Virtually normal di Andrew Sullivan - Liberationist queer Foucauld
- Liberazionismo: The second predominant politics of homosexuality springs naturally out of the first. Or rather, it is a kind of reverse image
- Imperativo esistenziale: combat
- the two politics, at their purest, agree about the fundamental nature of homosexuality: that it does not, properly speaking, exist.
- For the liberationists, homosexuality as a defining condition does not properly exist because it is a construct of human thought, generated in human consciousness by the powerful to control and define the powerless. •
- Lf prescription: to be free of all social constructs, •
- Identità: a fully chosen form of identity, •
- rebellion against nature, •
- this argument seems far less intuitively persuasive. Nature, after all, is an idea that comes naturally to people. •
- Lf: “homosexuality” does not refer to something tangible and universal; it is a definition of a particular way of being as defined by a particular culture. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that this is true. •
- Alcuni tipi di o: “trans-generational.” They are about the initiation of youths into adult culture •
- Giovani sodomizzati: Coerunas Indians •
- northern Morocco, the Koran is taught by older scribes in a similar way
- Lo zio materno in Guinea tribes, •
- Nonnismo in the public schools of Great Britain, •
- L efebo In ancient Greece, •
- Native American: the berdache. none of the berdache institutions seems to imply what we would understand as homosexuality: none is a relationship between two equal people of the same sex. •
- modern American • emergence of the “fairy” • it would be difficult to argue that the “normal” men who had sex with fairies were really homosexual, • They were, rather, men who were attracted to womanlike men •
- In other words, homosexuals, properly speaking, did not exist •
- it means that because homosexuals could not understand themselves in this way, homosexuals simply weren’t. •
- one’s self-understanding depends on the social constructs •
- Human nature does not exist; it is a spontaneous social creation. • Human beings exist, but what they are and what they mean to each other is entirely contingent on the world they find themselves in. •
- the work of Michel Foucault, • most significant influence on liberationist thinkers In many ways, he is to liberationism what Aquinas is to prohibitionism. •
- Words are invariably instruments of power, •
- This kind of argument was not new to Foucault, of course. Perhaps its originator was Rousseau, certainly present in Marx, • But in Foucault, this argument is linked to a deep pessimism about the possibility of escape. •
- x lf: the state as the source of oppression •
- il potere è ovunque: for Foucault, the sources of repression and control were that much more elusive chi in marx
- Per es: Foucault was a skeptic about the claims of the sexual revolution in the modern West. •
- simboli del potere The dialogue of the psychiatrist’s couch was merely an extension of the priest’s confessional; •
- lf: The history of sexuality in the West is not a history from repression to liberation, but the exchange of one kind of power • •
- Foucault sees the attempt to “free” gay people, first by identifying them, as another form of control: •
- “no orgasm without ideology.” •
- kant all origine: Foucault’s insight that the way we structure our thoughts changes the thoughts themselves •
- Obiezione: that does not mean that homosexual persons, however they understood themselves, did not exist •
- There is overwhelming evidence in both that at least part of homosexuality is determined so early as to be essentially involuntary: • even, to some extent, genetically predictable.
- But for the Foucauldeans, such contributions are essentially irrelevant. Both science and psychology are simply further discourses, further traps for freedom, •
- Unfortunately for Foucault, however, history itself, the very discourse of the past, concurs with science and psychology to suggest the presence of what we would understand as the homosexual, as the historian John Boswell has demonstrated. •
- omosessuali nella storia: mille e una notte Ganymede • Plato’s simposio Aristotle • Aquinas, • Alain of Lille, •
- in ancient Greece, where the language did not contain a word for homosexual,. Basta la descrizione
- Throughout history, •there are people • asserting their homosexuality in the face of unremitting hostility. •
- Homosexuals have historically reacted to their erasure not simply by subterfuge or resistance or violence, but by a complex undermining of the culture itself, by “camp,” by irony, by laughter.
- Non tutto è oppressione: There is, in short, a space within any oppressive social structure where human beings can operate from their own will. • There is in Foucault, in short, little alertness to the resilient life •
- The liberationist argument, with its pessimism about the possibility of real human freedom within traditional liberal society, must also confront a particularly discomforting fact: that the last few generations have seen a considerable flowering of gay culture and gay freedom. And this growth of homosexual freedom has continually had its vanguard in the United States, despite its tradition of fundamentalist Christianity, despite its capitalist system, despite its allegedly oppressive influence in world culture.
- Elenco: flaws in Foucauldean politics. •
- Because the state is not the source of power, but merely part of a matrix of power structures, there is no focus to the rebellion. •
- “queer” movement • una strategia d azione. attempt to generate an antipolitical politics, •
- the tactic of “outing,” the publication of someone’s homosexuality against that person’s will,to force him or her to be free (to use Rousseau’s unforgettable phrase) •
- “outing” follows the logic of liberationistIt challenges the boundaries of private and public which have been historically used to cordon off homosexuality from “public” life • It is a classic case of Foucauldean resistance. •
- Following Foucault, there is no concern in this endeavor that this activity might violate an individual’s rights or dignity, since that person is merely a function of the oppression that defines him. • the politics of liberation fails to catch the individuality of every human being. •
- Most homosexuals are not, of course, in or out of the closet; they hover tentatively somewhere in between. • .
- Queer strategy place structures above people, •
- philosophy based on the uprooting of oppressive orthodoxy should end up enforcing it is not a new irony. •
- Outing is only the most extreme form of this tendency. The use of language is a milder version. “gay” was no longer sufficiently liberationist, •
- But the truth is that although language is susceptible to control and manipulation, it must also serve the complex needs of countless complicated individuals and must therefore reflect the results of a million choices •
- Language that seeks to control by forcing meanings onto such a society will ultimately fail to work.
- un chiaro caso di fallimento della strategia queer: issue of gays and lesbians in the United States military. its antipolitical politics made equality within the armed services a ludicrous endeavor
- For a politics designed to subvert existing structures, participating in the very instrument of state power is a nonsensical •
- Altro caso di palese fallimento: The other salient political instance is the battle for gay marriage. In this, as in access to the military, liberationist politics buckles under its own contradictions. same-sex marriage represent a suspect assimilationist goal for our movement, •.
- queer: their most common form of political activity was not a “demonstration” but an “action”; media blitz. • politics of performance. •
- ACT UP meetings were a cacophony of rival oppressions, with little means for distinguishing
- non è un caso se il fondatore di act up sia un pubblicitario
- There was not even a vision, à la Marx, of some future of freedom to which this smashing might lead. •
- Judith Butler: “Power can neither be withdrawn. Nn resta che il: redeployment of power, •
- A politics which seeks only to show and not to persuade •
- difetto: the achievement will necessarily be transitory. •
- Moreover, a cultural strategy as a political strategy is a dangerous one • majorities win the culture wars. •
- La battaglia culturale:. It may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. •
- The liberationists prefer to concentrate—for where else can they go?—on those instruments of power which require no broader conversation, no process of dialogue, • So they focus on outing, on speech codes, on punitive measures against opponents on campuses, on the enforcement of new forms of language, by censorship and by intimidation.
- • as liberationist politics is cultural, it is extremely vulnerable; and insofar as it is really political, it is almost always authoritarian
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