Gender criticism

Rather than envisioning "power" as something exercised prohibitively from the top of society downward, against a sexuality envisioned as forcing its way upward from the level of the individual, Foucault thus describes both sexuality and power as relations that are incessantly and locally produced and productive at every level of modern culture, through "the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech" (21). He locates the imperative to utterance in the premodern institutional discourses of law and especially religion (both founded on protocols of confession), but most symptomatically in the newly prestigious ones of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, demography, medicine, and education.

By refusing to distinguish between sexuality "itself" and the discourses that structure, delimit, and (he argues) produce and reproduce it, Foucault undoes the positivist assumption that to write historically about sexuality involves increasingly direct, immediate knowledge or "understanding" of some unchanging sexual essence. To the contrary, he argues that modern sexuality itself is so intimately entangled with the historically distinctive contexts and structures that now count as knowledge, that such "knowledge" can scarcely be a transparent window onto a separate realm of sexuality: rather, it constitutes that sexuality.

Indeed, he goes beyond this. His ultimate argument is that sexuality per se comes into existence, not with the first sexual acts or even sexual prohibitions, but during the long process, culminating in the nineteenth century, by which, as sex learned an infinity of new paths into discourse, the value of Truth itself--in particular the Truth of individual identity--came to be lodged in the uncovering or expression of the Truth of sexuality.⁽¹⁰⁾

That is, what distinguishes modern sexuality from premier sex is the extreme, indeed unlimited epistemological pressure everywhere placed on it, and the epistemological centrality in turn accorded it in the wider field of all knowledges and institutions.

No doubt it will be clear why the analysis offered in Foucault's book has proven problematical in relation to other forms of politically-oriented analysis. As in most of Foucault's writing, the accounts of agency, or for that matter of causality or change, are elusive at best. His desultory insistence on the most local or molecular vantage makes class identity, interest, or struggle, or gender identity, interest, or struggle extraordinarily difficult to keep in focus. His renunciation of any economic metaphor based on scarcity or deprivation would seem to silence most forms of materialism. His refusal to distinguish between the realms of power and of eroticism is only one example of the resistance his work mounts to moralistic--indeed, to any ethicizing--appropriation; and while fugitive utopian or elegiac moments certainly animate his writing, what is more solidly founded there is an analysis of the utopian impulse as yet another alibi of the repressive hypothesis (6-8).

No doubt it will also be clear, however, why this volume was to prove so catalytic for literary study. Coarsely put: it justifies a view of writing as a form of sex, indeed as its most direct form; at the same time it justifies a view of sexuality as the central repository of the truth-values of modernity. How could these not be deeply energizing assertions for writers and scholars--at least if Foucault is right in his estimate of the prestige, the promise of epistemological force, the "sex appeal," of sexuality in our century? This is also to say, of course, that, far from offering resistance to the modern "scheme for transforming sex into discourse" (20) and "interplay of truth and sex" (57), processes that Foucault treats as historically unidirectional and inescapable, the effect of his book has instead been to accelerate that trajectory and load it with ever greater explanatory force. Rather than attempt vainly to impede it, he has, if successful, merely displaced and re-propelled it unpredictably by making less tenable the "repressive hypothesis" by which its subjects have concealed its itineraries from themselves. "Merely" displaced and re-propelled: but that is a more direct path of rhetorical efficacy--of historical intervention, which is to say, in Foucault, of seduction--than most critical works admit to undertaking. Thus, again excitingly for any writer, this work has seemed to offer new accesses to the performative force of writing. In the unmentioned, only slightly displaced continuity between what the book says and what it seems to make happen, readers can register the gap of unrationalized rhetorical force that the author has already thematized in the distance between what the "repressive hypothesis" says (sex is forbidden) and the almost hilarious proliferation of sexualized discourse that it in fact effects.

Specifying Sexuality

So far we have discussed a fairly unified, though vast, field of phenomena around "sexuality" that Foucault's volume at once describes and enacts. But the fact is that its incitements have not issued in a new movement of "sexuality criticism." Rather, its strongest effects have been radically partial--partial enough, perhaps, even to call into question the mapping of that neatly unified "sexual" field. That is to say, the discursive progeny of The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction has been, not the mythic "sexuality criticism," but a renewed, ambitious, assertive, splendidly explicit, and unprecedentedly institutionalized movement of gay/lesbian criticism. The metonym for "sexuality" that is effectually installed by The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is homosexuality.

