Adam and Steve
Queers love to argue about gay marriage; and to be fair, the American people love to argue about gay marriage. This is not new information or a profound unveiling of an unspoken reality. The pleasure and pain that is felt discussing this issue is axiomatic to American political discourse. As the far right likes to say, marriage is an institution that needs sanctity and protection through exclusion. And the far right is not incorrect in arousing such protective anxieties since the far left often, actually, actively wants to dismantle the institution of marriage within this nation. Both the far-right and the academic far-left find an interesting common ground in their understanding of marriage as an incredibly strong institution but also as one that relies upon constant faith that, if lost, may shatter its foundations altogether. Avowal and disavowal, endeavoring, reification, rectification, upholding, inclusion, and exclusion are a shared language between the two polarities—both left and right use words and ideas like this to talk about marriage. Bersani, Brown, Butler, Foucault, Kipnis, and Warner, all work together to inform and illuminate how hegemonic institutions like identity, gender, sex, sexualities, can meet and mingle within a discourse of gay marriage and thrive upon the strengths and protections of the state and what is allowed to be known. Simultaneously theorists also hoist up the importance of an adulterous mindset and a deeply entrenched skepticism to illustrate that gay marriage is a potential outcropping of a homophobic discourse that seeks to demystify queer identity into something normal.
Foucault describes discourse as a system of power, a space where areas of specialized expertise, the juridical, the institutional, the individual, and their normalizing affects congeal together into a frothy mixture of control. Foucault works to unveil the, “Discursive productions” and, “Effects of power…To bring out the ‘will to knowledge’ that serves as both their support and their instrument” (11-12). This unveiling serves to illustrate that despite the societal impression that sex is something that is repressed, it is the very idea that sexuality is repressed that supports “A ruse to make prohibition into the basic constitute element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex” (12). Power works insidiously in this way, it controls and operates within opacities and artifices; power thrives on lies told at the societal level, using them to mask its machinations.
Discourse is slippery and opaque; it thrives on both utterance and silence and produces the very things which are allowed to be talked about and the things which cannot find—or are denied—a language to be expressed through. Since repression silences, Foucault interrogates how silence operates; he stipulates that, “There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say” (27). Silence is, “An element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within overall strategies” (27). Foucault points to discourse’s insidiousness by qualifying those apparent silences actually uncover the, “Multiplied…forms of discourse on [a] subject; it has established various points of implantation for sex; it has coded and qualified its speakers” (29). And so, individuals who are coded and qualified to do so, are constantly “telling everything concerning [their] sex” believing that they are subverting societal power by doing so; and instead, they are playing directly into a system that is always already creating, “An apparatus for producing and ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (23). And those who are not qualified to speak about their sex, children, deviants, and some women are excluded from the controlling apparatus, and denied the ability to speak in the own “languages of experience”. This silence does not deny them their sexuality nor does it force them to be silent. Instead, this form of silence is produced by the spoken and unveils the regulatory apparatuses in place to ensure that sexuality is known in specific and particular ways and therefore, controlled. It is not repression, which silences everything; it is instead a power that enables speaking in incredibly mediated ways.
These silences work in tandem with the spoken and so, there are myriad fluctuations within the spoken and unspoken that regulate and inform the societal discourse of gay marriage. Combing the thoughts of Leo Bersani and Michael Warner illuminates one silence within the discourse of gay rights: the silent specter of AIDS, a signification that equates gay male identity with death. It is an identity that is sought—by gay marriage discourse—to be repudiated through a model of monogamous marriage that can rewrite gay male identity into an identity of productive commitment and family. Bersani speaks from a point of, what he rightfully calls, “necessary rage” during the AIDS crisis, showing that, “Power is in the hands of those who give every sign of being able to sympathize more with the murderous ‘moral’ fury of the good vicar than with the agony of a terminal KS patient” (201). The late 80’s were a period in which the gay male became an identity category that was synonymous with death; AIDS was framed as a righteous punishment for sexual immorality and promiscuity. AIDS attached itself, through discursive power, onto gay male identity through the hysteria of an already stigmatized and marginalized identity.
Wendy Brown builds upon and supplements Foucault, who is focusing on sex and sexuality in his work, to illustrate that this societally-believed participation—within a system of power that excludes and represses—mutates and perverts how people talk about themselves, their bodies, and how individuals perceive their self-evident rights. While Brown is discussing economic factors, she is doing so within a foucauldian framework and so she complicates and informs how AIDS remains latched onto and informs how gay men are perceived, to this day. AIDS is one way in which power creates “a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers” (Brown 14). In society at-large’s view, HIV-positive men are not the victims of random happenstance or social, economic forces; they instead still bear the stigma of an identity that is considered to be a direct result of their choices as, “A ‘free’ subject who rationally deliberates about alternative courses of action, make choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of those choices” (16).
