Michel Foucault: “Let’s escape as much as possible from the type of relations that society proposes for us and try to create in the empty space where we are new relational possibilities” (“The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will” 160)

Mostly, I’m less interested in what the film has to say, and more interested in how it goes about saying it. I’m deeply troubled by the idea that there is some kind of retribution or justice in outing a supposedly closeted gay man, even if he actively works against queers. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault discusses what he calls the hermeneutics of desire, which Lee Quinby describes in Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism:

The predominant mode of morality practiced in the United States today is a hermeneutics of desire. As Foucault defined it, this is a hermeneutics through which interiorized desire is deciphered. According to this system of morality, the attainment of the truth of one’s being involves bringing to light the shadowy impulses of one’s innermost self. Only in making one’s inner truth visible can the snares of desire be suppressed or regulated into normality. (69)

While Quinby’s discussion after this passage largely revolves around the compulsion to confess one’s innermost desires, there’s also the reverse to confession: rooting out others’ innermost desires. There is a compulsion to know another’s sexuality (played out in our everyday lives, when we wonder is s/he straight or gay).

As if gay and straight are ahistorical inner truths, as if same-sex desire necessitates a gay positionality, as if only closeted queers exhibit shame and internalized homophobia, as if hypocrisy were a charge of the highest order.

What does charging a supposedly closeted gay man with being a closeted gay man actually do? Perhaps my imagination is failing me, but it only seems to reinscribe the various tactics of discourse/power used against queers onto other potential queers. It seems like we have replaced the high school, where the queers are rooted out and ridiculed, with the political realm, where queers root out the closeted homophobes and ridicule them. And to elevate the stable gay and lesbian out identity as superior and wash this identity of any shame: To be out is to be mature and have escaped a society of shame; to be closeted is shameful, to be rooted out. It seems like a politics of ressentiment with little fruitful effects for queers. (And I’m not necessarily against ressentiment politics.)

What do we actually learn or do by attempting to out explicit homophobes as closeted gays? The Right is hypocritical, we can announce! But we already knew that! (Sedgwick might be useful here in her critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion, a hermeneutics that offers tautological arguments: the conclusion is already known.)

I’m not saying one’s intimate life should be protected as private, but I’m really struggling to finding political effects in such a “witch hunt” that are useful for combating an anti-queer society.

POST-SCRIPT: See Ta-Nehisi Coates’s thoughts here.

PPS: See Matt’s response to my post.

Of course, the IHE article provides more context and more egregious problems that these. Do many academics actually not read the texts they cite? I found the article interesting. However, one suggestion made by Armstrong and Wright (2008) — the study that the IHE article reports about — seems highly problematic:

“When an author uses prior research that is relevant to a finding, that author should make an attempt to contact the original authors to ensure that the citation is properly used,” they write.

As some commenters on the post note, this is simply not possible. One notes that Bruno Latour wouldn’t have time to answer all these requests, and that it’s impossible to email Derrida. Of course, practicality aside, it’s just not theoretically sound. Shouldn’t something put out in public speak for itself? Certainly, asking an author via email for clarification is not a bad idea, but if something’s out in public, it is the text, not the author. To rely so much on intent, to try to get at exactly what the author meant…. Author Function, anyone? Additionally, some concepts are redeployed or used in contexts that authors may disagree with.

That point aside, though, Armstrong and Wright bring up some pretty valid concerns (though not new concerns, I gather).

I just read this LA times story titled “What does gay look like? Science keeps trying to figure that out.” In it, various biological characteristics of queer bodies are discussed as correlating or even possibly causing queerness. After reading it, I am disturbed by some (if not all) of the studies that seek to understand “the origins of sexual orientation.” Among those studies:

• Having older brothers increases the likelihood of being gay for males. This might be because “After giving birth to a boy, [a mother's] immune system might create antibodies to foreign, male proteins in her bloodstream. Subsequent sons in the womb could be exposed to these “anti-boy” antibodies, which might affect sexual development in the brain.
• Left-handedness increases the likelihood of being gay or lesbian. One study hypothesizes that “development of a fetus might be disturbed by factors such as a mother’s illness, steering the fetus into being less than strictly right-handed — and, in some cases, less than strictly heterosexual” (emphasis mine).
• Gay men report having larger penises than straight men. “One guess is that gay men could have been exposed to an odd mix of hormones in the womb. Testosterone levels might peak early, causing enhanced penis growth, then drop off later in pregnancy — leading to some feminine characteristics.”