Yet the least clear thing about this book is in what sense it can be said to be a gay book. The author is not explicit about his own sexuality between its covers; and discussions of the history of homosexuality per se are few and brief (the index lists three references), and embedded in discussions of other sexualities or of sexuality more broadly. Take, for instance, the book's most famous and agenda-setting formulation about the history of homosexuality, under the heading of the "incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals":

As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood . . . . [His sexuality] was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. . . . [T]he psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized--Westphal's famous article of 1870 on "contrary sexual sensations" can stand as its date of birth--less by a type of sexual relations that by a certain quality of sexual sensibility. . . . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (42-3)

Foucault's discussion here of the invention of "the homosexual" is presented as an exemplifying instance of a process of specification, of the emergence of identities where previously there had been acts, that also included "all those minor perverts whom nineteenth-century psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names: there were Krafft-Ebing's zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohleder's auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscopophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women" (43), and those other "figures" and "privileged objects of knowledge," the hysterical woman and the masturbating child (105). The newly reified homosexuality, in short, is but one, representative example of "these thousand aberrant sexualities" (44, emphasis added) that came, in their plurality, to define sexuality itself.

Yet the discursive context in which Foucault's book does its performative work is not, as it happens, one that prominently features the classification of "these thousand aberrant sexualities." The rhetorical strategy of the book is to allow a reader to imagine, as it were by default, that the 19th-century social formations that emerge from its narrative are in essence those of the present day: "We `Other Victorians,'" the first chapter is entitled. But in the late-twentieth-century scene of the book's actual address, after the lapse of the century elided in "We `Other Victorians,'" to specify someone's sexuality is not to locate her or him on a map teeming with zoophiles, gynecomasts, sexoesthetic inverts . . . . Hysterical women are no longer taxonomized; and to imagine, as nineteenth-century psychiatry did, "the masturbator" as a particular kind of person distinct from other kinds of people would seem laughable.⁽¹¹⁾ This change does not reflect any lightening of the burden of meaning placed on issues of sexual definition since the period described by Foucault. Rather, it reflects an astonishing simplification of the fraught identity-categories through which sexuality is conceived. In the late twentieth century, if I ask you what your sexual orientation or sexual preference is, you will understand me to be asking precisely one thing: whether you are homosexual or heterosexual. And whether or not you find these terms inadequate or even irrelevant to your particular desires and velleities, you will be confident in interpreting "sexual orientation" as a reference to that differential and only that.

This startlingly coarse dichotomy-effect operates, unremarked, in and on the reading gestalt of Foucault's study. It operates all the more decisively for its silence, however, and in ways that inevitably drive wedges in at the joints between the book's constative and its performative projects. The first dichotomy-effect on the book is to install homosexuality in a more than just metonymically representational relation to sexuality as a whole. That the other "species"-identities attached to nonconforming sexual desires in the nineteenth century have only lost taxonomic power since then, while homosexual identity has so decisively gained it, implicitly installs homo/heterosexual definition as the (unasked) question of Foucauldian sexuality; but beyond that, as we must discuss further, Foucault seems to exclude even the hetero- side of any homo/hetero dichotomy from the purlieus of sexuality, insofar as "sexuality" itself is said to comprise more and more simply "a world of perversion" (40).

It happens repeatedly that dynamics and meanings attributed to "sexuality" in Foucault act and mean differently when they are read in the light of the homosexual metonym. There are many places where Foucault's generalizations about "sexuality" seem acutely truer when applied to homosexuality--but truer because different, and again, different because truer. He says, for instance, "What is peculiar to modern societies . . . is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret" (35). But what could be less secret than the, as it were, surplus the-ness of one particular secret within the open secret of sex, the one named by Christianity and multiple reinscriptions of Western law as the Unspeakable itself, nefandam libidinem, "that sin which should be neither named nor committed,"⁽¹²⁾ the crime "of so black a hue, of so abominable a nature, that we cannot pretend to give any report of it," "so detestable and repugnant to the common feeling of our nature that by no word can it be described without committing an outrage against decency"⁽¹³⁾--videlicet, "the love that dare not speak its name."⁽¹⁴⁾ The particular case of homosexuality here marks an intensification of, but by the same token a certain discontinuity from, the knowing reification "sex."