Foucault states that, “It was essential that the state know what was happening with its citizen’s sex, and the use they made of it, but also that each individual be capable of controlling the use he made of it” (26). Power, though useful and productive towards state ends, also instilled the belief within individuals that they were microcosms of the state; people now had a status both within and without the state. It produced forms of identity that both internalized the state and allowed people to consider themselves as free-subjects who can subvert state power by asserting their individuality through their sexuality. Which is why discourses of repression and oppression work so powerfully to control, they control by producing forms of liberty and freedom which help to maintain control, not undermine it (Brown).
This anxiety of AIDS slips-into and out-of the spoken and unspoken within gay-rights discourse. As Michael Warner points out, “It was precisely because of their virulent hatred of gay sex that so many straight Americans neglected to do anything about AIDS” (94). This observation follows an excerpt from Yale’s most visible gay voice, William Eskridge, who states that the AIDS epidemic, “Illustrated the value of interpersonal commitment for gay people” (93-94). Warner then follows Eskridge’s comments with what is again a “necessary rage”; a denunciation and diatribe against his framing that the take-away from the AIDS crisis is the value interpersonal commitment. Both Bersani and Warner argue that homophobia, not the evils of gay promiscuity, and not the value of committed coupling, was what became exposed by the AIDS crisis. Bersani’s opening salvo in his essay states, “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it” and informs Warner’s claim about societal homophobia and makes explicit a silence within gay rights discourse (Bersani 197). While sex, is always being talked about and gay identity is now, mostly celebrated, its legitimacy is always also being undermined by gay sex. People still don’t like gay sex, even gay men like Eskridge don’t like gay sex.
AIDS also belies another conjunction of the spoken and silent within gay marriage discourse and discussions of gay sex; gay men are always at the forefront of the debate while lesbians remain largely invisible. AIDS is clearly one facet of why that is, since it is a disease that has statistically affected gay men and can be moralized as a by-product of their sexual misconduct, it serves the purpose of a greater discourse that wants to make the gay community into a sort of boogeyman. Bersani complicates this by saying, “An authentic gay male political identity therefore implies a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse” and also elaborates that males bodies themselves as objects of desire and maleness also factor into the equation (209). Bersani demonstrates that gay male identity is something that is feared within anti-gay discourse because it forces an interruption of maleness but still embodies maleness and therefore threatens and upholds structures of male power.
The outcropping of male discursive power repudiates gay marriage and works to ignore or gloss-over the existence of non-male homosexuals in a similar way that male culture made lesbianism within ancient Greek society somewhat unintelligible (Halperin). This is not to say that lesbians are not included into the discourse; they are still visible. But the gain a certain invisibility in their contrast to gay men, gay women are the perceived “respectable branch” and therefore not the threat, danger or risk posed by the gay community—and are therefore largely ignored by conservative politicians.
All of this is not to say that gay rights discourse now disavows or discourages gay sex, but that the power that fluctuates within discourse allows and encourages a specific, normalized gay sex and silently allows other forms outside of the normal to be stigmatized with the threat of disease and AIDS. In an odd way, as Eskridge points out and encourages, gay male sex has become discursively lesbianized and promotes a specificity of partnership and monogamy within gay sex to make it appear outwardly normal. Likewise, lesbian sex is lesbianized and denied a kinkiness or sexiness; in misogynistic power structures, respectable female sexuality continues to be devoid of vulgarity or naughtiness. In this way, discourse allows and encourages gay sex to disavow its queerness. The queerness of gay sex once lay within the ability to form relationships outside of static, gendered monogamy; gay sex once unequivocally and willing allowed promiscuity without being laden with the language of consequence.
Lamentably, gay sex must now also always bear an addendum—the possibility of inviting death into your body through copulation. The way to deny the stigma of AIDS or sexual irresponsibility and gain respectability is through partnership, semi-permanent coupling—ultimately why marriage is sought as an end-goal. Society provides the script through which you have the, “Right to make live or to let die” through your own choices (Foucault, Society Must be Defended 241). All this is to say that the narration of lifestyle choices provided by society to gay men are implicitly, but not entirely limited to, making live through coupling monogamously, remaining single and celibate, or letting die by being queer and allowing themselves to live with the danger of contracting AIDS and dying alone.
