Dion Dennis. Journal of Homosexuality. Volume 32, Issue 3-4. 1997.
My subject is not the truth of being but the social being of truth, not whether facts are real but what the politics of their representation are. My aim is to release what he noted as the enormous energy of history that lies bonded [in popular taken-for-granted narratives]. The history that showed things ‘‘as they really were,’’ [Walter Benjamin] pointed out, was the strongest narcotic of our century. And of course, it still is. (Taussig, 1987)
One can understand the hankering, common among some gay activists and their allies, for a respite from the ceaseless and peripatetic local, national, and global wars of identity-politics that have been fought over the last quarter-century. Some battles have been won. Others have been lost. Some, like the status of gays in the military, remain as active sites of ongoing legal and cultural confrontation. And in highly complex venues, like the tragic and paradoxical effects of the AIDS epidemic, definitions of gain and loss have become distressingly muddy, polyvalent, and contingent. And, after the political and cultural struggles of a quarter-century, feelings of vulnerability and potential disenfranchisement remain as intense and as valid as ever. For that which has been undeniably gained seems forever consigned to the zone of the contested and contestable. But in all the flux of shifting bodies, rhetoric, and politics, another constant remains. That is, the ambiguities, multiplicities, and sheer rhizomic diversity of gay and lesbian identities exceed any attempt to define and domesticate the expressive range of what it means to be gay or lesbian (or human, put in the broadest possible context). But in bureaucratic social and political fields where the effective exercise of power compels the prefabrication of self-identical and demonstrably well organized representations of constituencies with clout, a classic conundrum emerges. Arlene Stein puts it this way:
The paradox is that if we don’t name our difference in explicitly sexual terms, we remain invisible as lesbians–but if we do name it we’re typecast as little more than sexual beings, and the vast complexity of our lives disappears. (Berman, citing Stein, 1993)
This is an unpleasant Catch-22 that spurs acts of symbolic guerilla politics from gay groups that are designed to destabilize such binarisms. For example, Rosemary Coombe recounts that
In Toronto one day, pedestrians were surprised to see the following message flashing on an electronic billboard: ‘‘Lesbians Fly Air Canada,’’ it repeatedly flashed. The next day the message was gone. A gay rights group had broadcast the statement to remind people of the similarities between lesbians and all other Canadians by evoking the archetypal ‘‘normal’’ Canadian experience. [This] stopped when Air Canada threatened to apply for an injunction to stop the group from using its name. (Coombe, 1991)
The late Randy Shilts’s oft-repeated comment that a biological explanation for homosexuality ‘‘would reduce being gay to something like being left-handed’’ reflects a similar integrationist desire to be regarded as ‘‘normal.’’ It is a bid to defuse the symbolic politics of identity and difference around ‘‘sexual orientation’’ to a stylistic margin. Such a benign margin would presumably be mutually and pleasantly inhabited by the designers of left-handed doorknobs and consumer products for gays and lesbians. Missing from Shilts’s wistful comment is the Foucauldian insight that all bodies have become busy matrices invested with power and knowledge relations in Euro-Western societies.
Joe Sartelle, in a recent article examining several strands of popular gay essentialism, describes how Texas journalist Molly Ivins, in a December 1993 column, constructs her gay essentialism. Ivins’s narrative starts with a series of Shilts-like assertions:
Homosexuality is not a choice. It is a human condition, fixed before one becomes sexually active. It cannot be changed by will. No one chooses to be homosexual any more than people choose to be heterosexual or brown-eyed or left-handed. (Sartelle, citing Ivins, 1994)
From this dictum, Ivins then collapses the diversity of gay identity by subsequently prattling on about the famous drag queens of Richardson County, Texas. By doing so, Ivins reinforces the deplorably over-determined image of gays and lesbians as gender inverts. That is, ‘‘they’’ are all effeminate men and butch women. By doing so, Ivins is witlessly participating and reinforcing the very povertystruck representations of ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘abnormal’’ sexuality that police desire, expression, and the imaginative limits of possible heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual identities. That is, both Shilts and Ivins are naive. And their sloppy, unreflective biologically flavored thinking on sexual desire, behavior, and identity is potentially dangerous. As writers on eugenics (Kelves, 1985), anthropology (Gould, 1981), and current designer genetics (Lewontin, 1992) show over and over again, all biological paradigms, eminent and infamous, are inherently ideological products. They are, in significant part, the complex effects of the social, cultural, and political orders from which they emerge. That is, biology as social ideology in practice is enmeshed in everyday discourse and the circulating regimes of commercial and noncommercial signs. Bio-ideology is coded into the nondiscursive operation of machines and the functions of architecture. It shapes the protocols and rules that fund research and public service. In all these cases and more, we would do well to recall Simon Watney’s words on the relation between biological activities and the symbolic construction of communities.
