Miša Stekl: Racial dynamics of radical queer politics and theory
Miša Stekl: Racial dynamics of radical queer politics and theory
Since the Tout! issue has been revisited so much in contemporary scholarship (from Amin’s Disturbing Attachments to Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men to the recent translation of Guy Hocquenghem’s Gay Liberation After May ’68), I started my archival trip by reading through the full journal. I quickly came to see why the issue’s publication caused such a scandal—soon after it was released, in April of 1971, it was seized by the police, and its director of publication, who was none other than Jean-Paul Sartre, was prosecuted for distributing “pornography.” This history of repression is central to the transgressive appeal of the journal, and of FHAR more generally, for queer activists and scholars—no less alluring than Tout’s cast of characters, which also featured (besides Sartre himself) Hocquenghem, widely considered a key precursor to “antisocial” queer theory. And two years later, when another FHAR publication (Recherches) was banned (also on the grounds of pornography), the movement’s revolutionary infamy would further implicate philosophers Félix Guattari, as Recherches’ founder, and Michel Foucault, who defended the issue in a trial speech. As Foucault pointed out, the charge of pornography served—in both the Tout and the Recherches cases—to censor the FHAR’s open avowal of homosexuality, not only within a heteronormative society, but against that society. (To be sure, both Tout! and Recherches do feature some risqué cartoon depictions of nude male bodies and gay sex, which could well have scandalized certain homophobic audiences; in each issue, though, the erotic cartoons forward yet more provocative political messages, e.g., by humorously reimagining men’s everyday, “homosocial” interactions as teeming with latent homosexual desires.) Indeed, I was constantly struck by just how radical many of the articles in the FHAR’s special issue of Tout! still sound today, with pieces affirming homosexual desire as “the most radical way to escape crushing normality” (7) and calling on “revolutionary homosexuals … to lead a credible project of building a new world, with the support of all other revolutionaries” (8). The scandals that surrounded the FHAR surely had much to do with their conception of gay liberation as a revolutionary “world-building” project; for the FHAR, gay liberation called for the destruction of the whole world order of capitalist modernity, and the building of a new world in its wake. Making explicit reference to Freudo-Marxist philosophers like Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich (names unlikely to appear in many popular queer publications today), several Tout! essays set forth a (queer?) theory of the capitalist “world” as powered by the repression of (homo)sexual desire; according to this theory, capitalism thrives upon bourgeois (hetero)sexual norms that “sublimate” libidinal energy by channeling it into productive and reproductive labor. It follows, at least for FHAR members, that gay liberation should unlock the potential for the downfall of bourgeois civilization—provided that repressed homosexual desire is affirmed as “the disruption of all mores/morals [mœurs], without restriction” (5), far from seeking to “be integrated into bourgeois institutions (marriage, the right to adoption…)” (6). Far from refuting conservative tropes of homosexuality as antithetical to the progress of Western civilization, the FHAR readily embraced “negative” representations of homosexual desire, as potentially leading to “the abolition of the heterosexual couple and of the family, which are the bases of the occidental society in which we live” (7).
In a dissertation chapter on the FHAR, I plan to trace the jagged through lines between their avant-garde affirmation of queer “negativity” and several different approaches to “negativity” in queer studies today. On the one hand, Freudo-Marxism has fallen somewhat out of vogue, as Foucault’s influential critique of the “repressive hypothesis” has led many queer theorists toward more “sophisticated” analyses that see power relations as producing (homo)sexuality, rather than operating solely or primarily through the repression of desire. While most theorists tend to distance themselves from notions of (homo)sexuality as (pre)existing before or outside of power relations, however, many of us remain committed to the trickster spirt of queer negativity that the FHAR advanced avant la lettre; for scholars in both the “antisocial” and “utopian” schools of queer studies, it is hard not to admire the FHAR’s antinormative demand that “we reclaim [revendiquons] our status as a social scourge [fléau social], right up to the total destruction of all imperialism” (7). Utopian theorists, from José Esteban Muñoz to Marquis Bey, often look back fondly on such gay liberationist affirmations of queerness’ radical potentiality to destroy imperial/capitalist worlds—and to build new ones. As Amin has argued, however, “There is a split at the heart of [utopian] Queer Studies’ relation to gay liberation: it seeks to forward the gay liberationist imaginary of revolutionary coalition into a queer futurity while at the same time brushing off the naive Freudo-Marxist theory of desire on which liberationists relied” (Amin 78). Particularly given Muñoz’s own often-forgotten debt to Marcuse, it’s worth asking: Can queer futurity stand without the pillars of Freudo-Marxism to support its idealizations of queer social relations, which utopians would like to see as not only antinormative but as breathing life into liberatory futures, building “worlds” beyond the violent norms that construct and constrict the heteronormative present? Moreover, given the complex role of race/racism in the white gay liberationist imaginary that I will diagnose in the FHAR, just how universally capacious are queer futurities? Or, who remains excluded from queer utopia?
