The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the Pathology of Manhood

Author(s): David Van Leer

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 587-605
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343655
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The Beast of the Closet:
Homosociality
and the
Pathology
of Manhood
David Van Leer
Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick
is the most
sophisticated
student of
gender
issues
now
treating
the role of
homosexuality
in literature. In her book Between
Men:
English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and a number of sub-
sequent
articles,
she has taken the examination of homosexual themes
beyond
the
preliminary stage
of
consciousness-raising
and made it a
topic
of serious academic interest. Her
genius
for
conceptualization
in
particular
has uncovered in male-male
relationships
a series of
interpretive categories
that not
only
allow a more informed
understanding
of
homosexuality
but,
by locating homosexuality
within a
larger
sexual
dynamic, lay
the
foundation for a
truly
ecumenical
study
of
gender.
To belittle this
achievement would be sheer
ingratitude.
Her theoretical
vocabulary
will
surely
remain the
language
of
gay
studies for
years
to come.
Nevertheless,
in
virtually creating single-handedly
a
theory
of
gay literary
discourse,
Sedgwick
has also embedded in it certain
problematic assumptions-
some the inevitable result of her
position
as an
outsider;
others the mark
of her own
particular
interests. And while one would not want to undervalue
her
contribution,
some of these
assumptions
must be identified
(even
unpacked)
if
gay
studies are to continue to
expand.
1
Sedgwick
examines from an
explicitly
feminist,
implicitly
Marxist
perspective
the relation of
homosexuality
to more
general
social bonds
Critical
Inquiry
15
(Spring 1989)
? 1989
by
The
University
of
Chicago.
0093-1896/89/1503-0008$01.00.
All
rights
reserved.
587
588 David Van Leer
between members of the same sex
("male
homosocial
desires").
She
argues
that the
similarity
between
(socially acceptable)
homosocial desire and
(socially condemned)
homosexuality
lies at the root of much
homophobia.
Moreover,
she sees this tension as
misogynist
to the extent that battles
fought
over
patriarchy
within the homosocial world
automatically
exclude
women from that
patriarchal power.
Thus she
places homosexuality
and
its attendant
homophobia
within a wider
dynamic
of social
relationships.'
Yet even as
Sedgwick
invents a more
sophisticated
definition of
"homophobia,"
she
may permit misreadings
of a more
elementary
sort.
Her use of
vocabulary
is
troubling.
In a
slangy prose
that
regularly
juxtaposes James Hogg
and Louis
Lepke, Tennyson
and Howard
Keel,
references to the
"campiness"
of
Thackeray's "bitchy"
bachelors or the
"feminized" cuckolds of
Wycherley's
The
Country Wife
seem tame
enough.
Yet there is a
political
difference between the
jokes.
One can
burlesque
fifties musicals or
organized
crime with
impunity;
to refer to
sexually
embattled men with feminine
adjectives,
however,
is to reinforce a sexual
stereotype
that sees in the
supposed effeminacy
of homosexuals a
sign
of their deviance. Nor are women
empowered
when terms of female
degradation
like "bitch" are turned back
against
men: the ironic reversal
does not
challenge
the terms'
validity
but reaffirms
it,
showing they
have
an even wider
range
of
applicability
than had been
thought.
This
injudicious
use of terms is reinforced
by Sedgwick's
ambivalent
relation to sexual cliches. Her
point throughout,
of
course,
is to overturn
stereotypes,
both
by showing
how the relations between men are much
more
complex
than the terms "homosexual" and
"homophobic" imply,
and
by demonstrating
how all such
categories
are themselves historical
constructions.
Nevertheless,
in her attention to social
contexts,
Sedgwick
overinvests in
(and
therefore
tacitly valorizes)
the
very stereotypes
she
rejects. Early
in her
book,
she
says
of classical
homosexuality:
"The
virility
of the homosexual orientation of male desire seemed as self-evident to
the ancient
Spartans,
and
perhaps
to
Whitman,
as its
effeminacy
seems
in
contemporary popular
culture."2 While
Sedgwick clearly distinguishes
1.
Throughout my analysis,
I use "homosexual" and
"gay" exclusively
in reference to
male
sexuality.
I do so in
part
to echo
Sedgwick's emphasis
and in
part
because the
logic
of
my
own
argument
does not
empower
me to
speak
on female
homosexuality.
2. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Between Men:
English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire
(New York, 1985),
pp.
26-27;
hereafter abbreviated BM.
David Van Leer is associate
professor
of
English
and American
literature at the
University
of
California,
Davis. He is the author of
Emerson's
Epistemology:
The
Argument of
the
Essays
(1986)
and articles on
American literature and
popular
culture.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 589
herself from
"contemporary popular
culture,"
her
very
introduction of
the
stereotype may
invite
misinterpretation.
Later,
in
describing
the in-
fluence of Oscar Wilde on American middle-class
homosexuality,
she
argues
that "its
strongest
associations,
as we have
noted,
are with
effeminacy,
transvestism,
promiscuity, prostitution,
continental
European
culture,
and the arts"
(BM,
p.
173).
This
list,
a curious mix
by any
account,
does
not undercut itself as did the
previous linking
of homosexuals and ef-
feminacy;
and
by failing
to differentiate the
"popular"
view from her
own,
Sedgwick implicitly
affirms the
accuracy
of the "associations."
Sedgwick surely
has no overt desire to reinstate these
stereotypes.
In her conclusion she demonstrates their inherent falseness
by
decon-
structing
as ahistorical and antisocial the
category
of the "natural" on
which
they
all
depend:
"The 'natural'
effeminacy
of male
homosexuals,
their 'natural'
hypervirility,
their 'natural' hatred of
women,
their 'natural'
identification with women-this
always-applicable
reservoir of contra-
dictory
intuitions,
to which our
society
is
heir,
must not be mistaken for
a tool of
analysis"
(BM,
p.
215).
Yet cliches are
powerful,
if
only
in their
linguistic compactness;
even when
they
are introduced as
fallacious,
that
power
tends to
linger.
Four
pages
before this
disclaimer,
for
example,
Sedgwick argues
that
"Symonds'
lack of interest in women as sexual
partners
seems to have allowed him to
accept unquestioningly
some of
the most conservative
aspects
of his
society's stylized
and
constricting
view of them."
Although
she admits a few sentences later that "his
misogyny
was not
greater
and
may
well have been less than that of an
identically
situated heterosexual man"
(BM,
p.
211),
the
interpretive damage
is
already
done;
we come
away
from the
chapter
with the "natural" de-
constructed,
but with
Symonds'
aberrant
sexuality
still the cause of a
prejudice
he shared with most of his male
contemporaries.
Sedgwick's
use of
prejudicial terminology
and
implicit
reinforcement
of sexual
stereotypes
is
aggravated by
her relation to her evidence.
Although
her use of feminist and Marxist criticism is of a
very high
order,
she does
not show an
equivalent
care when
treating
historical sources. In
analyzing
the motif of male
rape
in late
nineteenth-century
fiction,
especially
in
Dickens,
she builds to T. E. Lawrence's
graphic description
of his
rape
by
the Turks in Seven Pillars
of
Wisdom.
