Are the Lips a Grave?

A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex

Lynne Huffer

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535779
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual difference.

Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience.

1

Are the Lips a Grave?

Are the lips a grave? It’s a funny question, or maybe a scary one, but, funny or scary, it’s a question I keep asking. With my feminist twist on Leo Bersani’s queer title—“Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987)—I want to begin my exploration of antifoundational queer feminism by opening a space for rethinking the place of Luce Irigaray in the world of queer theory.¹ For if queer theory has made a place for the rectum as a respectable topic of scholarly discussion (scarcely imaginable before the mid-1980s), such is not the case for the feminist lips made famous by Irigaray in her 1977 essay, “When Our Lips Speak Together.”²

If the lips are feminist but not quite queer, to ask about the lips in queer theory is to ask, from the start, about new possibilities for a queer feminism. In that context, this opening chapter offers a theoretical frame for the explorations of sexual ethics that follow in the subsequent chapters. So doing, it contributes to a rich field of queer feminist inquiry that has much to offer, but has not yet adequately explored the philosophical foundations of a persistent queer feminist split. As I argued in the introduction, the divergence within sexual thinking that inaugurated queer theory in the late 1980s has since been repeated, again and again, in ever new queer feminist splits.³ I have long been interested in how these splits occur despite a shared philosophical antifoundationalism that drives both queer theory and poststructuralist feminisms like Irigaray’s.⁴ As I argued in the introduction, I contend that sexual ethics lies at the heart of this internally fractured queer feminist nexus.⁵

Here in this chapter I want to characterize this problem of sexual ethics as a philosophical dissonance in queer feminism. Resisting the impulse to harmonize the discordant, I want to examine this dissonance by rethinking Irigaray through a Foucauldian ethical lens. Both Irigaray and Foucault offer powerful antifoundationalist perspectives on the question of sexual ethics: Irigaray by rethinking sexual difference, Foucault by rethinking sexual subject making. And if Foucault’s aegis-creating role in relation to both poststructuralist feminism and queer theory seems incontestable, Irigaray’s feminist-but-not-quite-queer place in relation to Foucault remains uncertain and virtually unexplored.⁶ Reading Foucault and Irigaray together allows me to interrogate a shared antifoundationalism whose ethical stakes for feminist and queer theory and politics have yet to be examined in a sustained way. In opening a conversation between Irigaray and Foucault I hope to contribute to the work of building an ethical queer feminism that is not only capacious and erotic but also variegated, uneven, and shifting.

At the end of his life, Foucault asked: “why [have] we made sexuality into a moral experience?”⁷ Explicitly conceptualizing sexual morality as a historical problem, Foucault’s question opens possibilities for reconfiguring modern sexual ethics.⁸ And although Foucault poses the question retrospectively, as a historical problem that sent him to the archives of the ancient world, he asks it here, in his final interview, from within modernity, as an entry point for understanding sexuality as a history of the present. Rethinking the implications of this later, ethical Foucault—his minute dissection of technologies of the self in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds as ethical practices of freedom—I reconceive his ethical project as spanning his entire oeuvre, from History of Madness (1961) to The Order of Things (1966), through the genealogical work on punishment and sexuality in the 1970s, and ending with the project on ethical subjectivation in the early 1980s.⁹ In that context, I want to enlist Foucault’s ethical approach to sexual subjectivity as a way to hear, if not to harmonize, the ethical dissonance that has split queers from feminists.

But what is this dissonance exactly? While feminists have developed a robust field of ethical thinking that ranges from virtue ethics to ethics of care to deontology to postmodern ethics of various kinds, queer theorists have been more reticent to engage with ethics. The relative thinness of ethical thinking in queer theory stems, in my view, from a number of factors; the most pervasive of these is an implicit queer distaste for a conception of ethics as morality that dominates everyday thinking, professional ethics, and many traditional moral philosophies.¹⁰ Given the history of ethical systems that have condemned even the most benign forms of sexual deviation from the norm, the pervasive queer disengagement from ethics is not surprising.

