Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (12 page)

Charged as it may be with value, the persistence of the inversion trope has been yoked, however, to that of its contradictory counterpart, the trope of gender separatism. Under this latter view, far from its being of the essence of desire to cross boundaries of gender, it is instead the most natural thing in the world that people of the same gender, people grouped together under the sin-

Separatist:

Integrative:

Homo/hetero
sexual

definition:

Gender
definition:

Minoritizing
, e.g., gay identity, “essentialist,” third-sex models, civil right models

Gender separatist
, e.g., homosocial continuum, lesbian separatist, man- hood-initiation models

Universalizing
, e.g., bisexual potential, “social contruc- tionist,” “sodomy” models, “lexbian continuum”

Inversion/liminality/transitiv- ity
, e.g., cross-sex, androgy- ny, gay/lesbian solidarity models

Models of Gay/Straight Definition in Terms of Overlapping Sexuality and Gender

gle most determinative diacritical mark of social organization, people whose economic, institutional, emotional, physical needs and knowledges may have so much in common, should bond together also on the axis of sexual desire. As the substitution of the phrase “woman-identified woman” for “lesbian” suggests, as indeed does the concept of the continuum of male or female ho- mosocial desire, this trope tends to reassimilate to one another identification and desire, where inversion models, by contrast, depend on their distinctness. Gender-separatist models would thus place the woman-loving woman and the man-loving man each at the “natural” defining center of their own gen- der, again in contrast to inversion models that locate gay people—whether bi- ologically or culturally—at the threshold between genders.

The immanence of each of these models throughout the history of mod- ern gay definition is clear from the early split in the German homosexual rights movement between Magnus Hirschfeld, founder (in 1897) of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, a believer in the “third sex” who posit- ed, in Don Mager’s paraphrase, “an exact equation . . . between cross-gender behaviors and homosexual desire”; and Benedict Friedländer, co-founder (in 1902) of the Community of the Special, who concluded to the contrary “that homosexuality was the highest, most perfect evolutionary stage of gender dif- ferentiation.”
23
As James Steakley explains, “the true
typus inversus
,” accord- ing to this latter argument, “as distinct from the effeminate homosexual, was seen as the founder of patriarchal society and ranked above the heterosexual in terms of his capacity for leadership and heroism.”
24

Like the dynamic impasse between minoritizing and universalizing views of homosexual definition, that between transitive and separatist tropes of ho- mosexual gender has its own complicated history, an especially crucial one for

any understanding of modern gender asymmetry, oppression, and resistance. One thing that does emerge with clarity from this complex and contradictory map of sexual and gender definition is that the possible grounds to be found there for alliance and cross-identification among various groups will also be plural. To take the issue of gender definition alone: under a gender-separatist topos, lesbians have looked for identifications and alliances among women in general, including straight women (as in Adrienne Rich’s “lesbian continuum” model); and gay men, as in Friedländer’s model—or more recent “male liber- ation” models—of masculinity, might look for them among men in general, including straight men. “The erotic and social presumption of women is our enemy,” Friedländer wrote in his “Seven Theses on Homosexuality” (1908).
25
Under a topos of gender inversion or liminality, in contrast, gay men have looked to identify with straight women (on the grounds that they are also “feminine” or also desire men), or with lesbians (on the grounds that they oc- cupy a similarly liminal position); while lesbians have analogously looked to identify with gay men or, though this latter identification has not been strong since second-wave feminism, with straight men. (Of course, the political out- comes of all these trajectories of potential identification have been radically, often violently, shaped by differential historical forces, notably homophobia and sexism.) Note, however, that this schematization over “the issue of gender definition alone” also does impinge on the issue of homo/heterosexual defini- tion, as well, and in an unexpectedly chiasmic way. Gender-
separatist
models like Rich’s or Friedländer’s seem to tend toward
universalizing
understandings of homo/heterosexual potential. To the degree that gender-
integrative
inversion or liminality models, such as Hirschfeld’s “third-sex” model, suggest an alliance or identity between lesbians and gay men, on the other hand, they tend toward gay-
separatist
, minoritizing models of specifically gay identity and politics. Steakley makes a useful series of comparisons between Hirschfeld’s Scientific- Humanitarian Committee and Friedländer’s Community of the Special:

Within the homosexual emancipation movement there was a deep fac- tionalization between the Committee and the Community. . . . [T]he Committee was an organization of men and women, whereas the Com- munity was exclusively male. . . . The Committee called homosexuals a third sex in an effort to win the basic rights accorded the other two; the Community scorned this as a beggarly plea for mercy and touted the no- tion of supervirile bisexuality.
26

These crossings are quite contingent, however; Freud’s universalizing under- standing of sexual definition seems to go with an integrative, inversion model

of gender definition, for instance. And, more broadly, the routes to be taken across this misleadingly symmetrical map are fractured in a particular histor- ical situation by the profound asymmetries of gender oppression and hetero- sexist oppression.

Like the effect of the minoritizing/universalizing impasse, in short, that of the impasse of gender definition must be seen first of all in the creation of a field of intractable, highly structured discursive incoherence at a crucial node of social organization, in this case the node at which
any
gender is discrimi- nated. I have no optimism at all about the availability of a standpoint of thought from which either question could be intelligibly, never mind effica- ciously, adjudicated, given that the same yoking of contradictions has presided over all the thought on the subject, and all its violent and pregnant modern history, that has gone to form our own thought. Instead, the more promising project would seem to be a study of the incoherent dispensation it- self, the indisseverable girdle of incongruities under whose discomfiting span, for most of a century, have unfolded both the most generative and the most murderous plots of our culture.

