(the binary schema, cont.)
This abnormality of feeling and of development of the character is often apparent in childhood. The boy likes to spend his time with girls, play with dolls, and help his mother about the house; he likes to cook, sew, knit, and develops taste in female toilettes, so that he may even become the adviser to his sisters. As he grows older he eschews smoking, drinking, and manly sports, and, on the contrary, finds pleasure in adornment of person, art, belle-lettres, etc., even to the extent of giving himself entirely to the cultivation of the beautiful. Since women possess corresponding inclinations, he prefers to move in the society of women….In cases of completely-developed contrary sexuality, heterosexual love is looked upon as a thing absolutely incomprehensible; sexual intercourse with a person of the opposite sex is unthinkable, impossible. Such an attempt brings on the inhibitory concept of disgust or even horror, which makes erection impossible.
According to nineteenth-century medical category discussed by Foucault, the homosexual was categorized, “less by a type of sexual relations,” than by “a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself.” Being a homosexual was “a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul.”1 The nineteenth-century notion of “contrary” or “inverted” sexualities is related to the notion discussed by Butler that intelligible gender identities are those in which desire follows gender toward “the opposite sex.” Being a man requires that one’s desire be directed toward “the opposite sex.” But since being a man is understood as an expressive attribute and a consequence of being male, the maleness of the homosexual’s body becomes questionable (a questionability that is taken up in today’s anatomies, physiologies, and etiologies of male homosexuality). Thus a “male”/“man” whose desire is directed toward “the same sex” is not male/man in any full-blown sense, but is curiously in between male/man and female/woman.
But the nineteenth-century ontology that made the homosexual into a species made ‘homosexual’ a misnomer: because the homosexual was not a man per se, “his” desire for men was not directed toward “the same sex” per se. And such is the case with the twentieth-century gay man. But cannot it be said that the gay man’s desire is directed toward an “opposite,” either. For there to be an opposite, one must have a stable gender identity that lacks the features of the gender that one is not. But being curiously in between male and female, the gay man (as well as the nineteenth-century homosexual before him) is neither heterosexual or homosexual. The former would require that he not be the gender that he desires, the latter entails an absurdity (namely, that one be the gender that one desires).
Now because the sexuality of the
gay man (like the sexuality of the nineteenth-century homosexual) permeates his being, he possesses the inclinations of a woman, not simply in terms of sexual desire, but in terms of cultural/aesthetic sensibility. The popular appropriation of the term ‘metrosexual’ to denote a straight man with gay sensibilities reflects this notion that homosexuality is a consequence of gender inversion: a straight man with manicured nails is like a gay man, who is like a woman (as manicured nails is a womanly thing). But there is a crucial ontological difference between the (heterosexual) metrosexual and the gay man. Where the gay man’s delicate, feminine sensibilities accord with his nature, the straight man’s metrosexuality is contrary to his manly, heterosexual nature. For the gay man’s gayness not only expresses itself conspicuously in his bodily outwardness, but his homosexuality, being “consubstantial with him,” drenches the entirety of his physical substance.To see how pervasive this understanding of the gay man is, we need only to recall popular and scientific etiologies, anatomies, and physiologies of male homosexuality that (tentatively, thus retaining the mystery of his physiology) locate his homosexuality/androgyny in his DNA, in the effects of hormonal “imbalances” in utero, in the shape and size of his brain, and so forth. Moreover, this ontological notion that his sexuality affects “his total composition” has phenomenological and epistemological consequences. If the gay man’s sexuality pervades the visible, as well as invisible, parts of his substance, then gaydar is no mysterious thing, but merely the perception of a gayness that is on display for all to see. For the gay man’s sexuality is not simply reducible to an invisible, inward reality (desire), but is “everywhere present in him,” “written immodestly on his face and body,” “a secret that always [gives] itself away.” His gayness radiates from his body. He carries it in his limp wrist, in his lisp, in his very manner of carrying himself, with its overall wispy quality. It seeps through his pores2 and falls off his tongue.3
1 Foucault, Michel. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1990, 43
2 There are scientific studies claiming that gay men emit different scents from straight men.
3 The perceptual-phenomenological givenness of this gayness thus answers the epistemological question of whether and how one knows that a person is gay.
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