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Insult and the making of the gay self
By Didier Eribon Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3371-6
Chapter One
The Shock of Insult
It all begins with an insult. The insult that any gay man or lesbian can hear at any moment of his or her life, the sign of his or her social and psychological vulnerability.
"Faggot" ("dyke")-these are not merely words shouted in passing. They are verbal aggressions that stay in the mind. They are traumatic events experienced more or less violently at the moment they happen, but that stay in memory and in the body (for fear, awkwardness, and shame are bodily attitudes produced by a hostile exterior world). One of the consequences of insult is to shape the relation one has to others and to the world and thereby to shape the personality, the subjectivity, the very being of the individual in question.
As Marcel Jouhandeau wrote in his extraordinary short treatise on homosexuality from 1939, On Abjection, to be insulted is to be branded on the shoulder by a red hot iron.
What a revelation it is to be insulted, to be scorned in public. We become familiar with certain words that up to that point had only been heard in classical tragedies, but that now become our own accouterments, our own burdens. We are no longer what we thought ourselves to be. We are no longer the person we knew, but the one others think they know, the one others take to be this or that. If someone could think that of me, then in some way it must betrue. At first we pretend that it is not true, that this is only a mask, a costume for a play in which someone has clothed us, and that we could take off. But no. These garments adhere so tightly that they have already become your face, your flesh. To take them off would be to rend your own being.
The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal.
* The insult is a verdict. It is a more or less definitive sentence, for life, one that will have to be borne. A gay man learns about his difference through the force of insult and its effects-the principal one being the dawning of the awareness of a fundamental asymmetry instantiated by that particular linguistic act: I discover that I am a person about whom something can be said, to whom something can be said, someone who can be looked at or talked about in a certain way and who is stigmatized by that gaze and those words. The act of naming produces an awareness of oneself as other, transformed by others into an object. Sartre puts it nicely in an observation about Genet, tagged as a thief by the gaze of the other: "It is as if a page of a book suddenly became conscious and felt itself being read aloud without being able to read itself" (StG, 41). Insult is thus a way of looking me over and a way of dispossessing me. My consciousness is "beleaguered by others" (57) and I am disarmed by this aggression. To cite Sartre on Genet a bit more: "A dazzling spotlight transpierced him with its beams." Alone, powerless, all he could do was struggle "in that shaft of light" that is the gaze of the other, its power to name (136).
Insult is more than a word that describes. It is not satisfied with simply telling me what I am. If someone calls me a "dirty faggot" (or "dirty nigger" or "dirty kike"), or even simple "faggot" (or "nigger" or "kike"), that person is not trying to tell me something about myself. That person is letting me know that he or she has something on me, has power over me. First and foremost the power to hurt me, to mark my consciousness with that hurt, inscribing shame in the deepest levels of my mind. This wounded, shamed consciousness becomes a formative part of my personality. An insult can thus be analyzed as a "performative utterance," according to J. L. Austin's definition. In a well-known work, that English philosopher distinguished between constative and performative utterances. The former describe a situation and can be true or false. The latter produce an action and thus are neither true nor false-for example, "I call this meeting to order." In fact, Austin defines two kinds of performative utterances, illocutionary and perlocutionary. In the first kind, the utterance itself constitutes the action it announces. To say "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" or to respond "I do" (meaning: "I do take this woman as my lawful wife" or "I do take this man as my lawful husband") during a wedding ceremony is to make an utterance of this kind. In the second kind of performative utterance, the action is not produced by the utterance per se; rather it is one of the consequences (the fear, the emotions, or the thoughts produced by words like "I am warning you") of having said something. At first glance, one would include insult in this latter category. Insult is a linguistic act-or a series of repeated linguistic acts-by which a particular place in the world is assigned to the person at whom the acts are directed. This assignment determines a viewpoint on the world, a particular outlook. Insult profoundly affects the consciousness of an individual through what it says: "I assimilate you to this," "I reduce you to that." And so I am this or that. Insult can be found anywhere: linguists have expanded this category of performative utterances to include allusions, insinuations, irony, metaphor, and so on. Given that at the end of his book Austin himself comes to dissolve the distinction between performative and constative utterances, we might say that many of the utterances of everyday life can be described as injurious speech acts.
In any case, insult is a performative utterance. Its function is to produce certain effects-notably, to establish or to renew the barrier between "normal" people and those Goffman calls "stigmatized" people and to cause the internalization of that barrier within the individual being insulted. Insult tells me what I am to the extent that it makes me be what I am.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Insult and the making of the gay self by Didier Eribon Excerpted by permission.
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