It is up to us to define the terms in which [the scandal of AIDS treatment] will be eventually understood. This involves a commitment to the fullest possible understanding of the ways in which the psychic reality of all aspects of human sexuality are always organized symbolically in excess of both biological needs and the demands of many cultural and political roles that sexuality is currently used to naturalize and legitimate. AIDS demonstrates the practical need to insist upon a non-naturalistic explanation of all adult sexuality. (Watney, 1989)
Homosexuals as Dangerous, Homosexuals in Danger: Danger and the Birth of the Homosexual
We’re going to have a society of dangers, with, on the one side, those who are in danger and, on the other, those who are dangerous. And sexuality will be a kind of roaming danger, a sort of omnipresent phantom. Sexuality will become a threat in all social relations. And what we will have is a new regime for the supervision of sexuality; in the second half of the 20th Century it may be decriminalized, but only to [re]appear in the form of a universal danger. I’d say that [that is the danger]. (Foucault, 1988)
Throughout much of his work, the late Michel Foucault focused on the emergence of key ‘‘dividing practices’’ by which human subjectivities were interdependently constituted as objects of knowledge and subjects of power. In detail, Foucault has shown how the emerging choreography of institutional procedures and forms (the prison, school, hospital, army, asylum) are linked, directly and indirectly, with the deployment and expansion of specific types of knowledges. A basic feature of the human sciences (which Foucault once termed ‘‘the political anatomy of detail’’) from the eighteenth century to the present, are objectivizing practices that constitute many of the taken-for-granted categories (and boundaries) between ‘‘the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and the good.’’ These categories (and the development of statistical methods that engendered vast administrative bureaucracies) emerged as the industrial revolution spurred an exponential growth in poor, destitute, and mobile urban populations. These categories and statistical methodologies gave birth to techniques of specific and general prevention. That is, this was also the advent of statistical regimes of risk-management (such as insurance technology and epidemiology).
Foucault termed this phenomenon, this organization of human life as the prime object of knowledge for the emerging disciplines, bio-power (Foucault, 1990). Bio-power consists of detailed and rationalized administrative procedures designed to optimize and control human ‘‘life’’ along the twin goals of maximal economic productivity and political docility. The dual poles of bio-power that take life as an object of knowledge are an ‘‘anatomo-politics of the human body’’ and ‘‘a bio-politics of a population.’’ The former deals with the breakdown and detailed retraining of a given body to achieve an identity/skill nexus. (The ‘‘basic training’’ used to turn a homeboy into a soldier in ‘‘boot camp’’ is a good example of ‘‘anatomo-politics.’’) The latter, the ‘‘bio-politics of the population,’’ refers to the regulation and administration of populations along general and specific demographic axes. (These include birth and mortality rates, public health, migratory patterns, and ethnic composition. These now include such things as marketing data in the form of consumption patterns, attitudes, and behaviors.) Caught in the cross hairs between the disciplines of the body and the management of populations is the political question of sexuality. As a ‘‘case’’ in a population, it is situated at the intersection of the two poles of bio-power. For Foucault, notions of sex and sexuality, as repression and liberation, are the historical products of nineteenth century ‘‘dividing practices’’ (of the normative and the pathological) and do not represent ‘‘the truth of being.’’ They are part of the social being of truth, part of the politics of representation to be found in current regimes of bio-power.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, criminological anthropologists and psychiatrists (often one and the same) promulgated psycho-medical analyses of criminality and homosexuality. Subjects that committed these acts were often characterized as ‘‘abnormal’’ human types, the bearers of pathologies shaped by genetic (eugenic), psychological, and social forces. Generally, these bio-typologies depicted ‘‘criminals’’ and ‘‘homosexuals’’ as weak and unable to inhibit acting on their inherently ‘‘degenerate’’ impulses. That is, because of how their identities were constituted within these frameworks, as pathological genetic specimens, they were described as having ‘‘little or no choice.’’ These bio-analyses became a point of departure, in penal and psychological practice, for a class of professionals, trained in the medical gaze, to invent the procedures and detailed classification schemata that became the backbone of psychiatric evaluation. These crypto-analyses are the origins of the classification of ‘‘the homosexual’’ as a pathology in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Versions 1 & 2 (DSM I, DSM II) of the American Psychological Association (APA). In short, both criminality and homosexuality ceased being primarily defined by specific acts of behavior. Criminality and homosexuality became the decipherable signs of innate bio-attributes of identity. Homo criminalis and homo sexualis were species that could be found under the overarching genus of ‘‘The Dangerous Individual.’’
