1
Frantz Fanonâs Homosexual Territories
Homosexuality appears in strange ways in Frantz Fanonâs Black Skin, White Masks: metonymically, as âan attempt at rapeâ and an âattempt at fellatioâ; as a symptom and evidence of âNegrophobiaâ; as white masochism; as a footnote on âanti-semitic psychosesâ; as geographical absence in Martinique; as sex work in Europe; as affectââFault, Guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoiaâ; and as psychic âterritory.â1 Homosexuality appears as actions (failed and realized), as textual elaboration and diversion, as labor, and as space (psychic and geographic). Of all the works examined in this book, Fanonâs Black Skin has the most insistent, if inconsistent, treatment of homosexuality. Although other scholarship on Fanon proceeds as though Fanon exiles the homosexual from the black political imagination, I pursue the possibility that the homosexual instead haunts Fanonâs theory of colonial modernity. And, revising the genealogy of the white homosexual offered by Michel Foucault, I argue that the homosexual in colonial modernity cannot be imagined without the black body.
A possible subtitle for this chapter might be âBeyond Chapter Six.â Although Fanon writes about sex and sexuality throughout Black Skin, White Masks, his comments on homosexuality live in chapter 6, and this chapter has been the focus of queer critique. Titled âThe Negro and Psychopathologyâ (trans. Markmann) or âThe Black Man and Psychopathologyâ (trans. Philcox), the chapterâs engagement with psychoanalysis made it especially intriguing for gay and lesbian scholars whose work was embedded within psychoanalytic paradigms.2 However, focusing primarily on chapter 6 isolated the homosexual figure from Fanonâs other discussions of sex, sexuality, and blackness. By the mid-1990s, as queer studies was consolidating into a field, a critical consensus had emerged that while the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks was indispensable for thinking about blackness, and race more generally, he was too homophobic to be considered a foundational theorist of sexuality. This position was articulated by Kobena Mercer in the 1996 article, âDecolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanonâs Sexual Politicsâ: âLesbians and gay critics have reaffirmed a commitment to working with Fanon by using his analysis of negrophobia to open up the issue of homophobia both in Fanonâs own text and in broader narratives of nationalism as a whole.â3 Fanonâs method could be mined by lesbian and gay critics, and his insights on blackness made useful, but he could not be used to think about sexuality. His homophobia barred him from the role of sexuality scholar. Mercerâs status as the most prominent black gay cultural critic at the time authorized this approach to Fanon as a theorist of race, not sexuality, and most certainly not homosexuality. Scholarly work continues to live in the shadow of this divide between blackness and sexuality. To be more explicit, I am not arguing that histories and experiences of blackness should be added to sexuality studies, a position that is well established by now. I am arguing that sexuality studies cannot be imagined and theorized without blackness.
In broad strokes, this chapter stages a series of encountersâtricks, perhapsâwith two key Fanonian terms: homosexual and desire. Tricking is risky: the public park where you cruise might be empty or the public toilet subject to a police sting; the trick you pick up online might arrive at your doorstep, look at you, and then turn around and leave; the hot guy you fuck raw might be carrying drug-resistant gonorrhea; the drugs youâve taken to heighten your sexual pleasure might wear off in the middle of your encounter, and leave you realizing that you are having mediocre sex; you might, in the middle of sex, lose interest; you might fall in love with a strangerâs tenderness; you might be undone by the smell of a familiar perfume or cigarette or spice; the online stranger might turn out to be your cousin. To trick with Fanonâs homosexual and desire is to risk being left undone, unsatisfied, wanting more, and frightened. To trick is to risk proximity, to risk rubbing with and against the familiar and the strange, to risk becoming strange as a strangerâs scent lingers on your skin after an encounter. To trick with Fanonâs homosexual and desire is to risk having that encounter unsettle you, mark you.
