Queerness May Have Dodged a Bullet: Jodie Foster’s Neoliberal “Coming-Out” Rhetoric and the Politics of Visibility

kimberlee:

As I watch Foster’s speech unfold, I hold my breath in anticipation, only to release it with a conflicted, “Oh, come on! Just say it!!” My invitation/expectation of her coming out speech act works alongside, indeed, is part of, a collective interpellation that insists Foster answer the call and declare herself. But is this woman, this lesbian, the lesbian to whom I want to belong? In the late 1970s, my idea of lesbian was limited to the dark imaginary of my bedroom in the Midwest where I touched myself and whispered “lesbian” out loud, calling myself, completely oblivious to the demands of the same sex rights movement that collectively insisted on our visibility, and our survival.

julia:

After Jodie Foster “comes out” in her speech accepting the Cecile B. DeMille Award at the January 2013 Golden Globes, I judgmentally roll my eyes and breathe through a sense of frustration that our mainstream culture still waits with bated breath to hear the confessionals of wealthy and famous white people. To some of us who have lived in Los Angeles and moved in LGBTQ communities, the announcement also feels passé—Foster’s lesbianism is part of the cultural landscape. At the same time, the young girl in me remembers the butterflies flapping in my burgeoning queer stomach as I longed for the Foster who appeared in Bugsy Malone, Freaky Friday, and Foxes. I was always afraid that others could see my desire, exposing even more to the bullies who teased me and followed me home after school. Desire was dangerous. I go back to my eye roll and think “What game is she playing here?!”

The political and historical moment of Jodie Foster’s “coming out” speech is markedly different from the moments in our memories. The earlier (1960s–1990s) gay and lesbian rights movements challenged the social structures of homophobia and heteronormativity. At their most inclusive, these movements attended to the ways sexual orientation intersects with structures of race, gender, class, ability, sex, and nation. These movements stressed survival, resistance, visibility, strength in numbers, and structural change through collective and coalitional action. Out of these social movements, and in some ways in direct response to them, the emergence of neoliberalism shifted a focus on collective rights and social structures to the rights of the individual/private citizen. As is well established in the contemporary writings of queer studies, neoliberalism is defined by a conceptual shift in which private/individual concerns become the concerns of the public, resulting in what Berlant calls the intimate public sphere.¹ Out of this shift, it should come as no surprise that mainstream gay and lesbian politics align themselves with single-issue politics that focus on rights for the individual such as the fight for same-sex marriage.

Foster’s Golden Globes speech reminds us that our current neoliberal context shapes discursive possibilities. Mainstream LGBTQ politics push us to focus on the individual and, in contrast, we long for articulations of resistance that challenge the conventional and pry open coalitional possibilities and imaginaries.² Although no movement has ever been entirely inclusive, we long for the reverberation of voices that push us to collective sensibilities as a framework for selfhood. The echoes of the past iterate in our present: “The personal is political” (feminisms); “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Used to It!” (Queer Nation); “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door” (Harvey Milk).³ Each of these examples demonstrates a public and collective commitment beyond the self, a collective self, motivated by rage, longing, and desire. This is not to say that the self, the body of the individual is not included or is somehow absorbed into invisibility into a mass public. Each body is meaningful to the larger body. In other words, it’s not just for “me,” but rather for “we.”

In this essay, we examine Foster’s speech from a queer perspective in which nonnormativity (particularly resistance to homo- and hetero- normativity...