Homographesis

Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory

Lee Edelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134567300
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Literature

Brings provocative, rigorous and controversial readings of literary and cultural texts to gay critical analysis. Lee Edelman rearticulates the politics of sexuality, addressing some of the most hotly debated issues of our time.

PART 1

Literature /Theory / Gay Theory

1

HOMOGRAPHESIS

IN THE FALL OF 1987, when I was invited to participate in the conference that inaugurated the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale, the organizers asked me to join other gay scholars in a panel whose title insistently posed for us the question of identity: “What’s Gay about Gay Literature? What’s Lesbian about Lesbian Literature?” Although the rubric for our session was substantially different by the time the conference program appeared, the mode of its title remained pointedly—and almost aggressively—interrogative; now, however, the question it raised was more trenchant and more skeptical: “Can There Be a Gay Criticism?” All of these questions implicitly presupposed that our interest and energy as gay literary critics is, or at any rate should be, focused on determining the specificity of a gay or lesbian critical methodology. They seemed to call upon those of us working from lesbian, gay, bisexual, “queer,” non-heterosexual, or antihomophobic perspectives not only to confront the inscriptions of sexuality within the texts about which we write, but also to make legible within our own criticism some distinctively gay theoretical enterprise. The questions, in short, demanded of us a willingness to assert and affirm a singular, recognizable, and therefore reproducible critical identity: to commodify lesbian and gay criticism by packaging it as a distinctive flavor of literary theory that might find its appropriate market share in the upscale economy of literary production. In the process these questions directed us to locate “homosexual difference” as a determinate entity rather than as an unstable differential relation, and they invited us to provide our auditors with some guidelines by which to define “the homosexual” or “homosexuality” itself. How, they seemed to ask, can literary criticism see or recognize “the homosexual” in order to bring “homosexuality” into theoretical view? How, that is, can “homosexuality” find its place in the discourse of contemporary criticism so that it will no longer be unmarked or invisible or perceptible only when tricked out in the most blatant thematic or referential drag?

This imperative to produce “homosexual difference” as an object of cognitive and perceptual scrutiny remains central, of course, to a liberationist politics committed to the social necessity of opening, or even removing, the closet door. It partakes of the desire to bring into focus the historical, political, and representational differences that are inscribed in our culture’s various readings of sexual variation and it impels us to recognize sexual difference where it manages to pass unobserved. But at just this point the liberationist project can easily echo, though in a different key, the homophobic insistence upon the social importance of codifying and registering sexual identities. Though pursuing radically different agendas, the gay advocate and the enforcer of homophobic norms both inflect the issue of gay legibility with a sense of painful urgency—an urgency that bespeaks, at least in part, their differing anxieties and differing stakes in the culture’s reading of homosexuality and in its ability to read as homosexual any given individual. Practices such as “outing,” or publicly revealing the sexual orientation of closeted lesbians or gay men—especially those who use their access to cultural authority to perpetuate the stigmatization of homosexuality—arise, of course, in response to the fact that homosexuality remains, for most, illegible in the persons of the gay men and lesbians they encounter at work, in their families, in their governments, on television, or in film. Just as outing works to make visible a dimension of social reality effectively occluded by the assumptions of a heterosexist ideology, so that ideology, throughout the twentieth century, has insisted on the necessity of “reading” the body as a signifier of sexual orientation. Heterosexuality has thus been able to reinforce the status of its own authority as “natural” (i.e., unmarked, authentic, and non-representational) by defining the straight body against the “threat” of an “unnatural” homosexuality—a “threat” the more effectively mobilized by generating concern about homosexuality’s unnerving (and strategically manipulable) capacity to “pass,” to remain invisible, in order to call into being a variety of disciplinary “knowledges” through which homosexuality might be recognized, exposed, and ultimately rendered, more ominously, invisible once more.

That such readings, or even the possibility of such readings, of a legible homosexuality should occasion so powerful a social anxiety and such widespread psychic aggression points to the critical, indeed, the diacritical significance that our culture has come to place on the identification of “the homosexual”; and it underscores, in the process, the historical relationship that has produced gay sexuality within a discourse that associates it with figures of nomination or inscription. As recently as 1986, for example, Chief Justice Burger, in a concurring opinion filed in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick, went out of his way to remind the court that “Blackstone described ‘the infamous crime against nature’ as an offense of ‘deeper malignity’ than rape, an heinous act ‘the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature.’”¹ So conscious was Blackstone of the impropriety considered to inhere in “the very mention” of this offense that he went on, in a passage not cited by Burger, to acknowledge the prohibitive relation to naming that came to name this offense itself: “it will be more eligible to imitate in this respect the delicacy of our English law, which treats it, in its very indictments, as a crime not fit to be named: ‘peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum.’”² In his history of British criminal law, Sir Leon Radzinowicz suggests that a similar concern about the subversive relationship of homosexual practice to linguistic propriety may have influenced the report of the Criminal Law Commissioners when they undertook in 1836 to recommend reform in the legislative designation of capital offenses: “Sodomy, which they referred to as ‘a nameless offense of great enormity,’ they excluded for the time being from consideration, perhaps with the same feelings that influenced Edward Livingston when he omitted it altogether from the penal code for the state of Louisiana, lest its very definition should ‘inflict a lasting wound on the morals of the people.’”³