Before returning to these questions, I want to briefly examine the FHAR’s relation to the other major direction that “queer negativity” has taken in academic theorizing. To do so, I turn to two other journals started by subgroups of the FHAR, both of which I was able to consult at La Contemporaine: L’Antinorm and Le Fléau social (“Social Scourge”). While L’Antinorm and Le Fléau social have received far less scholarly attention than Tout! or Recherches, I found them critical to fully understanding the FHAR’s avant-garde queer negativity; as we might begin to surmise from the journals’ titles, they offer a genealogy of (what we now call) queer “antinormativity” and “antisociality.” L’Antinorm and Le Fléau social take us back to a time before queer “antisociality” was firmly opposed to queer utopianism—at the same time as they might teach us some critical lessons about the limitations of both versions of queer negativity. I argue that the so-called “antisocial” thesis, which is now most often associated with Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, inherits the FHAR’s psychoanalytic belief that sexuality—especially queer sexuality—names the irreducible kernel of incoherence at the heart of the social order and of subjectivity itself. To be clear, Bersani and Edelman do not share the liberationist faith common to the FHAR and later queer utopians; more Freudian than Marxist, antisocial theorists take up queer negativity as a perpetual disruption of social coherence, without however believing that queerness will bring about a more perfect social order. Rather, these theorists maintain that every social order constitutes its identity, as well as the identity of its subjects, around the exclusion of a disruptive, “catachrestic” signifier—like “queer”—that stands in for the inevitable incompleteness or incoherence of the order’s signification, as a product of language (drawing on Jacques Lacan’s understanding of social relations as mediated through the Symbolic order and its constitutive lack). What I found in returning to FHAR writings was, first of all, just how far back queerness’ association with Lacanian lack reaches; for instance, one article in Tout! specifically references the Lacanian notion of the unconscious as “structured like a language,” while arguing that all social hierarchies are structured around “the power of the master to dispose of the slave as an object of jouissance, as a hole” (9). Jouissance has become a key term in antisocial queer theory, naming a self-shattering pleasure that defies social regulation and exceeds sense-making. While antisocial queer theorists most frequently associate jouissance with queer sex, which may not build new futures but might at least offer a temporary breakdown of one’s subjectivity, the FHAR’s use of jouissance here highlights that transgressive pleasure can also attend the violent reinscription of power hierarchies, as much as their corrosion (a point that Edelman also makes in No Future: the queer jouissance of transgressing the Law is never so far removed from the Law’s jouissance in breaking its own limits). More to the point, the FHAR anticipates antisocial queer theory in its psychoanalytic understanding of all social relations as structured around lack and jouissance, so that phallic “masters” exercise supremacy over queer Others, reduced to “holes.” More than a decade prior to Bersani’s (in)famous “Is the Rectum A Grave?”, the FHAR already theorized the “hole” as the passive, lacking status to which phallocentric society consigns femininity—as well as queer sexuality (particularly as represented by gay male bottoms). Further, both Bersani and FHAR members seek to reclaim the subversive, negative potential of “sodomy,” which they associate with a particular kind of jouissance that inhabits the self-annihilating passivity of the “hole” or the lack that phallocentric society projects onto feminine and queer bodies. In effect, the FHAR lays the groundwork for anti-social theories of queer jouissance. And as we will now see, FHAR publications already flag some of the problematic racial and sexual dynamics for which antisocial queer theory has been rightly critiqued.