Sedgwick emphasizes
the literariness
of this
description
of a "real
rape,"
and its troubled relation to
English
notions of
empire
and the oriental. One
might,
of
course,
challenge
the
general assumption
that
autobiography
as a
genre
deals with the real
rather than the
literary. Sedgwick's willingness
to
accept
the
reliability
of this
particular autobiographical
account, however,
is even more
ques-
tionable. "Lawrence of Arabia" has
always
been a
problematic figure,
both for his sexual
ambiguity
and for his
willingness
to
cooperate
(at
least)
with the
mythic misrepresentations
of Lowell Thomas and other
romanticizers. That Lawrence
may
be an active
propagator
of the homo-
Critical
Inquiry
590 David Van Leer
phobic
discourse
Sedgwick
is
trying
to deconstruct (and that the notorious
"real"
rape may
not have taken
place,
at least
quite
as Lawrence describes
it)
compromises
his value as cultural barometer
(BM,
pp.
193-96).3
A similar looseness informs the two
chapters
on the
gothic
novel,
where
many
of the central concerns of the book come
together. Sedgwick
argues
that the
gothic
novel arose at
roughly
the same time that ho-
mosexuality
in
England
took on the character of a distinct subculture.
The rise of this subculture
was,
she
insists,
part
of a
larger process
of
definition
involving
not
only
all homosocial bonds between men but also
the relation between the sexes in modern
society.
To characterize these
tensions,
Sedgwick
introduces one of her most useful
terms,
"homosexual
panic":
the
homophobic
blackmail
experienced by
men who fear that
their "homosocial bonds"
might
be
perceived
as
(or
even
actually
be)
antisocial
"homosexuality."
She finds the fictional
equivalent
of this
homosexual
panic
in the characteristic
plot
of the
"paranoid gothic,"
in
which a man stands in a
life-threatening
relation to a male double
(BM,
pp.
88-92).
The
linking
of homosexual
panic
and the
gothic
novel to
develop
a
"homophobic
thematics" is an
interpretive
move of considerable
power,
both for
gay literary theory
and for a
theory
of the
gothic.
Yet the first
of these
chapters,
"Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual
Panic,"
is an
anomaly,
at least in form. One of the few
chapters
not focused on
a
specific
text,
this
piece actually
serves as a
practical
introduction to
Sedgwick's
whole
book,
comparable
in content
(though
not in
placement)
to the more theoretical introductions of her first two
chapters.
The first
half of the
chapter
focuses on Alan
Bray's study
of the rise of a homosexual
subculture in Restoration
England. Although agreeing
with
Bray's
facts,
Sedgwick
denies his conclusion that the homosexual subculture
represented
by
the
"molly
houses" cut across class lines. In
part, Sedgwick
feels that
such statistics
ignore
the
degree
to which
homosexuality
was
experienced
differently by
the various classes: aristocrats could
easily
hide their activities
while the middle class could not. But more
important,
she
argues
that
by failing
to locate the "homosexual" within the
larger
categories
of the
"homosocial" and even
"society," Bray
reifies the
category
of "homosex-
uality"
before it is
socially
constituted
(BM,
pp.
83-87).4
For
Sedgwick,
3. For the
passage
in
Lawrence,
see
chap.
80 of Seven Pillars
of
Wisdom,
A
Triumph
(Garden
City,
N.Y., 1935),
pp.
441-47. For reservations about Lawrence's
accuracy
in
describing
the
incident, see,
among
others,
Phillip Knightley
and Colin
Simpson,
The Secret
Lives
of
Lawrence
of
Arabia
(New York, 1970),
pp.
237-48.
4. See Alan
Bray, Homosexuality
in Renaissance
England
(London, 1982),
esp. pp.
81-
114. For a more
positive
evaluation,
one which finds
Bray's
definition of
"society" compatible
with the reviewer's
Marxism,
see
Christopher
Hill,
"Male
Homosexuality
in
17th-century
England,"
The Collected
Essays of Christopher
Hill,
3 vols.
(Amherst, Mass., 1985-86):
3:226-35.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 591
the issue of
homosexuality
cannot be
profitably
studied
apart
from what
she earlier called the
"larger question
of 'sexual
politics'"
(BM,
p.
5),
in
this
case,
the sexualization of a
political
or social
relationship.
It is unclear
why
an account not
generally
concerned with
previous
scholarship pauses
over the obvious
methodological
naivete of an
analysis
whose basic
assumptions
are so
congenial
to its own. But the
oddity
of
Sedgwick's lengthy qualification
of
Bray signals
a more
general
tension
in the
argumentative
tactics of the whole
chapter.
In the
remaining
half
of the
chapter, Sedgwick, borrowing
from Freud's account of Dr.
Schreber,
defines homosexual
panic
in terms of its
literary
embodiment in the
paranoid gothic. Discovering
in this
panic
the rudiments of a
"homophobic
thematics,"
she concludes:
The Gothic novel
crystallized
for
English
audiences the terms of a
dialectic between male
homosexuality
and
homophobia,
in which
homophobia appeared thematically
in
paranoid plots.
Not until
the late-Victorian Gothic did a
comparable body
of homosexual
thematics
emerge clearly,
however. In earlier Gothic
fiction,
the
associations with male
homosexuality
were
grounded
most
visibly
in the lives of a few
authors,
and
only
rather
sketchily
in their
works.
[BM,
p.
92]
The
analysis
is
inconclusive,
both in its shift of focus from the homosocial
to the homosexual and in its delineation of the audience's relation to a
homosexual thematics.
But more
important,
the final admission that this thematics rests less
on the works than on the sexual
preferences
of the authors introduces
a
disconcerting
ad hominem
argument.
Earlier in the same
paragraph,
Sedgwick began
to talk for the first
(and
in her book
virtually
the
only)
time about the
sexuality
of the authors. Three of the
major gothic
writers
were
perhaps gay:
in
Sedgwick's characteristically
comic
phrase,
"Beckford
notoriously,
Lewis
probably, Walpole iffily"
(BM,
p.
92).
Yet the authors
Sedgwick
identifies as
gay
are not those who wrote the novels she identifies
as
paranoid. Although Sedgwick
muddies the issue
by naming
in one
case the authors and in the other the novel
titles,
all the novels she
mentions are written
by
heterosexual
men,
except
for the two written
by
heterosexual women. The issue is not
really
Mrs. Radcliffe's relation
to homosexual
panic (although
one would like to hear how that
might
work).
Instead one wonders what
positive purpose
is served
by naming
(as
gay)
writers who have no direct relation to the
argument. Sedgwick's
answer-that readers knew some authors to be
gay,
other
plots
to be
(faintly) homophobic,
and then conflated the two
categories-seems
un-
likely,
if not inconsistent: it
requires
that the audience be
preoccupied
with the
very category
of the homosexual which
Sedgwick
in
attacking
Bray
claims does not
yet
exist. Yet the
only
other
answer,
that
Sedgwick
Critical
Inquiry
592 David Van Leer
herself
enjoys naming
the
names,
does not
argue
well for her own
image
of
homosexuality.
2
In
general
then one can
identify
two
problematic
moves in
Sedgwick's
analysis
of homosocial bonds: her desire to relate
homosexuality
to
"larger
questions"
of
society
and
sexuality,
and her
attempt
to thematize homo-
phobia
and the homosexual/homosocial bonds that underwrite it as
"homosexual
panic."
