Reflections on the Gay Question

An admirable translation of Didier Eribon’s best-selling Reflexions sur la question gai (Fayard, 1999), Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is at best a solid gay and lesbian studies/queer theory primer, at worst a reminder of how desperately those fields of inquiry need resuscitation. For those already acquainted with American queer studies’ 1990s leading lights (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David Halperin, George Chauncey, e.g.) reading Insult is like reminiscing with an old friend with whom nothing remains but a heady nostalgia:

‘Remember the double bind of the closet?’

’Ah, yes, yes, that was amazing!’

’How about performativity and gender melancholy?’

’Mm-hmm, good times . . . good times.’

This is not to say that such insights are no longer important or relevant, but rather that their familiarity — their use and abuse — is growing tedious, unchallenging. Eribon makes clear that one of his reasons for writing Insult is to import American queer theory to France: “I was writing in a country in which, until a very recent date, lesbian and gay studies basically did not exist, and in which any attempt to encourage them resulted in thunderous insults from the media as well as from institutions of higher learning.” (xix) His importation is an impressive feat — eloquent, accessible, comprehensive — yet fails to incite or excite upon re-importation.

Insult , however, is more than a compilation of American queer theory’s greatest hits. Throughout its four-hundred forty seven pages, divided into three sweeping sections,”The World of Insult,” “Specters of Wilde,” and “Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias,”Eribon is at pains to demonstrate the myriad ways gay men have moved from a world of subjection — a denigrated and ostracized place in the social order — to “subjectivation,” an affirmation of abjection, a creation of joyfully queer ways of life.”Focusing primarily on British and French literary luminaries (Pater, Symonds, and Wilde on one side of the channel; Proust, Gide, and Foucault on the other), he traces a historical trajectory of insulted pariahs who ultimately come to speak for themselves. Part of Eribon’s project is directed against those (above all American) scholars who have sacralized Foucault’s hypotheses concerning the “reverse discourse” — the notion that modern gay identity was forged in appropriating and “subjectifying” the late-nineteenth century psychiatric “invention” of homosexuality. Though Eribon excuses Foucault for such a blunder, he is less forgiving of American Foucaultians:

. . . Foucault’s readers rapidly forgot that the page in La Volonte de Savoir the French title for History of Sexuality, Volume I on the ‘invention of the homosexual’ was first of all, and above all, a polemical statement, a strategic intervention, that needed to be situated in the theoretical context in which it was made. As for Foucault himself, if he did in fact seem himself to adhere to the historical rupture provoked by psychiatry in 1870, he soon nuanced his position, especially once he read Boswell’s book i.e., Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality . Unfortunately, that page of La Volonte de Savoir has taken on doctrinal status on the American side of the Atlantic, where endless books and articles repeat that there were no ‘identities’ before the end of the nineteenth century, but rather simply acts occurring between people of the same sex. (315)

Thus the French importation of American queer theory comes with a well deserved critique of a sloppy American importation of Foucault. Especially in Part Two of Insult , a genealogy of nineteenth and early twentieth century gay male self-invention, Eribon explores gay worlds and identities that complicate more reductive historical accounts of the reverse discourse.

And yet this re-writing of gay history is too, alas, nothing terribly innovative. Taking methodological cues from John Boswell, Alan Bray, and especially George Chauncey (whose Gay New York was translated by Eribon and published in France in 2004), the author takes seriously the influence of popular, literary, and philosophical cultures on gay autoproduction. Bray’s “molly” and Chauncey’s “fairy” were recognizable...