Notes

1. D. A. Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” in his
   The Novel and the Police
   (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 207.
   

2. On this case see Michael W. La Morte, “Legal Rights and Responsibilities of Ho- mosexuals in Public Education,”
   Journal of Law and Education
   4, no. 23 (July 1975): 449–67, esp. 450–53; and Jeanne La Borde Scholz, “Comment: Out of the Closet, Out of a Job: Due Process in Teacher Disqualification,”
   Hastings Law Quarterly
   6 (Winter 1979): 663–717, esp. 682–84.
   

3. Nan Hunter, director of the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, analyzed
   Row- land
   in “Homophobia and Academic Freedom,” a talk at the 1986 Modern Language As- sociation National Convention. There is an interesting analysis of the limitations, for gay- rights purposes, of both the right of privacy and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, whether considered separately or in tandem, in “Notes: The Constitutional Status of Sexual Orientation: Homosexuality as a Suspect Classification,”
   Harvard Law Review
   98 (April 1985): 1285–1307, esp. 1288–97. For a discussion of related legal issues that is strikingly apropos of, and useful for, the argument made in
   Epistemology of the Closet
   (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), see Janet E. Halley, “The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity,”
   UCLA Law Re- view
   36 (1989): 915–76.
   

4. New York Native
   , no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 11.
   

5. Philip Bockman, “A Fine Day,”
   New York Native
   , no. 175 (August 25, 1986): 13.
   

6. A reminder that “the closet” retains (at least the chronic potential of ) its gay seman- tic specification: a media flap in June, 1989, when a Republican National Committee memo calling for House Majority Leader Thomas Foley to “come out of the liberal closet” and comparing his voting record with that of an openly gay Congressman, Barney Frank,
   

   was widely perceived (and condemned) as insinuating that Foley himself is gay. The com- mittee’s misjudgment about whether it could maintain deniability for the insinuation is an interesting index to how unpredictably full or empty of gay specificity this locution may be perceived to be.
   

7. On this, see my “Privilege of Unknowing,”
   Genders
   , no. 1 (Spring 1988).
   

8. On this, see my
   Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
   

9. Lord Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves,”
   Chameleon
   1 (1894): 28 (emphasis added).
   

10. Jean Racine,
    Esther
    , ed. H. R. Roach (London: George G. Harrap, 1949), line 89; my translation. Further citations of this play will be noted by line number in the text.
    

11. It is worth remembering, of course, that the biblical story still ends with mass slaughter: while Racine’s king
    revokes
    his orders (1197), the biblical king
    reverses
    his (Es- ther 8:5), licensing the Jews’ killing of “seventy and five thousand” (9:16) of their enemies, including children and women (8:11).
    

12. In Voltaire’s words, “un roi insensé qui a passé six mois avec sa femme sans savoir, sans s’informer même qui elle est” (in Racine,
    Esther
    , pp. 83–84).
    

13. On this, see “Privilege of Unknowing,” esp. p. 120.
    

14. Alan Bray,
    Homosexuality in Renaissance England
    (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 16.
    

15. On this, see Jonathan Katz,
    Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary
    (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 147–50. For more discussion, David M. Halperin,
    One Hun- dred Years of Homosexuality
    (New York: Routledge, 1989).
    

16. Conceivably, contemporary liberal/radical feminism, on the spectrum stretching from NOW to something short of radical separatism, could prove to be something of an exception to this rule—though, of course, already a much compromised one.
    

17. For a fuller discussion of this, see chapter 4 of
    Epistemology of the Closet
    .
    

18. See, for example, Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman,” reprinted in Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone, eds.,
    Radical Feminism
    (New York: Quad- rangle, 1973), pp. 240–45; and Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person, eds.,
    Women, Sex, and Sexuality
    (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 62–91.
    

19. I’m referring here to the publicity given to Richard Green’s
    The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality
    on its 1987 publication. The intensely stereotypical, homophobic journalism that appeared on the occasion seemed to be legitimated by the book itself, which seemed, in turn, to be legitimated by the status of Yale University Press
    it
    self.
    

20. Anyone who imagines that this perception is confined to antihomophobes should listen, for instance, to the college football coach’s ritualistic scapegoating and abjection of his team’s “sissy” (or worse) personality traits. D. A. Miller’s “
    Cage aux folles
    : Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s
    The Woman in White
    ” (in his
    The Novel and the Police
    , pp. 146–91, esp. pp. 186–90) makes especially forcefully the point (oughtn’t it always to have been obvious?) that this whole family of perceptions is if anything less distinctively the property of cultural criticism than of cultural enforcement.
    

21. When Watkins’s reinstatement in the army was supported by the full Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a 1989 ruling, however, it was on narrower grounds.
    

22. Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s
    Dracula
    ,”
    Representations
    , no. 8 (Fall 1984): 107–34, esp. 114.
    

23. Don Mager, “Gay Theories of Gender Role Deviance,”
    SubStance
    46 (1985): 32–48, quoted from pp. 35–36. His sources here are John Lauritsen and David Thorstad,
    The Early Homosexual Rights Movement
    (New York: Times Change, 1974), and James D. Steakley,
    The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
    (New York: Arno, 1975).
    

24. Steakley,
    The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
    , p. 54.