AIDS and the National Body 
 

 Edited by Michble Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, 
 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 
 
Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Edited, and with an introduction by Robyn Wiegman 
 
 Duke University Press Durham & London 1997 
 
© 1997 The Estate of Thomas E. Yingling 
 “Editor’s Introduction,” “The Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts,” 
 “The Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism; Reading Yingling, 
 Reading Gunn,” and “Caesura” © 1997 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper oo 
 Typeset in Melior by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. 
 Acknowledgment of copyrights and Library of Congress 
 Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed 
 
 page of this book. 
 
The Dream Visitor 
 
 Approximately one month before the appearance of my first Kaposi’s 
 sarcoma lesions, I had a dream in which I was visited by a figure. 
 He did not enjoin me to repent, as does the dream visitor in Parting 
 Glances. In fact, he had been dispatched with knowledge. There was 
 some important communication between him and me, but the issue 
 here was that he couldn’t speak. This man was a Holocaust figure—he 
 was on his way to the trains: millions dead, and they all knew it, and 
 no one did anything. What I recall—in addition to the shabby dignity of 
 his demeanor—was the utter boundlessness of the injustice of what¬ 
 ever ignorance it was we were condemned to and by in our communi¬ 
 cation. AIDS had shifted from a question of morality to one of episte¬ 
 mology. Then, I am reading Wittgenstein, and I come across this: “Look 
 upon this tumor as a perfectly normal part of your body’’—what is a 
 perfectly normal part of my body? AIDS had shifted to humor. But this 
 is the move one must make, and in order to do it, one must not “look 
 on” but read, and it is the question of reading with uncertain terms that 
 AIDS forces upon us. The whole business of the national body begins 
 here. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/aidsnationalbody01ying 
 
Contents 
 
 Introduction by Robyn Wiegman 1 
 Dear- 9 
 
 Reading with Uncertain Terms 
 
 The Oncology of Ontology 15 
 
 Wittgenstein’s Tumor: AIDS and the National Body 17 
 
 AIDS in America; Postmodern Governance, Identity, 
 and Experience 37 
 
 Hope 57 
 
 How the Eye Is Caste: Robert Mapplethorpe 
 and the Limits of Controversy 59 
 
 The Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts by Michael Awkward 
 
viii Contents 
 
 Knowledge Effects 
 
 Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference: The Predicament 
 of Gay Culture Studies 93 
 
 AIDS, Confession, and Theory: The Pedagogical Dilemma 105 
 Fetishism, Identity, Politics 108 
 Speaking with the Dead by David Roman 118 
 Untitled 133 
 
 The Stuttering I 
 
 Theory and the Debate over Canon 137 
 
 The Stuttering I: Lyric Subjectivity and Excess 147 
 
 The Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism: Reading Yingling, 
 Reading Gunn by Robert L. Caserio 158 
 
 Something 168 
 
 Caesnra by Stephen Melville 170 
 
 Bibliography 179 
 Index 189 
 
 Contributors 193 
 
Introduction 
 
 Robyn Wiegman 
 
 I shall never get you put together entirely. 
 
 —Sylvia Plath, “The Colossus” 
 
 When Tom Yingling died in 1992, he left no instructions, only an 
 improperly signed will, a few pieces of furniture, a car, and a diversity 
 of writing—poetry, lectures, essays, abstracts for books and papers, 
 journal entries, letters to friends. He left the way people leave their 
 houses to go to work in the morning. Of course he knew that he was 
 dying, but as with each of us, he had a particular approach, a form and 
 manner, to his personal grief. According to his own narrative, he had 
 always struggled with postponement: not “coming out” until his early 
 thirties, launching his academic career later in that decade, telling 
 people who really mattered to him about his illness only at the end. He 
 fretted over his relationship to time, to the significance, symbolically, 
 emotionally, of how and when and if he would arrive. In this way, it 
 seems to me, his death at the age of forty-two snuck up on him. He was 
 not accustomed to being early. 
 
2 Robyn Wiegman 
 
 I met Tom at the end of 1987. He was an Emerson Fellow in the 
 English Department at Syracuse University, finishing a manuscript 
 that the University of Chicago Press would publish as Hart Crane and 
 the Homosexual Text (1990). He had been particularly active in the 
 theory debates that accompanied the department’s reformulation of its 
 undergraduate curriculum, a process that abolished historical peri¬ 
 odicity as the governing rubric and put in its place the organizing 
 categories of “History, Theory, Politics.” Tom found himself most often 
 teaching comses under “politics,” and one might characterize his crit¬ 
 ical practice at the time as a heady mixture of poststructmalist theory 
 and postmodern Marxist ideology critique. He took from poststructur¬ 
 alism an attention to the discrusive articulation of social relations, 
 what he calls in Hart Crane “the placement of subjects in discourse” 
 (2), and from Marxism what he cites as a concern for “the materiality of 
 literary production and reception” (14). 
 
 After the completion of Hart Crane and with the decidedly material 
 influence of his ovra Hiv-positivity, diagnosed in 1989, Tom became 
 increasingly suspicious of his earlier critical tendencies. The post¬ 
 structuralist critique of the individual and of humanist notions of 
 identity, essence, and experience—in short, the theoretical legacy of 
 “social constructionism”—would not be wholly adequate to the way 
 he wanted to think about the complexities of embodied identity, nor 
 would a return to humanism suffice. While he found in psychoanaly¬ 
 sis an interesting attempt to discuss the subjective contours of identity, 
 Tom was finally too uncomfortable with the way theoretical practices 
 were most often mastering methodologies for the critic’s own claim to 
 epistemological sovereignty. As the essays in this volume will demon¬ 
 strate, Tom was increasingly drawn to a self-conscious critical practice 
 that could handle the inability of the critic to finally and assuredly 
 know. 
 
 One cannot help but to read such a critical turn away from ideol¬ 
 ogy critique and certain assumptions of poststructuralism as a conse¬ 
 quence of AIDS— both “my AIDS,” as he describes it, and AIDS as a social 
 relation. For Yingling, AIDS was the “disease that announces the end of 
 identity” (15; this.volume), and he meant this as much on the individ¬ 
 ual level as the national. In Tom’s thinking, aids made palpable—to the 
 point of psychic crisis—the irreconcilability of the body’s materiality 
 and oru imaginary relation to it. He spoke compellingly of his own dif¬ 
 ficulty adjusting to the way mv manifested itself in highly visible and 
 swift changes, from the spread of Kaposi’s sarcoma (ks) (first his leg. 
 
Introduction 3 
 
 then chest, face, and arms) to weight and hair loss, bruising, bloating, 
 and blindness. (Friends, doctors, even Tom, were shocked at the way 
 the KS spread from its initial spot on his leg in February 1991 to nearly 
 90 percent of his body by July 1992. During the last week of life, he was 
 blind from this aspect of his illness.) In literalizing the contradiction 
 between the material and the imaginary body, AIDS interrupted the 
 fantasy of “sameness” that underlies psychic holds on identity and the 
 coherent “self.” AIDS thus became for Yingling the literal and symbolic 
 figure of the “non-identical”—that which could never be thought of as 
 “itself” and that which undid the very fiction of the self. 
 
 Otherness as a condition of the constitution of the “self”—the mis- 
 recognition necessary to its own formation—is certainly not Yingling’s 
 invention. But the exploration of the way AIDS circumvents identity’s 
 fundamental repression is a crucial contribution to the critical dis¬ 
 course about the disease. More important still is Yingling’s focus on 
 “the national body”—the phrase he used to link the individual experi¬ 
 ence of AIDS to historical configurations of power, sexuality, capital, 
 and identity. For Yingling, “the national body” references the social 
 imaginary of identifications, desires, values, and practices that govern 
 the legibility of the body in U.S. culture. “[NJational identity,” he 
 writes in “Wittgenstein’s Tumor,” “requires an ideal conception of 
 the body and a rejection of accommodation to Otherness” (25; this 
 volume), and it does so in a context that understands “the ideal” as 
 without disease in all senses; physical, moral, sexual—in short, as a 
 normative and regulatory ideal. Exploring how that ideal functions, 
 especially in popular discourses about Hiv infection and aids, was for 
 Yingling crucial to any critical engagement with the disease, drawing 
 him into a conversation about the precise ways in which AIDS has been 
 figured as anti-American: in its violation of heterosexually sanctioned 
 erogenous zones, familial bonds, and social formations of privacy and 
 pleasure, along with its narrative tropes of invasion, foreign bodies, 
 and altered alterities. 
 
 I found “Wittgenstein’s Tumor: AIDS and the National Body” under a 
 stack of papers on the floor of Tom’s home office after he died, covered 
 with notes in handwritten scrawl; I have never found the disk version, 
 though in looking for it I came across many other documents that have 
 become of use to me here. “The Dream Visitor,” which opens this 
 volume, for instance, existed in a file by itself, titled by Yingling, on 
 the same floppy with “Hope,” a meditation on the meaning of his own 
 professional life in the context of being Hiv-i-. I have included such 
 
4 Robyn Wiegman 
 
 writing in this volume—along with poems, letters, and abstracts—in 
 order to represent the tensions I read in Tom’s work on the national 
 body: the way AIDS figures as a critical—in all senses of the word- 
 social condition and its individual interiorization. That Tom would be 
 embarrassed by the exposure of the personal I do not doubt. The dis¬ 
 ease did embarrass him, not just in the national discourse of sexual 
 shame that surrounds mv transmission, but in the debilitating cor¬ 
 poreal transformations it visited upon him. But it seems to me that 
 Tom’s focus on the national body—the last essay he would write— 
 necessitates just such an exposure: when the legibility of one’s own 
 body is shorn from all imaginary relations, not only those governing 
 national and personal identity, but those of desire, consumption, and 
 labor as well. 
 
 These last issues—of consumption and labor—are perhaps less de¬ 
 veloped than the others in the keynote essay of this volume, but their 
 significance for the meaning of living and writing with AIDS is pro¬ 
 found. In discussing how the “national feeling for the body’’ is linked 
 to commodity culture, Tom rather quickly notes in “Wittgenstein’s 
 Tumor” that “AIDS places one outside the circuits of that culture” (29; 
 this volume). While he does not develop this idea much further, it is 
 easy to see how the familiar image of the “wasted” AIDS body—the very 
 cultural insistence on such an image as the predominant sign for the 
 disease—emphasizes the point, as the body might be said to “fail” in 
 both ways: it is no longer capable of labor (so-called meaningful or 
 otherwise) or of entering the circuits of exchange necessary to the 
 “pleasures” of commodity consumption. Expenditure—for drug treat¬ 
 ments, high-cost medical practices and insurance policies, therapy- 
 promises postponement, not pleasure. Likewise eating, so often a 
 practice of pleasme, becomes for the person living with AIDS, or plwa 
 (and especially for Tom, who found immense satisfaction in food), a 
 consumptive practice more indicative of the body’s social and psychic 
 abjection. 
 
 And what of labor? Tom doesn’t say much directly about this in 
 “Wittgenstein’s Tumor” and yet the composite of essays offered here 
 cannot escape their own bearing on the complexities of “work” for the 
 PLWA. In the alienation that the severance from the national body en¬ 
 gendered, in the contemplative posture of a man watching his body’s 
 material reformations, in his own personal engagement with identity’s 
 inscription within Western regimes of a mind/body split, Tom seemed 
 to struggle—both for and against—the cultural function of work as a 
 
Introduction 5 
 
 normalizing agency. During the last year of his life, he was director of 
 graduate studies in English at Syracuse and a member of various dis¬ 
 sertation and thesis committees. “Working with the grad students is 
 extremely fulfilling—even in the face of the uncertainty of the future,” 
 he writes to an old friend, in a letter I’ve reprinted here. The work of 
 the critic, on the other hand, “has not been of much importance to me 
 at all: I finally get invitations to speak places (I’m supposed to go back 
 to Penn to speak in January—something I always fantasized about) and 
 I don’t care anymore about academic writing and research” (11; this 
 volume). And yet Tom would return seven months before he died to 
 Penn, where he had attended graduate school in the mid-eighties, to 
 deliver “Wittgenstein’s Tumor,” an essay he would continue to revise— 
 from what I can tell—until at least early May 1992. He would also 
 deliver versions of the essay at Cornell and Columbia; produce an 
 abstract for a Modern Language Association panel that last spring (see 
 “AIDS, Confession, and Theory” in this volume); continue to draft 
 “Fetishism, Identity, Politics,” begun a year earlier (also included 
 here); and tinker with his essays on lyric poetry and the politics of the 
 canon (see “The Stuttering I” and “Theory and Debate over Canon” in 
 this volume). 
 
 Yingling’s lack of “care” did not translate, then, into a cessation of 
 academic production; rather his relation to that production and the 
 meaning of that production ceased to signify apart from “my AIDS.” 
 The materiality of the illness infected, if you will, not simply his rela¬ 
 tionship to time, but the hierarchies of meaning with which life was 
 itself invested. The protocols of academic work that privilege the indi¬ 
 vidual as an intellectual mind, the lengthy cycle of writing/revision/ 
 submission/publication, the circulation of oneself at conferences and 
 symposia, the various routines associated with the crafting of a “na¬ 
 tional” reputation: these were no longer the conceptual contours of his 
 identifications, the manner through which he placed himself in time. 
 Instead, he seems to have sought—what? not solace nor comfort, cer¬ 
 tainly not fulfillment, perhaps just some kind of maintenance—in his 
 relationship to the everyday, a suspension of the academic’s vested 
 interest in his (or her) future arrival. “I don’t regret the choices I made 
 in getting into this,” he writes, “it just no longer seems like the most 
 important aspect of life” (11; this volume). 
 
 It is consistent with his own complex sentiments about academic 
 production that Tom made few plans while still alive concerning the 
 future handling of his scholarship. While he named me as his literary 
 
6 Robyn Wiegman 
 
 executive in a will prepared in 1991, he never managed to legally 
 sign it. We had no conversations in which he provided organizing 
 directions or conceptual frameworks for the essays, published and 
 unpublished, that were never collected; he located no disks, gathered 
 together no errant manuscripts. I have—it must be said—insinuated 
 myself into the task of assembling his writing, partly as mourning, 
 partly as emblem of intellectual respect, and partly to satisfy my own 
 need to participate in a politics of surviving. 
 
 Others have joined me in this—Michael Awkward, David Roman, 
 Robert L. Caserio, and Stephen Melville—each of whom knew Tom in 
 differing ways and who bring compellingly different conversations to 
 interact with his work in this anthology. Awkward uses both personal 
 narrative and literary critical strategies to engage Tom’s analysis of 
 Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men, challenging the way 
 identity-based theory has overinvested in social categories (of gender, 
 race, sexuality) to define political epistemologies and psychic inte- 
 riorities. Roman writes in response to Yingling’s assertion that gay 
 studies has achieved academic legitimacy by locating the elisions and 
 limitations of the contemporary formation of sexuality studies. Case¬ 
 rio provides a critical engagement with Yingling’s Hart Crane and the 
 Homosexual Text, carrying into the present an argument about poetry 
 and theory that he had only just begun with Tom before he died. And 
 Melville closes this volume with a consideration of what AIDS has (and 
 does not have) to teach us—about community, loss, and our own “out, 
 living” (172; this volume). In reflecting on Tom’s own writing and on 
 the contexts that give rise to this collection, the essays by contempo¬ 
 rary scholars extend the pol)rvocality we find in Tom’s work, being at 
 once personal narrative, literary criticism, social commentary, and 
 critical theory. They embody, if you will, the breadth of Tom’s own 
 critical dialogues—moving from visual culture to the canonical forma¬ 
 tion of gay and lesbian studies, to twentieth-century American poetry, 
 to the politics of the academy—and they do so by taking up quite 
 explicitly the way AIDS, “that word by itself” (58; this volume), is the 
 critical center of this book. 
 
 Approximately two weeks after Tom died, I had a dream in which he 
 visited me. The scene was the hospital room. I was sitting in a green 
 chair. Tom’s KS had begun to disappear; he was no longer blind. When 
 he told me he had to leave, the hospital door swung open and, as I 
 watched him exit, he turned into a young boy with a perfectly normal 
 body. The dream was more comforting to me then than it is now, with 
 
Introduction 7 
 
 its compensatory fantasy that aids had lost its power over him. I’ve 
 read enough Yingling to become distrustful of the resurrection of the 
 imaginary body, and I do not want to find in his death a way to manage 
 my own relationship to AIDS as psychic closure. Indeed, it seems to me 
 that the critical importance of this volume lies precisely in its ability to 
 render the contradictory power of aids. 
 
September 1,1991 
 
 Dear- 
 
 Your letter arrived about two or three weeks ago, and I’ve put off an¬ 
 swering because I haven’t wanted to deal with the issues you raised. To 
 make a very long and very complicated story short, I became symptom¬ 
 atic of AIDS in February of this year. I have Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is 
 the skin cancer associated with Hiv. I’ve spent the summer trying to 
 work some chemotherapy (an injection of interferon that I do once a 
 day), but the success has been negligible and the side effects fairly 
 debilitating (I spent June and July on the couch watching cable, trying 
 to keep the room from spinning). But the lesions continue to spread. It 
 doesn’t appear that KS is metastatic: it simply pops up spontaneously 
 anywhere on the body: the only seriously threatening sites are all inter¬ 
 nal, and we’re trying to slow its spread and (hopefully) keep it all 
 external. But no one knows with this disease; it seems that it just goes 
 wherever it wants, and while the drugs may interfere with the progres¬ 
 sion toward serious illness, they don’t seem able really to reverse or 
 halt it. 
 
 Needless to say, coping with all of this has been weird and awful. As 
 you probably know from your mother’s illness, the psychological pro- 
 
10 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 cess is more intense than the physical. I’ve known for two years (yes¬ 
 terday) that I was fflv-i-; I’ve been on AZT for almost two years. The 
 lesions (my only prominent symptom of AIDS so far) appeared in Feb¬ 
 ruary and were confirmed through biopsy in March. By April, I was a 
 basket case. Then I got really run down in May—and once school was 
 over, we (the doctor and I) decided to try the interferon treatment since 
 the KS appeared to be advancing fairly aggressively. 
 
 I suppose I might have told you all of this years ago, but I didn’t tell 
 anyone except two or three people. It is still information I can’t (psy¬ 
 chically can’t) share with everyone; I’m still working (the department 
 is putting me up for promotion this year), and I want my life to retain 
 whatever normal patterns it can for as long as possible, and it just 
 seems to me that people’s knowing would change things too much. It’s 
 not that I’m afraid of being run out of town or anything, but it doesn’t 
 seem to be the business of people who know nothing about the illness 
 and care little or nothing about me. I want to avoid what I know has 
 already happened: people who don’t talk to me who talk about me. 
 
 This is the strangest letter I’ve ever written to anyone. I don’t think 
 any of it follows coherently; it may just be venting, and while that’s 
 great it also means I’m skipping over important stuff as I go along. Let 
 me say first of all that not every day is hell or doom for me: I’m living 
 with my friend Randy (also positive but still quite strong and healthy) 
 and another friend in a huge and gorgeous house in Syracuse. They are 
 so helpful and supportive, and our domestic contentment is one of the 
 most important things to me right now. There are days, of course, when 
 I want to run away even from them, but basically I’m trying to work 
 with the disease and not let it control me. I’ve been in a support group 
 for two years, which is often a life-raft. But it is hard: and the hardest 
 part is that I don’t know if I’ll make it for one more year or for a decade 
 or more. I truly believe that some people will sruvive this epidemic; 
 but I also know that most of us won’t, and I try to be both realistic and 
 hopeful (a tough seesaw act). 
 
 An 5 rway, I get very sentimental these days—seeing all the wonderful 
 people I’ve had in my life and wondering if I’ve done the right thing by 
 them. Missing them. Grieving, I guess. And of course wondering “why 
 me?” and trying to fix (retroactively) what isn’t really broken (me, 
 friendships, the past). We watched Beaches last night and the scene 
 that stays with me most is when Barbara Hershey can’t find a picture of 
 her mother’s hands: how insistently she needs this object (the pic- 
 
Letter 11 
 
 ture)—with an irrational passion—as if that were going to give her the 
 answer to all the unanswerable questions. 
 
 More than anything else, I feel those unanswerable questions these 
 days, and a strong pull toward a certain reverence for life that I haven’t 
 felt for years: to allow myself to feel reverence (not fake religion or 
 panicked bargaining with god, but a mysterious recognition that might 
 almost promise contentment). That means as well, of course, that work 
 has not been of much importance to me at all: I finally get invitations to 
 specik places (I’m supposed to go back to Penn to speak in January— 
 something I always fantasized about) and I don’t care anymore about 
 academic writing and research. But that has something to do with this 
 un-answerability: as academics we’re forced to act as if we have all the 
 answers. The rewarding of aggressive hostility in the profession has 
 come to bother me immensely: none of it is worth the ill-feeling, the 
 intrigues, the inflated sense of purpose. I don’t regret the choices 1 
 made in getting into this, it just no longer seems like the most impor¬ 
 tant aspect of life (middle-age crisis strikes Central New York PWA— 
 film at eleven). 
 
 Through all of this I have maintained (and continue to try to main¬ 
 tain) a sense of humor-perhaps a little more sardonic at times. I refuse 
 to live thinking only about “the end.” So I’m director of graduate stud¬ 
 ies this year in the department (only teaching one course per semester). 
 Working with the grad students is extremely fulfilling—even in the 
 face of the uncertainty of the future. 
 
 I’m beginning to see that at this point. I’m writing more for myself 
 than for you, so perhaps I should stop ... I want you to know that I am 
 basically optimistic—if not about living to 100, at least about what my 
 life still is and can be. So although this letter may shock and sadden, 
 please be sure that I’m hanging in there. Call or write soon. 
 
 Tom 
 
Reading with Uncertain Terms 
 

The Oncology of Ontology 
 
 On first reading a certain work by Derrida, I mistook the word “ontol¬ 
 ogy” for “oncology.” That is the thing of AIDS, it is the signifier through 
 which we understand the cancer of being, the oncology of ontology— 
 not only in its threat to our being, its announcement that we are mov¬ 
 ing toward non-being, indeed cU'e already inscribed with it, in it. But 
 also that it is itself deeply not-identical, never quite the same, ap¬ 
 pearing under different guises, none of which is a disguise, following 
 circuitous routes into visibility and action. It is the disease that an¬ 
 nounces the end of identity. 
 
 ... Since its naming, aids has been presented to us as both physically 
 and figurally overwhelming, as virtually irresistible in its meanings. 
 And most of that figuration has centered on linking AIDS either directly 
 or metaphorically to desire—either through homosexuality or drug use, 
 both of which stand in synecdochically for a longer list of policed 
 activities. That those two activities in particular could come to signify 
 AIDS is itself a sleight of hand we might investigate, and most of our 
 thinking about AIDS in psychoanalytic terms has turned on how desire 
 
16 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 is immobilized (and therefore mobilized) in discourses about it: we can 
 read the political unconscious of Jesse Helms (his literal unconscious 
 being too excrescent to repay any attention); we can read American 
 anxieties about nonmonogamous, heterosexual sexual activity; we can 
 analyze the Other of American televisual domains (the African Ameri¬ 
 can, the Latin, the homeless, the sick in general: how can you be a 
 consumer when you are yourself consumed with illness?). 
 
 But more than the politics of desire is at stake in thinking about AIDS: 
 in fact, it may well be tbat aids bas said more about identity in omr 
 culture than it could ever say about desire. More specifically, we might 
 ask—through Lacan and others—about the mirror stage and the rela¬ 
 tion of the “I” to its body, for we encounter in living with AIDS the 
 production of non-subjects, people for whom the mirroring illusions 
 of discoruse are broken: the host body in this case continually reminds 
 its subject—with every glance in the mirror—of the distance between 
 the “I” and its lesions, and of the fact that the lesions may not be 
 subsumed into any transcendence: thus, one of the important discur¬ 
 sive moves from the beginning has been the insistence on the designa¬ 
 tion “person with AIDS.” The struggle in living with AIDS is to produce a 
 discourse adequate to an experience that is not deterritorialization (the 
 term Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari use to describe the flow of 
 desiring-production beyond the categories inscribed in the subject) 
 but reterritorialization (their term for the new “form” or convention 
 desire produces; its making): a new identity, a new codification and 
 damming of the flow of desire is offered in the body of the person with 
 AIDS, but that subject has in fact been emptied of desire. 
 
 It is thus that Kafka’s work-in which our reading shuttles among 
 fields we might call the body of desiring-production, its denial, and 
 the legislation of identity—becomes allegorical to living with aids and 
 finally more telling in its allegory than referential texts like Longtime 
 Companion or Parting Glances. Texts of body loss (see here as well The 
 Fly and The Elephant Man) are allegorical for aids not only because 
 they place in motion alienation from a body that no longer seems to 
 house a subject, but also because they foreground the impossibility of 
 speaking the condition of loss being written into (and onto) the body. 
 So it is not desire that is in question, but identity: the whole problem of 
 a disappearing body, of a body quite literally shitting itself away. That 
 is aids. 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor: 
 
 AIDS and the National Body 
 
 Toward the end of “Modernity—An incomplete project,” the essay he 
 delivered on the occasion of receiving the Adorno Prize from the city 
 of Frankfurt in 1980, Jurgen Hahermas reminds us of the differing func¬ 
 tion and meaning the same object may solicit in different social con¬ 
 texts. He suggests that while an aesthetic object may call forth one 
 reading from the expert or critic, there is too little homogeneity in 
 modern culture to guarantee that its entry into the life experience of 
 that culture will be congruent with the critic’s reading: 
 
 as soon as such an experience [an aesthetic experience] is used to 
 illuminate a life-historical situation and is related to life prob¬ 
 lems, it enters into a language game which is no longer that of the 
 aesthetic critic. The aesthetic experience then not only renews the 
 interpretation of our needs in whose light we perceive the world. 
 It permeates as well our cognitive significations and our norma¬ 
 tive expectations and changes the manner in which all these mo¬ 
 ments refer to one another. (13) 
 
18 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Citing the dual demand within bourgeois culture that one be both a 
 critical respondent to art and a consumer subject to the pleasure of 
 fashion, Habermas rejects the aesthetic experience as a means toward 
 meaningful social change, as a site for the completion of modernity’s 
 project of pursuing a rational human culture. We might borrow this 
 Habermasian notion as a way to work into the question of what has 
 gone wrong in American culture’s lukewarm response to AIDS, where 
 the “experts” (and critics) have found themselves unable to effect 
 meaningful social change despite their expertise, their warnings, and 
 their seemingly endless labor. In fact, Habermas’s essay presents a 
 number of interesting prospects in this regard: his use of Weber is a 
 perfect place to begin to think about how the aids epidemic has been 
 inscribed in dominant culture in a way that preserves the seeming 
 autonomy of such fields as the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic 
 (that autonomy being, according to Weber, one of the legacies of mod¬ 
 ern industrial capitalism), so that one is invited to assume (as George 
 Bush and other government leaders seem to) that research continues at 
 its own pace (how can you hrury truth?), that the lay public cares 
 deeply and can surfeit its fear and assuage its failure through aesthetic 
 texts like Longtime Companion (1990), and that the moral issues of 
 AIDS still turn on questions of condom distribution in schools and less 
 on care and treatment of pwas— or, more significantly, that moral is¬ 
 sues are destined to remain indeterminate in a diverse culture such as 
 America. One need not be a believer in Habermas’s dream of a per¬ 
 fectly reintegrated, postcapitalist cultru-e in order to begin to trace how 
 a successful campaign of response to aids needs to move across the 
 false autonomy of these realms. 
 
 But this may also be the expert’s position, largely lost on the culture 
 as it expresses aids in its dominant modes; in other words, while 
 writers like Simon Watney or Cindy Patton might be able convincingly 
 to demonstrate a detrimental link between the false neutrality of sci¬ 
 ence and the political realities of living with AIDS, that will probably 
 have very little impact on those school board members who are reach¬ 
 ing a decision about AIDS education in some small town in upstate New 
 York. This is one of the reasons for some skepticism in the HIV commu¬ 
 nity about the way in which the media have taken up figures like 
 Magic Johnson and Kimberley Bergalis: relatively sophisticated read¬ 
 ings of AIDS as signifier or as social fact have received none of the 
 attention recently lavished on these two despite their seeming lack of 
 knowledge about the epidemic.^ Unfortunately, one must say that their 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 19 
 
 entry into AIDS discourses has always bordered on the specular (this 
 perhaps against their own best intentions), making AIDS “real” by cir¬ 
 culating images that refer not to the complex interdiscursive chal¬ 
 lenges of the disease but to other, familiar images: in the Johnson case 
 these images are of sport, in Bergalis it is the popular image of the 
 weak, debilitated aids victim, of the suffering terminal patient. If 
 writers like Baudrillard are correct, and the media operate at the level 
 of a hyper-reality, circulating images and information without refer¬ 
 ence to the production of meaning, then sports entertainment is one of 
 the supreme modes of that circulation in our culture: the question of 
 meaning is never even staged (as it may be, for instance, in other areas 
 of the news); we are simply invited to bask in the play of images that 
 refer only to images in a system underwritten by their seductive ap¬ 
 peal. We might note as well that sport functions interestingly to secure 
 a sense of national identity: in the nineteenth century, production and 
 commerce defined the relation between regions in America. Now, in 
 an era of multinational corporate structures, it is more likely that Buf¬ 
 falo is linked to Washington, D.C. only through the Super Bowl (we see 
 the older model parodied in odd little practices like the wager of a 
 bushel of lobsters and a bushel of oranges between governors of states 
 whose “teams” will compete on the athletic field). What happens 
 when AIDS invades that system? It is literally unthinkable in the terms 
 usually at play there; thus, Magic has to be removed from the system. 
 
 The media have used both Bergalis and Johnson largely to evoke 
 emotional response. Thus, while Bergalis’s case appeared to open de¬ 
 bate about the ethics or morality of certain medical practices—and 
 therefore to offer a potential bridge to the false autonomy of science 
 and ethics as they have been constructed around this disease—we 
 really need rather to read her position in a nationally circulated and 
 nationally inspired narrative of fear and pity that leveled any impact 
 her illness and death might have had on public health debates and 
 made of her crusade mostly an enactment of pathos. Expert only in suf¬ 
 fering innocence (truly the AIDS victim), Bergalis signified for America 
 one of the tragic dimensions of the epidemic, but the spectacle she 
 provided would remain trapped in the realm of the aesthetic. The 
 Magic Johnson case is slightly different. By working with the experts 
 rather than against them, as Bergalis did, Johnson allows himself to be 
 presented as someone with the potential to have a significant impact 
 on the legitimation of AIDS and Hiv as a speakable concern, especially 
 among the African American, teen, and heterosexual populations. 
 
20 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 And there is heartening evidence that he may remain the occasion for 
 some rational debate about safe sex and/or abstinence as appropriate 
 preventives of transmission (although after his appointment to the 
 president’s AIDS commission, he evidently added the advice of absti¬ 
 nence to his routine statements about Hiv). But while the figure at its 
 center is heroic rather than pathetic, here too we are confronted mostly 
 with an aesthetic text designed to elicit feeling from an audience: one 
 of our champions will perhaps be cut down in his prime; it is Lou 
 Gehrig, Ajax, or Achilles. 
 
 Perhaps the most telling effect in both these instances is the role 
 irony plays in their construction. In both instances we are treated to a 
 spectacle of the unexpected. The Bergalis story is drenched in irony: 
 not only is she a young woman, and women, of course, are not at risk 
 from AIDS, but more importantly, her case became so newsworthy be¬ 
 cause a simple medical procedure (routine dental care) evidently was 
 the origin of her infection. Her appearance before a Congressional 
 committee was likewise represented as ironic in the sense that her 
 own death was imminent and yet she sought to protect others from 
 such incidental infection—perhaps measures could be taken to save 
 lives in the future, but those measures would be too late to save Kim¬ 
 berley Bergalis. And the final irony, the issue that threatened to bring 
 down the entire edifice of Hiv rights, was the “failure” of the CDC— that 
 watchdog agency of public health—to support her position. The John¬ 
 son case also reads as deeply ironic: athletic heroes simply are not at 
 risk from aids, and the discourse around their accomplishments is 
 completely incompatible with representations of aids. Johnson has 
 also been adamant in his refusal to admit any homosexuality as a 
 possible source for his infection, making him a huly exceptional figure 
 for HIV infection. Another drug-user, another homosexual, another sex- 
 worker: their contraction of Hiv is not newsworthy—there is simply 
 nothing to tell the public about people with aids until it appears in 
 some venue thought immune to it (as People magazine put it in cover¬ 
 ing the Johnson story, “Most of us are not homosexuals; most of us are 
 not intravenous drug users” [Alexander and Benet 59]—as if most of us 
 were professional athletes!). Most significantly, Johnson had always 
 signified for American culture a Huck Finn-like likeability: his boyish 
 grin, the seemingly bottomless reservoir of a good-humored nature 
 (cmd this alongside an obvious competitiveness). So “nice” was he that 
 Johnson had, in fact, helped to resurrect professional basketball among 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 21 
 
 white audiences in the seventies and eighties when polls had shown 
 the dominance of African American players to have alienated large 
 segments of white America. So the irony here is that Johnson, the 
 perpetual adolescent in an adult body, the player who had no ill will 
 toward his rivals yet usually prevailed over them, the Negro who could 
 be trusted—Johnson was a “nice” person, and AIDS happened only to 
 people who weren’t “nice” and had courted disaster or failure in their 
 personal lives. 
 
 What allows irony to work, of course, is a traditional notion that 
 texts are stable and expectations clear j/reversible; irony sets a limit to 
 the instability of reading by staging closure as a choice between alter¬ 
 natives, each of which is complete. Irony thus provides an epistemo¬ 
 logical security rather than a radical textual opening. Rather than lead 
 to questions about the grounds of reading, the seeming undecidability 
 of irony becomes the key to a new stability. Thus, in the name of telling 
 us something about AIDS, the media allows us to read AIDS— the most 
 destabilizing social question of the last decade—through a set of stable 
 discourses. Thus, in the Bergalis case—despite differing interpreta¬ 
 tions on the issue of whether medical personnel ought to tell clients of 
 an HIV infection—it is assumed that there must be some right answer to 
 the questions raised, that each side of the debate is reading the same 
 text, and that such readings—and the text of aids itself as it is pre¬ 
 sented—spring not from an interested position but from a certifiable 
 relation to truth. The multiplicity of those discourses does not, in fact, 
 destabilize our reading practices or our relation to the disease; it sim¬ 
 ply says there are multiple perspectives, that each of them is clear, and 
 that each presents some legitimate claim on our attention. The un¬ 
 decidability of irony on the emotional level becomes in this case an 
 aesthetic strategy that mirrors the unresolvable nature of AIDS as a 
 social ill. 
 
 But this shouldn’t really surprise us. If it is not presented as a scien¬ 
 tific issue or as a debate over some aspect of morality, AIDS is presented 
 most often through the conventions of the human interest story, and 
 most human interest stories—when they touch on “the controver¬ 
 sial”—are constructed to ensure an emotional response as the only 
 certain response to an irresolvable social problem that calls forth nu¬ 
 merous other uncertain responses. So what do 1 want? Would I rather 
 there be no coverage of Magic Johnson? Certainly not. aids activism 
 has lobbied for years for more public discourse about the disease, and 
 
22 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 now we seem to receive that; and government is spending—according 
 to George Bush—more on aids research than on any other medical 
 problem; so what do we want? 
 
 AIDS discoiu-se for the first decade of the epidemic was consumed by 
 the problem of meaning: what did aids mean as a social, historical 
 event, and what did it mean to be a person with AIDS? Virtually all of 
 the activity around the illness was bent on one goal (after, of course, 
 the goal of education and prevention of infection): to secure a subjec¬ 
 tivity for the person with aids that was not simply an erasure of his or 
 her previous subjectivity, that did not simply read the illness as the 
 end of meaning. Thus, we felt (I think) as though our task—and this we 
 represented to ourselves in fairly heroic terms—was to wrest from 
 dominant culture the wholly negative if not annihilative representa¬ 
 tion of mv infection and AIDS, and to construct in its stead a discourse 
 of empowerment, meaning, and possibility. And because of the histor¬ 
 ical conditions of the appearance of ADDS in the West, this was linked to 
 a discursive explosion around the question of homosexuality: to effec¬ 
 tively intervene in ignorant responses to AIDS, the institutional homo¬ 
 phobia (particularly of America and Britain) had to be addressed and 
 exposed (the best of this work remains Simon Watney’s Policing De¬ 
 sire). That task has met with relative success, but we are still con¬ 
 fronted on every side by a culture that has failed to integrate mv and 
 AIDS into its life experience (and I should say here that when I use a 
 term like “experience” I mean that to signify a complex semiotic and 
 dialectical process, not simply an unmediated knowledge of self or 
 other). I want to suggest that we need a third phase response to AIDS: if 
 phase one was pre-AZT and consisted mostly of emergency triage, 
 phase two was post-AZT and consisted mostly of working with (or pro¬ 
 testing against) researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and govern¬ 
 ment agencies. Phase three needs to continue the pressure of phase 
 two while expanding its frame of reference to address other cultural 
 questions. We see how this has happened already with the birth of 
 groups like Queer Nation, but I want to make this explicit: it is not 
 enough to struggle to change the meaning of AIDS; we must begin to 
 change that culture in which aids takes its meaning. This is where gay 
 and lesbian academic work still can make a difference—because the 
 culture in which AIDS takes its meaning (in America, at least) has read 
 it as equivalent to homosexuality and has misread that with a criminal 
 strength. More importantly, only gay and lesbian studies is positioned 
 to continue the strong critique of that wholesale institutionalized ho- 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 23 
 
 mophobia that has largely determined the parameters of our thinking 
 about sexuality. 
 
 In order to begin to make the call for such change less empty or 
 obligatory, I want to turn to an unlikely text: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 
 Culture and Value, and to a 1931 journal entry printed there. Wittgen¬ 
 stein, one of the gay modernists of Cambridge, is the subject of a recent 
 critical biography that refused to take seriously the notion that sexual 
 identity is a central component of subjectivity. As in the battle over 
 Langston Hughes’s sexuality—where one side (epitomized by the Ram- 
 persad biography and its squeamishness about Hughes’s sexual his¬ 
 tory) seeks to deny the relevance if not the existence of homosexual 
 desire in Hughes and the other side (let’s say Isaac Julien or Essex 
 Hemphill) presents Hughes as a symbol for the closeting of black male 
 sexuality in white culture^—Wittgenstein’s biographers have largely 
 denied or minimized questions about desire in their reading of his 
 work. The question of Wittgenstein’s sexual identity is thought to sully 
 his otherwise important contributions to philosophy, and his own 
 deep repression of sexual questions in his writing—and his reported 
 guilt over homosexual desire—both facilitate the argument that this 
 has no impact on how we might most legitimately read his philosophy. 
 We will return to this in a few moments, but for now, I would remind 
 you that Wittgenstein died of cancer in 1951, making the following 
 passage somewhat uncanny: 
 
 “Look on this tumour as a perfectly normal part of your body!” 
 Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to decide at will to 
 have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body? 
 
 ... We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural 
 part of the body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the 
 whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best 
 they can do is put up with it. 
 
 You can expect an individual man to display this sort of toler¬ 
 ance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this 
 of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things 
 that makes it a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting 
 someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for the body 
 and also to make the tumour welcome. (Wittgenstein 20e-21e) 
 
 There is a contradiction here: on the one hand, Wittgenstein tells us 
 that one can’t incorporate the tumor through strategies of accommoda¬ 
 tion; it will remain forever foreign to the self since the only language 
 
24 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 game one might invent for making the tumor a perfectly normal part of 
 the body -would be so private as to constitute what we would call an 
 abnormal response. Wittgenstein is clear by this point in his life that 
 language is a social act, that we may not simply use it to our o-wn ends 
 and that it is, in fact, often more determining of us than we of it; thus, 
 one cannot look on the tumor—or any other object—in a willful manner 
 if one hopes to reach some understanding of it: 
 
 what makes a subject hard to understand—if it’s something signifi¬ 
 cant and important—is not that before you can understand it you 
 need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast 
 between understanding the subject and what most people want to 
 see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may 
 become the hardest of ail to understand. What has to be overcome 
 is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the 
 intellect. (17e) 
 
 On the other hand, Wittgenstein suggests that we might expect an 
 individual to display a kind of tolerance toward the change in his body 
 such that some truce with difference could be effected: but this is not a 
 complete emotional or epistemological rapprochement—it is simply 
 “the best they can do” to “put up with it,” to allow it to stand in its 
 difference. But there is perhaps a more crucial contradiction in Witt¬ 
 genstein’s equivocation about how the will might play in this matter, 
 about whether or not “I”—or anyone—could have the power to decide 
 to have—or not to have—an ideal conception of my body. The answer 
 to this would seem a fairly strong “no,” that larger culture forces deter¬ 
 mine the ground of such attitudes. But some shift can occur in one’s 
 thinking if one begins to question cultural norms. 
 
 Somehow these questions turn for Wittgenstein on the prospect of 
 national culture and identity, and in order to explain this, I should 
 perhaps say that I have elid ed part of this passage, that disease here has 
 a double valence. Following the first three sentences quoted above, we 
 find a paragraph on a different kind of difference that may help explain 
 Wittgenstein’s curious assertion that the refusal of disease is essential 
 to nationhood: 
 
 Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews 
 is not treated as circumstantially as their intervention in European 
 affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are 
 experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 25 
 
 put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to 
 speak of a disease as if it had the same rights as healthy bodily 
 processes (even painful ones)]. (20e) 
 
 We can just as easily imagine “queer” in place of “Jew” in this passage, 
 but in writing of Jewish European history as disease, Wittgenstein 
 seems to be responding to the rhetoric of National Socialism. Our read¬ 
 ing of this passage should not stop at the simple solution of seeing 
 disease as a cover signifier for “Jew,” however: there is a national feel¬ 
 ing for the body that is simply racist ideology but there is also a na¬ 
 tional feeling for the body that has to do with how our culture reads 
 corporeality, physical competence, and health in general (each possi¬ 
 bly inflected by racial discourse but not exhausted by it). Perhaps we 
 need to take seriously Wittgenstein’s suggestion that national identity 
 requires an ideal conception of the body and a rejection of accom¬ 
 modation to Otherness. 
 
 The question we need to pursue turns on how the American feeling 
 for the body inscribes disease as foreign and allows aids to be read 
 therefore as anti-American. Before we turn to the question of the na¬ 
 tional feeling for the body, however, I would like to make a few re¬ 
 marks about the impact of AIDS on our thinking about the subject, for 
 Wittgenstein’s journal entry reminds us that the subject’s self-relation 
 is mediated, requiring us either to forgo rhetoric of a “Me” distinct 
 from a “not-Me” or to open the term to a semiotic or dialectical reading. 
 This would seem to be the impact of recent gay and lesbian theory as 
 well, which has instructed us to question the very paradigm of identity 
 that has allowed gays and lesbians to self-identify: Ed Cohen, among 
 others, has written about the screen of sameness that underwrites the 
 “we” of gay and lesbian political discourse, questioning how the cate¬ 
 gories of identity politics operate on an exclusionary principle similar 
 to that which minority peoples have always had to work against and 
 that imagines some essential condition of being signifiable as gay, les¬ 
 bian, etcetera (see Cohen). Judith Roof has claimed that the paradigms 
 of gay male subjectivity have been used to signify lesbian subjects, to 
 turn them into sodomizing men, and Judith Butler, who has perhaps 
 gone further than anyone else in reading identity as imitative and per¬ 
 formative rather than constitutive, likewise considers any notion of 
 the subject to be always already masculine (thus, her rejection of cer¬ 
 tain historical principles of feminism) (see Roof; Butler, Gender Trou¬ 
 ble). Because of the way in which it parodies the very idea of origin and 
 
26 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 essence, drag becomes one of the privileged figures of identity for her, 
 and in the rebirth of street theater around aids (in ACT UP, Queer Na¬ 
 tion, PISD, and other group actions) we have seen the notion of politico- 
 aesthetic performance resurrected with a vengeance. 
 
 But if we have sound intellectual and political reasons to be sus¬ 
 picious about the cultural and epistemological work performed in the 
 name of the subject, we must also see that AIDS work has required 
 construction of a juridical and social subject denominated “person 
 with aids”; in order to secure various entitlements (confidentiality as a 
 principle of the ethics of the epidemic; funding for treatment and test¬ 
 ing) and in order to resist the pressure to read aids only as the end of 
 subjectivity and the loss of personal meaning, it has been absolutely 
 necessary to make truck with the enemy and work with such catego¬ 
 ries as “intravenous drug-injector,” “homosexual male,” “person with 
 AIDS,” and “African American” as if the people meant to be covered by 
 such phrases were actually named by them. But this is impossible. As 
 Eve Sedgwick has pointed out in writing about the poverty of aca¬ 
 demic language in its description of such things as race, class, and 
 sexual identity,^ such terms hardly even begin to name the differences 
 among us, so that one intravenous drug-injector may live homeless on 
 the street, and one may live in the wealthiest section of the city. Choice 
 of drugs, mode of access to those drugs, and specific practices in the 
 use of those drugs may vary widely for different people all meant to be 
 covered by this one term. And the category “person with aids” can be 
 most empowering when least dominant: people living successfully 
 with AIDS most often learn that they cannot escape the medical, jiuidi- 
 cal, and social category that marks them as diseased but that their 
 resistance to the potentially negative effects of identification through 
 AIDS is linked to how much they can refuse AIDS as a totalizing condi¬ 
 tion of being. To be able still to be a teacher, a student, an actor, a wife, 
 lover, or child, a Republican or a Democrat, are all essential to a bal¬ 
 anced response to diagnosis (this, too, is what made the figure of Kim¬ 
 berley Bergalis so pathetic; there was no frame of reference except her 
 illness). 
 