Similarly, if the regime of sexuality "in general" is seen by Foucault as instituting knowledge-relations that are ultimately productive of that obscure object of desire, the unconscious, how much the truer must this be of the particular knowledge-relations around the secret, relentlessly spectacularized, and therefore utterly social space of tacit homo/heterosexual definition: the closet? The complex communities of blackmail, complicity, condescension, glamorization, and every sort of cognitive leveraging that are incessantly generated around any closet or the mere space of the possibility of one, enabled in the past century by the newly reduced homo/hetero meaning of "sexual preference," render potent and priceless on many different markets the commodity of ignorance, especially self-ignorance.

Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion . . . the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends. . . . We tell it its truth by deciphering what it tells us about that truth; it tells us our own by delivering up that part of it that escaped us. From this interplay there has evolved, over several centuries, a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him, determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be ignorant of himself. . . . Causality in the subject, the unconscious of the subject, the truth of the subject in the other who knows, the knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an opportunity to deploy itself in the discourse of sex. (69-70)

Here again, however, in narrating what appears to be the demystifyingly historicized story of sexuality per se and its centrality to a Western commonsense described in the tropes of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucault chooses not to make explicit the privileged referent of his "universal" noun phrases in the locus of a particular homo/heterosexual question. His refusal constitutes the closet of homo/heterosexual definition as "the unconscious" of this text: not in the sense that a certain homo/heterosexual specificity is cognitively unavailable to the author, but in the sense that the text's refusal to verbalize it forces its articulation or denial rather on the reader, whom it thus interpolates as "the other who knows [] the knowledge [the text] holds unbeknown to [itself]"; it founds the reader as the knowing Other of "that which divides [the text], determines [it] perhaps, but above all causes [it] to be ignorant of [it]self."

Foucault's analysis of the confessional tradition makes clear, if nothing else did, both how strongly and how resistantly this book is marked by its positioning at the end of the century that stretched between Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs (arguably the first European man to come out as a homosexual) and the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s. Even given the French context of its writing, more urbane and less hygienically dichotomized than the American context of its reading whose effects I here describe, Foucault's account of the confessional owes as much to the sacralized new ritual of coming out as to the psychoanalytic ritual that appears to be its first referent: "a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; . . . a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship . . . ; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it" (61-2). For Foucault to posit a historical continuity between religious confession and coming out is also, however, to unfold the reasons for his scepticism about the latter act.

From the Christian penance to the present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession. A thing that was hidden, we are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite particular way, one confessed? Suppose the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it (concealing it all the more and with greater care as the confession of it was more important, requiring a stricter ritual and promising more decisive effects)? (61)

Characteristically, Foucault dislocates a conventional understanding of the individual will involved in political action; the conditions that make sense of the speech-act of coming out, he suggests, actually constitute it as a nominal defiance that marks the place of a more disabling acquiescence: acquiescence in the lie of the repressive hypothesis, that speech and silence are, in the discourses of sexuality, each other's polar opposites.⁽¹⁵⁾ The dignified and, in his terms, more profoundly resistant strategy of this book is to refuse either to conceal or to reveal the "sexuality" (i.e., either the homo- or the heterosexuality) of its speaker; and concomitantly to articulate the reader, rather than the text itself, as the agent of the implied disarticulation of the supposedly unified field of "sexuality."

Performing Foucault

Post-Foucauldian work in gender theory has both profited and suffered from the ruptures of this founding text. In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard remarks that Foucault's followers have tended to ignore how actively his discourse, "a mirror of the powers it describes," proffers disillusion about "the effect of truth it produces"; historians, as he points out, have instead used it to refine and perpetuate a positivist order of "the truth, nothing but the truth" (10-11). In its own terms, this historical work has been extremely valuable, taking up Foucault's challenge to denaturalize by narrativizing present understandings of what sexuality is and entails. Yet the violently contradictory and volatile energies that every morning's newspaper proves to us are circulating even at this moment, in our society, around the issues of homo/heterosexual definition, show over and over again how preposterous must be anybody's urbane pretence at having a clear, simple story to tell about the outlines and meanings of what and who is homosexual and heterosexual. Jeffrey Weeks points out the thoroughgoing, coercive incoherence of the homophobic etiological models that prevail in our culture, according to which homosexuality is classified at the same time as "sin" and as "disease," "so that you can be born with [it], seduced into [it] and catch [it], all at the same time."⁽¹⁶⁾ Anti-homophobic analysis has the same divided conceptual heritage: the most current theoretical form in which this conflict is visible is in the debate in gay/lesbian studies between "social constructionist" and "essentialist" understandings of homo/heterosexual identity. The conflict, within both homophobic and anti-homophobic ideologies, has a long history; it is the most recent link in a more enduring chain of conceptual impasses, a deadlock between what might be called more generally universalizing and minoritizing accounts of the relation of homosexual desires or persons to the wider field of all desires or persons. Universalizing discourses are those that suggest that every person has the potential for same-sex, as for other-sex, desire or activity; minoritizing ones are those that attribute each of these desires to a fixed, unchangeable segment of the population. Each kind of account can underpin both virulently homophobic and supportively anti-homophobic ideological formations. As we have seen, historical narratives following Foucault have seemed to show universalizing paradigms, such as the terribly influential Judaeo-Christian proscription of particular acts called "sodomy" (acts that might be performed by anybody), as being displaced after the late nineteenth century by the definition of particular kinds of persons, specifically "homosexuals." A Classically-based but enduring honorific sub-tradition of durable and significant pedagogic/pederastic bonds between men of different ages was also seen as having been displaced by the new, minoritizing view of homosexual identity. It may, however, as we have seen in reading Foucault, be more descriptive to say that since the late nineteenth century the different understandings, contradictory though they are, have coexisted, creating in the space of their contradiction enormous potentials of discursive power.⁽¹⁷⁾