Beyond connecting FHAR texts to queer theorizations of negativity, I want to ask new questions concerning how issues of “race” and “racism” intervene in each discourse, as though inevitably. We now have a thorough understanding of how FHAR’s avowal of queer negativity was tainted by “racial fetishism”; Amin and Shepard have clearly demonstrated how several FHAR texts idealize the self-shattering jouissance imagined to engulf white gay men’s subjectivity as they become “holes” (bottoms) for dominating Arab men, whose fetishized depictions often reflect racist tropes of the “backwardness” and presumedly universal hypersexuality/bisexuality of racial Others. We also have an idea of how the overt anti-Arab racism of some FHAR texts might resound, more subtly, with certain racial tensions that critics have noted in antisocial queer theory—particularly in relation to its notorious privileging of white gay male archives of self-shattering as well as its guiding assumption that everyone possesses a (fantasy of) coherent subjectivity to shatter, an assumption that has been called into question by many lesbian, trans*, and non-white queer archives (see critiques of Edelman and Bersani from Muñoz, Calvin Warren, and Bobby Benedicto, among others). While building on these important critiques of both the FHAR and antisocial queer theory, I want to direct critical attention to another, perhaps more fundamental way in which “race” works in each instance.
In particular, I want to direct critical attention to FHAR members’ common understanding of homosexuality as a “race” and of (what we now call) homophobia as “sexual racism.” What does it mean, for the categories of race and (homo)sexuality, that homosexuality was understood as a kind of “race” by a generation of (white) gay French men? As strange and “problematic” as it now seems, the FHAR’s racialized idea of homosexuality appears to reflect a once-widespread, perhaps even once-hegemonic conception of sexuality as race. Certainly, we find similar discourse in French literature at least as far back as Proust, who famously called homosexuals “la race des tantes” (“the race of queens”) and “la race maudite” (“the accursed race”). And homosexuality remains a racial category in Foucault’s History of Sexuality: Volume One, which describes the 19th-century construction of homosexuality as the birth of “an entire sub-race race” (40). This understudied detail in Foucault’s genealogy of homosexuality’s invention begins to explain what it means that homosexuality was once understood as (a “sub-race”) race, an understanding which is all the more significant as it grounds Foucault’s influential account of racism as an intrinsic feature of modern “bio-politics” (wherein racism demarcates the racialized element of a population that will be left to die by modern “power over life”). Queer theory has yet to fully contend with how biopolitical racism was initially conceptualized on the basis of an understanding of “racism,” which Foucault shared with the FHAR, as an umbrella term that encompassed anti-homosexual violence. To be sure, “homophobia” would not be translated into French (“homophobie”) until later in the 1970s. But why then did so many French writers and activists default to “sexual racism” as the term of choice for (what we now call) homophobia (as opposed to any number of other available terms, like “anti-homosexual oppression”), and with what effects? And how does this forgotten discourse (on homosexuality as a race and homophobia as racism) inflect queer negativity, then and now?
