Read an Excerpt
Rhetorical Secrets
Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance in Contemporary America
By Davin Allen Grindstaff The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2006 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8760-0
CHAPTER 1
The Rhetorical Secret
[F]ar from being a category of resemblance ... The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself.
—Michel Foucault
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault writes, "We must not forget that the 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" (43). Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Eve Sedgwick contends, represent "a particular historical moment, culminating in 1891, a moment from the very midst of the process from which a modern homosexual identity and a modern problematic of sexual orientation could be said to date" (Epistemology 91). The so-called birth of homosexual identity, however, is marked by historical, conceptual, and discursive struggle, not by resemblance and coherence. This historical moment bears witness to a struggle between different, coexisting models of erotic life rather than one conceptual model usurping another; as queer scholars have recognized, this period does not observe a "Great Paradigm Shift" (Halperin, "How to Do"; Halperin, "Forgetting"; Sedgwick, Epistemology 44–47).
This historical period also constitutes the moment when, as Sedgwick notes, "secrecy itself becomes manifest as this [the homosexual] secret ... In such texts as Billy Budd and Dorian Gray and through their influence, the subject—the thematics—of knowledge and ignorance themselves, of innocence and initiation, of secrecy and disclosure, became not contingently but integrally infused with one particular object of cognition: no longer sexuality as a whole but even more specifically, now, the homosexual topic" (Sedgwick, Epistemology 74). The rhetorical equation of secrecy and homosexuality is the subject of this chapter, yet in ways that are distinct from both Foucault's analysis of the psychoanalytic confession and Sedgwick's treatment of the closet in literary documents. If Foucault displays how "sexuality" emerged historically, and if Sedgwick demonstrates the damaging effects of power that result from the predominance of sexual object choice and its structuring of the closet, then this chapter returns to the discursive exclusions, constitutive excesses, and conceptual struggles that are manifest in this historical moment.
The Rhetorical Secret
Reading and Knowing: Modern Performances of Homosexual Identity
Mapping the struggles inherent to male homosexuality's descent in the modern era, I follow Sedgwick's observation that Herman Melville's Billy Budd provides access to the "texture" of "a particular historical moment" (Epistemology 91). Melville's final novel, Billy Budd was drafted in 1891, yet it wasn't published until 1924. Although the story is set aboard a British naval vessel in 1790, its historical accuracy and portrayal of naval law have been criticized (Sealts 417–419). The representational significance of Billy Budd thus appears to lie within its ideological context and its possible connection to Melville's personal feelings of loneliness toward the end of his life (Martin 95–102). With regard to the novel's historical context, literary critic F. O. Matthiessen concluded, "By turning to such [historical] material Melville made clear that his thought was not bounded by a narrow nationalism, that the important thing was the inherent tragic quality, no matter where or when it was found. As he said in one of the prefaces to his verse: 'It is not the purpose of literature to purvey news. For news consult the Almanac de Gotha'" (501).
The story itself, once stripped of its bypaths and mysteriousness, is quite simple. Transferred to the Bellipotent from another warship, Billy Budd—described as a paragon of beauty and strength—is introduced to a world of power and discipline, represented in the figures of Captain Vere and master-at-arms John Claggart. Witnessing scenes of punishment and the exercise of authority, Billy is quickly instructed into obedience and docility. One night, Billy is roused from his sleep by a stranger who bids him to meet him at a secluded part of the ship. Once there, the stranger invites Billy to join a gang of mutinous sailors, a proposition that Billy vehemently rejects. Sometime later, however, John Claggart reports the potential mutiny to Captain Vere and names Billy Budd as one of the key conspirators. To resolve the issue, Vere calls upon Billy to defend himself against such charges. Later that day, within theconfines of Vere's cabin, Claggart accuses Billy directly. Vere commands Billy to defend himself. Unable to speak, due to his uncontrollable stutter, Billy strikes Claggart, murdering him. Following the strict martial code, against his personal feelings about the matter, Vere orders Billy Budd's execution.
