Adam James Tebble. Political Studies. Volume 59, Issue 4. May 2011.
This article marks the start of a project concerned with the relationship between politics and the idea of the taboo. More specifically, it will serve as a first step towards a theory of the significance of the taboo for public political communication and the institutions that govern it. In order to get a clear idea of this subject matter, however, in this article I will first explore the more specific relationship of homosexuality, construed as a taboo social practice, to the idea of publicness that underlies the political. It is, then, via an analysis of homosexuality’s relationship to publicness that we begin a journey towards a political theory of the taboo.
What, though, do we mean by ‘taboo’? There is a vast literature on this subject which encompasses the fields of psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology, with the work of Sigmund Freud (1990 [1913]) and Mary Douglas (2002 [1966]) being perhaps the most prominent, at least in the popular consciousness. In conformity with standard usage, we will define taboo as the status of social practices that are considered not only to be unacceptable, forbidden and hidden from view, but also to be undiscussable in the vast majority of circumstances.
For reasons to be outlined shortly, I will start this investigation by building upon liberal feminist theory, in particular the work of Susan Okin (1989). Two aspects of Okin’s contribution will be germane to our investigation: her analysis of the public/private distinction with respect to gender and justice, and her discussion of the private, non-political domain of the home as the primary locus of our moral development. The public/private distinction will be important because it opens up the conceptual terrain needed to begin to theorise homosexuality’s relationship to publicness, especially to the extent that it is marginalised from the public life of society. Okin’s idea about the home being the primary locus of our moral development, furthermore, will allow us to make some initial claims about marginalisation, especially with regard to the home’s role in the inculcation of moral values, life expectations and, most profoundly, deeply held assumptions regarding which aspects of our lives are properly considered public and which are properly considered private. Building upon Okin’s contributions, I will then seek to draw some parallels between gender- and sexuality-based marginalisation, in so far as both are supposed to occupy the private, non-political side of the public/private distinction, which is, perhaps unjustly, beyond the scope of justice. Here gay and lesbian people, as well as homosexuality as a subject matter, are removed from the public to the private domain, or what is commonly called the ‘closet’.
However, in contrast to the view that the marginalisation of gays and lesbians is but an aspect of gendered marginalisation, I will claim that the former is distinct because it occurs not in virtue of the public/private dichotomy but, in a significant sense, despite it. Central to the substantiation of this claim will be a reworking of the notion of the closet as but one aspect of the more general operation of norms of physical disappearance and discursive silence which together constitute homosexuality’s governing taboo ethic, or ethic of unacknowledgeability. Thus, even though similarly to gender differentiation, homosexuality has traditionally been publicly and therefore politically unacknowledged, in contrast to it, gays, lesbians and homosexuality as a subject matter are also rendered unacknowledgeable in both the public and private spheres by the ethic of unacknowledgeability. Indeed, we will see below how it is precisely Okin’s conception of the home as the locus of our moral development that plays such a vital role in this process. In contrast to Okin, however, I will claim that the home is no longer a site of injustice because the indispensable, gender-differentiated nurturing work that is done within it goes unrecognised, but because that nurturing is one of the principal sources of injustice to gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities.
Significantly, and in view of this and other findings relating to the nature of the closet that will be discussed below, I will then claim that the all-encompassing, simultaneously public and private nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability problematises the public/private distinction. Precisely, that is, because this ethic operates across both domains, there is an important sense in which the public/private distinction is ultimately of limited analytical value. Of course, if this is so, then one may ask with good reason why we should begin our analysis with this liberal distinction, or with Okin, at all. While acknowledging this and other important objections to the approach adopted here, I will nonetheless defend the necessity of the public/private distinction to any adequate theorisation of the taboo status of homosexuality. This is because, although limited as an analytical tool, it is nevertheless necessary for the theorisation of the politics of the taboo with which this project is ultimately concerned. This is so not least because the very notion of the political—which at some stage must be invoked with respect to public debate and decision making about homosexuality—presupposes it.
Having defended the problematic but nonetheless theoretically indispensable role of the public/private distinction, I will conclude by summarising three implications that this first step towards a political theory of the taboo has for normative political theory and the practice of politics. The first is that the ethic of unacknowledgeability clarifies the distinct nature of the marginalisation of taboo sexualities such as homosexuality. Here marginalisation does not occur via the relegation of important concerns to a private, non-political realm, as it does in the case of gender, but via their relegation to the realm of the invisible and undiscussable. Secondly, the ethic of unacknowledgeability encourages us to look not only at the justness or otherwise of how we decide what is and is not a subject of justice, but also of how we decide what should and should not be discussed at all, and how this impacts upon how we conceive of the political. Third, the efficacy of politics itself is called into question, once the silencing and disappearing force of the ethic of unacknowledgeability is comprehended. The political theory of the taboo challenges us, then, to identify and defend a theory of justice in virtue of which taboo social practices may be equitably addressed in the public domain, yet which at the same time can adequately grapple with the unique challenge that the ethic of unacknowledgeability presents to our notions of public and private that the political presupposes.
Gender, Marginalisation, and Publicness
I want to lay some groundwork for my argument about homosexuality and publicness by briefly analysing Okin’s critique of the distinction between the public and the private and the role it plays in her account of gender, politics and society. Doing so is important because it is through understanding the political significance of the public/private distinction that we may begin to understand one central ingredient of homosexuality’s relationship to the public sphere: its marginalisation from it.