As Watney notes, gay culture in the 1970s took major steps in forging non-essentialist social identities sturdy and secure enough to successfully contest restrictive and stigmatizing forms of institutional practice in medical, social, and legal venues. In 1980, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic, the APA, in its (then) new DSM-III, removed homosexuality from its definitive laundry list of reimbursable pathologies. It has since become a painful and bitter irony, therefore, that at the moment that gay identity was medically depathologized (dehomosexualized) that the AIDS epidemic would provide a vehicle for sustained cultural and political attempts to secure a repathologization, a rehomosexualization of gay identity under the gaze of medical, moral, and theological institutions, texts, and ‘‘authorities.’’ For like scientia sexualis itself, the representation-effects of the AIDS epidemic lie squarely at the intersection of ‘‘the life of the [individual] body and the life of the species.’’ And though ‘‘danger’’ has never been a medico-psychiatric category, it is a flexible political signifier par excellence. Representations of ‘‘danger’’ have become prolific at the twilight of progressive capitalism. In a time of economic decline and eroding political sovereignty that is characterized by escalating regimes of privatized security and harsh class polarization, evocations of the dangerous are extremely potent. Deprived of the bipolarity of the Cold War,
The war machine finds its new object as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed. It no longer needs a qualified enemy but operates against the ‘‘unspecified enemy,’’ domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world). There arises from this new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)
That is, the ‘‘enemy’’ must be invented, vanquished, and then reincarnated. For ‘‘the enemy’’ is a projected space of untameable darkness, murky chaos, and unspeakable excess of unfathomable ‘‘Otherness.’’ This production of ‘‘Otherness’’ is how societies constitute themselves as domesticated, self-identical, and knowable sites. In a paradoxical time where economic and informational globalization is paired with heightened expressions and acts of ethnic or sitebased territoriality, much of U.S. political life has been marked by a shifting allocation of attention to ‘‘unspecified enemies.’’ In the last few years, ‘‘we’’ (which is itself an ‘‘unspecified homogeneity’’) have constituted a plethora of ‘‘enemies.’’ A few, among others, are Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the Japanese economic-will-to-power, Haitian refugees, Mexican economic migrants, North Korea, ‘‘crime’’ (which itself is a key signifier of known but unspecified enemies), governmental spending, bureaucratic regulation, welfare recipients, and inner-city gangs. According to Sidney Blumenthal,
In America, as in Europe, the [dissolution of the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union] unleashed ethnic and religious tensions that had been mostly submerged for nearly half a century. Pat Buchanan’s call at the [1992 Republican Convention] for ‘‘cultural warfare’’ was an instance of such post-Cold War atavism. The old dichotomies are breaking down. There are some ideological categories that have no history in the politics of the Cold War. The ends of wars bring chaos and recriminations [and] are periods of enormous [political] realignment. (Blumenthal, 1994)
But while signifiers of dangerousness seem fluid and recodable (hence ‘‘unspecified’’), there are evocative problematics that serve as recurrent ‘‘strange attractors’’ for social movements. Some of the fiercest contestations revolve around the specific formulation and subsequent policing of ‘‘dividing practices’’–legal/criminal, moral/immoral and normal/pathological–along reproductive and sexual axes. As noted earlier, these disputed practices (such as abortion, needle distribution to IV drug users, sex and AIDS education, euthanasia, genetic screenings and therapies, the dispensing of condoms to teenagers, and homosexuality) meet at the nexus of practices of self-care with the administration of the populace. And the once simplistic racial and ethnic formulas for the administration of the populace has itself been complicated, in a time of rapid demographic transformations, by a prolific expansion of separatist claims to a privileged minority status. And, in some sense, Evangelical nativist discourse, expressed by the Reverend Lou Sheldon, Chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), that states
We were here first. You don’t take our shared common values and say they are biased and bigoted … We are the keepers of what is right and wrong. (Blumenthal, 1994)
is itself a response to marginalization, by poor or downwardly mobile whites. According to Richard Rodriguez,
Here in California we are headed for trouble. The state is filled with minorities–Guatemalans, West Hollywood gays, Chinese immigrants, senior citizens, religious fundamentalists. We are an Alice in Wonderland state where the majority of us claim to be minorities.
