There is a certain historical invariability to this theme, as if the homophobic image always draws on some common and ancient set of representations and insults. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Cambacérès was a favorite target for caricaturists. He can be found, for instance, represented turning his back to three women, which signifies that he takes no part in reproduction from generation to generation, and that he therefore embodies the death of society. Yet he is also without fail accompanied by a turkey that has in its anus the finger of a hand that would seem to be an appendage of its body. The lesson of these images is blindingly clear: Cambacérès is a Sodomite who is leading society to its ruin.∏ When Foucault, in an article published in the newspaper Libération in June 1982, critiques the idea that one could think of homosexuality as an ‘‘anthropological constant’’
and emphasizes that there is no permanence across time in what is designated by the term, he mentions Cambacérès in a list of those who should not be lumped into this category, one which had not yet been constituted in the period in which he lived.π I will come back to Foucault’s article in the third part of this book. Here I will only claim that a certain invariance does exist, even an astonishing stability, in homophobic discourse, whether it be caricature used as a defamatory image or insult used as a vehicle for the derogatory representation of those who have relations with persons of the same sex.∫ As Barry D. Adam comments, a gay man finds himself confronted with a ‘‘com-posite portrait’’ of himself, proposed by a set of images, representations, and discourses, all providing him with a degrading or inferiorizing image of himself. Not only are the inferior categories presented without fail as ridiculous or devalorized, the particular people categorized in them are always brought back by dominant or ‘‘legitimate’’ discourses to a set of general attributes and ‘‘discrediting’’ associations with crime, immorality, mental illness, and so on.Ω The inferiorized individual is thus refused the status of an autonomous person, for the dominant representation of the individual is always as an example of a particular species (one that should be condemned, one that is always to some degree monstrous or ridiculous).
π≤
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 So it is that insult is both personal and collective. It aims at a particular individual by associating that individual with a group, a species, a race; and at the same time it targets a whole class of individuals by aiming at a particular member of the class. Insult works by way of generalization rather than by particularization. It globalizes more than it singularizes.∞≠ It works by attributing to a category (treated as a whole or treated through the example of one individual) a group of characteristics that are conceived of as derogatory and that are considered applicable to each and every member of that category. Thus an insult can reach a person who is not its direct target, for in fact that person is also targeted.∞∞
This is why the e√ects of insult ceaselessly perpetuate and reproduce themselves, along with the wounds they provoke, and along with the submissions and the revolts that follow (sometimes both at the same time within the same person). But this is also why individuals who belong to a given stigmatized category do everything they can to dissociate themselves from the ‘‘group’’ that insult constitutes. Even though they unavoidably belong to a ‘‘collective,’’ constituted as such through the e√ects of insult (which is to say through the entire process of subjectivization and the constitution of personal identities), the members of the said ‘‘collective’’ work hard to escape from it in order to be able to see others in that group through the eyes of those doing the insulting or the mocking. The gay man who wishes to hide that he is a ‘‘faggot,’’ or the gay man who is known as such but wishes to gain his credentials of normalcy, will laugh along with those making tasteless or rude jokes about ‘‘fairies.’’ Perhaps he will delude himself into believing that he is spared the insult if he speaks it himself, or if he laughs along with the others who speak it; perhaps he believes that the others will perceive him di√erently than those at whom they are laughing.
(Imagine all the e√ort that will go into one’s clothing, one’s speech, one’s gestures in order to persuade oneself and others of one’s conformity to normalcy.) That e√ort notwithstanding, insult will still be directed at such people—even should they take it upon themselves to insult others—simply because insult is speaking of them too. They are constituted by it. That is its social function. Given that the principle of insult is to globalize, to do away with the singularities of any individual, its constitutive power will have out-witted in advance, and will forever outwit, all individual strategies aimed at dissociating oneself from the group that insult addresses collectively. Volens, nolens, you will belong to it, however hard you try not to. When he laughs at other gay men, a gay man laughs at himself. And those with whom he laughs
c a r i c at u r e a n d c o l l e c t i v e i n s u lt π≥
at the ‘‘fairies’’ and the ‘‘silly queens’’ will laugh at him as soon as he turns his back. (‘‘We all know,’’ Truman Capote is reported to have said, ‘‘that a fag is a homosexual gentleman who just left the room.’’) Yet this internalized shame, the will to dissociate from the group, to demonstrate that one does not belong among those laughable folk who become the object of insult—
these forces are so strong that for a long time they blocked any chance of establishing even a minimal degree of ‘‘solidarity’’ among the stigmatized.
‘‘Shame isolates,’’ writes Sartre, speaking precisely about the absence of
‘‘solidarity’’ and ‘‘reciprocity’’ among those whom he refers to, in the vocabulary of the 1950s, as ‘‘pederasts’’ (a word synonymous at that moment with male homosexuality).∞≤
To summarize: because it is always collective in nature, because it writes an individual into a group, one of the e√ects of insult is that it encourages the individuals in question—or those who wish to avoid being brought into question—to find any means to separate themselves from the ‘‘species’’ to which the social and sexual order would have them assigned. Precisely because it collectivizes, insult encourages individualism.