One of Okin’s (1989, chs 1 and 2) principal claims is that the gender-structured nature of society serves to exclude, marginalise and oppress women. At the heart of this claim, and of Okin’s wider political concern with the gender structure of society, is the distinction between public and private. This distinction, she claims, makes it possible to separate the family from what is considered the public realm in both our thinking about and practice of politics. By thinking about politics in this way, therefore, it becomes possible to ignore politically ‘the family, its division of labour, and the related economic dependency and restricted opportunities of most women’ (Okin, 1989, p. 9). The public/private distinction, then, serves to make clear how our social institutions systematically remove a range of issues and concerns about gender inequality from public contestation and thus from political resolution. Okin (1989, pp. 14-23) gives three reasons why the exclusion of gender from the political is unacceptable: it makes any theory of justice that does so inadequate because it fails to address the concerns of half the population; it serves to undermine equality of opportunity; and the unjust family it presupposes leads to an unjust society, given the centrality of the family to the moral development of all persons.
The idea of the home as central to our moral development is also of special interest for a further reason that relates to political theory. Significant here is Okin’s claim that, despite assuming the subject of justice to be a mature and rational person capable of being guided by principles of justice, contemporary theories of justice fail almost entirely to offer an account of how the subject comes to be that way. The significance of this is that it is in the home and in the family that most of our moral development actually takes place and here the vast majority of the work has been and still is done by women (Okin, 1989, pp. 9-10, pp. 17-23, pp. 131-2; 1998, p. 119). It is difficult if not impossible, therefore, to explain ‘how, within a formative social environment that is not founded upon principles of justice, children can learn to develop that sense of justice they will require as citizens of a just society’ (Okin, 1989, p. 17, emphasis in original).
It is clear, then, that thinking about politics in terms of the public/private distinction is useful as a tool for revealing underlying social processes that leave women in a disadvantaged position relative to men. This marginalisation occurs due to the supposedly private nature of domestic relationships, meaning that they are never the subjects of public discourse and, therefore, of political debate and possible reform. By having gender differentiation removed from our idea of justice, that is, women are faced with the prospect of never having their concerns properly addressed because that can only happen in the public political domain. Furthermore, Okin’s account of the home as the primary locus of our moral development clarifies the profound irony of this marginalisation: it is in the home that we are inculcated with moral values and with a sense of justice, yet the very idea of justice we inherit omits the home and its gendered division of labour as proper subjects of public political decision making.
To overcome this and to recognise fully the fact that the just family, as ‘a school of justice’, is not just ‘one among many co-equal institutions of a just society’ but is, rather, ‘its essential foundation’, Okin (1989, p. 17) discusses four different respects in which the public/private distinction should be replaced with a perspective that concedes that ‘the personal is political, and the public/domestic dichotomy is a misleading construct, which obscures the cyclical pattern of inequalities between men and women’ (Okin, 1989, p. 111, emphasis in original). Of these the final two—that ‘the family is undeniably political because it is the place where we become our gendered selves’, and that ‘the division of labour within the gender-structured family raises both practical and psychological barriers against women in all other spheres of life’ (Okin, 1989, p. 111, emphasis in original)—are of particular interest insofar as they relate to the essential features of Okin’s two-pronged analysis of gender and justice. The first builds upon her argument about the importance of the family to the moral development of the individual, whilst the second relates to the silencing of women in the public sphere owing to their being viewed as lacking in authority in it. Okin thus concludes by claiming that, instead of continuing to think about justice in terms of it, we need to advance a ‘humanist’ account of justice that transcends the public/private distinction. This is a justice for which the personal—that is, hitherto private relations that nonetheless carry with them profound implications concerning the differentiated life chances of men and women—becomes political (Okin, 1989, ch. 8).
Gender, Sexuality, and Processes of Public Disappearance
Politics and Silence
In the light of an albeit brief presentation of Okin’s accounts of the political significance of the public/private distinction and of the home as the primary locus of our moral development, I would like now to utilise the former to begin an analysis of homosexuality’s relationship to the idea of publicness. Following Okin (1989, p. 8) we will understand the idea of publicness as referring both to politics and to civil society/the marketplace.
Throughout the world, although clearly to very different degrees, homosexuality is removed from the political arena as a subject of discussion. With the exception of a relatively small number of jurisdictions, this occurs not only because heterosexuals are loath to discuss homosexuality, but also because such feelings are often held on the part of gays and lesbians themselves. Of course, an immediate objection here would be to point out that homosexuality is explicitly mentioned in many if not most of the world’s legal codes. It is, then, simply not the case that homosexuality is left undiscussed and, as such, banished from the public in the way that the public/private distinction makes clear with respect to gender. Moreover, gays and lesbians have participated and do participate in debates in the public sphere, undermining still further the claim that they are somehow invisible.
Yet the historical example of the legal concept of coverture gives good reason to reject the first of these objections. The concept of coverture meant that, from a legal standpoint, husband and wife were considered to be one person upon marriage, with that person being the husband. This, of course, had the consequence of the wife losing the rights she enjoyed as a single woman, such as those to property, a salary (when permitted to work) and to the making of contracts, thus rendering her legally invisible. Importantly and despite being codified into the law of the land, the status of women was therefore ‘public’ only inasmuch as at least some kind of public discussion was necessary to draft a law that rendered them legally invisible after marriage. The discussion and ensuing political decision therefore may have been in public, but the intent was nevertheless the maintenance of post-matrimonial female invisibility.