To understand more
precisely
how these concerns
affect her account of
homosexuality
in novels and
authors, however,
we
must consider how
they
inform an extended
reading-of Henry James'
"The Beast in the
Jungle."5
James'
short
story
concerns
John
Marcher's search with his friend
May
Bartram for the
"'something
rare and
strange, possibly prodigious
and terrible'" that he feels his
special destiny,
his "beast."6 In the final
chapter,
while
visiting May's grave,
he sees visible in the face of another
mourner the emotional
intensity
that he himself has lacked. Marcher
concludes that his fate is an
empty
one,
that "he had been the man of
his
time,
the
man,
to whom
nothing
on earth was to have
happened."
This vision of
emptiness,
at
May's grave,
is often connected with his
failure to love
her,
a love that Marcher feels would have allowed him to
"escape"
into "life."7 It is this last
move,
with its
universalizing equation
of the
"everything"
that Marcher has missed with the
spurious
universal
of
prescribed
heterosexual
desire,
that
Sedgwick
wishes to
challenge.
Recontextualizing
the
story
within both homosocial tensions and
(less
emphatically)
James'
own sexual
ambivalence,
Sedgwick argues
that
the absence in Marcher's life is not
general
but
specific.
His secret is in
fact two secrets: first the belief in his
specialness,
which he shares
only
with
May;
and second the nature of that
specialness,
a
mystery
to
everyone
including
Marcher.
Sedgwick
then associates the
unnameability
of that
second secret with the less
mysterious
but
equally
unnameable "Love
that dare not
speak
its name." This reduction
works,
according
to
Sedgwick,
both
ways.
Not
only
does the notion of the
mysterious effectively
silence
homosexuality,
but the
implication
that all silences are homosexual reduces
homosexual
meaning
to a
single thing,
a "We Know What That Means."
5. See
Sedgwick,
"The Beast in the Closet:
James
and the
Writing
of Homosexual
Panic,"
in
Sex, Politics,
and Science in the
Nineteenth-Century
Novel: Selected
Papers
from
the
English
Institute, 1983-84, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell
(Baltimore, 1986),
pp.
148-86;
hereafter
abbreviated "BC."
6.
Henry
James,
"The Beast in the
Jungle,"
The
Complete
Tales
of Henry James,
ed. Leon
Edel,
12 vols.
(London, 1962-64),
11:359.
7.
Ibid.,
11:401. Like
many
critics of the
story, Sedgwick
focuses on the final
scene,
whose
easy
resolution of Marcher's
problem
she finds
unconvincing.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 593
Thus Marcher's outer
secret,
"the secret of
having
a
secret,"
functions
as a closet within which hides not a secret homosexual but "the homosexual
secret-the closet of
imagining
a homosexual secret"
("BC,"
p.
174).
This
reading
offers a
healthy
correction to the
impressionistic
meta-
physical readings
of Marcher's absence as divorced from
any
context,
either his own or his author's. Yet
Sedgwick's
characterization of homosexual
panic
as a double secret has its own limitations. The
doubling
of the
secret,
though
a literal
reading
of the
situation,
reduces too
easily
to the
claim that Marcher's secret is
simply homosexuality.
(It
is in this form
that Ruth Bernard
Yeazell,
the editor of the
anthology,
summarizes the
argument
in her introduction.)8 The
precise
identification of Marcher's
beast
may
even have the
paradoxical
effect of
making
him seem less
obtuse: his
ignorance
is
psychologically
understandable if there is a real
beast he is
avoiding.
But most
important, Sedgwick's approach
fails to take
seriously enough
the dilemma of the
panic
itself.
Sedgwick implies
that
greater self-knowledge
would
help
Marcher overcome his
panic.
Yet both our
understanding
of
the historical moment and her own reconstruction of it show the
difficulty
(perhaps
the
impossibility)
of such a resolution. Resolution of the
panic
in the direction of overt
homosexuality
was at the time of the
story
theoretically possible
but
socially
suicidal.
Locating
the
story
when "an
embodied male-homosexual thematics has ... a
precisely
liminal
presence,"
epitomized by
the "Wilde trials"
("BC,"
p.
169),
Sedgwick acknowledges
the existence of Wilde's "thematic discourse" without
admitting
the
punitive
authority
of its
setting.
Marcher,
like
Wilde,
could
triumph
over his
panic
in this direction
only by leaving
the closet for the
gaol.
The alternative
choice of heterosexual
love, however,
is
likely
to look more
expedient
than
self-knowledgeable
in this context. Far from
resolving
the individual's
panic,
it would
only
direct that
panic
outward;
and
questions
about "which
do I desire?" would
merely
redefine themselves as a similar
anxiety
about
"why
do I desire what I
desire,
or
pretend
to?" Given such a
dilemma,
Marcher's
uncertainty
seems less
self-ignorance
than
political
and
epis-
temological self-preservation.
In
underestimating
the
inescapability
of the
panic, Sedgwick similarly
overestimates the
salutary
effect of Marcher's
confidante,
May. Sedgwick
realizes,
of
course,
that her
reading
of Marcher's secret alters
May
as
well:
It leaves us in
danger
of
figuring May
Bartram,
or more
generally
the woman in
heterosexuality,
as
only
the
exact,
heroic
supplement
to the murderous enforcements of male
homophobic/homosocial
self-ignorance.
"The
Fox,"
Emily
Dickinson
wrote,
"fits the Hound."
8. See
Yeazell, "Introduction," Sex, Politics,
and Science in the
Nineteenth-Century
Novel,
p.
xi.
Critical
Inquiry
594 David Van Leer
It would be
only
too
easy
to describe
May
Bartram as the fox that
most
irreducibly
fits this
particular
hound.
["BC,"
pp.
178-79]
Yet her "harder"
descriptions
are
unconvincing. Sedgwick's rejection
of
the
graveside
revelation as a male
conspiracy
about "what
[May] Really
Wanted and what she
Really
Needed"
places May
at the center of a scene
that in fact
ignores
her wants and needs
("BC,"
p.
168).
And the claim
that
May's imprisonment
"is founded on
[Marcher's]
inability
to
perceive
or value her as a
person beyond
her
complicity
in his view of his own
predicament" simultaneously
admits and denies the
priority
of
May's
complicity
("BC,"
p.
176).
The embattled nature of these two defenses
suggests Sedgwick's
difficulty
in
demonstrating
Marcher's victimization of
May
without
labeling
May
herself a victim.
Sedgwick's
third
(and
most
successful)
defense
argues
that while
May
does
help
Marcher,
this
help
is not the
object
of
her own desire. Instead, "both the care and the
creativity
of her investment
in
him,
the
imaginative
reach of her
fostering
his homosexual
potential
as a route back to his truer
perception
of
herself,
are forms of
gender-
political
resilience in her"
("BC,"
p.
180).
Yet even this
reading
of
May's
"resilience" is troublesome.
Perhaps,
as
Sedgwick
claims,
"it is
always
open
to women to know
something
that it is much more
dangerous
for
any
nonhomosexual-identified man to know"
("BC,"
p.
179).
Yet this
truth
only
marks the
degree
to which women do not have
any
stake in
homosexual
panic,
and
May's
resilience is built on her ultimate indifference
to Marcher's dilemma.