As Eve Sedgwick has written in Tendencies, she’d be fine with these studies if the approached biological factors as conducive or productive of same-sex attraction. Instead, terms like disturbed are used.

But I think even if these studies used different terminology, I wouldn’t be okay with it. Why even look for the “origins” of same-sex attraction? First of all, these studies miss that sexual orientation is largely a historical and social construction, rising out of the nineteenth century. As Foucault has noted in History of Sexuality, before this period, Western society focused on acts, until the implantation of identities on bodies: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual. These implantations, he argues, give rise to the power of the medical and psychological disciplines: the more they invade bodies, the more power they get, and the more power they get, the more they can invade bodies. A search for the origins of sexual orientation is an invasion into queer bodies, for the purpose of controlling sexuality.

I am also disturbed by the search for origins of sexual orientation. Foucault also smartly argues that seeking for origins is an ill-founded pursuit. It marks a foundation and ignores prior causal influences, as well as other influential factors. Genealogy, Foucault argues, is a stronger method for understanding causations and cultural-historical (and perhaps even biological?) influences on our bodies. What if scientists, instead of looking for the origins of sexual orientation, instead looked at from a genealogical perspective, with so many different genealogical forces going into the orientation.

And what is up with the claim that an early peak in testosterone leads to femininity? I hope this is journalistic laziness and the authors of the study at least wrote “feminine biological characteristics,” because gay male femininity, such as flipping the wrist, is socially constructed: it’s a value put on an action. But even if the scientists who wrote this study meant biological characteristics, this is largely a stereotype of gay men. There isn’t anything inherently feminine about a gay/queer male body. Hell, I can show you some bears and some daddies that show this.

And this whole thing reeks of strategic rationality. As Adorno and Horkheimer have written, strategic rationality is the rationality of domination. It’s been a while since I’ve read Dialectic of the Enlightenment, but this rationality of origins, causations, and statistics seems wrapped up, to me at least, in domination.

No, my left-handed body is not disturbed. I’m reminded of the Feminist slogan “Keep your laws off my body.” I wonder if a queer politics slogan shouldn’t be “Keep your science off my body.”

Does this mean that we have constituted ourselves as, in the words of a detractor, “the School of Resentment”? Not at all: we are, if anything, rather inclined to piety. Nonetheless, any attempt at interpretation, as distinct form worship, bears a certain inescapable tinge of aggression, however much it is qualified by admiration and empathy. Where traditional “close readings” tended to build toward an intensified sense of wondering admiration, linked to the celebration of genius, new historicist readings are more often skeptical, wary, demystifying, critical, and even adversarial. This hermeneutical aggression was initially reinforced for many of us by the ideology critique that played a central role in the Marxist theories in which we were steeped, but, as we were from the beginning uncomfortable with such key concepts as superstructure and base or imputed class consciousness, we have found ourselves, as we will discuss at some length in this book, slowly forced to transform the notion of ideology critique into discourse analysis. Moreover, no matter how thoroughgoing our skepticism, we have never given up or turned our backs on the deep gratification that draws us in the first place to the study of literature and art. Our project has never been about diminishing or belittling the power of artistic representations, even those with the most problematic entailments, but we never believe that our appreciation of this power necessitates either ignoring the cultural matrix out of which the representations emerge or uncritically endorsing the fantasies that the representations articulate. (8-9)

Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

Joseph ends his post by asking, Is there such a thing as Christian Fascism? Is there a way to talk about the sacred that is not tainted by empire or dismissed as irrationality?

This is particularly important with the humanist backlash against Christian Fundamentalism that Orosco discusses. I think this backlash is partially fueled by a the Christian Fundamentalist movement’s own reaction against the the Enlightenment, against the age of (hyper?)rationality. I’ll agree with most humanists that certain forms of Christianity are whacko, but equating a belief in god with a belief in the Easter Bunny is a bit (very) logocentric.