Similarly, the issue of homosexuality has traditionally been brought up only within the context of debates about the framing of laws that seek to make it disappear through criminalisation. In the most extreme instances the intent behind such public political debate and decision making is not to render just homosexuality but also homosexuals invisible, by making the former a capital crime. Moreover, even in those places where homosexuality is not a capital offence, it is still uncommon for there to exist legislation that deals with issues that are important to gays and lesbians. Thus, debates about inheritance, tax, next-of-kin rights, citizenship and marriage (understood as the right to marry, as well as the rights that follow from marriage) are, in so far as they relate to gays and lesbians, systematically omitted from political debate and decision making, because the majority would feel repulsed at discussing them and the minority too afraid or ashamed to bring them up. Similarly, with regard to the second objection, it is undoubtedly true that gays and lesbians have always participated in political debates—and even in debates about (the criminalisation) of homosexuality. Yet in the overwhelming majority of circumstances they have done so only so long as the fact, let alone the defence, of their homosexuality remained concealed.
The explanation for this political disappearance is to be found in the way in which, by their very nature, dominant norms largely preclude debate about homosexuality that involves the challenging of its marginal status, for to do so would run contrary to all that we are expected to think and feel about it in the public realm. As Michael Warner (2005, p. 54) comments,
[t]he public sphere as an environment … is not just a place where one could rationally debate a set of gender or sexual relations that in turn can be equated with private life; the public sphere is a principal instance of the forms of embodiment and social relations that are themselves at issue.
It is here where we may draw a parallel with Okin’s account of the public/private distinction as functional to the marginalisation of women and girls. In the case of gender the relegation of family relationships and the household division of labour to the private sphere renders as apolitical, and therefore as non-subjects of justice, many issues that profoundly affect individual life chances. Similarly, the preponderance of norms of physical disappearance and discursive silence means that, in the overwhelming number of circumstances, homosexuality is acknowledged in the public domain only to the extent that the purpose of doing so is the legal reinforcement of its invisibility. In all other instances it is something that is best kept private and to oneself.
Violence, Suspicion, and Secrecy in Civil Society
We have seen how our distinguishing between public and private serves to marginalise females from politics, thus removing the question of their status and life chances from the ambit of justice, and how feelings of shame, fear and disgust lead to a similar outcome with respect to homosexuality. In the case of women, of course, this has not gone unchallenged. Across the world women have and do seek to work, or take part in activities, such as sports, considered unfit for females, or wear clothing deemed as inappropriate or immodest.4 What happens, then, when the boundary that the public/private distinction demarcates is crossed or challenged in the public realm of civil society and the marketplace? Responses can range from quiet disapproval to harassment and violence as a means of pressurising women into conforming to dominant norms concerning their role, their expected behaviours, appearance and, ultimately, their physical positioning within society.
Similarly, gays and lesbians are subject to harassment, abuse and violence on a regular basis because they are deemed to have violated norms concerning acceptable behaviour regarding, for example, the public display of affection, or by behaving in ways that contravene preponderant definitions of masculinity and femininity. Like women and indeed visible ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians are the permanent possible targets of harassment and violence in the public, civic social sphere, when they are perceived to have challenged a social boundary.
However, in contrast to gender and to visible ethnicity (where, for example, members of minority groups are harassed for venturing into ‘the wrong part of town’), such harassment is not intended to put homosexuals ‘where they belong’ in any spatial sense. Rather, it is aimed at making them publicly invisible. Ultimately, then, and unlike women and visible ethnic minorities, there is no place where gays and lesbians are expected to be because they are deemed not to belong anywhere. Importantly, this difference is born of the possibility that, as a behavioural rather than physical trait, homosexuality is capable of being concealed. Thus, social danger for homosexuals is contingent upon their ‘obviousness’ as gay or lesbian, with those that are unable or unwilling to conceal their sexuality, and thus who come across to others as either ‘effeminate’ males, ‘butch’ females or as ‘sexually predatory’, having to deal with the permanent possibility of public harassment and violence. Moreover, even in the case of those who are incapable of concealing their sexuality, their ‘obviousness’ is often considered not to be an essential aspect of their demeanour but, rather, a premeditated affront to society and received norms (Warner, 2005, p. 24).
Importantly, the possibility of concealment also makes possible the avoidance of social danger, a fact that places ‘straight-acting’ gay men in an enviable position relative to visible ethnic minorities and women. Yet the idea that this is a good thing needs to be rejected for a number of reasons. First, as we have seen, it is an option that is only open to some and not all homosexuals. Moreover, concealment is a strategy whose availability decreases with age. If you are young and do not flout received norms then you can indeed hide your sexuality. However, after a certain age your presumed homosexuality is considered very visible. This is so, moreover, regardless of whether or not the homosexual remains single after marrying age. Indeed, gays and lesbians often find themselves between a rock and a hard place here. If you choose to remain single, the ‘excuse’ of being a bachelor or spinster begins to wear thin in the minds of others. Yet if you do have a partner, it becomes increasingly less plausible that you are merely ‘best friends’.
