Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (11 page)

Ahasuerus’s queen, had refused to be put on exhibition to his drunk men friends, “the wise men, which knew the times,” saw that

Vashti the queen hath not done wrong to the king only, but also to all the princes, and to all the people that are in all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus. For this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes, when it shall be reported.
(Esther 1:13–17)

Esther the Jew is introduced onto this scene as a salvific ideal of female sub- missiveness, her single moment of risk with the king given point by her cus- tomary pliancy. (Even today, Jewish little girls are educated in gender roles— fondness for being looked at, fearlessness in defense of “their people,” nonsolidarity with their sex—through masquerading as Queen Esther at Purim; I have a snapshot of myself at about five, barefoot in the pretty “Queen Esther” dress my grandmother made [white satin, gold spangles], making a careful eyes-down toe-pointed curtsey at [presumably] my father, who is manifest in the picture only as the flashgun that hurls my shadow, pil- laring up tall and black, over the dwarfed sofa onto the wall behind me.) Moreover, the literal patriarchism that makes coming out to
parents
the best emotional analogy to Esther’s self-disclosure to her
husband
is shown with un- usual clarity to function through the male traffic in women: Esther’s real mis- sion, as a wife, is to get her guardian Mardochée installed in place of Aman as the king’s favorite and advisor. And the instability and danger that by contrast lurk in the Gentile Aman’s relation to the king seem, Iago-like, to attach to the inadequate heterosexual buffering of the inexplicit intensities between them. If the story of Esther reflects a firm Jewish choice of a minority politics based on a conservative reinscription of gender roles, however, such a choice has never been able to be made intelligibly by gay people in a modern culture (although there have been repeated attempts at making it, especially by men). Instead, both within and outside of homosexual-rights movements, the con- tradictory understandings of same-sex bonding and desire and of male and fe- male gay identity have crossed and recrossed the definitional lines of gender identity with such disruptive frequency that the concepts “minority” and “gender” themselves have lost a good deal of their categorizing (though cer- tainly not of their performative) force.

Each of these complicating possibilities stems at least partly from the plu- rality and the cumulative incoherence of modern ways of conceptualizing same-sex desire and, hence, gay identity; an incoherence that answers, too, to the incoherence with which
hetero
sexual desire and identity are conceptual-

ized. A long, populous theoretical project of interrogating and historicizing the self-evidence of the pseudo-symmetrical opposition homosexual/hetero- sexual (or gay/straight) as categories of persons will be assumed rather than summarized here. Foucault among other historians locates in about the nine- teenth century a shift in European thought from viewing same-sex sexuality as a matter of prohibited and isolated genital
acts
(acts to which, in that view, anyone might be liable who did not have their appetites in general under close control) to viewing it as a function of stable definitions of
identity
(so that one’s personality structure might mark one as
a homosexual
, even, perhaps, in the absence of any genital activity at all). Thus, according to Alan Bray, “To talk of an individual [in the Renaissance] as being or not being ‘a homosexu- al’ is an anachronism and ruinously misleading,”
14
whereas the period stretch- ing roughly between Wilde and Proust was prodigally productive of attempts to name, explain, and define this new kind of creature, the homosexual per- son—a project so urgent that it spawned in its rage of distinction an even newer category, that of the heterosexual person.
15

To question the natural self-evidence of this opposition between gay and straight as distinct kinds of persons is not, however, to dismantle it. Perhaps no one should wish it to do so; substantial groups of women and men under this representational regime have found that the nominative category “homo- sexual,” or its more recent near-synonyms, does have a real power to organize and describe their experience of their own sexuality and identity, enough at any rate to make their self-application of it (even when only tacit) worth the enormous accompanying costs. If only for this reason, the categorization commands respect. And even more at the level of groups than of individuals, the durability of any politics or ideology that would be so much as
permissive
of same-sex sexuality has seemed, in the twentieth century, to depend on a definition of homosexual persons as a distinct, minority population, however produced or labeled.
16
Far beyond any cognitively or politically enabling ef- fects on the people whom it claims to describe, moreover, the nominative cat- egory of “the homosexual” has robustly failed to disintegrate under the pres- sure of decade after decade, battery after battery of deconstructive exposure—evidently not in the first place because of its meaningfulness to those whom it defines but because of its indispensableness to those who de- fine themselves as against it.

For surely, if paradoxically, it is the paranoid insistence with which the definitional barriers between “the homosexual” (minority) and “the hetero- sexual” (majority) are fortified, in the twentieth century, by nonhomosexuals, and especially by men against men, that most saps one’s ability to believe in “the homosexual” as an unproblematically discrete category of persons. Even

the homophobic fifties folk wisdom of
Tea and Sympathy
detects that the man who most electrifies those barriers is the one whose own current is at most in- termittently direct. It was in the period of the so-called “invention of the ‘ho- mosexual’” that Freud gave psychological texture and credibility to a counter- valent, universalizing mapping of this territory, based on the supposed protean mobility of sexual desire and on the potential bisexuality of every human creature; a mapping that implies no presumption that one’s sexual penchant will always incline toward persons of a single gender, and that of- fers, additionally, a richly denaturalizing description of the psychological mo- tives and mechanisms of male paranoid, projective homophobic definition and enforcement. Freud’s antiminoritizing account only gained, moreover, in influence by being articulated through a developmental narrative in which heterosexist and masculinist ethical sanctions found ready camouflage. If the new common wisdom that hotly overt homophobes are men who are “inse- cure about their masculinity” supplements the implausible, necessary illusion that there could be a
secure
version of masculinity (known, presumably, by the coolness of its homophobic enforcement) and a stable, intelligible way for men to feel about other men in modern heterosexual capitalist patriarchy, what tighter turn could there be to the screw of an already off-center, always at fault, endlessly blackmailable male identity ready to be manipulated into any labor of channeled violence?
17

