t o t e l l o r n o t t o t e l l
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conditions of production, circulation, and interpretation of anything that might be said about this or that gay person, about gay people in general—
having control, as well, over the conditions of reinterpretation and resignification of anything gay men and lesbians might say about themselves, ready to deny it, devalue it, subject it to ridicule, or simply reduce it to the state of an object within the categories of dominant discourse.
8
Heterosexual Interpellation
Thus do gay people live in a world of insults. They are surrounded by a language that hems them in and points them out. The world insults them; it speaks of them and of what is said about them. The words of day-to-day life as well as of psychiatric, political, and juridical discourse assign each of them individually and all of them collectively to an inferior place within the social order. And yet this very language preceded them: the world of insults preexisted them, and it takes hold of them even before they know what they are.
At the outset of the book she devoted to hate speech, Judith Butler considers the question as to whether a given individual’s social being is not fundamentally dependent upon being the object of someone else’s speech—
even before that speech is expressed. One does not exist because one is
‘‘recognized,’’ but because one is ‘‘recognizable.’’ An address is, in its possibility, prior to any specific actualization. Butler writes: ‘‘If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it, insulting us from the start, as it were, by its prior power.’’∞ Insult, as we usually understand it, would then only be a particular case of this constitutive and ‘‘insultive’’ power of language.
Butler thus confers on language the role that Louis Althusser, in elaborat-ing the notion of ‘‘interpellation,’’ gave to ‘‘ideology.’’ For Althusser writes, in a famous article devoted to ‘‘ideological state apparatuses,’’ that ‘‘ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.’’ To elucidate this idea of interpellation, Althusser makes recourse to what he calls a ‘‘little theoretical theatre,’’ imagining a scene in which a police agent yells to someone: ‘‘Hey, you there!’’
Althusser continues: ‘‘Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.
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Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man.’’≤
Althusser in fact specifies that in the real functioning of ideology there is no temporal succession (first the interpellation, followed by the fact of self-recognition as the person interpellated): ‘‘The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’’ (175). Consequently, given that ideology precedes the birth of the very individuals it interpellates, Althusser can claim that ‘‘ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects’’ and that individuals, even before being born and therefore from the very moment of birth, are ‘‘always-already’’ subjects constituted by the ideology that shapes the world into which they come (175).
We may well want to leave behind this rather massive notion of ‘‘ideology,’’ which, however suggestive, surely does not account for the diversity of processes that are at work. There is no one ideology, and it would doubtless be preferable to speak (as does Bourdieu, basing his remarks on his ethnological work in Kabylia) of cognitive structures, or, more exactly, of schemas of perception. We could then investigate the rather miraculous concordance of individual cognitive structures with social cognitive structures and with social structures themselves—that is to say, the construction of an individual unconscious or habitus in its adaptation to the surrounding world, the incorporation within a given brain (through the very process of being in the world) of a collective history and of the social and sexual structures that are the product of that history. We could investigate the very processes by which such a concordance is created.≥ But Althusser’s idea that the ‘‘subject’’ (a subjectivity) is ‘‘subjected’’ by the ‘‘interpellation’’ that ideology (or language, according to Judith Butler) throws its way seems particularly useful and pertinent in the context of a reflection on insult and on the social forces carried by insulting words. For certainly insult is one of the most remarkable (or most concrete) forms of what Althusser has (abstractly and metaphorically) designated as ‘‘interpellation.’’ He recalls, in fact, that the word ‘‘subject’’ has two meanings. It is at one and the same time ‘‘a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions,’’
and ‘‘a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission.’’ Thus he is able to say that ‘‘the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection. . . .’’ There is thus no subject except in a fundamental relation to subjectivation. This is why Althusser can assert that subjects ‘‘work all by themselves [marchent tout seuls].’’∂
We should note that Althusser is here first and foremost speaking of the division of labor between classes and of the role given to individuals in that division by ideology—as if they were naturally assigned to their place, attach-ing them to the social function to which they have been designated. Yet clearly these remarks can be transposed to other social realities, such as sexual divisions and hierarchies between the sexes and between sexualities.
This analysis can thus provide a theoretical framework for understanding the e≈caciousness of insult: it—just like the interpellation by the police agent—fulfills the function of an injunction that assigns someone a place in a sexualized social space. But in the real working of language and of social life there is no temporal succession (I am insulted, and thereafter I recognize myself as the person at whom the insult was aimed). The insult preexisted me. It was there before I was, and it has always-already (as Althusser puts it so well) subjugated me to the social and sexual order that it simply expresses and recalls. If subjects ‘‘work all by themselves,’’ that is, if people seem to accept the roles given to them in the division of the sexes and of sexualities, just as in the division of classes, it is not because insult has been granted some police-like power to imprison me in some devalued place. Similarly, the police are not required to guarantee that laborers turn up each morning to be exploited at the workplace. Insult and its e√ects are only the most visible components of a deeper interpellation that has already, indeed always-already, been performed upon me by social, mental, and sexual structures.