Most profoundly, the act of concealment actually reveals a second, more subtle, way in which homosexuality is marginalised, which makes it different to gender and visible ethnicity, and which is clarified by the motivation of homosexuals to conceal their sexuality in the first place. This happens in the first instance out of considerations of prudence and, in extremis, self-preservation, because of the anxiety that comes with permanent exposure to public humiliation, discrimination, or violence. However, gays and lesbians are not only acting out of prudence, or responding as rational agents to a set of exogenous conditions and probabilities. They may also be responding to endogenous forces, in the form of deeply ingrained feelings of shame, disgust and self-loathing that motivate the strategy of concealment in virtually every social context.7 Thus, despite significantly reducing the probability of the ‘straight-acting’ gay or lesbian experiencing violence or harassment, as a long-term measure concealing one’s sexuality ultimately serves only to reinforce the very norms of physical disappearance and discursive silence that lead one to feel obliged to do so. What looks at first like a strategy of social advancement is deployed not only at the cost of moral and existential capitulation to those norms that necessitated the strategy in the first place but, indeed, to their continued social reproduction.
Beyond this, also distinctive of the public marginalisation of gays and lesbians is the social context of suspicion to which they are continually subject. This context is rooted in the way in which sexualities are public and private in very different ways (Warner, 2005, p. 24)
and it is this difference, coupled with the possibility of concealment, that acts as a powerful incentive for gays and lesbians not to disclose their sexuality, and to remain in what has come to be known, in both queer theory and contemporary parlance, as the ‘closet’. The upshot of living in the closet, however, is not a new-found feeling of protection and liberation. Rather, it is a feeling of recurring anxiety at whether it is wise for others to know about one’s sexuality in the public domain (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 68; Warner, 2005, p. 52). Thus, the difference that is homosexual marginalisation in public is born not only of the operation of norms of disappearance and silence, but also of the capacity of gays and lesbians to adopt a strategy of non-disclosure of their sexuality. This is a capacity which, while making possible the avoidance of social danger, leaves one to navigate an often tortuous private emotional journey against a background of communally induced self-loathing, not to mention a succession of contexts of suspicion in which the supposedly private unspoken fact of one’s homosexuality is precisely what is so loudly at issue in the minds of others.
The Ethic of Unacknowledgeability
The Home as a School of Injustice
What accounts for the public disappearance and silencing of homosexuality? To answer this question we need to build upon the second aspect of Okin’s analysis of gendered marginalisation: her idea of the home as the primary locus of our moral development, including the development of our moral capacity to be adult choosers possessed of a sense of justice.
Importantly and in contrast to Okin, however, the home is not held up as important to underscore the undoubtedly significant point that a vital sphere of our lives is not governed by rules of justice, even though most of the work done in it to bestow us with a sense of justice is done on a gendered basis. The important point here, rather, is that it is in the home where we not only learn to be our private and public selves; it is where we also learn to be complicit in the disappearance, silencing and, in extremis, the choosing of violence and abuse that govern our practical and discursive attitudes towards homosexuality. Of course, we need to be clear as to what the dynamics of this silencing are. It is not as if at some crucial moment in the development of their gay children, nurturing mothers warn them that as they enter society they had best not display or mention their homosexuality. Rather, the stance that one adopts is a learned behaviour that is built up over the long term in the domestic sphere. It is here where young gays and lesbians learn through imitation, observation, reprimand and fear of hurting loved ones, what does and does not get talked about and what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
The effect of this silencing is that a significant aspect of the moral development of gays and lesbians is omitted from the very sphere in which it is supposed to take place (Warner, 1999, p. 8). Moreover, this has repercussions for both heterosexual and homosexual youth. For heterosexuals this means that they are not brought up to acknowledge or accept homosexuality in others, while for younger gays and lesbians it means both this and that they are not brought up to acknowledge or accept their own homosexuality.
A particularly powerful although by no means unique example of the damaging effects of the unacknowledgeability of homosexuality within the home relates to the issue of sex education and puberty. Owing to rapid and unexpected hormonal changes, many teenagers experience these years as deeply troubling and one of the important duties of the nurturing parent is to help their child by discussing the changes that are occurring, including the awakening of sexual desire. Yet at the very moment in which they need such guidance, the sexuality of gays and lesbians has already been rendered unmentionable both in the minds of their parents and, through their example, in the minds of the adolescents themselves. Of course, this does not mean that in more liberal households sex is not discussed. Yet this comes at the cost of it being discussed in heterosexual terms. Not only are the gay or lesbian adolescents’ needs unacknowledged, they are introduced to a world in which they are told, through omission, that they have no place (Sullivan, 1995, p. 12; Warner, 1999, p. 8).
The private sphere is marked not only by the absence of those moral values which one needs to orient oneself in later life, but also by the presence of values that systematically undermine that objective. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990, p. 81) claims, gay people ‘seldom grow up in gay families’ and ‘are exposed to their culture’s, if not their parents’, high ambient homophobia long before either they or those who care for them know that they are among those who most urgently need to define themselves against it’. Thus, she continues, they ‘have with difficulty and always belatedly to patch together from fragments a community, a usable heritage, a politics of survival or resistance’. Ultimately gays and lesbians are largely left without an ‘intact and to hand … identity and history and commitments’ that are ‘personified and legitimated in a visible figure of authority’.
