Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (33 page)

1. the aim, rather, is to treat homosexuality as a position from which one
   can
   know, to treat it as a legitimate
   condition
   of knowledge. Homosexu- ality, according to this Foucauldian vision of
   un gai savoir,
   “a gay science,” is not something to be got right but an eccentric positionality to be ex- ploited and explored: a potentially privileged site for the criticism and analysis of cultural discourses.
   (
   Saint
   61)
   

   The disavowal of the lack, the “eccentric positionality”—figured problemati- cally but suggestively in Lacan via disavowal of castration—erases any possi- ble epistemological privilege that attends the “postcolonial subject” vis-à-vis the fantasmatic white male possessor of the phallus of the dominant fiction.
   33
   To put it in other terms, Freud’s
   closeted
   Jewishness here (and I use the term very precisely both historically and in terms of its discursive, paranoic
   

   effects) has the toxic effects of any closeting at precisely the historical mo- ment that produces the epistemology of the closet. Moreover, to trump my- self, it is not that the uncloseting of that identity would result in an auto- matic dissolving of the toxic energy of the antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic imaginary (Dean, “On”), but “coming out” is perhaps a pro- phylactic, a way of defending the self from full participation in the most noxious modes of that discourse. Freud is constantly, I suggest, both com- ing out and hiding out in the queer (Boyarin, “Freud’s”) and Jewish closets in his discourse.
   

   Doubled consciousness has had its calamitous effects, precipitating both the “Negrophobia” of the (modernizing) Jew Freud and the “antisemitism” of the (postcolonial) Negro Fanon, which, I contend form part and parcel of the same (not merely analogous) historical process. The pathological possibilities that the mechanisms of introjection and projection afforded in such a doubly liminal situation—“not yet/no longer wholly”—appear most devastating in the gender discourses and practices of these colonized male subjects: in their misogyny, homophobia, and self-contempt:
   

   What does a man want?
   

   What does the black man want?
   

   At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.
   (Fanon,
   Black
   8)
   

   They appear as well in the inscription of these affects as universalized concepts within the discipline of psychoanalysis: as their sublation and attempted sub- limation, i.e., as their alleged universalization and psychologization.
   34
   

   The racial other is “he” who lacks the phallus. “He” is always castrated. If, however, on the one hand, the situation of that racial other (the Jew, the black) is productive of knowledge, not unlike Halperin’s
   gai savoir,
   these im- brications, on the other hand, of race and gender engage pathological effects of misogyny and homophobia in those same male (and even female) others. Blacks had been read as “feminine” by the dominating culture. The myth of hypervirility is no counter to this point, for as Fanon repeatedly shows, “The Negro
   is
   the genital” (Fanon,
   Black
   180; emphasis added). Maleness in the metropolis is equated with having the phallus, while in that same culture it is precisely the condition of “Woman” to
   be
   the phallus. The same appears true for the Negro.
   

   Like blacks, Jews were read as females in European antisemitic culture. Geller has put this succinctly: “In the Central European cultural imagination, male Jews are identified with men without penises, that is, as women” (Geller,
   

   “Paleontological” 52). Gilman has also provided us with the following rather startling evidence for this claim:
   

   The clitoris was seen as a “truncated penis.” Within the turn-of-the- century understanding of sexual homology, this truncated penis was seen as an analogy not to the body of the idealized male, with his large, intact penis, but to the circumcised (“truncated”) penis of the Jewish male. This is reflected in the popular fin de siècle Viennese view of the relationship between the body of the male Jew and the body of the woman. The cli- toris was known in the Viennese slang of the time simply as the “Jew” (
   Jud
   ). The phrase for female masturbation was “playing with the Jew.”
   

   (Gilman,
   Freud
   38–39)
   

   The black man is a penis; the Jew is a clitoris. Neither has the phallus. This could have been the source of a powerful critique of gender and sex-
   

   uality as constructed within the very colonial cultures that Freud and Fanon experienced as so oppressive, and it almost was. Although they had the criti- cal position from which to do so—and saw much else from that position— neither Freud nor Fanon seem ultimately able to make that move away from an ultimately Eurocentric, colonized universalism, to both understand the an- tiphallus to which their colonized subject positions provides potentially priv- ileged access and then move to a political demystification of the phallus as a representation
   tout court.
   Instead, the parallel projects of Fanon and Freud seem to be, at least in part, getting the phallus for their respective male selves/peoples, symptomatized, not at all incidentally, by a moment of homo- phobia that circulates in both of their texts.
   35
   The phallus is the ultimate white mask or
   laissé passer.
   We can now sharpen considerably our interpreta- tion of Freud’s reaction to his father’s story of having “passively” picked his hat up after it was knocked off by a Christian antisemite. McGrath argues that Freud would have understood the hat in the story as a symbol for the phallus, so “the knocking off of his father’s hat could have directly symbolized to him the emasculation of Jakob Freud” (McGrath,
   Freud’s
   64).
   