In another dissertation chapter, I will trace ideas of homosexuality as a race back to 19th-century sexology and scientific racism. If, as both Foucault and several FHAR articles assert, the homosexual only emerged as a distinct personage around 1870, I argue that this initial sexological construction of homosexuality relied on methods and epistemologies developed by “racial science.” (According to Foucault’s [in]famous account of homosexuality’s invention, “the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species” [43]. By highlighting the racial connotations of homosexuality’s historical construction as a “species,” I will bring a new light to this much-debated Foucault passage, which many American queer theorists have interpreted, imprecisely, as the first time that homosexuality figured one’s “identity,” rather than simply a sodomitic act that did not necessarily define any deeper “truth” of one’s “self.” See Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault for a Foucauldian critique of this common reading.) Through close readings of key sexological texts, I will examine how homosexuality, or “inversion,” was initially conceptualized in tight relation to race. I argue that the homosexual “invert” was conceived in and through civilizationist hierarchies that positioned European bodies as most evolved and sexually differentiated, while locating Black bodies on the lowest evolutionary rung and therefore as the least sexually differentiated (or even “ungendered,” as Hortense Spillers would say). In line with racialized hierarchies of sexual difference, sexologists defined homosexuality as a relic of primitive civilizations, most often located in Africa or the Americas, which they associated with looser, less highly evolved sexual cultures. Seen as “backwards,” a kind of “arrested development,” homosexual practices were presumed to be ubiquitous in racially primitive cultures, having become increasingly restricted with the progress of human civilization (laying the grounds for FHAR men to assert that all Arabs are bisexual—a less repressed culture). But whether homosexuality’s ante/anti-civilizational status was vilified or reclaimed, it was understood on racial terms, such that when homosexuality appeared in the white man, it was considered a (“sub-racial”) racial blight, as a sexual degeneracy that also risked degenerating the “race.” Building on critical theorizations of “racialized plasticity” (i.e., Kyla Schuller, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Kadji Amin) as well as analyses of the fraught historical relations between homosexuality and Blackness (esp. Siobhan Somerville and Valerie Rohy), I examine how race and (anti)Blackness have colored homosexuality/queerness from its birth.
Returning to the FHAR, I am interested in how its spirit of queer negativity may not only have enabled several schools of queer theory, but may itself have been enabled through the historical racialization of homosexuality’s most “transgressive” attributes (as primitive, ante/anti-civilizational, etc.). It was by “subversively” acceding to homosexuality’s abject status as a (“sub-race”) “race” that the FHAR conceived of homosexuality as corrosive of white European civilization, and no doubt this structural relation of homosexual to racial degeneracy is also at the root of the FHAR’s more notorious “racial fetishism.” Here I go beyond previous analyses of FHAR’s fetishization of Arab bodies, as a vehicle for white male self-undoing, by analyzing the primitive, “backwards” libidinal energy which one article in L’Antinorm attributes to Afro-Brazilian spiritual practice. As a case study in the relation between queer negativity and the negation of Blackness, in particular, this article declares that “the FHAR is a MACUMBA”—that is, an umbrella term for a variety of African diasporic religions that the FHAR bundle together and fetishize for their alleged ritual practices of spiritual possession, which are said to involve “transvestism” (L’Antinorm 5). The piece further deploys the FHAR/Macumba, gay/Black analogy by comparing the FHAR, “at its origins,” to Quimbanda, which they represent as a Blacker, more originary and more radical Macumba sect as opposed to Umbanda: “The FHAR, at its origins, was a Quimbanda. I fear that now all is happening as though this black Quimbanda was slowly disappearing from the historical scene to make room for Umbanda—the religion of the whites, the saints, and the saviors.” (5) Setting aside the issue that Umbanda is also an Afro-Brazilian religion, the point here is that queer negativity is capacitated by assuming the place of Blackness’ racialized, counter-civilizational power.
Ultimately, I want to know how such antiBlack dynamics emerge from queerness’ vexed historical relationship to “race,” with individual instances like the FHAR’s texts playing out structural antagonisms. Above all, I’m interested in how these antagonisms may live on, otherwise, in queer theory and politics today. How has homosexuality become dissociated from race, and to what effects? What traces of race remain, as in “gay is the new Black” analogies that surface in both gay liberal (homonationalist) and homophobic (anti-gender) contexts? And in queer theorizing, how are umbrella deployments of “queerness”/lack as a catch-all, universal site of social exclusion related to the FHAR’s homogenizing conception of “racism” (which similarly lumped together homosexual and racialized positions)? What might we learn about the promises and pitfalls of gay liberation—and queer utopian?—politics by understanding the strange historical contingencies, and constancies, that shape (homo)sexuality and race?
Works Cited
Amin, Kadji. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Duke University Press, 2017.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Random House, 1978.
L’Antinorm no. 3 (1973).
Tout! Special issue, no. 12 (1971).