Insult and what it produces within me are two faces of the same phenomenon, the same reality, of what we might call the social and sexual order.
Insult sets loose within me a spring whose tension had been built up by the processes of socialization, the very processes that guarantee that an insult means something to me. Insult sets loose the built-up tension in the spring, and it rebounds upon me in its violence.
The social and sexual order that language carries within it, and of which insult is one of the most pointed symptoms, produces the subject simultaneously as subjectivity and as subjection-subjectivation—that is to say, as a person adapted to all of the socially instituted rules and hierarchies. Gay subjectivity is thus an ‘‘inferiorized’’ subjectivity, not only because of the inferior social position in which gay people find the
mselves in society, but
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also because that very society produces those subjects: it is not a question of, on the one hand, a preexisting subjectivity, and, on the other, a social imprint that comes along later to deform it. The subjectivity and the social imprint are one and the same: the individual ‘‘subject’’ is produced by the interpellation, that is to say, by the cognitive (and therefore social) structures of which it is the vector.
Thus ‘‘homosexuality’’ does not simply designate a class of individuals defined by sexual preferences and practices. It is also a set of processes of
‘‘subjection,’’ processes as much collective as individual to the extent that there is a common structure of inferiorization at work, and it is all the stronger to the extent that it is the same for all, and yet at the same time specific to each individual—who might even at moments in his or her life believe that he or she is the sole victim.
The ‘‘homosexual’’ subject thus always has a singular history, yet this history is itself always in relation to a collective history constituted by other
‘‘subjects’’ being subjugated by way of the same process of ‘‘inferiorization.’’
A homosexual is never simply an isolated individual, even when he or she believes himself or herself to be alone in the world or when, having understood that not to be the case, he or she attempts to dissociate himself or herself from all the others precisely to evade the di≈cult recognition of belonging to this stigmatized ‘‘collective.’’ For it is only by way of becoming critically and reflectively conscious of one’s belonging to such a group that one can, to whatever extent it may be possible, liberate oneself from it. The
‘‘collective’’ exists independently of any individual’s consciousness of it and independently of any individual will. Only by accepting and assuming this belonging can an individual come to constitute himself or herself as the
‘‘subject’’ of his or her own history.
If every homosexual is subjected-subjugated by way of identical processes that operate with reference to the same social and sexual norms and that produce the same e√ects in minds and in bodies, and if, as a consequence, a gay man is always-already inscribed in a collective that includes him even before he belongs to it or knows or wants to belong to it, then clearly every gay gesture, every kind of participation—even the most reticent or distant or secretive—in gay life will place any gay men into relation with all the others, with the entire history of homosexuality and its struggles. No sooner does he walk into a bar, cruise in a park or some other meeting place, or visit a gay
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f social space, no sooner does he open a book that evokes kinds of experience or feelings in which he can recognize himself to some extent (and certainly it is often for that very reason that he chooses to read this book or that: how else are we to understand why gay men who never read literature still sometimes read Proust or Wilde?), than he finds himself linked to all the others in his same moment who make the same kinds of gestures. But he also finds himself linked to all those who, in the past, created those spaces, visited them before him, to all those tenacious individualities and collectivities that imposed them and maintained them in the face of oppression, to all the e√ort and all the courage that was necessary so that gay literature and gay thought might exist.∑
Walking through London at the beginning of the 1980s, Neil Bartlett
gazes at all the nineteenth-century facades and thinks of all the men who walked these same streets before him. He notices that the city has a history, that that history is his own: what he is today, others have invented for him.∏
Nicole Brossard says much the same thing about lesbian experience when, in her poem, ‘‘My Continent,’’ she evokes the manner in which she associates herself with all those women who have written before her: ‘‘My man-ifold continent of those who have signed themselves: Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Michèle Causse, Marie-Claire Blais, Jovette Marchessault, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich, Colette and Virginia, other drowned women. . . .’’π
Consciously or unconsciously, willed or unwilled, accepted or not, gay subjectivity is haunted by a world and a past of which it is perhaps unaware (but never totally so, except in childhood), yet which provides the basis for a collective belonging that today’s visibility only brings into the light of day. It brings this world and this past into the light of day by a≈rming it, remaking it, reformulating it, organizing it, and also by defending it against all the e√orts to erase it, e√orts that struggle to recreate older situations—ones in which it would nonetheless be incorrect to believe that this ‘‘collective’’ did not exist. It was simply less visible and, perhaps, less conscious of itself as a
‘‘collective.’’ (Although even that is not absolutely certain.)