Moreover,
to establish this
resilience,
Sedgwick
must redefine the homosexual
panic
as "homosexual
potential."
It is
necessary
at this
point
to admit how
very
odd a view of
May
has been constructed.
May,
who never before in criticism neeeded a
reason for her
actions,
now needs to be
protected
from the obvious ones.
Moreover,
her
position
(as
Sedgwick presents
it)
is as
epistemologically
imprecise
as Marcher's reformation is
unlikely. May's
desire to nurture
Marcher's
progress
from
self-ignorance
to
self-knowledge ignores
the
epistemic privacy
of the self: her
"knowledge"
of him as other is different
in kind from his own as
self;
and while she
may
understand better than
Marcher the content of his
self,
she cannot better understand
(or
even
"know" at
all)
his
experience
of it as self. Thus
any
belief in
May's "greater
knowledge,"
far from
acknowledging
her
"cognitive advantage," merely
commits the same error of "We Know What That Means" that
Sedgwick
earlier attacks as
homophobic
reductionism.
The awkwardness of
Sedgwick's reading
of
May suggests
that more
is at stake than is
immediately apparent. Following directly
on the
passage
quoted
earlier,
where she fears that
May's
fox
may simply
fit Marcher's
hound,
Sedgwick
continues:
She seems the woman
(don't
we all know
them?)
who has not
only
the most delicate nose for but the most
potent
attraction toward
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 595
men who are at crises of homosexual
panic
. .
.-Though
for that
matter,
won't most women admit that an
arousing
nimbus,
an
excessively
refluent and
dangerous
maelstrom of eroticism somehow
attends men in
general
at such
moments,
even otherwise
boring
men?
["BC,"
p.
179]
The kind of woman discussed here is
stigmatized
in
gay slang
with the
unpleasant
term
"fag hag."
The
ugliness
of the
term, however,
merely
underlines the self-hatred
gay
men embed in the
concept.
Directed outward
at
women,
the hatred is
explicitly misogynist.
But whatever the sources
of other forms of
gay misogyny,
this
concept
of the
"fag hag,"
with its
particular contempt
for the
sympathetic
female,
arises
primarily
from a
self-contempt
so intense as to
reject
all
incoming
affection: the
gay
man
presupposes
himself to be so
repulsive
that the affection of
any
woman
is read as a mark of her
abnormality,
a
psychotic
attraction to the
inherently
unlovable.
(A
similar catch-22 infects
any straight
man's
friendship: by
liking
a
gay
man,
the heterosexual male
proves
himself
secretly gay,
and
therefore
contemptible.)
It is
possible
that
having
sexualized Marcher's
situation,
Sedgwick
needs to defend
May
from what she feels is the attendant sexual cliche.
Yet
despite
her dismissal she does not
successfully distinguish
May's
nur-
turing
role from the "too
easy" reading.
She directs the blame at Marcher:
"It is
only through
his
coming
out of the closet-whether as a homosexual
man,
or as a man with a less
exclusively
defined
sexuality
that nevertheless
admits the
possibility
of desires for other men-that Marcher could even
begin
to
perceive
the attention of a woman as
anything
other than a
terrifying
demand or a
devaluing complicity"
("BC,"
p.
176).
Yet this
reading
is too
harsh,
and not
merely
because no one could
escape
the
closet
Sedgwick
has defined. A
sexually
uncertain man would in fact
probably
not view women as
"hags":
the minute he sees their
friendship
in terms of
complicity,
he has
already implicitly
resolved his
uncertainty
and moved from
panicked
heterosexual to
self-hating gay.
But more
important,
Marcher is not the one who has introduced this view of wom-
en.
By admitting
the
accuracy
of the
category-"(don't
we all know
them?)"-Sedgwick
herself concedes too
much,
as she does with the
homosexual
stereotypes
in her book. Rather than
simply denying
the
category
as
homophobic
and
misogynist,
she
implies
instead that there
indeed are
"fag hags,"
and even that "most women" feel this
pull
at
times,
though May
is not one in this
story.
Sedgwick
insists on the
reality
of the
ugly category
to belittle not
women but
men, who,
apart
from the attendant eroticism of these moments
of
panic,
are "otherwise
boring."
And to understand her commitment
to the unfortunate
concept,
we must turn from
May
to
Marcher,
to look
not into his closet but at it. The notion of
"coming
out of the
closet,"
unlike that of the
hag,
seems
relatively
affirmative. It assumes that self-
knowledge naturally
takes the form of
public expression.
Until one
publicly
Critical
Inquiry
596 David Van Leer
identifies the self as
"Other,"
society triumphs by claiming
that
everyone
conforms to the norm. The millennial
hope
is that a
statistically significant
other will be redefined as
normal;
if
enough
admirable men declare their
homosexuality,
then the masses will be educated out of their
homophobia.
As with most
consciousness-raising slogans,
the
political prediction
is
probably
too
optimistic.
The statistical
predominance
of females has
not,
for
example,
overturned the
assumption
that the
majority
is male.
Nor was the historian Michel Foucault able to lend his
prestige
to homo-
sexual culture: to call even Foucault's
history
of
sexuality "gay"
would
for most scholars be to diminish his individual
achievement;
and
though
"out of the
closet,"
he remains for the heterosexual establishment
sig-
nificantly
homosexual
only
in his death.9 But more
important,
the
political
naivete of closet rhetoric
may
mask a more harmful
psychological
self-
destructiveness.
Explanation presupposes
the need for
explanation;
and
public
confessions of one's otherness
may only
reinforce
society's
sense
of
normalcy. Coming
out of the closet
may
be an act not of self-affirmation
but of
self-flagellation,
less a self-identification than an identification of
oneself as the
enemy.
To someone
fully adjusted
to his
sexuality,
who
does not
accept
the social definition of the
normal,
there
simply
is no
closet to leave.
The notion of the closet
Sedgwick
inherits from
gay propaganda
is,
then,
itself
problematic.
In
assimilating
it to her
"homophobic
thematics,"
moreover,
Sedgwick
shifts the
emphasis
from
self-acceptance
to the
pre-
liminary stage
of
self-knowledge.
Not the closet in which a homosexual
traditionally
hides from
public persecution, Sedgwick's
"closet" is instead
the mere
possibility
of homosexual
meaning,
the "closet of
imagining
a
homosexual secret." The
problem
of
public expression
is
coupled
with
(and
finally
subsumed
by)
that of choice. As we have
seen,
this
psychol-
ogizing
of the dilemma
implicitly
denies
any practical
reason for
being
in the closet.
Moreover,
it
stigmatizes
as trauma what is for Marcher
merely private experience;
no one thinks of himself as in a
closet,
however
much others "know" him to be there.
The salient feature of
Sedgwick's
closet,
and its difference from the
closet of
gay propaganda,
is not
only
that there is no homosexual inside
it but that there must never be. Thus in some senses Yeazell's
misreading
of
Sedgwick's interpretation
is not erroneous but inevitable and
necessary.
Yeazell
merely
focuses on
Sedgwick's
most
striking
silence: her "homosexual
meaning"
can never mean
homosexuality.
