, people who practiced those acts were assigned a psychology, a set of feelings, a particular kind of childhood, and so on.

  Foucault has thus become a powerful antidote to John Boswell and his

  ‘‘essentialist’’ conception of gay history. Foucault’s analyses have become the Bible of ‘‘constructionist’’ historians, which is to say that he is the source of inspiration for almost everything written in the United States and for almost everything written elsewhere as well. The idea that there is no invariant reality to homosexuality, that Greek love is not a prefiguration of modern homosexuality, has become widely accepted. The case has been won. Still, it equally remains the case that the Hellenists in Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century thought of themselves as di√erent kinds of ‘‘personages’’ than those around them and that they had this sense of being di√erent from childhood onward. They wrote well before psychiatric discourse got hold of ‘‘sexual inversion’’ as a concept, before that discourse pigeonholed acts between

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  persons of the same sex in their large nosological table of perversions and

  ‘‘identities.’’

  There is another di≈culty that has, to my knowledge, never been brought up before. It is the case that Foucault himself, in Madness and Civilization, fifteen years before La Volonté de savoir, suggested a di√erent date for the invention of the ‘‘personage’’ of the ‘‘homosexual’’: the seventeenth century.∞∏ In the earlier book he describes a process through which ‘‘homosexuality’’ is invented that is nearly the opposite of the one described in La Volonté de savoir: it is only because the ‘‘homosexual’’ and the ‘‘mad person’’

  have already been constituted (notably through a profound transformation of ‘‘sensibility’’ of which the internment of the insane and the debauched is the most visible symptom), it is only because these objects are now readily available that psychology, which will take hold of them for its own purposes, can appear and develop in the nineteenth century.

  I do not juxtapose these two books by Foucault with their contradictory presentations merely out of a sense of the need for exactitude and precision in commentary on his work and its evolution. Many other cultural and

  political matters are at stake here as well. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault gives us an analysis cast in the terms of prohibition and repression: his project is to make audible the speech of those who had been reduced to silence. In La Volonté de savoir he describes the act of speech as one of the constitutive elements of an apparatus of power that incites individuals to speak. It is easy enough to imagine how di√erent the political perspectives implied by these two analyses would be. Yet I have the impression that in his interviews from the 1980s Foucault was trying to integrate these two positions and to go beyond them through the idea of an ‘‘aesthetics of existence’’

  that would involve the creation of new subjectivities.

  There is thus an astonishing intellectual kinship between Foucault and Wilde, seen in the manner in which they both sought to invent gestures of resistance, to take their distance from instituted norms. Foucault should be placed within a history of the coming to speech of gay people and in the line of authors who, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, have tried to create spaces—practical spaces as well as literary and theoretical ones—in which to resist subjection and in which to reformulate oneself.

  Thus the three distinct sections of my book are organized around a single idea: I have tried to reconstruct, in lived experience, in literary history, and in the life and the work of Michel Foucault, the movement that leads from

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  subjection to the reinvention of the self—from a subjectivity shaped by the social order to a chosen subjectivity.

  The French title of this book is Réflexions sur la question gay. French readers will have little di≈culty noticing the reference to Sartre.∞π It is more than a passing reference. Sartre is not read as much nowadays as he used to be.

  When he is read, it is usually not with an eye toward finding tools for thinking about politics. Yet perhaps it is time to return to Sartre, whose thought—both its practical and philosophical sides—contains a great conceptual richness for those who wish to understand struggles for cultural recognition or minority movements. His work, along with that of Bourdieu, Go√man, and Foucault, constitutes one of the major points of reference for the reflections I o√er here.

  I owe a great debt to certain American authors, such as Eve Kosofsky

  Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David Halperin, and a few others. Their works have provided me with endless inspiration. The polemics against gay and lesbian studies that have flourished in France in recent years in a certain sector of cultural journalism as well as in academic circles have had a certain absurd quality about them—o√ering us nightmarish visions and waving banners

  saying ‘‘You must not read this.’’ Of course those waving the banners haven’t read anything and are merely asking others to follow their example. Who has ever had the idea of ‘‘reducing Proust to his homosexuality,’’ to cite the phrase used over and over again? The point is to analyze what Proust said about homosexuality, which is something quite complicated. Would one say of George Chauncey that he wanted to reduce New York to its homosexuality, in recreating for us the ‘‘Gay New York’’ of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth?∞∫ Should we refuse to read this master-work of historical analysis? Refuse to learn? To pursue knowledge?