2. The Phallus as White Mask
   

The writers of the Négritude movement, like Ashkenazic rabbis, embraced a “feminization”: “
Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek
” (Léopold Sen- ghor, qtd. in Fanon,
Black
127). Fanon himself, however, experienced his negritude as “castration” and was unwilling to accept it: “Nevertheless with all

my strength I refuse to accept that amputation” (140), and, on that note, en- tered into his chapter on “The Negro and Psychopathology” and went devas- tatingly “wrong” in treating gender within the colonized people. His “wrong- ness” perhaps is symptomatic of the situation of the male
post
colonial subject, and this blindness in a seer of such clarity as Fanon makes it doubly instruc- tive, that is, the male subject of a colonizing discourse who cannot escape his desire to be white/uncircumcised. It is here that the Freudian/Lacanian read- ing of the condition of lack as being figured in the discourse of a particular cul- ture as castration is most powerfully diagnostic of the effects of this culture, but only if we remember to read this figuration as the product of a particular cul- ture, and no more. Otherwise, the very diagnosis threatens always, in all ver- sions of psychoanalysis, to collapse into the disease. This symptomatic chapter on the sexuality of women most discloses this collapse in Fanon.

In this chapter Fanon develops his notorious notions of (white) woman’s psychology. “Basically, does this
fear
of rape not itself cry out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?” (Fanon,
Black
156).
36
After producing that most grotesquely misogynistic account of the psychosexuality of “white women,” Fanon, more- over, writes of the woman of color: “I know nothing about her” (Fanon,
Black
180), eerily echoing Freud’s “dark continent” of woman’s sexuality (Freud, “Question” 212).
37

In his brilliant and passionate cri de coeur against “Negrophobia,” Fanon produces both misogyny and homophobia: “The behavior of these women [who are afraid to dance with a Negro] is clearly understandable from the standpoint of imagination. That is because the Negrophobic woman is in fact nothing but a putative sexual partner—just as the Negrophobic man is a re- pressed homosexual” (Fanon,
Black
156). Notice the telling shift of subject that this sentence encodes gramatically. It is the desire/fear of the “Negro- phobic woman” that Fanon sets out to inscribe, but she is “nothing but a pu- tative sexual partner,” the grammatical object of someone else’s desire. Thus, the colonized male, who in a situation of partial decolonization begins to look at himself from the position of the white man’s gaze, recovers his “maleness” (as this is defined within the dominant culture) by pathologizing his male and female enemies as “feminized.” In other words, the very misogyny and ho- mophobia of the colonizer become internalized, then projected out by the colonized and ultimately turned against women and gays.
38
It is not I who have these despised characteristics; it is they!

This defense comes particularly to the fore in Fanon’s text when he denies the existence of “homosexuality” in Martinique. Here his homophobia is much more extreme than that of Freud. There are in Martinique berdaches

(my term), but they lead “normal sex lives” (his term), and “they can take a punch like any ‘he-man’ and they are not impervious to the allures of women” (Fanon,
Black
180; his scare quotes). “Fault, guilt, refusal of guilt, paranoia— one is back in homosexual territory” (183). And most dramatically, precisely at the moment when Fanon is retorting to the racism that describes the Negro as sensual, he feels constrained to write: “I have never been able, without re- vulsion, to hear a
man
say of another man: ‘He is so sensual!’ . . . Imagine a woman saying of another woman: ‘She’s so terribly desirable—she’s darling’” (201). The psychic mechanism here is clear: the colonizers demasculinize us; we will assert our value by abjecting everything that stinks of the effeminate, the female, the homosexual. Freud’s self-described “overcoming of his homo- sexual cathexis” seems to me to be cut of the same psychic cloth as his psychic “bedrock” of the repudiation of femininity (Fuss, “Interior” 30).
39

