the binary schema ii.

Concerning the Production of an Onto-Political Anomaly
(the binary schema, cont.)

Butler argues that it would be a mistake to think that a discussion of personal identity should proceed independently of a discussion gender identity “for the simple reason that ‘persons’ only become intelligible through becoming gendered in conformity with recognizable standards of gender intelligibility.”¹ When we consider those who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility, we see that even though such individuals “appear to be persons,” they emerge the domain as “‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings,”² for intelligibility as a person requires that one be an intelligible gender. But these individuals – these “specters of discontinuity and incoherence” (of which the gay man is but one example) – emerge only as such through “the existing norms of continuity and coherence.”³ The norms have a productive, as well as prohibitive, function: creatures such as the gay man are created by the very same onto-cultural laws render their existence a logical absurdity. Heterosexual normativity does not stand unless it had something anomalous to stand against.

Thus the question of how the gay man is accommodated by institutional heterosexuality is somewhat misleading: the gay man does not exist prior to (outside of) the cultural laws only to subsequently gain (or be refused) accommodation. Rather the gay man is a product of the very laws that prohibit his existence. The paradox of the laws is that the anomalies that stand outside them are inevitably produced by the mere existence of the laws are thus only conceivable within the domain of the laws. The question of accommodation, therefore, is this: how is the gay man given place within a domain that does so by outlawing him?

We can see how this accommodation has been achieved in actual practice by looking at the history of (the production of) the gay man. Foucault situates the birth of the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, and here we can see the roots of today’s ontologies of the gay man. Foucault contrasts the Victorian psychological/medical category of homosexuality with the ancient juridical category of sodomy:

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, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.⁴

Thus the crucial distinction is that, where ancient category pertained to a species of forbidden act, the modern category made a species of the homosexual. Whereas the category sodomite was derived from the category sodomy (which was a type of act), the category homosexuality was derived from the category homosexual (which was a type of creature). The ancient status of being a sodomite, unlike the modern status of being a homosexual, reflected no deep ontological fact about the person in question. It meant simply that one was a perpetrator of forbidden sexual acts. By contrast, the fact of being homosexual ran deep, permeating the individual’s being, becoming (in Foucault’s words) “consubstantial with him.”

Now despite pockets of protest, the basic contours of this ontology have stuck with us. Foucault’s words about the nineteenth-century homosexual could very well be said about the twentieth-century gay man: nothing that goes into his total composition is unaffected by his sexuality. Take the transformation from ‘homosexual’ to ‘gay’ that occurred in the twentieth century. How is it that a word synonymous with ‘festive’ became synonymous with ‘homosexual’? Where ‘homosexuality’ wears its ‘sexuality’ on its sleeve, ‘gay’ does not. But as the sexuality of the homosexual was “everywhere present in him,” having implications “for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of [his] personal existence,”⁵ the fact of his being festive became an outgrowth of his being gay (homosexual). Or, rather, festivity became an essential part of his constitution, becoming a visible marker of the pervasive, body-wide ontological fact of his homosexuality. It is thus no accident that Truman Capote’s urbane wit made him the life of the party, that the biggest and best parties in town are at parades events and gay clubs.

¹ Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics ed. New York: Routledge 2006, 22

² ibid 23

³ ibid

⁴ Foucault, Michel. Trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1990, 42–43

⁵ Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 2