The idea of the home as the primary locus of our moral development also has important implications for the role mothers themselves play in facilitating the reproduction of marginalisation. If we agree with Okin that mothers are in the main responsible for transmitting moral values to future generations, then does it follow that they are also responsible for transmitting the idea of the public and private and, crucially, the idea of gender-differentiated expectations and roles to them? To a certain extent this is acknowledged by Okin (1989, pp. 131-2) in her discussion of same-sex parent-child bonding with respect to the social reproduction by mothers of the ‘mothering’ role in girls. But if it is the case that mothers play such a central role in the moral development of the young, it follows that it is by and large mothers who are responsible for instilling expectations, not only regarding gender, but also sexuality. At its most extreme this would mean that if we were to describe mothers as the primary inculcators of moral values, then it is they who are in the main responsible for bringing up straights to loathe gays and for gays to loathe themselves.
Are women therefore to be blamed for being responsible for the cultural reproduction of homosexual marginalisation, not to mention the very sexism of the gender-structured nature of society under which they labour? In the first instance and, pace Okin’s characterisation, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the home is the primary locus of our moral development, for this all too easily omits other important institutions such as school and church, both of which are male dominated. Moreover, and even if we concede the primacy of the home, Okin’s account leaves little room for the authority of the male head of household in exerting a controlling influence over mothers, although this also begs the question of the role mothers play in encouraging young males to view themselves in this way. Perhaps more significantly, however, in both cases the child is brought into the public sphere of civil society/market at an early age where he or she is exposed to other influences beyond those of the home (Warner, 2005, p. 54). Moreover, family members spend much of their time outside the home. Fathers, in particular, are involved in a mutually reinforcing migration between the values of the public and private spheres, while mothers talk with other mothers and often work. Equally significantly and particularly in an age of increasingly sophisticated modes of communication and dissemination of knowledge, the child is not only brought into the public sphere, but the home is experienced by the child as being penetrated by the public sphere from the outset.
The upshot of all this is that the process of moral development is in many respects always both a public and private one, where dominant norms concerning sexuality emerge in a mutually reinforcing relationship between these two spheres (Sullivan, 1995, pp. 6-12). Talk of apportioning responsibility for the moral deformation of gay and lesbian youth to mothers, then, seems as unhelpful as it is sociologically dubious. Regardless of the degree to which the home or mothers are responsible for this, the more important point is that the home is complicit, not only in the removal of homosexuality as a subject of justice, but in its removal as a subject tout court across all spheres, including its own sphere. It is in the home, therefore, that we come to learn that the governing ethic of homosexuality is an ethic of unacknowledgeability.
From the Home to the Clandestine Public
The ethic of unacknowledgeability presents families with a particularly stark choice, the not uncommon result of which is also revelatory of how that ethic operates across all spheres. Faced with the silencing of homosexuality in the private sphere, the gay youth can internalise this silence and remain in the closet, or he can challenge it. Of course, and similarly to the dynamic of disappearance and silencing in the public sphere of civil society/market, if he breaks the silence he puts himself at risk of the withdrawal of love, of domestic abuse or of eviction. Eviction from the home in particular not only represents the physical banishment of what is considered to be shameful or disgusting, it represents a catastrophic violation of the norms of love and trust that, it is claimed by those authors discussed by Okin (1989, pp. 26-33), are the proper governing conceptions of order in the home, in the absence of rules of justice. Moreover, eviction represents the denial of that which is so essential to our becoming rational choosers capable of acting justly. In this sense, then, the idea of eviction also repudiates Okin’s claim that the home is the centre of moral development, or a school of justice. For many gays and lesbians the acquisition of a sense of morality and justice is something that they must complete on their own, outside the home and without support (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 75; Warner, 1999, pp. 51-2). This is in contrast to invisible ethnicities, such as many religious minorities, where families provide a context of retreat and an accessible history which, while often deformed by the experience of historical injustice and a shared sense of prolonged suffering, also offers deeply embedded coping mechanisms that are handed down from generation to generation.
Moreover, and similarly to the double-edged effect of the inculcation of inappropriate values, the effect of eviction is not only in what is withdrawn from the adolescent, but also in the circumstances he or she is thrown into. Eviction, that is, not only represents a profound betrayal of the nurturing and caring nature of the home and its supposed governing bonds of love, but is potentially catastrophic from the evictee’s point of view. It means in many instances exile into a public which may not only be governed by love but, also, by sexual self-interest and the ever-present threat of public harassment and violence from the dominant culture, a point to which we will return shortly.
Differentiating Gender from Sexuality
What lessons are we to draw, then, from the ethic of unacknowledgeability? Perhaps most significantly and in contrast to Okin (1997) and others (Butler, 1993; Law, 1988; Pharr, 1988; Rich, 1994 [1980]; Sunstein, 1997) who have viewed gay and lesbian marginalisation as but an aspect of gender, in many important respects the former is distinct. As we have already seen, this is so in the first instance with regard to the norm of disappearance where, in contrast to gender, gays and lesbians are not understood to be properly confinable to the private sphere but, rather, not to belong to any sphere at all. With respect to the norm of silence the situation is again distinctive. In the case of gender it is not so much that women are silenced but, rather, that what they say is ignored, or considered irrelevant. At least since Aristotle, this has been so typically because women are deemed either to lack authority or, to the extent that they have authority at all, only to have it in the home. In the case of homosexuality, by contrast, the silencing is quite literal and dispositional in nature. Here homosexual voices are silenced, both by the heterosexual majority, and by gays and lesbians themselves, where feelings of self-loathing or, if not these, of the possibility of humiliation or violence, often lead them not to admit they are gay or, if they do, to keep it to themselves.