The power of insult and stigmatization is so great that it brings an individual to the point of doing almost anything to avoid being included in the group being designated and constituted by insult. It thus becomes possible to understand why, as a result, only the decision to accept oneself as a member of that targeted ‘‘collective,’’ and only the minimal solidarity found as a gay man with other gay men and with lesbians can serve as a point of departure for an e√ective resistance to insult and to the process of stigmatization socially performed on gay people. Such a struggle has to do not only with political mobilization or with the creation of a culture. It is also a self-transformation and a change in the world, experienced in each gesture one makes, each word one says, in order to free oneself as much as possible from the weight of interiorized homophobia. It is the accumulation of all of these tiny moves, microscopic actions that begin to take the place of, or at least begin to counteract, the ongoing accumulation of small acts of cowardice, microscopic acts of resignation or renunciation, innumerable silences, which, in their totality, make up the lived reality of domination. Yet such a process could never be brought into existence by an individual will unless that will were supported by the awareness that it was acting as part of a collective enterprise—one of self-reconstruction—in which people as group recover their status as autonomous and free individuals. This is why collective visibility is so important. And this is why, on the other hand, all those who work
π∂
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 to perpetuate the current sexual order find it necessary to condemn this visibility.
To recover one’s personal autonomy and become a full individual implies in the first place the reconstruction of a collective image so that it o√ers di√erent models. It may be by challenging or bypas
sing those ‘‘portraits’’
made available by the spokespersons of social and sexual norms or by relieving those portraits of their derogatory force (e√eminacy only being ridiculous because of the e√ects of a decree that can be overturned, even if such a rejection of the norm might only be sustainable within the confines of a counterculture). This is why individual autonomy and individual freedom can only be won and built up through collective battles, battles that must be ongoing.
Day-to-day language (like the language of images) is everywhere traversed by power relations as by social relations (of class, sex, age, race, and so on), and it is by and through language (and images) that symbolic domination works, by means of the definition—and the imposition—of socially legitimate ways of perceiving and representing the world. Dominance, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, belongs to the person who imposes a way of being seen.
A person is dominated who is defined, thought, and spoken of by some-
one else’s language and/or who is unable to impose his or her own self-perception.∞≥ Only through periods of social or cultural crisis or by way of the emergence of political or cultural organization can the symbolic order be brought into question. The linguistic representations tied to that symbolic order find their principle power in their claim to arise from some unchanging natural order. Sometimes people sympathetic to that order pretend to analyze it in order to be able to rea≈rm it in all its arbitrariness, presenting it as if it has always existed.∞∂
Political organizing and political action are always struggles for representation, for language, for words. They are struggles about ways of perceiving the world. It is a question of who is to control the ways a group is perceived and defined, indeed the way the world is perceived and defined. Political organization and action often consist in a group trying to validate, to impose, its own way of perceiving itself, thereby escaping from the symbolic violence being done by the dominant representation. But it is worth specifying that there is hardly any one way in which gay men ‘‘perceive themselves.’’
(And the situation is only more acute when one speaks of gay men and
c a r i c at u r e a n d c o l l e c t i v e i n s u lt π∑
lesbians.) Thus we have the necessary complexity of the gay and lesbian movement. And thus, as it is often pointed out, the definitions it provides will be only provisional constructions, fragile ones, often necessarily in contradiction with themselves. So it is that younger gay men come to the big city and, even as they establish a relation to the long tradition that precedes them there, they will reinvent for themselves, in their own way, the very history that has itself provided for more than a century the conditions for its own recreation. No wonder that one often experiences the contradictory feelings that ‘‘it has always been this way’’ and that ‘‘things are always changing.’’
It is necessary and essential that gay men and lesbians be able to provide their own images of themselves to escape from the images that have been so long produced of and on them. In doing so they will o√er more positive models (or at least more neutral ones or ones closer to reality) to those who have at hand only strongly negative images. The project is to produce one’s own representations for oneself and thereby to produce oneself as a discursive subject who refuses merely to be the object of the Other’s discourse. Yet, given that the ways in which gay men and lesbians perceive themselves and wish to speak of themselves are so eminently multiple, it is inevitable that any definition produced by some of them will not please others. Many things are at stake between gay men and lesbians themselves in the project of collective self-definition. ‘‘Identity’’ is therefore neither a reality nor a program, neither a past nor a future nor a present, but a contested space, a space of political and cultural conflict. This implies that that space can never be completely stabilized by any unitary discourse that would claim to provide a fixed way of apprehending identity.