It remained for work emerging from the later feminist and gay movements to begin to clarify why the male paranoid project had become so urgent in the maintenance of gender subordination; and it remained for a stunningly effica- cious coup of feminist redefinition to transform lesbianism, in a predominant view, from a matter of female virilization to one of woman-identification.
18
Al- though the post-Stonewall, predominantly male gay liberation movement has had a more distinct political presence than radical lesbianism and has present- ed potent new images of gay people and gay communities, along with a stir- ring new family of narrative structures attached to coming out, it has offered few new analytic facilities for the question of homo/heterosexual definition prior to the moment of individual coming out. That has not, indeed, been its project. In fact, except for a newly productive interest in historicizing gay def- inition itself, the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues of homo/heterosexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that available to, say, Proust. Of the strange plethora of “explanatory” schemas newly available to Proust and his contemporaries, especially in support of mi- noritizing views, some have been superseded, forgotten, or rendered by histo- ry too unpalatable to be appealed to explicitly. (Many of the supposedly lost ones do survive, if not in sexological terminology, then in folk wisdom and

“commonsense.” One is never surprised, either, when they reemerge under new names on the Science page of the
Times
; the men-women of Sodom ma- triculate as the “sissy boys” of Yale University Press.)
19
But there are few new entries. Most moderately to well-educated Western people in the twentieth century seem to share a similar understanding of homosexual definition, inde- pendent of whether they themselves are gay or straight, homophobic or anti- homophobic. That understanding is close to what Proust’s probably was, what for that matter mine is and probably yours. That is to say, it is organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence. It holds the minoritizing view that there is a distinct population of persons who “really are” gay; at the same time, it holds the universalizing views that sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities; that apparently heterosexual persons and object choices are strongly marked by same-sex influences and desires, and vice versa for apparently homosexual ones; and that at least male heterosexual iden- tity and modern masculinist culture may require for their maintenance the scapegoating crystallization of a same-sex male desire that is widespread and in the first place internal.
20

It has been the project of many, many writers and thinkers of many dif- ferent kinds to adjudicate between the minoritizing and universalizing views of sexual definition and to resolve this conceptual incoherence. With whatev- er success, on their own terms, they have accomplished the project, none of them has budged in one direction or other the absolute hold of this yoking of contradictory views on modern discourse. A higher
valuation
on the transfor- mative and labile play of desire, a higher
valuation
on gay identity and gay community: neither of these, nor their opposite, often far more potent de- preciations, seems to get any purchase on the stranglehold of the available and ruling paradigm-clash. And this incoherence has prevailed for at least three- quarters of a century. Sometimes, but not always, it has taken the form of a confrontation or nonconfrontation between politics and theory. A perfect ex- ample of this potent incoherence was the anomalous legal situation of gay people and acts in this country after one recent legal ruling. The Supreme Court in
Bowers v. Hardwick
notoriously left the individual states free to pro- hibit any
acts
they wish to define as “sodomy,” by whomsoever performed, with no fear at all of impinging on any rights, and particularly privacy rights, safeguarded by the Constitution; yet only shortly thereafter a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (in
Sergeant Perry J. Watkins v. United States Army
) that homosexual
persons
, as a particular kind of person,
are
enti- tled to Constitutional protections under the Equal Protection clause.
21
To be gay in this system is to come under the radically overlapping aegises of a uni- versalizing discourse of acts and a minoritizing discourse of persons. Just at

the moment, at least within the discourse of law, the former of these prohibits what the latter of them protects; but in the concurrent public-health con- structions related to AIDS, for instance, it is far from clear that a minoritiz- ing discourse of persons (“risk groups”) is not even more oppressive than the competing, universalizing discourse of acts (“safer sex”). In the double binds implicit in the space overlapped by the two, at any rate, every matter of defi- nitional control is fraught with consequence.

The energy-expensive but apparently static clinch between minoritizing and universalizing views of
homo/heterosexual definition
is not, either, the only major conceptual siege under which modern homosexual and heterosexist fates are enacted. The second one, as important as the first and intimately en- tangled with it, has to do with defining the relation to gender of homosexual persons and same-sex desires. (It was in this conceptual register that the radical- feminist reframing of lesbianism as woman-identification was such a power- ful move.) Enduringly since at least the turn of the century, there have presided two contradictory
tropes of gender
through which same-sex desire could be understood. On the one hand there was, and there persists, differ- ently coded (in the homophobic folklore and science surrounding those “sissy boys” and their mannish sisters, but also in the heart and guts of much living gay and lesbian culture), the trope of inversion,
anima muliebris in corpore vir- ili inclusa
—“a woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body”—and vice versa. As such writers as Christopher Craft have made clear, one vital impulse of this trope is the preservation of an essential
heterosexuality
within desire itself, through a particular reading of the homosexuality of persons: desire, in this view, by definition subsists in the current that runs between one male self and one female self, in whatever sex of bodies these selves may be manifested.
22
Proust was not the first to demonstrate—nor, for that matter, was the Shake- speare of the comedies—that while these attributions of “true” “inner” het- erogender may be made to stick, in a haphazard way, so long as dyads of peo- ple are all that are in question, the broadening of view to include any larger circuit of desire must necessarily reduce the inversion or liminality trope to a choreography of breathless farce. Not a jot the less for that has the trope of inversion remained a fixture of modern discourse of same-sex desire; indeed, under the banners of androgyny or, more graphically, “genderfuck,” the dizzy- ing instability of this model has itself become a token of value.