Thus, it is not the case that gays are not allowed to speak, or that they speak only to be ignored. Nor is it that what they say is only heard in some non-political private domain. Rather it is that what gays and lesbians would say is unmentionable, often as much to themselves as to others. By contrast, we are not encouraged to consider gender as an unmentionable issue, even if the terms in which it is discussed serve to inhibit women’s life chances relative to those of men. It is in this sense, then, that we may fully understand Lord Alfred Douglas’ famous description of his own homosexuality being ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ (Douglas, 1894). Distinctive of gay and lesbian marginalisation is the idea not of being unacknowledged but, rather, of being unacknowledgeable.
This notwithstanding, the ethic of unacknowledgeability does share much in common with Judith Butler’s conception of the ‘unintelligibility’ of sexualities that deviate from or do not fit within the dominant ‘heterosexual matrix’ (Butler, 2004, ch. 1, esp. pp. 30-1, pp. 34-6; 2006, pp. 22-34). A gay couple defending their moral claim to walk down the street holding hands, for example, will do so in terms of their public display of affection carrying the meaning of love, bonding and commitment. Yet what many understand in this defence is an impermissible and aggressive assertion of decadence. Despite this, the ethic of unacknowledgeability also differs from unintelligibility in that it draws attention not to the fact that queer utterances and, in the Butlerian sense, ‘performances’, are unintelligible within a heteronormative frame; rather, central to the ethic of unacknowledgeability is that non-heterosexual utterances and performances should not be heard or seen at all. Second, the ethic of unacknowledgeability differs from the idea of unintelligibility in that it is specifically conceived with politics and public political communication in mind. Unacknowledgeability, that is, does not just refer to the taboo social status of minority sexualities, but also to the consequences of that taboo for public political communication, and the impact these have upon individual life chances of gays, lesbians and others.
The Closet is Not Gay
I want now to look at some of the implications the ethic of unacknowledgeability has for the ways in which we commonly think of the gay closet and, ultimately, for the relevance of the public/private distinction to the analysis of the taboo. There are at least two. First, the ethic of unacknowledgeability calls into question the idea that the closet uniquely affects homosexuals. There are, for instance, many effeminate men and masculine women who are not gay or lesbian, yet who nonetheless encounter harassment or abuse because they are presumed to be gay and either very inept at, or deliberately failing, to hide it (Warner, 1999, p. 37). Furthermore, in many if not all societies it is still common for gays and lesbians to marry under social pressure to prove their heterosexuality, only to ‘let down’ their (heterosexual) spouses and children through the discovery of long-term sexual infidelity. Moreover, the closet is a phenomenon that heterosexuals can also find themselves in when they are not sure if a third party knows that a loved one, friend or colleague is gay. Under such circumstances heterosexuals also become acquainted at first hand with the deep anxiety that comes with the possibility of inadvertent and damaging disclosure (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 80).
The Gay Public, or the Closet ‘Writ Large’?
Most significantly, the ethic of unacknowledgeability calls into question both the private nature of the closet and, simultaneously, the public nature of the gay public space. To be exiled from the home for daring to leave the closet is to be placed beyond the domestic sphere, but without being properly placed in the public sphere. ‘In such a regime of sexual domination’, writes Warner (2005, pp. 52-3, emphasis in original),
publicness will feel like exposure, and privateness will feel like the closet. The closet may seem to be a kind of protection. Indeed, the feeling of protection is one of the hallmarks of modern privacy. But in fact the closet is riddled with fear and shame. So is publicity under the conditions of the closet. Being publicly known as homosexual is never the same as being publicly known as heterosexual; the latter always goes without saying and troubles nothing, whereas the former carries echoes of pathologized visibility. It is perfectly meaningless to ‘come out’ as heterosexual. So, it is not true, as common wisdom would have it, that homosexuals live private lives without a secure public identity. They have neither privacy nor publicness, in these normative senses of the terms.
Pathologised visibility, moreover, impacts profoundly upon the very nature of the gay public itself, in contrast to ethnic minorities, whose members may retreat into public spaces that afford respite from the social pressures that come with negotiating contexts of minority status, exposure and disclosure. Most obviously until the very late twentieth century—and even then only in the urban centres of the wealthy liberal democracies—the gay built environment was typically marked by anonymous signage and dark-tinted windows, or no windows at all. Thus, while we can agree with both Sedgwick (1990) and Warner (2005, p. 52) that the metaphor of the closet is to a certain extent misleading because it implies a physical, spatial repression, this does not mean that its operation is not materialised in the public domain.
Another example of the clandestine nature of the gay public is with respect to jokes made within the gay community about homosexuals who are considered too effeminate. Much is made of the ‘obviousness’ of ‘queens’ who are deemed to behave too effeminately, whereas masculine, ‘straight-acting’ gays are more acceptable and desirable because they are not so ‘obviously’ gay. Effeminacy, then, is a marker of homosexuality that ‘wrongly’ brings it into the open, while acting ‘straight’ properly conceals it, revealing that the gay public itself reproduces the very norms that lead to its formation. Similarly, the signalling of homosexuality through discrete dress codes and the social significance of the ‘gaydar’—in virtue of which gays are said to be able to recognise one another as gay in circumstances that would otherwise forbid it—reveals that, while public in the sense of not being a private world but rather a shared one, with respect to society at large the gay public is in a significant sense merely a reproduction of the private closet in an inter-subjective, public mode.
