Acting Out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality in Turn-of-the-Century Paris

Acting Out Orientalism: Sapphic Theatricality in Turn-of-the-Century Paris Emily Apter I N BRIEFLY CONSIDERING THE STATUS of Orientalism as a theatrical conceit in turn-of-the-century feminist performance, I want to situate recent discussions surrounding performativity and the stereotype that in their turn beg certain questions about the appointment and settling of identity. It has struck me that in the concern to escape stale gender epistemologies, with their heterosexist contraries, psychosexual clichés, or more new-fangled doxa of “ difference,” a frangible alternative rhetoric has been ushered in figuring sexual identity as a con­ ditional performativity that leaves only a ghostly and sometimes ghastly trace of the stereotype behind in the wake of its performances. Mutable sexualities, body parts semiotically open to erotic opportunity, sexed bodies recast as morphologically plastic and phantasmatically unbound —such parsings, grafted from the language of Judith Butler’s chapter on “ The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary” in Bodies That Matter, while eschewing an outright utopianism of gender possibility, nevertheless rekindle great expectations for a genuinely gender-troubled future.1As do Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s locutions in her discussion of queer performativity in Henry James.2Elaborating a notion of perform­ ativity that underscores “ the obliquities among meaning, being and doing,” criticizing the term’s narrow theatrical application, Sedgwick warns against the domestication of the term through reductive deter­ minations of whether particular performances (e.g. of drag) are really parodie and subversive (e.g. of gender essentialism) or just uphold the status quo. The bottom line is generally the same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic. I see this as a sadly premature domestication of a con­ ceptual tool whose powers we really have barely yet begun to explore. (QP 15) With this caveat against taming the mental constructs for thinking sex­ uality Sedgwick ups the ante in the intellectual quest for alternatives to exhausted dyads and oppositionalities. But in dismantling historically resilient gender ontologies with an eye to accomplishing more than a sim­ plistic resistance to gender essentialism and less than a naively redemp­ tive vision of sexual polysemy, Sedgwick still leaves open the question of 102 Su m m e r 1994 A p t e r the hinge that keeps identity signification in place. A nagging anxiety about how referents ultimately come to bear meaning (that follows learn­ ing of the arbitrariness of signifiers or the non-originary nature of the Transcendental Signified), accompanies the prospect of reading sexual semiotics adrift in psychic prohibitions and identifications. The material­ ist grounding of phantasmatic signification—acknowledged as essential by Butler and Sedgwick alike—often remains elusive on the level of inter­ pretation. My hypothesis in this essay is that part of what allowed turn-of-thecentury French gay and lesbian sexual identity to perform itself along Sedgwick’s axis of “ meaning, being, and doing” was its mediation by the culturally exotic stereotype. A rather underrated staple of critical discourse that may be ripe for theoretical revisitation, the stereotype, as we all know, is a term deriving from the history of printing referring to the metal plate made from a mold of composed type. An early example of technology’s impact on textual representation, the stereotype retains the semantic residue of the materiality of its origin even within its more figurative usage as a synonym for the commonplace, hackneyed, or con­ ventionally “ settled in form.” The notion of imprinting, whether visual or discursive, remains a key to understanding the negative reputation of the stereotype as that which stamps the complex subject with the seal of reductive caricature and/or bad habit. It was in this way that Oscar Wilde employed the term in his bitter reproach to Lord Alfred Douglas. “ My habit, he wrote in De Profundis—due to indifference chiefly at first —of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood.” 3The association of the stereotype with “ permanence” and “ fatality” implies that the stereotyped charac­ ter is flawed, even deviant, insofar as it contains a groove of moral deca­ dence veering toward the death drive. Wilde’s reference to his...