Inside/Out

Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories

Diana Fuss, Diana Fuss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135200916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lesbians and gays have gone from "coming out, " to "acting up, " to "outing, " meanwhile radically redefining society's views on sexuality and gender. The essays in Inside/Out employ a variety of approaches (psychoanalysis, deconstruction, semiotics, and discourse theory) to investigate representations of sex and sexual difference in literature, film, video, music, and photography. Engaging the figures of divas, dykes, vampires and queens, the contributors address issues such as AIDS, pornography, pedagogy, authorship, and activism. Inside/Out shifts the focus from sex to sexual orientation, provoking a reconsideration of the concepts of the sexual and the political.

I

Decking Out:
Performing Identities

1

Imitation and Gender
Insubordination¹

Judith Butler

So what is this divided being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible being, it is a being that does not exist, an ontological joke. Monique Wittig²

Beyond physical repetition and the psychical or metaphysical repetition, is there an ontological repetition? … This ultimate repetition, this ultimate theatre, gathers everything in a certain way; and in another way, it destroys everything; and in yet another way, it selects from everything. Gilles Deleuze³

To Theorize as a Lesbian?

At first I considered writing a different sort of essay, one with a philosophical tone: the “being” of being homosexual. The prospect of being anything, even for pay, has always produced in me a certain anxiety, for “to be” gay, “to be” lesbian seems to be more than a simple injunction to become who or what I already am. And in no way does it settle the anxiety for me to say that this is “part” of what I am. To write or speak as a lesbian appears a paradoxical appearance of this “I,” one which feels neither true nor false. For it is a production, usually in response to a request, to come out or write in the name of an identity which, once produced, sometimes functions as a politically efficacious phantasm. I'm not at ease with “lesbian theories, gay theories,” for as I've argued elsewhere,⁴ identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression. This is not to say that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian, but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies. So it is unclear how it is that I can contribute to this book and appear under its title, for it announces a set of terms that I propose to contest. One risk I take is to be recolonized by the sign under which I write, and so it is this risk that I seek to thematize. To propose that the invocation of identity is always a risk does not imply that resistance to it is always or only symptomatic of a self-inflicted homophobia. Indeed, a Foucaultian perspective might argue that the affirmation of “homosexuality” is itself an extension of a homophobic discourse. And yet “discourse,” he writes on the same page, “can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy.”⁵

So I am skeptical about how the “I” is determined as it operates under the title of the lesbian sign, and I am no more comfortable with its homophobic determination than with those normative definitions offered by other members of the “gay or lesbian community.” I'm permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary trouble. In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it would cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced by the instability of those categories which sustains the various erotic practices that make me a candidate for the category to begin with. To install myself within the terms of an identity category would be to turn against the sexuality that the category purports to describe; and this might be true for any identity category which seeks to control the very eroticism that it claims to describe and authorize, much less “liberate.”

And what's worse, I do not understand the notion of “theory,” and am hardly interested in being cast as its defender, much less in being signified as part of an elite gay/lesbian theory crowd that seeks to establish the legitimacy and domestication of gay/lesbian studies within the academy. Is there a pregiven distinction between theory, politics, culture, media? How do those divisions operate to quell a certain intertextual writing that might well generate wholly different epistemic maps? But I am writing here now: is it too late? Can this writing, can any writing, refuse the terms by which it is appropriated even as, to some extent, that very colonizing discourse enables or produces this stumbling block, this resistance? How do I relate the paradoxical situation of this dependency and refusal?

If the political task is to show that theory is never merely theoria, in the sense of disengaged contemplation, and to insist that it is fully political (phronesis or even praxis), then why not simply call this operation politics, or some necessary permutation of it?

I have begun with confessions of trepidation and a series of disclaimers, but perhaps it will become clear that disclaiming, which is no simple activity, will be what I have to offer as a form of affirmative resistance to a certain regulatory operation of homophobia. The discourse of “coming out” has clearly served its purposes, but what are its risks? And here I am not speaking of unemployment or public attack or violence, which are quite clearly and widely on the increase against those who are perceived as “out” whether or not of their own design. Is the “subject” who is “out” free of its subjection and finally in the clear? Or could it be that the subjection that subjectivates the gay or lesbian subject in some ways continues to oppress, or oppresses most insidiously, once “outness” is claimed? What or who is it that is “out,” made manifest and fully disclosed, when and if I reveal myself as lesbian? What is it that is now known, anything? What remains permanently concealed by the very linguistic act that offers up the promise of a transparent revelation of sexuality? Can sexuality even remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure, or does it perhaps cease to be sexuality precisely when the semblance of full explicitness is achieved?⁶ Is sexuality of any kind even possible without that opacity designated by the unconscious, which means simply that the conscious “I” who would reveal its sexuality is perhaps the last to know the meaning of what it says?