If homosexual practices have been placed in so powerful, and so powerfully proscriptive, a relation to language, homosexuals themselves have been seen as producing—and, by some medical “experts,” as being produced by—bodies that bore a distinct, and therefore legible, anatomical code. As early as 1750 it was possible for John Cleland, in his Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, to have Mrs. Cole affirm to Fanny Hill, with regard to male-male sexual desire, that “whatever effect this infamous passion had in other ages, and other countries, it seem’d a peculiar blessing on our air and climate, that there was a plague-spot visibly imprinted on all that are tainted with it, in this nation at least.”⁴ In the next century both Cesare Lombroso and A. Tardieu, applying a not wholly dissimilar logic, would claim to have developed physiological profiles that made it possible to identify “sexual deviants,” thus allowing the nineteenth century’s medicalization of sexual discourse to serve more efficiently the purposes of criminology and the law. As a result, John Addington Symonds would be able to invoke the received idea of the homosexual as a man with “lusts written on his face”;⁵ and the narrator of Teleny (1893), offering a strikingly similar pronouncement, could express his very real concern that his outlawed sexuality might be marked upon his flesh: “Like Cain,” he says, “it seemed as if I carried my crime written upon my brow.”⁶ By the second decade of the twentieth century, such notions were less readily acceptable as scientific fact, but they were still available for appropriation as metaphors that could effectively reinforce the ideological construction of homosexual difference. Thus Lord Sumner could assert in 1918 that sodomites bore “the hallmark of a specialised and extraordinary class as much as if they had carried on their bodies some physical peculiarities.”⁷ Homosexuals, in other words, were not only conceptualized in terms of a radically potent, if negatively charged, relation to signifying practices, but also subjected to a cultural imperative that viewed them as inherently textual—as bodies that might well bear a “hallmark” that could, and must, be read. Indeed, in one of the most explicit representations of this perception of the gay body as text, Proust observed the way in which “upon the smooth surface of an individual indistinguishable from everyone else, there suddenly appears, traced in an ink hitherto invisible, the characters that compose the word dear to the ancient Greeks.”⁸ That this topos still effectively expresses a need to construe the gay body as legible (a need that continues to be deployed to significant disciplinary effect) is evidenced by its rearticulation some forty years later in James Baldwin’s Another Country: “How could Eric have known that his fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice, and lived in his eyes with all the brilliance and beauty and terror of desire?”⁹

The textual significance thus attributed to homosexuality is massively overdetermined. Although homosexuality was designated as a crime not fit to be named among Christians, and although it was long understood, and represented, as “the love that dare not speak its name,” Judeo-Christian culture has been eager to read a vast array of signifiers as evidence of what we now define as “homosexual” desire. Alan Bray has written valuably about the historical transition in Britain from the “socially diffused homosexuality of the early seventeenth century,” a homosexuality whose signifying potential lay in its mythic association with sorcerers and heretics, werewolves and basilisks, to the emergence in the following century of a “continuing culture . . . in which homosexuality could be expressed and therefore recognized; clothes, gestures, language, particular buildings and particular public places—all could be identified as having specifically homosexual connotations.”¹⁰ With this transition we enter an era in which homosexuality becomes socially constituted in ways that not only make it available to signification, but also cede to it the power to signify the instability of the signifying function per se, the arbitrary and tenuous nature of the relationship between any signifier and signified. It comes to figure, and to be figured in terms of, subversion of the theological order through heresy, of the legitimate political order through treason, and of the social order through the disturbance of codified gender roles and stereotypes. As soon as homosexuality is localized, and consequently can be read within the social landscape, it becomes subject to a metonymic dispersal that allows it to be read into almost anything. The field of sexuality—which is always, under patriarchy, implicated in, and productive of, though by no means identical with, the field of power relations—is not, then, merely bifurcated by the awareness of homosexual possibilities; it is not simply divided into the separate but unequal arenas of heteroand homosexual relations. Instead, homosexuality comes to signify the potential permeability of every sexual signifier—and by extension, of every signifier as such—by an “alien” signification. Once sexuality may be read and interpreted in light of homosexuality, all sexuality is subject to a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Yet while the cultural enterprise of reading homosexuality must affirm that the homosexual is distinctively and legibly marked, it must also recognize that those markings have been, can be, or can pass as, unremarked and unremarkable. One historically specific ramification of this potentially destabilizing awareness is the interimplication of homophobia and paranoia as brilliantly mapped by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who observes that “it is the paranoid insistence with which the definitional barriers between ‘the homosexual’ (minority) and ‘the heterosexual’ (majority) are charged up, in this century, by nonhomosexuals, and especially by men against men, that most saps one’s ability to believe in ‘the homosexual’ as an unproblematically discrete category of persons.”¹¹ As Sedgwick notes elsewhere, these “definitional barriers” are the defensively erected sites of a brutally anxious will to power over the interpretation of selfhood (paradigmatically male in a patriarchally organized social regime)—a will to power that “acts out the structure of a much more specific erotic/erotophobic project as well: the project of paranoia. In the ultimate phrase of knowingness, ‘It takes one to know one.’” Interpretive access to the code that renders homosexuality legible may thus carry with it the stigma of too intimate a relation to the code and the machinery of its production, potentially situating the too savvy reader of homosexual signs in the context, as Sedgwick puts it, “of fearful, projective mirroring recognition.”¹² Though it can become, therefore, as dangerous to read as to fail to read homosexuality, homosexuality retains in either case its determining relationship to textuality and the legibility of signs.