  Of course that would be ridiculous. Important works have been published (even if most of them are not translated into French). Perhaps in France a di√erent name will be chosen for gay and lesbian studies, given how many misunderstandings have occurred around this expression, one which seems to call for the establishment of a new discipline. Whereas it is in fact much more a question of opening a whole group of disciplines to new approaches and new objects of study. But gay and lesbian studies, which is to say, the whole set of works published and of research projects undertaken in this area, have at their best always first and foremost been about adding to

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  knowledge, inciting thought, provoking reflection. I will oft
en take my distance from the authors I refer to; I will sometimes oppose them. But in many ways this book is my acknowledgment of all I have learned from them.

  I use the word gay for the simple reason that it is the word the people who are in question in this book today use to designate themselves.∞Ω Language is never neutral; acts of naming have social e√ects: they provide definition for images and representations. The choice of the word ‘‘gay’’ is a recognition of both the legitimacy and the necessity of the movement of self-a≈rmation that mobilized the word. In this regard, this book is an engaged act.

  I am not unaware of certain problems resulting from the choice of the word gay, and I do not wish to minimize them. I will be criticized, given that I am talking about ‘‘gay questions,’’ for remaining silent about lesbians.

  This is a deliberate choice, but not because I am uninterested in lesbian questions. It is not my intention to reproduce the classic gesture of leaving out women when speaking of homosexuality in general. Far from it. To the contrary, I am convinced that, as far as contemporary politics are concerned, lesbians and gay men are quite close to each other, and for very good reasons. Their common enemies (as we have seen frequently in France in the past few years) make no distinction between them, denouncing them with the same gesture and fighting against them without distinction.

  My choice is also not due to any belief that certain fields are reserved for specific people, inaccessible to those who do not belong to the group that is the focus of the work or the research. Just as I have never thought that one had to be gay to write about homosexuality—be it historically, sociologically, or theoretically—I do not think that one must be a woman to write about women or a lesbian to o√er thoughts on lesbians. The richness of intellectual labor suggests that anyone can intervene in any debate, and that works cannot be disqualified ahead of time by those who imagine they possess the monopoly over a given field. The quality of the work is what matters, not the sex or the sexual orientation of the author.

  Yet, given that I wanted to pose the problem of ‘‘subjection-

  subjectivation’’ (what is a gay subjectivity and how is it constituted?), it seemed to me that the analyses would rarely be able to apply both to men and to women. To evoke socialization in the family, at school, in relation to professions, and, of course, in relation to sexuality and to the construction of

  ‘‘gender’’ would require very di√erent approaches for boys and for girls, for men and for women. From this point of view it seems impossible to approach the question of gay men and lesbians as if they were a homogenous group.

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  Still, when it seems to me that my analyses bear with equal validity on men and on women, I indicate this. The process of subjection-subjectification may not always be the same for gay men and lesbians, but it sometimes is.

  This is, then, a book on the gay question. Yet there will be no theory of homosexuality to be found in it, not even of male homosexuality. I want merely to present a set of reflections, sometimes incomplete, provisory, and hypothetical. They will perhaps provoke further reflections; in fact they are intended to do so, without regard for borders—be they national, disciplinary, or sexual. This is an open book, open to debate, discussion, dialogue.

  p o s t s c r i p t

  At the moment that I am finishing this introduction, I read in the newspapers that a young gay man was murdered in a small town in Wyoming. He was tortured by his two attackers and left to die, tied to a barbed-wire fence.

  He was twenty-two. His name was Matthew Shepard. I know he is not the only gay man to have had such a tragic fate in the United States in the past few years, just as I know that numerous gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals are regularly and systematically victims of such violence. A report by Amnesty International recently provided a terrifying list—one that was, alas, far from complete.≤≠ But it is Matthew Shepard’s photograph that I have in front of me today, along with the account of what he su√ered. How can I not think of him as I prepare to publish this book? How can I not ask the reader to remember, in reading it, that there are more than just theoretical problems at stake?

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  A World of Insult

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  Dominated individuals make common

  cause with discourse and consciousness,

  indeed with science, since they cannot

  constitute themselves as a separate group,

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  mobilize themselves or mobilize their

  potential power unless they question the

  categories of perception of the social order

  which, being the product of that order,

  inclined them to recognize that order and

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  thus submit to it.

  p i e r r e b o u r d i e u , ‘‘Description and

  Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and

  the Limits of Political E√ectiveness’’

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  1

  The Shock of Insult

  It all begins with an insult. The insult that any gay man or lesbian can hear at any moment of his or her life, the sign of his or her social and psychological vulnerability.