In
redefining
the nature of
the
relationship
between Marcher and
May, Sedgwick ignores
the obvious
possibility
that Marcher
might
be
unanxiously gay
but
simply unwilling
9.
Perhaps
the clearest mark of this silence lies in the
popular
reviews of Foucault's
multivolume
history
of
sexuality. Gay
critics,
whatever their academic
discipline,
have been
chosen as
particularly
suited to review these volumes.
Few, however,
have in their reviews
made a
point
of either Foucault's sexual
preferences
or their own.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 597
to tell
May
of his
(dis)interests.
Such a
reading
of Marcher as
actively
homosexual is not a "better
explication";
it
probably
illumines the
story
less than
Sedgwick's
account. But
given
her own
presuppositions,
it is
one that
Sedgwick
should
consider,
if
only
to
reject.
That she
ignores
it
suggests
that in her
psychologized
closet
only
confused heterosexuals or
latent homosexuals can hide. The definition of
homosexuality
as an internal
problem
of
self-knowledge
rather than an external one of social intercourse
is itself her
entrapping
closet.
The
presence
of this
always-absent homosexuality
is felt most
clearly
in the most
extravagant
of
Sedgwick's analyses:
her account of the noncruise
in the
graveyard.
In
Sedgwick's reading,
Marcher's final
turning away
from the
grief-stricken
man in the
graveyard
is more
precisely
"his desire
for the male face"
only
afterward turned into "an envious identification
with male loss"
("BC,"
p.
182).
The
path
traveled
by
Marcher's desire in this brief and
cryptic
non-encounter reenacts a classic
trajectory
of male entitlement.
Marcher
begins
with the
possibility
of desire
for
the man.... De-
flecting
that desire under a fear of
profanation,
he then
replaces
it with
envy,
with an
identification
with the man in that man's
(baffled)
desire for some
other, female,
dead
object.
["BC,"
p.
181]
What is
striking
about this
reading, apart
from its studied
outrageousness,
is how little it has to do with the kind of sexual
anxiety previously
attributed
to Marcher. It
may
be that the
sequence
of man's-desire-for-man-sub-
sequently-deflected
is a "classic
trajectory
of male
entitlement";
it invokes
surely
the traditional model of the closet as a
place
to hide forbidden
love. It is
not, however,
the model of
Sedgwick's
closet of homosexual
panic,
where overt homosexual desire is avoided at all costs. The more
likely reading
in terms of homosexual
panic
would have Marcher first
experience
homosocial
grief, only
to
suppress
it for fear that it would
appear indistinguishable
from
(or
even
secretly be)
a form of
homosexuality.
And,
of
course,
once
again Sedgwick ignores
the
actively
homosexual
reading
that her
categories
seem to invite: Marcher turns
away
from the
man not in cowardice but because nice
gays
don't cruise
graveyards.
The final
paragraph
of
Sedgwick's
article
epitomizes
the
difficulty
she has
dealing
with untroubled forms of male
experience,
both
gay
and
straight.
When
Lytton Strachey's
claim to be a conscientious
objector
was
being
examined,
he was asked what he would do if a German
were to
try
to
rape
his sister. "I
should,"
he is said to have
replied,
"try
and
interpose my
own
body."
Not the
gay self-knowledge
but
the
heterosexual,
self-ignorant acting
out of
just
this
fantasy
ends
"The Beast in the
Jungle."
To face the
gaze
of the Beast would
Critical
Inquiry
598 David Van Leer
have
been,
for
Marcher,
to dissolve it. To face the "kind of
hunger
in the look" of the
grieving
man-to
explore
at all into the
sharper
lambencies of that encounter-would have been to dissolve the
closet.
Marcher, instead,
to the
very
end,
turns his
back-re-creating
a double scenario of homosexual
compulsion
and heterosexual
compulsion.
["BC,"
p.
182]
We need not mention
yet again
the
political
naivete of
believing
the
problem
of
sexuality
will dissolve when faced.
Still,
one must note the
disproportion
between
supposedly
twin
compulsions.
The "heterosexual
compulsion,"
as
Sedgwick
states in her
preceding paragraph,
is
society's
insistence on
heterosexuality
as
compulsory.
The "homosexual
compul-
sion," however,
not
previously explained,
seems an ominous
outgrowth
from what started as "homosexual
panic"
and
progressed
to "homosexual
potential."
It is unclear
exactly
where this
compulsion
lies,
except perhaps
in an
alleged promiscuity
that leads homosexuals to leave no
gravestone
unturned. That it does not lie in a
well-adjusted homosexuality
is clear
in
Sedgwick's
treatment of
Strachey.
She does not
merely squelch
his
campy joke by misapplying
it to a scene of
greater
seriousness;
by labeling
his
joke
a mark of
"gay self-knowledge"
(did
Strachey really
desire the
Hun?),
she
effectively
reduces
gay self-knowledge
to a
joke.
3
It would be foolish to attack with
high
seriousness the formulations
of a work whose mode is
comic,
however serious its content.
Nevertheless,
one must
acknowledge
the limits of
Sedgwick's categories.
To characterize
the
uncertainty
heterosexuals
experience
when unable to
distinguish
between
socially
sanctioned bonds and forbidden male
love,
Sedgwick
has
proposed
the embattled
(and
somewhat
internally
inconsistent)
category
of the homosexual
panic.
The unintentional result is to banish from her
discourse the
category
of the
healthy, well-adjusted
male homosexual
while
reintroducing
two chief
myths
of
gay self-contempt-the fag hag
and the closet
queen.
The
question
that remains is not
why
she has done
so,
but what
assumptions
buried in her otherwise
sympathetic readings
have unleashed these demons.
Part of the
problem
arises from
Sedgwick's
notion of historical context.
Although
not concerned with historical data as
such,
Sedgwick's study
borrows from Marxism and Foucault the belief that
concepts
must be
studied in their relation to the whole structure of
society.
For this
reason,
as we have
seen,
she
rejects Bray's analysis
of the subculture of the
molly
house. "So far as it is
possible
to do so without
minimizing
the
specificity
and
gravity
of
European
homosexual
oppression
and
identity,
it is an-
alytically important
to remember that the domination offered
by
this
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 599
strategy
is not
only
over a
minority population,
but over the bonds that
structure all social form"
(BM,
p.
87).
Yet her conclusion moves to the
"long
view" at an
inopportune
moment.
Although Sedgwick hopes
to
generalize
"without
minimizing
the
specificity
and
gravity"
of homosexual
oppression,
her shift in focus from a
specific strategy
of containment to
the whole
society
within which the
group
was contained
(and
which
experienced
the fallout of
containment)
necessarily
does minimize that
specificity.
Foucault's
categories
are,
of
course,
notorious for their
ability
to overlook the minutiae of historical
factuality.
Here, however,
the
gen-
eralization has a more immediate
political
drawback,
perhaps
because,
unlike
Foucault,
Sedgwick
does not
try
to "write in the
language"
of the
minority
she studies.10 It is one
thing
to claim that the motives and effects
of
oppression
extend
beyond
the realm of the
oppressed;
it is another
to
say
that the
object
of
oppression
is not the
oppressed
but
society
as a
whole.11
The limits of such
generalizations
are best seen in
Sedgwick's
use of
the word
"homosexual,"
and one
reading
would see her
reifying
"homo-
sexual" in much the
way Bray
does
"society."