 This is one of the crucial differences between commercial films like 
 An Early Frost or Longtime Companion, both of which have been 
 bailed for their ground-breaking representation of AIDS— one on tele¬ 
 vision, the other in theaters—and an independent film like Parting 
 Glances^ Both An Early Frost and Longtime Companion offer us the 
 spectacle of how contraction of AIDS affects the bourgeois subject 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 27 
 
 whose crisis is at the center of the narrative—in An Early Frost this is a 
 young Chicago stockbroker whose family knows nothing of his homo¬ 
 sexuality and who seems himself to know nothing about aids (he fails 
 to read early signs like nightsweats and the incipient cough of pneu- 
 mocystis as anything other than a flu); in Longtime Companion this 
 involves a circle of friends in New York City who have lived, what we 
 might call for want of abetter term, the Fire Island life. The affluence of 
 the central figures in both texts has been noted before, as has the fact 
 that An Early Frost, cast as a family melodrama, seems to focus more 
 on the family’s (especially the father’s) inability to name and accept the 
 homosexuality of the son, rather than on the illness (we see Aiden 
 Quinn, the son, in moments of illness, but the real burden of AIDS is 
 enacted by a stereotypical “faggot,” an unrepentant, bitter, impover¬ 
 ished, and lonely person with AIDS he meets in the hospital). Longtime 
 Companion does, in this respect, have the virtue of representing AIDS 
 as a communal rather than familial problem and of acknowledging the 
 work gay people have done in caring for those with the disease. But in 
 both instances we are invited to read AIDS mostly as the tumor that can¬ 
 not be accommodated, as the end to what Michael Warner has called 
 the “uniquely valuable subjectivity, the limitless self-formation and 
 non-ascetic pleasures” that ground Americans’ self-relations (“Wal¬ 
 den’s Erotic Economy” 173). 
 
 Parting Glances, on the other hand, offers us a completely different 
 representation of AIDS and of the person with AIDS, making its AIDS 
 character, Nick, seem at first almost incidental to a narrative in which 
 “parting” will refer to Robert and John, lovers whose relationship is 
 threatened by Robert’s need to spend a year overseas on business. In 
 the end, that parting does not occur, but Nick’s illness brings us an¬ 
 other sense of the potential partings that hover always between gay 
 friends, and the film ends with another kind of parting glance, this a 
 literal trashing and symbolic reading of the Fire Island life depicted in 
 Longtime Companion—only the symbolic reading here constructs that 
 world as fat and ridiculous. Unlike An Early Frost and Longtime Com¬ 
 panion, both of which work to liberalize our attitude toward homosex¬ 
 uality by presenting bourgeois gay couples whose love for one another 
 establishes their sameness to bourgeois heterosexual couples. Parting 
 Glances does not work as a love story in the usual sense. While Robert 
 and John have a relationship in which we as viewers are meant to 
 invest, John explains to Nick in one of the film’s most touching mo¬ 
 ments that it has always been him that he has loved, and other mo- 
 
28 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 merits in the film reinforce our sense that desire circulates rather than 
 settling in this text, that bodies move against one another (as at a party, 
 as in dancing), and one cannot place a limit on their possible relations. 
 Nick, whose character is defined by excess rather than absence (he is a 
 rock singer, and the one piece we see of his is a video entitled “I’m only 
 in it for the drugs”), refuses repentance as the appropriate response to 
 his AIDS diagnosis. Unlike An Early Frost, this is not a narrative of 
 Oedipal forgiveness, and when—in a parody of Amadeus—he is visited 
 by a figure of doom linked intertextually to the father, saying only 
 “Repent!” Nick throws a keyboard at him. Finally, Nick retains a sex¬ 
 ual energy lost to melodramatic mourning in An Early Frost and Long¬ 
 time Companion; rejecting suicide at the movie’s close, Nick seems 
 nevertheless to have incorporated knowledge of his death into life in a 
 way that Bataille might approve, and to have moved the question of 
 subjectivity around AIDS from one of hopeless loss to one of exuberant 
 expenditure. Perhaps because the film celebrates a noninstrumental 
 relation between the body and culture (all those marked by instrumen¬ 
 tality are sexual and emotional pariahs), AIDS can become not the total¬ 
 ized moment of the subject’s erasure, but another factor in a dance 
 marked equally by death and desire. 
 
 This returns us to the question of what “the national feeling for the 
 body” might be and how that might determine part of our thinking 
 about AIDS. This is hardly an unexplored topic in American studies, of 
 course: from Cooper on in the literature of the United States and at 
 least since Fiedler, we have been aware of the peculiar parameters of 
 the masculine subject offered in the name of “the American.” Lauren 
 Berlant has recently written of the paradox of privilege and disembodi¬ 
 ment that defines the ideal of American citizenship: “if in practice the 
 liberal political public sphere protects and privileges the [abstract] 
 ‘person’s’ racial and gendered embodiment [white, male], one effect of 
 these privileges is to appear to be disembodied or abstract while retain¬ 
 ing cultural authority. ... In American culture . . . public embodi¬ 
 ment is in itself a sign of inadequacy to proper citizenship” (“National 
 Brands” 113-14). Thus, according to Berlant, women and people of 
 color are always marked as inadequate and/or different because their 
 identity is confirmed by the visibility of their bodily difference and by 
 their social definition through the category of embodiment. Certainly 
 we can include here people with aids, often physically marked by 
 lesions, by wasting syndrome, by a T-shirt that reads “living with 
 AIDS,” and by a necessarily renewed knowledge of how fragile and 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 29 
 
 tenuous embodiment can be. This never-again-to-be disembodied sub¬ 
 ject thus typifies Wittgenstein’s point about how an individual might 
 accommodate illness but a nation may not: it is in the self-definition of 
 the national to reject not only disease but the very notion of embodi¬ 
 ment it recalls. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies traces the burden of 
 such thinking in pre-Nazi ideology, suggesting that anything fluid, 
 feminine, or collective had to be disavowed by the masculine subject, 
 and if we are tempted to think that our culture’s more recent interest in 
 the male body (in figures like Schwarzenegger or Stallone) recom¬ 
 mends the masculine as a category of embodiment as well, we need 
 only see how the narratives they anchor celebrate the masculine sub¬ 
 ject’s ability to transcend embodiment: wounds do not identify the 
 body as a surface inscribed by history; rather, they serve as a measure 
 of triumph, an index of the distance traveled in transcendence. The 
 male body suffers in these texts, but “real men’’ rise above it. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant recent shift in the national feeling for 
 the body, however, is something quite different: maybe it is less the 
 abstract ideal of citizenship that names the American in our era and 
 more the equally abstract structure of commonality called commodity 
 culture. AIDS places one outside the circuits of that culture, whether 
 that be those represented in gay publications like The Advocate or on 
 QVC. Pleasure and labor are both denied the body with aids. 
 
 I would like to close by thinking about the debate over political 
 correctness that erupted last year, and the reactionary position in that 
 debate that read gay studies as inimical to the national body. We can 
 read the canonical moment in gay studies as one part of an effort to 
 bust the traditional canon of American Studies; and (unlike African 
 American or women’s writing in their anticanonical drives) it is not 
 just the list of texts we are interested in here—imagine American Stud¬ 
 ies without Whitman, James, Melville, Crane, Matthiessen, Santayana, 
 Hughes, Cullen, Locke, and the entire milieu of the Harlem Renais¬ 
 sance, or without women writers such as Cather, Stein, and Rich— 
 perhaps Jewett, and Dickinson. In other words, gay and lesbian writers 
 seem in some ways to be in the canon—just not as explicitly gay and 
 lesbian writers. What is beginning to shift is the way in which we read 
 these texts, and there are people who are quite upset about the legit¬ 
 imation of sexualized reading practices. Christopher Benfey, writing 
 in The New Republic, critiques Michael Moon, Eve Sedgwick, and 
 myself for being reductive in our interest in the sex lives of writers, not 
 really understanding that our interest is less in those lives than in the 
 
30 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ones that surround our own, that the question—for me at least—is how 
 we read and how we use reading to negotiate social issues like sex¬ 
 uality. Benfey writes, “It’s hard to see who benefits from having the 
 poetry of Crane or Whitman, or the stories of Henry James, designated 
 as simply and exclusively ‘homosexual’ in nature” (40); he misses the 
 point here with his adverbs—no one imagines that homosexual writing 
 is either simple or exclusive of anything. And certainly it is disin¬ 
 genuous to ask who benefits from this. But what is defended in pro¬ 
 tests like Benfey’s are not just the names of hallowed dead men but an 
 even more hallowed tradition of transmitting culture and ideological 
 value through something called “literature,” a cultural object he un¬ 
 derstands to be formed by aesthetic practices transcendent of embar¬ 
 rassing cultural or material specificities like sexuality (where “desire” 
 is admissible, it can never take an articulated form: thus Crane may 
 write about love but we should not “limit” that to questions about 
 same-sex affection). 
 
 The question I would like to raise is this: what is the relation be¬ 
 tween homosexuality and the canonical, and why should gay studies 
 appear as a threat to the national health? (This latter question will be¬ 
 come more intelligible as we proceed.) Whatever our position within 
 such debates, we are all familiar enough by now with the issues they 
 raise to quickly sketch out a set of answers to the question, “what is at 
 stake in the figure of ‘canon’?” Ideological value, cultiual centrality, 
 what an earlier literary period identified as the centripetal force of 
 culture; and in America, canon has always served the interests of na¬ 
 tionalism as well. But there has recently been in the mainstream press 
 a distvubing escalation of attacks on academics and their supposed 
 wholesale jettisoning of Western values serious enough to warrant a 
 renewal of attention to questions about literature and its value in 
 American culture. The charge in such attacks is that this “fascism” or 
 “McCarthyism of the left,” as it is called, is more than an idle ivory- 
 tower phenomenon; the movement toward multiculturalism and/or 
 toward the punishment of hate speech on campus is represented as 
 unhealthy for the nation and dangerous to its future (it is also interest¬ 
 ing in this regard how issues around canon and hate speech are col¬ 
 lapsed until it seems that democracy itself is founded on any student’s 
 right to wear, as one haternity at Syracuse is now wearing, T-shirts that 
 read [on the hont] “homophobic and proud of it” and [on the back] 
 “club faggots not seals”—the logo on this beauty is a rear end with a 
 line through it stating “this is an exit not an entrance”). Obviously, 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 31 
 
 reading William Dean Howells never caused such behavior in any 
 group of people, but the defense of free expression is trotted out in 
 such instances as the very thing the left has fought for and now wants 
 to take away from others, and that issue is equated with a supposed left 
 agenda wherein the canon would no longer be an educational force- 
 disregarding the fact that the very notion of canon suggests there are 
 distinctions to be made in evaluating language acts, that everyone’s 
 speech is not equal (so John Taylor’s essay in New York can ridicule 
 Catharine Stimpson for suggesting that Samuel Delaney’s Stars in My 
 Pockets Like Grains of Sand is just as valuable a read as Shakespeare, 
 while defending the value of every voice in the student population, 
 including racist, sexist, homophobic voices [see Taylor]). 
 
 There would seem to be a contradiction here. Although the analogy 
 is seldom stated, these responses to recent academic politics imagine 
 that multiculturalism is to America as AIDS is to the body; a foreign 
 agent has invaded and if we do not practice “safer education” we will 
 find a whole generation unable to defend itself from the opportunistic 
 infections of the left. It is significant, of course, that the appearance of 
 these pieces (in Time, Newsweek, New York [reprinted in Reader’s 
 Digest], and in columns by Kirkpatrick, Will, and others) has coin¬ 
 cided with our adventure in the Persian Gulf, and we can read in that 
 linkage how questions about literature and canon are sutmed not only 
 to national ideology but to the production and reproduction of bodies 
 available for combat.® One of George Will’s recent Newsweek columns 
 makes this explicit by naming Lynne Cheney “secretary of domestic 
 defense.” This is Will: 
 
 In this low-visibility, high-intensity war [in academia], Lynne 
 Cheney is secretary of domestic defense. The foreign adversaries 
 her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the 
 long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal. 
 Those forces are fighting against the conservation of the common 
 culture that is the nation’s social cement. She, even more than a 
 Supreme Court justice, deals with constitutional things. The real 
 Constitution, which truly constitutes America, is the national 
 mind as shaped by the intellectual legacy that gave rise to the 
 Constitution and all the habits, mores, customs, and ideas that 
 sustain it. (72) 
 
 We need to think of this as something more than the usual anti- 
 intellectualism of the American press, and because the body finally is 
 
32 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 the site on which ideology is enacted, homosexuality (although it 
 never appears in Will’s piece) names for American culture a condition 
 of intolerability not named even by the archfiend feminism or that 
 father of lies, Afrocentrism.® Although these movements are also con¬ 
 demned in these attacks and are in their ways as threatening to the 
 stability of American ideologies as is homosexuality, it is homosex¬ 
 uality that is always the flashpoint of common sense in these pieces, 
 the moment when things have gotten out of hand. This has something 
 to do with the fear of conversion and contagion, something not at¬ 
 tached to feminism and Afrocentrism in quite the same ways. In other 
 words, you can’t make someone female or African American, but you 
 might make someone (haven’t you always wanted to make om sons?) 
 queer. (Our daughters are another story: it is precisely feminism that 
 destroys them, not by making them female but by perverting how they 
 read that: so identity is at stake in a different way in that discourse. Ho¬ 
 mosexuality is a threat to the healthy male body; feminism is merely 
 false consciousness.) In any case, canon is employed in American cul¬ 
 ture to produce a healthy national ideology, and that has always been 
 its most apparent function. From the beginning of anything we might 
 identify as American literature, the presence of a literary canon has 
 been imagined as an indicator of national cultural health and matmity, 
 one of the final measuring sticks of America’s intellectual and global 
 coming of age. And the invisibility of same-sex desire has always been 
 necessary to the maintenance of that canon and to the ideological 
 maintenance it performs. 
 
 If the canon secures—among other things—an ideologically correct 
 body, a healthy body, we might think of that body as the site of a certain 
 reproduction. Nor by this do I only mean to indicate the reproduction 
 of cultural value and ideology that we have come to equate with can- 
 onicity, for in the terms offered by recent critiques of multiculturalism, 
 left discourse fails precisely because it can give birth to nothing of 
 cultural worth; it has no fructifying essence and produces only an 
 atmosphere in which individuals read themselves as victims of op¬ 
 pression. We turn again to Will: 
 
 feminist literary criticism is presented as a political act, liberat¬ 
 ing women writers from the oppression of “patriarchal literary 
 standards.” [One wonders what feminism he reads.] Thus does 
 criticism dovetail with the political agenda of victimology. The 
 agenda is the proliferation of groups nursing grievances and de- 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 33 
 
 manding entitlements. The multiplication of grievances is (if ra¬ 
 dicals will pardon the expression) the core curriculum of uni¬ 
 versities that are transformed into political instruments. That cur¬ 
 riculum aims at delegitimizing Western civilization by 
 discrediting the books and ideas that gave birth to it. (72) 
 
 Finally, the value of “proper” American values, so defined by George 
 Bush and by the nervous academic right, is that they give birth, and 
 they give birth to what? American values: in one of the great tautolo¬ 
 gies, to be “American” is to be generative of the American, to be (in 
 one of Emerson’s tropes that comes back to haunt us in the Reagan- 
 Bush era) the party of hope for whom the future is an American future 
 (Will’s language positions feminism as an unnatural abuse of nursing 
 and giving birth). And as we all know, homosexuality is nongenera- 
 tive. Nor should we underestimate the importance of this figure. Eve 
 Sedgwick has remarked how her nonreproductivity as a woman allies 
 her to an extent with gay men, both marked “odd” in America because 
 barren (see Moon and Sedgwick). So we have: maturity, reproduction, 
 health, all secured by the canonical; does this begin to sound like a 
 heterosexually inflected discourse? 
 
 It is probably clear that the figure of reproduction clues us in to how 
 heterosexuality is at stake in the canonical and in health, as well, if we 
 imagine homosexuality’s historical and current links to illness. But I 
 would like to return for a moment to the notion of maturity to think 
 how it names the heterosexual allegiances of the canonical, especially 
 since maturity is so closely connected to the other two terms. Not only 
 is maturity required for reproduction (and in some communities re¬ 
 production is the required sign of maturity) but the developmental 
 narratives of psychology—whether pop or Freudian—equate mental 
 and sexual health with maturity in ways that gay and lesbian people 
 have historically had to challenge. We see this very clearly in the way 
 Hart Crane’s contemporaries responded to him: because it indicated 
 arrested development and a truncation of personality, homosexuality 
 could not be the wellspring of a truly mature (that is, canonical) cul¬ 
 tural vision. And while considerable effort has been spent in the past 
 fifty years to erase from homosexuality the stigma of personal and 
 cultural immaturity that contributed to Crane’s tragic demise and 
 misassessment—and to any number of unknown and now historically 
 unknowable humiliations and rejections for other people as well—it 
 may be time to rethink homosexuality’s claims to maturity, for “matu- 
 
34 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 rity” lands us right back in a fetishized valuation of identity. To be 
 mature in our culture means to have reached a developmental point of 
 self-possession, and power accrues to such moments. But perhaps the 
 paradigm of non-adult sexuality—precisely in its ability to free us 
 from the t 3 iTanny of acceptable social identity—is our most subversive 
 stance. I think of this not only in terms offered by Freudo-Marxists or 
 Deleuze and Guattari, but in gay and lesbian appropriations of the 
 terms “boy” and “girl,” in the consistent locus of youth as a point of 
 reference in both formations. This is perhaps the final meaning of 
 Ganymede: not as an object of desire but as a figure for it—so we are not 
 speaking here “for” pedophilia but against developmental psychology 
 and the power of its narrative norms to shape cultural expectations in 
 the field of human sexuality. 
 
 And if we shift the term from maturity to majority, and then think 
 about minority, we can put an interesting double valence into play, one 
 that leads back again to the canonical. Borrowing from Deleuze and 
 Guattari’s book on Kafka, Louis Renza years ago claimed Sarah Orne 
 Jewett’s fiction as a political resistance to majority cultme in the name 
 of a geographical and gender regionalism (see Renza). My question 
 here is what happens if we think of all gay and lesbian literature as 
 minor in this sense. Gertainly we can add to the list of gay and lesbian 
 writers associable with Jewett two names whose work stands in inter¬ 
 esting relation to region and minority: Henry James and Willa Gather. 
 In both cases—as in Jewett’s—there is a concerted effort to resist the 
 official identities and responsibilities of the adult world. In the case of 
 both women "writers, they express their desire to live in a prepubescent 
 moment (Jewett’s stated preference is age nine; Gather’s pre-teen and 
 hence also pre-gendered to the extent that sex-gender asymmetry is a 
 cornerstone of what Judith Butler has called “the regulatory fiction of 
 heterosexual coherence” [“Gender Trouble” 338], and the imperatives 
 of adult identity introduce penalties for breaches in that system un¬ 
 thinkable to adolescent girls fond of dressing as boys and insisting that 
 their name is William rather than Willa). It may not be immediately 
 apparent that Henry James’s work explores minority and regionalism 
 in terms congruent with Gather’s or Jewett’s, but certainly we have for 
 some time read his fascination with children as both an escape from 
 and a projection of the sexual demands of adult social relations; and it 
 is wholly possible that what upsets traditional readers of James when 
 they encounter Eve Sedgwick’s “Beast in the Closet” is less the imputa- 
 
Wittgenstein’s Tumor 35 
 
 tion of homosexuality as central to the master’s desire than the shift 
 that now places his work in the category of the “minor” and the par¬ 
 ticular rather than the major and the universal. In any case, we might 
 begin to think gay and lesbian writers as “minor” in Renza’s sense and 
 also as minors, as those who choose not to codify their selves accord¬ 
 ing to the official relations prescribed by the social text. This would 
 allow us to read adolescence less as a state of being in a developmental 
 narrative and more as a trope for the shifting and multiple allegiances 
 of being. And it may help us to read aids, and other categories of 
 difference we have only begun to consider, less as conditions that fail 
 to achieve the normal, less as spots we can at best put up with and at 
 worst ignore. It may—if we embrace pathology—allow us to read as if 
 from an other side. 
 
 Notes 
 
 This essay was delivered as a paper at Columbia University, New York City, 
 Jan. 1992. The notes in this essay were prepared with the help of Alys 
 Weinbaum, Patrick Horrigan, and Mario DiCangi. 
 
 1 National Basketball Association star player Magic Johnson led the Los An¬ 
 geles Lakers to five NBA victories and more recently served as captain for the 
 U.S. Olympic team. In the fall of 1991 Johnson tested positive for the AIDS 
 virus. His stardom coupled with his HIV status continues to be a hot topic in 
 media discussions of AIDS. In contrast to Johnson, the rather “ordinary” 
 young woman, Kimberley Bergalis, grabbed public attention by joining 
 forces with the media in her campaign to make her illness as visible as 
 possible. Having become infected with the virus after a visit to her dentist, 
 this unlikely victim’s body became a common spectacle. 
 
 2 See Rampersad; Julien’s film Looking for Langston (1989J; and Hemphill’s 
 work on Hughes and Julien in Hemphill 181-83 and 174-80, respectively. 
 
 3 See Sedgwick’s discussion of intersecting identities in the introduction to 
 Epistemology of the Closet 1-66. 
 
 4 An Early Frost was directed by John Erman (1985J; Longtime Companion by 
 Norman Renee (1990); and Parting Glances by Bill Sherwood (1986). 
 
 5 Note, for example, the repeated coincidence of articles on AIDS and AIDS 
 research in the same issues of Time and Newsweek that devoted themselves 
 to patriotic coverage of the war: Newsweek, “Saddam’s Endgame” and 
 “Grief Counseling for Colleagues of AIDS Victims” (7 Jan. 1991); Newsweek, 
 “Desert Victory” and “A Tempest in the Test Tube” (18 Mar. 1991); News¬ 
 week, “Saddam’s Slaughter” and “AIDS: Grin and Bear It, a New Humor 
 Magazine” (15 Apr. 1991); Time, “On the Fence” and “When the Doctor Gets 
 
36 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Infected” (14 Jan. 1991); Time, “The Fog of War” and “Delays that Can Cause 
 Death” (4 Feb. 1991); and Time, “Back to the Bad Old Days” and “Bumbling 
 Toward the Nobel” (20 May 1991). 
 
 6 The major contemporary proponent of the philosophy of Afrocentrisrn or 
 Afrocentricity is Molefi Kete Asante, whose work seeks to find the dis¬ 
 tinctively African roots of African American experience in order to situate 
 it as an extension of African history and culture. In this respect Afrocen- 
 trism is an explicit critique of how a Eurocentric vantage point in scholar¬ 
 ship and culture persistently masquerades as a universal one. See Asante. 
 
AIDS in America: Postmodern Governance, 
 Identity, and Experience 
 
 Do justice, cost what it may.—Henry David Thoreau 
 
 In a much-cited essay, Neil Hertz notes how the explosion of academic 
 publishing in recent years induces in the subject enjoined to “keep up” 
 a vertigo that recalls Kant’s category of the mathematical sublime: an 
 overwhelming series of numbers and/or sheer magnitude of informa¬ 
 tion defeats comprehension and induces an abysmal intellectual and 
 epistemological encounter that we mark as the sublime (see Hertz). 
 Anyone interested in AIDS must suffer from a similar vertigo: the num¬ 
 ber of books, essays, pamphlets, and articles, the kinds of information, 
 issues, and events that occur are so overwhelming in sheer number as 
 to defeat any attempt at comprehensive incorporation by one person; 
 the ever-increasing number of written responses to the history of repre¬ 
 sentation of the disease makes it impossible even to survey recent 
 literature much less to comprehend the totality of discourse about HTV 
 since its appearance as GRID in January 1982. In addition, the exponen¬ 
 tial increase in cases and costs plus rapidly changing medical research 
 and protocols challenge the intention of any individual to do intellec- 
 
38 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 tual and/or ethical justice to the various realities of the illness. As 
 Sarah Schulman said at the Spring 1990 OUT write conference in San 
 Francisco, the field of AIDS and Hiv continues to be transformed so 
 rapidly that those who write about it do so with the understanding that 
 by the time their words appear in print, they will be largely obsolete. 
 Inscribed since its appearance as profoundly unimaginable, as beyond 
 the bounds of sense, the AIDS epidemic is almost literally unthinkable 
 in its mathematical defeat of cognitive desire. 
 
 But already we have here begun to make sense of aids, even if only in 
 noting how it defeats our usual academic practice of careful, inclusive 
 analysis. And we have also here assumed aids as an ongoing event, as 
 something that moves within a history that is only partially its history. 
 The mathematical sublime thus quickly gives way in the case of aids to 
 what we might call the historical sublime, for even more than the 
 mathematical, the historical sublime marks reading—and our stake in 
 it—as an activity framed equally by demand and defeat, as the ground 
 on which we are condemned to negotiate the difference between that 
 which can be comprehended by the capacities of the intellect and that 
 which can only be apprehended as beyond, in excess, or pitted against 
 such capacities.^ AIDS, for instance, can be apprehended—on bodies, in 
 friends, in news reports, in changing populations, behaviors, and rit¬ 
 uals: we know that it is in some undeniable sense “real,” whether its 
 reality be outside or within us. But the frames of intelligibility that 
 provide it with even a meager measure of comprehensibility are noto¬ 
 riously unstable. This is evident not only on the macropolitical level, 
 where intense battles over the meaning of AIDS have accompanied 
 every stage of research and treatment in the history of the disease, but 
 also on the micropolitical level, down to the level of the everyday (as 
 anyone touched by it will tell you, the quotidian meaning of aids 
 seems to change almost as often as the virus itself replicates—in wildly 
 varying, if never quite random patterns). The gap between the ap¬ 
 prehension and the comprehension of the disease is thus an asymp¬ 
 totic space where allegory persistently finds itself at play and where 
 the ongoing histories in which AIDS unfolds (variously comprised of 
 the viral, the personal, the communal, the national, and the global) are 
 referred to larger and more masterful or authoritative histories that 
 guarantee interpretation of its meanings and restabilize (sometimes 
 ironically) those values it places at risk. 
 
 Like the systemic depletion that allows aids to appear as a seem¬ 
 ingly endless number of symptoms and thereby remain both the same 
 
AIDS in America 39 
 
 as and different from itself, the material effects of AIDS deplete so many 
 of our cultural assumptions about identity, justice, desire, and knowl¬ 
 edge that it seems at times able to threaten the entire system of Western 
 thought—that which maintains the health and immunity of our episte¬ 
 mology: the psychic presence of AIDS signifies a collapse of identity 
 and difference that refuses to be adjected from the systems of self- 
 knowledge. Susan Sontag has noted that aids has surpassed cancer as 
 the stigmatized term par excellence of contemporary culture, but her 
 contention that it has the “capacity to create spoiled identity” (16), to 
 alter how we know ourselves, is remarkably tame. Because it provides 
 only negative structures of identification, AIDS is most notable for its 
 capacity to produce non-identity or internalized abjection. Unlike the 
 collapse of subjectivity noted in narratives of postmodernism that cel¬ 
 ebrate the simulacrum of inscription or the break with an oppressive 
 history of metaphysics, the finality marked as and by AIDS includes an 
 undeniably literal death, a death so irretrievably literal that its figur- 
 ality must be continually exposed as figuration, as cultural critics like 
 Simon Watney, Jan Zita Grover, and Douglas Crimp have been doing 
 for more than half a decade; and (to reverse the burden of literality and 
 figurality) the finality of AIDS is so in-wrought with configurations of 
 cultural anxiety and dread that its literality must also be continually 
 addressed in strenuous, referential narratives of victimization, pun¬ 
 ishment, resistance, and healing. 
 
 But in addition to offering us a focal point for analysis of the social 
 and political intricacies of signification, aids also focuses for us nu¬ 
 merous questions central to the current vogue for academic research 
 and writing on the question of sexual minority. Who is the subject “at 
 risk” in discourse about AIDS, in the homophobias attached to those 
 discourses? Certainly it is not only those infected with Hiv, and cer¬ 
 tainly not all those are gay men. But of particular interest here are two 
 phenomena not perhaps to have been expected at the beginning of the 
 epidemic: the appearance of large numbers of lesbian activists and 
 post-liberation-generation gay men and women on the front lines of 
 AIDS work. Let us ponder first of all how the two terms “lesbian” and 
 “gay,” driven apart by rapidly accelerating differences in visibility and 
 privilege marking them through the supposedly halcyon decade of the 
 ’70s, have been brought together in this discourse—and how they re¬ 
 main apart. Surely it is not some lesser gift of generosity or conscience 
 essential to gay men that leads to the oft-repeated assertion that, were 
 the gay medical crisis of the ’80s a woman’s health crisis gay men 
 
40 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 would not be working for the cause with the fervor or numbers with 
 which lesbians have responded to the crisis of adds. There are two 
 important factors here: first, lesbians—as women—are marked in our 
 culture in such a way that their “difference” is inescapable; gay men, 
 on the other hand, are marked different in a way that does not preclude 
 their “passing” or their negotiation of many of the privileges of mas¬ 
 culinity even if known to be gay. Thus, the heartening lesbian response 
 to AIDS may be due in large part to a heightened politicization of les¬ 
 bian subjectivity (historically and personally) he/ore the appearance of 
 AIDS. Moreover, in its unyielding equation of value with white, male- 
 embodied masculinity, American culture imprints a double bind on 
 those on its margins: gay people of color and lesbians, for instance, 
 may well find themselves alienated from white gay male cultme, but 
 they may also recognize that their own political future and visibility 
 are bound in complex and equivocal ways to the struggle of gay white 
 men. The dialectic of that recognition does not often work the other 
 way: gay white men are less likely to see their own political fortunes at 
 stake in what happens for people of color or women. It remains to be 
 seen whether the numbers of younger gay men and women who have 
 joined the battle against aids will continue their political work. Cer¬ 
 tainly they, too, know people infected and dying, dead or at risk, but as 
 a generation they could choose to avoid AIDS, to see it as the issue of an 
 older generation of gay men. Yet they continue to see their own subjec¬ 
 tivity and freedom implicated in this battle. They have been politi¬ 
 cized under the banner of AIDS precisely because one of the vigorously 
 recurring allegories grafted onto aids has been its use as a mechanism 
 for policing same-sex desire. These younger activists rightly perceive 
 that what is at stake in public responses to the disease—from confus¬ 
 ing, obscurantist, and moralistic safe-sex recommendations to violent 
 Congressional eruptions of homophobia tied cruelly to denials of pub¬ 
 lic health—moves far beyond questions of public health. AIDS has pro¬ 
 vided a site for surveillance of the most private bodily practices, and 
 where subjectivity is framed through sexual orientation and prefer¬ 
 ence, such surveillance calls into question any complacent desire for 
 a comfortable “private life” (now read as the inadequate goal of gay 
 liberation). 
 
 The political and the personal are, of course, so densely written 
 as intertexts in the more recent history of minority discourse that it 
 would be wise to say that it is only for purposes of analysis that we 
 
AIDS in America 41 
 
 even begin to think of them separately here; AIDS is a late and agoniz¬ 
 ing—but by no means singular—moment of crisis for a culture bent on 
 maintaining the fiction that the personal is not in any way political. 
 When we return to the question of experience below, we will reforge 
 the personal and the political in a more dialectical practice of reading, 
 hut let us begin with a consideration of how AIDS has been inscribed as 
 an issue in the public forum. Perhaps the most visible and incontest¬ 
 able site of such inscription (and for that reason the site of the most 
 vehement contestations) has been the apparatus of government, and 
 while AIDS has forced a confrontation with government on virtually all 
 levels, the apparatus of the nation-state seems most appropriate to our 
 discussion here, for from the beginning of the epidemic in the United 
 States the federal government has housed the broadest powers of iden¬ 
 tification and intervention, and bas therefore been at the center of 
 debates about public response.^ In fact, municipal and state govern¬ 
 ments, with varying but usually lesser powers in this regard, have 
 become the target of so much political work in part because of the 
 vacuum created by federal irresponsibility. The failure to use their 
 power (effectively) to intervene in the disease constitutes the continu¬ 
 ing charge against all levels of government by AIDS activists, and Randy 
 Shilts’s narrative of its history. And the Band Played On, is—for all its 
 faults—one of the most successful texts to date to document the co¬ 
 lossal magnitude of bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude up to 
 1985 (Shilts’s history, and not that ineptitude or indifference, stops in 
 1985). Shilts’s writing makes a convincing case for reading the early 
 history of AIDS as determined by a remarkable lack of concern, commu¬ 
 nication, and cooperation on many fronts, much of that from within 
 federal agencies and among organizations like the Centers for Disease 
 Control and the National Institutes of Health. As baffling, however, 
 was a similar lack of cooperation among nations working to isolate 
 agents and treatments; as Shilts writes the history of AIDS, it would 
 have followed a far different trajectory in a world not structured hy 
 competitive national economies that had in turn spawned competitive 
 nationalistic communities and practices in supposedly trcmsnational 
 areas such as scientific research (scientists in the United States and 
 France were unable—due largely, as Shilts tells it, to the vanity of 
 Robert Gallo at NIH— to share research during the crucial first years of 
 aids). In accounts such as this, the government is charged with crimi¬ 
 nal neglect of its people,^ and the invocation of crime seems appropri- 
 
42 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ate given the liberal philosophy that has historically constructed the 
 nation-state as protector of citizen’s rights by law and citizen’s prop¬ 
 erty and health through institutional intervention. 
 
 The allegory of value framed by the politics of the nation-state is a 
 modern one, of course, its roots in the liberal politics of the nineteenth 
 century. But despite our ciirrent need for such a model of government 
 and for the needs-determined allocations it continues to promise if not 
 deliver, it is not clear that an institutional hamework developed dur¬ 
 ing the imperialist excmrsions of bourgeois Eruope remains a salient 
 paradigm for political organization and analysis in a moment of mul¬ 
 tinational or postmodern capitalism. Ronald Reagan’s simulation of 
 same notwithstanding, postmodern governance is not based in the 
 political representation of subjects under the beneficent gaze of a pa¬ 
 ternal presence. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, suggests that “the polit¬ 
 ical and the social seem inseparable to us, twin constellations, since at 
 least the French Revolution, under the sign (determinant or not) of the 
 economic,’’ but that “for us today, this undoubtedly is true only of their 
 decline” (15). For Baudrillard, the entire politics of representation has 
 eventuated in the implosion of meaning and the rise of a silent major¬ 
 ity that functions to deny the meanings of the social; the masses are 
 no longer potentially revolutionary, in need/search of some adequate 
 self-knowledge, empowerment, or representation. The masses are not 
 some “term which serves as universal alibi for every discourse” (66); 
 rather, they 
 
 no longer belong to the order of representation. They don’t express 
 themselves, they are surveyed. They don’t reflect upon them¬ 
 selves, they are tested. The referendum (and the media are a con¬ 
 stant referendum of directed questions and answers) has been 
 substituted for the political referent. Now polls, tests, the referen¬ 
 dum, media are devices which no longer belong to a dimension of 
 representation, but to one of simulation. They no longer have a 
 referent in view, but a model. (20) 
 
 The only political energy not bent to the implosion or denial of mean¬ 
 ing in our era in the West comes from what Baudrillard terms “micro¬ 
 groups,” those social forces that do not move passively and with fas¬ 
 cination in the face of spectacle but insist on resistance, on decoding 
 and recoding messages, “contrasting the dominant code with their 
 own particular sub-codes . . . [by] way of redirecting, of absorbing, of 
 victoriously salvaging the material diffused by the dominant culture” 
 
AIDS in America 43 
 
 (42-43). The actions of “fringe” groups in response to the AIDS crisis, 
 therefore—not only their seizure of signification, for instance, but their 
 absolute insistence on it, their insistence on the political, social, col¬ 
 lective, and individuated meaningfulness of AIDS— might be read as 
 working against the annihilating but passive power of the silent major¬ 
 ities (act up’s first motto: “Silence = Death”). Baudrillard’s critique 
 also suggests that aids activism has not been co-opted into the great 
 institutional machinery of culture that currently recodes sign value 
 as use value (found in the society of spectacle and its explosion of 
 semiosis) but instead insists upon forcing spectacle itself into politi¬ 
 cal use—hence the resurrection of agit-prop, street theater, poster art, 
 etcetera.^ 
 
 Also crucial here, however, is our recognition of a tension in Ameri¬ 
 can political and institutional life between the nation-state as a politi¬ 
 cal entity and “America” as a term that ceases to designate the state 
 and signifies instead a Platonic ideal of social consensus, homogene¬ 
 ity, and historical transcendence. Hannah Arendt describes the nation¬ 
 state as claiming “to be above all classes, completely independent of 
 society and its particular interests, the true and only representative of 
 the nation as a whole” (17), but the illusory quality of that claim has 
 never become as broadly apparent in America as it has, for instance, in 
 Europe, due in part to much stronger anti-state traditions and move¬ 
 ments there. In fact, the term “America” functions with such slippery 
 teleological power that all critique of the state’s overinvested interests 
 ends only by invoking a more originary value for the same term (thus 
 Reagan was elected partly on a platform of appeal to end state domi¬ 
 nation, yet that appeal was framed as a return to “America”).^ In 
 American political discourse, “America” and the nation-state are not 
 synonymous, and while the slippage between the terms is ever conve¬ 
 niently manipulated, the mythic term virtually always takes prece¬ 
 dence and value over the more material one; conservatives may thus 
 not only ignore the need for the nation-state to respond to population 
 groups not visible within “America” (predominantly gays and iv-drug 
 users in the early years of the AIDS epidemic) but may even cast those 
 needs as anti-American, as a danger to rather than within the state. In 
 addition, we encounter in American political discourse a rather un¬ 
 breakable convention that the materiality of history disappear before 
 the myth that America represents the end of (Western) history, what 
 Jean-Philippe Mathy has noted as “the paradigm of posthistorical ex¬ 
 perience” (272). Long before Francis Fukuyama’s recent apologia for 
 
44 Thomas E. Tingling 
 
 the triumph of democracy as the end of history (see Fukuyama), Amer¬ 
 ica was conceived as the achievement of a radical break with the Eruo- 
 pean past and—in its claim to utopian fulfillment and modernity— 
 with time itself. According to Mathy, “the American mission, because 
 it is conceived in moral terms, is the exact opposite of realpolitik” and 
 Americans evidence “an inability to think in historical terms” (273). 
 Thus, Reagan’s wax-museum performances could borrow indiffer¬ 
 ently from Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Kennedy, stripping their 
 words of historical context and of any ideological difference from his 
 own use of them, producing a spectacle that invoked American history 
 only to collapse it into the supposed timelessness of America as idea. 
 AIDS, on the other hand, is not intrinsically historical (unless we mean 
 by history the appearance of that which moves within myths unable to 
 contain it), but discourse on AIDS invariably invokes the notion of his¬ 
 tory: research suggests a “natural history” of the virus (ten-year-plus 
 incubation periods); gay and lesbian rhetoric links the fight against 
 AIDS to Stonewall and to the entire question of gay and lesbian history; 
 PWA rhetoric states that the ethics of our historical moment will be 
 judged by its response to AIDS; joiu-nalists and experts alike project 
 “the next ten years” or rehearse the present and past in a narrative 
 behind which always hovers a specter of apocalypse in which aids 
 functions as the demonic counterpart to the beneficent “end of his¬ 
 tory” coded in myths of America. In Borrowed Time, his elegiac mem¬ 
 oir of the deaths of his lover and other friends, Paul Monette suggests 
 that AIDS is inherently historical for the individuals it effects: gay men, 
 condemned according to Monette to seek their history in “mythic frag¬ 
 ments, random as blocks of stone in [Greek] ruins” (22), find that “the 
 magic circle” of health and denial they were “trying to stay within the 
 borders of” during the early days of the AIDS epidemic was “only as 
 real as the random past” (6). aids thus becomes a rhetorical or epis¬ 
 temological nightmare as well: history, personal and/or collective, 
 which should reveal pattern, reveals only a deadly but determining 
 arbitrariness. 
 
 The other tenacious public discourse around AIDS, and one that is 
 inseparable from the practices of the nation-state, is framed as science. 
 From my latest T-cell count to Robert Gallo’s theft of viral agents from 
 French cultures, we have understood AIDS not only as a political crisis 
 but also as a mystery to be solved by the power of science (understood 
 as a pure domain of human knowledge wherein “nature” progressively 
 submits to the power of human intellection and technological ad- 
 
AIDS in America 45 
 
 vance). Part of what baffles about AIDS, of course, is its resistance as an 
 illness to this scenario of empowered science, but I am more interested 
 here in the morality or politics of science, and in the failure of scien¬ 
 tific communities to respond more fully and quickly to the demands of 
 the disease. We may develop a method for reading the medical fiasco 
 of AIDS in terms also suggested by recent philosophy and theory, par¬ 
 ticularly by Lyotard’s notion of postmodernism. In what has become 
 something of a touchstone, Lyotard suggests that the grand religious, 
 political, and economic narratives of the past on which were premised 
 the knowledge and totality of culture have fractured in an era of infor¬ 
 mation (hence, “the postmodern condition’’); as a result, “the tempo¬ 
 rary contract [elsewhere, ‘language game’] is in practice supplanting 
 permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cul¬ 
 tural, family, and international domains’’ (Post-Modern Condition 66). 
 As Mathy suggests in his comments on Lyotard, the major contention 
 in The Post-Modern Condition is that “the proliferation of autonomous 
 and heterogeneous universes of discourse and behavior separated, and 
 protected, by incommensurable differences [is] the social and political 
 counterpart to the generalized disbelief in ... ‘grand narratives’ ’’ (292). 
 
 Translating this to the question of AIDS, we find a true incommen¬ 
 surability of discursive universes: as disciplines, medical and scien¬ 
 tific research have indeed become separate, autonomous realms of 
 knowledge and power unprepared to meet the emergency social con¬ 
 ditions of the AIDS epidemic. Perhaps more sharply, the discursive 
 universe in which gay men move and operate—a universe of open and 
 various sexualities and (now) a universe of political rage—seems com¬ 
 pletely foreign if not still perverse to the medical community, the me¬ 
 dia, and the “mainstream” Americans constructed by that media.® 
 Most costly among these incommensurabilities, however, is that be¬ 
 tween the nation-state and the populations most decimated by AIDS: 
 still a cornerstone of the official “grand narrative” of American politi¬ 
 cal and social life, the Platonic ideal of a classless, homogeneous State 
 named “America” is incongruous with gay culture and the medical 
 crisis AIDS forced upon it. Hence, as is suggested by Shilts’s comments 
 on the government’s virtually immediate response to two other dra¬ 
 matic health crises of the 1980s (toxic shock syndrome and the Tylenol 
 tampering case), the deaths of thousands of homosexual men did not 
 solicit any government response for so long in part because homosex¬ 
 ual men were not recognized as constituents of the (now infamously 
 phrased) “general population,” and in part because homosexual men 
 
46 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 did not constitute a rights-group in the eyes of a nation-state deter¬ 
 mined to read its population according to nineteenth-century demo¬ 
 graphic categories such as geography, age, ethnicity, labor, and gender 
 rather than by behavioral patterns such as anal intercoruse and intra¬ 
 venous drug use—and concerned mostly to guarantee the “health” of 
 consumer culture, the non-toxicity of pmchasable goods. Thus, aids 
 becomes a rather obvious site on which to interrogate the beneficence 
 of that autonomy granted within the postmodern, and this is perhaps 
 one way to think the shift in gay male political needs and strate¬ 
 gies pre- and post-AlDS: autonomy is desirable except as crises arise 
 wherein the incommensurability of one site of culture with another 
 (minority cultme with medical, political, and scientific establish¬ 
 ments) is written along lines of power that effectively prevent one of 
 the parties in the “temporary contract” from partaking in the formation 
 of the language game that constructs their social and political rela¬ 
 tions. This is the imperative of groups like ACT UP: to shift the language 
 game, to speak, demonstrate, and demand in ways that are seen as 
 inappropriate to the game when that game erases them or excludes 
 them from its continual reformulation.^ 
 
 If up to now our analysis has focused on rather conventional public 
 or political sites, we must acknowledge that politics is not limited to 
 the apparatus of the nation-state and its official mythologies. Critics 
 who have turned their attention to other ideological sites in culture— 
 and there have been many, particularly in the realm of the media and 
 its construction of .AIDS—have sought to enable resistance through cri¬ 
 tique and counterdiscomse. Simon Watney, Cindy Patton, and Jan Zita 
 Grover are exemplary among those who have treated aids itself as a 
 symptom, producing strong ideological readings in which aids dis¬ 
 course is exposed as thick with political meaning.® Unlike the media, 
 which has tended to mystify the disease (and to literally mystify it: 
 continuing, for instance, to identify it as “mysterious” long after its 
 epidemiological paths had been established) (see Kinsella 134-36), 
 these writers seek to demystify both the disease itself and the appa¬ 
 ratus through which the media produce their mythologies of AIDS. 
 Watney, for instance, contrasts the notion of “AIDS in Africa” to “Afri¬ 
 can AIDS,” pointing out how racist, colonialist residues function in the 
 latter designation to obscure “the specific characteristics of the dif¬ 
 ferent AIDS epidemics in these countries [of Africa], constructing them 
 in a spurious unity . . . which is immediately denied any of the cul¬ 
 tural, social, economic, and ethnic diversity . . . taken for granted in 
 
AIDS in America 47 
 
 Europe and North and South America” (“Missionary Positions” 90). In 
 his earlier, trenchant analysis of British homophobia and AIDS, Polic¬ 
 ing Desire, he had suggested not only how “a particular virus, one of 
 the simplest life forms on the planet, has been used by a wide variety of 
 groups to articulate a host of issues and concerns, consciously and 
 unconsciously” (9), but also that many of those concerns were tangen¬ 
 tial rather than central to questions of illness and public health. For 
 instance, homosexuality has been so insistently at issue in the dis¬ 
 course on AIDS, not because the disease occm's naturally as a result of 
 homosexual activity, but precisely because the structure and stability 
 of contemporary configurations of heterosexuality require the invis¬ 
 ibility and interdiction of same-sex desire, while the fight against aids 
 historically required that the lives of those framed by such desire be 
 made both visible and legitimate.® Similar analyses of the ideological 
 invisibility of black and Latino cultures in America suggest that AIDS is 
 also spread by power imbalances between those communities and a 
 governmental structure not concerned with them in any instance and 
 therefore without the requisite knowledge and apparatuses for educa¬ 
 tion and provision of services in this particular, severely costly in¬ 
 stance (see Alonso and Koreck). 
 