Underwriting all of these versions of the graphic inscriptions of homosexuality, and making possible the culture of paranoia that Sedgwick so deftly anatomizes, is, as Michel Foucault asserts in his History of Sexuality, a transformation in the discursive practices governing the modern articulation of sexuality itself. Noting that sodomy was a category of “forbidden acts” in the “ancient civil or canonical codes,” Foucault argues that in the nineteenth century the “homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature.”¹³ Homosexuality becomes visible as that which is “written immodestly” on the “indiscreet anatomy” of a specifically homosexual body only when it ceases to be viewed in terms of a universally available set of actions or behaviors, none of which has a privileged relation to the “sexual” identity of the subject, and becomes instead, in Foucault’s words, “the root of all . . . actions” and thus a defining characteristic of the actor, the subject, with whom it now is seen as “consubstantial.”

One way of reformulating this discursive shift is to see it as a transformation in the rhetorical or tropological framework through which the concept of “sexuality” itself is produced: a transformation from a reading of the subject’s relation to sexuality as contingent or metonymic to a reading in which sexuality is reinterpreted as essential or metaphoric. When homosexuality is no longer understood as a discrete set of acts but as an “indiscreet anatomy,” we are in the presence of a powerful tropological imperative that needs to produce a visible emblem or metaphor for the “singular nature” that now defines or identifies a specifically homosexual type of person. That legible marking or emblem, however, must be recognized as a figure for the now metaphorical conceptualization of sexuality itself—a figure for the privileged relationship to identity with which the sexual henceforth will be charged. In keeping, therefore, with the ethnographic imperative of nineteenth-century social science, “the homosexual” could emerge into cultural view through the attribution of essential meaning—which is to say, the attribution of metaphorical significance—to various contingencies of anatomy that were, to the trained observer, as indiscreet in revealing the “truth” of a person’s “sexual identity” as dreams or somatic symptoms would be in revealing the “truth” of the unconscious to the emergent field of psychoanalysis.

Thus sexuality, as we use the word to designate a systematic organization and orientation of desire, comes into existence when desire—which Lacan, unfolding the implications of Freud’s earlier pronouncements, explicitly defines as a metonymy—is misrecognized or tropologically misinterpreted as a metaphor.¹⁴ Yet if we view this misrecognition as an “error,” it is an error that is inseparable from sexuality as we know it, for sexuality cannot be identified with the metonymic without acknowledging that the very act of identification through which it is constituted as sexuality is already a positing of its meaning in terms of a metaphoric coherence and necessity—without acknowledging, in other words, that metonymy itself can only generate “meaning” in the context of a logocentric tradition that privileges metaphor as the name for the relationship of essence, the paradigmatic relationship, that invests language with “meaning” through reference to a signified imagined as somewhere present to itself. As Lacan writes in a different context, “metonymy is there from the beginning and is what makes metaphor possible”;¹⁵ but it is only within the logic of metaphor that metonymy as such can be “identified” and retroactively recognized as having “been” there from the start. Metaphor, that is, binds the arbitrary slippages characteristic of metonymy into units of “meaning” that register as identities or representational presences. Thus the historical investiture of sexuality with a metaphoric rather than a metonymic significance made it possible to search for signifiers that would testify to the presence of this newly posited sexual identity or “essence.” And so, reinforcing Foucault’s assertion, and pointing once more to the convergence of medical and juridical interest upon the question of sexual taxonomy in the nineteenth century, Arno Karlen notes that the “two most widely quoted writers” on homosexuality “after the mid-century were the leading medico-legal experts in Germany and France, the doctors Casper and Tardieu. Both were chiefly concerned with whether the disgusting breed of pederasts could be physically identified for courts.”¹⁶

In citing this material I want to call attention to the formation of a category of homosexual person whose very condition of possibility is his relation to writing or textuality, his articulation, in particular, of a “sexual” difference internal to male identity that generates the nec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Part I Literature /Theory/Gay Theory
• 1. Homographesis
• 2. Redeeming the Phallus
• 3. The Part for the (W)hole
• Part II Equations, Identities, and “AIDS”
• 4. The Plague of Discourse
• 5. The Mirror and the Tank
• Part III Body Language/Body Politics
• 6. The Sodomite’s Tongue and the Bourgeois Body in Eighteenth-Century England
• 7. Capitol Offenses
• 8. Throwing Up/Going Down
• 9. Tearooms and Sympathy
• Part IV Ocular Proof
• 10. Seeing Things
• 11. Imagining the Homosexual
• Notes
• Index