But
again
the
political
effect
is more immediate. In
treating society
as a
single thing, Bray simplifies
the
dynamics
of
persecution:
not
everyone
in
society participates
in the
oppression;
and some members of
society
are in fact more the victims
of that
oppression
than its initiators. Yet it is true that homosexuals are
the victims of
oppression,
and whether the source of the
oppression
is
single
or
multiple,
univocal or
multivocal,
seems a
secondary
issue.
By
"homosexual,"
Sedgwick,
on the other
hand,
means the
concept
of the
homosexual as it came to be known from the Restoration on
down,
defined
by
friend and foe alike. This "homosexual" has a far more tenuous
relationship
to the
history
of homosexual individuals than does
Bray's
statistical characterization. It is the
concept,
not the sexual
preference,
that
plays
a
dynamic
role in
Sedgwick's
delineation of "the
masculine,"
"the
feminine,"
and "the homosocial." And it is this
conceptualization
that allows
Sedgwick
to
imagine
a "homosexual
panic"
without homo-
sexuals. The loss of individuals is
necessarily
attended
by
a loss in
sympathy:
10. For Foucault's desire to recover the lost
languages
of otherness
(or,
more
precisely,
to
study
the
archaeology
of their
silencing),
see Michel
Foucault,
Madness and Civilization:
A
History of Insanity
in the
Age of
Reason,
trans. Richard Howard
(New York, 1965),
pp.
x-
xi. That Foucault does not make a
parallel
claim for the discussions of
homosexuality
in
his
history
of
sexuality may
mark not
personal
reticence but his shift of focus from discourse
to
power.
11. A similar
reading
of women's
place
in
society
would
enrage
feminist
historians,
and in
literary
studies it
generates
such troublesome conclusions as the claim that Samuel
Richardson is the
greatest
"woman" writer.
Sedgwick
does,
in
fact,
outline in
passing
a
similar reduction of black
history,
which,
by identifying
the South's motive as "the control
of labor
power" (BM, p. 88),
brackets the
question
of racial hatred.
Critical
Inquiry
600 David Van Leer
whatever the true focus of
homophobia,
it is the
homosexual,
not "the
homosexual,"
who
gets
battered.
The troublesome
impersonality
of her
categories
is
compounded by
the two directions in which
Sedgwick
most
frequently generalizes.
In
focusing
on the
concept
of
homophobia,
she tends to internalize the
hatred,
both within texts
(as
"homophobic
thematics")
and within minds
(as
"homosexual
panic").
Such a
psychologization,
of
course,
comically
inverts Freud's notion of the relation between homosocial bonds and
homosexuality,
which treats the "homosocial"
largely
in terms of the
more fundamental "homosexual."12
By redefining
homosocial
bonding
as the master
category
of which overt
homosexuality
is a
subset,
Sedgwick
suggests
that homosexual
panic
is not abnormal but a
necessary stage
in
the
development
of all males.
Sedgwick's witty reworking
of
Freud, however,
creates new
problems,
especially
for her view of
homosexuality. Inverting
Freud
may merely
alter his
specific
conclusions without
challenging
his fundamental cat-
egories. Sedgwick's equation
of
paranoia
and
homosexuality
builds,
for
example,
on the
very analysis
of Dr. Schreber that
gay
scholars find
problematic
(BM,
pp.
20, 91-92). Moreover,
her inversion denies more
completely
than did Freud the social dimension of
homosexuality.
Freud's
characterization of male
bonding
as
repressed homosexuality
has
permitted
those
readings
that discover latent
homosexuality throughout
male re-
lationships
in literature. Whatever one thinks of such
readings, Sedgwick's
rejection
of them
stigmatizes
as
marginal any
form of
gay reading:
her
long
view of
homophobia
"allows us to read these novels as
explorations
of social and
gender
constitution as a
whole,
rather than of the internal
psychology
of a few individual men with a
'minority'
sexual orientation"
(BM,
p.
115).
Sedgwick immediately
admits that
just
such a universalization
has
traditionally
been used to belittle women authors
who,
like
Virginia
Woolf,
did
not,
like
Jane
Austen,
take all mankind for their
subject.
But
she offers no real
apology
for her
generalization.
Nor could she. For not
only
does she reduce the homosexual subculture to "a few individual
men,"
but she defines their
"homophobia"
as a
problem
not of social
persecution
but of "internal
psychology."
Thus in her account
homophobia
did not have to be
internalized;
it was never external in the first case.
The
only
real answer
Sedgwick
offers to this universalization is
gender-
linked: as
doubly
an
outsider,
she is
unlikely
to delineate "most author-
12. For this view of
homosexuality,
see Freud's
study
of Dr.
Schreber,
"Psychoanalytic
Notes
Upon
an
Autobiographical
Account of a Case of Paranoia
(Dementia Paranoides),"
Three Case
Histories,
ed.
Philip
Rieff
(New York, 1963),
pp.
162-68. For a homosexual
critique
(itself
both within the context of feminism and favorable to
Sedgwick's work),
see
Craig
Owens,
"Outlaws:
Gay
Men in
Feminism,"
in Men in
Feminism,
ed. Alice
Jardine
and
Paul Smith
(New
York and
London, 1987),
pp.
219-32. For a more detailed
account,
see
Freud's Three
Essays
on the
Theory of Sexuality,
ed. and trans.
James Strachey
(New York,
1962), pp.
2-14.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 601
itatively"
a male homosexual
literary
tradition
(BM,
pp.
115-16).
The
answer, however,
points
to the
problematic
character of her other
gen-
eralizing tendency,
her
yoking
of
homosexuality
and feminism. The re-
lation,
both
positive
and
negative,
between women and
gay
men has been
too often discussed to bear much
repetition.
Whatever the "natural"
affinity
of the two
groups,
however,
they may
not be so
easily
assimilated
one to the other.
Sedgwick's
announced
purpose
in her book is a
"larger
one of 'sexual
politics.'"
As a feminist writer
assuming
an audience of
feminist readers
(BM,
pp.
13, 19),
she
proposes
to
study
male homosocial
bonds
throughout
heterosexual
Europe
and "to use the
subject
of
sexuality
to show the usefulness of certain Marxist-feminist historical
categories
for
literary
criticism"
(BM,
p.
16).
Sedgwick's
assimilation of
gay
thematics to feminist
theory may
move
too
quickly.
The
implied
(and
sometimes
overt)
comparison
of
gays
and
women is
minimally castrating.
It is unclear that discrimination
against
homosexuals is best characterized as
"patriarchal oppression,"
that
Oedipus'
problems
with Laius are identical to Electra's with
Agamemnon
and
Aegisthus.
Nor is the conflation
fully
sensitive on the
ways
in which
gay
men do and do not have access to male
power:
one need not be
phallocentric
to notice that one has one. Most
important,
the
comparison
almost
inevitably
collapses
into a
cooptation,
both because of the natural self-interest of
any
author and because assimilation
always
annihilates the
specific
character
of the
minority. Perhaps Sedgwick's
claim that
homophobia
is
misogynist
does not mean to
deny
the extent that it is first and foremost
homophobic
(though
one doubts that
Sedgwick
would read the converse-that
misogyny
is
homophobic-as
a
corollary).