 If such media analysis implies that some representational practice 
 adequate to the political, ethical, and semiotic demands of AIDS ought 
 to be found, this writing also opens a critique of the media as an indus¬ 
 try, as a commodifier of spectacle and information rather than as a 
 facilitator of some more genuine or analytical understanding. Here, a 
 postmodern critic (Baudrillard) and a modern one (Walter Benjamin) 
 would agree that Western culture has reached the limit or the end of 
 representational practices as they have traditionally functioned in al¬ 
 liance with knowledge of the social. 
 
 Baudrillard reads the media as destroyer of social meanings and as 
 producer of information-as-spectacle, and Benjamin marks this dis¬ 
 tinction as one between information and experience. But at stake in 
 both analyses is history and the dialectic between the subject and 
 her/his culture. Baudrillard may consider the curious passivity of the 
 masses a sign of their denial of their own historicity, while Benjamin’s 
 analysis is more clearly wagered on classical Marxian claims, but both 
 fundamentally mistrust what Horkheimer and Adorno termed “the 
 culture industry.” Benjamin writes, “with the full control of the mid¬ 
 dle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments 
 in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a [new] form of commu- 
 
48 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 nication . . . information” (88). Baudrillardian speculation on the col¬ 
 lapse of meaning would reject any appeal to the meaningfulness of 
 internalized process as anachronistic; we will take up below Ben¬ 
 jamin’s complicated and peculiar use of the term “experience” as a 
 signifier for collective, dialectical knowledge. For now, let us see that 
 information is not so much for Benjamin a representation structured 
 by false consciousness, and open therefore to ideology critique, as it is 
 a mode of semiotic circulation directly opposed to the cultural and 
 subjective valuation of experience expressed in the following: 
 
 Man’s inner concerns do not have their issueless private character 
 by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to 
 assimilate the date of the world around him by way of experience. 
 Newspapers constitute one of many evidences of such an in¬ 
 ability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader 
 assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experi¬ 
 ence, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just 
 the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the 
 realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The 
 principles of jorunalistic information (freshness of the news, brev¬ 
 ity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between 
 the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the 
 make-up of the pages and the paper’s style.... The replacement of 
 the older narration by information, of information by sensation, 
 reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. (158-59) 
 
 Each item, each piece of data refers only to itself; “news” is the reifica¬ 
 tion and sale of event, and this becomes even more apparent when AIDS 
 appears in contiguity to—and hence as the scandal of—a culture of 
 celebrity (the “shame” that inverts its “fame”). The deaths of Rock 
 Hudson, Liberace, Willi Smith, and Amanda Blake are reported for 
 their tremendous salability, but no connection between these deaths 
 and the more political or even medical “facts” of the disease are en¬ 
 couraged in the reportage itself.^*’ One need not subscribe to a fully 
 Marxian theory of history and culture to recognize that any reading 
 practice failing to link supposedly autonomous events and universes 
 of knowledge—scientific research, op-ed pieces, the visible deaths of 
 stars and the invisible deaths of so many others, public demonstra¬ 
 tions, treatment advances, hospital overcrowdings, insurance and le¬ 
 gal issues—is condemned to a limited understanding, if not to a simple 
 repetition or invocation of myth. Nor ought such issues remain iso- 
 
AIDS in America 49 
 
 lated in a frame marked “aids”: they take place and meaning in more 
 inclusive allegories of value that determine when, how, and if they 
 will signify at all." 
 
 But how do we reconcile the fact that the genocide of aids continues 
 to take shape in the United States both as deliberate public policy and 
 more privately in the lives and on the bodies of millions of individ¬ 
 uals, especially when the invocation of “individual,” like Benjamin’s 
 appeal to “experience” or “inner concerns,” would seem to many 
 to operate within a discredited paradigm of subjectivity that locates 
 meaning in interiority? More generally, what valence do we wish to 
 assign subjectivity in oiu- analysis of aids? Diana Fuss succinctly states 
 in her inquiry into identity politics in gay and lesbian culture that “to 
 the extent that identity always contains the specter of non-identity 
 within it, the subject is always divided and identity is always pur¬ 
 chased at the price of the exclusion of the Other, the repression or 
 repudiation of non-identity” [Essentially Speaking 103). If identity is 
 not only a fiction but a particularly fragile, chiasmatic, and contradic¬ 
 tory fiction at that, what is the value—political, personal, or ontologi¬ 
 cal—of that identity marked “person with AIDS”? Has the prostitute 
 who identifies herself as such merely accepted a false coherency in her 
 life, and is it possible to read the subject marked “person with AIDS” as 
 coherent in any case? Is the man who denies that his mv-positivity 
 allies him somehow with “them” (those “people with ‘full-blown’ 
 AIDS”) both politically reprehensible and accurate in his sense that 
 “person with AIDS” constitutes a distinct category of being? 
 
 Susan Sontag’s AIDS and Its Metaphors provides one avenue into 
 answering such questions, for it rightly suggests that one of the nu¬ 
 merous differences between the constructions of meaning written onto 
 AIDS and those written onto earlier epidemics in history inheres in the 
 fact that unlike AIDS, which is persistently interpreted as a judgment 
 on the individual for sin or excess, “Diseases, insofar as they acquired 
 meaning [in the past], were collective calamities, and judgments on a 
 community” (45). Myths of identity have framed the interpretation of 
 AIDS, and it remains a disease that attaches—rightly or wrongly—to 
 identities: gay, iv-drug user, African, hemophiliac, infant, transfusion 
 patient (the “guilty” and “innocent” “victims” are labeled through 
 some category of identity that promises—falsely—to explain their con¬ 
 traction of the disease). Because AIDS has been read so persistently 
 within a paradigm of group and/or individual identity, one of the con¬ 
 tinuing tasks facing those who respond to it has been to insist on it as 
 
50 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 a collective calamity. But one of those tasks has also been—because 
 “person with AIDS” would otherwise signify non-being in a culture 
 founded in and devoted to myths of being—the validation of any indi¬ 
 vidual or collective identity threatened by the illness with erasure. We 
 must think AIDS not only as a public issue of ideology, apparatus, and 
 representation but also as it is internalized and expressed by those 
 infected and effected, and we must do this, not because disease is a 
 matter of privacy nor because individual experience provides unmedi¬ 
 ated authority and knowledge, but because “aids” as a signifier lodges 
 in deep subliminal zones of memory, loss, and (im)possibility, zones 
 that in the end are among the most crucial sites on which discipli- 
 narity is inscribed and therefore potentially disrupted. Only because 
 experience is material, dialectical, and collective can a critic like Ben¬ 
 jamin be concerned about its atrophy, and we can employ “experi¬ 
 ence” as a signifier to mark not private and interior knowledges but 
 the intersection between such knowledges and the collective, public 
 structures that frame them. 
 
 When we turn to the inscription of AIDS in the discourse of private or 
 personal experience, we find a number of powerful literary texts in the 
 genre of memoir and confession, and a number in the conventions of 
 domestic and family-crisis drama that establish the “likeness” of AIDS 
 to—and its difference from—other social problems. Not all of those 
 texts offer a dialectical understanding of AIDS as experience. It would 
 perhaps be useful here to say something about the work attached to the 
 name “Louise Hay.” Hay is only one in what we must call a boom 
 industry (those providing sphitual solutions or guidance in the face of 
 the radical alterity AIDS introduces into a life), but her name has come 
 almost to signify that industry, and her work ranges from books and 
 tapes to seminars (weekly group sessions, attended by hundreds in 
 L.A., are called “Hayrides”). Hers is, indeed, a labor based in and seek¬ 
 ing the “affirmation” of people with aids, and for some Hay’s work is 
 truly transformative. Clients are encouraged to work with a mirror, to 
 talk to themselves, to release rather than express anger, to love them¬ 
 selves; gay men taught to hate themselves or people with AIDS who 
 internalize shame due to their illness can achieve a more positive self¬ 
 recognition in these practices (see Hay). But the most pragmatically 
 compelling aspect of Hay’s work is also its most troubling, for it slips 
 rather precariously from psychoimmunology to something closer to 
 moralistic nonsense. Moving from a relatively nonjudgmental inquiry 
 into the role of representation or mental imaging in physical well- 
 
AIDS in America 51 
 
 being to a completely interiorized discourse in which illness, death, 
 and even exposure to the virus are read as the free, “deep” choice of the 
 individual. Hay’s discourse has been attacked for its implication that 
 those who fall or remain ill are incapable of effectively loving them¬ 
 selves, and for its mystification of AIDS as a gift to the self necessary to 
 some crucial spiritual healing (not surprisingly, one available in her 
 practice). There is nothing intrinsically wrong, of course, with any 
 private experience, nor with private experiences of aids. But AIDS has 
 required a continual vigilance against secrecy, shame, and repression, 
 the hallmarks of that same (perhaps bourgeois) privacy that polices 
 homoerotic desire: in that respect, completely private responses— 
 while probably inevitable—seem insufficient for understanding the 
 full cultural significance of the disease. The emphasis in Hay’s work 
 finally falls on an improved narcissistic relation as a cornerstone of 
 cosmic harmony, and such transformations as result from it remain 
 wholly contained within the individual’s psyche. In framing this em¬ 
 powerment of the individual. Hay relies on a model of identity where 
 the self is relatively stable, identifiable, and whole, where one recovers 
 through meditation and spiritual growth an originary plenitude. The 
 valence of purity and integrity of self in her discourse is clearly based 
 in an epistemological imperative to keep the self separate from its 
 others, something Donna Haraway has noted as the burden of most 
 immune system discourse (see Haraway). Hay is not alone in produc¬ 
 ing as a response to immune system disease a discourse where nothing 
 foreign invades the self, but her work is open to a number of critiques. 
 More recent theorists of gay and lesbian subjectivity, for instance, read 
 the political subversiveness and radical marginality of gay and lesbian 
 culture as the direct result of their situation outside the ordinary struc¬ 
 tures of patriarchal culture, including the structure of stable, trans¬ 
 parent ego that would seem to be Hay’s model of subjectivity. Unstable 
 and psychically eccentric in ways interpretable as politically trans¬ 
 gressive rather than pathological, the ego structured by same-sex de¬ 
 sire in poststructuralist paradigms offers—in the words of Jonathan 
 Dollimore—“the paradox of a marginality which is always interior to, 
 or at least intimate with, the center” yet not itself centered, and there¬ 
 fore key to the development of “new strategies and conceptions of 
 resistance” (37). Judith Butler claims that “the gendered body” itself is 
 “performative” rather than substantive, with “no ontological status 
 apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” {Gender Trou¬ 
 ble 136). That body, for Butler, “is not a ‘being,’ but a variable bound- 
 
52 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated” (138). While 
 the subjectivity constructed by aids should not be equated to gay or 
 lesbian subjectivity, the paradigm of marginality and regulation would 
 seem more than accidentally appropriate. 
 
 What we encounter in the field of AIDS— and of only marginal 
 concern to someone like Hay—is the political regulation of the body 
 around what is encoded as the supremely private site of accommoda¬ 
 tion to discipline: death. In her refusal to read the collective dimension 
 of AIDS as a death that is at least in part an act of political regulation, 
 Hay would return us to what Edith Wyschogrod has termed the au¬ 
 thenticity paradigm of death, the equation of a “good death” with 
 moral value: “Nothing so palpably illustrates the refinement and self- 
 control of a person as the fearless and noble management of his dying” 
 (3), the classic example being Socrates, in whose soul “is writ small the 
 class virtues of the well-ordered state” (4). Wyschogrod offers a post¬ 
 modern paradigm of authentic death as well, one where authenticity 
 eventuates not through rational transcendence of death as an event but 
 through acknowledgment of that death aheady represented in objects, 
 persons, time, and desire. In the incorporation of death into life (her 
 example here is Rilke), “the reciprocal relation between the accep¬ 
 tance of death and the profundity of the person holds: we redeem 
 experience, render ourselves worthy of it, and it of us, by living up to 
 the death in it” (10). But “neither the older nor the newer version of the 
 paradigm can any longer provide meaning,” Wyschogrod claims; they 
 have been superseded by more recent histories of genocide and nu¬ 
 clear holocaust, by the intentional construction of death-worlds where 
 the mimetic relation between an individual and his/her death is bro¬ 
 ken and “the living are forced to exist as if already dead” (34). The 
 meaning of the death-world for Wyschogrod turns on intention, and 
 although it arises from a technological society, its most profound func¬ 
 tion is mythical: “The death-world is not the extreme expression of 
 technological society itself, for what characterizes that society is its 
 rationality, its divorce from mythic consciousness, its uprootedness 
 from the life-world. Instead the death-world is an attempt to make 
 whole the broken cosmos by an imaginative act of radical negation ... 
 by consigning to itself all that seems worthy of death” (28). Plague will 
 not do for this analysis because it seems to belong to a life-world “of 
 indeterminate horizons from which phenomena arise” (17), rather 
 than to the deliberate annihilation of vast numbers of people; the 
 Holocaust, on the other hand, will serve as an example, and the point 
 
AIDS in America 53 
 
 for us is that AIDS shares more, finally, with genocide than with plague. 
 Like the death-worlds Wyschogrod investigates, there is only one sig¬ 
 nified in AIDS: all signifiers point to “death,” and do so not as a site of 
 the validation of the life-world but as its negation. And as in the death- 
 worlds, it is the power of others to inflict dying that continues to shape 
 the history of AIDS: the benign neglect of government agencies makes 
 the epidemic a passive-aggressive act on the part of rational society 
 (the institutionalization of power as indifference). AIDS shares many of 
 the features of that man-made mass death that destroys the authen¬ 
 ticity paradigm, and it is the promise of metaphysical redemption, of a 
 repair of that identity-confirming experience of death that “healers” 
 like Hay hold forth to those people with AIDS who desire—among other 
 things—a meaningful death. 
 
 But not all invocations of the “experience” of aids need turn on this 
 repair of broken subjectivity—or need not frame such repair as the 
 reconstruction of a free, rational, and ultimately singular psyche. In an 
 essay entitled “At Risk in the Sublime: The Politics of Gender and 
 Theory,” Lee Edelman narrates his participation in the October 1987 
 Lesbian and Gay March on Washington, constructing it as his “nearest 
 approach to an experience of the sublime” (the sublime, of course, can 
 only ever be approached), claiming that “the multitudinous unity and 
 the mathematical sublime produced by our seemingly incomprehensi¬ 
 ble mass served to reconstitute our identity in the face of all our devas¬ 
 tations” (220-21). Noting, finally, that such reconstitution is “theoret¬ 
 ically regressive” through the constitution of “a coherent locus of 
 subjectivity under the suspect banner of unity, idealism, and em¬ 
 powerment,” when in fact the gay and lesbian community is often 
 “painfully incompatible” even with itself, Edelman nevertheless reads 
 the march as a “powerful and progressive force within the politics of 
 gender” (227). While AIDS does not appear in Edelman’s essay as one of 
 the “devastations” inflicted by “homophobic America” on its gay and 
 lesbian community, it is there as an unspoken devastation, and Edel¬ 
 man’s comments might be taken as a gloss on that other powerful 
 experience of collective identification in recent years that does in fact 
 address the question of AIDS: the AIDS memorial quilt. 
 
 Although numerous reports of the experience of viewing the quilt 
 mark its complex and overwhelming demand on apprehension and 
 comprehension as a sublime rupture eventuating in unity, the object 
 under consideration in this case seems to successfully resist the last 
 move of the sublime (reincorporation) precisely because the unity it al- 
 
54 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 lows and constructs, the identity it offers through its collective scope, 
 remains outside all of our corporate structrues of knowledge. As in 
 evidentiary encounters with the Holocaust, AIDS in this concrete me¬ 
 morial induces a contemplation in which all systems of signification 
 seem inadequate. Ultimately, of course, some repah overwrites this 
 abysmal grief, but as an artifact the quilt continues to challenge mu 
 understanding, and any cognitive accommodation that is forthcoming 
 remains marked as radically by difference as by identity. Even as labor, 
 the quilt is in some profound way disturbing (handicraft in an era of 
 consumer goods, and motivated neither by profit nor beauty; hand¬ 
 icraft where the trace of labor and its social referent remain visible, 
 where that is indeed what defines its value—an unreifiable practice; 
 labor seeking to intervene in an appalling alienation and both out of a 
 love and anguish encoded on the sruface of the object). It would seem 
 almost to fulfill some of the folkloric function of narrative as Walter 
 Benjamin describes that in preindustrial culture. Produced anony¬ 
 mously yet binding the cultiue together, the telling of stories din¬ 
 ing group activities and labor brings the “soul, eye, and hand . . . 
 into connection” (108) and constructs a communal reference system 
 of knowledge and value in which experience becomes recognizable 
 through collective frameworks and becomes therefore communicable 
 as experience, rather than abbreviated or atrophied in a world of infor¬ 
 mation and industrial alienation. It is only in structures such as the 
 quilt or, to a greater or lesser extent, in any demonstration or perfor¬ 
 mance—in the making of artifacts about AIDS— that the disease can be¬ 
 come meaningful in a way that allows those affected and infected by it 
 to secure it as an experience and not merely as information. It allows as 
 well an affirmation of identity not fated to succumb to the traps of affir¬ 
 mative, bourgeois culture in its determination to seal that identity and 
 those meanings in a world of alienation and death. Only in such arti¬ 
 facts may the collective experience of AIDS be encountered, and only in 
 encountering that collective knowledge may the gay and lesbian com¬ 
 munity continue to become visible to itself as something quite other 
 than the site par excellence of social atrophy and alienation. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 See the exchange between Neil Hertz and Paul de Man at the end of de 
 Man’s “Conclusions; Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator.’ ” 
 
 2 AIDS is not, of course, a disease that occurs only in the United States—and 
 
AIDS in America 55 
 
 its effects are far more devastating in non-metropolitan sites, whether that 
 he the Ivory Coast, Brazil, or (within the metropole) Harlem. Nevertheless, 
 my focus here is on how AIDS has inscribed itself in American culture. 
 Similarly, AIDS is not a gay disease, hut its history is so densely interwrit- 
 ten with the more recent history of gay culture that I take up both in this 
 essay. 
 
 3 One of the more powerful visual pieces produced by ACT UP represents the 
 trace left by a bloodied hand and the written text: “The government has 
 blood on its hands.” 
 
 4 Douglas Crimp has written about “the graphic response to aids” in “Art 
 Acts Up.” Also see the introduction to a book he cowrote with Adam 
 Rolston entitled AIDS Demo Graphics. 
 
 5 For an analysis of the history and ideology of this practice see Bercovitch. 
 
 6 For superb analyses of the construction of media audiences through the 
 negation of homosexual desire and representation see Leo; Watney, Polic¬ 
 ing Desire: Pornography, aids and the Media. 
 
 1 Thus, when ACT UP interrupted U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Ser¬ 
 vices Louis Sullivan at the Sixth International AIDS Conference in San 
 Francisco in June 1990, many felt their actions an “inappropriate” silenc¬ 
 ing of the speaker; the point in that intervention was multiple, but among 
 the strong reasons for pursuing it was the continuing nonrepresentation of 
 those most directly effected by the epidemic in the very apparatuses (such 
 as that convention, such as the Department of Health and Human Ser¬ 
 vices) supposedly designed to address their needs, and supposedly doing 
 an admirable job in that. The “game” in this case had failed to include all 
 of its players, and some of those players—the ones with less power in the 
 situation—decided to halt the game. 
 
 8 Here again we are confronted by the mathematical sublime, this time mak¬ 
 ing it impossible to indicate all of the excellent work done in this field. In 
 addition to those writers discussed here, see Crimp, AIDS: Cultural Anal¬ 
 ysis/Cultural Activism for an introduction to some of the central issues. 
 
 9 Even though the media have aggressively sought to recolonize and com¬ 
 modify traditional Others in American culture (just as one may now sam¬ 
 ple endlessly from exotic cuisines and cultures in the marketplace), this 
 cannot be accomplished for gay and lesbian people. As Yiidice suggests, 
 “the mainstream media have launched a campaign to demarginalize, de¬ 
 color [and] degender[, but] gays and lesbians, much harder to demarginal¬ 
 ize, are either stigmatized as the ‘sinful’ AIDS-ridden Other or are left un¬ 
 represented” (221). 
 
 10 When Halston died in March 1990, for instance. People (9 Apr. 1990) 
 made his death a cover story: “He put American fashion on the map. He 
 dressed Jackie, Liz and Liza. He died last week of AIDS, a broken man.” Al¬ 
 though his business failure is the biographical referent of the last phrase, it 
 
56 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 signifies redundantly as the “truth” of any aids story (aids = broken), and 
 while the magazine contains a four-page spread entitled “Fashion—An 
 Industry Dressed in Mourning” and references to Michael Bennett’s death 
 from AIDS on its book review pages, there is nothing in it to suggest how 
 these deaths are linked, linked to other social and political questions— 
 nothing, for instance, to link it to the story on George Bush’s refusal of 
 broccoli (nothing on his refusal to speak about aids) or the story on a 
 woman basketball player at Wellesley who “escaped China’s brutal crack¬ 
 down.” Much less is there any attempt to shape the reporting of the disease 
 as more than a series of single deaths and private tragedies. This is not, of 
 course, true in the non-mainstream—especially gay/lesbian—press. 
 
 11 The first weekly news magazine to put AIDS on its cover [Newsweek, 
 18 Apr. 1983) featured a tube of blood marked “Caution: ks/aids” below 
 the graphic, “Epidemic: The Mysterious and Deadly Disease Called AIDS 
 May Be the Public-Health Threat of the Century. How Did It Start? Can It 
 Be Stopped?” Above this are two small headers for other stories: “Chal¬ 
 lenger’s Men Take a Space Walk” and “Russia’s Spies Get the Boot.” The 
 final indifference to AIDS during the Reagan years cannot be separated 
 from what were national priorities of the political right—increased milita¬ 
 rism, a renewal of Cold War hostility with the Soviet Union, a flat denial of 
 funding for domestic issues—and the Newsweek cover remains uncanny 
 in its framing of aids by these other two stories. 
 
Hope 
 
 I don’t care about professional success now—my concern circulates 
 around my physical health and my emotional well-being. But I cannot 
 give myself permission to see that as enough, to imagine that my life 
 may be more important than my work. Now it is the case, I think, that 
 the emotional health of the subject depends to a great extent on its 
 ability to imagine itself a productive member of some community. And 
 right now the frustration I feel and the intermittent uselessness are 
 directly connected to a lack of focus in my working life. Why can’t I 
 figure out something to do? Why am I so uninterested in intellectual 
 stuff? I still have ideas, I still perform interpretations: but my attention 
 is all riveted on myself. I can’t seem to pull myself out of myself. 1 can’t 
 seem to find something to believe in, and that keeps me unable to 
 commit to a project. 
 
 I have thought that aids, of course, would make a good project for 
 me. But what? Reading AIDS films? Why bother; we all know about 
 them. Maybe wbat I want to do is sexuality and the lyric. Perhaps it’s 
 Zizek and a critique of ideology’s conception of its own knowledge- 
 
58 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ability (I can look at the bookshelf and invent endless numbers of 
 projects). Or perhaps it’s simply time to take care of personal business: 
 to talk with family and friends about my AIDS, to work with students. 
 Maybe it’s not my futme fame I need to invest in now. 
 
 So I could write things about O’Hara or Ashbery or even Freud, and 
 do critiques of Sedgwick and Moon—but it doesn’t come together into 
 anything. Should I return to the modern? If what this profession is all 
 about is the production of something we call knowledge, what kind of 
 “legacy” do I wish to leave behind? I think there’s nothing I have to say 
 that others won’t say perfectly well; the stuff of gay studies is launched 
 and its success guaranteed—so at this point, what do we do with it? 
 What do we want? To be able to extend the discomse, to talk about 
 ourselves more and more? 
 
 When I wrote Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text, I was not trying 
 simply to be trendy—and yet I tried very hard to be up-to-date and new 
 about everything, so I suppose it was kind of trendy. But I was trying to 
 say something that I thought had not been said, to produce a first step 
 in a new direction. 
 
 It comes to me (from where?) that the only thing I can possibly write 
 about at this point is aids: all of the writing about it has been ideology/ 
 culture critique—how does that work? The representations have been 
 silly, sentimental, pernicious, etc. (Now that we are past the point that 
 critique will drive everything we say, what will we say?) I had thought 
 at one point of expanding the “Postmodern Governance” piece into 
 chapters: science and government (their incommensurability with our 
 discourses about disease); politics and ethics; identity (start with Witt¬ 
 genstein and the tumor as normal, but then try to get somewhere with 
 the question of erotics, too, and the centrality of the erotic to identity 
 [in the Renaissance, syphilitic discourse is never the end of the self], 
 and representation (especially movies and TV). Perhaps. 
 
 When I look back at the paragraph above, I don’t like it. The question 
 is: why would one do this? What’s the point? There may be one, but it 
 isn’t at all clear what it is. And yet, the place to begin is with trying to 
 make some kind of difference in the way things are discussed and 
 perhaps that is to bring personal discourse and the politics of experi¬ 
 ence back into AIDS discourse and “the political” more generally. But 
 that seems weak and self-motivated. There has to be something more 
 important to write about. AIDS is the text at the center of the book—that 
 word by itself. 
 
How the Eye Is Caste: Robert Mapplethorpe 
 and the Limits of Controversy 
 
 In marking one of the limits of the sex-gender system, male homosex¬ 
 uality stabilizes and therefore helps naturalize an arbitrary and seem¬ 
 ingly increasingly unstable set of technologies and disciplines that 
 operate upon the late-twentieth-century American body. The legibility 
 recently accorded gay male culture by American academics should not 
 obscure the fact that in majority culture male homosexuality remains a 
 focus for tremendous anxiety and for (often) brutal fantasies that cen¬ 
 ter not only on sexual practices per se but also on the failure of that 
 system to keep its abject Other in its place. That failure is related to 
 another, perhaps more fundamental, anxiety registered in the terror 
 produced by male homosexuality, one that indicates the role of vis¬ 
 ibility in cultural epistemology: one must know what homosexuality 
 looks like in order to avoid its multiple contagions, including now the 
 more literal contagion ignorantly equated with it, AIDS. But if the link¬ 
 age of male homosexuality to the visible has operated as an episte¬ 
 mological aid, it has also assured that homosexuality—even in be- 
 
60 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 coming visible to itself—might never be produced out of sight of the 
 pornographic. 
 
 The insistence of that cultural anxiety helps to explain why more 
 controversy is attached to the name “Mapplethorpe” in the discourses 
 around the recent Helms amendment to restrict nea funding than to 
 the name “Serrano,” and why Mapplethorpe’s photos of nude men and 
 leather sex have functioned so prominently in that debate. At stake is 
 not the fate of Mapplethorpe’s reputation as a photographer, which 
 seems at this point to be fairly secure, nor even the supposed “free¬ 
 dom” of the NEA and neh to sponsor controversial projects. What is at 
 stake is the fate of male (and by extension, female) homosexuality as a 
 newly visible and vocal force in American culture. The denial of nea 
 funding in the wake of the Corcoran Gallery’s canceled exhibit of the 
 Mapplethorpe and Serrano pieces is only the latest installment in a 
 concerted effort to build a right-wing national consensus out of fears 
 that play prominently on homophobia and more or less explicitly 
 equate male homosexuality with a national security risk.^ One of the 
 reasons to insist on the legitimacy of Mapplethorpe’s work is to inter¬ 
 vene in that construction and the political agenda that frames it. A 
 victorious Helmsian would deny funds for AIDS’ research and educa¬ 
 tion, for lesbian and gay rights, and would mark any representation 
 whatsoever of gay male or lesbian existence “pornographic.” Given its 
 open wording,^ victory for the Helms-sponsored restrictions on NEA 
 funding would outlaw not only more sexually explicit texts but even 
 so innocuous an image as Mapplethorpe’s Embrace. 
 
 It is pointless to speculate on how Mapplethorpe might have re¬ 
 sponded to the recent Congressional flap; for someone intent on forc¬ 
 ing the previously unseen into visibility, Mapplethorpe’s politics were 
 peculicurly privatistic. But it is clear that he courted, if not throve on, 
 controversy. In Dominick Dunne’s Vanity Fair essay/interview (Febru¬ 
 ary 1989), which was written in sight of Mapplethorpe’s death from 
 AIDS in April, 1989, and at his instigation, it is clear that Mapplethorpe 
 enjoyed his status as enfant terrible: shocking Upper East Side cir¬ 
 cles with his leather chic and savoring the rather toothsome irony of 
 the Whitney Museum exhibiting photographs bent on shattering the 
 taboos of even the most bored, sophisticated patrons. One self-portrait 
 exhibited there, for instance, shows Mapplethorpe without pants on, 
 bent over away from the camera and turned back toward it with a 
 demonic grin or leer, a bullwhip issuing from his ass like a tail. It is 
 among his rudest images. But if the current publicity surrounding his 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 61 
 
 name makes it difficult to read against this tendency, we must remem¬ 
 ber that Robert Mapplethorpe was not only a photographer of the 
 (homo)sexually graphic. His work can be broken down into three 
 broad areas of focus; nudes, objects such as flowers and sculpture, and 
 portraits. And in his best and most interesting work, the protocols of 
 all three intersect, collide, and inform one another. What marks his 
 more unconventional images most singularly, in fact, is how poised 
 and balanced they are as compositions, their supremely high finish as 
 aesthetic objects conflicting with their occasionally violent and often 
 camp content. It would seem, therefore, a measure of the obsessions of 
 our culture that Mapplethorpe can be made out to be a gay photogra¬ 
 pher tout court, as, in the words of Dominick Dunne, “a documen- 
 tarian” of “the era of dangerous sex ... of the homoerotic life in the 
 1970s at its most excessive, resulting, possibly, in the very plague that 
 [killed] its recorder” (126).^ 
 
 The NEA controversy requires some brief comment here on the rather 
 familiar parameters of debates about pornography, but the issue I wish 
 ultimately to address in this paper is how desire is mediated in Map¬ 
 plethorpe’s work (comparing it to that of Bruce Weber and others in 
 passing). In particular, I am interested in how race figures as a dis¬ 
 course of difference and therefore as an incitement to desire, espe¬ 
 cially in Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men in Black Book 
 (1986). The controversy that has greeted that practice suggests that 
 these photographs mark a limit, one not as often considered as the 
 limit marked by the pornographic, but perhaps a more important one 
 in the context of gay male culture: the limit of caste. 
 
 We cannot here settle the debates about pornography that, unlike 
 virtually any other political debates on representation, have the cu¬ 
 rious power of bringing together those who are on every other question 
 antagonistic toward one another (Jesse Helms and Andrea Dworkin, 
 for instance). But we can begin by noting that definitions of pornogra¬ 
 phy shift with the contextual arrangements that call it forth as a mirror 
 of desire, an Imaginary, for some population. It makes common as well 
 as theoretical sense to assert that as a category pornography is par¬ 
 ticularly difficult to define since taxonomies shift radically according 
 to the subject it places in question. That subject, in academic analy¬ 
 sis, has almost always been considered female; only a few men have 
 stepped into the fray. Briefly, the debate centers on how one reads the 
 deployment of desire in pornographic texts. For some feminist argu¬ 
 ments, all representation is violent in that it is phallocentric; therefore. 
 
62 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 what is commonly identified as pornography [Hustler magazine, for 
 instance) is only the latest instance of a regime and is exceptional only 
 in its overt display of violence against women.^ For other arguments 
 that also proclaim themselves feminist, pornography sets in motion 
 possibilities for desire that allow women as well as men to experience 
 themselves as desiring subjects: therefore, pleasure in texts such as On 
 Our Backs (a lesbian publication with explicit sexual content, both 
 visual and verbal) or female pleasure in “straight” pornography must 
 be accounted for as something other than ideological misrecognition.® 
 It seems impossible to deny the collusive relation between patriarchal 
 oppression of women and the sexual technologies and ideological ap¬ 
 paratuses that have framed women as objects of male sexual pleasure, 
 including but not limited to pornography. For its feminist apologists, 
 however, there is danger in condemning pornography as the spoilage 
 of an otherwise wholesome sexual domain in which women and chil¬ 
 dren would be free of sexuality defined only as male lust. 
 
 But however one might seek to settle this debate, it is not clear that 
 pornography has had the same function for gay male culture, desire, 
 and subjectivity as it has had for female culture, desire, and subjectiv¬ 
 ity. For gay male culture, pornography has historically served as a 
 means to self-ratification through self-gratification (or at least through 
 the acknowledgment if not the enactment of homoerotic desire); and 
 the relation of these experiences to patriarchal privilege and pleasme is 
 not univocal. The national lesbian and gay quarterly, OUT /LOOK, ran a 
 retrospective of the work of Tom of Finland, a Los Angeles illustrator 
 who, in the words of one admirer, “draws good horny porn” (Patrick 6) 
 that, in the words of one detractor, presents “over-muscled, thick¬ 
 necked, jut-jawed, small-brained idols of male domination” (Wolf 5). 
 In the debate that ensued on the editorial pages of OUT/LOOK, it be¬ 
 came clear that what one set of gay readers found a challenging explo¬ 
 ration of sexuality others found a corrupt and uninterrogated equation 
 of power with sexual attraction and desire: patriarchy in gay butch 
 drag. The point to be taken from this, however, cannot simply be that 
 one of these sets of readers is correct and the other incorrect, nor simply 
 that there are differing responses to sexually explicit material all of 
 which are legitimate and defensible. Rather, the problem to be ad¬ 
 dressed in this case is the relation between the phallus of male ho¬ 
 mosexual desire and the phallus of male heterosexual desire, where 
 “phallus” indicates both the power of the Symbolic order and the sex¬ 
 ual organ associable with its articulation. This would require a full 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 63 
 
 theory of the status of male homosexual practices within patriarchal 
 culture, the distinction between those practices and male homosexual 
 desires, and a clear articulation of how such practices and desires differ 
 (if and when they do) from male homosocial, heterosexual, patriarchal 
 practices and desires: I am not here able to complete that investigation. 
 Nevertheless, we should not assume that phallic pleasure in one econ¬ 
 omy is equivalent to phallic pleasme in the other: as if a phallus were 
 a phallus were a phallus. Recent gay male culture has indeed appro¬ 
 priated masculinity as a representational strategy for its own self¬ 
 empowerment, and that appropriation has been equivocal at best in its 
 commitment to other political questions. But this masculinity, appro¬ 
 priated, no longer takes its meaning solely within the structure of het¬ 
 erosexual institutions and practices; it is wrenched into intertextuality 
 with numerous homosexualities as well. Al Parker may signify in gay 
 culture, but so do the radical fairies. 
 
 A recent exhibit by Doug Ischar, “Household Misappropriations,” 
 facilitates an analysis of the relation between male homosexuality and 
 masculinity as it can be read in the articulation among “the heroic 
 male image,” patriarchal power, and gay male domesticity (a non¬ 
 exotic contemporary homosexuality). Ischar seeks to lay “tenuous 
 claim to the heroic male figure as both co-optable subject and attain¬ 
 able object of desire.”® The exhibit juxtaposes small, colorized re¬ 
 productions of World War II images of masculinity (from Life magazine 
 and other, more official sources) to written texts by Barthes, Genet, Vo- 
 loinov, and others—and to five photographs of a contemporary “gay” 
 man cleaning his apartment, washing dishes, etcetera. Ischar asks: 
 “How does the macho-styled Gay man collude with and ‘cash in on’ 
 the oppressive dominant function of this sign by silently ‘passing’? ... 
 [H]ow does the heroic male figure (and his Gay inhabitant/claimant) 
 resonate within the context of a sometimes mundane domestic life?” 
 What results in Ischar’s text is a dialectical process in which the ico- 
 nicity of masculine bodies is put into play and into question: the “do¬ 
 mestic” space is filled not by a “feminine female” who is absent from 
 the cartoonlike scenes of World War II male-bonding, but by a “Gay 
 male” who has no trace of “the feminine” about him. There is no means 
 (or it seems to me politically unproductive) to say exactly where this 
 dialectic eventuates, for the exhibit suggests that our own readings are 
 bound to be “misappropriations.” But Ischar’s work is apposite here in 
 that it marks the ideological mobility of images of the masculine, and 
 does, in fact, allow us to read how “the buddy in the bunk above . . . 
 
64 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 replaced the marble god replica, the buddy in the bunk below, his 
 furtive and abject worshiper.” And it suggests how a sign originating in 
 a repressive practice (military hierarchies) may be dislocated from its 
 initial site and installed in one subversive to the system in which it 
 took its original meaning. We might also consider pornography (how¬ 
 ever we define it) as a text to be mobilized to effects that can displace 
 violence and phallocratic order; we might think of its images as less 
 irresistible and more open to misappropriation. 
 
 Leo Bersani, in his contribution to the special issue of October on 
 AIDS, argues that sexuality exceeds its inscription, and that one of the 
 values of pornography is its ability to reveal the tendency of sexuality 
 to “demean the seriousness of the efforts to redeem it” and to make 
 sexuality culturally safe, limited, and knowable (“Is the Rectum” 222). 
 This is certainly correct—in one sense. But Foucault is also correct in 
 one sense to recast Herbert Marcuse and suggest that the stimulation of 
 bodies is as much a means to their control as is the repression of them: 
 sexual liberation is never sexual freedom. How is it that both of these 
 arguments (one in support of a libertarian attitude toward sexuality, 
 one that would question the politics of that reading) might sway the 
 same subject, might persuade me of their truthfulness and their analyt¬ 
 ical usefulness? This contradiction marks more than some personal 
 inability to resolve the issue. It marks as well the overdetermination of 
 sexuality (if not the entire representational economy) at this moment 
 in American culture. The meaning of any particular sexual act, repre¬ 
 sentation, or subjectivity cannot be reduced to a single valence. This 
 “truth” is itself a refusal of the premise that grounds Helms’s search for 
 a pure signifier (both “pure” of illicit content and “pure” in its ability 
 to produce a single rather than a multiple or contested meaning). It is 
 this naive desire for stable reading that allows the alliance in principle 
 between Helms and anti-porn feminists. 
 
 Given Roland Barthes’s interest in the erotic and in semiotic density, 
 it is not surprising that discursive multiplicity figures crucially in his 
 reading of Mapplethorpe. In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes that por¬ 
 nography is itself “homogeneous . . . completely constituted by the 
 presentation of only one thing: sex”; “at most it amuses me (and even 
 then, boredom quickly follows)” (41, 59). Mapplethorpe’s work, on the 
 other hand, represents for Barthes “erotic” photography that “takes the 
 spectator outside its frame ... as if the image launched desire beyond 
 what it permits us to see: not only toward ‘the rest’ of the nakedness, 
 not only towards a fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excel- 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 65 
 
 lence of a being, body and soul together” (59). It is not possible, of 
 course, to locate these “functions” with any critical accuracy.^ Indeed, 
 what constitutes such “excellence” as Barthes seeks is exactly what is 
 at issue for Helms, Dworkin, the admirer of Tom of Finland, or Map¬ 
 plethorpe; what Barthes sees as the monological text of pornography 
 others may read as multiply dense and textured. But his distinction 
 between the pornographic and the erotic is part of his desire to escape 
 the overdetermination of sexuality in contemporary Western culture. 
 Camera Lucida ends with a plea for egress from the alienation and 
 ennui Barthes reads in current sexual fantasies and practices: 
 
 One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live 
 according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United 
 States, where everything is transformed into images: only images 
 exist and are produced and are consumed. An extreme example: 
 go into a New York porn shop; here you will not find vice, but 
 only its tableaux vivants (from which Mapplethorpe has so lu¬ 
 cidly derived certain of his photographs). . . . [L]et us abolish the 
 images, let us save immediate Desire (desire without mediation). 
 (118-19) 
 
 Walter Benjamin is perhaps the ghost that haunts Barthes in this writ¬ 
 ing’s prophetic outrage against modernity, and the invocation of his 
 name should alert us to the impossible nostalgia of the passage: there is 
 no unmediated desire.® We experience sexual arousal only in the con¬ 
 text of difference or mediation, and in hegemonic sexual culture, that 
 mediation has been defined almost solely through the discourse of 
 sexual difference and the corpus of visual codes, strategies, and in¬ 
 junctions that support the “naturalness” of that difference known as 
 heterosexuality. 
 
 Interestingly, Mapplethorpe’s work arises from a homosexual site at 
 precisely that historical moment (the late ’70s and ’80s in New York) 
 when gay male culture rejected the discourse of sexual difference and 
 its parody of male/female roles as the paradigm most appropriate to it. 
 In it difference is staged, at least in the pictures of black men, through 
 the discourse of race (in his works on leather sex, difference is staged 
 through power relations and as pain, excess, and/or the exotic). As 
 such, Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men cannot escape the 
 charge of racism, of a fetishistic interest in black men that objectifies 
 them and denies them their subjectivity. But Mapplethorpe’s work 
 does not present a single or consistent view of black men’s bodies, and 
 
66 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 he has his defenders. Kay Larson, for one, has written that Mapple¬ 
 thorpe’s work in Black Book and other related texts investigates “a 
 formerly taboo subject (for Caucasians, at least)—the sexuality of black 
 men.” She continues: 
 
 Mapplethorpe has been accused of racism in using black men as 
 objects of titillation and arousal. Those arguments don’t hold up 
 in front of the pictures themselves.... Mapplethorpe’s black men 
 are the first, in my memory of photographic history, to be given 
 full dignity and equal stature as sexual beings—more equal, per¬ 
 haps, than Mapplethorpe’s whites, who tend to be a little nerdy by 
 comparison. The photographer obviously enjoys the flow of light 
 eddying and rippling off polished dark bodies, just as he does the 
 excitement of treading on a taboo (fear of black men). ... By 
 placing his black men on a pedestal, Mapplethorpe seems to he 
 working overtime to violate white cliches. (16) 
 
 Larson is correct to note the paucity of hlack subjects in the history of 
 photographic portraiture and in the tradition of the nude. Indeed, 
 Mapplethorpe himself claimed that one of the attractions of these men 
 for him as photographic subjects was precisely the novelty or interven¬ 
 tion it allowed him as a photographer. What strikes one about Larson’s 
 apology, however, is how, in attempting to justify Mapplethorpe’s 
 work as nonracist, it participates in racist discourse itself. When Lar¬ 
 son suggests that white men are “nerdy” in comparison to hlack men, 
 she admits (without acknowledging) that Mapplethorpe’s work re¬ 
 peats the cliche of the black sexual athlete; and her appeal to “light... 
 rippling off polished dark bodies” as a violation of white cliches seems 
 wholly unfounded. The very notion of bodies with a “polish” almost 
 literally objectifies them, making them ebony sculptures in a white 
 fantasy; and far from subverting white cliches, the discoimse of reflec¬ 
 tivity (which produces white fascination with the hlack man’s “shine”) 
 is wholly contained within racist paradigms (see, for instance, Charles 
 Bowman, 1980). Finally, impotence (and therefore the phallic power 
 or threat black men present to white power) figures prominently in 
 Larson’s prose: criticisms “don’t hold up in front of the pictures them¬ 
 selves.” The “natural” potency of the black man’s body (unproblemat- 
 ically captimed in the photograph for Larson) disarms, makes impo¬ 
 tent, any response other than awe: it naturalizes the discourse that 
 situates it as an object for the gaze. 
 
 Mapplethorpe does (sometimes literally) place his black male sub- 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 67 
 
 jects on a pedestal, and it seems that his interest in many of the studies 
 in Black Book is in the variability of the eroticized body rather than in 
 the power of the photographic apparatus to fix men in its gaze. But if 
 the overall effect of works such as Black Book is to grant “equal stature 
 as sexual beings” to black men, that does not in itself guarantee the text 
 as free of the history and discourse of racism. Larson’s claim for the 
 “dignity” of these men is problematic, for instance, since discourse 
 about the “dignified black” is deeply and tiresomely embedded in 
 racist ideology. More importantly, one must insist that the sexual field 
 is not the most appropriate or transformative site in which to contest 
 the inequality that results from racial oppression, since Western cul¬ 
 ture has always sexualized its racial Others (see Bhabha; Gilman). Per¬ 
 haps the most troublesome aspect of this is how black men and sado¬ 
 masochism come to signify as equivalently exotic in Mapplethorpe’s 
 work and in the commentaries it has occasioned. Both are made to 
 signify taboos and the “darkness” of the sexual drive (particularly the 
 homosexual drive). Race is thereby made legible as a sexual practice 
 rather than as a social, economic, and cultural difference with a history 
 of great cost for those marked by it as Other. 
 
 Kobena Mercer has crystallized much of this in his response to Map¬ 
 plethorpe’s photographs, suggesting that they “facilitate the public 
 projection of certain sexual and racial fantasies about the black male 
 body,” reminding us that not all of those fantasies are overtly sexual, 
 and demonstrating how Mapplethorpe’s work removes the black male 
 body “from the social, ideological and historical forces that have sedi¬ 
 mented and moulded received meanings into its shape and appear¬ 
 ance” (n. pag.). Mercer’s comments are in response to a London exhibit 
 and to the British issue of Black Males. But the title of Mapplethorpe’s 
 book is not the only thing changed in the British issue of these photos: 
 the British issue also contains a preface by Edmund White whereas the 
 American text is prefaced by Ntozake Shange.® Thus, the book is pro¬ 
 duced to signify more as a gay text in Britain and more as a raced text in 
 America. Mercer intervenes in this setup, insisting that one read the 
 racial discourse within the gay. His critique of the work is damning, 
 and he seems correct to insist that Mapplethorpe’s photos are only 
 another instance of “objectifying black men’s bodies into an aesthetic 
 ideal invested with what the white male subject wants-to-see.” 
 