Other, more theoretically or rhetorically adventurous work "after" Foucault has opened new disciplinary territory by embodying or enacting its contradictions less numbly. This has been especially necessary, and especially powerful, in the critical analysis of what Foucault made it possible to think of as "the discourse of" AIDS. His conceptual centrality to activist understandings of the disease that silenced him is only one of the nightmarish overdeterminations typical of AIDS. Of those overdeterminations, the sickening rhyme between the disease's patterns of depredation and the lines of proscription already drawn by a homophobic and racist culture is the obvious and almost overwhelming one. To dismantle the murderous monolith that AIDS has kept threatening to forge out of the accidents of a virus; out of the established homophobic moralisms of state and church; out of the insatiable modern momentum toward increased surveillance; out of a centuries-old intertextual narrative linkage between fatality and male-male desire; out of the institutional consolidations of advanced medical research, and its ideology-drenched forms of figuration; out of an invidious capitalist health-care delivery system; out of the incoherences of modern discourses of addiction and the "foreign substance"; out of imperialist needs to constitute the third world as at once the incubator of western illness and the laboratory of western medicine; out of the vengeful iconographic traditions of both expert technical imaging and popular media--that pressing need has consolidated, under an academic banner of "cultural studies" but by no means confined to academia, a new axis of inquiry involving literary and communications theorists, film theorists, art historians, historians of medicine, artists, film and video makers, feminist community and cultural activists, and AIDS activist groups like ACT UP.

The generative energy that Foucauldian analysis has made available for this form of intellectual/political activism is still, however, intimately inscribed with the contradictory imperatives (of truth, of performance; of proliferation, of specification) transmitted by his work. For example, like thousands of other gay men lost to AIDS, Foucault acquired a sexuality visible to a broad public only when journalism (belatedly) specified his cause of death. It was AIDS that engraved the impoverishing homo/hetero dichotomy most indelibly on the retrospect of his work; slowly but unrelentingly, the obituary process revoked his potent refusal of (what he had figured as) confession. The epistemological stress that Foucault showed to be lodged in modern sexuality has not been dislodged by the crisis of AIDS, but rather yoked violently to an epistemological stress now also attached to death. In the decade of AIDS, the hidden sex of the obituary has been framed as a question of authority: in New York Times usage throughout the first decade of the epidemic, for example, cause of death was customarily given as an unattributed fact--that is to say, as one transparently known to The Times; in obituaries of unmarried, non-clergy men under 60 who didn’t die in accidents, on the other hand, "a hospital spokesman" or a sibling or partner of the dead person was always specified as the source of information, whether or not AIDS-related illness was given as the cause of death, and presumably whether or not it actually was.⁽¹⁸⁾ Precisely by proffering a named authority--by making the authority-process, atypically, visible--The Times in these cases solicits and tendentiously points the scepticism of obituary readers: a scepticism normal obituary practice repels. It has been characteristic of the discourse around AIDS to be so tied to a truth-imperative whose form is intransitive but whose angle is killingly partial. Last year a friend of mine, being treated for a skin rash, came under pressure from his doctors to agree to an HIV-antibody test he had decided he did not want to take. The male doctor sent the female doctor out of the room, the better to set the stage for man-to-man epistemological heroics: "Don't you," the doctor, scalpel-eyed, at last bore down, "want to know?" "No, I don't," my friend bravely replied. "I think you're the one who wants to know."