One thing, we should insist, is very clear: for young gay men and lesbians who are obliged to construct their personal identities with no other models than those provided by caricatural and insulting images, and with no other schemas for thinking about their sexuality and their emotions than the insulting words by which they are surrounded—even if those words haven’t been directly addressed to them—the mere fact that other images are being produced, that other models of identification can be located in their society, that all the phenomena that make up a ‘‘gay culture’’ can be visible, all this generates freedom. For it is through these other identifications that the a≈rmation of one’s own singularity in the face of the identity shaped from
π∏
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 the exterior by the social order becomes possible. It was that exterior social order that instituted gay people as a collective and then isolated them from each other. It is amusing then, or maybe frightening, to notice that every time non-devalorizing images of homosexuality are produced, this or that guardian of the heteronormative order will be there to decry the ‘‘proselytism’’ behind them. We should note, in passing, how ludicrous this notion of proselytism is. It imagines that someone could be incited to become homosexual by way of representations of homosexuality. But it thereby brilliantly reveals the absolute dissymmetry between a desirable heterosexuality and a regrettable homosexuality: no one ever speaks of ‘‘heterosexual proselytism,’’ yet images of heterosexuality have a positively hegemonic distribution. The omnipresence of the image of heterosexuality rather serves to make clear that representations do not entice people to become this or that: a gay man can be exposed to images of heterosexuality during his entire childhood, adolescence, and adult life without thereby becoming heterosexual. Gide had already pointed this out, when he put these words in the mouth of his character, Corydon:
Just think how in our society, in our behavior, everything predes-
tines one sex to the other; everything teaches heterosexuality, everything urges it upon us, everything provokes us to it: theater, literature, newspapers, the paraded example set by our elders, the ritual of our
drawing rooms and our street corners. . . . Yet if a young man finally succumbs to so much collusion in the world around him, you refuse to
grant that his decision was influenced, his desire manipulated if he
ends up making his choice in the ‘right’ direction! And if, in spite of advice, invitations, provocations of all kinds, he should manifest a
homosexual tendency, you immediately blame his reading or some
other influence; . . . it has to be an acquired taste, you insist; he must have been taught it; you refuse to admit that he might have invented it all by himself.∞∑
To those who today reproach gays and lesbians for constructing them-
selves as a group, as a ‘‘mobilized minority,’’ and who consistently insist that they return to the values of free and independent individuals, one can of course respond that in fact it is the social and juridical order that has already constituted ‘‘homosexuals’’ as a collective—as an ostracized minority that
c a r i c at u r e a n d c o l l e c t i v e i n s u lt ππ
has been deprived of rights. But one should go even further and add that the very possibility of personal autonomy is denied to them given the structural impossibility for them to identify with positive images of their own feelings, their own sexuality, and therefore of their own personalities—given, further, the impossibility of accepting a relation of ‘‘reciprocity’’ (in the Sartrian sense of the word) with other gay people. They are limited by an external constraint; their consciousness has literally been invaded by discourses and images (in short, by a social order) that rejects them.
And if someone who is heterosexual can think of him or herself as free and autonomous as regards his or her psychological and sexual characteristics, is this not precisely because everything that such a person feels and is corresponds to the demands and the impositions of the sexual order? The feeling
that heterosexuals possess of their own free will and personal autonomy in fact exists only as a surface e√ect of the supposed naturalness and self-evidence that they gain by belonging to the majority. Their ‘‘individuality’’ and their ‘‘freedom’’ are made possible, sustained (as a pure illusion) by their conformity with values that are hardly universal. How could they be when they deny the right of first-person existence to a certain number of individuals who have been reduced to the status of discursive objects, of negative signs to be manipulated by dominant culture. One could even say that the stability of heterosexual identity is only assured by way of the delimitation and exclusion of ‘‘homosexuality,’’ of a homosexual ‘‘identity’’ defined by a certain number of devalorized characteristics assigned to an entire
‘‘category’’ of persons. Heterosexuality defines itself in large measure by what it rejects, in just the same way as, more generally, a society defines itself by what it excludes. (This was Foucault’s point in Madness and Civilization. ) It seems likely that as gays and lesbians a≈rm their multiple and heterogeneous identities, thereby destabilizing an imposed and inferior homosexual ‘‘identity,’’ they also contribute to the undoing—for heterosexuals themselves—of the seamless adhesion to things taken for granted. For those things taken for granted would depend on the exclusions and demarcations that are being undone. Thus, as the Foucault of the 1980s would say, ‘‘gay culture’’ is capable of generating new ways of life, new forms of relations between individuals, as much for heterosexuals as for gay men and lesbians.
A veritable autonomy can only see the light of day through the con-
struction of a ‘‘collective’’ that is conscious of itself as such and conscious of the fact that personal autonomy is never a given but always something that must be fought for. This concrete autonomy is to be won in the first place
π∫
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 from those who always plead for an abstract autonomy as a way of demanding that gay men and lesbians continue to accept a situation in which autonomy is refused to them or somehow rendered impossible. It is only in
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 12