 While his point is wholly different, one can also see in David 
 Joselit’s essay on Mapplethorpe an admission that these photographs 
 merely repeat conventional, racist images: 
 
68 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 the sequencing of Black Book implies a violent eruption/erection 
 of sexuality in a setting of middle-class composure. .. . The Black 
 Book is not so much a collection of portraits as a series of conven¬ 
 tional images, some specifically related to stereotypes of black 
 men. . . . Not only do most of his models have well-developed 
 physiques, but many unselfconsciously display large, semierect 
 penises. The effect of their exposed sex is not truly pornographic, 
 or even erotic; Mapplethorpe allows no sense of sexual play or 
 arousal to interfere with oiu- opportunity to look.... [T]hese exag¬ 
 geratedly phallic men look out at the viewer—and at Mapple¬ 
 thorpe—with an expression of sullen threat, of suppressed vio¬ 
 lence. Far from inviting intimacy, they hold it at bay. (21) 
 
 In addition to suggesting his culture’s cliches about black men, Joselit 
 seems here to express his own uninterrogated attitudes: we perhaps 
 have differing notions of what constitutes a semierect penis, but I 
 do not read this as a dominant effect in the text; as to their unself¬ 
 conscious display, one wonders why Joselit would expect black male 
 models in nude photographs to be embarrassed by their genitals, large 
 or small. More importantly, while the portrait of Roedel Middleton to 
 which he refers does in fact hold the viewer at bay, to claim that it 
 suggests “suppressed violence” is merely to suggest that any black face 
 that withholds intimacy is a potential threat to the white man’s power 
 otherwise to know and place black men in the visual field. 
 
 Those who read Mapplethorpe’s use of black models as ideologi¬ 
 cally innocent tend not to theorize photography as a discursive prac¬ 
 tice whose meanings are intertextual with other social texts and prac¬ 
 tices. As Allan Sekula suggests, “A photographic discourse is a system 
 with which the culture harnesses photographs to various representa¬ 
 tional tasks” (87). There is no photographic discourse in which the 
 image innocently reflects a natural referent (the dominant theory of 
 photography in the nineteenth century). Moreover, Sekula argues that 
 “the photograph, as it stands alone, presents merely the possibility of 
 meaning. Only by its embeddedness in a concrete discourse situation 
 can the photograph yield a clear semantic outcome” (91). If it is true 
 that Mapplethorpe’s photographic practices cross a number of tradi¬ 
 tionally discrete boundaries, taking up the conventions of art pho¬ 
 tography, for instance, in order to present material that seemed (before 
 he did this) incommensurate with its interests, we should recognize 
 that they are not therefore free to produce some “original” effect com- 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 69 
 
 pletely independent of the discourse of race in the culture they spring 
 from and address. As Victor Burgin has written in another context, 
 “any ‘mood’ or ‘feeling’ these pictures might produce, as much as 
 any overt ‘message’ they might be thought to transmit, depends not 
 on something individual and mysterious but rather on our common 
 knowledge of the typical representation of prevailing social facts and 
 values: that is to say, on our knowledge of the way objects transmit and 
 transform ideology, and the ways in which photographs in their turn 
 transform these” (41). The bodies of black men, like all that occupies 
 the camera’s gaze, are, as Burgin puts it, “already in use in the produc¬ 
 tion of meanings, and photography has no choice but to operate upon 
 such meanings. There is. then, a ‘pre-photographic’ stage in the pho¬ 
 tographic production of meaning which must be accounted for” (47). 
 
 Man in Polyester Suit is perhaps the most outrageous and potentially 
 offensive image in Black Book; virtually all those who comment on the 
 canceled Corcoran exhibit single out this picture as one of the signifi¬ 
 cant transgressive moments in it. Clearly, this photograph is not coded 
 as a pornographic text; its appeal is cerebral rather than libidinal, so¬ 
 liciting contemplation of the intertextuality of sexual and racial fan¬ 
 tasies and confronting its viewer with the “pre-photographic” stages of 
 social meaning upon which it works. In notes to the ICA exhibit of 
 Mapplethorpe’s work, Janet Kardon has written that this photograph 
 “catches the viewer in a binary pull: The action cannot be perceived 
 unless the eye constantly darts in opposite directions as in a tennis 
 match, or, in this instance, between the mundane polyester suit and 
 what outrageously protrudes from its trousers. Lurking within the con¬ 
 ception of such photographs is a cunning and urbane humorist, always 
 ready to surprise and outwit his viewer” (“The Perfect Moment” 11). In 
 Camera Lucida, Barthes also claims that Mapplethorpe “shifts his 
 close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photo¬ 
 graphing the fabric of underwear [or of the suit] at very close range: the 
 photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of 
 the material” (42). 
 
 Both Kardon’s and Barthes’s readings may be accurate (although the 
 metaphor of the tennis match seems ludicrous: one wonders what ten¬ 
 nis she watches), but they are not complete accounts of the discourse 
 of this text. Mercer insists that we read the dialectical relation between 
 the aesthetic cleverness encoded here and the pre-photographic set of 
 meanings ineradicably encoded in the image. The strength of his cri¬ 
 tique is difficult to deny: “the racism thus presupposed is denied and 
 
70 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 white-washed by the jokey irony. . . . Sex is [still] confirmed as the 
 ‘nature’ of black men[,] as his cheap and tacky suit confirms his failure 
 to accede to ‘culture’... his camouflage fails to conceal the fact that he 
 originates essentially, like his dick, from somewhere anterior to Civil¬ 
 isation” (n. pag.). 
 
 We will return to this image, and to the question of how it may 
 subvert this strong coding, but I want for the moment to consider 
 Joselit’s comment that Mapplethorpe’s photographs are not erotic or 
 pornographic—that they are simply an opportunity to look. Nothing, of 
 course, is simply an opportunity to look; the gaze is always deployed 
 or manufactoed according to cultiu'al power and is never innocent of 
 ideology. But Joselit is correct, I think, in claiming that Mapplethorpe’s 
 work differs from the erotic and the pornographic as these are conven¬ 
 tionally coded. The subjects Mapplethorpe explores (nude men and 
 women, sadomasochistic practices) may indeed provoke response to 
 them as pornographic or erotic, but the codes he employs in making 
 his photographs frame them in the codes of art photography. These 
 different photographic practices, of course, are not discrete but inter- 
 textual with one another; nevertheless, the codes of the art photograph 
 position the viewer, the artist, and his subject differently than do the 
 codes of pornography and erotica. The cover of Black Book, for in¬ 
 stance, offers a sense of the posed elegance and artificiality that pho¬ 
 tographic discourse is for Mapplethorpe.^'’ Mapplethorpe himself has 
 suggested that even his overt interest in sexual organs is not always 
 and only what it seems; “when I’ve exhibited pictures, particularly at 
 Robert Miller Gallery, I’ve tried to juxtapose a flower, then a pictmre of 
 a cock, then a portrait, so that you could see they were all the same. I 
 would just like people to be able to get the real meaning” (qtd. in 
 Kardon, “Robert Mapplethorpe” 25). What he does not register in this 
 is that difference is already inscribed in these objects, and that any 
 sameness he can produce among them as a photographer is predicated 
 on his erasure of their social, material difference and its meanings. 
 
 Because Mapplethorpe’s work, and Black Book in particular, places 
 its subjects sparsely and aesthetically—almost clinically—before the 
 camera, there is little space for conventional sexual fantasy. In that 
 respect, his photographs are quite different from those of Bruce Weber, 
 the photographer known for the dramatic style of his Calvin Klein ads 
 who has a specific market for his work in the gay community. In We¬ 
 ber’s commercial photography, the body is commodified; rather than 
 being erased, background or setting functions as a prop to fantasy. His 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 71 
 
 recent book, ORio de Janeiro, for instance, repeats cliches about desire 
 for and as the exotic that cannot signify without a locale. The dynamic 
 of the gaze on the cover, in which a man stares intently at a woman 
 whose sultry gaze is directed at the viewer, is wholly in keeping with a 
 naturalized sexual difference that places women before men’s eyes, 
 and it suggests how we are to think about looking in the book itself. 
 What we find inside is a by-now familiar postmodern, consumerist 
 practice of locating men as well as women before the gaze, one that is 
 not particularly transgressive since it does little to unsettle the place¬ 
 ment of the viewer. Weber’s work speaks to sexual fantasy in quite con¬ 
 ventional ways:” its appeal turns on commodification and the power 
 of money to inform desire; its emphasis is entirely on pleasure. The 
 setting in Rio is exotic, requiring both the leisure and the finances to 
 travel; there clothing and other commodities frame and mediate the 
 body throughout the book, producing images that might function indis¬ 
 criminately as advertisement for various products; a watch, mousse, 
 sheets, cigarettes, condoms. Clearly, one cannot separate the fetishism 
 of commodities in this discourse from the commodification of sexual 
 fantasy or from its fetishization: everything here stands in for some¬ 
 thing else, and there is no question of the social relations among people 
 that produce the relations among these “things.” 
 
 Fantasizing reaches its zenith in Weber’s book in a section devoted 
 to the jujitsu champion Rickson Gracie. In addition to a number of 
 photos that display his graceful muscularity for the viewer, there is 
 substantial written text about him, his personal history is presented to 
 the reader (including a male genealogy), and there are photos of his 
 family (especially of him and his son). All of this information facili¬ 
 tates fantasy about him as the perfect type of the desirable male and 
 codes that type as impossible to determine outside the structures of 
 patriarchy. Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs, on the other hand, 
 deny our ability to step into them in this way: at their best, they prob- 
 lematize and do not merely pander to our fantasies. 
 
 In Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, a text she composed from 
 photos taken by women working for the Farm Security Administra¬ 
 tion, Andrea Fisher suggests that Esther Bubley’s work encodes wom¬ 
 an’s resistance to the fixing gaze of the photographic apparatus in a 
 manner that will help us understand Mapplethorpe’s work. In Girl 
 Sitting Alone in the Sea Grill, we find a different reference to context 
 than that found in Weber’s text: there is a context in this image, but it is 
 one that does not totalize itself as a version of the viewer’s desire; it 
 
72 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 does not participate in raising the discourse of desire to the level of 
 myth, as do the photographs in Rio. Both the arrival of her Other and 
 the arrival of our gaze at its fixity of her, Fisher implies, are deferred; 
 “she stares away, with the oblique unfocused gaze of her own fantasy. 
 She sets in train a flow beyond the unified place of the Other.... One is 
 constantly sliding off the image, an imminent arrival forever post¬ 
 poned” (105). This is similar to the way in which the cover image of 
 BlackBookhoth solicits our gaze yet remains closed to it. This image of 
 the parting veil or curtain may or may not be an allusion to Du Bois, 
 and it may or may not be an allusion to Derrida, but the parting of the 
 veil certainly signifies that a rending is a rendering. In this case, the 
 rending of the screen that has kept hlack men invisible in American 
 photographic texts promises a rendering of them, a finding of some 
 “truth” about them. And yet the image speaks obliquely, for it is turned 
 away from the viewer, contained and closed within itself (head bowed 
 slightly), its symmetry as much an ironic refusal as a revelation. 
 
 Fisher makes Marjory Collins’s Sleeping in a Caron Sunday in Rock 
 Creek Park the centerpiece of her entire inquiry into women’s photo¬ 
 graphic practice in the FSA, finding it resistant and rich in a number of 
 ways: “sleep evokes that other sight of dreaming. Though she may 
 become the target of desire, she is also immersed within desires of her 
 own. While sleep may leave her powerless in the waking world, her 
 silent desire also suggests a different register of power. . . . Sightless 
 through dreaming, she becomes not only object of a gaze but, at once, 
 its obstacle” (108).For Fisher, the photographs in Let Us Now Praise 
 Famous Women encode female desire as a site of power through their 
 refusal to define the suhject/object relation of their own gazing, be 
 it fantasy or dream, and we see a similar (although decontextualized 
 and therefore perhaps “mythic”) figure in Mapplethorpe’s study of 
 Rory Bernal from Black Book. What we are presented with here is the 
 body as the site of pleasure, but also with the ultimate enigma of that 
 pleasure. What is figured here is the body’s capacity for loss within 
 a somatic realm that the camera can only ever signify and never 
 
 represent. 
 
 In the end, the black man’s body, as Mercer suggests is historically 
 the case in Western cultures, is often made to signify “flesh” for Map¬ 
 plethorpe, and nothing more. But Black Book seems in some ways to 
 foresee and answer that charge. In the first untitled photo in the book, 
 for instance—the first of five that pointedly are alone in not naming the 
 model and in focusing only on the body and cock (not the face) of the 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 73 
 
 men—the text encodes some awareness of its own fetishistic practice 
 by referring to a racial history that includes lynching (for instance, 
 Untitled, 1980). This photograph can’t help but call to mind a histor¬ 
 ical regime in which black men were not only denied the power to look 
 (and the cloth here closes the veil of the cover cruelly back over the 
 face of the man) but were banged and mutilated, often for fear of tbe 
 very thing here exposed: the penis. The not-quite-supplicant hands 
 raised in a gesture superfluous to the body’s condition—this is not 
 merely a brutal and dehumanizing photograph, one that reduces the 
 black man to bis genitals, but is one where such objectification is 
 implicitly questioned. I do not find it helpful to call this a racist photo¬ 
 graph; rather, I think we might see it as a photograph that addresses 
 racism—particularly as that which has sited itself in the sighting of the 
 black man’s sexuality. Man in Polyester Suit follows immediately after¬ 
 ward in Black Book, and I think it possible (without in any way deny¬ 
 ing the validity and strength of Mercer’s analysis) to suggest that the 
 text at least in part anticipates the response that it has made the penis 
 the only signifying thing about the black man'. Although its contrast to 
 the cover is interesting in this respect, the context of the book as a 
 whole makes Suit read as more than a cerebral play on the difference 
 between skin and cloth (Barthes’s and Kardon’s readings). It also seems 
 to make it signify more richly than Mercer suggests. If the image pre¬ 
 sents a view of what whites are certain is true—that the black man’s 
 true weapon, his penis, lurks large and always just out of sight—its 
 placement in the book encourages us to read that as an interrogated 
 practice and not simply as a joke. 
 
 I want to close by considering an image by another white American 
 man, Robert Frank. His photograph of a funeral in St. Helena, South 
 Carolina, part of The Americans, encodes itself (even in the tilting 
 frame) as an intrusion on the social scene of a rural black commu¬ 
 nity. The photograph records a ritual that remains unknowable to the 
 viewer; unlike the dead man, who remains open to the camera’s gaze, 
 the people in it turn away with nothing to say except that they know 
 something the camera can never share. Nor do they speak to one an¬ 
 other. There is, in the photo, a sense of the unspoken understandings 
 that produce and maintain community in codes of dress and posture, 
 of generation and death, and even in the sense of an exterior space and 
 its dissolving light—none of which has been orchestrated by the pho¬ 
 tographer, none of which is under his power.^^ The contrast I am try¬ 
 ing to point to here is similar to one between Lewis Hine and Alfred 
 
74 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Stieglitz as noted by Sekula; “the Hine discourse displays a manifest 
 politics and only an implicit aesthetics, while the Stieglitz discourse 
 displays a manifest aesthetics and only an implicit politics” (103). 
 From this perspective, Mapplethorpe’s work has an implicit politics 
 and an explicit aesthetics, while Frank produces a rather overt politi¬ 
 cal text through its aesthetics. By placing Funeral—St. Helena, South 
 Carolina against other images of the social text of Cold War America, 
 Frank not only encodes the social subjectivity of his black subjects, but 
 also allows us to read it within the larger structure that articulates it. 
 
 The retrospective of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work held in 1988-89 
 was entitled The Perfect Moment, and the search for “the perfect mo¬ 
 ment” will always have an aesthetic agenda that solicits the forgetting 
 of concrete discursive situations. Mapplethorpe’s work returns us not 
 to politics but to the question of vision, to the photographer-as-artist, 
 and to the clever balance in his work. Its very undecidability (is the 
 text in excess of its racism? is that conscious or unconscious?) be¬ 
 comes the hallmark of its status as “art” and of its producer as artist. 
 In an interview conducted for the retrospective, Mapplethorpe said, 
 when asked why he sees no difference in his pictures according to 
 their subject, how he can see a cock, a flower, and a portrait as all the 
 same: “The same is that I’m seeing them; it’s my eyes that are pho¬ 
 tographing them” (qtd. in Kardon, “Robert Mapplethorpe” 28). This 
 implies, wrongly, that objects are free of ideological associations—that 
 they have not performed other, “pre-photographic” cultural work; it 
 implies, wrongly, that the photographer’s vision is somehow itself out¬ 
 side of ideological contradiction; and it implies, wrongly, that it is that 
 vision that produces the meaning of the discourse—that intention is 
 the final authority. 
 
 A man who, at the end of his life, was charging $10,000 a sitting was 
 no doubt invested in his own authority as an artist. But the caste sys¬ 
 tem into which Robert Mapplethorpe was taken up has an unsettling 
 effect in the Vanity Fair interview noted above. Dunne reports that 
 Mapplethorpe “gave a large cocktail party at his studio to celebrate his 
 forty-second birthday,” and lists as among those in attendance Susan 
 Sarandon, Sigourney Weaver, Gregory Hines, the Prince and Princess 
 Michael of Greece, the Earl of Warwick, Bruce Mailman, who was a 
 managerial partner in the St. Marks Baths until it closed, gallery own¬ 
 ers, museum directors, and others (187). What one notes with a chill, 
 though, is that when discussing aids in this interview, Mapplethorpe 
 points out that half the men in Black Book are dead: “Most of the blacks 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 75 
 
 don’t have insurance and therefore can’t afford AZT. They all died 
 quickly, the blacks” (185). At least in the world as Vanity Fair repre¬ 
 sents it (and that was the world Mapplethorpe was part of at the end of 
 his life), “the blacks” remain a generic category, signifiers not of a 
 sameness among gay men but of a difference that cannot be overwrit¬ 
 ten. These men were Mapplethorpe’s friends, and in this comment he 
 does recognize how privilege was encoded in their interactions. But 
 the apparatus of Vanity Fair takes the political edge off that recogni¬ 
 tion, subsuming the deaths of these (here) anonymous black men into 
 the more spectacular aura of the famous photographer, his celebrity, 
 and the controversial works he produced. One reads here with an an¬ 
 ger and a sadness that are all too familiar how race (and aids, and race- 
 and-AlDS) are made to function as a difference more exploited than 
 explored. That distinction identifies the problem that will continue to 
 haunt analysis of Mapplethorpe’s work. For all of their occasional 
 power and astonishing beauty, these images too often stage racial dif¬ 
 ference in order to insure their own status as controversial texts. And 
 that staging seeks to bypass the social history that has made it both 
 necessary and possible, limiting its interventions in the social con¬ 
 struction of the erotic to a problematic aesthetic effect. 
 
 Notes 
 
 I wish to acknowledge Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Michael Awkward, 
 Lynne Joyrich, Steven Mailloux, and Kathleen Woodward for their re¬ 
 sponses to earlier drafts of this paper. I wish also to acknowledge my 
 critical dialogue with Robyn Wiegman, whose work has helped me better 
 to understand both the economy of visibility mentioned here and the in- 
 tertextuality of racism and heterosexism (see her dissertation, “Negotiat¬ 
 ing the Masculine”). I want to thank her as well for first bringing Kobena 
 Mercer’s work on Mapplethorpe to my attention. 
 
 1 This is seen as well in the intertextual dance of national defense and male 
 homosexuality with which the Bush administration tried to explain the 
 Iowa explosion, an episode without peer in the recent annals of staged 
 homophobia. 
 
 2 In late spring and early summer of 1989, controversy over erotic photo¬ 
 graphs by Robert Mapplethorpe and photos by Andreas Serrano consid¬ 
 ered obscene (particularly a series entitled “Piss Christ” in which Serrano 
 photographed crucifixes suspended in containers of his own urine) led 
 Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery to cancel an exhibit of them in an 
 effort to forestall loss of government funding for these and other projects. 
 
76 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Congress, led by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), instituted new, strict guide¬ 
 lines covering the content of work to be supported through the National 
 Endowment for the Arts, and placed the gallery that had originally sup¬ 
 ported Serrano’s work (in Helms’s home state of North Carolina) on a five- 
 year probationary period during which it is ineligible for receipt of NEA 
 funding. The Helms amendment reads in part, “None of the funds autho¬ 
 rized to be appropriated pmsuant to this Act may be used to promote, 
 disseminate, or produce—(1) obscene or indecent materials, including but 
 not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the exploi¬ 
 tation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts.” 
 
 3 Some of the more noteworthy contributions by men have been Ellis; Ber- 
 sani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”; and Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, 
 AIDS, and the Media. 
 
 4 The classic positions here are outlined by Dworkin; and Griffin. 
 
 5 Pat Califa is the most notable proponent of lesbian S & M (see “Unraveling 
 the Sexual Fringe: A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality” and “Feminism and 
 Sadomasochism”). Other feminists, who maintain that pornography is 
 meaningful only through its engagement with cultiual fantasies more 
 often than not shaped according to patriarchal structures of subjectivity 
 and oppression, nevertheless contend that there is the possibility of sub¬ 
 version, contradiction, excess, and transformation in it for individual 
 women not posited as a single, unitary, exploited Woman (see for exam¬ 
 ple, Kaplan). Sydney Pokorny, vwiting in Gay Community News, makes a 
 similar case for the lesbian value of the spectacle provided by Madonna 
 and Sandra Bernhard: despite its commercialization, Pokorny finds in it 
 the “heretofore forbidden pleasure of watching two unabashedly unin¬ 
 hibited girls being incredibly sexual with each other” (10). 
 
 6 Ischar, “Household Misappropriations,” Spring 1989, Visual Studies 
 Workshop, Rochester, New York; all quotations from exhibit. 
 
 7 Barthes’s distinction between the studium (the public meaning of the text) 
 and punctum (the private meaning of the text) fails to note the first lessons 
 of his own earlier work in semiotic theory that “private” responses to texts 
 operate by codes that are, when one analyzes them, as ideological and 
 socially constructed as more overtly “public” responses. 
 
 8 Or this occurs only in the Imaginary relation between child and mother, a 
 dyad that Camera Lucida explicitly mourns the loss of. 
 
 9 It is surprising to find Shange’s prose in celebration of the strength and 
 beauty of black men given the context of recent American journalistic 
 confrontations between black women and black men over the questions 
 raised by sexual politics. One is left to marvel at how Mapplethorpe’s 
 publishers foresaw the controversy of his work and sought to forestall it 
 with this legitimating preface. 
 
 10 Although Mapplethorpe has dismissed the comparison, his work owes 
 
How the Eye Is Caste 77 
 
 something to Edward Weston in its concentration on structure and surface 
 as ends in themselves separable from the histories traced in their produc¬ 
 tion as image. But Mapplethorpe far more than Weston poses his work: 
 where Weston’s work poses as the investigation of a structure it finds in 
 natural objects (even the surreal nudes work this way to a certain extent), 
 Mapplethorpe’s work foregrounds the photographer’s role in constructing 
 the text. We may read this as part of his gay cultural heritage and its 
 privileging of the aesthete and artifice. 
 
 11 Rio is not perhaps specifically “gay” in its semiotics, although Brazil has 
 certainly come to function as a privileged (fantasy) site for North Ameri¬ 
 can gay men. Weber’s postcards (of sailors, hunky men dousing them¬ 
 selves with water, male models posed dramatically and sexually in all 
 sorts of social settings) have become icons in the gay community. On the 
 day I purchased Rio on South Street in Philadelphia, three male store 
 clerks borrowed it from me in three successive stores in order to ooh and 
 ah over its contents—particularly Rickson. 
 
 12 John Tagg has written of the nationalist agenda of the FSA staging of the 
 Depression as a meaningful term deployed through iconographically sta¬ 
 ble and exchangeable images (“The Currency of the Photography”). One of 
 the important functions of that work concerns the construction of a cultur¬ 
 ally specific concept of class; we might note that Fisher’s written text does 
 not (despite her inclusion of images by Dorothea Lange and others that fall 
 within the paradigms of class set up by the fsa’s official vision of Amer¬ 
 ica). Fisher finds in Bubley and Collins exemplary texts for the encoding 
 of women’s desire as a register of power other than that which operates in 
 the male gaze, but she fails to analyze how the meanings set in motion by 
 these photographs operate only within a white, middle-class realm. See 
 also Kozol. 
 
 13 Mapplethorpe’s discourse of the body in Rlack Book is one of the body as a 
 site of consistent vigor, tone, and organic unity. As such, we find a com¬ 
 pletely different discourse of the body in Mapplethorpe’s work than in 
 that of Johns Coplans, who has recently exhibited large, irregular self- 
 portraits of his own seventy-year-old body. What one sees in these images 
 from and of Coplans are shocking defamiliarizations of how the body 
 wears its history, what one writer has called its “vigorous ugliness” (Phil¬ 
 lips [curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Art], “A 
 Body of Work,” on Johns Coplans, The Art Institute of Chicago, April 
 1989), its fat, its small scars and deformities. Unlike the Mapplethorpe 
 practice of presenting smooth, organically centered (if not culturally cen¬ 
 tral bodies) in his work. Coplans presents a fragmented body, one that is 
 perceived—like the body we know as our own before the mirror organizes 
 it—piecemeal, not in proportion even to itself. 
 
 14 Yet Frank’s work is different, more self-consciously “aesthetic” and “polit- 
 
78 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ical” than that of Arthur P. Bedou, a black photographer working in Mis¬ 
 sissippi and Louisiana until mid-century. Bedou’s work records black life 
 at a time when it was otherwise invisible within hegemonic culture—a 
 group of men playing croquet on the gulf coast: starched white shirts 
 under palm trees; the cars assembled for a summer picnic seen from a 
 nearby hill; a Photographer in Center of a Large Crowd of formally attired 
 black men and women (c. 1910). And this “simple” recording of public 
 events—which has, of course, its own aesthetics—becomes its politics 
 wben the work is exhibited as part of a traveling exhibit from the Schom- 
 burg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, Debo¬ 
 rah Willis, Curator (seen at The Milwaukee Art Museum when I delivered 
 an earlier version of this essay at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies 
 in April 1989). It is this latter point that Barthes seems not to understand 
 in his comments on the James Van Der Zee portrait he includes in Camera 
 Lucida. By making that family grouping an occasion for his own memori¬ 
 alizing project, Barthes fails to see how the very existence of the Van Der 
 Zee text is based in a cultural Otherness that makes his aunt’s dreary life— 
 and his own patrician writing—not some “secret meaning” or “engage¬ 
 ment” but a politically superfluous, if not offensive, appropriation of the 
 text. 
 
The Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 
 
 Mi chael A wkward 
 
 For Chris and Athena 
 
 It is impossible, of course, to fully know, much less repay, the burdens of one’s 
 deeper debts.—Tom Yingling, Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text 
 
 But every memoir now is a kind of manifesto, as we piece together the tale of 
 the tribe. Our stories have died with us long enough. We mean to leave behind 
 some map, some key, for the gay and lesbian people who follow—that they may 
 not drown in the lies, in the hate that pools and foams like pus on the carcass of 
 America.—Paul Monette, Becoming a Man 
 
 During my family’s annual trips to the Philadelphia area, one of the 
 stops we frequently make is the cemetery in which my mother’s body 
 was buried in 1986. After my first, tearful visit, when my pain was still 
 so raw “it had no bottom and it had no top,” these blues journeys home 
 have taken on a nameless sameness, a disconcerting monotony. Now, 
 when my family returns to the car to give me a few moments alone 
 with my mother’s remains, I try to do what 1 know I am supposed to: to 
 
80 Michael Awkward 
 
 talk to her. But these monologues make me feel utterly self-conscious, 
 as though I’m merely mouthing the words of a dated script, fulfilling 
 my role as the dutiful son to a mother who joked often that her children 
 would not remember her after she had passed. 
 
 The living move on. My heathen heart tells me that the dead rest, 
 even when they are not wholly “disremembered and unaccounted 
 for,” even when the son or lover, daughter, sibling, or friend believes 
 that the dearly beloved “could never be dead until she herself had 
 finished feeling and thinking.”^ For those who have passed on, death 
 arrests development, kills the process of identity formation. It is the 
 living who change, move, transform their thinking, their attitudes, 
 world views, often with the assistance of their sometimes misremem- 
 bered recollections of the textualized dead. Continually, we re-make 
 even the dearly departed, to whom we cling because of what we be¬ 
 lieve they can teach us about our unstable living. 
 
 No putative cultural war against great dead white male writers will 
 ever lessen the firmness of their hold on our cultural imagination, in 
 part because most of the best of them—Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, 
 Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, as well as others—not only provide for 
 us a window to the past, but eulogize passing in a manner that in¬ 
 structs how both to survive it and, in its wake, to transform ourselves 
 and our worlds. For my friend, Tom Yingling, the figure who most 
 obviously illuminated the past and the future was Hart Crane. For me, 
 increasingly, it is my mother, or my construction of her. And Tom. 
 
 II 
 
 In the days and nights immediately after Tom died, I searched for two 
 letters he wrote to me that I hoped would help me better cope with his 
 passing, neither of which I’ve ever found. The first was written in 
 December of 1986, diuing our first months out of graduate school and 
 away from Penn, and after he’d learned of my mother’s death. The 
 second was written in December of 1991 after what had been the long¬ 
 est period of silence that had passed between us since I met him at 
 Penn in 1980. It was painfully impersonal, an emotionally distanced 
 reply to several messages I’d left on his answering machine over the 
 course of two months and a letter I’d sent him a few weeks earlier. This 
 second letter signaled to me that he intended to maintain that distance. 
 I believed that, because he’d found and moved in with a new lover, he 
 no longer had time for me, no longer needed me. So I, in turn, tried to 
 
Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 81 
 
 withdraw emotionally. I fear nothing so much as being judged unwor¬ 
 thy, unwanted, not sufficiently interesting, by those few people to 
 whom I’ve opened my heart. 
 
 When our friend Diane urged me in November of 1991 to visit him in 
 Syracuse during the upcoming semester 1 was to spend on a fellow¬ 
 ship at Princeton, I resisted, responding: Syracuse is hardly closer to 
 Princeton than it is to Ann Arbor. I fought the urge to contact him, even 
 at an affluent university’s expense. When I skimmed the table of con¬ 
 tents of Diana Fuss’s collection, Inside/Out, I failed to notice Tom’s 
 piece, “aids in America.” Had I seen it, I would not have suspected that 
 it was autobiographically motivated. No one told me that he was giving 
 a lecture at Penn, our old stomping grounds, forty minutes away from 
 Princeton. Because he had sworn the friends we had in common to 
 secrecy—new secrets, his to share with whomever he wished, when he 
 was ready—no one told me he was dying of aids until a few days after 
 my family and I had driven back to Michigan, until he had almost died, 
 until the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions had covered him, disfigured him, 
 until he could no longer move his bloated body. I didn’t know. 
 
 I’d misread the clues, missed the interpretive keys. Was out of the 
 loop. What kind of reader was I? What manner of friend? Maybe he 
 sensed I couldn’t have been of as much help to him as he’d been after 
 my mother died, that he’d have to comfort me again. Clearly, he knew 
 that I’d read death—her death and his—intertextually. Maybe I was 
 next on the list, the next difficult letter, the next anguished call. Maybe 
 much further down. Surely, he’d grown sick of confessing. I know I 
 loved him. That he loved me. But I don’t know if I could have handled 
 knowing. I like to think I could have, that I could have been a source of 
 some . . . something. As he’d always helped me. As I’d tried to be to 
 him, suspecting, all the while, that he needed me less than I did him. 
 But I was still prone to crying uncontrollably because I missed my 
 mother. Maybe I could not have handled knowing. 
 
 But he’d supported me. Recognized my worth and ignored—or 
 helped me to confront—my weaknesses. Comforted me. Our Penn 
 friend, Athena, who, with her husband, Chris, drove with me from 
 Ann Arbor to Syracuse to say good-bye to Tom, called him a teddy 
 bear. When my wife, Lauren, and I visited him in Syracuse, nearly two 
 years earlier, three months after my oldest daughter was born, I hugged 
 him. I’m sure I always hugged him. But he said, “Thank you.” For a 
 hug? Why? When Chris, Athena, and I were leaving him for the last 
 time, in the care of, among others, Steve and Celeste, Penn friends 
 
82 Michael Awkward 
 
 who’d flown in from Berkeley, he was bloated, dying, but lucid, and I 
 blew him a kiss. It was horrifying to see him suffer so, look so, but I 
 loved him, owed him in the ways you owe people who’ve opened their 
 minds and lives to you, an unrepayable debt. I have tried to repay it. 
 Am trying now, here. 1 will continue to try, though, as Tom certainly 
 knew, I will inevitably fail. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Rereading Tom’s engaging analysis of Robert Mapplethorpe’s contro¬ 
 versial Black Book, particularly in the context of others of his un¬ 
 collected and/or unpublished critical and more personal writings. I’m 
 especially struck by two things: (1] the skillfulness of his navigation of 
 the troubled waters connecting race, sexuality, and caste in America, 
 and (2) the manner in which the specter of AIDS haunts the essay, 
 troubling his efforts to rehabilitate Mapplethorpe from charges that his 
 representations of black men were racist. I’d been aware of the naviga¬ 
 tional skills as early as 1989, when I heard him deliver an earlier ver¬ 
 sion of the essay at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee’s Con¬ 
 ference on Twentieth Century Cultural Studies. But the impact of aids 
 as a contagion—in the essay’s conclusion and, obviously, so many 
 other places—did not strike me as powerfully then as now, since it has 
 killed my friend. 
 
 Tom’s writings add significantly to debates about aids and its rep¬ 
 resentation, and to our comprehension of the difficulty of speaking 
 about difference in institutional settings and by way of discursive 
 formations that work to stabilize its meanings. Tom’s struggle with dif¬ 
 ference-including scholarship/autobiography; homo/heterosexual¬ 
 ity; white/black; poor/affluent; canonical/non-canonical—is high¬ 
 lighted by the anthology’s structurings and choices, and makes me 
 acutely aware of our differences. These differences seem to matter 
 more on paper, in what was and is our place in the geography of iden¬ 
 tity politics, than they did in person. Particularly because my point of 
 entry into this text, his last words and testament, is his engagement 
 with another white gay male’s engagement of black male bodies. 
 
 What does it mean for me, a living heterosexual black male, to join 
 my dead gay white friend’s lovingly organized body, to be positioned 
 in its folds, to enter the most provocative and representative of the 
 remains of Tom’s body? Notwithstanding my previous sentence’s play 
 on the notion of eroticization of difference—we all know that not all 
 
Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 83 
 
 difference is erotic to all people—I am well aware that I can say nothing 
 to de-solidify the very real boundaries between life and death so as to 
 return Tom to the world of the living. Nor can I, in any fundamental 
 way, remake myself. In fact, I don’t believe that I can do much to clarify 
 Tom’s challenging engagement with Mapplethorpe’s representations 
 of difference. And I want to resist the urge to wallow in my grief or to 
 allow my black male presence to serve merely to legitimize what was, 
 finally, in the age of academic identity politics, a risky intellectual 
 project—a gay white male’s effort, in the face of a resounding critique 
 of this celebrated white photographer’s representations of his racism, 
 to explore “how race figures as a discourse of difference and therefore 
 an incitement to desire” (61; this volume). I want to try to do with it 
 now what I did not do when Tom asked me to read this essay before he 
 sent it off for publication: interrogate his analysis. Point out not merely 
 its many strengths, but also its tensions, its self-difference. And, par¬ 
 ticularly because he’s passed on, I want to envision ways in which to 
 keep aspects of his ideas in circulation just at the point this essay 
 stops, gives up, and when Tom moves on. 
 
 Ultimately, “How the Eye is Caste” says less to me about the photog¬ 
 rapher’s or Tom’s participation in an erotics of difference than it does 
 about the limits of viewing even the most controversial of representa¬ 
 tions, including Mapplethorpe’s indisputably transgressive images, as 
 scrutinizable only in the context of a history of “ideological associa¬ 
 tions” or “ ‘pre-photographic’ cultural work” (74; this volume). How¬ 
 ever unwittingly, such a perspective fixes their creators and objects 
 in endless, Sisyphean struggles with rocks that perpetually roll back 
 down the mountainside. Tom’s reading is, without question, theoreti¬ 
 cally deft and, for the most part, daring, anticipating and disarming 
 virtually all possible reservations about Mapplethorpe’s achievements 
 and, finally, his own. He disarms by giving credit to the perspectives 
 of both the photographer and his harshest leftist critics, and then, ul¬ 
 timately, by positing that the photographer’s achievement is ideo¬ 
 logically limited because of autobiographical statements about “the 
 blacks,” AIDS and his own artistic vision. Tom tells us that, in response 
 to inquiries about how, despite their apparent differences, he can view 
 “a cock, a flower, and a portrait” as the same, Mapplethorpe replies, 
 “The same is that I’m seeing them; it’s my eyes that are photographing 
 them” (74; this volume). Taking him to task, Tom suggests that Map¬ 
 plethorpe views “the photographer’s vision [as] somehow itself out¬ 
 side of ideological contradiction; and it implies, wrongly, that it is that 
 
84 Michael Awkward 
 
 vision that produces the meaning of the discourse—that intention is 
 the final authority” (74; this volume). 
 
 By the end of his essay, Tom has moved far afield from his initial 
 defense of his subject’s representational choices because of a desire to 
 “insist on the legitimacy of Mapplethorpe’s work [in order] ... to 
 intervene in that [Helmsian] construction and the political agenda that 
 frames it” (60; this volume). After situating “Mapplethorpe” as a valu¬ 
 able sign within his own political economy, and offering reasoned 
 interrogations of the positions of some of the photographer’s most per¬ 
 suasive leftist critics, Tom concludes that Mapplethorpe’s “peculiarly 
 privatistic” politics inspires photographic texts that fail adequately to 
 attend to the contexts in which the meanings of blackness circulate. 
 Emphasizing Mapplethorpe’s Vanity Fair connections, his “authority” 
 as a celebrated artist, and a class position that permits him to battle the 
 contagion AIDS in ways that his poor black subjects cannot, “How the 
 Eye is Caste” concludes with a withering critique of the photographer’s 
 representational failiue: 
 
 One reads here with an anger and a sadness that are all too familiar 
 how race (and AIDS, and race-and-AlDS) are made to function as a 
 difference more exploited than explored. That distinction identi¬ 
 fies the problem that will continue to haunt analysis of Mapple¬ 
 thorpe’s work. For all of their occasional power and astonishing 
 beauty, these images too often stage racial difference in order to 
 insure their own status as controversial texts. And that staging 
 seeks to bypass the social history that has made it both necessary 
 and possible, limiting its interventions in the social construction 
 of the erotic to a problematic aesthetic effect. (75; this volume) 
 
 Tom argued that Mapplethorpe’s photographs are not sufficiently his¬ 
 torically contextualized, evince the artist’s failure to acknowledge 
 his own complicity in structures of dominance, and demonstrate that 
 he wants not merely to explore racial and sexual myths, but to ex¬ 
 ploit them. Much of the significant work in American literary and cul¬ 
 tural studies in the last quarter century foregrounds ideology and self- 
 reflexivity, and Tom relied heavily on this mode of inquiry, which is 
 both beneficial and costly to his essay’s overall persuasiveness. 
 
 Clearly, artists ought to be mindful of the complicated social histo¬ 
 ries their works evoke, the discourses in which they participate. But 
 to what end, ultimately? Now that we have identified heretofore re¬ 
 pressed and marginalized social categories, loosed them onto a now 
 
Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 85 
 
 generally more accommodating academic and “real” world, we are 
 bound to codify their meanings, to define, to establish boundaries be¬ 
 tween being and non-being. The search for authority and authenticity 
 commences, is never-ending, clashes with our increasingly firmly 
 held belief that identities are constructed. But, temporarily at least, 
 strategically at least, we need to be able to invest them with more 
 positive significations than those who had suppressed them could 
 fathom. Hence the authority of female experience. Hence the Black 
 Aesthetic. Hence what Paul Monette describes in his self-described 
 gay male “manifesto,” Becoming a Man, as a “watershed,” his “break¬ 
 through to my queer self”: the discovery that “gay might not just be 
 about whom we slept with but a kind of sensibility, what survived of 
 feeling after all the fears and evasions of the closet” (272). 
 
 How do we know when we are being sufficiently attentive to the 
 historical meanings of nonhegemonic status? What are the standards 
 that govern their deployment? Clearly, artists and theorists must walk 
 a fine line between creation and commentary, between envisioning the 
 future and trying, against all odds, because versions of the past are 
 never any less susceptible to “ideological contradiction” than the ob¬ 
 jects and persons Mapplethorpe placed before his camera, to recite 
 aspects of the story correctly. If Tom is correct that Mapplethorpe’s 
 “intention is [not] the final authority,” what is? Who is? These ques¬ 
 tions lurk in the margins of Tom’s prose, not explicitly asked, never 
 explicitly addressed, but clearly, Mapplethorpe is not invested with 
 determinative authority. And Tom doesn’t claim to possess or seek that 
 authority. But if anyone has it, according to this essay, however prob¬ 
 lematic Mapplethorpe’s use of the term, it is “the blacks,” not all of 
 them, certainly, but some, somewhere, adequately informed about the 
 history and culture with which the photographer’s work resonates and 
 does not do justice, according to Tom. 
 
 These are difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions, but ones I pose 
 because they help to point out the tensions in Tom’s essay and, I be¬ 
 lieve, of the institutional moment of self-reflexivity and identity poli¬ 
 tics that, as far as I know, may be fading fast. But, sometimes at least, I 
 feel it is not fading fast enough. I’ve been publicly rebuked for mistak¬ 
 ing the availability to me of texts and analytical strategies that con¬ 
 stitute the body of black feminist work with an invitation to enter it, 
 assess its strengths and limitations, perhaps even add something to its 
 heady mix. On such occasions, people who don’t know me feel em¬ 
 powered to characterize me: I am the invasive other, biologically pro- 
 
86 Michael Awkward 
 
 grammed and culturally inclined to render hin-tful judgments, hold 
 poisonous attitudes, strive to weaken the already weakened body. The 
 signifying possibilities of my words and work do not liberate me from 
 the cultural contexts in which my body, my gender, my black-male- 
 ness, are read. No matter what I say or do, I am marked, defined, 
 stripped, as it were, of the value of my individual negotiations of those 
 contexts and situated within an economy of gender and race where my 
 place is known, and the outcome of my interests in the black feminist 
 body understood as something to be prophylactically guarded against. 
 Like the photographs in Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, about which Tom 
 speaks compellingly before he confronts the nightmare of Mapple¬ 
 thorpe’s autobiographical, “privatistic” politics, there are aspects of 
 my profile that render me incapable of what some would view as pro¬ 
 ductive address. I am, in such instances, a foil, a whipping boy, a sign 
 of the degradation of the class of humanity whose male and racialized 
 bodies link them with me. 
 
 My challenge as a scholar has been to find a means of speaking 
 productively despite and to that skepticism, to learn what I can from it, 
 and resist, as an act of self-defense, the urge to flaunt strategically my 
 record of service to its causes, which, weighed against the doubtlessly 
 significant moments when I have transgressed against its ideals, might 
 make me a welcome ally. As much as I understand that some will 
 inevitably consider my presence to be transgressive, and me no more 
 capable of resisting phallocentric urges and impulses than Mapple¬ 
 thorpe is—as Tom put it—to “escape the charge of racism, of a fetishis- 
 tic interest in black men that objectifies them and denies them their 
 subjectivity” (65; this volume), I struggle to escape representative 
 black-male-ness. While, being human, at times I stumble and falter, I 
 believe that this is no idle fantasy of mine, not a function of some urge 
 toward disembodiment or disassociation. Rather, it reflects my belief 
 that while any investigation—of people, places, or things burdened by 
 a history of representation—must necessarily begin with a strategic 
 placing of the object under scrutiny in the context of appropriate in¬ 
 vestigative and/or social categories, our responsibility, if we are to take 
 full advantage of the rips in the social and institutional fabrics that 
 have allowed us some sunshine and a few points of entry, is to prob- 
 lematize others’ placements, others’ acts of scrutiny, others’ histories. 
 
 In addition to contextualizing representation, we must also strive to 
 ensme that all meanings don’t remain fixed, don’t stagnate, don’t stra¬ 
 tegically exclude the needy and the worthy systematically. Like the 
 
Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 87 
 
 theorists of the photographic image Tom cites, including Allan Sekula 
 and Victor Burgin, I recognize the inescapability, in interpretive situa¬ 
 tions, of referentiality, of cultural situatedness and representativeness. 
 But art is forward as well as backward thinking, and we must never 
 forget that. 
 