Fred Moten writes, âFanonâs texts continually demand that we read themâagain or, deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time.â4 To read with and for the homosexual and desire is to read âfor the first time,â to privilege terms that are not considered Fanonian keywords. To read with and against the grain. Again, or deeper still. Again, or deeper still. Again, or deeper still. For the homosexual and desire. To read for the first time is to read for oneâs interestsâand, perhaps, survival. To seek sustenance where one has been told none might be found, to suck stones, hoping to find some life-giving moisture. Fanon teaches us how to suck stones. On the disciplining question of method, he writes, âI shall be derelict.â5 Learning from Fanon, I slip in and out of disciplinary methods, borrowing and stealing, deforming what exists while inventing what I need. But Fanon is not enough. He was unable to think about black women. We need not replicate his mistakes. This chapter thinks with Fanon and ends with Audre Lorde, because she imagined what he could not.
A black queerâsometimes diasporicâreads Fanon, and invites youâthe reader, the voyeurâto participate in this encounter.
The Homosexual
As I turn to look at how the homosexual figures in Black Skin, White Masks, let me clarify my task. I am not interested in claiming Fanon was not homophobic.6 While that is a conceptually interesting exercise, Iâm unconvinced that it is necessary. I find the (implicit) demand that he be nonhomophobic so that queer studies can engage him a practice of racial policing that keeps the status of âtheorist of sexualityâ tethered to whiteness. Nor am I interested in discovering the black homosexual lurking somewhere Fanon refused to look. Indeed, given the subject-making work of âhomosexualâ and the thing-making work of âblackâ within colonial modernity, it is unclear to what âblack homosexualâ could refer. The âidentity-constitutingâ and âidentity-fracturingâ genealogies that move from sodomite (as a legal-religious category) to homosexual (as a medical-legal-psychosocial category) to gay (as an activist-cultural-legal category) to queer (as an ostensibly post-identitarian activist-academic category) have taken the white human as the subject-object of these frames.7 Blackness is still to be thought.
In this section, I map the conceptual terrain against which Fanon plots the homosexual, a terrain that begins with his understanding of how the black manâFanon is androcentricâemerges in colonial modernity through sociogenesis. Another way to map the terrain would be to account for the geohistories that subtend Fanonâs theorizing: his life in colonial Martinique, from his birth in 1925 through his middle-class upbringing in a family of eight children to his education under AimĂ© CĂ©saire until he left home in 1944 to join the French army; his experiences aboard the Oregon, a ship carrying 1,000 menâat eighteen, Fanon was the youngestâthat transported enlisted men from the Caribbean to âthe Moroccan port of Casablanca,â from where the men received basic training at the âEl Hajeb camp near Meknesâ; his stay at the camp, a location that was âcrowded with Algerians, Moroccans and troops from the African colonies,â and where a special brothel was established by the army to cater exclusively to Martiniquan soldiers, not to the white French and not to the Africans; his brief time in Algeria and then his travel to France; and his time as a student in Lyon.8 What did Fanon experience across these different spaces and institutions? How were diverse erotics framed and practiced and understood and misunderstood? How has positioning Fanon as a theorist disembedded him from these geohistories, and, in the process, created a truncated understanding of how he thinks and from where he thinks? I am interested in these questions, but I do not pursue them here. I mark them to indicate the many ways scholars have yet to think about Fanon, geohistory, and sexuality.
The conceptual account that follows embeds Fanonâs claims and observations about the homosexual within the terms Fanon adopts and trans*forms by routing psychoanalysis and philosophy through the experience of blackness. I learn how to think about trans*forms from Christina Sharpe:
I want to think Trans* in a variety of ways that try to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies. The asterisk after a word functions as the wildcard, and I am thinking the trans* in that way. . . . The asterisk after the prefix âtransâ holds the place open for thinking (from and into that position). It speaks, as well, to a range of embodied experiences called gender and to Euro-Western genderâs dismantling, its inability to hold in/on Black flesh. The asterisk speaks to a range of configurations of Black being that take the form of translation, transatlantic, transgression, transgender, transformation, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation, . . . transmigration, and more.9
Sharpe offers a way for us to read Fanonâs questioning black bodyââO my body, make of me always a man who questionsââinto Black Skin, White Masks, as it enacts a range of trans*formations and is, in turn, implicated in the signifying chain that blackness inaugurates and interrupts. To trans*form is to ask how the black bodyâFanonâs bodyâinterrupts and impedes the white thinkers he encounters, in part by naming those thinkers as white, and by noting the geohistories from and into which they write. It is to ask what happens to the black bodyâFanonâs bodyâas it rubs against those thinkers, as it experiences itself as abraded, voided, trans*fixed, and desired.