I think about skinheads. Hateful, angry, mean as snakes. They know they do not count in America. Literally do not count. They have been written out of the civil rights agenda for the last 30 years because they are white. (Rodriguez, 1994)
If I understand Rodriguez (a classically educated, middle-aged, bronze-skinned gay man brought up by Irish Catholic nuns) aright, then the resurgence of homophobic and racist groups such as skinheads is, in part, an unintended but predictable effect of a quartercentury of identity-politics that valorizes who people are in terms of the artifices of bio-bureaucratic categories, rather than attending to more salient, less racially tinged features such as social class, education, or degrees of poverty and marginalization. According to Lawrence Wright,
Washington [D.C.] in the millennial years is a city of warring racial and ethnic groups fighting for recognition, protection and entitlements. How much this contest has widened, how bitter it has turned, how complex and baffling it is, and how far-reaching its consequences are became evident in a series of congressional hearings that concluded in November, 1993. (Wright, 1994)
Insofar as some organized gay and lesbian groups unreflexively deploy the rhetoric and bureaucratic tactics of a so-called ‘‘progressive” racial politics, a corruptible politics that is increasingly in ruins as a just or workable model for entitlements, a gay politics of freedom may be swept up by an impending turn-of-the-century political repudiation of ersatz bio-essentialist constructions of race, ethnicity, and gender. As Kelves (1985), Hacking (1991), Foucault (1978, 1990), Said (1978), and others have pointedly shown, the construction and subsequent identification of the Self with a rigid field of predetermined categories emerged from nineteenth century projects of imperial and industrial administration (domestic and colonial). But in the rapidly accelerating disjunctures of race, place, class, and ethnicity in the New World (Dis)Order, the initial rudimentary binary divisions (of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation) have become destabilized along dual poles. First, the polarities have been reversed. Since the 1960s, a set of attributes that were valorized now stand as stereotypical objects of derision. For example: To assert, in the political climate of the U.S. universities, that someone is ‘‘a white, middle-aged, heterosexual, Euro-centric male’’ is a de facto politically correct form of bigotry (after Rodriguez, 1994). That is, the structural dynamics of valorization and marginalization continue. But those that are ostracized inherit mechanisms that sustain and promote powerful economies of grievance. And these are the structural positions now held by (among others) the increasingly well organized Christian right, anti-abortion groups, and skinheads.
Secondly, the invention and aggressive advancement of biopolitical categories has been rhizomic. That is, as Rodriguez says, California is ‘‘where the majority claims to be minority’’ (Rodriguez, 1994). According to Wright, because increasingly capricious differences of pigmentation and lineage determine the dispersion of a lucrative array of entitlements, a harsh zero-sum identity-game now dominates ethnic politics. And these deadly contests are simultaneously enacted in the halls of government and on the streets of urban barrios and ghettos that serve as de facto war zones (Martinez, 1994).