 IV 
 
 During the process of writing our dissertations, Tom and I talked on 
 several occasions about the difficulties and consequences of doing 
 work that was viewed as transgressive. (He explored textual manifesta¬ 
 tions of Hart Crane’s homosexuality, and its consequences; my own, 
 less ambitious effort, sought to demonstrate twentieth-century black 
 female intertextuality in the novel.) I eventually came to understand 
 that the phrase from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching 
 God that I’d used as an interpretive center of my study because it 
 visualized the sorts of cooperative black female infra- and intertex- 
 tual relations I was trying to describe—“my tongue is in my frien’s 
 mouf” (17)—was infused with undeniably homoerotic potentialities 
 that, while muted to some degree in the interactions between Janie and 
 her “kissin’-friend,” Pheoby, are unleashed within the tradition I tried 
 to sketch by Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Alice 
 Walker’s The Color Purple/ I didn’t know how to deal with this issue, 
 how to handle it, whether I could, in addition to striving to offer an 
 extended, albeit limited, exemplification of the formulations on inter¬ 
 textuality offered by highly regarded black feminist scholars, insist 
 that the trajectory of this image’s movement through time and space 
 was not toward an achievement of ideal heterosexual coupling. Rather, 
 that movement was toward the laying on of female hands, tongues, and 
 bodies. What could I, a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual male at the 
 time, before the development of a full-blown and fully embodied queer 
 theory and gay cultural studies, have done with that? 
 
 Tom told me that it was okay that I not tackle this weighty subject, 
 too, one that, frankly, I wasn’t—perhaps still am not—prepared to han¬ 
 dle. I didn’t—don’t—know enough about gay studies, perhaps, but 
 even if I were to get up to speed. I’m not sure I’m the one who should 
 have done that work. That exploration would not merely have fol¬ 
 lowed the general directions of black feminist criticism, but would 
 have foregrounded a black lesbianism that, in a controversial moment 
 in the pioneering essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara 
 
88 Michael Awkward 
 
 Smith posited was everywhere.^ I stopped short because I sensed that 
 this was a boundary I should not cross. 
 
 My intent here is not to rebuke Tom, but to place my story next to his 
 story, to acknowledge that his limitations are my limitations, are all of 
 our limitations, and will continue to be so until we discover a means of 
 consolidating the gains of these transformative times without rigidify- 
 ingthe meanings of “black men,” “black women,” “gay white men,” all 
 other others, and even “dead white male writers.” A part of me resists 
 the certainties of Tom’s critique of Mapplethorpe, because I recognize 
 there are ways in which it makes me—makes us all—a slave to “ideo¬ 
 logical associations,” which we have become increasingly willing to 
 challenge, and resist, when they appear in cultural contexts that we 
 have marked as om own. Perhaps, given the boldness of his confronta¬ 
 tion of the complicated issues Mapplethorpe represents, expecting 
 Tom to problematize history and de-authorize “the blacks” would 
 have been expecting too much. (Very few scholars seemed capable of 
 such negotiations in 1990.) But I can try to do so now, and must. Cer¬ 
 tainly, I saw aspects of black women’s poetics that I could not explore 
 wholeheartedly, but others can, and must. 
 
 In that way, I want to believe, Tom’s essay, Tom’s book, Tom’s living 
 remain, like love, what Hurston calls “uh movin’ thing” that “takes its 
 shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” (182). 
 I certainly hope so. I hope that we can engage, learn from, disagree 
 with, perhaps even completely reject, aspects of Tom’s formulations. 
 “We” are those who knew him well, those centrally concerned with 
 issues his impressive body of work interrogates, and those for whom 
 he is a tragic victim of the AIDS contagion. All of these categories of 
 readers can and, perhaps, will keep his words and work alive. And 
 they will discover, finally, that Tom was not only a brilliant man, a 
 courageous scholar, but also—his sometimes understandably forlorn 
 reflections notwithstanding—much loved, much respected, and he is 
 much missed. As Robyn put it in the letter she wrote asking me to 
 participate in this volume, Tom Yingling was a sweet man. 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 In this section, I quote lines from Toni Morrison’s Sula (149) and Beloved 
 (336); and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (286). 
 
 2 These thematics appear also, most interestingly, in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora. 
 
 3 According to Smith, a good deal of contemporary black women’s literature 
 
Burdens of One’s Deeper Debts 89 
 
 is “lesbian” because the women in these texts are generally “positively 
 portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one another.” To help her 
 make her point, Smith turns to Sula, which she argues “works as a lesbian 
 novel not only because of the passionate friendship between Sula and Nel 
 but because of Morrison’s consistently critical stance toward the heterosex¬ 
 ual institutions of male-female relationships, marriage, and the family” 
 (175). On a number of occasions, Tom discussed with me his interest in 
 writing an essay on the homoerotic elements of Sula. 
 
Knowledge Effects 
 
Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference: 
 The Predicament of Gay Culture Studies 
 
 Any theoretical attempt to divorce homosexuality either from masculinity or 
 from the fate of sexuality in general has to be seen as contributing to the mainte¬ 
 nance of a status quo in which specific forms of homosexual practice are de¬ 
 nounced and pathologized.—Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies 
 
 Although the exact dialectical relations among these aspects of cul¬ 
 ture are seldom explored as carefully as they might he, cultoal theo¬ 
 rists seem currently to agree that the fate of what Judith Butler terms 
 “the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence” (“Gender” 338)^ has 
 been and remains indissolubly fused to the fate of patriarchy, capital, 
 and the master race. We have even witnessed in the late 1980s what we 
 might call the canonical moment in lesbian and gay studies, that mo¬ 
 ment when it has arrived at an institutional and disciplinary presence 
 and authority quite recently unthinkable. The Winter 1989 issue of the 
 Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter puts it thus: “If lesbian and gay 
 studies have been simmering in North America for decades, in the last 
 few years they seem to have come to a boil” (3). The evidence for this is 
 available in the subject matter of conferences, essays, books, and dis- 
 
94 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 sertations, in the founding of programs and centers—even, although 
 minimally as yet, in advertisements for hiring. Routledge Press, which 
 has succeeded in marketing itself as the foremost publisher of texts in 
 cultural theory, is rumored to be planning a list entitled “The Gay ’90s” 
 for this century’s gay and lesbian ’90s. Materialist, sophisticated in its 
 understanding of sign and text, brashly disrespectful at times yet often 
 impeccably credentialed: the study of homosexuality has been, in the 
 ’80s, exemplary as an archaeological investigation initiated and car¬ 
 ried forward under the banner of an oppositional politics, and the 
 strength of that work already available in the field seems to guarantee 
 that gay studies—like the study of other minority discourses and ex¬ 
 periences—will become an inescapable part of the way in which we 
 negotiate the texts of culture. 
 
 What is perhaps most heartening is the fact that it is no longer only 
 the tenured who have the courage to engage in this research—and we 
 should not fool ourselves: to he openly gay or lesbian in the academy, 
 to he working on gay and lesbian literature and theory (despite what 
 seems to be something of a revolution in manners), is still to find 
 oneself all too often embattled, belittled, and un(der)employed. This 
 growing encampment on the margin of the academy, making its forays 
 into the center, is therefore to be acknowledged and applauded for its 
 labor. Those not within the lesbian and gay community are not aware 
 of how extremely hard-won even the slightest legal or social conces¬ 
 sion toward lesbian and gay rights is or how perilously fragile the gains 
 of the past few years remain. In an era in which the virulent hatred of 
 lesbians and gays may still be expressed sanctimoniously on the na¬ 
 tional airwaves as well as in the House and Senate, in an era in which 
 much sponsorship of anti-gay-and-lesbian legislation is linked to an 
 indifference or backlash to ADDS (and vice versa), in an era in which 
 funding for exhibits, research, and grants may be denied under the 
 statutes of the Helms amendment (no gay-identified man received an 
 NEA grant for 1990)—in this historical moment, the emergence of a 
 strong gay and lesbian discourse in the academy is crucial to those 
 who seek some site from which to speak against the assumption to 
 power of the political right. 
 
 However, the exact parameters that will accurately and ethically 
 delimit a distinct branch of cultrual studies to be known as lesbian and 
 gay studies have yet to be determined. Unlike feminist inquiry, where 
 certain theoretical paradigms have found it helpful to separate the 
 subject from her sexuality, lesbian and gay studies would seem to be 
 
Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference 95 
 
 inescapably wrought upon a sexualized subject. That linkage, given 
 the increased commodification of sexual activity in modern Western 
 cultures more generally, might make us wary of overreading the ability 
 of transgressive same-sex practices to reshape the fundamental struc¬ 
 tures of our culture.^ As Fredric Jameson wrote almost a decade ago, 
 “[T]he right to a specific pleasure, to a specific enjoyment of the poten¬ 
 tialities of the material body—if it is not to remain only that, if it is 
 to become genuinely political, if it is to evade the complacencies of 
 hedonism—must always in one way or another also be able to stand as 
 a figure for the transformation of social relations as a whole” (74). At 
 this moment in its history, lesbian and gay studies must vigorously 
 insist upon the specificity of those oppressions that inundate and de¬ 
 fine the desires of people of erotic minority, but it must also continue 
 to address questions about its construction within “social relations as 
 a whole.” We cannot assume that sexuality is the most significant- 
 much less the only—cultural fantasy through which meaning and sub¬ 
 jectivity are produced and through which desires are framed, policed, 
 and institutionalized; however, we must not for a moment cease to 
 read as lesbian and gay subjects, to interrogate the assumptions about 
 sexuality that frame the ideological imperatives we face and inhabit 
 daily. If the first of these two injunctions is akin to gay heresy, the force 
 of resistance generated by the second is in direct ratio to how seriously 
 one takes the demand that we move our project beyond the identifica¬ 
 tion of homosexuality and homophobia and toward more inclusive 
 questions about cultural power and the various relations it frames. 
 Sexuality does not exist prior to and apart from the ideological work it 
 performs in containing and articulating struggles and contradictions 
 that appear more immediately on “other” axes of cultural power and 
 difference; the legacy of Foucault, which can help us to read not only 
 the care but also the politics of the self as a struggle with compet¬ 
 ing discursive and historical claims, ought to free us from the reifying 
 gesture that threatens to inundate any and all projects in identity 
 politics.... 
 
 . . . What is forgotten in the drive to achieve institutional presence 
 and in the privileging of male or female homosexuality as a distinct 
 facet of human culture? How is the object of gay and lesbian studies to 
 be constructed? Such questions arise from my reading of two recent 
 texts, David E. Greenberg’s The Construction of Homosexuality and 
 Displacing Homophobia, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 
 edited by Ronald Butters, John M. Glum, and Michael Moon. 
 
96 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 Let us begin here by considering the titles of these texts and the 
 question of the subject. Gay and lesbian studies, like much of post¬ 
 structuralist academic discourse in the past decade, has found itself 
 divided on hovir it understands the subject denominated as “gay” and 
 “lesbian.” Nor is this only a recent debate: the struggle over taxon¬ 
 omy has been real for homosexual men and women at least since sexol¬ 
 ogy came to authority in the late nineteenth century. Current wisdom 
 suggests that “homosexuals” are not a transhistorical kind of human 
 being, appearing with only local variation in different historical mo¬ 
 ments and contexts; rather, such wisdom dictates that all sexual iden¬ 
 tities and practices are constructed hy and within the materiality of 
 cultiue in force at the moment of their appearance. In other words, ho¬ 
 mosexual desire and identity—like heterosexual desire and identity— 
 could not he considered intrinsic to and constant in human beings, 
 since any instantiation of them would he legible only as the product of 
 specific historical conjunctures of force and production that bring the 
 subject into being and visibility. This argument (which one sees prom¬ 
 inently in feminist, postcolonial, and African American studies as 
 well) is known as “constructionism,” and those who reject it, favoring 
 some theory of a constant homosexual nature, are known as “essential- 
 ists.”^ We will leave aside here any extended discussion of the useful¬ 
 ness of these various positions and the validity of their claims, for the 
 debate can quickly become tiresome. But both of these texts have titles 
 that refer to this debate—Greenberg’s explicitly, SAQ’s more slyly. 
 
 The stated purpose of Greenberg’s book is to understand the “chang¬ 
 ing sexual typologies and images of persons who engage in acts we 
 classify as homosexual,” to produce “a phenomenology of homosex¬ 
 uality” that will explain not only the forms that behavior has taken 
 throughout the history of human culture but also the governing and 
 dissenting attitudes toward it (3, 4). He seems to seek, that is, not an 
 essential understanding of homosexuality but a culturally grounded 
 reading of how its construction has changed across history. This would 
 appear to be something in the vein of Foucault’s series on the History of 
 Sexuality, and Greenberg offers some interesting speculation on the 
 role market-capitalism and bureaucratic organization have played in 
 the articulation of homosexuality in Western cultures. But the effect 
 of Greenberg’s work is quite different from that of recent outstanding 
 texts on sexuality and culture largely in debt to poststructuralist theory 
 (see, for instance. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D. A. Miller, Butler, Jeffrey 
 Weeks). Greenberg’s history (499 pages, beginning with speculation on 
 
Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference 97 
 
 paleolithic rituals of semen ingestion and continuing through gay lib¬ 
 eration) reads at times like James Michener and too often like a rehear¬ 
 sal of facts: Greenberg does not have the habit of questioning the em¬ 
 pirical (in fact, he rather weakly dismisses Foucault for his lack of a 
 properly empirical method). Thus, his sociology is neither critical nor 
 oppositional but descriptive, in thrall to a dream of panoptic truth that 
 Foucault among others has disciplined us to suspect. In a late address 
 to the question of methodology, Greenberg writes that he had hoped 
 that in his work “individual idiosyncrasies [in cultural attitude toward 
 homosexuality] would cancel out, like the random-error terms in a 
 regression equation” (493), allowing truth to appear in an undifferenti¬ 
 ated and unequivocal form—as if language could offer us these “facts.” 
 What Greenberg offers is a reference text rather than a speculative 
 analysis of the history of homosexuality; although he argues that atti¬ 
 tudes toward homosexuality are constructed in culture, Greenberg’s 
 work falls outside the parameters of the constructionist debate since he 
 has no theory of how the subject is constructed except as a mirror of 
 such attitudes. This mimetic theory of social articulation in which the 
 construction of the subject is not necessarily questioned leads, finally, 
 to a logic of essentialism despite the rhetoric of historical change in the 
 text. 
 
 Displacing Homophobia, on the other hand, would appear to imply 
 a nonessentialist understanding of homosexuality since its implied 
 way of doing justice to the question of sexual minority is not through 
 celebration of the homosexual (whatever that might be) but through 
 displacement of the powers that operate on and against homosex¬ 
 uality. But in saying that, we can see how the title also signifies that it 
 wishes to “displace homosexuality” as the issue for gay studies. But 
 even this move away from a reified notion of homosexuality is perhaps 
 insufficient. In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray writes that 
 “in order for woman to reach the place where she takes pleasure as 
 woman, a long detour by way of the analysis of the various systems of 
 oppression brought to bear upon her is assuredly necessary” (31). 
 Irigaray has been berated for a logic of essentialism herself, of course, 
 but the point here is well taken and its parallel for gay studies impor¬ 
 tant: to displace homophobia only, and not to read the interdiscur- 
 sivity of homophobia with “the various systems of oppression brought 
 to bear upon” those who are defined through homophobia, does not 
 displace homosexuality at all—it remains all that one sees, the only 
 question one can ask about. Homosexuality is thus allowed to take its 
 
98 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 meaning without fuller reference to those other cultural systems that 
 frame all sexualities as meaningful sites of subjectivity and political 
 struggle. In John Clum’s reading of Tennessee Williams, for instance, 
 there is no interest in how the institutional practices of theatrical rep¬ 
 resentation and the ideological imperatives of the ’50s force Williams 
 into a realist mode where heterosexuality achieves an unbreakable, 
 mythic stature: by concentrating only on what he calls homophobic 
 discourse (which also mis-signifies, since he seems by the phrase to 
 mean the production of oppressive homosexual stereotypes), Clum 
 makes homophobia an instance of unfair representational practice that 
 refers only to homosexuals and homosexuality. Similarly, Sedgwick’s 
 essay on Willa Gather, which reads briefly the “invidious need of a pas¬ 
 sionate young lesbian to place, and at a distance, the lurid, contagious 
 scandal of male homosexuality’’ in Gather’s denunciation of Wilde 
 diming his imprisonment (64), does not ask other questions linked to a 
 fuller understanding of the cultmal history available to us in the sig- 
 nifier “Willa Gather”: how/why national romance, cultural difference, 
 history, and archaeology become crucial questions for her as a lesbian 
 writer; how her lesbianism might be read as intertextual with the over¬ 
 whelming antimodernism of her writing (how, that is, the archaic ele¬ 
 ment signals anxiety and sublimation in her text) compared to the 
 modernist experimentations of Proust or James (or Stein, whom Sedg¬ 
 wick does not consider). Sedgwick’s comparison of Gather’s crossing 
 into masculine, heterosexual fictions with Proust’s crossings of sex¬ 
 uality and gender in his fictions elides crucial differences between 
 these two writers, not the least of which centers in the sexual ideology 
 of the well-made aesthetic object. To begin to trace such contiguous 
 obligations (which Sedgwick has accomplished forcefully elsewhere) 
 would be truly to begin to displace sexuality and the phobias attendant 
 to it from some of their more obvious cultural labor, including their 
 more obvious academic labor as instances of critical desublimation. 
 
 Displacing Homophobia does assemble, however, work by some of 
 the more prominent scholars in the field: Sedgwick writing here on 
 James, Proust, and Gather; Stephen Orgel on Renaissance theatrical 
 practices; Joseph Boone on Lavyrrence Durrell; David Halperin on clas¬ 
 sical Athens; John Leo on television; Robert Gaserio on law and fiction; 
 Ed Gohen on the Wilde trial as/and scandal; Moon on Whitman. Much 
 of what is here is first-rate, but I would like in particular to address the 
 essays by Leo and Gaserio, for they exemplify gay and lesbian study of 
 American culture at its current best. Both frame their analyses of cul- 
 
Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference 99 
 
 tural texts by moving across boundaries such as the legal, the literary, 
 the social, and the sexual; in other words, they read the construction of 
 sexuality within discursive practices that are not limited to questions 
 about the sexual, and they seem to have moved beyond the literary 
 canon as their object of inquiry. Caserio’s essay seems quite important 
 for those working in the field of narrative theory, for it works within 
 ideological narrative poetics but against the tendency of that discourse 
 to suspect all textual production—even resistant reading—as an exer¬ 
 cise inevitably recuperated by hegemonic powers. Although he wishes 
 to maintain that resistance is possible within power structures, Ca- 
 serio is appropriately skeptical about how that resistance might be 
 shaped, and hy placing his discussion of two contemporary fictions 
 against the Supreme Court’s Bowers v. Hardwick decision, he argues 
 that the subject of discourse is not always caught within the networks 
 and operations of power it seeks to resist. In his reading, the demand 
 for privacy and the desire for parenting by gays and lesbians cannot 
 signify only within paradigms structured by and for liberal, bourgeois 
 culture precisely because these demands subvert the heterosexual 
 privilege encoded and guaranteed in those paradigms. Leo’s work on 
 broadcast television and the commodification of patriarchal masculin¬ 
 ity (including the heterologies of male homosexuality) reaches beyond 
 the question of justice to or discourse about gays and inquires into the 
 process through which postmodern “cultural artifacts . . . repeat effi¬ 
 ciently, quickly, and easily a point of view with ‘recognizable mean¬ 
 ing,’ a homogeneity culturally produced and sustained which de¬ 
 values difference” (48). Thus, his essay points toward a more inclusive 
 reading of televisual and other cultural discomses and toward a read¬ 
 ing of homosexuality in its structural relation to other sites of cultural 
 power. 
 
 Other essays here show this discursive range as well, and gay and 
 lesbian studies at its most profound will no doubt continue to con¬ 
 struct an object of inquiry beyond the narrower limits of literary crit¬ 
 icism, but this remains at issue for the reader of Displacing Homo¬ 
 phobia, for gay studies as it appears in this volume would seem an 
 overwhelmingly male, white project confined mostly to questions 
 about literary texts (as the above list of contributors demonstrates). 
 Only Sedgwick (approximately half of whose essay analyzes two texts 
 in which Gather’s protagonist is male) and Caserio (who gives Mari¬ 
 anne Hauser’s The Talking Room equal time with Terry Andrews’s The 
 Story of Harold) address the issues of lesbianism, and the introduction 
 
100 Thomas E, Yingling 
 
 by Ronald Butters does not even note or explain its more general ab¬ 
 sence from the text. The closest one comes to any consideration of 
 “race” is in Boone’s references to the orientalism evident in Flaubert 
 and Durrell, and in the introduction, where Butters complains that 
 Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Djcfionary identifies racist slurs as “usually 
 offensive” and homophobic ones as only “often disparaging.”^ We un¬ 
 derstand Butters’s point: “faggot” is always offensive. But in a text that 
 seldom calls attention to how racism and homophobia are intertextual, 
 such hairsplitting over the refusal to grant gays equal oppression with 
 “the ethnically slurred” (4) seems problematic, especially since the 
 essays here consistently demonstrate that Western culture has man¬ 
 aged (if sometimes—as with Wilde—at considerable expense) to make 
 a place for white male homosexual authors and their texts.... 
 
 Finally, a few words about aids, which, for better or worse, condi¬ 
 tions political discourses in the gay male community today (and, to a 
 certain extent, in the lesbian community as well) and so offers itself as 
 the nonliterary side of inquiry par excellence. There is one essay in 
 this volume on AIDS, and while it is brilliant, its outcome is disturbing. 
 Lee Edelman suggests that “there is no available discourse on AIDS that 
 is not itself diseased” (316), no way, that is, to produce antihomopho¬ 
 bic discourse in response to the injunction, “Silence = Death” (the ACT 
 UP logo). Insofar as all discourse refers only differentially to its ob¬ 
 ject, Edelman is right to suggest that there could never be a “pure” 
 discourse of antihomophobia, that all discourses including antiho¬ 
 mophobic ones are constructed through suppression of those self¬ 
 differences that survive discmsive sublimation in the trace. Edelman 
 argues that to prefer (homo- or heterosexually) is to privilege, and to 
 privilege is always to confuse the figurality of language with the liter- 
 ality of a referent. This not only would allow us to deconstruct the 
 category of hetero- or homosexual, but occurs even on the level of 
 cellular inscription: “The virus endangers precisely because it pro¬ 
 duces a code, or speaks a language, that can usurp or substitute for the 
 genetic discourse of certain cells in the human immune system. . . . 
 Subsequent to the metonymy, the contiguous transmission, of infec¬ 
 tion, the virus establishes itself as part of the essence or essential mate¬ 
 rial of the invaded cell through a version of metaphoric substitution” 
 (314). The logic of Edelman’s argument is airtight, disarming ail who 
 would prefer a more referential discomse on AIDS; it is immune, one 
 might say, to critique. No doubt hearing this complaint in advance. 
 
Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference 101 
 
 Edelman ends the essay with a disclaimer: “1 am sufficiently suscepti¬ 
 ble to the gravity of the literal to feel uneasy, as a gay man, about 
 producing a discourse in which the horrors experienced by my own 
 community, along with other communities in America and abroad, 
 become the material for intellectual arabesques that inscribe those hor¬ 
 rors within the neutralizing conventions of literary criticism” (316). 
 But AIDS is not reducible to a set of specular “horrors” (even when 
 asked to assume its most “literal” form), as Edelman must know, and I 
 feel uneasy about the fact that Edelman’s claim to dis-ease is intended 
 to cover the question of whether his writing has done justice to the 
 disease. One understands that AIDS activism often argues with a philo¬ 
 sophically naive urgency, that ACT UP volunteers are not always so¬ 
 phisticated literary theorists, but “discourse,” as Edelman’s confession 
 seems to deploy the term, does not imply that language is simply a 
 system of essentially neutral differential relations.® It signifies as well 
 institutional practices and inscriptions of discipline and knowledge 
 across the body down to the level of what Foucault (in a figure un¬ 
 canny for AIDS work) called the capillary. It is on that level, in fact, that 
 the injunction against silence, against passivity, is addressed: to inter¬ 
 rupt the production of discourses and the sites on which power is 
 articulated when those discourses and the apparatuses that frame and 
 legitimate their “knowledge” do not do justice to those affected by the 
 virus and its concomitant political urgencies.® 
 
 I do not mean here to cast aspersions on deconstruction or to ask that 
 those who practice it cede their authority to write on what appear to be 
 self-evidently “political” topics (although we ought to remember that 
 deconstruction reads language as simultaneously undecidable and im¬ 
 perative; the referential, that is, cannot simply be bracketed), but Edel¬ 
 man’s piece forces an encounter with the issue of what it means to do 
 critical and theoretical justice to any aspect of the social text—includ¬ 
 ing the broader possibilities of lesbian and gay studies as a site of 
 critique and foreclosure. In “Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Ausch¬ 
 witz,’ ” Lyotard suggests that “justice is . . . always possible, albeit as 
 prudence ... the prudence to make or speak the linkage ‘that suits’ in a 
 particular case” (26). What is “unsuitable” as justice in Auschwitz’s 
 infamous version of the law for Lyotard is the incommensurability 
 of the command “Die, 1 decree it”: no “we” can be constituted in 
 that command. “Auschwitz” becomes then “this impossible phrase 
 wherein the law is not known, wherein it cannot be just, wherein the 
 
102 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 command cannot obligate, wherein man loses what is proper to him, 
 namely, his we” (16). Similarly, AIDS signifies an incommensurability 
 that now figures the contemporary impossibilities of justice. As yet 
 some “we” remains (although who constitutes that “we,” how and 
 why, remain frustratingly narrow for those clearly under its sign)—but 
 in variations on a “final solution” (unfortunately never completely 
 bruied in public discussions of Hlv) one often still encounters its era¬ 
 sure.’’ Who is addressed, written about and on in AIDS discourse are 
 questions one must continue to address to do justice to this contempo¬ 
 rary figure of injustice. There is not one thing, or one correct thing, to 
 say about aids; on that Edelman is correct. Our discourse about it is 
 produced within the history into which the virus and its effects have 
 been introduced, and that history is multiple, contradictory, vertigi¬ 
 nous. But what we see in Edelman’s reading of the disease is how gay 
 studies can turn its attention to “new” objects of study without suffi¬ 
 ciently interrogating the methods it employs; to follow out the meta¬ 
 phors of HIV, it would make more political sense to let our discourse 
 infect and recode the message in master discoiuses and knowledges 
 (from fiction to sociology to deconstruction) rather than let this “new” 
 thing be treated through “old” practices. 
 
 Newsweek magazine’s March 1990 cover story on the future of gay 
 America (with a brief inset on the lesbian community: men are active 
 and diseased, women domestic) cleverly renamed homosexuality “the 
 love that won’t shut up,” intimating just how far the politics of sexual 
 minority has advanced since the Wilde trials. But if that advance has 
 been increasingly dramatic, much remains to be accomplished in plac¬ 
 ing sexuality (homo-, hetero, bi-, and other variations) before us as the 
 almost overwhelmingly meaningful cultural articulation it is. Is it ap¬ 
 paratus, discourse, subjectivity, practice, materiality, performance, or 
 collective fantasy? When is it oppressive, transgressive, revolutionary, 
 repressed, commodified, in excess of signification? What, precisely, is 
 “it”? or will “it” always defeat our dreams of critical precision? The 
 continuing move to displace homophobia carries in it not only an 
 advancement of knowledges in the academy but also an urgency of 
 lived relations that cannot be subordinated ethically to the production 
 of academic discourse. In the end, the relation between the body and 
 the page, like the relation between sexual preference and cultural ref¬ 
 erence, can be neither supervened nor collapsed. It is in the tensions 
 promised in that asymptotic relation that gay and lesbian academic 
 work can stake its most powerful claims to cultural relevance. 
 
Sexual Preference / Cultural Reference 103 
 
 Notes 
 
 1 Feminist theory generally has been better than gay-male theory at examin¬ 
 ing the frameworks through which the expected congruencies and desired 
 disruptions of sex-gender linkages are constructed. Butler’s recent work 
 extends this inquiry in extremely interesting and important directions. Re¬ 
 jecting the linear substantialist reading that moves from biological sex to 
 cultural gender to desire, Butler proposes instead that “the gendered body 
 is performative . . . [in] that it has no ontological status apart from the 
 various acts which constitute its reality, and if that reality is fabricated as an 
 interior essence, that very interiority is a function of a decidedly public and 
 social discourse, the public recognition of fantasy through the surface poli¬ 
 tics of the body” (“Gender” 336). Thus, for Butler, all identification (and 
 her work is principally concerned with identifications through gendered 
 narratives) becomes impersonation: “[G]endered subjectivity [is] a history 
 of identifications, parts of which can be brought into play in given con¬ 
 texts and which, precisely because they encode the contingencies of per¬ 
 sonal history, do not always point back to an internal coherence of any 
 kind” (331). See also her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of 
 Identity. 
 
 2 The recent visibility awarded Robert Mapplethorpe, and the ubiquitous 
 defense of his work by the gay press and by gay academics, offers a signal 
 instance of this: forced to respond to Mapplethorpe with legitimating ges¬ 
 tures (and that seems to me undeniably necessary), gay culture simulta¬ 
 neously finds itself unable to address the phallocentric appeal of Map¬ 
 plethorpe’s work, its occasional debt to racist discourse, and American 
 culture’s increasing tendency to address same-sex cultiual practices only 
 through economies of the masculine. 
 
 3 For a more comprehensive discussion of these issues within feminism, 
 around race, and for gay and lesbian studies see Fuss’s Essentially Speaking. 
 
 4 One could begin by listing names—Baldwin, Lorde, Delaney, the Smiths 
 (not only Barbara, but also Bessie), Thurman, Hughes, Rustin—or one might 
 address the ways in which the outcome of racial difference has written 
 itself into the AIDS pandemic (Other Gountries: Black Gay Men Writing, 
 a collective from New York Gity, currently has in performance an extraor¬ 
 dinary piece entitled Acquired Visions that reads both the positive and 
 negative intersections of race, homosexual desire, and AIDS in American 
 culture). One might begin the arduous task of reading the racism in gay 
 discourse (even where, as in some of Mapplethorpe’s work, the black body 
 is “celebrated”), or the equally arduous task of explaining the multiple 
 obligations that produce homophobia in the African American community. 
 Black gay culture should neither be read as simply a constituent part of 
 some larger gay culture nor be completely subsumed within the paradigms 
 
104 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 of African American cultural studies: although some progress seems to 
 have been made in addressing the question of lesbianism, it is not clear that 
 the political imperatives that shape the discourse of African American 
 studies can accommodate the question of male homosexuality at this time. 
 
 5 Taking AIDS “literally” is not always to be naive about representationality: 
 in psychoimmunological work, mental imaging is read as a discursive inter¬ 
 vention, and thought becomes a medical and political practice (sometimes 
 staying alive is a subversion of power); in the work of Jan Zita Grover, 
 Simon Watney, and others, analysis of the discursivity of AIDS is among the 
 best work in cultural studies one can find. The literal and the figural are not, 
 that is, always confused, even in “referential” AIDS discourse; but the ques¬ 
 tion of effect is not bracketed, either. 
 
 6 In Edelman’s essay, a logic of triangulation grounds every rhetorical turn, 
 moving from the ACT UP pink triangle to a set of x = y equations that run 
 through the piece (“Defense = Discourse”; “Discourse = Disease”; “De¬ 
 fense = Disease”). But there is another triangle announced in the subtitle: 
 “Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS,” and if superimposed on these others, 
 that triangle suggests that “literary theory” centers the entire essay; it be¬ 
 comes not one side of a triangle but the equals sign itself. Everything is 
 literary theory for Edelman, and literary theory is a language game. That 
 “intellectual arabesque” does not for me adequately accommodate the dis¬ 
 ease as a social text or those who participate—willingly and unwillingly— 
 in it. 
 
 7 In February 1990, the lesbian and gay community in Syracuse, New York, 
 was forced to mount a locally unprecedented and massive effort against 
 county legislation that would have destroyed confidentiality of Hiv testing. 
 The effort seems at this juncture to have been successful, but during it one 
 sponsor of the legislation was quoted as saying that people with AIDS, if put 
 in jails, should not worry—since they were dying anyway. Given G. Everett 
 Koop’s prediction within the same time period that AIDS cases in rural 
 communities in the ’90s will exceed those in urban communities, and given 
 the appalling lack of knowledge about aids in many of those communities, 
 such “intellectual arabesques” as Edelman offers seem the luxury of one 
 untouched by HIV issues in their more urgent and emergent sites. 
 
AIDS, Confession, and Theory: 
 The Pedagogical Dilemma 
 
 Perhaps more than anyone else, Cindy Patton has laid out for us the 
 issues of ADDS in the classroom. As she points out, working through 
 AIDS texts can mean a sometimes disturbing if not violent confronta¬ 
 tion with our students’ assumptions about pornography (any represen¬ 
 tation of the male body can become for our straight male students a 
 pornographic text: so reading Douglas Crimp’s AIDS Demo-Graphics 
 brought the response from one of my students that he didn’t want to 
 have to look at some guy’s dick on the page), about anal desire (an 
 absolutely foreign state of being), (homo)sexuality (again, an alien no¬ 
 tion for many), and the different communities that have been dif¬ 
 ferently effected by hiv/aids. But even more, as Patton suggests in 
 Inventing AIDS, “Teaching about hiv/aids . . . means teaching howto 
 understand, how to read and interpret both the facts that bombard us 
 and the context of our own lives” (110). Of course, all good teaching 
 does this, regardless of the topic, but a text like Simon Watney’s Polic¬ 
 ing Desire insists upon the politics of all media production and recep- 
 
106 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 tion, and so one can use it to provide an object lesson in practices of 
 reading that move beyond the question of how AIDS alone might be 
 catachrestically (mis)represented. 
 
 To use the phrasing of Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe in Hege¬ 
 mony and Socialist Strategy, we can begin to see how aids is artic¬ 
 ulated to other social questions, and to see how any subject in the so¬ 
 cial field is always the site of multiple political and epistemological 
 struggles. These kinds of interventions in ignorance about the disease 
 as it has become part of America’s (and the world’s) social text may 
 take place in the classroom—and may be especially effective in class¬ 
 rooms where it is not supposed to appear, such as a twentieth-century 
 literature survey—and in other institutional sites through teach-ins, 
 guerrilla theater, committee work, etcetera. As such, AIDS discourse 
 provides an exemplary moment for questioning how we parse “knowl¬ 
 edge” in the academy: for instance, reading various populeir media, 
 scientific discourses, and political arguments against one another 
 takes us across institutional boundaries and allows us to ask how 
 knowledge effects are indeed produced in our culture—and who has 
 input in such production. 
 
 But for me, by January 1992, this was no longer enough; I felt that the 
 time had come to come out to my graduate seminar about having AIDS. 
 The fall had presented occasional difficulties with canceled classes, 
 there were numerous rumors about my health circulating among de¬ 
 partment members, and I wanted in some way to try to make the text of 
 my AIDS, to actively participate in if not fully control the way it would 
 be constructed and re-constructed in a department of fairly aggressive 
 readers. And while to some the emphasis on my having AIDS may seem 
 to have placed me at the center of a circus of discursive babble about 
 myself and the disease, I in fact chose the confessional mode as a way 
 out of the specular: if I spoke about this, I would no longer be merely 
 the object of others’ fantasies—or at least their fantasies would have to 
 confront some of my own statements about having the disease. I hoped 
 that my confession might elicit not just the sympathetic response of 
 students and colleagues but some speculation about the material con¬ 
 ditions of pedagogical instruction as well: how we align bodies in 
 classrooms, the schedules according to which “learning” is expected 
 to happen in the university, how “knowledge” is assumed to be a dis¬ 
 embodied thing. 
 
 The dilemma I wish to pose is how one might do this without falling 
 into the experience/confession trap (in this case. Silence really does 
 
AIDS, Confession, and Theory 107 
 
 seem to equal Death, yet the politics of beginning a paper with a con¬ 
 fessional moment are also questionable: does this only play out the 
 drama of my own narcissistic investment in my illness emd death?). Of 
 course, coming out with aids is a pedagogical act whenever and wher¬ 
 ever it occurs, forcing those outside the communities most directly 
 affected by AIDS to think about the pandemic in a way they otherwise 
 would not. The goal here is to let students read my body so they might 
 see treatment effects, etcetera, and to include them in my disease pro¬ 
 cess so that AIDS isn’t just an abstract injustice or horror, something 
 that relegates it once again to the specular. But what does it mean to 
 make the professor’s body the text of class: has it always already been 
 that? Is it, to put it bluntly, inappropriate? 
 
 What seems potentially most radical about this is not just concretiz¬ 
 ing students’ sense that they are at risk—at least for knowing someone 
 with AIDS, but that the subject of knowledge should assume a body at 
 all, which may mean it is no longer eligible to be imagined as a subject- 
 that-knows. In fact, the body may be the thing that subjectivity cannot 
 (ac)count—especially the body in illness, since any identity is con¬ 
 firmed through structoes that integrate the body into an ideal whole¬ 
 ness. AIDS is not, of course, synonymous with a disintegrating body, 
 but that is the threat. Finally, my take on aids and pedagogy is that it 
 moves us beyond the extremely important and useful issues of repre¬ 
 sentation and into an encounter with the embodiment of knowledge 
 and so with embodiment itself, something we have never been able to 
 broach in American education. What I want to develop in this paper is 
 a further sense of how aids infects the discourse of pedagogical rela¬ 
 tions, and especially in the question of how the body becomes a site of 
 knowledge and not just an occasion for it, and why that matters. 
 
 Note 
 
 This paper abstract was accepted by David Roman for a panel on “AIDS: Politics 
 and Pedagogies in the University” for the 1992 MLA. 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 
 
 Toward the end of The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford poses 
 questions he considers central to the cmrent realignment of knowledge 
 in the postmodern academy: “on what basis may human groups accu¬ 
 rately (and we must also add morally) be distinguished?” and, quoting 
 from Edward Said, “How does one represent other cultures? Is the 
 notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilization) a useful 
 one?” (273, 274). These questions are crucial not only to how we think 
 about those groups Clifford explicitly considers (those that Western 
 ethnography has traditionally marked as “distinct” and “Other”), but 
 also to how we think about largely metropolitan lesbians and gays as 
 they continue to work toward a more effective visibility and disciplin- 
 arity within the academy and without it. The academic analysis of 
 lesbians and gay men, like the population such study claims to address 
 and represent, has begun to insist upon itself as a distinct facet of hu¬ 
 man culture, able to resist the marginalization that has tended to mark 
 it only as the scandalous or pathological Other. It is no accident that les¬ 
 bian and gay studies has become important in postmodern discourses 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 109 
 
 by analogy to other “species” of difference like race, class, and gender; 
 and while the exact dialectical relations among these aspects of culture 
 are seldom explored as carefully as they might be, we seem currently in 
 agreement that the fate of heterosexuality has been and remains indis¬ 
 solubly linked to the fate of patriarchy, capital, and the master race. But 
 what is the value of claiming a specificity for lesbian and gay culture 
 and identity, and can we really read that claim as self-fashioned? 
 
 We have been witness in the late 1980s to what we might call the 
 canonical moment in lesbian and gay studies: conferences, papers, 
 books, even our own incipient star system; all of this attests to our 
 successful intrusion into academic business as usual, and we should 
 be especially pleased with this given the ignorant virulence that char¬ 
 acterizes discourses about homosexuality in our more public debates 
 as a nation. But we must also remember that canonical moments are 
 not the fruition of some natural cultural process; they do not inno¬ 
 cently mirror some object that precedes the attention of their critical 
 gaze, and we must say this despite the fact that in this case our dis¬ 
 course seems spurred by a “real” population of “real” gays and les¬ 
 bians beginning to be visible in American society. But if we think of 
 canonicity not just as the generation of a list of validated texts but 
 as the politically inflected codification of fantasies about collective 
 origin or identity, then we can see that this canonical moment, this 
 fantasy (like all others) has a dual function. It allows something to be 
 entertained that otherwise would remain illicit (reading Henry James 
 and Robert Mapplethorpe together, for instance), but it also occurs 
 only at the cost of some repression. Apposite here is F. O. Matthies- 
 sen’s repression of homoeroticism in what many take to be the canoni¬ 
 cal moment of American studies. As Jonathan Arac has pointed out, in 
 writing American Renaissance Matthiessen disciplined his response 
 to Whitman so as to erase the very thing he signified in the corres¬ 
 pondence between Matthiessen and his lover: the legitimation of ho¬ 
 mosexual love. (Matthiessen, like Hart Crane and other gay men of the 
 American 1920s, lived a contradiction between homosexuality and 
 male friendship that Whitman’s text seems to have promised to solve 
 for them.) Repression functioned in this case to make homosexuality 
 invisible, but the episode should remind us that disciplinarity re¬ 
 quires repression and that our own shaping of the discipline of gay and 
 lesbian studies might no doubt find the structure of its insights coaxial 
 with certain blindnesses. 
 
 It may seem strange to think about homosexuality in terms of what it 
 
110 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 represses: same-sex desire has functioned almost as synecdoche for 
 the repressed in our culture (thus, people now “come out” about any¬ 
 thing once held secret), and we sometimes imagine that freeing it, 
 nothing remains unsaid. But that is not necessarily the case. As Michel 
 Foucault suggests in The History of Sexuality, the historical irony of 
 our discourse about sexuality may well be that we imagined our politi¬ 
 cal liberation to be somehow dependent upon what we could say about 
 sexual desire as the ground of our subjectivity. If we take Foucault’s 
 notion of power and knowledge seriously, we have to be fairly skepti¬ 
 cal about the level of subversiveness we want to read into the recent 
 appearance of gays and lesbians as self-defined people in Western 
 culture (and we might add, I think, in democratic cultme). In light 
 of such a skepticism, how might we more critically read the disciplin¬ 
 ary or canonical moment of lesbian and gay studies? If many of those 
 who identify as lesbian or gay do so within discourses and practices 
 marked by an access to power and hence are “visible” or acceptable 
 only within politically centrist terms, what could possibly constitute 
 the political transgressivity of studying same-sex desire in our culture? 
 On the other hand, isn’t the demand that we signify always as politi¬ 
 cally earnest exactly what Foucault has in mind to reject when he calls 
 us the “other Victorians,” those who are determined to make sexuality 
 and pleasure answer to ethics? 
 
 To return to repression: is there anything displaced or forgotten 
 in our move from margin to center? If we think not, we have in¬ 
 voked a strangely monolithic structure of collective homosexual self- 
 awareness uncontaminated by any trace of difference from itself, and 
 that seems theoretically untenable. If we think so, we need to ask how 
 our construction of a field to be known as gay studies might be changed 
 by our knowledge that material has been lost or repressed in the pro¬ 
 cess of coming to recognize ourselves as a distinct and specific facet of 
 contemporary cultin-e. In Foucault’s words. 
 
 Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which 
 power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which 
 knowledge tries gradually to uncover [but] as the name that can be 
 given to a historical construct ... in which the stimulation of 
 bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to dis¬ 
 course, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of 
 controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance 
 with a few major strategies of knowledge and power. (105-6) 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 111 
 
 That is, our discourse and our being are not organic appearances but 
 arise at the nexus of other forms of knowledge, power, and pleasure, 
 and our analysis of homosexuality or homophobia needs always to 
 inquire into this structrual density. 
 
 Perhaps the most obvious place to begin this analysis is with the 
 question of gender and the screen of equality implied in the term “les¬ 
 bian and gay”; as my own prose demonstrates, lesbian and gay studies 
 slips all too easily and all too often into simply “gay studies,” yet never 
 into “lesbian studies.” This asymmetry should concern us, for among 
 other things it suggests that “our” canonical moment is itself gendered 
 and that perhaps what we have witnessed is the canonical moment of 
 gay studies but not the canonical moment of lesbian studies—that les¬ 
 bian studies may, in fact, be more powerfully configured under the 
 rubric of feminism than under any accommodations gay men will ever 
 collectively and institutionally be able to make to it. We might also 
 interrogate the moment of our appearance for its attention to the social 
 text of race; Marlon Riggs, the creator of Tongues Untied (1989) and 
 other videos about African American gay men, offered a plenary ad¬ 
 dress at this year’s gay, bisexual, and lesbian conference at Harvard, 
 and there has been an increased interest recently in making visible the 
 lives and texts of gay men of color, as there has historically been an 
 interest in race in the discourse marked lesbian. 
 
 But when much of the political energy of the summer of 1989 was 
 taken up with an absolutely necessary defense of Robert Mapple¬ 
 thorpe’s work, the issue of Mapplethorpe’s racial politics was forced 
 into the background or brought us apologies for his photographs of 
 black men on the grounds that he was making visible a certain kind of 
 “beauty” taboo in American culture. In the need for solidarity in that 
 encounter with Jesse Helms and the right, race within the gay commu¬ 
 nity became a difference legible in terms that did not offer any sus¬ 
 tained attention to current and historical fetishizations of black men 
 according to their “difference.” In that, an inassimilable debate has 
 escaped the mainstream in relation to Mapplethorpe’s work, one cen¬ 
 tered on the charge of its appropriation of the black man as an erotic 
 fantasy for white consumers (Kobena Mercer and I have addressed this 
 question). In the end, however, we need to decide about these images 
 less whether they are or are not racist in some final or definitive way 
 than how and why they present to us a discursive formation and repre¬ 
 sentation of race that is difficult to acknowledge under the regime of 
 desire that produced and reproduces them. In other words, we all 
 
112 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 know that there is racism within gay formations—the question is not 
 “is it there?” but “why don’t we seem able to address and change it?” 
 
 To have framed both of these issues in this way is already to mark 
 them as issues for democratic inclusivity, as terms within a discourse 
 where representation becomes the “answer” to political oppression, 
 thinking that if we take everyone into account in our own discourse, or 
 give everyone voice, we will have evaded any oppressive practice. This 
 is the logic behind cultural studies paradigms of race/class/gender/ 
 sexuality/age/ability/etcetera. We can generate that list and live in 
 that logic, but this has rapidly become the most pointless of academic 
 exercises—pointless not because the systems of social intelligibility 
 marked by these terms have ceased to be crucial in the articulation of 
 political power and control, but because the regime of representation 
 into which they most often lead us has its base in a logic of liberal 
 pluralism that we have by now sufficient history and reason to mis¬ 
 trust. Identity politics has lately gotten a deservedly bad rap all around. 
 Although she argues at times for its strategic effectiveness, Diana Fuss 
 has generally dismissed identity politics for its essentialist assump¬ 
 tions in Essentially Speaking; and Judith Butler has discussed in Gen¬ 
 der Trouble how feminism can no longer retain the category of a unified 
 (and ultimately masculine) subject as the base of its intervention. 
 