AIDS is one facet of the unspoken driving forces that push gays into a discourse of “human rights” through marriage; and this mixes itself into a new, more societally latent homophobia that cannot be ignored as a primary reason why gays are denied the right to marry. One dominant belief within the far right—and within queer studies as well—asserts that being gay is a choice, and so; gays can willingly chose to live their “lifestyle”. But denying gays the right to marry also exposes them to the effects of not participating in a privileged institution; legitimate citizenship becomes fully realized within marriage and comes with the added protections and benefits of state recognition. As Kipnis states, “Adultery summons the shaming language of bad citizenship” and how Kipnis uses adultery, in a discursive sense, is much akin to how gay identity is stigmatized which shows that, “Marriage is meant to function as a boot camp for citizenship instruction” (Kipnis 14). The discursive interruptions of adultery and gay identity act as destabilizing forces against marriage.
Kipnis frames how Adultery is condemned, by arguing that it, “Puts things at risk: from the organization of daily life to the very moral fabric of the nation” (14). And gay marriage works in its own way to affect a similar feeling of risk—from the outside, rather than the inside, of marriage. Laura Kipnis argues for the fragility of the institution of monogamy—and therefore for the fragility of “normal” marriage—expertly,
“If you’re working on monogamy, you’ve already entered a system of exchange: an economy of intimacy governed—as such economies are—by scarcity, threat and internalized prohibitions; secured ideologically—as economies are—by incessant assurances that there are no visible alternatives” (Kipnis 11).
The idea of “working” is so often evoked to describe what makes marriage successful and is laden with language of economy and production. By accepting the language of work, a system of internalized control is developed that produces a behavioral regime within people. This language requires a belief in the idea that whatever system a person is stuck within has no alternative to escape to. In the same way, the homonormative—or what has become the norm within gay culture—creates a longing for the illusion of entrapment; there becomes a sense that things are only imperfect in gay relationships because they lack the “incessant assurances” that marriage provides. There is a security and an anxious confinement within marriage that provides an odd sense of sanctuary. By pursuing this sanctuary, the gay rights discourse becomes ever more normalized to broadcast the preparedness of gays to enter the “boot camp for citizen instruction”.
Kipnis argues in “Adultery” that fragility within the hegemonic is not always easy to unveil but moments of weakness are omnipresent and important; these moments illustrate the inner workings of power structures and provide an opportunity to dismantle or reevaluate them. Within her piece, she expresses the joy that can be felt in moments of weakness through affairs and adultery, surmising that adultery, “May actually raise fundamental questions about what sort of affective world you aspire to inhabit and what fulfillments you’re entitled to” (13). Moments of disavowal against institutions happen all of the time; Eskridge disavows promiscuity and upholds monogamy within the institution of gay male identity as a response to the AIDS crisis—he flees to support a more established, known, supported, and institutional relationship in a moment of weakness. Disappointingly, his disavowal is against gay alternative lifestyles and is an appeal-to and appraisal-of the societal norm, as if he were a born-again Christian, seeking forgiveness from the church that cast him out. Eskridge’s stance is certainly is not an adulterous one to take. Adultery functions as, “A form of social articulation, a way of organizing grievances about existing conditions into a collectively imagined form, and one which offers a vehicle for optimism about other, better possibilities” (Kipnis 14). To be adulterous is to hold out for and consider alternatives to the norm, to attempt to formulate new understandings and possibilities that could replace what’s already established. And so, a healthy sense of skepticism or dread is understandable from the far-right; inviting gays into the institution of marriage is adulterous to what is established as normal: it is new, different, alarming—risky.
Is that risk AIDS? Is it the risky invitation of gay sex into the wedding bed? Is it risking an affront to what is traditionally understood as marriage? There’s something else at work; the answer to all of the above questions is: yes—but also, a resounding no. Marriage is clearly a much embedded facet of society, not necessarily bedrock, but it is deeply woven into the societal fabric. However, there’s a fragile superstructure within marriage that’s exposed when you start to open it up. It reveals fissures in the supportive concrete; it shows that the institution is malleable, that it is just as open to the effects of discourse as anything else within society. Marriage is subject to a productive power that is always already producing new forms of knowledge and what is known and accepted. There is a fear that the gays are the Greeks, rolling a big, hollow horse over the fields and into the walls of Troy and an anxiety that once inside they’ll let open the gates wide for everyone to pillage and plunder the privileged city of marriage—desecrating it. It is a fear that the normalizing power that discourse exerts might not be enough to adequately normalize the queer. There’s a simmering anxiety from the far right that the strength and exclusivity of marriage must be evoked and reiterated, made into law, to maintain itself as a viable institution; it must be something that is endeavored towards. Marriage is hard work, after all.