I certainly believe that there is a way to discuss the sacred without dismissing it as irrational. Unfortunately, that’s not the mode of Enlightenment, which rejects the non-empirical. Although I don’t have her book in front of me to reference, Gloria Anzaldúa’s excellent book Borderlands / La Frontera has a great discussion of the sacred and spiritual in her (and many people, particularly marginalized ethnic groups, such as Latinas and Chicanas) and how that sacred/spiritual nature is denied and rejected by mainstream (white male) society. I think that once we get truly rational — that is, once we listen and accept others, and listen and accept our bodies — that perhaps there is room for a rational spirituality. Certainly, some fundamentalist Christianity is not rational, but there are rational aspects that need to be explored, and many wonderful Christians who are very rational and loving people.

Baker asks in her review, In answer to the question of what is to be done, I would assert as I usually do: Knowledge is power. I would assert the reverse, ala Foucault: Power is Knowledge. Unfortunately, with such corporate and governmental control backing Christian Fundamentalism, they definitely have the power-knowledge (hegemony?). What does marriage mean? What does citizenship mean? What does freedom mean? What are our country’s values? These are terms defined by those in power. Knowledge that our country is becoming Christo-Fascist doesn’t do much good, as Baker proposes it might, if our society is as fully of cynics and nihilists as Frederick Jameson and Cornell West claim. The answer to such knowledge becomes “so what? there’s not much I can do.”

Baker also notes that rational discourse is not usually an option with Christian fundamentalists (have you tried to argue gay rights with a fundamentalist? [and I hate asking that question, because it creates a false monolithic creation of fundamentalists]).

I agree. So what is to be done? How can we create a society where all forms of living (as long as they are not build on domination and oppression) are valid? This begins, I think, on the libidinal level: how do we listen and what do we desire? Do I, as a queer radical young man, truly value being listened to? If so, then I too need to listen to the conservative Republican Christian businessman and father. And by truly listening to each other, I think we need to listen to each other’s stories, each other’s hopes, each other’s dreams, each other’s fears.

My friend Luke and I had a great conversation the other night about hate. As a (although not well-read) fan of Zizek, I was proposing that hate might have some validity. As he states in The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?:

…confronted with ethnic hatred and violence, one should thoroughly reject the standard multiculturalist idea that, against ethnic intolerance, one should learn to respect and live with the Otherness of the Other, to develop a tolerance for different lifestyles, and so on – the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred: hatred directed at the common political enemy. (11)

For the longest time, I was thinking about hate and hating the “common political enemy” (the system, as I read it), and proposing that this was a good way to think about things. But Luke brought up a great point, which actually might have changed my mind (I’m still mulling it over): Hate is totalizing. It is ignoring the complexity of a situation and instead putting into a very constricting box. To hate capitalism is to hate all the advances to have come along with it. And I thought of Hannah Arendt’s book on Eichmann, on the banality of evil (the title escapes me): Evil is banal, it is cliché. Isn’t hate, too, cliché?

To hate Christian fundamentalism is to miss its valid aspects: its fear of a changing world, and its rejection of such an unhealthy insistence on rationality. To hate Christian fundamentalism is, in effect, to not listen.

Wow, I think I got off on a few tangents here, and I’m not even sure if this post has much cohesiveness, but eh, that’s okay.

The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals….They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production, the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. (211)

Why should individuals be useful? Why are people reduced to their uses, instead of viewed as whole beings? When we view others as how they can be useful to us, we cease to see them as whole entities and instead see them as things, not separate from our solipsistic views. It seems like discipline is something to be questioned and fought against in all the above functions.

From “The Order of Discourse”:

Any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the knowledge and powers which they carry….What, after all, is an education system, other than a ritualization of speech, a qualification and a fixing of the roles for speaking subjects, the constitution of a doctrinal group, however diffuse, a distribution and an appropriation of discourse with its powers and knowledges?” (1469)

Foucault, Michel. “From The Order of Discourse.” The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from the Classical Times to the Present. Eds. Patricial Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004. 1460-1470.