 The same issues have to arise for gay and lesbian studies. There is no 
 such thing as “the homosexual and his/her truth,” and if we imagine 
 that as the project of lesbian and gay studies, we have smrendered to a 
 lie at the outset. What we perhaps need to think about here is fetish¬ 
 ism, as that has been defined in psychoanalysis not as the overval¬ 
 uation of some part-object but as the denial of lack. All identity is 
 fetishistic in that it is structured on the denial of self-difference and 
 absence; identity, that is, cannot occur except through fundamental 
 (and generative) misrecognitions. In the case of gay identity, the con¬ 
 structed fiction and denial of lack at the heart of subjectivity occurs 
 through recognition of the tropes and practices of sexuality, offering 
 sex as a center for otherwise decentered being. This is perhaps doubly 
 fetishistic since we understand desire itself to be decentering, to be 
 driven by lack. Thus, the trajectory of gay identity politics may read as 
 follows: first, we stabilize desire (itself a move of considerable cultural 
 violence) and then we attach the self to that desire almost as effect to 
 cause, creating a second-order violence of identification. 
 
 Identity politics is the reigning philosophy of the popular gay press, 
 however, and that should not surprise us since that press exists only as 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 113 
 
 it can identify and exploit a demographic market. In the debate in that 
 press about Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), 
 we can begin to see some of the implications of this as a practice for 
 generating critique. In that debate, I was struck by the fact that the 
 “pro-gay” position called for an end to homophobic stereotypes and 
 for more positive representations of homosexuality, and that this was 
 done in a way that imagined that we know and agree on what those 
 “positive” images might be. In other words, a charge about the mis- 
 recognition of homosexuality is leveled against Demme by people who 
 claim not to misrecognize but to “know” it and to be therefore fully able 
 to speak as and for homosexuals. There are a number of problems here, 
 not the least of which is that we have no idea what kind of homosex¬ 
 uals will be considered representative in such discourse. Furthermore, 
 if Bill, the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, who is explicitly 
 identified as someone without a conventional sexual identity, as a man 
 who only imagines himself transsexual because he would otherwise 
 have no identity whatsoever (he is, if you will, Gilles Deleuze and Felix 
 Guattari’s deterritorialized or schizo being)—if he is considered an 
 image dangerous to homosexuals (the claim is that this film will pro¬ 
 mote gay bashing), then why is Divine—in all her cross-dressing glory, 
 eating dog shit at the end of Pink Flamingoes (dir. John Waters, 1972)— 
 considered an outrageous, humorous, and ultimately liberatory figure? 
 
 My point is not that we ought to find Bill a liberatory figure as well, 
 but that there is a contradiction in demanding “positive” images from 
 mainstream culture while simultaneously embracing the strange and 
 unusual in our own cultural space. In other words, if we need to get rid 
 of Demme’s film on political grounds, do we also need to get rid of 
 Divine, since homophobes could conceivably find her image confir¬ 
 matory of themselves in their misrecognition of her? The very notion 
 that someone could say—in the discourse of identity politics—what 
 homosexuals do or do not, should or should not look, sound, and be 
 like is a potentially dangerous trap we may not be able to escape from 
 once we decide to enter it. Moreover, as theorists of desire from Sig¬ 
 mund Freud and Georges Bataille to Leo Bersani have noted, sexuality 
 seems always destined to be determined as much by misrecognition as 
 by anything we might term an accurate cognition and to remain in ex¬ 
 cess of any theoretical or political moves to enlist it in the service of 
 cultural mobility. Sexuality is imbricated with violence and death in 
 virtually all its manifestations, and to attempt to find or articulate a 
 clean, acceptable desire—especially a homosexuality imagined in this 
 
114 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 way—should be nearly untiiinkable. If we are to build a critique of cul¬ 
 ture and an active alternative community based in the rejection of 
 those terms and practices that have heretofore constituted the dis¬ 
 ciplinary or canonical formation of desire along unswervingly het¬ 
 erosexual lines, we must strenuously reject the wisdom of institu¬ 
 tionalizing a counterdiscipline or alternative list of acceptable and 
 unacceptable sexualities. 
 
 This would seem to be the impetus behind the new politically fash¬ 
 ionable use of the term “queer” to designate things nonheterosexual— 
 as in Queer Nation or what a cover of The Advocate, referring to Poison 
 and Paris Is Burning, coined as “cinema queerite.” This word works so 
 well because it appropriates a former badge of shame and because it 
 suggests that it is not our business or duty to appear acceptable, that 
 there is something inassimilable in nonheterosexuality and only its 
 queerness—its difference—can define it. A similarly differential defi¬ 
 nition of identity is powerfully articulated in Judith Butler’s work, par¬ 
 ticularly in Gender Trouble. Although her final paean to performance 
 has left some unsatisfied with her work’s political implications, it is 
 clear that there is something to ponder in the notion that identity (and 
 sex/gender identity in particular) is performative rather than substan¬ 
 tive, especially if we remember that a strong sense of discipline would 
 inform any theory of performance, making instantiations or perfor¬ 
 mances of sexuality (queer or straight) more than self-expression. 
 
 My point here is not to defend The Silence of the Lambs. Its homo¬ 
 phobia is apparent if hy that we mean that it constructs the category of 
 homosexuality within the Symbolic as one marked by pathological 
 lack. In the terms offered us by feminist film theory, we have no femi¬ 
 nine object at the center of this spectacle, since Jodie Foster’s on-screen 
 presence secures identification rather than specularity, and since the 
 moments of castration are Bill’s—when he puts a ring through his tit; 
 when he dances with his cock pulled back between his legs. We have 
 here a spectacle that equates the homosexual with a desire to be a 
 woman and “woman” with castration, and all of that adds up to a 
 pretty oppressive vision of male homosexuality. But how could we ex¬ 
 pect a narrative about coming of age as an FBI agent to offer anything 
 else? To note this film’s homophobia is only to say that it was produced 
 in America. The point in all parables of the law (and this film is noth¬ 
 ing if not parabolic of the law of the father) is that no one is hee of the 
 implications of any one else’s desire or behavior except as the mecha¬ 
 nisms of identification with the law allow one to fantasize and occupy 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 115 
 
 a social niche securely on this side of transgression. The truly radi¬ 
 cal response to Demme’s film, then, would not be to proclaim its un¬ 
 fairness and misrecognition of homosexual desire (only offered to us 
 through highly coded moments anyway), but rather to suggest that all 
 sexuality is caught within intricate networks of desire and violence, 
 that desire—if never consciously a desire to dismember—always nev¬ 
 ertheless dismembers. 
 
 Juridically we are subjects marked by our relation to a state that 
 defines us through the criminalization of our sexual behavior—that is 
 one way in which the gay and lesbian struggle is historically different 
 from the struggle of other “minorities.” Until those definitions are no 
 longer in force, we cannot forgo the difficult work of identity politics, 
 and that has to include our critique of images from Hollywood and 
 other unenlightened sources. But identity politics as a discourse about 
 juridical subjects keeps us in a definition of power and the political 
 that is monarchical in its origin, keeping us still within what Foucault 
 identifies as “the repressive hypothesis,” the notion that power holds 
 in check certain beings—or certain cultural forces like sexuality. In The 
 History of Sexuality, Foucault writes that “we must at the same time 
 conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king” (91). The 
 twofold emphasis here is quite important: just as we must think of 
 sexuality without some oppressive law of the father, we must also 
 think it without our own counterlaw. There simply is not some proper, 
 true, pure, or real sexuality waiting to appear once we remove the 
 obstacles of social oppression. Perhaps more crucial to us is Foucault’s 
 suggestion that we cannot think power only through “the system of 
 Law-and-Sovereign which has captivated political thought for such a 
 long time” (97). Rather, he writes, 
 
 we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the 
 Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy 
 
 that is immanent in force relationships_In short, it is a question 
 
 of orienting ourselves to a conception of power which replaces the 
 privilege of law with the viewpoint of the objective, the privilege 
 of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege 
 of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of 
 force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, 
 effects of domination are produced. (97,102) 
 
 We could think of Foucault’s paradigm for the political as postmod¬ 
 ern: replacing such stable or foundational discursive politics as Marx- 
 
116 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 ism and liberalism (neither of which has been able to formulate a 
 forceful theory of sexuality capable of challenging the privilege of pa¬ 
 triarchal masculinity, since the sovereign and his law remain the final 
 referent of all discourse and all bodies in both of these systems] with a 
 reading of power as generalized and diffuse, as immanent in all social 
 relations and therefore variable and reversible. What interests me here 
 is not just the antifoundationalism that drives Foucault’s critique of 
 traditional notions of political power but also that his theory deploys 
 itself in terms wholly in accord with contemporary discourses of de¬ 
 sire. Power becomes multiple, dispersed, labile, moving across bodies 
 and points of orientation or recognition, marking a struggle between 
 law and aim; this could be Jacques Lacan on desire, but it is Foucault: 
 “a multiple and mobile field of... relations, wherein far-reaching, but 
 never completely stable, effects . . . are produced” (102). Foucault 
 challenges us to move out of a stable, dyadic, and ultimately Imaginary 
 understanding of power (including Louis Althusser’s reading of ideol¬ 
 ogy and the mirror stage), one that assures subjectivity through the 
 overdetermined presence of a sovereign, transcendent Subject, and 
 into a Symbolic universe of discomse where power flows through rela¬ 
 tions and infuses discourse, knowledge, and subjectivity along chan¬ 
 nels that are under constant negotiation and renegotiation. Part of 
 what I would like to do here is move heyond an Althusserian notion of 
 the subject and her relation to culture, for as Pierre Bourdieu reminds 
 us, social reality is not simply the reproduction of structures housed in 
 the subject: 
 
 Action is not the mere carrying out of a rule, or obedience to a rule. 
 Social agents, in archaic societies as well as in ours, are not auto¬ 
 mata regulated like clocks, in accordance with laws they do not 
 understand. In the most complex games, matrimonial exchange 
 for instance, or ritual practices, they put into action the incorpo¬ 
 rated principles of a generative habitus This ‘feel for the game’, 
 
 as we call it, is what enables an infinite number of ‘moves’ to be 
 made, adapted to the infinite number of possible situations which 
 no rule, however complex, can foresee. (9) 
 
 Thus, identity politics fetishizes not only identity, but also politics 
 to the extent that it imagines social agency as a compulsion within the 
 subject to implicitly obey and act out the power structures that define 
 it and to the extent that it essentializes power as the content rather 
 than the generative effect of social relations. What Foucault offers. 
 
Fetishism, Identity, Politics 117 
 
 then, is not just the notion that power is erotic or that sex is ideological 
 (Freud had done that much), but a way of reading power that is fully 
 congruent with our theory of the erotic. His work forces us to consider 
 whether or not homosexual subjectivity—once understood as a self- 
 evidently erotic category—bas become part of a taxonomy whose self¬ 
 evidence is political rather than erotic; and, if any identity politics is 
 bound by the conventions of law rather than desire, then we need to 
 ask whether we have produced in gay and lesbian identity politics a 
 model for thinking about desire that cannot allow desire to operate 
 within it, that cannot (finally) allow for desire. We have to take se¬ 
 riously the possibility that perhaps it has been transgression against 
 sanctioned legal and social identity that has constituted the erotic and 
 seductive appeal of homosexual behavior for many, and that in map¬ 
 ping out new criteria for identification as homosexual, one erases the 
 erotic edge that supposedly is the content of this new subjectivity. In 
 other words, we must face the possibility that the repressed of our 
 canonical moment is erotic pleasure itself (and this is reported as well 
 by older friends who have attended recent Gay Pride activities in New 
 York City only to find that the erotic carnival they participated in in the 
 1970s—and 1 mean carnival in the European, Bakhtinian sense—has 
 become a political carnival without the explosive edge of erotic aban¬ 
 don it once allowed). 
 
 The final issue I would like to leave you with is the question of 
 agency and how we will think it in the days ahead. Not just through the 
 defunct categories of essential or constructed subjects, not just as auto¬ 
 mata under a discursive grid more or less hostile to same-sex adven¬ 
 ture, but a far more difficult task: to explain our negotiation of the 
 cultural space as a site always still unforeclosed by law; to read in our 
 cognition of ourselves not just the recognition and misrecognition of 
 ourselves and others, but to continue to ask ourselves what—and not 
 just who—queer studies is for. All our profit lies in that asking. 
 
Speaking with the Dead 
 
 David Roman 
 
 What AIDS shows us is the limits of tolerance, that it’s not enough to be toler¬ 
 ated, because when the shit hits the fan you find out how much tolerance is 
 worth. Nothing.—Tony Kushner, Angels in America 
 
 I feel that my speaking is also disrespectful because it flies in the face of the 
 absoluteness of Tom’s death and all the other deaths, as if in the face of that my 
 words could give a sense of closure, of significance, of comfort. In fact, another 
 AIDS death signifies nothing and there isn’t or shouldn’t be any comfort. So I’ve 
 made a vow that this is the last memorial at which I will speak.—Robert Rafsky, 
 at fellow AIDS activist Tom Cunningham’s memorial 
 
 I want to begin by commenting briefly on the epigraphs I have selected 
 to begin my response to Thomas Yingling’s “Fetishism, Identity, Poli¬ 
 tics.” Both epigraphs are public performances—one in the theater, the 
 other at an AIDS memorial service—that call attention to the discursive 
 challenges surrounding our relationship to the social phenomenon we 
 call AIDS. In the first, from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis (a 
 Jewish gay male who reads Walter Benjamin in bed) speaks to Belize (a 
 
Speaking with the Dead 119 
 
 black gay man who is a registered nurse and former drag queen). Louis 
 is angry; his lover, Prior, has recently been diagnosed with AIDS. Louis 
 cannot handle Prior’s illnesses, but rather than dealing with that di¬ 
 rectly, he chooses to hold Belize captive in a long exegesis on the 
 problems facing America; his complaint begins with this discussion of 
 the limits of tolerance and his quote on AIDS. As the play continues, it 
 becomes clear that Louis, while insightful, is a talkaholic; Belize tells 
 him so. Louis’s main response to AIDS is excessive speech. 
 
 The second quote, from Tom Cunningham’s memorial service, is 
 spoken by the nationally recognized AIDS activist Robert Rafsky, who 
 died of complications due to AIDS a few weeks later. Rafsky, too, in¬ 
 vests in speech. In the memorial to Rafsky published in the Village 
 Voice, he is cited as having been one of ACT UP/New York’s “most 
 eloquent, and fearless voices” (“Age of AIDS”). Unlike Louis, Rafsky 
 has demonstrated how speech and silence must continually be negoti¬ 
 ated in response to AIDS.^ As his final tribute to Tom Cunningham, 
 Rafsky offers him, and all the others lost to AIDS, his silence. His speak¬ 
 ing with the dead is a public performance—indeed, an articulation—of 
 his silence. 
 
 I think my responses to aids are more often than not caught some¬ 
 where between paralysis and agency, between Louis and Rafsky. Be¬ 
 ginning about 1980,1 started spending time in the theater, and about 
 1985 I began volunteering for various community AIDS organizations. 
 Both experiences inform how I think and speak, and from both—I don’t 
 always separate them so distinctly—I have learned about the func¬ 
 tion of performativity—that is, of enacting and signifying tactical posi¬ 
 tions—and about my need for the communal, what Stephen Greenblatt 
 calls, a “felt community” (5). In other words, I too want to speak with 
 the dead. I also want to offer some type of tribute to Thomas Yingling. 
 But I’m not sure how to do either without having my response be, in 
 Rafsky’s words and context, “disrespectful.” Still, this essay is an at¬ 
 tempt to respond to Yingling’s ideas, writings, and contributions to 
 lesbian and gay studies, AIDS studies, and American studies. Since it 
 exists in publication, it is also a type of public performance, a perfor¬ 
 mative ritual offered with respect and in recognition of the power of 
 some of those voices now silenced by AIDS but who, despite AIDS, 
 continue to speak to me. 
 
 For well over two decades, scholars in all fields—and many with no 
 institutional affiliation (read employment)—have set the groundwork 
 
120 Davi d Roman 
 
 and often the theoretical foundations for the current outpouring of 
 research in lesbian and gay studies. The historian John D’Emilio, 
 among others, has written extensively on these early years of lesbian 
 and gay studies, documenting the various contributions of commu¬ 
 nity-based scholars and their efforts to break down what he sees as the 
 “class-based distinction between intellectual activity and the rest of 
 life” (167).2 D’Emilio cites a number of interventions—in academic 
 journals, campus life, research institutions, and professional organiza¬ 
 tions—that have catalyzed the community-based movement of lesbian 
 and gay studies since the 1970s. D’Emilio’s history of lesbian and gay 
 studies in the United States forcefully demonstrates that the origins 
 of lesbian and gay studies are unequivocally linked with the post- 
 Stonewall lesbian and gay liberation movement. 
 
 Like D’Emilio, Tingling, in “Fetishism, Identity, Politics,” writes 
 about this parallel growth of the lesbian and gay movement in and 
 out of American universities and raises serious concerns about the 
 (re)emergence of lesbian and gay studies in the late 1980s. Specifically, 
 Tingling asks us to consider how we might “more critically read the 
 disciplinary or canonical moment of lesbian and gay studies.” I sug¬ 
 gest we begin to respond to this question by stepping back and spec¬ 
 ulating on the existence of a “canonical moment” in the first place. I 
 think if we are to understand the cmrent state of gay and lesbian stud¬ 
 ies, it makes sense to consider the current localized instances of “can- 
 onicity” and their relation to the continuing fight for lesbian and gay 
 rights. We need, in short, to account for the locations of lesbian and gay 
 studies: In what departments, institutions, and communities are les¬ 
 bian and gay studies emerging? If its main harbor is in departments of 
 English or the humanities, what are the limits of this canonical move- 
 ment?3 Who and what speaks for lesbian and gay studies in this its 
 most recent manifestation? In what ways do lesbian and gay studies 
 correspond to the national movement for lesbian and gay rights?"* Un¬ 
 doubtedly, in the 1990s there is more interest in, and tolerance of, the 
 growing industry around lesbian and gay scholarship than twenty 
 years ago, but, as various lesbian and gay scholars and theorists have 
 recently argued, the moment seems anything but canonical. 
 
 Lesbians, as usual, run the risk—if not the reality—of being left out of 
 the current wave of interest. Tingling points to this quite clearly when 
 he states that “lesbian and gay studies slips all too easily and all too 
 often into simply ‘gay studies,’ yet never into ‘lesbian studies’ ” (111; 
 this volume).® Julie Abraham goes one step further when she claims 
 
Speaking with the Dead 121 
 
 that this slippage is a nearly irreparable dilemma intrinsic to the disci¬ 
 pline as it was formulated in the 1980s: “A gay/lesbian studies identi¬ 
 fied with the subject of sexuality will inevitably favor gay subjects, 
 even when the emphasis is on the perverse and the queer, because the 
 culture’s discussion of sexual dissidence has been so consistently a 
 discussion of the homosexual male” (21). She joins Elizabeth Grosz 
 who, in “Bodies and Pleasures in Queer Theory,” also questions why 
 lesbianism has been “so decidedly ignored” (226). 
 
 If we are left to wonder, as Yingling insists we must, what is being 
 repressed in the canonical moment of lesbian and gay studies, it may 
 well be lesbians or, as Sue-Ellen Case explains, certain kinds of les¬ 
 bians. Case argues that whatever new lesbian visibility there is in the 
 1990s is premised on the “lesbian with phallus-as-fetish,” the lesbian 
 with a dildo who is “born out of the rib of gay male subcultural images” 
 (39). This lesbian, according to Case, emerges out of the cultural logic 
 of phallic (re)production. Such a normalizing logic allows for the loca¬ 
 tion of the newfound lesbian visibility in a limited representational 
 economy that can only reabsorb her within the specific agendas of its 
 ideological authority. Case explains the illusion of power created by 
 this process: “While the dyke believes she is finally appearing, she 
 is actually disappearing into the market” (45). Thus, she concludes, 
 “when the dyke enters the class(room), she is on the stage of dominant 
 practices” (45), a stage with little room for, or tolerance of, the order of 
 lesbian politics. 
 
 In an essay that shares some of these concerns but focuses primarily 
 on the need to address issues of race and ethnicity in lesbian and gay 
 studies, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano explains how lesbians of color—both 
 in and out of the classroom—stand outside of this representational and 
 critical commodification process, unimagined at worst or visualized 
 only within the normative racialized discourses of white fetishistic 
 erotics at best. Like Abraham and Case, Yarbro-Bejarano raises serious 
 and as yet unanswered concerns regarding the idea of a “canonical 
 moment” in lesbian and gay studies. Yarbro-Bejarano calls for a les¬ 
 bian and gay studies that includes more than “just white, middle- 
 class lesbians and gays” (126). By offering a means for imagining such 
 a field (see also Roman), she challenges us to recognize and “empha¬ 
 size the contribution of lesbians of color to this theoretical project of 
 categorical expansion, in part because some white feminists have ap¬ 
 propriated that contribution, and also because lesbians of color have 
 provided a significant piece of the theoretical groundwork that could 
 
122 David Roman 
 
 and should serve as the foundation of lesbian and gay studies” (130). 
 Yarhro-Bejarano, for example, cites the ^vork of a number of Chicana 
 lesbians—Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldiia, Chela Sandoval—who 
 provide a new paradigm for understanding marginality and oppres¬ 
 sion by theorizing their “multiple and shifting identities and identifi¬ 
 cations, consciousness, and political agency” (133). Yarbro-Bejarano’s 
 project begins to enact the more critical readings of lesbian and gay 
 studies suggested in Yingling’s essay, demonstrating, along with Abra¬ 
 ham, Case, and Grosz, the type of work lesbian and gay scholars have 
 yet to do. 
 
 More to the point, these diverse lesbian theorists call into question 
 the by now commonplace assumption that lesbian and gay studies has 
 found its niche in academic institutions. The fact that there is al¬ 
 ready in place a location from which to challenge the critical authority 
 emerging within (as) lesbian and gay studies in no way undermines the 
 significance of their concerns. To speak about lesbian and gay studies, 
 especially within academic forums such as this one, more often than 
 not presupposes an unproblematic positionality for the field. The act 
 of speaking, seemingly validated with publication, suggests the illu¬ 
 sion of an arrival at once welcome and stable—despite the subjectivity 
 and concerns of the speaker—simply on the basis that something has 
 been said, even if this something is actually a critique of the very 
 process that allows its articulation in the first place. Therefore, lesbian 
 voices such as these—the malcontents at the annual cashbar—may be 
 expected, perhaps even tolerated, but not without some price for both 
 speaker and listener. “Can we talk?” asks Marlon Riggs, “but of course 
 we can, queer diva darling, if you abide by the rules of dominant dis- 
 comse, which means in short, you must ultimately sing somebody 
 else’s tune to be heard” (101). The apprehensions voiced by white 
 lesbian theorists and lesbian and gay theorists of color—each with 
 distinct relationships to the university—suggest both the limits of the 
 “canonical” and the complexity of effects associated with the practice 
 of lesbian and gay studies. 
 
 This is especially true if we consider the position of lesbian and gay 
 studies for students. I imagine that Riggs’s comments hold particular 
 resonance for queer graduate students of all genders and colors who 
 must practice what he calls “verbal drag schtick,” the haunting self- 
 conscious activity of second guessing and performing critical authori¬ 
 ties in order to legitimate one’s own speaking position: “But does she 
 comprehend discursive intertextual analysis, can she engage in post- 
 
Speaking with the Dead 123 
 
 feminist, neo-Marxist, postmodern deconstructionist critique? Does 
 she understand the difference between text, subtext, and metatext?” 
 (Riggs 103). 
 
 Despite what Michael Warner describes as the “boom point” (“From 
 Queer” 19) in the field, out lesbian and gay scholars negotiating gradu¬ 
 ate exam reading lists, dissertation committees, research grants, reap¬ 
 pointment and tenure rulings are continually vulnerable to the muscle 
 of individual and institutional homophobia prevalent throughout the 
 academy. A career based in lesbian and gay studies still holds no guar¬ 
 antees. A simple perusal of recent Modern Language Association’s 
 (mla) job lists will counter any notions of canonicity. Are two or three 
 job-listings a year advertising for an interest in lesbian and gay studies 
 enough to constitute a significant breakthrough? I remember how 
 quickly my enthusiasm for these few positions dissipated when I no¬ 
 ticed how many other institutions were not searching for their “queer 
 theorist.” D’Emilio claims that with the new market interest in lesbian 
 and gay scholarship, “a young lesbian and gay scholar may have diffi¬ 
 culty finding a job, but she or he is increasingly likely to have a disser¬ 
 tation published” (168). True, perhaps, but notice too the scholar’s 
 “difficulty finding a job.” Only here does publication without employ¬ 
 ment threaten the possibility of actually landing a teaching position.® 
 
 Even those who have established the critical vocabularies of the 
 profession and have been rewarded with tenure are not exempt from 
 constant surveillance and attack. The public gay-baiting of Professor 
 David Halperin (an internationally respected scholar and pioneer in 
 the field) in response to slanderous and unsubstantiated accusations 
 against him by a disgruntled colleague at MIT demonstrates the vul¬ 
 nerability we all face in practicing and promoting lesbian and gay 
 studies on our campuses.^ Capitalizing on that campaign of vilifica¬ 
 tion, Roger Kimball bashed Halperin in the Wall Street Journal while 
 covering the 1992 MLA conference: “A great deal that Prof. Halperin 
 had to say about sex that afternoon cannot be printed in a family news¬ 
 paper. But it is worth reminding ourselves that his students at MIT 
 regularly receive his unedited reflections on this and other subjects in 
 his classes. Tuition at MIT is $18,000 a year. I wonder if the parents of 
 MIT students think they are getting value for their money.” While many 
 would want to dismiss such a personal attack as typical of a certain 
 extremist position in the popular press, Kimball’s comments suggest 
 the kinds of attitudes gay and lesbian scholars continually confront.® 
 
 The fundamental point I want to make is that the current interest in. 
 
124 David Roman 
 
 and controversies around, lesbian and gay studies cannot be under¬ 
 stood in isolation from other discursive practices addressing lesbians, 
 gays, and queers. Just as the emergence of a critical practice identified 
 as “lesbian and gay studies” and the theoretical arsenal now readily 
 understood as “queer theory” needs to be seen in conjunction with 
 other political and social movements in gay and lesbian life in the 
 1990s, as D’Emilio suggests, so must the attacks against gay and les¬ 
 bian scholars and scholarship be viewed as yet one more salient dis¬ 
 play of bias and hatred informing the national debates on lesbian and 
 gay civil rights. 
 
 D’Emilio explains the importance of understanding the dynamics of 
 the university as a social space informed by and participating in the 
 ideological practices of its day. He writes; “One of the signal achieve¬ 
 ments of the campus turmoil of the 1960s was the recognition that 
 universities are not ivory towers where individuals engage in the dis¬ 
 interested, dispassionate, and detached pursuit of knowledge and 
 truth. Rather, universities are intimately connected to the society of 
 which they are a part. They are capable of producing change, to he 
 sure, but they also reflect, and reproduce, the dominant values, beliefs, 
 habits, and inequalities of their society” (162). 
 
 The current status of lesbians and gays in the United States remains 
 under serious debate. The “boom” in queer theory, and in lesbian and 
 gay studies in general, is in many ways symptomatic of these debates, 
 as Grosz explains in “Bodies and Pleasures in Queer Theory.” To iden¬ 
 tify the moment in gay and lesbian studies as “canonical” invents a 
 legitimating space not always available for many of the lesbian and gay 
 scholars I have cited. It presupposes secured political positions for 
 gays and lesbians inside and outside of the university and imagines 
 commodity fetishism and the rhetoric of tolerance as viable sites for 
 lesbian and gay agency. The task at hand is to critically locate sites of 
 agency in order to challenge the commodification and depoliticization 
 of lesbian and gay studies within institutional movements based on 
 tolerance or market trends. 
 
 While Yingling sees the late 1980s as the canonical moment in les¬ 
 bian and gay studies and introduces this theme by citing the cultural 
 anthropologist and theorist James Clifford, I view the late 1980s and 
 early 1990s as a liminal movement in lesbian and gay studies. I want to 
 cite a different anthropologist, Victor Turner, to make my point. Turner 
 explains that “the attributes of liminality are necessarily ambiguous, 
 since the condition and the persons elude or slip through the networks 
 
Speaking with the Dead 125 
 
 of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural 
 space” (95). Liminality suggests the neither here nor there; it insists on 
 the process of social initiation, the ways in which cultures enact legit¬ 
 imacy and authority and acculturate subjects into the social fabric of 
 its reigning ideology. Turner, of course, builds upon the ideas of Ar¬ 
 nold Van Gennep, who introduces the concept of the liminal to theor¬ 
 ize social “rites of passage.” For both Van Gennep and Turner, the 
 liminal is the transitional moment between 
 
 [an] earlier fixed state in the social structure, from a set of cultural 
 conditions (a “state”), or from both. During the intervening “limi¬ 
 nal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “pas¬ 
 senger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that 
 has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the 
 third phrase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is con¬ 
 summated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a rela¬ 
 tively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and 
 obligations vis-a-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural” 
 type; he is expected to behave in accordance with certain custom¬ 
 ary norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social 
 position in a system of such positions. (Turner 94-95) 
 
 I invoke the less fashionable ideas of Van Gennep and Turner because 
 it may be precisely within this border space of the liminal that plea¬ 
 sure itself can be recuperated for lesbian and gay studies—recuperated, 
 that is, if we agree with Yingling that erotic pleasure has been re¬ 
 pressed in lesbian and gay studies. Yingling worries that “we must face 
 the possibility that the repressed of our canonical moment is erotic 
 pleasure itself” (117; this volume) and cites both the institutionaliza¬ 
 tion of lesbian and gay studies and the political investment in identity 
 politics as complicit in this process. His suggestion that we more crit¬ 
 ically examine the “canonical moment” must involve then a process of 
 locating the erotic and pleasurable in lesbian and gay studies. 
 
 Some have found pleasure in the dynamics of the classroom. For 
 Joseph Litvak, for example, pleasure may be recuperated through the 
 teaching of lesbian and gay studies.^ Working within the Foucauldian 
 model that frames Yingling’s essay, Litvak reminds us that the same 
 system that produces discipline must also produce “ ‘perversions,’ if 
 only to encrypt them in each and every good middle-class subject as so 
 many stages (suggestive term) through which he or she must pass” 
 (10). Litvak suggests that it is precisely at this moment of encrypt- 
 
126 David Roman 
 
 ing that lesbian and gay studies can intervene: teaching gay studies 
 “seems, that is, to offer a way of prying open the crypts that have 
 already been sealed, of keeping others from forming too quickly, of 
 bringing out, or educing, or even educating loves, pleasures, and de¬ 
 sires that education otherwise serves to put away” (11). Litvak’s goal 
 for lesbian and gay studies is to recognize the ideological processes 
 that produce surveillance and transgression, including the university 
 and the classroom, and to identify and extend the moments—what I 
 would call liminal moments—when these positions are negotiated. 
 
 If the liminal performs the not yet disciplined, the almost disci¬ 
 plined, the about to be disciplined, it makes sense for us to exploit it. 
 Rather than aiming toward the canonical, it may be worthwhile to 
 protract the liminal moment of lesbian and gay studies. Judith Butler 
 has taught us that it is often politically efficacious for us as lesbians 
 and gays to “proliferate and intensify the crisis of identity politics” 
 (“Force of Fantasy” 121), to allow for and revel in the anxieties or 
 pleasures produced by the “uncontrollability” of the categorical terms 
 established by regulatory disciplines and institutions. I find Butler’s 
 response to the crisis of identity politics remarkably useful in thinking 
 through the current status of lesbian and gay studies. If lesbian and gay 
 studies is in the liminal phase—a process that gestures toward, and at 
 times even aspires to, the canonical—and if the liminal is defined in¬ 
 herently as uncategorical, then the possibilities of our scholarship and 
 pedagogy and their effects are endless. It is precisely in the intensifica¬ 
 tion of the liminal where the proliferation of multiple subjectivities, 
 multiple kinds of lesbian and gay studies, and multiple pleasures be¬ 
 come available to us. The liminal phase always enacts the move to¬ 
 ward canonicity: it produces the illusion of assimilation while still 
 holding license to remain temporarily outside of disciplinary control, 
 even as it presupposes a narrative that will conclude in the initiation 
 of customary norms. 
 
 From this perspective, the current crisis in lesbian and gay studies 
 seems less about the anxiety of who and what queer studies is for or 
 about. Rather it seems to me that the crisis is located in the institu¬ 
 tional demands that insist upon responses to such questions: institu¬ 
 tional demands that arrive in the form of justifications for new pro¬ 
 grams, courses, and hires from not always sympathetic deans, chairs, 
 and colleagues. These demands are further exacerbated by the local 
 governing bodies of higher education, especially for publicly funded 
 state schools and institutions with religious affiliations. Lesbians and 
 
Speaking with the Dead 127 
 
 gays know only too well that there Eire few, if any, discursive ways out 
 of inquiries pertaining to sexuality that are not already predetermined 
 and contained within dominant discourse or, in Yingling’s words, “un¬ 
 foreclosed by law” (117; this volume). How can we possibly answer 
 these questions—who and what queer studies is for and about—with¬ 
 out falling into either the trap of defensive rhetoric or the universaliz¬ 
 ing, but well-intended, impulse of bourgeois liberalism? 
 
 It is not possible to escape these questions: Who is queer studies for? 
 What is queer studies for? Yingling concludes his essay by challenging 
 us with his proposal that “all our profit lies in that asking.” The multi¬ 
 ple, shifting identities that each of us may bring at any time to our 
 classrooms, institutions, and communities, with students, peers, and 
 colleagues—whether queer or straight and with differing degrees of 
 homophobia and homoignorance—suggest that these questions will 
 always be asked and answered differently depending upon the local 
 circumstances and specific dynamics of the exchange. This is not to 
 say that these questions are trivial. I agree with Yingling that it is to our 
 profit that we consider the purposes of our practices. But these ques¬ 
 tions can only be addressed locally and always in consideration of the 
 materiality of who can speak. Our responses will never be choral and 
 will differ according to our own specific circumstances and subject 
 positions. 
 
 Yet, what are the limits of celebrating the liminal if as lesbians 
 and gays we continue to aspire to a type of acculturation, with all 
 the customary norms—domestic partnership, antidiscrimination, and 
 other civil rights—available and intact? I think Yingling offers us a way 
 to conceptualize a response that allows for both the radical capacities 
 of the liminal and the securing comforts of the canonical when he 
 writes that “our discomse and our being are not organic appearances 
 but arise at the nexus of other forms of knowledge, power, and plea¬ 
 sure, and our analysis of homosexuality or homophobia needs always 
 to inquire into this structural density” (111; this volume). Lesbian and 
 gay studies, to prove successful in the long run, must continue to rec¬ 
 ognize and explore what Yingling refers to and what Yarbro-Bejarano 
 explicates more fully: that our identities and our desires, while based 
 historically in marginalization and oppression, are dynamic processes 
 that escape the construction of a “distinct culture.” 
 
 While Yingling and Yarbro-Bejarano, among others, provide the the¬ 
 oretical framework for lesbian and gay studies, it is important to note 
 that AIDS activists have provided a menu of available tactics that may 
 
128 David Roman 
 
 enable social change for gays and lesbians inside and outside of the 
 university. While AIDS, according to Kushner, has shown us the limits 
 of tolerance, AIDS activists have demonstrated the efficacy of local in¬ 
 terventions against the systemic processes that discriminate against 
 people with aids and contribute to the growing epidemic (see Crimp, 
 aids). Such “local resistances” contest the systems of power that con¬ 
 struct and, in the process, control marginal identities. As Cindy Patton 
 explains: 
 
 The idea of local resistances, taken seriously and in specific con¬ 
 texts, means that coalition, especially geographically understood, 
 is not a coherent idea. What the emergence of ACT UP through 
 the silence = death symbols suggests is that sparks are given off 
 through attempts to “unleash” power within the power/discourse 
 gap. Resistance in other locales may he ignited by these sparks, 
 hut must spring from an analysis of the local situation, finding 
 leverage points within the narrow space offered differently by 
 different localities. (163) 
 
 Patton’s ideas on the local claim highlight the necessity to intervene on 
 multiple fronts differently—perhaps even in contradiction or, using 
 her term, “incoherent[ly]”—and to recognize that there are always 
 multiple, distinct sites of contestation. She recommends that activists 
 focus on tactics and locality and then strategize accordingly. This is 
 good advice and an excellent program for lesbian and gay studies if we 
 are to make a dent in the always different institutional biases leveled 
 against us. There is no reason, as D’Emilio has argued consistently, for 
 scholars to view the university as any more accommodating than any 
 other social institution or discipline. For those who work in lesbian 
 and gay studies, the task remains both to exploit and maintain the 
 liminal phase of lesbian and gay studies and to work directly in our 
 local environments to systematically challenge and contest institu¬ 
 tional regimes that, at best, tolerate our presence and scholarship.” 
 Such a simultaneous endeavor, while employing particular tactics of 
 resistance for different localities, only demonstrates the need to en¬ 
 gage the multiple sites of contestation within the university. 
 
 But there is more at stake for lesbian and gay studies at this point 
 than simply replicating and appropriating the tactics of aids activists 
 in order to challenge the local instances and dynamics of regulatory 
 violence normalized against queers in the 1990s. We must also keep 
 
Speaking with the Dead 129 
 
 the focus on AIDS as a priority agenda of lesbian and gay studies, for as 
 Simon Watney explains, “we should not define lesbian and gay studies 
 in a way which marginalizes an epidemic that is undoubtedly the 
 worst single catastrophe in ‘our’ history, however we theorize ‘our¬ 
 selves’ ’’ (“Lesbian and Gay Studies” 72). A thorough and interdis- 
 ciplinar\' analysis of AIDS is still needed if we are to understand the 
 often contradictory ways AIDS is both constructed and encountered 
 in different locales and communities, the effective and noneffective 
 counterstrategies in local resistances employed to fight aids, and the 
 various power networks (including the university and its production 
 of knowledge) by which their effects are extended. Such work necessi¬ 
 tates, as Butler explains in her support of Watney’s position, “an im¬ 
 portant set of dialogues among those who work between the academy 
 and the movement to think about priorities” (“Letter”). These dia¬ 
 logues among people with different and multiple positionalities, sub¬ 
 jectivities, and desires will facilitate both our understanding of and 
 response to AIDS, as well as serve as a tribute to the dead, especially to 
 those who helped establish initially the lesbian and gay studies we 
 profess to practice. 
 
 I never met Thomas Yingling, although we were scheduled to meet at 
 the MLA in New York in 1992.1 had organized a panel, through the Gay 
 and Lesbian Caucus of the MLA, on “AIDS: Politics and Pedagogies in 
 the University,” and Yingling was set to deliver the paper abstracted in 
 this volume (“AIDS, Confession, and Theory”) on teaching with aids. 
 He died some months before the meeting. Our only immediate connec¬ 
 tion during his life was through om correspondence. I think, although 
 I’m not really sme, that we may have gotten along, but the possibility 
 of a conversation, never mind a friendship, is now foreclosed by aids. 
 Or is it? How peculiar is it for me to continue responding to Tom (can I 
 call him Tom?) Imowing, of course, all along that he is dead. How, after 
 all, can we speak, indeed argue, with the dead? Because of our overlap¬ 
 ping and nearly historical conjunction as gay men in the academy 
 interested in lesbian and gay studies, and despite our significant dif¬ 
 ferences—in rank and status, race and ethnicity, professional interests 
 and training, and most acutely, our relationship to aids— I want to 
 claim an affinity with him. I realize, of course, that in the process of 
 identification I run the risk of enacting the very violence of misrecog- 
 nition he has argued so effectively against. This, for me, is an accept- 
 
130 David Roman 
 
 able and worthwhile risk, for how else can I convey and indulge my 
 romantic impulse for what could have been and my relentless rage for 
 what will never be? 
 
 To speak and identify as someone who is not living with aids as¬ 
 sumes, inevitably and unfortunately, a desire to differentiate from peo¬ 
 ple with AIDS. For a gay man (and one of color) to announce publicly 
 his seronegativity (however tenuous this may be)^^ plays into a dy¬ 
 namic established by the dominant discursive strategies that con¬ 
 structs people with AIDS as other. It perpetuates the very problematic 
 and omnipresent binarism (usually at the expense of people with aids] 
 that insistently categorizes people as with aids or without.^® This is not 
 my aim. I am left wondering what means are available to me to speak 
 with the dead—to claim an identification—without enacting the vio¬ 
 lence of misrecognition. Can there be recognition without violence? Is 
 my moiurning only a narcissistic performance of survival? Or, if I am 
 speaking with the dead, who is listening and what is the response? All 
 my profit lies in this asking. 
 
 Notes 
 
 This essay was written in the spring of 1993. Discussions with Carolyn 
 Dinshaw, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Robyn Wiegman, and David Norton 
 have helped shape some of these ideas. I would also like to thank Sue- 
 Ellen Case, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Brad Epps, and Joe Litvak for sharing 
 with me the early drafts of their essays. 
 
 1 For me, the most useful discussions of this negotiation are Sedgwick, 
 “White Glasses”; Crimp, “Right On, Girlfriend!”; and Harper. 
 
 2 See also Escoffier, who constructs a less dynamic history of the field by 
 insisting on the binarism not only between two, for him, distinct genera¬ 
 tions of scholars but also between those inside and outside of the academy. 
 
 3 See Epps, for example, who discusses this in relation to Spanish tradi¬ 
 tions, and Easton, who provides a thorough discussion of gay and lesbian 
 studies and art history. This is not to suggest, by any means, that the social 
 sciences and other disciplines have not engaged lesbian and gay issues. It 
 is precisely the question as to how this work is eclipsed by the humanities, 
 and more specifically “English,” that I wish to raise. 
 
 4 On this point, see the interview with Duberman where he recounts how 
 in Vermont, a conservative politician after reading Duberman’s coedited 
 anthology. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Lesbian and Gay Past, 
 helped rally support for the success of the lesbian and gay state civil rights 
 bill. 
 
Speaking with the Dead 131 
 
 5 Although Yingling calls attention to the “repression” of the lesbian in 
 lesbian and gay studies, his essay simultaneously enacts it by claiming a 
 canonical moment for lesbian and gay studies. 
 
 6 Yingling refers to this problem in his earlier essay, “Sexual Preference/ 
 Cultural Reference.” He writes: “to be openly gay or lesbian in the acad¬ 
 emy, to be working on gay and lesbian literature and theory (despite what 
 seems to be something of a revolution in manners), is still to find one¬ 
 self all too often embattled, belittled, and un(der)employed” (94; this 
 volume). 
 
 7 For a detailed discussion of Halperin’s situation, see Nussbaum. Unfortu¬ 
 nately, Nussbaum, in an otherwise brilliant argument, does not factor in 
 lesbian studies. 
 
 8 In a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (27 Jan. 1993), Timothy B. 
 Peters, a former student of Halperin’s, protested against Kimball’s insinua¬ 
 tions: “Mr. Kimball makes a leap by assuming that radical scholarship 
 automatically translates into radical and/or bad teaching. ... To suggest 
 that radical fields of inquiry discredit a scholar’s ability to teach (an of¬ 
 ten altogether different pursuit) makes the criticism personal and mean- 
 spirited and, therefore, inappropriate.” 
 
 Degrees of homophobia are also omnipresent in the publishing world. 
 Richard Mohr, for example, sees this as the central problem he encoun¬ 
 tered in his attempts to find a university press to publish his recent 
 book Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. The anthology How Do I 
 Look? Queer Film and Video, edited by Bad Object-Choices and published 
 by Seattle’s Bay Press, could not find a domestic printer. In both cases, 
 presses and printers were concerned primarily with images discussed and 
 reproduced in the texts. 
 
 9 Litvak’s paper, incidentally, was presented at a 1992 MLA panel sponsored 
 by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus whose call for papers was entitled “Class¬ 
 rooms from Hell.” By the time of the meeting, the program was retitled 
 “Mourning, Shaming, Trashing, and Pogroms in and around the Queer 
 Studies Classroom.” The other presenters were Michele Aina Barale, Sean 
 Holland, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 
 
 10 And yet, it needs to be noted, Litvak joins Sue-Ellen Case in pointing out 
 the vexed position of the lesbian or gay teacher in the classroom. 
 
 11 Consider for example two completely different and simultaneous occa¬ 
 sions for lesbian and gay studies. In 1992, the Center for Lesbian and Gay 
 Studies under the direction of Martin Duberman at the Graduate School of 
 the City University of New York received a $250,000 Rockefeller grant. 
 That same year the Auburn Gay and Lesbian Association (agla), a queer 
 student group at Auburn University in Alabama, was denied access to uni¬ 
 versity funds since AGLA supposedly advocated the violation of state sod¬ 
 omy laws. The Alabama state senate unanimously approved this censure. 
 
132 David Roman 
 
 12 Once again, I cite Sedgwick’s “White Glasses” for an excellent discussion 
 of the tenuous nature of speaking subjects and (our) health, in particular as 
 it relates to our positions around Hiv and aids. 
 
 13 See, for instance and for starters, Sullivan, “Gay Life, Gay Death.” More¬ 
 over, to test positive for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is not the 
 same as to be diagnosed with aids. In other words, Hiv and AIDS are not 
 coterminous and/or interchangeable terms. 
 
Untitled 
 
 These scars I carry on my body 
 
 are but the latest indication 
 
 you on one side of things, me on the other. 
 