Butler discusses the power that endeavoring has on the institutional bastions of identity—marriage being one of those bastions—and despite the unforeseen outcomes of discourse, an endeavoring mindset still has the power to mutate queerness into normality. Disavowal is paramount in understanding how gays endeavor to normalize themselves in preparation for acceptance into the institution of marriage and Butler asks, “What does it mean to avow a category that can only maintain its specificity and coherence by performing a prior set of disavowals?” (16). Marriage is the epitome of a performative speech act; one moment you are not married and then, voila! Now that it has been uttered, you are now man and wife. So by entering into marriage, gays perform an avowal of marriage and a disavowal of marriage simultaneously; however they enter into it, they retain certain bits and pieces of societal baggage and create new forms for normalcy through the act of being married. There is a constant state of justification about what marriage means to any given person, it is always an imperfect copy, a state of hyperreality.
It would appear that the latent fear within the anti-gay-marriage-right is that this unreality of marriage is brought into sharp focus by attempting to include gays into it. It allows for redefinitions and modifications even when those modifications are omnipresent and are always already happening. This fragility is what makes the far right anxious but its normalizing strength—the insistence upon certain disavowals—is what makes queer theorists, feminists, and the far left anxious. There’s an understanding that marriage is fragile and that it rests upon a foundation of collective faith but it is only fragile through a disavowal of the institution itself, that participating within the institution breathes new life into it. Like Butler’s Lesbianism, being married is something that one already is and yet endeavors to be at the same time, it is a, “Deep-seated…physically entrenched play” but is also buttressed through legal recognition and state control and therefore, is a more organized regime than lesbianism (18).
All of this, in very abstract and incoherent ways, was flying through my mind during the student discussion group facilitated for Jack Halberstam’s visit since gay marriage would not, and could not, be avoided or left untouched. The meeting before, the discussion during, and the concluding conversations after Jack’s visit, were rife with hotly, angrily debated contestations of the thoughts within queer community’s stances between the pros-and-cons of gay marriage. Our sympathies lay under the same umbrella of queer identity, theory, and experience. But there was an inability from the pro-side to understand why anyone would want to deny or discourage an attainment of rights and there was an inability form the con-side to effectively argue that what constitutes “rights” is often an intensely regulatory regime that forces the oppressed to adopt the ethics and mores of their own oppressors. And I, for one, felt defeated by the ardently wrought arguments on both sides; I was stuck contemplating my quiet, simmering ambivalence about the issue. When I did speak, I ended up justifying caution and disapproval more than I ended up convincingly forming an argument. It was all to say that, I felt that it was both fine and not fine that gays want to marry, but that these discussions were an opportunity to critically beleaguer marriage as an institution; it was a moment ripe for adultery. Upholding marriage’s values to a room full of queers seemed counterintuitive, too safe, and perversely dishonest.
These discussions could have guided and informed a movement that strips marriage of some of its regularizing and normalizing teeth; we had the ability to finally, discursively separate church and state—gospel from the institutional. We could have celebrated the lived reality of those who chose not to accept marriage as satisfactory. We had an opportunity to conversationally dismantle the institutional privilege of those who couple, for life, through thick-and-thin with one another unhappily and dejectedly—to acknowledge that not everyone is cut out for such a commitment and that there was something alarming about marriage as the ultimate end-goal of any meaningful, romantic relationship.
Alas, gay marriage, is an incredibly powerful discursive apparatus, it wedges itself into the queer movement that aggregates through ambiguous banners of identity: gender, sex and sexuality—alternative lifestyles and models of relationality. It sows the seeds of in-fighting and dissent and engorges itself upon the bounty of disagreements that it reaps. The pro argument maintains that since same-sex marriage is withheld from so many people that want it and since its opponents engage in the most visible form of national, juridical bigotry, gay marriage needs to be upheld as the goal. While the con side maintains that marriage itself is one of the most insidiously constructed forms of institutional, juridical bigotry and misogyny that American society has claim to. There’s a powerful feeling that Foucault is right all of the time and that marriage is the new “repression”; I cannot help but believe that marriage is the word used to incite and arouse an aggregate community into thinking that it is being liberated through their own subjugation into the newest discursive forms and productive powers of normalization.
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The MIT Press (1987): 197-222. Print.
Brown, Wendy. ” Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Project Muse: Theory and Event 7.1 (2003). Web.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” Inside/Out: Lesbain Theories, Gay Theories (1991): 13-31. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended. New York: Picador, 1997. Print.
—. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.
Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.
Kipnis, Laura. Intimacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble With Normal. Cambridge: Havard University Press, 2000. Print.
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