As a form of a bio-politics of the body, as a bio-politics of representation, gay politics is deeply enmeshed in these other forms of bodies and their representation. In my estimation, the danger for gay politics is in the potential failure to recognize and avoid such bio-political snares. In bad scenes, like the one below, polarities may be reversed but key dichotomies endure undisturbed while hate and the will-to-dominate flourish.
In Kendall County, Texas (1994), a militant middle-aged white male, a member of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, runs for a position on the local school board in an affluent suburb of San Antonio, Texas. We see and hear him on KSAT News. Agitated, he pledges to tirelessly work to suppress homosexuality in the schools, conflating it with criminality and Satanism. Meanwhile, on another San Antonio station, his 25-year-old daughter, A., appears on Geraldo. She is a large leather lesbian who works as a heterosexual dominatrix in the Oak Lawn district of Dallas. In private conversations, she utters her unqualified loathing for all men. Mistress Marie, as she is known to her clientele of well-to-do slaves, regards ‘‘the male’’ as contemptible and as an inherently degenerative biological form (personal conversation, Roxana Zapata, 1994).
These dual subject-positions, father and daughter, inhabit the same essentialist structure of knowledge and identity. Together, they reproduce the standard discourse of valorization and marginalization. It is only the polarities that are reversed. Each needs the other to sustain an economic and bio-political identity. Together, the patriarch, zealous in his quest for a Christian Reich, and his daughter, eager to act out the dark underside of that vision upon the flesh of paying male slaves, are locked in a death dance. It is the hegemony of the technical practices of bio-power, attached to a certain quasi-morality, that produces such unhappy results. And it is to these that we now turn.
Biocracy and the Bid for a Christian Reich: Possible Directions for Gay Politics at Millennium’s End
In an earlier section, Foucault predicted that sexuality would be recoded ‘‘in the form of a universal danger.’’ One vivid example is below. The following is an excerpt from Pat Robertson’s 700 Club (on CBN) for the week of March 1, 1993:
Pat: [School-based sex education] is a dangerous steam roller that’s going to destroy families in America. It’s going to destroy the lives of innocent little children, because they’re not ready. I mean they ought to be allowed to play, and have dolls, or choo-choo trains. They should be ALLOWED TO DEVELOP without sexuality being forced upon them by these deviants.
A magazine called Sexology [is] behind this. They are antifamily, anti-God, anti-traditional values, and they want to open up our children to all kinds of bizarre sex, and it’s WRONG. They say we can’t have Bibles in the school, we can’t let the kids pray, but we’re training them how to be homosexuals. (Robertson, 1993)
In all its stages, the educational apparatus is a key site of biopower. It works to create productive and docile subjects. But there are struggles over the type of desirable minds and bodies that the technology of the school should produce. And Robertson’s commentary, which was folded into a CBN news report on the status of a sex education program in Georgia’s schools, is but one site of struggle. For gay politics, the importance of Robertson’s tirade unfolds along several tracks. First, Robertson conflates ALL schoolbased sex education as the dangerous work of generic ‘‘deviants,’’ an ad hominem argument that is imbued with the rhetorical normative authority accorded to the medical gaze. Secondly, all sex education is constituted as inherently ‘‘anti-family, anti-God, antitraditional values.’’ With this move, Robertson fashions his claim as pro-family, pro-God, and pro-traditional values, nobly defending innocent children from perverted sexologists. Thirdly, if all nonEvangelically approved sex education is ‘‘bizarre’’ (that is, abnormal to the Biblically normative gazer), then all those who teach sex education must be ‘‘training them [children] how to be homosexuals.’’ This series of rhetorical maneuvers climaxes with the figure of the ‘‘abnormal’’ homosexual as the penultimate ‘‘anti-Christ’’ and as a Satanic signifier. It is meant as the intolerable cap on a panoply of disgusting tactics perpetrated on children, families, and God. In the Robertsonian universe, this is the dreaded result to which all sex education programs are held equally culpable.