 It could be a dream 
 in which I see this, 
 
 but we have become too worldly to believe 
 that dreams are not of this world. 
 
 Certainly it is recurrent, 
 and everyone is in profile, 
 as on coins. This has a history 
 I cannot excavate without you.... 
 
The Stuttering I 
 
Theory and the Debate over Canon 
 
 In 1929, Gertrude Stein had a terrible fight with Bernard Fay over 
 nouns and adjectives. She didn’t like them, she said, and he did. She 
 punished him by making his portrait almost entirely of adverbs and 
 prepositions in How Writing Is Written. It was no doubt not with our 
 present quandary over canons and canonicity in view that Wallace 
 Stevens in 1942 resolved the problem of choice and all the binary 
 heritage of Western metaphysics by declaiming: “it was not a choice / 
 Between excluding things. It was not a choice / / Between, but of” 
 (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” 403). 
 
 But Stevens’s resolution speaks to the problem we wish to solve in 
 literary study today: too often we think of the choices of canonicity as 
 terribly urgent, and we tend to structure those as choices “between” 
 and not “of,” as choices of either/or rather than and/and. Only so 
 much can be taught, the pragmatic argument runs, and some exclu¬ 
 sions must be made. The Stevens choice “to include the things / That 
 in each other are included, the whole, / The complicate, the amassing 
 harmony” (403), cannot be our choice. We haven’t the luxury of time 
 
138 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 necessary to attend “the whole, the complicate, the amassing har¬ 
 mony” except as specialists, especially since the problem of canon- 
 icity finds its most naturalized site in the classroom, where such grand 
 schemes of harmony are exactly what we wish to challenge in our 
 students’ naive assumptions about literary history. The whole thrust of 
 poststructuralist debate—and we will include the issue of canonicity 
 in that debate for the moment—has been to question the legitimacy of 
 that vision of literary history suggested by Stevens: there is no whole, 
 complicate, or amassing harmony except as certain voices are forced to 
 harmonize, except as others are silenced or ignored. 
 
 The debate over canonicity has raged for quite a few years now in 
 literary circles, but I for one am not sure that it is a useful question 
 anymore, that it indeed helps us to do the work that needs to be done in 
 overturning notions of “the amassing harmony.” We have not solved 
 the problem of’the canon’s past exclusivity simply by offering semi¬ 
 nars on women poets whose work was written out of former literary 
 histories, for instance; and we can offer anthologies that include—or 
 champion—Afro-American, Commonwealth, Amerasian and Amerin¬ 
 dian writers, women, gay men, and lesbians, but the anthology en¬ 
 forces a particular way of reading texts and is still a henign prison for 
 those tokenized in it. In neither of these cases have we eliminated the 
 problem that produced om: desire for a canon in the first place. Too 
 often we relegate the debate over canonicity to a problem of literary his¬ 
 tory and rewrite that history more inclusively, but the question facing 
 us is not really “which poets ought we to teach” (and I take it here that 
 poetry, unlike fiction and drama, exists in America almost exclusively 
 within academic markets that choose to produce and reproduce certain 
 texts and not others}—the question is, rather, “why are we teaching 
 poetry at all?” Is there room, need, or use for poetry in the curriculum? 
 Before we can ask whether some do it better, differently, or more to om 
 liking than others, we need to decide what it—poetry—does. 
 
 I will turn to this point later but wish to demonstrate first how de¬ 
 bates over canonicity produce conservative ends not congruent with 
 their liberal beginnings when they do not address the more fundamen¬ 
 tal problem of what poetry can do that other texts cannot. We all know 
 that canons are political, for instance, that they serve “the dominant 
 interests.” But what those dominant interests are is not always appar¬ 
 ent—or is, I should say, perhaps most to be questioned when they 
 appear most natural and self-evident. 
 
 Let us take the issue of gender, the issue that has perhaps had the 
 
Theory and the Debate over Canon 139 
 
 most telling impact on the question of canon in American literature. 
 The “dominant interest” in the field of gender is the interest of the 
 patriarchy, of course, and I do not for a moment mean to diminish or 
 question how hegemonic and oppressive is the system of institutions 
 and ideological apparatuses that constitute patriarchal control. But the 
 way in which this problem is translated into the issue of canon debate 
 cannot simply be to see the problem as one of representation, of mak¬ 
 ing sure that women receive equal time and pay (in the form of articles, 
 conferences, and appearances on the syllabus). This constitutes part of 
 Marjorie Perloff’s critique of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s Norton 
 Anthology of Literature By Women—that too often, its choices seem to 
 be made primarily on the basis of gender and with little consideration 
 given to questions of aesthetics (see Perloff). I am not about to sug¬ 
 gest that aesthetics escape ideology or that our thinking about canon 
 should be based in aesthetic concerns: surely, that is exactly what we 
 have been fighting against. But Perloff is persuasive in her critique of 
 Gilbert and Gubar because she introduces us to the work of a poet 
 excluded by them (Lorrine Niedecker) whose work in Objectivist con¬ 
 ventions interrogates the position of women in patriarchal structure, 
 but does so in an aesthetic that challenges the reader in a way foreign to 
 many of the more overtly “political” and “feminist” texts included in 
 Gilbert and Gubar’s anthology. 
 
 Perloff’s main point of contention is not that Gilbert and Gubar have 
 overlooked a significant voice (although her essay makes a case for 
 reevaluating Niedecker’s lack of reputation); rather, her essay asks that 
 feminist criticism address the problem of subjectivity in a more post¬ 
 structuralist manner than it often currently does in constructing its 
 own, “alternative” canon. Cora Kaplan’s argument in “Pandora’s Box” 
 is more pointed: 
 
 as I see it, the present danger is not that feminist criticism will 
 enter an unequal dependent alliance with any of the varieties of 
 male-centered criticism. It does not need to, for it has produced an 
 all too persuasive autonomous analysis which is in many ways 
 radical in its discussion of gender, but implicitly conservative in 
 its assumptions about social hierarchy and female subjectivity.... 
 Humanist feminist criticism does not object to the idea of an im¬ 
 manent, transcendent subject but only to the exclusion of women 
 from these definitions which it takes as an accurate account of 
 subjectivity rather than as a historically constructed ideology. 
 
140 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 The repair and reconstitution of female subjectivity through a 
 rereading of literature becomes, therefore, a major part, often un¬ 
 acknowledged, of its critical project. (147,149) 
 
 What Kaplan identifies here is exactly the point: our debate over can- 
 onicity often is so complicit with humanist assumptions about literary 
 texts, their place and value in culture, that it is little more than a 
 rearrangement of issues that accord completely with the social fabric 
 of American postcapitalism (I see this most clearly on a personal and 
 professional level in the astonishing recent explosion of publishing for 
 a gay market—almost all of which understands the political agenda of 
 homosexuality from a liberal, democratic point of view, and much of 
 which is completely bourgeois in its values). The debate needs to shift, 
 at this point, from the problem of which texts are read to the question 
 of how any text is produced and reproduced within and against a 
 number of ideological constructions and constraints. 
 
 Wendy Martin’s American Triptych is exemplary of the desire to 
 restructure our understanding of American poetic history according to 
 the issues of gender, hut it certainly becomes at points an example of 
 Kaplan’s complaint, accepting the notion of the immanent, transcen¬ 
 dent subject as “an acciu'ate account of subjectivity rather than as a 
 historically constructed ideology.” Martin’s work compares the con¬ 
 straints historically faced by women writers to the freedom men have 
 had, using (at one point) Adrienne Rich and Allen Ginsberg as exam¬ 
 ples. In this particular comparison, men’s writing is characterized as 
 egocentric and women’s as “concerned with internal process and rela¬ 
 tionship” (199), and her examples do indeed point to these qualities in 
 the texts of Ginsberg and Rich. Martin sees Ginsberg as “the death 
 knell of the male counterculture,” moving eccentrically around the 
 globe in his phallocratic freedom, while Rich, the martyr, is “fran¬ 
 tically writing poetry between household chores or in the middle of 
 the night after comforting a restless child” (198). The problem here is 
 not just the oversimplification of her comparison (I oversimplify her 
 text to make my point), nor even that Martin should perhaps have 
 examined Ginsberg’s compromised phallocentrism, his “queer” posi¬ 
 tion in the patriarchy (this is his term). 
 
 The real problem is that Martin as critic has become transparent to 
 the egos her analysis encounters. She takes her position as reader by 
 identifying with “Ginsberg” and “Rich,” and does not see “them” as 
 textual effects but as egos with fulfilled or stifled potentials for tran- 
 
Theory and the Debate over Canon 141 
 
 scendent self-expression. I realize that we have here the specter of a 
 man speaking woman’s most useful desire for her, and I regret that I 
 cast myself in this position; as a male teacher with feminist concerns, I 
 am aware of the dangers in this position. But I use Martin as an exam¬ 
 ple here not because I wish to cast aspersions on the feminist project 
 but to point toward one of the avenues that project (and the related 
 projects of gay/lesbian and Afro-American studies) can no longer af¬ 
 ford to take (and, indeed, it seems less and less to be taking this ap¬ 
 proach). I wish to raise the question that is bracketed in discussions 
 ending with a call for “equal time” according to race, gender, class, or 
 ethnicity: that is, what do we consider the use and value of poetry to 
 be, and why should it be part of a curriculum at all? 
 
 Do we believe, for instance, that studying poetry can make one a 
 better human being, a better woman, a better citizen, a more liberal or 
 enlightened American? To answer “yes” to any of these is to see poetry 
 as the site of the production of a surplus value that accrues to the 
 individual who consumes it. It is still to buy into the myth of literature 
 as ennobling. But why is reading a poem more ennobling than study¬ 
 ing automobile designs of the 1950s? What is the value of reading 
 Sylvia Plath if one does not understand the crisis of legitimation that is 
 so ingrained in her text? Can her poems teach our students to navigate 
 the treacherous shoals of postindustrial capitalism and the narrow 
 straits of postheterosexuality? Before we can decide what canon is 
 acceptable (and Plath is part of mine because she so systematically 
 overturns our expectations of centered subjectivity), we must decide 
 “acceptable for what?” (I take it here that to say we will not have a 
 canon is impossible; choices are made according to interested posi¬ 
 tions, and we are each covalent with at least one interested position. 
 We each have a canon.) What is it we are trying to teach when we teach 
 poetry? Is it coverage—a comprehensive understanding of twentieth- 
 century poetry? Why? Is it an in-depth study of some minds we find of 
 value (leading to seminars on Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, or 
 Gwendolyn Brooks)? Why? Is it politics or gender we consider impor¬ 
 tant? (Might Robert Lowell enter here?) Or is it class? (Might Robert 
 Lowell enter here?) Or are we trying still to teach something captured 
 in the word “poetics,” an appreciation of form and structure, the 
 empty center from which all illusion is called forth? (Might Robert 
 Lowell figure here?) 
 
 I, for one, can find value in any or all of the above projects for study, 
 but I can no longer take for granted that such projects are self-evidently 
 
142 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 meaningful or important, and I refuse to grant that they are revisionist 
 of the canon simply because they include sections on feminism or 
 place Elizabeth Bishop in equal relation to Wallace Stevens. Our pur¬ 
 pose in reforming the canon of modernist poetry oughtn’t to be simply 
 getting rid of T. S. Eliot or showing up his misogyny. We cannot solve 
 the problem of Eliot simply by also reading H.D. Our critique needs to 
 be of ideology and the needs it inscribes in us as readers, scholars, and 
 teachers even when our politics are noble and liberationist. Perhaps 
 the thing to say about Eliot at this time, for instance, does not primarily 
 concern gender [although certainly his text exhibits a radical misog¬ 
 yny that cannot be ignored) but focuses on class—on the dynamic of an 
 “allusive” tradition that is a literary enactment of the social desire for 
 inheritance. Eliot (and Ezra Pound with him) speak an aristocratic 
 tongue wherein Greek and Latin are inherited as the signs of textual 
 class just as property, houses, manners, and style are inherited as signs 
 of economic and social class. It seems that we do not so much need to 
 rid the canon of Eliot and Pound as we need to use them to say some¬ 
 thing about the canon’s ideological interests. 
 
 Certainly a crucial aspect of those interests concerns gender. That 
 men have been more generally inheritors of all signs of culture and 
 plenty would have to be addressed in this, as well as the fact that Eliot 
 misrecognizes the problem of the “modern” as the problem of private 
 sexual relations. But part of what is at stake in reforming our reading 
 practices of Eliot, Pound, or any other male modernist must be related 
 to class, and to the interconnections between class and gender—in¬ 
 cluding our critical misrecognition of the one for the other. Frank 
 Lentricchia’s essay on Wallace Stevens in Critical Inquiry, “Patriar¬ 
 chy Against Itself,” makes a case for the intertextuality of inheri¬ 
 tance, economic self-reliance, literary authority, and gender in Ameri¬ 
 can modernism, and while one can critique the essay (as Gilbert and 
 Gubar rightly do in “The Man on the Dump”) for its “testerical” attack 
 on essentialist feminism or for its acceptance of Oedipus, an accep¬ 
 tance that inevitably naturalizes heterosexual deployments of desire, 
 one must still recognize that Lentricchia’s text begins to ask a new 
 question about Stevens. (Ann Kibbey’s work in earlier American litera¬ 
 ture takes a similar, more explicitly “feminist” approach, and Cora 
 Kaplan is exemplary in this.) The books and essays of these critics 
 could not be written today if it were not for the work of liberal femi¬ 
 nists who in the dozen years since Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics have 
 made gender a canonical issue. But such work goes beyond the limita- 
 
Theory and tJie Debate over Canon 143 
 
 tions of humanist feminism and places gender as one function within 
 a more complex understanding of the social fields of discourse and 
 control. 
 
 My point here is that “fixing” the canon will not do—not just because 
 it will still be “fixed” (i.e., immobile and hegemonic)—but more impor¬ 
 tantly because the canon is not the problem. The real problem we face, 
 as teachers, writers, and scholars interested in poetry is that we can no 
 longer teach “poetry.” Let us think, for instance, of a course in modern 
 and postmodern American poetry that centers on the problem of the 
 object; and let us think of this as the enlightened project of a postfor¬ 
 malist, post-“authorial” teacher. Certainly, we would find Pound at the 
 core of such a course; we would read Fenellosa and Eliot and look at 
 the theory of the image and of the objective correlative. We might use 
 Williams, and those who wanted to address gender would ask why the 
 objects in those other texts were always so insistently female and/ 
 or feminized. We could bring in Marianne Moore’s work and per¬ 
 haps Elizabeth Bishop’s mapping, Sylvia Plath’s horrific rooms full of 
 threat, or Lorrine Niedecker’s long canonical silence (if they’d heard 
 of her through Marjorie Perloff). The course could also include Ob- 
 jectivists—Denise Levertov, Robert Greeley-and could look at Afro- 
 American traditions for depicting objects of desire (Langston Hughes’s 
 “Trumpet Player,” for instance). It might even return at some point to 
 the good old Canon Aspirin’s author, Wallace Stevens. But what would 
 such a course have accomplished? As I have described it here, it would 
 have made the desire to possess, describe, and/or essentialize objects 
 the natural center of consciousness, shared equally if differently (and 
 in such cases difference is used only to establish deeper similarities) 
 among all people. It would place the poet still at the center of a linguis¬ 
 tic system he or she controls, and the inevitable point about the re¬ 
 sistance of things to language would have made poetry’s existence that 
 much more mysterious, would have made the poem itself as object a 
 very special case. 
 
 How different this same course would feel if it began not with the 
 object as given (even when questioned as to gender) but with the object 
 as a question, with Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and the analysis of 
 objects as ideological markers, with the altogether astonishing analy¬ 
 ses of Baudrillard into the way objects reify ideological positions, with 
 Lacan’s “objet petit a” or Julia Kristeva’s psycho-semiotics. Such a 
 course would no longer be “English 393” or “Contemporary American 
 Poetry.” It would have become something concerned with the theory of 
 
144 Thomas E. Tingling 
 
 poetry as language and with the inscription of objects both in and as 
 texts. It would include Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” and Hart 
 Crane’s “Possessions.” It would analyze the construction of desiring 
 subjects and their objects of desire according to gender expectations; it 
 might even employ films. This is the course we need, I would argue, 
 one that moves beyond the question of canon (because canon is always 
 bound by genre, nation, gender, a naive relationality to history; even 
 revisionist canons reify their texts as natural expressions of human 
 interest) into the question of representation itself. Such a course would 
 encounter the question of textuality, subjectivity, and semiotics; it 
 would investigate difference (including sexual difference) as the con¬ 
 stitutive stuff of writing. 
 
 Oh, you say, that sounds like a course on theory and not a course on 
 poetry. But this is exactly my point. The debate over whether or not 
 theory deserves a central place in our curriculum, and what its impact 
 on the liberal art of literary study would be, is still a question that is 
 bracketed and glossed over in our work when we allow dehates over 
 canonicity to ahsorh our attention without thinking of them within the 
 problematic of discursive representation. Theory begins the project 
 that grants the problem of canonicity meaning and yet is forced to 
 remain conveniently beyond its horizon. But it is precisely the value of 
 poetry for our teaching at this time that it leads directly into a con¬ 
 frontation with the subject as an ideological effect of theories of lan¬ 
 guage. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes: 
 
 Contemporary poetry . . . tries to transform the sign back into 
 meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning 
 of words, but the meaning of things themselves. This is why it 
 clouds the language, increases as much as it can the abstractness 
 of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign and stretches to the 
 limit the link between signifier and signified. . . . This is why our 
 modern poetry always asserts itself as a murder of language, a 
 kind of spatial, legible analogue of silence. (133-34) 
 
 I do not here wish to engage the problem of “things in themselves,” 
 although this would return us nicely to Stevens (and to Stein) and to 
 the quotes with which 1 began this paper. 1 do not wish either to argue 
 at length about why this theoretical agenda seems itself canonical at 
 the moment—it is not self-evident to me that ideological investigations 
 are the natural domain of literary critics and scholars; quite the op¬ 
 posite. What 1 wish most forcefully to suggest is that Barthes’s prose 
 
Theory and the Debate over Canon 145 
 
 points to a useful analogy betAveen theory and much of contemporary 
 writing: poets are always already theorists and not simply subjects 
 seeking expression of their subjective realities (this is merely our weak 
 notion of what autobiographical poets of preceding generations have 
 been up to). 
 
 It is not useful to see poetry as the opposite of theory (like the sim¬ 
 plified opposition between Ginsberg and Rich in my example from 
 Martin, such an opposition ensures a conservative interpretation of 
 what poetry is); rather, we must see that contemporary poetry is con¬ 
 cerned—and concerned in a theoretical way—with the ontological and 
 epistemological issues that arise when the legitimacy of language is no 
 longer taken for granted. Certainly the recent journalistic drubbing 
 taken by John Ashbery when his Selected Poems was issued suggests 
 that the problem of language has not been resolved in our critical 
 thinking (much less that the theorists have won the battle). But the 
 issue I am getting at here is not just the “Ashbery” problem (a problem 
 that for many comes down to “if I don’t understand him how can I 
 teach him to my students: where is that handy anthology that teaches 
 me how to read his work?”). It is the problem of Rich, Greeley, O’Hara, 
 Plath—all of the writers already “in” our canon; and if it touches all of 
 them differently according to their stake in the cultural systems of 
 gender, class, and race, we need to hand the problem of language to our 
 students as the problem of contemporary poetry and writing; we need 
 to free theory from its place as the unconscious of the curriculum, and 
 that is exactly what it is at the moment—the unconscious, what we will 
 not speak: “Don’t say that in front of the children! They’ll find out 
 about fhaf when they’re ready!” 
 
 Our students are ready; they must be made ready, for they cannot 
 understand what is at stake in contemporary poetry unless they appre¬ 
 ciate the current debate about language as a problematic. They need 
 not read Derrida’s Of Grammatology or Lacan’s Four Fundamental 
 Concepts, but if they do not see language as a system of differences, if 
 they see it still as a medium for the expression of the poet’s agony and 
 insight, then no shake-up in the canon is going to remove them from 
 the tyranny of the great white heterosexual Father and his language. 
 They will still be reading in a phallogocentric fashion. To cite Theodor 
 Adorno: “Your feelings insist that [the lyric] remain [opposed to so¬ 
 ciety], that lyric expression, having escaped from the weight of mate¬ 
 rial existence, evoke the image of a life free from the coercion of reign¬ 
 ing practices, of utility, of the relentless pressures of self-preservation. 
 
146 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 This demand, however, the demand that the lyric word be virginal, is 
 itself social in nature” [Notes to Literature 39). While the handy allu¬ 
 sion to “virginity” opens an entire other problematic of sexual differ¬ 
 ence, modernity, and critical objectivity that we have time only to 
 acknowledge and not to interrogate, the point here is that we need to 
 understand our teaching, reading, and writing of poems, criticism, and 
 theory as part of the material world, as a response to and interrogation 
 of what it means to be a subject in discoiuse. Writing does not occru 
 outside theory or ideology, and we cannot allow them to be kept out¬ 
 side the debate about or investigation of the canonical. 
 
The Stuttering I: Lyric Subjectivity 
 and Excess 
 
 Ich, ich, ich, ich, ich 
 —Sylvia Plath 
 
 To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. 
 
 —Theodor Adorno 
 
 When we speak of politics and the lyric, a number of possibilities 
 come to mind: one could, on the most mundane level, define as “politi¬ 
 cal” only those poems whose announced theme or interest refers to 
 specific conditions of political or social history; poems like Adrienne 
 Rich’s “Rape,” or Archibald MacLeish’s forgotten texts from the 1930s 
 like Conquistador, seem to announce themselves as strictly “political” 
 texts. Or one could read the work of Blake, Shelley, and Byron as an 
 attempt to alter the regime of an Enlightenment they found philosophi¬ 
 cally and politically repressive: this was how Romanticism was dis¬ 
 seminated as revolutionary in my undergraduate days. But a political 
 reading of lyric poetry surely needn’t concentrate only on poems that 
 mark their themes as overtly “political.” This would have the effect of 
 
148 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 removing the question of politics from the present reading of the text, 
 making it only a question of historical reference; and it is in the reading 
 of the text that its politics are made, not in the themes or questions it 
 addresses. As Tony Bennett has suggested, “the task which faces Marx¬ 
 ist criticism is not that of reflecting or bringing to light the politics 
 which is already there, as a latent presence within the text which has 
 to he made manifest. It is that of actively politicizing the text, of mak¬ 
 ing its politics for it, by producing a new position for it within the field 
 of cultural relations” (167-68). 
 
 The most interesting recent political reading of Romanticism, to 
 continue for a moment on that topic, has not been the kind of thematic 
 reading I’ve mentioned above, but has focused on what Marjorie Lev¬ 
 inson calls “the resist[ance to] historical elucidation,” on how the rep¬ 
 resentational strategies of Romanticism reduce the political, social, 
 and economic world to a problem in phenomenology and that to a 
 problem in aesthetics, to what even Keats recognized as “the egotisti¬ 
 cal sublime” [Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems 55). Its texts are not 
 Wordsworth’s sonnets on capital punishment or Toussaint L’Ouver- 
 ture but The Prelude, “Tintern Abbey,” “Peele Castle”—the “same” 
 Wordsworth read differently, used to produce a new position for the 
 sign “Wordsworth” in the field of cultural relations. What I am inter¬ 
 ested in doing with this essay (and I can only hope to point in certain 
 directions) is question the way in which recent poetry in America that 
 announces itself as politically motivated and committed (and my ex¬ 
 ample here will be Robert Lowell) in fact recapitulates to the Romantic 
 disappearance of history in the very act of appearing to do the oppo¬ 
 site—and, in working against the dominant reading of the “Confes¬ 
 sional” poets, collapses lyric subjectivity with personhood and/or per¬ 
 sonality (my example here will be Sylvia Plath). If we understand that 
 the politics of a text do not reside in it as a potential but magically 
 hidden meaning, and rather that its politics are, as are its other “fea¬ 
 tures,” produced always in the context of the text’s re-production in 
 the anthology, classroom, article, seminar, or individual reading, we 
 should also beware that little has been done to problematize the politi¬ 
 cal act of reading and interpreting poetry perse despite the plethora of 
 books and careers recently devoted to political theory and criticism. I 
 would like to spend a moment on this problem before moving on to the 
 specific texts I wish to talk about. 
 
 Various critics, including Terry Eagleton, have commented upon 
 Marxism’s apparent lack of interest in poetry as a signifying practice, 
 
The Stuttering I 149 
 
 suggesting that it has been easier for Marxist critics to address more 
 transparently social forms like the novel or the drama than to inves¬ 
 tigate poetry’s ideological allegiances. Eagleton has pushed against 
 this tendency, but even revisionary critical projects in American Stud¬ 
 ies often fail to address poetry as a significant part of their inquiry. 
 The editors of The American Renaissance Reconsidered, for instance, 
 whose volume collects representative essays of the New Historicism in 
 American Studies, congratulate themselves on rectifying certain ex¬ 
 clusionary mistakes of F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, in¬ 
 cluding in their reconsideration of American literature and its politi¬ 
 cal agenda in the nineteenth century: the “sentimental” novelists; 
 Edgar Allen Poe; Frederick Douglass; Harriet Beecher Stowe—all ex¬ 
 cluded from serious consideration by Matthiessen. But Walter Benn 
 Michaels and Donald Pease neither acknowledge Emily Dickinson’s 
 original exclusion from Matthiessen’s book nor include her in their 
 own; Walt Whitman is the only poet whose text is discussed at length 
 and he is seen less as a poet and more as an ideologue within the text of 
 American literary history (the distinction I am reaching for here is 
 between Harold Bloom, who reads Whitman as a poet, I think, and 
 someone like R. W. B. Lewis and the myth critics, who do not). Now 
 noncanonical but then highly visible poets like William Cullen Bryant, 
 Robert Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, or Henry Wadsworth Long¬ 
 fellow are nowhere reconsidered from this political context that con¬ 
 gratulates itself on reconsidering virtually everything else. 
 
 The same is true of Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen’s Ideology 
 and Classic American Literature. Both of these works are exemplary as 
 ideological inquiries into the academic study of American culture, but 
 it is remarkable (and symptomatic) that they choose not to consider 
 poetry in a markedly “political” project. If we try to understand why 
 this is, we must confront one more legacy of formalism—the notion 
 that the poem is not referential (in this case “discursively referential”) 
 in the same way that fictions, political pamphlets, and dramas are. An 
 influential materialist theory of language and literature such as M. M. 
 Bakhtin’s, for instance, makes its claims mostly for fictions and fails to 
 see that poetry may also function as a mode of conflicting social dis¬ 
 courses and practices. Surprisingly, some of Bakhtin’s essays point 
 directly toward poetry as a “pure” use of language; “The poet is a poet 
 insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary and singular language, and a 
 unitary, monologically sealed-off utterance” (296-97). Bakhtin does 
 not ordinarily contend that language can escape the social conditions 
 
150 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 of its own use, production, and exchange; more often he asserts the 
 opposite, and hence we should perhaps read the first statement here as 
 an assertion of the poet’s ascription of monologic capacities to lan¬ 
 guage and not as a statement about the actual achievement of a linguis¬ 
 tic unity around the intentions of an authorial presence. 
 
 Although it has been used by critics to bolster the most conservative 
 uses of literature in our culture, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in fact 
 exemplifies the radical multiplicity that is social language, construct¬ 
 ing itself from an absent center of conflicting voices and cultural dis¬ 
 courses. This text is not, of course, strictly lyric, but what we must 
 forego is the notion that the lyric—unlike the epic or narrative poetic 
 text—is, in fact, the record of a single voice; the Ijrric, like the nonlyric, 
 is multiply crossed by voices and intentions: by ideology. The poet 
 may, as Bakhtin claims, attempt to purify language and make it his or 
 her own, removing the traces of otherness he or she finds there, but this 
 is always only an attempt, and the pressures that fracture fiction and 
 keep it beyond authorial or individual control also fracture the pro¬ 
 duction of poetry and keep it a weave of voices and discourses rather 
 than a single voice, language, or word. 
 
 The difference in l 5 n'ic poetry, and I would claim that there is a 
 difference and that that difference is important (as Dickinson puts it, it 
 is in “the internal difference, / Where the meanings are” [“There’s a 
 certain Slant of light”]), is that the lyric is produced in the conventions 
 of subjective unity, in a code that collapses closed meaning and per¬ 
 sona, “self.” I want to do more here than reiterate notions of the Althus- 
 serian “hailing” of the subject; what we need to remember in citing 
 Althusser on interpellation into symbolic discourse is that there is 
 more than one discourse, more than one discursive position, more 
 than one hailing. In a reading of subjectivity that follows a narrow 
 constructionist line, there is no room for resistance—no sense of being 
 able to be Other than what discourse defines. We should remember 
 that Ernesto Laclau repeatedly reminds us that a class is hegemonic 
 not through the imposition of force, but through its ability to neutralize 
 contesting versions of the “real” (see Laclau and Mouffe). The same 
 might be said of discourse. Additionally, we should remember that the 
 subject is always in excess of its hailing, its particular momentary 
 appearance or self-recognition. This is what makes interpellation pos¬ 
 sible: that there is always something more that exceeds any particular 
 site of subjectivity. The “I” is always elsewhere, that which is not now 
 
The Stuttering I 151 
 
 being discussed. This is the material out of which ideology may put 
 the subject to use. And in the era of commodity aesthetics, it might be 
 better to call this process the “solicitation” rather than the “hailing” of 
 the subject, so that we recall that seduction operates in it, that this 
 process occmrs in a libidinal as well as political economy. 
 
 The work of the confessionalists (and I like that term because it is so 
 wrong) puts numerous pressures on the conventions of a unified lyric 
 presence in addition to this slippage of the subject, which might be 
 seen in any use of language. (And we should remember that their work 
 is not just autobiographical, and that autobiography is in this instance 
 not just the comfortable home of the colluding bourgeois subject.) 
 What might help us not to read confessionalist work as other than 
 naive subjectivity transparently recorded is a fuller awareness of 
 the pressures against self-knowledge thematized in it: their work is 
 framed, for instance, by a battle between psychoanalysis and psychia¬ 
 try that is played out across the bodies, lives, and pages of a generation 
 (and in this case, a generation of poets). The conflict I mean to point to 
 here is that between psychiatry’s relatively unchallenged institutional 
 power as a science and the more skeptical process of psychoanalysis, 
 which is concerned with the word as a sign of absent or lost desire 
 (Robert Lowell, for instance). Think of being in the remarkably contra¬ 
 dictory position of having shock therapy administered to one while 
 being told in therapy that autobiographical investigation was the key 
 to mental health. 
 
 In addition, the vogue of existentialism, which Lowell and Plath 
 both use occasionally as a posture and occasionally as a spur to inquire 
 into the “meaning” of a life, the center of which has not held, puts great 
 pressure on the lyric subject and his or her “autobiographical” project. 
 Cold War politics, the bomb, and the inception of a commodified art 
 industry all play their part, too, in the speechlessness that overtakes 
 writers like Plath and Lowell. Reading their work politically means 
 reading against the myths of Lowell and Plath that would make it 
 simple autobiography, and against the larger, framing myths of “con- 
 fessionalism” that have commodified them in an academic game and 
 reduced their work to bits of information. It is the “I” that stutters its 
 excess, where it cannot be grafted into language, that the confessional 
 poet seeks to represent: the way in which it is misrepresented in the 
 very moment of its representation is his or her focus (I am thinking 
 here of John Berryman in particular, hut we can see this in any number 
 
152 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 of others as well: Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Randall Jarrell, 
 Allen Ginsherg—the subject is endlessly misrepresented by govern¬ 
 ment, psychology, sex, even literature). 
 
 What Plath seems to understand is that there is no move to “proper” 
 representation, that there is no way to speak the excess of the “I” ex¬ 
 cept in silence, disfigurement, or visionary madness—that every other 
 position within discourse is merely “set up.” Lowell’s “madness,” on 
 the other hand (and it seldom becomes a textual madness, the madness 
 of writing), is the kind of discomfort that arises from the desire to be 
 rational in an irrational world or irrational body. The very structure of 
 the verse—its interreferentiality (and I do not mean by this its “inter- 
 textuality” but its dependence upon motif), its continuous turn to mo¬ 
 ments of strong closure—each of these turns us away from the possibil¬ 
 ity that this may be a difficulty we do not yet know how to negotiate or 
 name. What we find in the work of Lowell and Plath, then, if we under¬ 
 stand Ijnic subjectivity as the site of excess, is that in Lowell this 
 excess is always controlled under the figure of the author in search of 
 those terms that will best represent his life, while in Plath there is 
 never any sense of narrative continuity or of the “personal story” grant¬ 
 ing individual moments their meaning. Despite the clearly autobio¬ 
 graphical reference of some of the works, excess is not controlled. 
 Rather, when Plath’s poems recount exemplary confrontations with 
 the question of existential meaning, they do so as an encounter with 
 the symbolic: the discourses of masculinity and femininity; of Catholi¬ 
 cism, Jewishness (as opposed to Judaism); madness and vision; moth¬ 
 erhood; death; mythology—subjectivity in her work is always deter¬ 
 mined not as a discourse of the “self” but by the crossing of discourses 
 in which any genuine “self” can only be defined through the mecha¬ 
 nisms of denial and absence. (Compare Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue” 
 [81-82], where “Absence!” is thematized as a complaint of personal 
 loss and recuperated to meaningfulness through literary allusion and 
 balanced motifs, to the process of absence in Plath’s “Ariel,” where the 
 body moves from “Stasis in darkness” to disintegration, and where 
 enjambment works against even syntactical balance: “And I / Am the 
 arrow, / / The dew that flies / Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the 
 red / / Eye, the cauldron of morning” [Ariel 26-27].) 
 
 I would like to turn to Robert Lowell’s “Memories of West Street and 
 Lepke,” which we might read as an inversion of Wordsworth’s “Tin- 
 tern Abbey.” Like the Wordsworth poem, “Lepke” looks backward at a 
 moment in the subject’s life that he considers more vital, but unlike it. 
 
The Stuttering I 153 
 
 “Lepke” focuses on, among other things, that subject’s relation to the 
 state (in Wordsworth, this appears only in the dating of the poem; as 
 Marjorie Levinson has written, July 13, the day before Bastille Day, is 
 the unnamed historical catastrophe in the poem [“The New Histor- 
 icism” 16]). The Lowell poem places its subject at the center of a moral 
 drama, seeking some sense of a genuine subjectivity, a self that, as 
 Walter Benjamin writes of the storyteller, is “the figure in which the 
 righteous man encounters himself” (109). No longer a “fire-breathing 
 Catholic C.O.” incarcerated after “telling off the state and president,” 
 the speaker has become no better than the other residents on “Bos¬ 
 ton’s / ‘hardly passionate Marlborough Street,’ / where even the man / 
 scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans, / has two children, a 
 beach wagon, a helpmate, / and is a ‘young Republican’ ” (85). Like this 
 young Republican, he, too, has a “nine months’ daughter,” who “rises” 
 in her “flame-flamingo infants’ wear” (85). (Commodification and the 
 language of advertisement here define even the relation to one’s off¬ 
 spring.) “These are the tranquillized Fifties,” the text reports, and 
 Lowell turns from them and the sense of diminishment he feels in this 
 larger history to his own personal history, to his moral “seedtime” (a 
 Wordsworthian term straight from “Tintern Abbey”) in order to re¬ 
 establish his moral authority in some economy other than the one in 
 which he “hog[s] a whole house” and “Only teach[es] on Tuesdays” 
 (85). In the final turn to “Murder Incorporated’s Czar Lepke,” we are 
 invited to see both Lowell and his opposite each condemned to isola¬ 
 tion among objects “forbidden the common man”—except for Lepke 
 this isolating private property is not his moral stringency and poetic 
 madness, as it is for Lowell, but “a portable radio, a dresser, two toy 
 American / flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm” (86). 
 
 The play of subjectivity within the person marked “Lowell” 
 throughout Life Studies is great: to some extent, its purpose is exactly 
 that of Wordsworth’s Prelude, to prove (against all evidence) that the 
 subject is a single, cohesive, and integrated being. In “Lepke,” the pos¬ 
 sibly violent disruptions of identity are delimited through construc¬ 
 tion of an alter ego who signifies secure boundaries between self and 
 Other, past and present, for although these appear ambiguous and slip¬ 
 pery, each is ultimately knowable. The major burden of his appearance 
 in the poem seems to be that Lepke, as a synecdoche for American 
 capitalism and its collusion with a “Flabby, bald, lobotomized” (86) 
 Christianity (other inmates have been named Jehovah’s Witnesses or 
 speculative, vegetarian metaphysicians), and as a figure who faces “no 
 
154 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 agonizing reappraisal” (the phrase is John Foster Dulles’s description 
 of the Cold War), has no conscience; he functions here to make the 
 conscientious-ness of “Lowell” appear real—and not merely as the 
 property of a leisured middle-class man of letters. What I mean by this 
 is what the middle class discovered in (to look forward to “For the 
 Union Dead”) “the last war,” that a private conscience is not enough, 
 politically speaking—that the category of “conscientious objector,” 
 which was the only way resistance could be officially encoded at first, 
 was insufficient in the face of the fiasco of Vietnam, and that some¬ 
 thing beyond the individual’s private conscientious response was 
 called for. 
 
 In “For the Union Dead,” placed not merely as the last poem in the 
 dual volume but as the philosophical and moral telos of Life Studies 
 and For the Union Dead, we see the retreat into quietism and despair 
 that accompany the late Romantic liberalism that marks politics in 
 Lowell: the “savage servility” of Boston (72); the emptiness of the civic 
 project (seen in the pointed contrast between the statue by St. Gaudens 
 commemorating “Colonel Shaw / and his bell-cheeked Negro infan¬ 
 try” [71] from the Civil War and the continuing segregation in Ameri¬ 
 can life); the failvue of supposedly democratic modes of representation 
 adequately to address searing political issues (“a commercial photo¬ 
 graph / shows Hiroshima boiling / over a Mosler Safe, the ‘Rock of 
 Ages’ / that survived the blast” and on his “television set, / the drained 
 faces of Negro school-children” [72]). Representation fails its own best 
 political intentions (in the St. Gaudens’ relief, in the television doc¬ 
 umentary, in the Lowell poem) because—as the advertisement sug¬ 
 gests—the most unthinkable horrors become mere images to be circu¬ 
 lated. “For the Union Dead” carries in it a critique of the very means 
 through which Lowell has legitimated his entire career: the image 
 made meaningful by a secure referentiality is no longer available; but 
 the only alternative to this for Lowell is despair, poignancy, a continu¬ 
 ing insistence that the personal is there “instead of” the political, that 
 the personalized is the only form in which history takes place. 
 
 In turning to the work of Sylvia Plath, we have to ask: how does one 
 read her? That is the question her text keeps asking, not just how can 
 one stand to read it, but also, how, literarily, is one to read it? As 
 prophecy? as autobiography? as death-wish? against the culture that 
 produced it? What makes it difficult to settle this question is that Plath 
 is, in the most radical Emersonian tradition, an un-settler; hers is the 
 
The Stuttering I 155 
 
 kind of writing that decenters meaning, making it happen elsewhere. 
 “Daddy,” for instance, opens with the line “You do not do, you do not 
 do,” and offers as a moment in counterpoint the lyric subject’s ironic 
 marriage to its destructive Other, written in the phrase: “I do, I do” 
 [Ariel 49). But the signifier of Otherness in this text is most dramat¬ 
 ically “German,” in its famous image of Nazis, and in Plath’s extraordi¬ 
 nary stuttering of herself in the following lines: “I never could talk to 
 you. / The tongue stuck in my jaw. / It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, 
 ich, ich, ich” [Ariel 49). But surely this play of pronouns across two 
 languages takes us back to the “do-ing” that fills the text as well, and 
 we recognize that this is also a “du”-ing, an “Ach, du,” a familiar Other 
 in which one recognizes one’s place as an “ich.” The subject here is 
 quite literally a signifier for another signifier, and each of these ex¬ 
 ceeds the meaning of its pronominal reference. It is in such language 
 that Plath sees the staging of the patriarchal control of subjectivity, and 
 “Daddy” is only the most egregious example of the critique of pa¬ 
 triarchal Otherness seen everywhere in her work. 
 
 Any reading that equates the poem’s “Daddy” with a biological 
 or autobiographical father explains the poem without reference to 
 the discourses through which it takes up the question of female sub¬ 
 jectivity annihilated by patriarchal injunctions against it. Adorno 
 wrote “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” [Prisms 34269), 
 and I apologize for the ease with which one may invoke Auschwitz 
 since it is so difficult actually to say anything about it—indeed, it 
 is a sign for what is unspeakable about our era. But this is one way to 
 think about the destructive poetics of Sylvia Plath: that “poetry after 
 Auschwitz” indeed has to be barbaric itself in order to avoid capitu¬ 
 lation to the very principles that produced the Holocaust; it must be 
 a barbaric rather than a “meaningful” or civilized project. This is 
 how I think we might read her turn to violent images: not as the mor¬ 
 bid response of an unstable ego but as the political response of a de- 
 civilized one. In the work of Sylvia Plath we see something like a 
 pointed protest against the cultural hegemonies imposed on women— 
 as Lowell writes in his introduction to Ariel, the figural subject at the 
 center of Plath’s lyrics is “one of those super-real, hypnotic, great clas¬ 
 sical heroines” (vii). But the question he never takes up is what hap¬ 
 pens when a woman finally assumes this role as opposed to merely 
 reciting lines from Racine or Shakespeare? What happens is anger, 
 violence that can only be sanctioned as self-destruction, the need to 
 
156 Thomas E. Yingling 
 
 destroy the body, to become a “pure acetylene / Virgin / Attended 
 by ... / whatever these pink things mean,” rising “To Paradise” {Ariel 
 54-55). 
 
 But even in this poem of delirium, with its revision of Dickinson’s 
 “possibility” at its close, as her “selves dissolv[e], old whore petti¬ 
 coats” (55), it is the discourse that does the work: all ironic, the Chris¬ 
 tian drive for a purified woman, the poetic drive for a saintly one, the 
 notion that the female body is always already enclosed by its own 
 whoredom, that the female self has been bought and sold: this is not 
 experience, this is the deployment of meaning through a cultural semi¬ 
 otics so dense that there is no subjectivity undefined by its power, no 
 self except what can be annihilated in language. I have only a few 
 moments to glance at the poem “Edge,” where the lyric subject revises 
 Medea: 
 
 The woman is perfected. 
 
 Her dead 
 
 Body wears the smile of accomplishment. 
 
 The illusion of a Greek necessity 
 
 Flows in the scrolls of her toga. 
 
 Her bare 
 
 Feet seem to be saying: 
 
 We have come so far, it is over. 
 
 Each dead child coiled, a white serpent. 
 
 One at each little 
 
 Pitcher of milk, now empty. 
 
 She has folded 
 
 Them back into her body as petals 
 
 Of a rose close when the garden 
 
 Stiffens and odours bleed 
 
 From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. 
 
 The moon has nothing to be sad about. 
 
 Staring from her hood of bone. 
 
 She is used to this sort of thing. 
 
 Her blacks crackle and drag. 
 
 [Ariel 84) 
 
The Stuttering I 157 
 
 This is a sure reversal of standard tropes and discourses signifying 
 “woman”—motherhood, the garden, the moon, a perfect body, and the 
 most pointed of all: the refusal of sentimentality or poignancy. 
 
 What we see in Plath is the desire to articulate a vision whose antag¬ 
 onism is not immediately neutralized. This is, I would claim, a politi¬ 
 cal poetry, and occurs even when the poems are not thematically 
 “about” politics—and, and this is more surprising, given the years in 
 which these were written, even when they turn pointedly away from 
 history toward a problem of the symbolic. Plath’s claim on our atten¬ 
 tion is that her poetry never grounds its excess in any familiarizing 
 referentiality, but makes its lyric subject stutter always toward some 
 thing it knows but cannot say. (Even our past notions of feminism fail 
 at times, since hers is not a text of “active resistance” but of representa¬ 
 tional guerrilla warfare.) Her poetry is always concerned with what it 
 cannot articulate; that is the “edge” it cuts. From “The Colossus,” the 
 title-poem to her first volume: 
 
 I shall never get you put together entirely. 
 
 Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. 
 
 Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle. 
 
 Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. 
 
 Thirty years now I have labored 
 To dredge the silt from your throat. 
 
 I am none the wiser. 
 
 Nights, I squat in the cornucopia 
 Of your left ear, out of the wind. 
 
 Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. 
 
 The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. 
 
 My hours are married to shadow. 
 
 No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel 
 On the blank stones of the landing. 
 
 [The Colossus 20-21) 
 
 This is the poetry of a resistance we have only begun to know. We do 
 not have a politics of the lyric until it takes this poetry into account. 
 
The Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism: 
 Reading Tingling, Reading Gunn 
 
 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 The acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possibilities, you 
 hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself any control over the 
 presentation of these experiences and so could be true to them, was by trying to 
 render the infinite through the finite.—Thom Gunn, 1979 
 
 The attractiveness and the distinction of the late Thomas Yingling’s 
 Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text derives from Yingling’s perfor¬ 
 mance of multiple, indeed self-divided, and even self-contradictory, 
 critical intentions. On the one hand, Yingling’s hook opposes the tran¬ 
 scendental and universalizing impulse in Crane’s poetry, and insists 
 on returning the poet’s opaque flights of sublimity to the specific sit¬ 
 uatedness of Crane’s psyche and of his historical time and place. Si¬ 
 multaneously, on the other hand, Yingling’s book, in spite of its love 
 for historical specificity, endorses a sublime universal of its own: dia¬ 
 critics, writing, the global textual nature of desire and of the world. But 
 there are critics, I submit, in whom self-contradiction enables a tern- 
 
Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism 159 
 
 peramental and intellectual generosity toward their objects, and a ca¬ 
 pacity for fine analysis of them, in comparison with which a more 
 rigorous critical coherence is disabling and cold. 1 count Yingling high 
 among critics empowered by their internal divisions. How these divi¬ 
 sions operate, and how they articulate a critical and artistic moral for 
 our moment, is best spelled out in the relation of Yingling’s book to its 
 subject’s mortality. 
 