If all that has been said so far about the way insult defines the relation of a certain group of individuals to the world is indeed correct, this is evidently because there is a general validity to this structured relation to language.
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(Judith Butler emphasizes this point.) Language is ‘‘already there’’ for everyone, and it imposes on everyone and on every group the cognitive structures and perceptual schemas that it carries with it, just as it imposes the subjugation to those schemas and structures and to the psychological identities that they help to determine and reproduce. Language is already there when I arrive in the world, as are the social roles that words—and, in particular, insults—designate. As Sartre puts it so well, and here he is remarkably close to Althusser (or the other way around), ‘‘processes’’ [ techniques] and ‘‘roles’’
take hold of us from childhood onward. ‘‘When the young Gustave Flaubert emerges from his childhood years,’’ Sartre says at the outset of The Family Idiot, ‘‘processes lie waiting for him. As do roles to be played.’’∫ We do not create the world into which we arrive. In it we find gestures to be made, social roles, beliefs, professions, mental habits, and so on. They are all there before we are. Among all the materiality that we find, there is language: a language that carries with it representations, social and racial hierarchies, forms of ‘‘character’’ and ‘‘identity’’ made by history and preexisting any individual. Within language we find insults which mark out, make known, and reinforce the hierarchy between various ‘‘identities.’’ All the ‘‘processes’’
and the ‘‘roles’’ of which Sartre speaks are clearly hierarchized—socially, culturally, racially. The world is ‘‘insulting’’ because it is structured according to hierarchies that carry with them the possibility of insult. One can see this exemplified in the film by the videographer Marlon T. Riggs, Tongues Untied, in which he narrates the itinerary that led him to assume his identity as both gay and black. In his case, the ‘‘formative’’ insults of his personal identity designate two relationships of belonging to two stigmatized groups: the black adolescent subject to insults from white people who call him
‘‘nigger’’ and the gay adolescent subject to the insults from both black and white people who call him ‘‘faggot.’’Ω
It is more or less certain that the majority of gay people will have heard homophobic insults spoken before they ever enter into sexuality themselves, before they could have been the target of those insults, before reaching the age at which one might know oneself to be a potential target. This, we should note, distinguishes sexual insults from racist insults. The latter, when, for example, they deal with skin color, are directed at a visible ‘‘stigma,’’ whereas the former are directed at a ‘‘stigma’’ that is not given, or at least not actualized, from the moment of birth and that can therefore be disguised. It is possible to hide the fact of being gay, and in all moments of ferocious
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f repression of ‘‘sexual deviance’’ many such people have managed to escape persecution by hiding or even obliterating their ‘‘homosexual being.’’ More simply, and more commonly, marriages of ‘‘convenience’’ have been for many gay people a means of evading suspicion and stigmatization. In contrast, it is much more di≈cult to hide the fact that one is black. More tellingly, at the age of ten or even fifteen, one may not know that one is (or will be) gay, but at the age of ten one knows that one is black. From earliest childhood one has the experience of the meanings that takes on in Western societies, from which racism is rarely absent. Yet, however fundamental this distinction is, it is not absolute. For a black youth might not know that he or she is black before being confronted with the violence of racial prejudice.∞≠ But also, inversely, for many gay people (at least for those who are gay from their youth) there is a correlation between their apprenticeship in the use of insults and the confused awareness that they themselves are that which is in question in the insulting word. A child can know at ten—without knowing it completely, but knowing something of it in any case—that the word ‘‘faggot’’
just about designates him and will do so entirely one day. (From this comes the discomfort, or even the horror, of having to understand one’s situation more and more clearly as the years go by and of having to understand that others know this as well.)
There are other di√erences that can be mentioned. A black youth will
most likely live in a black family, and thus, to the extent that he or she is subjected to racism, will likely be supported by his or her family through that experience. A gay youth is rather unlikely to live in a gay or lesbian family, and the insult and stigmatization found in the exterior world are likely to be found in the family as well. Such young people will frequently be obliged to disguise themselves from their ‘‘own’’ as well as from ‘‘others,’’ and the kind of ‘‘racism’’ they are subjected to is as inherent in family life as in the outside world. In a famous passage Proust speaks of ‘‘a race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing . . . sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close her dying eyes’’ (rtp, 2:637). This creates a practice of silence and dissimulation in gay youths and perhaps produces those peculiar psychological characteristics by which gay people have been identified in literature and in film (deceitful, mendacious, traitorous)—characteristics that, of course, re-
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 10