But even her characterization of the
bonds between feminism and
antihomophobia
as
"profound
and intuitable"
seem to
place
male
antihomophobes
within the "feminized" world of the
intuitive.
The limitations of this feminization are most obvious in
Sedgwick's
account of "male
rape."
The term is itself
prejudicial. Although
it is
possible
to
penetrate
a male without his
consent,
the act does not au-
tomatically
feminize him
(as
the word
"rape"
does).
The
power dynamics
of homosexual
intercourse,
and
by
extension of male
rape,
are different
from those of heterosexual intercourse.
Sedgwick unwittingly acknowledges
this
difficulty
when she tries to
untangle
the
imagery
of
passivity
associated
with the
alleged activity.
The association between
possession
and the control of the anus
must have
something
to do with an odd feature of the male
"rapes"
discussed in this
chapter
and the next:
except
in the one case of
literal
rape
[Lawrence
of
Arabia],
it is the
participant
who would
ordinarily
be termed
passive-the
one associated with the "iron
ring"
of the
sphincter-who
is
presented
as the
aggressor;
the
phallus
itself
barely figures
in these
"rapes."
[BM,
p.
225
n.8]
Critical
Inquiry
602 David Van Leer
The unobviousness of the
explanation
(not
to mention its anatomical
impossibility)
makes us wonder
why Sedgwick
does not
just
discard her
equation
of "iron
rings"
and anuses. But she seems to need these
rapes.
Earlier,
in
fact,
she had defined the homosexual
panic
as
comparable
to
female
rape.
The fact that what
goes
on at football
games,
in
fraternities,
at the
Bohemian
Grove,
and at climactic moments in war novels can
look,
with
only
a
slight
shift of
optic, quite startlingly
"homosexual,"
is not most
importantly
an
expression
of the
psychic origin
of
these institutions in a
repressed
or sublimated homosexual
genitality.
Instead,
it is the
coming
to
visibility
of the
normally implicit
terms
of a coercive double bind.
(It
might
be
compared
to the double
bind
surrounding rape
that
imprisons
American women: to dress
and behave
"attractively,"
i.e.,
as
prescribed,
is
always
also to be
"asking
for
it.")
For a man to be a man's man is
separated only by
an
invisible,
carefully
blurred,
always-already-crossed
line from
being
"interested in men."
[BM,
p.
89]
This
passage,
one of
Sedgwick's
central definitions of the homosocial
dilemma,
contains most of her standard
arguments:
the
indistinguishability
of
homosociality
and
homosexuality,
the
similarity
of this dilemma to
women's
problems,
even the
wittily
Freudian inversion of Freud. And
at its heart lies the
metaphor
of
rape:
the male who acts masculine is
stigmatized just
as is the woman whose
femininity
leads to violence.
What is most
interesting
about the
passage,
however,
is the
position
afforded male
homosexuality.
As
always homosexuality
is
marginalized,
placed
within scare
quotes
(as
a
sign
of its
phenomenality),
or reduced
to a
gonadal adjective.
And,
as
always, any continuity
between homo-
sexuality
and male
heterosexuality
is denied. But most
shocking
is its
role in the
parenthetical rape analogy. Throughout
her
analyses, Sedgwick
assumes the
insatiability
of
gay
men. In the
passage quoted
earlier,
she
claims that in male
rape
the
penetrated
man is the
aggressor.
Now in
her
"rape
ratio,"
she
implies
that
gay
men cannot even be violated. A
woman who dresses
appropriately
is said to invite
rape.
A man who acts
appropriately
looks like a homosexual. A man's man is to an attractive
woman as
homosexuality
is to
"asking
for it."
Homosexuality
is in itself
"asking
for
it,"
an invitation to
rape.13
13. That the immediate
problem
is not
homophobia
but a
relentlessly metaphoric
approach
to
"reality"
is clear from
Sedgwick's
notorious footnote on
fist-fucking
in
James'
notebooks
("BC,"
p.
186
n.32).
Finding rightly
in
James' description
of his "demon of
patience"
a
strikingly
sexual
image, Sedgwick
reads the moment as an invocation of
"fisting-
as-ecriture." Her inversion of tenor and vehicle
(if
anything
the
passage
describes "ecriture-
as-fisting")
is
symptomatic
of her overinvestment in the
semiology
of literature and sex:
only
someone who thinks she knows the
"meaning"
of both would believe the
hyphenate
works as well either
way.
Whatever its
source, however,
the
homophobia
that
unintentionally
results is
dangerous.
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 603
4
At this
point
it is
impossible
not to wonder
whether,
despite Sedgwick's
explicit antihomophobia,
the
argument's
disenfranchisement of homo-
sexuals must not be labeled
homophobic. Regularly
her Girardian "erotic
triangles"
show themselves
actually
to be Greimasian
squares
with the
corner of
"homosexuality"
erased. Her substitution of "the homosexual"
for the
homosexual,
or the "homosocial" for relations between
men,
truncates the
history
of
gay
men and their relation with male heterosexuals
by focusing
on the modern
period
in which these
categories
were first
defined.14 Nor does
Sedgwick's
black-box model of the closet as a
place
of
binary
decision do
justice
to the
range
of choices
actually possible
and
to the
variety
of male bonds that can result without
panic. By defining
the homosexual
against
the
homosocial,
she obscures the extent to which
men,
whatever their sexual
orientation,
may
even
support
each other-
a
support
she
explicitly
affords to lesbians within the female homosocial
context
(BM,
p.
2).
The
problem
rests not in a
personal
lack of
sympathy
or in an
inevitable
political
tension between feminists and
gay
men,
but in
Sedgwick's
more fundamental confusion about the rhetoric of Otherness and its
relation to
power.
Power admits of
only
two
positions-the
enfranchised
and the
disenfranchised,
the
majority
and the
minority.
If one is outside
a
minority,
one is
necessarily
within the
majority
with
respect
to that
particular minority. Sedgwick's majority
status vis-a-vis
gay
men is most
evident in her
problematic terminology,
of which her use of sexual stereo-
types
is
only
the most obvious
example.
Unable to
speak
from within
the
minority, Sedgwick
must
perforce speak
from within the
majority;
denied the
language
of
homosexuality,
she
necessarily speaks
hetero-
sexuality.
Such a
vocabulary
is
inevitably prejudicial.
The
very concept
of "homosexual
panic"
seems
homophobic.
To name as "homosexual" a
panic
over the
inability
to
distinguish
between homosexual love and
heterosexual
bonding
is to reduce fear of
indistinguishability
to fear of
homosexuality.
Even the term "homosocial" moves in
conflicting
directions.
Constructed after and in answer to the term
"homosexual,"
it is simul-
taneously parasitic
on the word and hostile to the sexual
preference.
Thus,
as a
category,
it contains
by
definition what it means to
deny.
As
always,
the
etymological paradox
is resolved in favor of the
socially
nor-
mative,
until there is no
positive place
within
"homosociality"
for "ho-
mosexuality."
The
heterosexuality
of
Sedgwick's
language informs her
analytic
categories
as well. In
defining
male homosexual
panic
as "the normal
condition of the male heterosexual entitlement"
("BC,"
p.