Those queer theorists who do discuss ethics have implicitly adopted the approach of Continental ethicists who, following Nietzsche, distinguish between ethics and morality in a challenge to the exclusionary violence of moral norms. Importantly, some particularly influential antimoral queer complaints have specifically targeted feminist moral theory and politics. In Split Decisions, Janet Halley critiques the cultural feminist belief in “the pervasive moral character of patriarchy and feminism” (SD 61), repudiating feminism’s view of a male-dominated world in which “female values have been depressed and male values elevated in a profound moral error that can be corrected by feminism” (SD 61, emphasis added). Along similar lines, Gayle Rubin’s earlier critique of the “conservative sexual morality” of the feminist antipornography movement buttressed her call in the mid-1980s to split sexuality studies from feminism and the analysis of gender (28). And although neither Halley nor Rubin dismisses ethical thinking altogether—Rubin calls for a “true ethics” (15), while Halley calls for one that is “different” (SD 60)—their dismissals of feminist moralism do not include any clear articulation of exactly how their ethics is new. The same could be said of queer theorists Michael Warner and Tim Dean, who, implicitly rejecting morality and embracing ethics (although not explicitly against feminism), both argue for what appears to be a fairly traditional conception of ethics as moral autonomy.¹¹ At the radical end of the queer ethics spectrum, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman (again, implicitly) reverse common conceptions of ethics as relational moral norms into a negative ethics that is nonrelational and antisocial.¹²

Let me resituate this problem of queer ethics within the genealogical frame that informs my approach to an ethical queer feminism. First, while the implicit ethics versus morality distinction we find in some queer theory may be heuristically and politically useful, it does not adequately respond to the Foucauldian problem of the historical link that binds sexuality to morality. Second, the distinction does not resolve what Judith Butler calls a “paradoxical condition for moral deliberation” that Foucault’s lifelong work on subjectivity goes to great lengths to explore.¹³ That is, ethical subjects must negotiate their historically specific relation to morality even as their ethical practice both acknowledges and interrupts the force of morality in their own production as subjects. Thus, relating this paradox back to the problem of ethics in queer theory: if queer theory has attempted to do the latter—that is, acknowledge and interrupt morality in its violent production and repression of sexually deviant subjects by articulating either a new or a negative ethics—it has done so at the expense of a robust historical thinking about how subjects actually live and negotiate their relation to moralities. If we define ethics, in its broadest sense, as reflection that responds to the Socratic question how are we to live? queer theory must engage the ethical in ways that are more nuanced and varied than its now stock array of antinormativities allows.¹⁴ Indeed, the fact that queer theory’s antinormativities have acquired a normative moral force of their own dramatizes a crucial Nietzschean point: simply negating moral norms will not prevent the rebounding force of new moralities precisely at the site where morality has been contested.¹⁵

In this light, Foucault’s historical question—why has sexuality become a moral experience?—opens a slightly different post-Nietzschean path through the queer feminist thicket that is sexual ethics. For, as Foucault well knew, if Nietzsche’s challenge to morality is scathing, his solution to morality’s violence is not a naysaying dismissal of moral norms in favor of a thinly articulated ethics. Rather, the development of what Foucault calls a desubjectivating ethics—an ethics of the self as a self-undoing practice of freedom—requires a retraversing, thinking-feeling transvaluation of the historical space that binds ethics to morality.¹⁶

That retraversal requires a return to the paradoxical position of the moral subject Butler describes, where even a resistant negotiation of ethics requires a recognition of one’s production as a subject by and within morality. In recalling that paradox, we can also refine the broad Socratic question—how are we to live?—by remembering Foucault’s definition of ethics as a historical interrogation of the relation between subjectivity and truth and to view that interrogation as simultaneously pursuing the question of a manner of living and jamming the machinery of moral subject production.¹⁷ To ask about ethics in this genealogical sense is to ask about the historical constitution of a subject that is also unraveling: a non-self-identical form of desubjectivation.

More specifically, with regard to sexuality, this Foucauldian mode of accessing ethics begins with the assumption that the modern subject is, like it or not, both a moral subject and a sexual subject: indeed, it is within the dispositif of a morally inflected sexuality that we become intelligible to ourselves as subjects. Further, modern sexual subjectivity comes at the cost of what Foucault, following Deleuze, calls assujettissement: a subject-producing subjection that simultaneously creates and subjugates sexual subjects within an increasingly differentiated grid of deviance and normalization. Importantly, Foucault embeds this process of subjective sexualization in a genealogy that links the rise of rationalism to bourgeois morality: rationalism and morality go hand in hand in the modern system that both incites and imprisons us as sexual beings. Foucault teaches us, then, that we cannot leap free of sexual morality by ignoring it, denouncing it, or simply calling for a new ethics. Rather, the violent “land of morality” must be retraversed if we are to practice the freedom of a nonviolent ethics.¹⁸