Fanon grapples with three main questions in Black Skin, White Masks: What does the black man want? What happens to the black man when he encounters white civilization? How can the black man pursue freedom? The second question is the major focus of the book, and it is the basis for his theory of sociogeny. Sociogeny is a slippery concept, especially since the word appears just once in Black Skin, White Masks:
Reacting against the constitutionalizing trend at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud demanded that the individual factor be taken into account in psychoanalysis. He replaced the phylogenetic theory by an ontogenic approach. We shall see that the alienation of the black man is not an individual question. Alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny.10
Phylogenesis refers to the development of a species and is commonly used to think about evolution whereas ontogeny refers to the development of an individual organism from the earliest stages to maturity. In Fanonâs account, Freud moved from a Darwinian account of the human, which arranged groups of humans on a model embedded in scientific racism, to a model focused on interiority; from an evolutionary-historical account to a psychic-historical account that I will describe as psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny. However, Freudâs innovation does not account for the black man: âneither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in the course of his research.â11 If, in the phylogenetic model the black man is at the bottom of the hierarchy of humans, this status is not affected by shifting to an ontogenic model. What accounts for the persistent bottom status of the black man within phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny? Fanon recognizes that phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny are dominant world-imagining, world-building theories designed to explain how life emerges and functions: they cannot simply be discarded but they cannot account for âthe black man.â Sociogeny interrupts and supplements the species-making and individual-forging labors of phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny by accounting for the experience of blackness. Fanon places sociogeny âalongsideâ phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny to give it equal weight: like phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny, sociogeny is world-imagining and world-building.
Sociogeny not only governs alongside phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny, but also interacts with them. Although scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Diana Fuss, and Gwen Bergner have addressed how Fanon rethinks psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny, this body of work has not placed psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny alongside sociogeny.12 If psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny produces the individual, as theorized by psychoanalysis, it also interacts with sociogeny. Fanon addresses this interaction in chapter 6; it is the terrain against which his scattered comments on the homosexual emerge. âIn Europe,â he writes, âthe family represents the way the world reveals itself to the child. The family structure and the national structure are closely connected.â13 Notice the scale in the first sentence, the move from Europe to family to world, a shift that not only refuses a distinction between the private and the public, but also emphasizes how colonial modernity (re)made the world so that the child raised in Europe experiences âthe worldâ being revealed through the family. He continues, âthe child leaving the family environment finds the same laws, the same principles, and the same values. A normal child brought up in a normal family will become a normal adult.â14 The parallel structure between âsameâ and ânormalâ reveals how the ânormalâ is produced through repetition: structures that repeat produce those habituated to them as normal. However, Fanon is not claiming that structures produce ideas of normal according to different geohistorical patterns. Rather, the world Europe has made, through phylogeny and psychoanalysis-as-ontogeny, has created ideas of the normal child and family and adult. Subsequently, he clarifies, âThe white family is the guardian of a certain structure. Society is the sum of all the families. . . . The white family is the educating and training ground for entry into society.â15 In this latter formulation, âsameâ and ânormalâ have been replaced by âwhite.â On a formal level, Black Skin, White Masks proceeds through repetitions with slight variations: ânormalâ is replaced by âwhite,â for instance. Sociogeny, that is, how individuals inhabit and navigate family, society, nation, and Europe, is invisible, which is to say ânormal,â which is to say âwhite.â
As Sylvia Wynter explains, black and white people are âsocializedâ âin the mode of sociogeny.â16 Sociogeny grounds ideas of family, society, and nation. More importantly, sociogeny directs how family, society, and nation are experienced. Mapping the role of experience, Wynter writes, âwhile the black man must experience himself as the defect of the white manâas must...