151),
Sedgwick
means
primarily
to offer the traditional consolation of clinical
therapy:
14. A similar characterization of women's literature as a "recent"
phenomenon
was a
popular
male
technique
for
denying
the existence of a female
literary
tradition.
Critical
Inquiry
604 David Van Leer
don't
worry
too much about homosexual
panic,
for
panic
is normal. As
a feminist
reader,
she uses this consolation
ironically
to undercut traditional
notions of male
superiority by showing
male entitlement to be a
"panic,"
one to which woman is
by
definition immune and one
by
which she is
empowered.
Yet
finally
such inversions of the male/female
dynamic depend
on a reinforcement of the homosexual/heterosexual
one,
pushing straight
and
gay
men further
apart.
In
delineating
the "normal" condition of
heterosexuality, Sedgwick
means to
imply only
that male
panic
is
statistically
the norm. The moral thrust of the
term, however,
is unavoidable.
Any
account of the normal will
implicitly
raise
questions
about the
abnormal,
and
adjustment
(as
the lack of
panic) begins
to seem deviant. The het-
erosexual,
the
sexually
ambivalent,
the
self-hatefully
deviant: these are
the inheritors of
Sedgwick's "normalcy";
the contented
homosexual,
even
should his sexual
invisibility empower
him in the
marketplace,
is
necessarily
excluded from
Sedgwick's
account of entitlement.
The inevitable limitations of external
analysis
of a
minority
are com-
pounded
when the
analytic
discourse is itself a
minority
one. The
temptation
is to conflate
minorities,
here to
speak
of
sisterly sympathy
and to read
the similarities betweeen forms of
oppression
as
congruencies. Though
personally
attractive, however,
this conflation
misrepresents
the
genealogy
of
power.
Whatever its
intention,
the
reading
of one
minority by
another
is an act not of
confraternity
but of double
imperialism:
it absorbs one
minority
into the relative
majority
of the more
powerful minority by
relying
on the
implicit protection
of the
greater majority
to which both
stand as minorities.
Despite
the
personal
and
political allegiances
between
women and
gay
men,
"the female" has no
privileged
role in a
theory
of
"the homosexual."15
Assuming
the
continuity
between
gay
men and fem-
inism,
Sedgwick compromises
the
individuality
of
homosexuality by
im-
plicitly siding
with the male heterosexual
majority
that discriminates
against gay
and female both. And her
overaggressive
deconstruction of
Bray's homosexual/society dichotomy
could be read as a
self-protective
denial of her
complicity
in that
"society's" persecution
of
gay
men.
15. To some
extent, then,
those feminists who
suspect
the
phallocentrism
of Roland
Barthes and Foucault are
justified.
It is not
necessary,
of
course,
to accuse
gay
thinkers of
misogyny.
Nevertheless,
whatever their
response
to
individuals,
gay
men
may
see femaleness
as a
category
with little immediate
applicability
to their situation. For
representative
accounts,
which themselves have
difficulty avoiding
a subtle form of
homophobia,
see Naomi
Schor,
"Dreaming Dissymmetry:
Barthes, Foucault,
and Sexual
Difference,"
in Men in
Feminism,
pp.
98-110,
and
Jane Gallop,
"Feminist Criticism and the Pleasure of the
Text,"
North
Dakota
Quarterly
54
(Spring
1986):
119-32. On the more
general problem
of double im-
perialism,
consider the
attempts
of black feminist
theory
to
guard against
colonization
by
black male critics.
See,
for
example, Mary
Helen
Washington,
"'The Darkened
Eye
Restored':
Notes Toward a
Literary History
of Black
Women,"
in Invented Lives: Narratives
of
Black
Women
1860-1960,
ed.
Washington (Garden City,
N.Y., 1987),
pp.
xv-xxxi,
and Valerie
A.
Smith,
"Black Feminist
Theory
and the
Representation
of the
Other,"
in
Changing
Our
Own Words:
Proceedings of
a
Symposium
on
Criticism,
Theory,
and Literature
by
Black
Women,
ed.
Cheryl
Wall
(New Brunswick, N.J.,
forthcoming).
The Beast
of
the Closet
Spring
1989 605
The
power dynamics
of
minority
criticism are
implicit
in the
very
notion of
interpretation.
One cannot read from a
position
of
weakness;
to
speak
is to assert one's
authority. May
Bartram herself
epitomizes
this
problem:
in
Sedgwick's
account,
May
is the woman who can
"really
know"
Marcher's secret without
committing
the
majority's homophobic
sin of
"really knowing" homosexuality.
Yet the awkwardness of this
reading
of
James only
underscores the
degree
to which
Sedgwick
finds herself in
the same
interpretive position:
she claims
concerning
male
panic
in
general
the same
"cognitive advantage"-a "particular
relation to truth and au-
thority"-that
her
May
claims
concerning
Marcher's beast
("BC,"
p.
179).16
And her defense of
May
(like
her attacks on
Bray)
becomes a mode of
implicit
self-defense.
By
this
logic,
Marcher's sexual confusion arises from
the
impossible
act of
interpretation May
(and
Sedgwick)
ask him to
perform.
Coming
out of the closet becomes an act of
interpreting
the self as other.
The move is not
only psychologically
self-destructive;
it is
epistemologically
incoherent,
claiming
access to the
very power
of
interpretation
denied
by
the content of that
interpretation.
To read oneself as "homosexual"
is to forfeit the
language
of
interpretation,
which is the
majority's
alone.
The
problem
is
finally
one of
politicaljudgment.
Sedgwick's
delineation
of the rhetoric of the Other assumes the
continuity
between
theory
and
praxis.
The
assumption may
be
overly optimistic:
the two are not
identical;
they
can even be at odds. And
Sedgwick's
enthusiastic commitment to
the former at times leads her to
betray
the latter. In the
political
world,
minorities can work
together
toward common
goals.
But in the world of
theoretical
abstraction,
there is
only
the One and the Other-no
mediating
reader,
no Third World of
mutually supporting
othernesses. The belief
that identical
politics
will
generate
identical
languages compromises many
minority
accounts of other minorities. The
problem
is
compounded
in
psychoanalytic
discourse,
where
preoccupation
with the individual
psyche
deemphasizes questions
of
politics, society,
and
history.
In her account
of male
bonds,
Sedgwick implicitly
defines the
problem
of manhood as
psychological, thereby empowering
the
woman,
who
by
definition is saved
from such neuroses. To the extent that she steals this
power
from the
entitled,
her Promethean
glee
is infectious. And if her
psychologization
repathologizes manhood-slyly redefining
a
socially compulsory
hetero-
sexuality
as a "heterosexual
compulsion"-the
rhetorical
sleight
of hand
is still better than
misogyny
deserves. But the
practical problems
of the
male homosexual are
quite simply
more
crippling,
even lethal. And to
the extent that
Sedgwick disempowers
this
already endangered group,
she does not uncover a
homophobic
thematics but underwrites one.
16. Thus
Sedgwick
has created an inversion of Elaine Showalter's Tootsie
phenomenon,
one in which
only
a woman can solve the
problems
of men. See
Showalter,
"Critical Cross-
Dressing:
Male Feminists and the Woman of the
Year,"
Raritan 3
(Fall 1983): 130-49;
reprinted
in Men in
Feminism,
pp.
116-32.
Critical
Inquiry