Resisting the Mark: Shifting Identities and Assumptions in Foster’s Coming Out Speech

Introduction: Moving the Mark

Those of us who navigate borders in a daily way also learn to navigate the disciplining of markers assigned to us by others. We do this by constantly shifting and crossing borders at the intersections of culture, geographic location, gender, and sexuality as a form of resistance to the marking of identity categories. Some of us do this as a way of simultaneously occupying multiple cultural spaces. Others do it to define their sexuality or their gender identities on their own terms. This mode of being evokes different possibilities for resisting “the mark.” After all, if one is marked as a “woman of color” or a “lesbian,” the urge by others and ourselves to essentialize our identities can be pervasive. Judith Butler argues that coming out only produces a “new and different closet” and considers identity categories to be, “instruments of regulatory regimes.”¹ Her argument lays out the always shifting meaning of these categories and rejects the need to fix our subjectivities into any particular box. The term “queer” has evolved in response to such critiques, unstable in its production of meanings, continually questioning the norms of gender and sexuality, even as it provides a broad identity umbrella that has built in fluidity to account for the evolving manifestations of queerness.² Resisting the mark is perhaps one specific strategy, one manifestation of queer, allowing those of us who cross borders in various ways to navigate categories with greater nimbleness and fluidity. It calls into question the very markers that seek to fix us into one, time-stamped interpretation of ourselves, creating a lived experience that is always fluid, always at the edges of what may be firmly defined, whether the resistance is enacted in the language we use, the labels we claim and discard, or the contradictions and paradoxes we embrace and embody.

Sexuality has never been an “identity” to me. It has been about how one relates to those we love and with whom we create a community. And perhaps that interpretation of sexuality draws on my own histories, borrowing from both my upbringing in India and my present life in the United States. Gayatri Gopinath³ critiqued the impulse to embrace a Western-style “out” GLBTQ identity as the only end point for all nondominant sexualities, and I have found the persistent demand to name and to fix oneself into a category to be suffocating. I strategically use the label “queer” in various spaces, and not in others, because, at the very least, it allows me some ambiguity and process.

The impulse to fix a marker, to proclaim our identities as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or queer is often about claiming our belonging to a particular group or identity. Feminists have challenged hegemonic forms of belonging to whiteness,⁴ but the project of resistance and possibilities is further complicated by shifting desires to belong to particular groups at certain times. The discourse of whiteness, for example, demands that bodies enact normative performances of whiteness, heterosexuality, class, etc. in order to belong. As we continue to resist the marking and fixing of our identities along lines of race, culture, and sexuality, can we also renegotiate the terms of engagement for temporarily belonging in these very spaces through strategies of silence around how we name ourselves, and the embodiment of contradictions and multiple positions? It is a possibility that has intrigued me. I wonder what happens if we apply the idea of “resisting the mark,” a strategy often utilized by marginalized border crossers, to a Hollywood movie star like Jodie Foster? Is it still as resistive when it comes from center stage? Was there a strategic aspect to her 2013 Golden Globes speech when viewed through this framework, or does it merely reify the status quo?

The “Coming Out” Speech that Wasn’t

The “coming out” speech that wasn’t. That’s how many people read Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech for her Cecile B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Golden Globes. Much of Foster’s life has unfolded in the public eye...