  ‘‘Faggot’’ (‘‘dyke’’)—these are not merely words shouted in passing. They are verbal aggressions that stay in the mind. They are traumatic events experienced more or less violently at the moment they happen, but that stay in memory and in the body (for fear, awkwardness, and shame are bodily attitudes produced by a hostile exterior world). One of the consequences of insult is to shape the relation one has to others and to the world and thereby to shape the personality, the subjectivity, the very being of the individual in question.

  As Marcel Jouhandeau wrote in his extraordinary short treatise on homosexuality from 1939, On Abjection, to be insulted is to be branded on the shoulder by a red hot iron.

  What a revelation it is to be insulted, to be scorned in public. We

  become familiar with certain words that up to that point had only been heard in classical tragedies, but that now become our own accouter-ments, our own burdens. We are no longer what we thought ourselves

  to be. We are no longer the person we knew, but the one others think

  they know, the one others take to be this or that. If someone could

  think that of me, then in some way it must be true. At first we pretend that it is not true, that this is only a mask, a costume for a play in which someone has clothed us, and that we could take o√. But no. These

  garments adhere so tightly that they have already become your face,

  your flesh. To take them o√ would be to rend your own being.∞

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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 The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal.≤

  The insult is a verdict. It is a more or less definitive sentence, for life, one that will have to be borne. A gay man learns about his di√erence through the force of insult and its e√ects—the principal one being the dawning of the awareness of a fundamental asymmetry instantiated by that particular linguistic act: I discover that I am a person about whom something can be said, to whom something can be said, someone who can be looked at or talked about in a certain way and who is stigmatized by that gaze and those words.

  The act of naming produces an awareness of oneself as other, transformed by others into an object. Sartre puts it nicely in an observation about Genet, tagged as a thief by the gaze of the other: ‘‘It is as if a page of a book suddenly became conscious and felt itself being read aloud without being able to read itself ’’ (s t g, 41). Insult is thus a way of looking me over and a way of dispossessing me. My consciousness is ‘‘beleaguered by others’’ (57) and I am disarmed by this aggression. To cite Sartre on Genet a bit more: ‘‘A
dazzling spotlight transpierced him with its beams.’’ Alone, powerless, all he could do was struggle ‘‘in that shaft of light’’ that is the gaze of the other, its power to name (136).

  Insult is more than a word that describes. It is not satisfied with simply telling me what I am. If someone calls me a ‘‘dirty faggot’’ (or ‘‘dirty nigger’’

  or ‘‘dirty kike’’), or even simple ‘‘faggot’’ (or ‘‘nigger’’ or ‘‘kike’’), that person is not trying to tell me something about myself. That person is letting me know that he or she has something on me, has power over me. First and foremost the power to hurt me, to mark my consciousness with that hurt, inscribing shame in the deepest levels of my mind. This wounded, shamed consciousness becomes a formative part of my personality. An insult can thus be analyzed as a ‘‘performative utterance,’’ according to J. L. Austin’s definition. In a well-known work, that English philosopher distinguished between constative and performative utterances.≥ The former describe a situation and can be true or false. The latter produce an action and thus are neither true nor false—for example, ‘‘I call this meeting to order.’’ In fact, Austin defines two kinds of performative utterances, illocutionary and per-locutionary. In the first kind, the utterance itself constitutes the action it announces. To say ‘‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’’ or to respond ‘‘I do’’

  (meaning: ‘‘I do take this woman as my lawful wife’’ or ‘‘I do take this man

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  as my lawful husband’’) during a wedding ceremony is to make an utterance of this kind.∂ In the second kind of performative utterance, the action is not produced by the utterance per se; rather it is one of the consequences (the fear, the emotions, or the thoughts produced by words like ‘‘I am warning you’’) of having said something. At first glance, one would include insult in this latter category. Insult is a linguistic act—or a series of repeated linguistic acts—by which a particular place in the world is assigned to the person at whom the acts are directed. This assignment determines a viewpoint on the world, a particular outlook. Insult profoundly a√ects the consciousness of an individual through what it says: ‘‘I assimilate you to this,’’ ‘‘I reduce you to that.’’ And so I am this or that. Insult can be found anywhere: linguists have expanded this category of performative utterances to include allusions, insinuations, irony, metaphor, and so on. Given that at the end of his book Austin himself comes to dissolve the distinction between performative and constative utterances, we might say that many of the utterances of everyday life can be described as injurious speech acts.