Paula Hyman has recently formulated a sharp description of a particu- larly relevant version of this process: “Challenging elements of the Western model that rigidly limited the public role of women and spiritualized them as mothers, eastern European immigrants and their children contested the boundaries between domestic and public life that characterized middle-class gender norms. As they integrated into middle-class American culture, howev- er, immigrant Jewish men and their sons—like their predecessors in Western societies—played out their ambivalence about their own identity as Jews in non-Jewish societies in gendered terms” (Hyman,
Gender
8–9) and, as a con- sequence, “Jewish men, first in the countries of western and central Europe and later in America, constructed a
modern
Jewish identity that devalued women, the Other within the Jewish community” (134–35; my emphasis).

A fascinating parallel to this phenomenon surfaces in Alice Kaplan’s read- ing of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
The Childhood of a Leader.
In that text Sartre shows how a feminized, homosexualized Frenchman constructs himself as male by the abjection of Jews: “Only anti-Semitism succeeds in giving him the gift of masculinity he has sought” (
Reproductions
18). Likewise, only misogyny and homophobia could succeed in giving Freud and Fanon the whiteness that they sought. The misogyny, homophobia, and racism of both are, on this analysis, a dimension of the self-hatred of the racially constructed and de- spised man, which according to Gilman always involves a projection of the racist stereotype onto other members (or subgroups) of one’s “own” (Gilman,
Jewish
1–21): the Ostjude, the Congolese, women, homosexuals. If we see colonized blacks and Jews as Europeans saw them, that is, as members of a single group, this point is absolutely clear: Freud’s racism toward “primitives,” as Fanon’s toward Jews, should be read precisely (at least in part) as an avatar of self-hatred.

Fanon’s interpretation of Negrophobia as a product of homosexual desire is strikingly similar to Freud’s interpretation of Daniel Schreber’s paranoia, with its antisemitic (philosemitic) components as a product of homosexuali- ty.
40
I do not think that Fanon is citing Freud so much as reproducing the thought processes that led Freud to his conclusions.
41
In other words, I am suggesting that the internalized self-contempt that the colonized male comes to feel for his disempowered situation—represented in the case of Jews by the affect surrounding circumcision and in the Negro through his representation as penis—is a powerful force for the production of the twin diseases of misog- yny and homophobia in the colonial situation, because their situation is mis- recognized as feminine. The intrapsychic mechanism is a type of splitting oc- casioned by the move from one subject position—that of the colonized—to another in which there is a partial identification with the colonizer.
42
The sub- ject begins to see himself with the eyes of his oppressor and thus tries to abject what he sees as contemptible by projecting it onto other Others: the Jew onto the black, the black onto the Jew, both onto women and homosexuals.

Fanon reveals the grounds of this structure in himself just as clearly as Freud does. He considers this situation of self-contempt to resemble that of all colonized subjects. By drawing synecdochically on the “Negro of the An- tilles,” he purportedly writes of “every colonized man,” and the conclusion he draws is that the colonized person wishes to achieve the status of the “univer- sal”; the black to become white (18; cf. Spitzer,
Lives
37). This is a highly symptomatic moment in Fanon, for he completely ignores the deep contempt that the colonized may feel for the colonizers, and this lack of recognition on Fanon’s part is deeply revelatory (see also Bhabha, “Signs” 162). The compar- ison to the historical situation of fin-de-siècle Viennese Jews suggests a more illuminating, less universalizable account of these mechanisms. It is, after all, only the “emancipated” Jew who wishes to become gentile, who views his own circumcision with contempt.
43
As Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks points out: “If [premodern] Jews as a minority loathed their difference, then conversion could be a simple option. But that didn’t happen.” In fact, for traditional Jew- ish culture, only the circumcised male was considered “whole” (Boyarin and Boyarin, “Self-Exposure”). Circumcision was, for them, not productive of anxiety and self-contempt but rather a mark of resistance and a deliberate (private) setting apart of oneself from the dominant culture, a version of Scott’s “hidden transcript.” Even if, as I have argued elsewhere (Boyarin, “Jew- ish”), traditional Jewish male subjects in late antiquity perceived themselves as “feminine,” in part because of their circumcision, this did not imply for them a lack or deprivation but a gain, insisting that the foreskin is a blemish and that circumcision, far from being a mutilation, is an adornment of the male