Melville's tale of mutiny, however, has evoked diverse and conflicting interpretations, from symbolizing the religious conflict between good and evil to providing social- political commentary on capital punishment (Sealts 421–424). It was F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance that, in 1941, introduced Melville's work into the canon of American literature and the study of American culture more generally (Bergson; Pease). Moreover, Matthiessen's seminal study of American literature presented what David Bergman has called "a covert celebration of the homosexual artist" (94). "Matthiessen," Bergman argues, "erected in American Renaissance virtually a gay canon of American literature" (96). Matthiessen's criticism thus renders Billy Budd, among other literary works, a significant part of American culture and a representation of queer American culture. Georges-Michel Sarotte, for example, contends that Melville's oeuvre is "essential to any discussion of the homosexual in the American novel before the 1940's" (12). Sedgwick's reading of Billy Budd in Epistemology of the Closet thus provides entry into the discursive world in which modern homosexuality was conceived.
Universalizing and Minoritizing Homosexuality
The birth of modern male homosexuality, Sedgwick argues, is wrought with competing accounts of identity, namely, universalizing and minoritizing, which produce particular effects of paranoid homophobic power. Sedgwick locates modern male homosexuality within a regime of power that is at once repressive and productive, at once "murderous" and "generative" (Epistemology 90). Engaging the texture of modern male homosexuality, Sedgwick's reading of Melville's Billy Budd exposes the repressive effects of the closet and its epistemology, the struggle between universalizing and minoritizing accounts of homosexuality. More specifically, she argues, masculinist-homosocial regimes of power must repress their own homoerotic dimension in order to come into being. In one account, homoerotic desire is universal aboard the Bellipotent, for as Sedgwick notes, "[E]very impulse of every person in this book that could at all be called desire could be called homosexual desire, being directed by men exclusively toward men" (92). In the minoritizing account, on the other hand, the same-sex desire that appears to be everywhere is cast as "mutiny," as a threat aboard the ship Homosociality [with its presumed heterosexuality]. Sedgwick's primary line of questioning reveals the tension between these accounts of male homosexual desire: "Is men's desire for other men the great preservative of the masculinist hierarchies of Western culture, or is it among the most potent of the threats against them" (93)? Sedgwick later suggests: "A better way of asking the question might then be, What are the operations necessary to deploy male-male desire as the glue rather than as the solvent of a hierarchical male disciplinary order" (94)? These operations, it becomes clear, are repressive enactments of power.
Consider the title of Sedgwick's chapter on Billy Budd, "After the Homosexual" (Epistemology 91), which claims to identify "the most murderous plots of our culture" (90). Power is thus set against desire in a repressive relation. Robert Martin's discussion of the homoerotic in Billy Budd comes to the identical conclusion: "[This is] a tale that could bear witness to the power of eros and its conflict with authority ... Power depends, in Billy Budd, on the suppression of eros" (124). Billy Budd renders theatrical, in Sedgwick's terms, "the fantasy trajectory toward a life after the homosexual" (127) or the contemporary "genocidal fantasy" of Western culture (129). This repressive relation between power and eros is central to Sedgwick's thesis on universalizing and minoritizing accounts of male homosexual identity. The "murderous plot" of Billy Budd performs two different, yet compatible operations or modes of repression: I) phobia and 2) display (Epistemology 104). The first of these is the repression of the self by the self. This internalized homophobia, embodied in John Claggart, is initially enacted when he accuses Billy of mutinous engagement (a metaphor for homosexuality). Claggart's homosexual desire is ultimately repressed through his murder. The second type of repression, performed by Captain Vere, is the repression of the homosexual self by others. This display of power is performed thrice: Billy witnessing a formal gangway-punishment, Billy striking and killing Claggart, and Billy's own execution at the end of the story.
Whether it is read as a tale about capital punishment or as a tale about homophobic violence, Billy Budd is often received as a story about power, repressive power at that. And at some level, Melville's story is indeed such a tale. Barbara Johnson, in her analysis of Billy Budd, argues, "[I]t is reading, as much as killing, that is at the heart of Melville's story" (238). Johnson's comment suggests that the narrative also displays specific modes of reading and knowing. Billy Budd is as much about the production of knowledge as it is about the display of power. Sedgwick's analysis probes further, disclosing the homosexual-homophobic implications of the closet, as a way of reading and knowing the world, such that the production of knowledge about homosexuality is necessarily linked to the display of homophobic power. But how does this relationship between knowledge and power become invisible, normalized beyond reproach? How does the epistemology of the closet appear to be other than what it is? How does the rhetorical secret persuade us of its innocence rather than revealing its undeniable guilt? Returning to Sedgwick's commentary on the closet, I explore these questions as a matter of rhetoric.
