Frottage

Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora

Keguro Macharia

• Editorial: NYU Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479861675
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios de los pueblos negros

A new understanding of freedom in the black diaspora grounded in the erotic

In Frottage, Keguro Macharia weaves together histories and theories of blackness and sexuality to generate a fundamentally new understanding of both the black diaspora and queer studies. Macharia maintains that to reach this understanding, we must start from the black diaspora, which requires re-thinking not only the historical and theoretical utility of identity categories such as gay, lesbian, and bisexual, but also more foundational categories such as normative and non-normative, human and non-human. Simultaneously, Frottage questions the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined. Between Frantz Fanon, René Maran, Jomo Kenyatta, and Claude McKay, Machariamoves through genres—psychoanalysis, fiction, anthropology, poetry—as well as regional geohistories across Africa and Afro-diaspora to map the centrality of sex, gender, desire, and eroticism to black freedom struggles. In lyrical, meditative prose, Macharia invigorates frottage as both metaphor and method with which to rethink diaspora by reading, and reading against, discomfort, vulnerability, and pleasure.

1

Frantz Fanon’s Homosexual Territories

Homosexuality appears in strange ways in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: metonymically, as “an attempt at rape” and an “attempt at fellatio”; as a symptom and evidence of “Negrophobia”; as white masochism; as a footnote on “anti-semitic psychoses”; as geographical absence in Martinique; as sex work in Europe; as affect—“Fault, Guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoia”; and as psychic “territory.”1 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, Fanon’s 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 Fanon’s 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 “Beyond Chapter Six.” 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 “The Negro and Psychopathology” (trans. Markmann) or “The Black Man and Psychopathology” (trans. Philcox), the chapter’s 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 Fanon’s 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, “Decolonisation and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sexual Politics”: “Lesbians 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 Fanon’s own text and in broader narratives of nationalism as a whole.”3 Fanon’s 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. Mercer’s 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 encounters—tricks, perhaps—with 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 you’ve 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 stranger’s 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 Fanon’s 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 stranger’s scent lingers on your skin after an encounter. To trick with Fanon’s homosexual and desire is to risk having that encounter unsettle you, mark you.

Fred Moten writes, “Fanon’s texts continually demand that we read them—again or, deeper still, not or against again, but for the first time.”4 To read with and for the homosexual and desire is to read “for the first time,” 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 one’s interests—and, 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, “I shall be derelict.”5 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 queer—sometimes diasporic—reads Fanon, and invites you—the reader, the voyeur—to 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, I’m 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 “theorist of sexuality” 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 “homosexual” and the thing-making work of “black” within colonial modernity, it is unclear to what “black homosexual” could refer. The “identity-constituting” and “identity-fracturing” 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 man—Fanon is androcentric—emerges in colonial modernity through sociogenesis. Another way to map the terrain would be to account for the geohistories that subtend Fanon’s 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 Aimé Césaire until he left home in 1944 to join the French army; his experiences aboard the Oregon, a ship carrying 1,000 men—at eighteen, Fanon was the youngest—that transported enlisted men from the Caribbean to “the Moroccan port of Casablanca,” from where the men received basic training at the “El Hajeb camp near Meknes”; his stay at the camp, a location that was “crowded with Algerians, Moroccans and troops from the African colonies,” 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 Fanon’s 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 “trans” 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 gender’s 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 Fanon’s questioning black body—“O my body, make of me always a man who questions”—into 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 body—Fanon’s body—interrupts 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 body—Fanon’s body—as 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 Fanon’s 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, Freud’s innovation does not account for the black man: “neither Freud nor Adler nor even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in the course of his research.”11 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 “the black man.” 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 “alongside” 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. “In Europe,” he writes, “the family represents the way the world reveals itself to the child. The family structure and the national structure are closely connected.”13 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 “the world” being revealed through the family. He continues, “the 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.”14 The parallel structure between “same” and “normal” reveals how the “normal” 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, “The 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.”15 In this latter formulation, “same” and “normal” have been replaced by “white.” On a formal level, Black Skin, White Masks proceeds through repetitions with slight variations: “normal” is replaced by “white,” for instance. Sociogeny, that is, how individuals inhabit and navigate family, society, nation, and Europe, is invisible, which is to say “normal,” which is to say “white.”

As Sylvia Wynter explains, black and white people are “socialized” “in the mode of sociogeny.”16 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, “while the black man must experience himself as the defect of the white man—as must...