Finally, in contrast to many of Foucault’s interpreters, I conceive of Foucault’s ethics as an ethics of the other. As we have seen, and as Foucault insists repeatedly in his later work, ethics involves an interrogation of the subject. Not a pregiven substance, that subject is a form that is “not primarily or always identical to itself” (“ECS” 290). As a non-self-identical process of emergence and disappearance, the ethical subject is historically linked to the emergence and disappearance of others. As the historian Elsa Barkley Brown reminds us, we live the lives we do because others live the lives they do.¹⁹ And just as assujettissement produces and subjugates us within a grid that differentiates subjects in relation to others, so too ethical desubjectivation is a practice of freedom inextricably bound to the practices of others: “freedom,” Foucault writes, “is the ontological condition of ethics” (“ECS” 284); and again, he says, “the freedom of the subject in relation to others . . . constitutes the very stuff of ethics” (“ECS” 300).

I use Foucault, then, to amplify the ethical resonance of my queer Irigarayan question: are the lips a grave? That resonance includes not only a critique of the sexual moralities undergirding assujettissement but also the opening of different ethical questions through a desubjectivating, other-oriented practice of freedom within the moralities of our historical present. Harnessing the Foucauldian genealogical critique of morality in the service of a possible queer feminism allows me to respond to what I identified in the introduction as the dual burden of ethics: first, the acknowledgment of harms and, second, the active elaboration of alternatives to those harms. Most important, as an approach that combines critique with transvaluation, this Foucauldian take on ethics forges powerful tools for both confronting the moralism of much feminist theory and addressing the thinness of ethics in queer theory. The ethics I offer is kinky and relational but attentive to harms: an erotic ethics of the other.

Although this kinky practice of freedom invokes orgiastic, even utopian images, this ethics refuses the consolations of utopianism.²⁰ Rather, I think of this ethical queer feminism as heterotopian: the articulation of a space that, as Foucault famously puts it, is both “utterly real . . . and utterly unreal.”²¹ Cobbled together out of bits and pieces, the shards of the queer and feminist work I engage here begin to form a shattered, troubled, but reorienting mirror of our age: a space in which to see, simultaneously, both the place where we are—the rational moralism of assujettissement—and the place where we are not—“that virtual point which is over there” (“DS” 179). In Irigarayan terms, it allows us to see and practice both a critique of the monosubjective, monosexual system of sameness she diagnoses in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) and, at the same time, a different approach—as lips, perhaps—to the ethical question of the other.²²

There is a long road to travel from my opening question—are the lips a grave?—to the queer feminist erotic ethics I’ve invoked. Moving across that distance is the work of this book. My argument in this chapter contributes to that effort by applying different lenses to the question of Irigaray’s absence from queer theory. This approach allows me both to confront head-on the obstacles that make a queer feminist ethics so difficult, and to highlight the conceptual resources Irigaray has to bring to this endeavor. Because the ethics I’m after is a relational one, I focus especially on the explicitly nonrelational negativity of the antisocial queer theory initiated by Bersani. In addition to Bersani, I pay special attention to Janet Halley because her embrace of antisocial negativity so perfectly dramatizes the queer split from feminism I am trying to understand.

I develop my argument in this chapter in three distinct sections. First, I pursue the question of Irigaray’s absence from queer theory by addressing the oft-noted problem of her putatively homophobic and heterosexist remarks about sexual difference. The first section, “Hommosexual (with a Double m),” asks specifically about the place of homosexuality or same-sex relations in Irigaray’s work and documents the exclusion of Irigaray from queer theory as the index of a certain kind of nonqueer feminist threat to the queer. I challenge this line of thinking by making a counterclaim to the charges of idealism that underlie the numerous critiques of her homophobia and heterosexism. Reading Irigaray with Bersani and Halley, the lips with the rectum, I show how both share what we might call a commitment to the queer undoing of modern subjectivity that distinguishes the antisocial thesis from other strands of queer theory.²³ Arguing for a queer heterosexuality in Irigaray, I demonstrate how Irigaray shares with Bersani a critique of the masculine monosubject and of redemptive sex.

The second section, “Lip Reading,” uses the vehicle of the personal voice—a queer feminist mimesis of myself as a different subject in another time—to examine the lips as a figure for Irigaray’s antifoundationalism. The return of the lips in this section dramatizes a spatiotemporal alterity as the rupture of the Same that characterizes Irigaray’s thinking. Reengaging the question of Irigaray’s absence from queer theory, I reflect on queer per...