To claim that this is what I am is to suggest a provisional totalization of this “I.” But if the I can so determine itself, then that which it excludes in order to make that determination remains constitutive of the determination itself. In other words, such a statement presupposes that the “I” exceeds its determination, and even produces that very excess in and by the act which seeks to exhaust the semantic field of that “I.” In the act which would disclose the true and full content of that “I,” a certain radical concealment is thereby produced. For it is always finally unclear what is meant by invoking the lesbian-signifier, since its signification is always to some degree out of one's control, but also because its specificity can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to disrupt its claim to coherence. What, if anything, can lesbians be said to share? And who will decide this question, and in the name of whom? If I claim to be a lesbian, I “come out” only to produce a new and different “closet.” The “you” to whom I come out now has access to a different region of opacity. Indeed, the locus of opacity has simply shifted: before, you did not know whether I “am,” but now you do not know what that means, which is to say that the copula is empty, that it cannot be substituted for with a set of descriptions.⁷ And perhaps that is a situation to be valued. Conventionally, one comes out of the closet (and yet, how often is it the case that we are “outted” when we are young and without resources?); so we are out of the closet, but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure whose door, like Kafka's door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a light of illumination that never arrives? Curiously, it is the figure of the closet that produces this expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfaction. For being “out” always depends to some extent on being “in”; it gains its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being “out” must produce the closet again and again in order to maintain itself as “out.” In this sense, outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet produces the promise of a disclosure that can, by definition, never come. Is this infinite postponement of the disclosure of “gayness,” produced by the very act of “coming out,” to be lamented? Or is this very deferral of the signified to be valued, a site for the production of values, precisely because the term now takes on a life that cannot be, can never be, permanently controlled?

It is possible to argue that whereas no transparent or full revelation is afforded by “lesbian” and “gay,” there remains a political imperative to use these necessary errors or category mistakes, as it were (what Gayatri Spivak might call “catachrestic” operations: to use a proper name improperly⁸), to rally and represent an oppressed political constituency. Clearly, I am not legislating against the use of the term. My question is simply: which use will be legislated, and what play will there be between legislation and use such that the instrumental uses of “identity” do not become regulatory imperatives? If it is already true that “lesbians” and “gay men” have been traditionally designated as impossible identities, errors of classification, unnatural disasters within juridico-medical discourses, or, what perhaps amounts to the same, the very paradigm of what calls to be classified, regulated, and controlled, then perhaps these sites of disruption, error, confusion, and trouble can be the very rallying points for a certain resistance to classification and to identity as such.

The question is not one of avowing or disavowing the category of lesbian or gay, but, rather, why it is that the category becomes the site of this “ethical” choice? What does it mean to avow a category that can only maintain its specificity and coherence by performing a prior set of disavowals? Does this make “coming out” into the avowal of disavowal, that is, a return to the closet under the guise of an escape? And it is not something like heterosexuality or bisexuality that is disavowed by the category, but a set of identificatory and practical crossings between these categories that renders the discreteness of each equally suspect. Is it not possible to maintain and pursue heterosexual identifications and aims within homosexual practice, and homosexual identifications and aims within heterosexual practices? If a sexuality is to be disclosed, what will be taken as the true determinant of its meaning: the phantasy structure, the act, the orifice, the gender, the anatomy? And if the practice engages a complex interplay of all of those, which one of this erotic dimensions will come to stand for the sexuality that requires them all? Is it the specificity of a lesbian experience or lesbian desire or lesbian sexuality that lesbian theory needs to elucidate? Those efforts have only and always produced a set of contests and refusals which should by now make it clear that there is no necessarily common element among lesbians, except perhaps that we all know something about how homophobia works against women— although, even then, the language and the analysis we use will differ.

To argue that there might be a specificity to lesbian sexuality has seemed a necessary counterpoint to the claim that lesbian sexuality is just heterosexuality once removed, or that it is derived, or that it does not exist. But perhaps the claim of specificity, on the one hand, and the claim of derivativeness or non-existence, on the other, are not as contradictory as they seem. Is it not possible that lesbian sexuality is a process that reinscribes the power domains that it resists, that it is constituted in part from the very heterosexual matrix that it seeks to displace, and that its specificity is to be established, not outside or beyond that reinscription or reiteration, but in the very modality and effects of that reinscription. In other words, the negative constructions of lesbianism as a fake or a bad copy can be occupied and reworked to call into question the claims of heterosexual priority. In a sense I hope to make clear in what follows, lesbian sexuality can be understood to redeploy its ‘derivativeness’ in the service of displacing hegemonic heterosexual norms. Understood in this way, the political problem is not to establish the specificity of lesbian sexuality over and against its derivativeness, but to turn the homophobic construction of the bad copy against the framework that privileges heterosexuality as origin, and so ‘derive’ the former from the latter. This description requires a reconsideration of imitation, drag, and other forms of sexual crossing that affirm the internal complexity of a lesbian sexuality constituted in part within the very matrix of power that it is compelled both to reiterate and to oppose.

On the Being of Gayness as Necessary Drag

The professionaliz...