Importantly, the closeted nature of the gay public space calls into question the conceptualisation of the public sphere as an emancipatory zone for marginalised social groups (Fraser, 1997; Young, 1990). For, without wishing to deny its value as what Nancy Fraser (1997, p. 82) calls a ‘zone of regroupment’ for such groups, to the extent that it is permitted to exist at all, the gay counter-public at least can also be interpreted as being no more than a rather large public closet. It is a space where one can be public about one’s homosexuality—but only in so far as it is beyond the view of society at large, and without having any direct influence on the political sphere where ultimate authoritative decision making takes place. The question as to whether the gay public is an emancipatory counter-public at all, or merely the closet ‘writ large’, where so many of the social processes it is supposedly an antidote for end up being reproduced, is an important question that merits further consideration.
The public sphere of gays and lesbians, then, is largely constructed around an architecture of invisibility and is often subject to the behavioural imperatives of concealment. Yet, as we have seen, at the same time the private sphere in which gays and lesbians find themselves is already and always marked by norms of disappearance and silence and, if not this, then devoid of a shared history.
The simultaneously private and public nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability is made manifest by the social genesis of what are commonly understood as privately held feelings of guilt and shame. Far from being merely private in nature, these are ultimately part of a process in which gays and lesbians are held individually responsible for actions that are sourced in society’s attitude towards them, and to which they are merely trying to respond. As Warner (1999, p. 8) tellingly explains, in later life many gays ‘will be told that they are
“closeted”, as though they have been telling lies. They bear a special burden of disclosure’. Yet, he continues, ‘[i]t seldom occurs to anyone that the dominant culture and its family environment should be held accountable for creating the inequalities of access and recognition that produce this sense of shame in the first place’. Thus, as he (Warner, 2005, p. 52) writes elsewhere,
common mythology understands the closet as an individual’s lie about him- or herself. We blame people for being closeted. But the closet is better understood as the culture’s problem, not the individual’s. No one ever created a closet for him- or herself. People find themselves in its oppressive conditions before they know it, willy-nilly. It is experienced by lesbians and gay men as a private, individual problem of shame and deception. But it is produced by the heteronormative assumptions of everyday talk. It feels private. But in an important sense it is publicly constructed.
Instead, then, of thinking of the closet as private and impacting only upon the lives of gays and lesbians, the ethic of unacknowledgeability encourages us to think of it also as a public phenomenon in both its genesis and material and cultural manifestation and, importantly, as one that can impact negatively and unequally upon the lives of all. In an important sense the ethic of unacknowledgeability transcends the public/private distinction.
Is a Liberal Queer Theory Possible?
The all-pervasive nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability, of course, also presents us with an important problem. For if it reveals the public/private distinction to be ultimately limited in its contribution to the analysis of homosexuality and publicness, then we also have good reason to doubt its relevance to a political theory of the taboo. Why, that is, begin an analysis of gay and lesbian marginalisation in terms of the public/private distinction if the ethic of unacknowledgeability that underlies that marginalisation ultimately transcends it? It is precisely for this reason that much contemporary feminist and queer theory eschews liberal approaches such as Okin’s and the one defended here. Rather, they examine marginalised sexualities in terms of the operation of preponderant social norms, as evidenced in the resonance of notions of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, ‘the heterosexual matrix’, ‘unintelligibility’ and ‘heteronormativity’ in the work of Adrienne Rich (1994), Monique Wittig (1992a; 1992b), Butler (1993, pp. 223-42; 2004, pp. 41-56; 2005, pp. 7-9; 2006, pp. 22-34, pp. 47-106) and Warner (1991, pp. 3-17; 2005).
Despite this, there are at least three reasons why the public/private distinction is indispensable to an adequate exploration of the marginal status of homosexuality, and why these approaches may be insufficient, especially if they are intended to serve as the basis for a normative theory, such as the political theory of the taboo. First, this is because of the unavoidably public as opposed to private nature of those political debates about sexuality that at some point must be had. Without such debates and the institutions that make them possible, it is difficult to see how issues such as the legality of homosexuality itself, or the legal rights, responsibilities and protections of gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities can be addressed.
In contrast to these reasons for the necessity of a conception of publicness to a political theory of the taboo, there is also the question of the value of the private sphere when construed as a bulwark against intrusion. This, of course, is what Warner (2005, p. 26, p. 53) has called ‘the kind of privacy that you value’ and is also an important aspect of Okin’s (1989, pp. 127-8) liberalism when she discusses the role of the state with respect to gender. Moreover, the idea of the private sphere and of privacy not only underlies the idea of protection against the state, but also against the civic social tyranny of the majority. At the most extreme, this is made clear by the historical example of the Nazis’ outing of homosexuals in the concentration camp system via the enforced wearing of the inverted pink triangle badge. This institutionally sanctioned obliteration of privacy not only exposed gay men to the Nazi state’s power to determine where the public/private boundary should actually lie; it simultaneously exposed them to the now publicly legitimated, non-statist abuse and degradation meted out even by fellow Holocaust victims who, despite awaiting the same unavoidable and tragic end, nevertheless viewed gays as in the meantime worthy of abuse, humiliation and worse (Heger, 1994; Seel, 1995; 1997).