The Temporality of Ignorance
The temporal structure of secrecy/disclosure is evident in Sedgwick's discussion of the relationship between "ignorance" and "knowledge." Ignorance is characterized in two conflicting ways, one that treats it as a simple lack of knowledge [a matter of repression] and one that conceptualizes it as a claim [a matter of invention]. Ignorance, as a lack of knowledge, is illustrated through the instance of U.S. President Ronald Reagan lacking linguistic skills in his interactions with Mitterrand (Epistemology 4). Because Reagan is merely "ignorant," his hypothetical learning of the French language in the future (presuming he learned it well) would not alter the language itself. The French language, previously unknown by Reagan, would not in itself change upon being learned. This instance of not knowing a foreign tongue stands in marked contrast to the examples that follow. Sedgwick notes, "The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which male sexuality receives careful education)" (5). This second type of ignorance is also demonstrated in cases of workplace discrimination against persons with AIDS in which firing them is justified by a claim to ignorance of that medical fact (5). Ignorance, in such situations, is a rhetorical invention rather than the simple lack of some incontestable information, such as a foreign language. Ignorance can thus function as if it were a "stubborn fact" even though it might be, on the contrary, "a pretense," its invention in discourse (6). Through these inventions of ignorance, misogyny, AIDS-phobia and homophobia are effectively displaced—in the closet—on the other side of secrecy and disclosure. Relations of power clearly operate in these instances yet advance the claim of "not guilty." How do we arrive at this verdict? How do we turn a blind eye to the effects of power?
The temporal structure of the rhetorical secret enables both forms of ignorance to function in the conventional discourse of lesbian and gay politics. It allows us to believe that the contents of the secret remain unaffected by their disclosure, and that simply acknowledging the facts of homosexuality and homophobia will remedy the social effects of heteronormative power. It assumes that the revelatory act of coming out will secure the rights of citizenship and that the documentation of homophobia will provide legal recourse against it. The opening pages of Epistemology of the Closet seem to reference the popular fantasy of lesbian and gay politics that endows the public act of coming out with the capacity to liberate: "Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it carries dangers with it as well ... [the] privileging of ignorance as an originary [productive], passive innocence" (7). Sedgwick thus disavows ignorance's status as a stubborn fact or mere lack of knowledge, disavows accounts in which ignorance is seen as "a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness" or "pieces of the originary dark" (8). The rationale derives from Foucault's repression hypothesis: "[A] writer who appeals too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive wattage on any question of power seems, now, naïve" (7). The rhetorical secret, therefore, functions retroactively. Its temporal structure, the belief that secretive contents precede their disclosure, attributes a certain "truth" status to the contents themselves. In other words, disclosure does not alter or change the secret contents, for in actuality they existed prior to the act of disclosure. Under this discursive regime, we remain unable to question the relations of power that are at work in the production of knowledge and the invention of ignorance. Rather than rely upon the rhetorical secret's temporality, we must examine the ways in which the secret contents of the closet change upon disclosure—their modes of invention.
The Spatiality of Privacy
In addition to its temporality, the rhetorical secret relies upon the spatial relationship between public and private. Emerging as "the love that dares not speak its name," forever under the threat of repression, modern male homosexuality could only make public appearances under a rubric of codes (Beaver 104; Creech 77–78; Chauncey 288). Although what Charles E. Morris III has called "homosexual double-consciousness" might be considered a mechanism that simply reinforces the repressive nature of the closet (262), his analysis of literary critic F.O. Matthiessen encourages us to recognize the resistive potential in the "homosexual palimpsest." Passing, Morris optimistically argues, "affords obscured agency, and immersion in the mainstream, precisely so that one might swim against the tide, undermining the homophobic order of things" (263). Such agency, especially in oppressive contexts, requires the performance of the private in public, in a word—the closet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rhetorical Secrets by Davin Allen Grindstaff. Copyright © 2006 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