In notable ways, how Robertson and other Christian Fascists shape discourses and practices of homophobia parallels Edward Said’s portrait of European cultural and academic forms of Orientalism (Said, 1978). For Said, Orientalism is about the construction of ‘‘the Arab Other’’ as an object of fantasy and as the object for a rationalized knowledge. Orientalism, as a structure of knowledge, continues to serve as a projection of Westernized desires and fears. (Media constructions of ‘‘Arab terrorists,’’ the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein are but recent exemplars.) Revealing more about Imperial anxieties and the will-to-dominate than about its colonized subjects, Orientalism simultaneously invents Arab Others as the subjects of dangerous sexualized fantasies and as a flat, dull one-dimensional Self, an easy object for the gaze of the eugenicist. The same net that enmeshed homosexuality and criminality, as markers of biologically inherent forms of inferiority in the nineteenth century, found another object in ‘‘the Arab.’’
In the section below, I have extensively modified a well-known passage in Said’s Orientalism. I have done so to highlight how well Said’s formulation of Orientalist problematics fits as a contemporary description of gay politics and the politics of AIDS.
Homosexuality and AIDS are not mere physical, biomedical, and political subject matters that are reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions. They are a flexible distribution of representations and resources into [anti] aesthetic, clinical, epidemiological, sexual, sociological, historical, and media texts; they are an elaboration of a whole series of ‘‘interests’’ and intertexts, which by means of research grant production and risk-management tactics that it both invents and maintains; they are an intent to understand, control, manipulate, incorporate, and/or marginalize disparate behavioral milleus; they are inserted into preexistent series of discourses and practices that are in uneven arrangements with various kinds of power–political, intellectual, cultural, moral, and economic. Because AIDS and gay politics are cultural and political facts, they are also ongoing events that modify and are modified by the multiple contexts of their emergence and circulation. (adapted with extensive alterations from Said, 1978)
A key supposition, often completely unexamined, that is thoroughly mixed into many of these circulating bio-bureaucratic configurations of power/knowledge/bodies/dollars, is what Ivan Illich calls ‘‘the fetish [of] a life.’’ Illich, in his recent writings on ‘‘biocracy’’ (bio-bureaucracy), health care reform, and the aggressive marketing of self as a site of risk-management, states that
What I fear is that the abstract, secular notion of ‘‘a life’’ will be sacralized [and] that this spectral entity will progressively replace the notion of a ‘‘person.’’ ‘‘A life’’ is amenable to management [practices] in ways that are unthinkable when we speak of a ‘‘person.’’
‘‘A life’’ is the most powerful idol the church has had to face in the course of its history. The acceptance of ‘‘life’’ as a Godgiven reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith. (Illich, 1994)
Illich, writing as historian and theologian, then goes on to trace how current (and unexamined) notions of life–as ‘‘sacred,’’ as ‘‘property,’’ as a form of ‘‘ecology’’–are contingent historical products. For Illich, the symptoms that allopathic medicine treats are peripheral to the care of bodies. They are, instead, markers that signify the worsening plight of our recent conditions of ‘‘working, playing and living.’’ In the midst of a passionate plea, Illich asks us to ‘‘look at the conditions of our households and communities, not at the quality of health care delivery; health is not a deliverable commodity and care does not come out of a system’’ (Illich, 1994).
Some of the thought-threads in Illich’s recent piece ‘‘Brave New Biocracy’’ represent a potentially usable conceptual and political disjuncture for gay politics. For gay subjects, faced with the resurgent crypto-Fascist politics of the Christian Coalition, it offers some resources. Rather than just aggressively reacting against damning categories, it offers a means for countering the key assumptions about such notions as self, behavior, and world that undergird the Coalition’s pseudo-fundamentalism, across a wide variety of issues (such as abortion, euthanasia, education, and economics).
Secondly, gay politics can also elude the other half of the bio-administrative prison. Rather than turning exclusively to the arms of corporatist bureaucracies (such as the NIH), gay politics can begin to formulate strategies of the self-capable of new forms of human arrangements. At the end of his life, Foucault, in his examination of classical Greek and Roman texts, was exploring modes of identity, sexual conduct, and self-care that were external to our bio-politics.
These tasks are not the exclusive burden of gay and lesbian communities. They are, in fact, the tasks for all those that feel contemporary social, economic, and cultural arrangements have become regimes of de facto spiritual and material marginalization and imprisonment. Living our lives with imagination, dignity, creativity, and care is not just a gay or lesbian task. It is a human task.