Equally importantly from the standpoint of a political theory of the taboo, an account of public and private is needed even by those who favour subaltern and/or performative activisms over the formal political arena as a means of publicly subverting heteronormativity. In their differing ways these activisms, such as those evidenced in the work of Wittig (1992a; 1992b), in Butler’s (2004, pp. 204-31; 2006, pp. 194-203) theory of ‘performativity’ and, relating to marginalised groups more generally, in Fraser’s (1997) conception of the ‘sub-altern counter public’, all explore the possibilities of agitational politics which serve as alternatives to more formal political decision making. Yet, even here, a conception of public and private is still required, although not in order for marginalised voices to be heard in a formal political arena. As we have seen, that all too often merely replicates the very exclusions that are at issue. Rather, it is necessary so that the rights and protections that secure such ‘street-level’ oppositional activisms can be identified and juridically secured by the state against intrusion by social forces that are hostile to them.
Acceptance of the need for formal public political debates about homosexuality, and of a notion of the private to secure gays and lesbians from the decisions resultant from those debates and to secure them to a space in which to contest them, however, also implies a workable conception of public and private. Even if therefore one may have well-founded reservations about the relevance of the public/private distinction as a methodological tool for the analysis of taboo social practices, owing to the all-pervasive nature of the ethic of unacknowledgeability, it remains indispensable to the political theory of the taboo and, as such, must at some stage figure in that analysis, however problematically.
A second objection to the argument made here is that it bears little relation to the status of gays and lesbians today. Indeed, one need only visit San Francisco, Sydney and London to see just how visible and accepted homosexuality is. What the ‘gay urban renaissance’ so clearly illustrates in these places is that the ethic of unacknowledgeability has been overcome and that mainstream culture is modifying itself with respect to homosexuality, just as it did with respect to gender and race before. To accept what happens in such places as indicative of a global trend, however, would be at best naïve, not least when viewed from the perspective of sexual minorities in, for example, Guatemala City, Teheran or Lagos. In any case, for whole swathes of the non-urban regions of the wealthy liberal democracies, the ethic of unacknowledgeability captures something that is all too real in the lives of countless lesbians, gays and members of other sexual minorities. Yet perhaps most importantly, even in the cities mentioned above, the transformation of the ethic of unacknowledgeability is still at best a partial one. In these supposedly tolerant places, it is still not uncommon for gays and lesbians to find themselves alternately in and out of the closet, depending upon social circumstances (Sedgwick, 1990, pp. 67-8). Moreover, the gay urban renaissance is in any case contingent. Cultural change brought on by shifting demographics can have very deleterious consequences indeed for the new-found openness toward homosexuality (Tebble, 2006, pp. 479-81).
Conclusion
Homosexuality’s relationship to publicness is of importance to political theory because it makes real the need to extend an insight first had by feminist theory. We have seen how, similarly to gender, homosexuality is removed from the public sphere and, as such, from considerations of justice. Yet, in contrast to gender, we have also seen that the relationship between homosexuality and publicness is a complex one which needs more than an account of the public and the private to be properly explained. The significant difference here is that, in the case of homosexuality, it is the taboo ethic of unacknowledgeability in both public and private that ultimately explains its removal from both spheres. In contrast to gender, which is thought about in a way that serves to remove the inequalities it sustains from politics and justice, homosexuality’s marginalisation is sourced in a governing ethic that precludes it being discussed at all. Thus, the political theory of the taboo to which the example of homosexuality gives life leads us not to interrogate the boundary between public and private, but to interrogate the ethic of unacknowledgeability whose all-pervasiveness, unlike other processes of marginalisation, makes the marginalisation of gays and lesbians distinct and not reducible to, or merely an aspect of, gender.
Importantly, this article has not only been about analysing a relationship. It has also been about clarifying the implications of that relationship for politics and political theory, two of which appear to be salient. The first is that the distinctiveness of the relationship of homosexuality to publicness provides the opportunity for us to build upon the advances of feminist political theory. If feminism has taught us to look at how we practise politics and how we think about that practice, the study of homosexuality’s relationship to publicness encourages us to look very carefully at the ways in which our social norms encourage us not to discuss or confront certain issues. In both cases, the way in which we think and practise has profound consequences for individual life chances, and it is this that should motivate us to consider the political theory of the taboo as profoundly important. That is, we should consider the taboo as a proper subject of reflection upon the nature and demands of justice, just as we have come to consider the claims of feminist theory—ostensibly dealing only with issues relevant to women—as rightfully falling within the ambit of political thought in the most general sense.
How, then, should we think about politics in the light of the ethic of unacknowledgeability? The answer to this leads to the second implication of this study. If the resolution of political questions is understood as being predicated upon a public, usually face-to-face, discourse, then any aspect of the life of society that is governed by an ethic of unacknowledgeability would appear to fall beyond the reach of effective, let alone equitable, political decision making. Given, however, that the operation of this ethic can have enormous consequences for individual life chances, we are faced with a special challenge. If the very dynamic of marginalisation at issue is one of disappearance and silence—that is, of taboo status—then it seems that politics as a general approach is precluded in advance from being an effective social decision-making mechanism with respect to it. The political theory of the taboo therefore introduces a new standard for the appraisal of theories of justice. This is the extent to which they are capable of responding to the unacknowledgeable, and at the same time, of adequately grappling with the unique challenge that this ethic presents to our conceptions of public and private that politics inevitably presupposes.