 Yingling represents Crane’s suicide as the product of America’s ha¬ 
 tred of homosexuality and of Crane’s misprision of the true, purely 
 textual or diacritical, being of both eros and language. Amounting to a 
 critical therapy for Crane’s willful embrace of death, the critic’s work 
 tries to rescue Crane from suicide, and from the causes that drove 
 Crane toward it. Yet the rescue attempt shows the critic’s self-division 
 already in play. For Yingling, Crane’s death certifies the intransigence 
 and integrity of the poet’s homosexuality. In spite of homophobia. 
 Crane’s desire triumphs in death, using mortality to stop the limitless 
 play of diacritical differences, to make a fixed stand on behalf of a 
 determinate homosexual desire. Crane, figured by the critic on one 
 page as the agent of a “cruelly disabling and isolating vision of homo¬ 
 sexuality” (Yingling 189) can be refigm-ed, within the space of a few 
 pages, as the agent of “a reclamation of homosexuality and the body as 
 well” (193). Consider, for a further example of the critic’s analytic self¬ 
 division, Yingling’s rhetoric as he estimates the success of Crane’s “Re¬ 
 pose of Rivers”: “[I]f [Crane’s] life had by the summer of 1926 already 
 become a plague from which he could not escape .. . the poem never¬ 
 theless bravely signals [his] refusal to surrender his project for homo¬ 
 sexual centrality.... Crane’s lyrics,... it is not hyperbolic to say, at the 
 cost of his life... allow homosexual subjectivity to be heard as authen¬ 
 tic experience" (144; emphasis added). In this way of putting it, the 
 poet’s life is the long disease of American homophobia; and the life 
 begins to mend when, matched with the poet’s integrity in standing 
 true to his experience and desire, self-elected death brings Crane all 
 the vital things he wanted from both his sexual and his poetic callings. 
 
 Nevertheless, while the critic pictures Crane’s life as a death from 
 which his mortal demise was a poetic rebirth of life, the critic has other 
 ways of pictming the phenomenon. He prefers the other ways. In what 
 I’ve described, the close mingling of life and death in Crane, their 
 phoenixlike incarnation of each other, suggests a phenomenology or 
 even an ontology that Yingling decidedly distrusts. While tracing 
 Crane’s contradictions, Yingling does not appear to want his critical 
 
160 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 stance to be their replica. He trusts instead in his intellectual com¬ 
 mitment to a consistent and all-unifying claim that life and death, 
 homosexuality and heterosexuality, and all the contrasts and differ¬ 
 ences or all the similarities that we can name, are not substances or 
 identities or realities, whether delimited or intermingled; they are 
 words and texts, rather, infinitely in process and discursive. How does 
 Yingling most intend to save “Repose of Rivers” from its author’s (and 
 its own) besetting mortality? He does so by moving, rather like the 
 poem, from what seems specific and delimited to what is less so. He 
 designates a specification or limitation of experience or meaning in the 
 poem only to move beyond, up onto the peak of a theoretical and 
 sublime semiosis. Although Yingling admits, to begin with, that in 
 “Repose of Rivers” “the homosexual text,” as he puts it (already he 
 signals homosexuality not as a definite practice but as an open dis¬ 
 course), is “obscure,” he declares, in spite of the obscurity, that it is 
 “right to read [the poem] as a text of homosexual authorization” (139). 
 He declares this in order to allegorize the poem as “a model of homo¬ 
 sexual subjectivity that moves beyond ... family romance and its strict 
 duality of masculine and feminine identities” (139). Significantly, the 
 allegorization moves not only beyond these strict dual identities, but 
 beyond homosexual identity as well. Designating “Repose of Rivers” ’s 
 climactic audition of wind flaking sapphire as a figure of homosexual 
 inspiration, the critic—to judge from what he says earlier about Crane’s 
 “Voyages”—also must hear the sound as the inspiration of language 
 understood “not as a medium of incarnation” (103), and not as a me¬ 
 dium of identification, but as one of resounding “difference, of diacrit¬ 
 ics, of writings” (103). Homosexual authenticity is not found in bodily 
 sexual practice, or in identity, but in one sole “authenticity”: diacrit¬ 
 ics. The enfranchisement of homosexuality takes place out on the lim¬ 
 itless ocean that is language, blown upon by the boundless winds of 
 words. On the freedom of the seas of difference, the critic rescues the 
 poet’s drowned body and desire from the limitations of the conven¬ 
 tionally identifiable, literal, and fatal ocean. The means of rescue from 
 mortality is theory. In the liberty of theory, moreover, rather than in 
 homosexuality “per se,” there is the approximate realization of “the 
 unmarried epic” and “the homosexual sublime,” the phrases whereby 
 Yingling names the objects of Crane’s baffled quest. 
 
 The sea of textual differences serves many life-saving purposes 
 in Yingling’s analysis. It is the point of repair from narrow and life- 
 threatening false distinctions and oppositions in which Crane is said 
 
Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism 161 
 
 by the critic (unlike the critic?) to be invested: a false division between 
 poetic universality and historical specificity; a falsely straitening op¬ 
 position of homosexual love to all other love; a false distinction be¬ 
 tween mind and (homosexual) body. When, in a spirit said by Yingling 
 to be antithetical to “Repose of Rivers,” Crane wrote “The Broken 
 Tower,” the writing was the prophecy of his suicide, for according to 
 Yingling “The Broken Tower” gives way to Crane’s conviction that 
 homosexuality is a failure of life, because it cannot become the “pure 
 being” (182) a punitive patriarchal Other demands that it be. In “The 
 Broken Tower,” we are told, the poet tragically loses his nerve to live in 
 the inevitable allegory that is language and desire. Accordingly, Ying¬ 
 ling says, “The Broken Tower” is a text in which “autobiography be¬ 
 comes an act of death” (185), for life is eternal allegoresis, according to 
 the critic; whereas death is simply the end. 
 
 It is here, however, in the attempt to construct out of a theory of dia¬ 
 critics a realm of vitality and homosexuality safe from death, that Ying- 
 ling’s contradictions poignantly show through. Yingling’s picture of 
 Crane’s willful wandering into death designates modernist poetics’s 
 supposedly mistaken idea about language as the crucial instrument 
 of Crane’s self-destructive error. The assumption of Hart Crane and 
 the Homosexual Text is that modernist poetics amounts to a stub¬ 
 bornly wrong attempt to displace language in two erroneous direc¬ 
 tions, toward two impossible “places”: toward a mystifying, language- 
 transcending reference point; toward illusive limitary incarnations 
 (the word made flesh) and determinate, fixed moments of being or 
 meaning. The critic insists that Crane might have overcome his errors 
 by a more proper address to displacement. The more proper form is 
 poststructuralist: it avoids language’s illusive tendencies; it recognizes 
 the unlimited character of signification, albeit without mystifying the 
 infinity of discourse. Still and all, the question arises: how can one tell 
 what is proper from what’s improper? The critic, even as he discrimi¬ 
 nates good forms of displacement from bad, himself gives in to uses of 
 the bad kind. Crane’s death, used by the critic as a limitary fact, dic¬ 
 tates, delimits Yingling’s interpretation of “The Broken Tower,” so that 
 the poem must he identified as an unbridgeable contrast with “Repose 
 of Rivers,” as the seal of Crane’s death—his very suicide. And yet “Re¬ 
 pose of Rivers,” whose mode of modernist linguistic displacement 
 makes its status as authentically homosexual text uncertain and ob¬ 
 scure, as the critic admits, is read by Yingling simultaneously (and 
 self-contradictorily) as if a transparently clear homosexual writing and 
 
162 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 a transparently identifiable homosexual being shine through the ob¬ 
 scurity. But the critic’s improper displacement, it turns out, enables a 
 brilliant reading; just as Crane’s improper displacement of language 
 produces brilliant poems. Limitation, an inhibition of restless diacrit¬ 
 ics, distance from safety, and closeness to death are not (after all) the 
 enemies of life. 
 
 Now in making these demurrers my intention is not to mortify Ying- 
 ling, whose loss to me remains personally and intellectually wrench¬ 
 ing. It had been my intention to propose and debate these contra¬ 
 dictions with Yingling in life. I trust he would have allowed and 
 welcomed the debate, on the basis of an exchange of letters I had begun 
 with him in 1991, as well as on the basis of another facet of Hart Crane 
 and the Homosexual Text, one that strikes me as the real reason for the 
 theory there, a basis that the theory makes possible, but is separable 
 from. Indeed it is the theory in Yingling’s criticism that I think is mor¬ 
 tal and that I propose does not possess the secure vitality we all have 
 trusted for so long in doing our collective work. What is more secure 
 and vital than theory in Yingling, what makes one (I hope) generously 
 note the contradictions inherent in his trust in the diacritical life-line, 
 is an alternative strategy: his attempt to use his book to recreate him¬ 
 self as Crane’s advocate and other self. The theory in Yingling func¬ 
 tions like a Yeatsian mask, for the purpose of getting the personal man 
 in place. And the person under the critical persona is a Yingling-Crane, 
 whose especial source is Crane’s feisty letters, the ones in which— 
 beginning when he is nineteen years old, when he reveals to Gorham 
 Munson that the object of a recent love affair is not a her, but a him— 
 Crane stands up, now plainly, now giddily and extravagantly, against 
 homophobic pressure to hide the nature of his eros. Although Yingling 
 actually criticizes the extravagance, in a curious extension of homo- 
 phobic hurt; indeed, although Yingling rebukes Crane for misunder¬ 
 standing and misusing the sublime freedoms of the diacritical uni¬ 
 verse, he nevertheless situates himself both as the writer of Crane’s last 
 letter to his culture, and as still Crane’s friend—a critic-lover-friend, 
 the one friend and lover who does not abandon Crane even as he crit¬ 
 icizes him. 
 
 Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text is subliminally but most pow¬ 
 erfully a correspondence with Crane; the accompanying theory, the 
 necessary envelope and postmark. The book on Crane gives us a critic 
 whose reading of his subject’s way of loving is simultaneously the 
 defense of the critic’s own way, and is therefore the projection of a 
 
Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism 163 
 
 same-sex love affair into the living space in which the critic evokes his 
 poet. While such love affairs, whether “hetero” or “homo,” are likely to 
 be always the stuff of criticism, it is notable how often the erotic link is 
 buried or anesthetized in the current deployment of “theory,” even the 
 queerest. Queer theory’s logically faultless subversion of homosexual 
 “identity” has tended, ironically, to put eros at a distance from crit¬ 
 ics’ efforts to recapture it. The irony is tellingly described in James 
 Creech’s Closet Writing/Gay Reading. In Yingling the contradictions at 
 the level of theory, forecasting the state of critical affairs described by 
 Creech, seem the signs of a palpable personal love at work. For, after 
 all, what characterizes the critic’s love is fixation, the intellectual 
 equivalent of the dogged devotion of an erotic commitment, which in 
 its repeated stress on keeping both the beloved and love in existence, 
 is far more limited, limiting, and unfree than the limitless textuality 
 the devotion is alleged to approximate. Finiteness of attachment, cir¬ 
 cumscription of focus, an involuntary self-limiting, are observable 
 characteristics of eros. Our will to free homosexuality from fetters is I 
 think our aim, as much as anything, to respect and dignify the non¬ 
 idealizing, non-infinitizing characteristics of all sexual love. We free, 
 paradoxically, the power of erotic constraint over us. In Crane, one 
 should notice, every expansion of meaning is always pulled back into 
 the narrows of formal control; precisely the tension, the pressure of 
 constraint upon inspiration and sex gives Crane’s poetry its charac¬ 
 teristic difficulty and its characteristic eroticism. The source of Ying- 
 ling’s expansive theory is the same tension between the limitlessness 
 of the realm of theory and the fixated, limitary, eroticized attachment 
 at its heart. 
 
 In drawing a line from Yingling to Creech, I’ve already hinted at the 
 way Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text in retrospect appears to 
 have predicted current developing—and divided—intellectual trajec¬ 
 tories in queer cultural studies. The intellectual force of Lee Edelman’s 
 Homographesis shows the still-vivid power of the poststructuralist 
 mode that was Yingling’s most conscious inspiration. Yet alternative 
 inspirations in his study of Crane—the enacted valuation of something 
 that is more personal and modest than “theory,” of something no less 
 submissive to history and fate than rebellious against them—predicts 
 the emphases of such recent work as Teresa de Lauretis’s The Practice 
 of Love and Leo Bersani’s Homos. The title of de Laiu'etis’s book insists, 
 after all, that the consummation of theory’s flights must take place on 
 the more limited ground of practice; it is no accident, moreover, that 
 
164 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 the insistence accompanies the critic’s attempt to model lesbian prac¬ 
 tices on fetishism—on, that is, an erotic form of constraining fixation. 
 And Bersani’s brilliant summing up of queer theory’s fortunes ends 
 with a celebration, apropos of Jean Genet’s Funeral Rites, of homo¬ 
 erotic wastefulness, of homosexuality’s refusal of productive and re¬ 
 productive duties; in short, of its closeness to mortality. The tension 
 in Yingling’s book between allegiance to the limitlessness of theory 
 and the limitariness of eros is one essential origin of present critical 
 dehates. 
 
 For putting things in this way about the development of criticism, 
 my authority is not queer theory per se, however. My authority is nei¬ 
 ther “theory” nor “literary criticism,” but poetry (the supreme theory, 
 arguably). I would have tried to persuade Yingling that my reading of 
 his self-divided dynamics is not unjust, that it has some corrobora¬ 
 tion in contemporary gay poetics, by having asked him to meditate 
 on Thom Gunn’s Jack Straw’s Castle and The Passages of Joy (both 
 pre-AIDS volumes) as well as on The Man with Night Sweats. My re¬ 
 quest would have fully acknowledged, to begin with, the explicit pres¬ 
 ence in Gunn’s poems of the poet’s poststructuralist consciousness of 
 the textuality of his realm. The much-cited poem “The Menace,” for 
 example, which is about the threatening aspects of sex between leath- 
 ermen, proposes—with the help of an embedded excerpt from Gregory 
 Bateson’s writing on playful, “textualizing” displacements of denota¬ 
 tion—that a semiotized eros can use play to liberate a fetishized homo¬ 
 erotic maleness from, as the poem says, the strenuous dullness of its 
 limitations (Gunn 340). Yet what is finally remarkable about Gunn’s 
 poem is that its expansive diacritical play with menace, which would 
 appear to push back the border of death by expanding this semiosis 
 that is life, contracts, and returns the homosexual players to limitation. 
 And the return is cmiously blessed, as if the play—in spite of its trans¬ 
 formative value—had been an exercise in the personal, loving submis¬ 
 sion to the limits rather than the expansive opportunities of sexual 
 love. Whereas in Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text the critic’s 
 appeal to the limiting specificity of historical and cultural situations is 
 only a moment in a movement toward an unfixed expansion of tex¬ 
 tuality, in Gunn what is unfixed is only a moment in an opposite 
 direction. Already in his earlier poems Gunn lays the groundwork for 
 the way in which The Man with Night Sweats takes on power from 
 pathos: the pathos of homosexuality and friendship working as a form 
 of mortal limitation, mortified by inherent constraints on loving and 
 
Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism 165 
 
 living even as they acknowledge the new twist in mortification pro¬ 
 duced by the present American moment of history and disease. Ying- 
 ling’s impulsive, nontheoretical doubling of Crane and loving of him 
 parallels Gunn’s picture of the intimate, mutually limiting stress that 
 eros, life, and death place upon each other—a stress that makes it diffi¬ 
 cult to designate life, love, and death as widely contrasting realms, in 
 the way attempted by Yingling’s more deliberate aims, dazzled as they 
 are by the unavowed idealizing and infinitizing of life by theory. 
 
 Gunn’s model for the narrowing of the difference between life’s and 
 love’s expansiveness, especially in the forms of critical-semiotic spec¬ 
 ulation and of poetry, and life’s and love’s limitation (no matter what 
 historical specifics contextualize the limitation), is given more cen¬ 
 trally than in “The Menace” in another poem from The Passages of Joy, 
 “The Exercise” (331-32). Like “The Menace,” “The Exercise” is a con¬ 
 ditioning poem; an uncanny rehearsal of habits useful for learning the 
 stress of the new historical limits that are endured in The Man with 
 Night Sweats. The speaker of “The Exercise,” caught up in a transac¬ 
 tion among the weather, a suburban landscape, and poetic inspiration, 
 says “Though the wind was like / impulse, it was not impulse. / If I was 
 formed by it, I was formed / by the exercise it gave me. / Exercise 
 in stance, and / in the muscle of feeling. / I became robust standing 
 against it” (332). Robust health is celebrated in the poem, but the de¬ 
 velopment of strength even in the pre-AlDS era turns out to have its own 
 frailty: for one thing the development is painfully slow. Although the 
 wind is a figure for “the swiftly changing” (332), what the wind plays 
 on is slowly changing. Inspirations, however invigorating, are also 
 mortifying, tardy in turning into endurance or grace. And the grace of 
 endurance is inseparable from one’s enduring limits. The exercise— 
 whether of breathing or writing—is, to be sure, a glad one, and tingles, 
 the poem says, “with knowledge” (332); but the path of gladness and 
 knowledge is a narrow passage. 
 
 The Man with Night Sweats traces the narrow passage shared by the 
 advance of life and homosexuality and the advance of death in our 
 historical present. In doing so, it several times echoes Grane’s “Repose 
 of Rivers,” and so furnishes thoughts about Yingling with a relevant 
 endpoint. Gunn’s “To a Friend in Time of Trouble” depicts its ad¬ 
 dressee taking refuge from a plagued city in weekend country labors 
 (408-9). Chores, and climbing, suddenly loose the friend’s mind from 
 grief and rage: life returns in the access of release. But is release expan¬ 
 sion, the slipping of limits? The poem concludes by saying that “the 
 
166 Robert L. Caserio 
 
 released mind” ... “feels the healing start, and still returns, / Riding its 
 own repose, and learns, and learns” (409). The “and learns, and learns” 
 strikes one at first as a form of expansion—and as a form too of trailing 
 off. But when one rereads the apparently morendo phrase as instead 
 the syntax of intensification, the impression of both expansion and a 
 slack unwinding is reversed. “And learns, and learns” figures concen¬ 
 tration-release and repose are the result of lessons deepening under a 
 delimiting impact. Is the learning not learning to lose as well as to be 
 loosed? Learning and losing, loss and release come together; they are 
 not differentiated or singly sublimed; instead, involved, they repose 
 on mortality. This poem, recollecting its origins in homosexual eros, in 
 mortality and in Crane, hugs all three, characterizing life and homo¬ 
 sexuality as a constant nonhomophobic reposing upon one or another 
 vivid limitation. In another echo of “Repose of Rivers,” “A Sketch of 
 the Great Dejection,” a drearily sublime marsh and ocean are ironi¬ 
 cally inspiring: “My body insisted on restlessness / having been prom¬ 
 ised love, / as my mind insisted on words / having been promised the 
 imagination” (Gunn 424). The confluence of these lines is with Ting¬ 
 ling even more than with Crane, for Gunn’s speaker here settles for 
 restlessness and mere words, and surrenders the desire for incarnation 
 and transcendence, as Tingling repeatedly claims Crane should have 
 done. But a contrast with Tingling also shows itself. Gunn’s speaker 
 admits that the fruit of his surrenders is an alertness due to confusion 
 and discomfort. It is not due to what Tingling suggests is the more 
 clear-sighted and more comfortingly expansive result of the diacritics 
 that are said to be more liberating than love. Contradicting this claim, 
 the speakers of Gunn’s latest poems repose not on expansiveness but 
 on plainness (“Death is so plain!” [475], the poem “Her Pet” cries out) 
 and painful constraint. In the spirit of “The Exercise,” the artist in “Her 
 Pet” makes art out of “A strength so lavish she can limit it” (475). Tet it 
 is hard to tell the strength of this art, however lavish, apart from its 
 limitations, which become its shaping and loving medium. 
 
 If there is a contrast between Gunn’s and Tingling’s aesthetic, erotic, 
 and ethical values, it is only in relation to one aspect of Tingling’s 
 makeup: the aspect of the theorist, for whom the theory of discourse is 
 a bulwark against loss and extermination. Is there in this bulwark an 
 echo of heterosexuality’s persistent fantasy of love’s generative in¬ 
 finity, of unending offspring? But there is, I repeat, another Tingling, 
 the personal lover-shadow of Crane, bare of theory. Tingling’s later 
 writings show a Gunn-like dignity, in which the critic is exercised by 
 
Mortal Limits of Poetry and Criticism 167 
 
 the stress of adversity, and labors with pain, like the protagonist of 
 “Her Pet,” “to bring on its end” (475). In the course of the labor, curi¬ 
 ously, a new aesthetic interest emerges; for example, in this posthu¬ 
 mous collection’s reading of Niedecker and Plath. In them, Yingling 
 points out “the poetry of a resistance we have only begun to know” 
 (157; this volume) and “an aesthetic that challenges the reader in a way 
 foreign to many . . . overtly ‘political’ . . . texts” (139; this volume). 
 Although political in significance, the resistance and the challenges at 
 issue are achieved, it appears, by an ascesis of the strength of politics 
 and of theory. Their strength is so lavish that now, for the critic, it can 
 repose on, and limit itself to, poetry alone. In these final expressions of 
 his own pained concentration or repose, Yingling is true, in I venture 
 to say a truly homosexual way, to the mortal limits of love, of criticism, 
 and of contemporary art. 
 
Something 
 
 When I am silent 
 I imagine deep meaning, 
 my skin gone suddenly 
 away from me—into 
 some further sense 
 I cannot follow 
 but with words 
 that sound out the flesh. 
 
 I have become skeptical 
 of motives, paranoid perhap 
 this child who once 
 took his intuitions as a rule. 
 
 Creatvue comforts. 
 
 —Figure it. 
 
 Include in that 
 
 the smiles and hallelujahs, 
 
Something 169 
 
 what was lost before was born: 
 the names of many, the place 
 to be, the aching-after care. 
 
 Wellness hollows us 
 but we are unprepared. 
 
 Water rises in the hollow. 
 
 It is that errancy I seek 
 within myself: to turn and find 
 the world was really there. 
 
Caesura 
 
 Stephen Melville 
 
 Parting, Words 
 
 This essay began as a contribution to an mla panel honoring the mem¬ 
 ory of Tom Yingling, and attempted to do so by pursuing questions 
 about what aids might have to teach us about imaginations of criticism 
 and community. To this question, I wanted to answer (and still do want 
 to answer): nothing. As will become quickly apparent I both do and do 
 not mean this absolutely. What there is to be learned from AIDS is that 
 we die—but this is hardly the “new knowledge” contemporary theory 
 so loves—nor is it clear that it is news to say, as I will, that there is 
 neither criticism nor community apart from this. 
 
 A colleague dies, too young; and that dying has the structure of a 
 sentence, so it is a death not simply premature but also prematurely 
 inhabited. This is and is not the common lot, a singular death, like all 
 deaths; and like all deaths, like each death, it recalls—can recall—the 
 common human exposure to death and to one another. Beyond such 
 bare facts there appears to stretch only the vast gray ground of cliche— 
 “a stereotype block,” says the OED: words whose linkage is automatic 
 
Caesura 171 
 
 and whose inner articulation has been lost. Cliched phrases, variously 
 mumhled, inscribed, or withheld (either in denial or out of respect for 
 what cannot be said)—are those through which something, at once a 
 life and a death—something that definitively escapes its survivors— 
 can nonetheless be acceded to. These phrases and the various genres 
 of eulogy, lament, and apostrophe into which they open do not matter, 
 finally, for their work of representation but for something else, some¬ 
 thing it is tempting to subsume under the linguist’s category of phatic 
 communion, a certain gathering together around an emptiness both 
 semantic and real. These phrases appear as if tokens of a ritual order 
 for which a faith is admittedly lacking; and so also they offer a way of 
 overcoming a certain modern speechlessness before death, a speech¬ 
 lessness that may itself appear as if a symptom of a fall from the grace 
 of some more vital tradition or community. 
 
 Within modernity, “criticism” frequently enough figures as a name 
 either for that fall or for its causes; it is that thing before whose relent¬ 
 less judgment all received forms, traditions, and communities are 
 asked to stand or fall—and I suppose that is reason enough for the 
 strange repercussions arcane curricular debates can seem to have upon 
 the moral fiber of a nation with its own deep stakes in and confusions 
 about the kind of community it is or is not, wants to be, or does not 
 want to be. But criticism has, of course, also been figured as one of the 
 strongest bulwarks against that fall, as a mode of care for and prolonga¬ 
 tion of those values that modernity itself ceaselessly undoes, and one 
 can come to care deeply that the forms of criticism as a mode of appar¬ 
 ent communion remain intact regardless of one’s actual stake or inter¬ 
 est in the culture it presumably preserves and passes on. 
 
 This second figure opens one way of linking together the terms that 
 entitled the mla panel. What they finally add up to is a view in which 
 what is to be learned from AIDS is the terms of membership in the 
 human—which is to say mortal, moral, and cultural—community, the 
 terms of what would then be our mutual belonging and legacy. These 
 terms, this nexus of terms above all, sketch out the familiar outline of a 
 mode of thought of which the academic critical community, increas¬ 
 ingly given over to criticism in the first sense, has become justly and 
 sustainedly suspicious in recent years. So the question would now be 
 about how a community defined by its relation to criticism—if com¬ 
 munity it is—can find a way to acknowledge a debt to something called 
 “the human” and evidently inscribed within its practice, while con¬ 
 tinuing to mark or measure a certain distance from the terms that ap- 
 
172 Stephen Melville 
 
 pear to ground it Eind the phatic reassurances it offers. In what ways 
 can one speak of the legacies—real or metaphorical, moral or mate¬ 
 rial—that one may feel or find oneself asked to bear? 
 
 Out, Living 
 
 It is a familiar thought that modernity is marked and worked by a 
 special relation to death: Descartes’s withdrawal from the world in 
 order to find its proof can be imagined as a form of suicide, a way of 
 thinking the world on the ground of the thinker’s absence from it or of 
 its absence from him—and not simply because he stuck his head in an 
 oven. And Kant’s massive critical effort to establish the grounds of 
 possibility for the world or worlds in which we know and act can 
 appear—as it does in Jay Bernstein’s The Fate of Art—as an extraordi¬ 
 nary act of melancholic mourning. 
 
 In the nearer past, there have been efforts by Robert Jay Lifton and 
 others to suggest that the postwar generation is well understood as a 
 generation of people who defined themselves as survivors of a sort. 
 The thought as I recall it was that the effect of the ongoing fact and 
 presence of “the bomb’’ made the world one that had in principle 
 ended—that is, made the world something whose catastrophe had 
 been survived and that was thus inhabited only posthumously. In its 
 moment—the late sixties and early seventies—this thought seemed to 
 connect in multiple ways with such things as Leon Festinger’s theories 
 of “cognitive dissonance’’—especially as evidenced in the sometimes 
 peculiar, often chiliastic, reactions of those on the fringes of certain 
 disasters, not actually affected by them but close enough to be unable 
 to imagine them simply as someone else’s—thus unable either to take 
 such events on for themselves or to set them aside, unable to determine 
 the terms of their inhabitation of that world. 
 
 Whatever fascination such notions might once have held for stu¬ 
 dents of culture appears to have receded now behind the wash of the¬ 
 ory. And yet they remain interesting descriptions and are perhaps 
 usefully recalled as a part of the background against which current 
 concerns and practices can be figured and which occasionally resur¬ 
 face through them, as for example in the effort to think “the nuclear 
 sublime.’’ More generally, one might note the extent to which a certain 
 rhetoric of survival has penetrated both academic discourse and popu¬ 
 lar culture—both in those theoretical positions that embrace the de¬ 
 scription of one’s victimization—of what one has survived—as a mode 
 
Caesura 173 
 
 of empowerment and in those ever-burgeoning bookstore sections de¬ 
 voted to “recovery” (as if life itself were increasingly lived as damage 
 survived, at once clung to and surmounted). And then too, of course, 
 there is all our ongoing intrigue with things “post-”—whether we 
 take this up theoretically in terms of “posthistoire,” “postaesthetics,” 
 “postmodernity,” and so on, or in the popular terms proposed by Mad 
 Max, Bill and Ted, Neuromancer, and all the movies and fictions that 
 stretch more or less between them. These too have, of comse, their 
 own philosophic background, particularly in that bundle of Hegelian 
 claims that seem to amount to an assertion of something like the end of 
 the world. 
 
 At a certain level, aids seems to repeat or renew all this; it is hardly 
 surprising that the genres of popular culture that have been able to 
 powerfully figure our postapocalyptic situation have shown them¬ 
 selves able to figure AIDS as well. Like Lifton’s bomb, it announces a 
 death within the horizon of which one must live, and like the bomb it 
 shifts “survival” away from the disaster, which cannot be smvived, to 
 those who live not in it but in its light. The disaster it poses cannot be 
 one’s own in that it cannot be survived in the first person; no one, thus 
 far, has been able to escape the wreckage once drawn into it. 
 
 But there are, of course, differences as well; the bomb’s threat is 
 universal extinction and that extinction is, in imagination if not in fact, 
 immediate, aids comes one at a time and its work is not immediate; 
 it comes in the form of a sentence, holding its sufferers in a pecu¬ 
 liar pause or parenthesis like the one given powerful expression by 
 Maurice Blanchot’s crucially ambiguous “arret de mort,” a cusp or 
 ridge in which the end that is death and the suspension of that end are 
 bound together. And it is, of course, from Blanchot that I have taken the 
 term “disaster” as well. One of Jacques Derrida’s readings of Blanchot’s 
 recit unfolds under the title “Survivre,” and, like these remarks, it 
 explores a certain disruption of the lines between life and death, be¬ 
 tween surviving the disaster because one has lived through it and 
 surviving it because one has not. I do not propose to chart all the ways 
 living, living on, and living through can be knotted or unraveled, even 
 in a sentence as simple as the one I’ve just written: what the fabric itself 
 everywhere displays is at once the absoluteness and finality of the 
 distinction between life and death and the constant passage of the one 
 into and out of the other. 
 
 Would it be too much to say that modernity’s peculiar orientation to 
 death, to momning and to living on, has at its heart a certain dream of 
 
174 Stephen Melville 
 
 immunity and immortality, an imagination of the living dead wrho, 
 because at once living and dead, absolutely attached to their own dis¬ 
 aster, hold themselves beyond the grasp of either life or death? And if 
 this is not too much, would it be just to say that this is lived with a 
 particular depth or passion by those who call themselves Americans? 
 Such questions are doubtless too large and too shapeless to permit of 
 serious answering—or perhaps it is America that has become too large 
 or shapeless for their serious posing—although I persist in thinking 
 that something of its m 3 dh remains active in the shapes of thought and 
 action I am trying to bring into view—and about which it is perhaps 
 time to come clean. 
 
 The thought, derived in part from Stanley Cavell and in part from 
 various French philosophers (Blanchot, Derrida, and Nancy, above 
 all), is just that what one might call the contemporary critical com¬ 
 munity is everywhere worked by an extraordinary, radical, and self- 
 certifying skepticism that is not without its roots in the broader forms 
 of life within which it finds itself. This skepticism is extraordinary 
 and radical in that it is more fully lived than thought, and it is self- 
 certifying in that it turns inside a confusion or conflation of life and 
 death that finds its fulfillment in a fantasy of immortality rather than 
 in an acknowledgment of mortality and finitude. As a social theory it 
 plays out in a fantasy in which the mutual attachment of damage and 
 identity figured as survival is taken as adequate to the articulation of a 
 social order that can secure, in melancholic recreation, the vanished 
 mythic goods of “community.” 
 
 Against this, it would be urgent to say that the ever-open passage 
 between life and death such fantasy both draws upon and denies can 
 only ever open toward finitude, can only ever work as exposure to a 
 death that is neither one’s own nor appropriable to one’s self but which 
 is permanently that of the other. So the nothing to be learned from ADDS 
 is the real nothing that is one’s exposure not to what one survives or 
 can imagine one’s self to survive, but to him or her whom one outlives. 
 Learning this nothing would be learning to mourn not as a defense 
 against death and absence but as an affirmation of one’s exposure to it 
 as continuous with one’s essential openness to the other. 
 
 The other is then him or her whom you outlive, with and without 
 whom you live out your days, and this outliving is not accidental but 
 structural—that is to say, it is what it is that there are others. To imagine 
 surviving apart from those you outlive and with whom you are lived 
 
Caesura 175 
 
 out is to imagine a world in which there are no others—even if your 
 imagination is that you are not alone hut surrounded by those who 
 have survived with you. It is a dark dream of posthumous intimacy 
 freed of all distance, freed of the demand for acknowledgment, freed of 
 separation because locked within it. 
 
 Separation is the inescapable condition of community, and there is 
 no greater community to be imagined beyond it: the only question is 
 whether and how that condition is to be acknowledged or denied, how 
 one is to admit or refuse the dispersal of ends and the mutual exposure 
 that is all there is of binding in it. Separation—singularity, as Nancy 
 puts it—is indefeasible, either to be begun from or else to return upon, 
 and against, those imaginations and communities that would turn 
 from it. 
 
 Departments, Of Literature 
 
 I do not, now, expect to find myself in my teaching and writing apart 
 from someone—colleague, friend, or subject of my scholarly concern- 
 dying too soon. I don’t know that this is a new fact in the university, 
 although it is certainly a very old one, so if there has been a certain 
 absence or abeyance it has taken the form of a permission to forget, and 
 the time of that permission has, all things considered, been exceed¬ 
 ingly short. It is tempting to say that this time of absence or abeyance is 
 also the time of the self-forgetting of criticism. 
 
 There is in the professional critical community (by this I suppose I 
 mean a community that imagines the lives within it taking the shape of 
 careers rather than the shape of a constant exposure to dying)—there is 
 in this community a measuring, a habit of measuring, what is living 
 and what is dead in another’s thought or writing as if that were a way of 
 dating it, determining one’s distance from it, and of negotiating each 
 time anew the passage from death to life (bringing, then, a voice, a 
 poem, a work to life). This is a deep and persistent habit: if the human¬ 
 ist terms in which I have cast it now seem alien or outmoded, it is far 
 from clear that the current tendency to cast such negotiations in more 
 overtly political terms offers any serious break with them or with the 
 rage against time and separation they represent. These ways of imagin¬ 
 ing oneself to speak for a community or a tradition conceal an imagina¬ 
 tion of oneself as immortal or outside the world, thus attempting to 
 turn separation into a trope of belonging and radical inclusion. The 
 
176 Stephen Melville 
 
 work of criticism and of reading—of acknowledging one’s exposure to 
 what is other—is the refusal of all such imaginations. It is a way of 
 displaying that interlacing of life and death in the midst of which—by 
 which—what there is of actual community is worked and unworked, 
 rhythmed and sprung. Legacy, thought within the structure of filiation 
 proper to criticism, is neither recovery nor preservation but prolon¬ 
 gation of what is always already and only in separation, the thing 
 Blanchot calls a “work” and can describe only in its unworking, its 
 desouevrement. This would be the shape of solidarity, in time or in 
 community; it would also be why it matters to think as Blanchot does 
 about the death of the author and the life of the work, about what it 
 means that there are objects that can be only as objects of reading, 
 submitted to a scansion in which they do not retmn to themselves. 
 And it would be why it matters to be able to read, as Derrida does, a text 
 like Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a doing and undoing of legacy, an 
 imagination and denial—an institution—of community. 
 
 I do not know why historically we have come to call the elements of 
 our institutions “departments” or “divisions.” What I have come to 
 hear in the names of those departments that cannot find their ground 
 in calculation, application, and the simple transmission of knowledge 
 is a movement no curriculum can contain, a movement even in its 
 origins already ruinous or exuberant: aneconomic, mortal, exposed. 
 
 AIDS, Community 
 
 And have I, in saying all this, said anything about AIDS? I suppose not, 
 so there is perhaps this to be added: 
 
 If death came simply from the outside, as perhaps it does for plants 
 and animals (or at least those animals who have not found themselves 
 taken up into and transformed by the terms of human community), it 
 would be a very different thing, unable to support either ritual or poli¬ 
 tics. But death is in the world as its limit, as the fact of an outside that 
 cannot be touched or entered, even as it installs in the world the dream 
 of occupying that outside. So if death is always punctual, dying always 
 has the form of a sentence—and if dying is a ceaseless murmur, that 
 murmur is nonetheless bent over and over again to the particular peri¬ 
 ods, gaps, and caesuras that make that murmur something other than 
 mere noise. It is in this mutual scansion that death is of the world and 
 does not hold itself beyond representation except by also being held 
 
Caesura 177 
 
 within it. And so it participates in more general vicissitudes of repre¬ 
 sentation. That it does so is part and parcel of its singularity. One 
 cannot ask that death he withheld from representation or that there be 
 no politics of dying, but only that that politics not fail to mark what it is 
 of—a marking that may make of it something more or less or other than 
 a politics and that will, in the end, determine what it is to speak of 
 an AIDS community as it determines what it might mean to speak of 
 any community. Here too it matters to insert a comma, to register the 
 gap—the nothing—that gives the two words and the two things their 
 solidarity. 
 
 Blanchot cites Bataille: No one has the right not to belong to my 
 absence of community. No higher logic intervenes to redeem this 
 string of negatives, to gather up what it disperses into a positive com¬ 
 munity that might then affirm itself on the ground of a common hu¬ 
 manity, and so Bataille’s readers are left to find their way in relation 
 to an absence from which they can neither be excluded nor exclude 
 themselves. And yet Bataille, and Blanchot citing him, clearly mean 
 this to count as a way toward the acknowledgment of how we are with 
 one another. If they are successful in this, it will be because, right 
 failing, we find ourselves faced with the prospect of a naked and un¬ 
 secured obligation to that absence, an obligation that picks us out, one 
 by one, in our singularity. 
 
 Yingling, Tom 
 
 I would like to believe that in saying these things I am saying some¬ 
 thing not wholly foreign to the shape of Tom’s intrigue with Wittgen¬ 
 stein and national bodies and the abrupt emergence of Bataille in his 
 consideration of filmic responses to AIDS. But, in the end, nothing of 
 that kind can authorize my words: I can claim no shared theoretical 
 posture with him, as I can also claim no common sexuality, no shared 
 suffering, no mutual activism, and no deep friendship. We got along 
 well and promised one another more time and never found it—so in 
 the end we shared a stretch of time and space and friends and little 
 more. I have, I dare say, no right to speak of him, and I imagine the 
 absence of that right to be legible in the turns of grammatical person- 
 first and third, singular and plural—that variously mark, elide, or 
 efface a voice that can claim securely neither anonymity nor the ur¬ 
 gency of subjectivity, personal or sheerly human, for itself. Almost 
 
178 Stephen Melville 
 
 nothing, then—a voice attempting to read, too late and under the ob¬ 
 scurest of obligations, the rhythm of a friendship unaccomplished. 
 
 Names, too, are in their way cliches. On the occasion of death, but also 
 in the order of our institutional lives, we often break and reform them, 
 laying straight the lines of filiation and reshaping their apparent empty 
 repetition as species and genus: Yingling, Thomas, finds its place on 
 the roll of the dead and in omr bibliographies. Criticism, it seems to me, 
 works otherwise. It hears in the name something at once solid and 
 fissured with inscription, twisting repetition and heterogeneity, re¬ 
 peating the self in otherness; a form, paradigm, or ruined stereotype 
 of community. What it wants, its way of having and letting go, is to 
 hear the text repeated in its separation from itself: Tom, then—Tom, 
 Yingling 
 
Bibliography 
 
 Abraham, Julie. “I Know What Boys'Like: Tales from the Dyke Side.” Village 
 Voice Literary Supplement []\me 1992): 20-23. 
 
 Adorno, Theodor. Notes to Literature. 1958. Ed. RolfTiedemann. Trans. Shierry 
 Weber Nicholsen. Vol I. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 
 
 -. Prisms. 1967. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT Press, 
 
 1986. 
 
 “Age of AIDS: A Death in the Family.” Village Voice 23 Mar. 1993:13. 
 
 “AIDS: Grin and Bear It, a New Humor Magazine.” Newsweek 15 Apr. 1991: 58. 
 
 Alexander, Benita, and Lorenzo Benet. “Believe in Magic.” People Weekly 
 25 Nov. 1991:59. 
 
 Alonso, Ana Maria, and Maria Teresa Koreck. “Silences: ‘Hispanics,’ AIDS, and 
 Sexual Practices.” differences 1.1 (Winter 1989): 101-24. 
 
 Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards 
 an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben 
 Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.121-73. 
 
 Arac, Jonathan. “F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance.” 
 The American Renaissance Reconsidered. Ed. Walter B. Michaels and 
 Donald E. Pease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 90-112. 
 
180 Bibliography 
 
 Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace 
 Jovanovich, 1951. 
 
 Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987. 
 Ashbery, John. Selected Poems. New York: Viking, 1985. 
 
 “Back to the Bad Old Days.” Time 20 May 1991: 28. 
 
 Bad Object-Choices, ed. How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. Seattle: Bay, 
 1991. 
 
 Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Es¬ 
 says. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. 
 Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-422. 
 
 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. 1980. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: 
 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981. 
 
 -. Mythologies. 1957. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday, 1992. 
 
 Baudrillard, Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. 1978. Trans. Paul 
 Foss, Paul Patton, and John Johnston. New York: SemiotextJeJ, 1983. 
 Beaches. Dir. Garry Marshall. Touchstone Pictures, 1988. 
 
 Benfey, Ghristopher. “Telling It Slant.” New Republic 18 Mar. 1991: 40. 
 Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New 
 York: Schocken Books, 1969. 
 
 Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Metheun, 1979. 
 
 Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. 
 Bercovitch, Sacvan, and Myra Jehlen, eds. Ideology and Classic American Lit¬ 
 erature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 
 
 Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Com¬ 
 parative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern 
 Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991.110-40. 
 
 Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1995. 
 
 -. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (Winter 1987): 197-222. 
 
 Bhabha, Homi. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.” 
 Screen 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 18-36. 
 
 Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. 
 
 Matthew Adamson. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. 
 
 “Bumbling Toward the Nobel.” Time 20 May 1991: 50. 
 
 Burgin, Victor. “Photographic Practice and Art Theory.” Thinking Photogra¬ 
 phy. Ed. Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1982. 39-83. 
 
 Butler, Judith. "The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discur¬ 
 sive Excess.” differences 2.2 (1990): 105-25. 
 
 -. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: 
 
 Routledge, 1990. 
 
 -. "Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse.” Femi¬ 
 nism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990: 
 324-40. 
 
 -. “Letter to the Editor.” AD^Q 12 Apr. 1992. 
 
Bibliography 181 
 
 Butters, Ronald R. “Foreword." Displacing Homophobia. South Atlantic Quar¬ 
 terly [special issue) 88.1 (Winter 1989): 1-5. 
 
 Califa, Pat. “Feminism and Sadomasochism.” Heresies 3.4 (1981): 30-34. 
 
 -. “Unraveling the Sexual Fringe: A Secret Side of Lesbian Sexuality.” The 
 
 Advocate 27 Dec. 1979:19-23. 
 
 Case, Sue-Ellen. “The Student and the Strap: Authority and Seduction in the 
 Class/Room.” Professions of Desire. Ed. George Haggerty and Bonnie Zim¬ 
 merman. New York: MLA Publications, 1995. 38-46. 
 
 Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, 
 Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UT, 1988. 
 
 Cohen, Ed. “Are We (Not) What We Are Becoming? ‘Gay’ ‘Identity,’ ‘Gay Stud¬ 
 ies,’ and the Disciplining of Knowledge.” Engendering Men: The Question 
 of Male Feminist Criticism. Ed. Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden. New 
 York: Routledge, 1990.161-75. 
 
 Creech, James. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chi¬ 
 cago: U of Chicago P, 1993. 
 
 Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge: 
 MITP, 1988. 
 
 -. “Art Acts Up.” Out/Look 9 (Summer 1990): 22-30. 
 
 -. “Right On, Girlfriend!” Social Text 33 (1992): 2-19. 
 
 Grimp, Douglas, with Adam Rolston. AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay, 1990. 
 
 de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse De¬ 
 sire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. 
 
 “Delays That Can Cause Death.” Time 4 Feb. 1991: 69. 
 
 de Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator.’ ” The 
 Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. 73—105. 
 
 D’Emilio, John. Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the Uni¬ 
 versity. New York: Routledge, 1992. 
 
 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1967. Trans. Gayatri Chakiavortv' SpWak. 
 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. 
 
 “Desert Victory.” Newsweek 18 Mar. 1991: 22. 
 
 Dickinson, Emily. “There’s a certain Slant of light.” The Complete Poems of 
 Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston and Toronto: Little, 
 Brown, 1960.118. 
 
 Displacing Homophobia. Ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael 
 Moon. South Atlantic Quarterly [special issue) 88.1 (Winter 1989). 
 
 Dollimore, Jonathan. “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in 
 Wilde and Gide.” Genders 2 (Summer 1990): 24-41. 
 
 Duberman, Martin. Interview by M. L. Cooper. Lambda Book Report 3.8 (1993): 
 10 - 11 . 
 
 Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Ghauncey, Jr., eds. Hidden 
 from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New' York: NAL Books, 
 1989. 
 
182 Bibliography 
 
 Dulles, John Foster. War or Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1950. 
 
 Dunne, Dominick. “Interview with Mapplethorpe.” Vanity Fair Feb. 1989: 
 126+. 
 
 Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Putnam’s, 
 1979. 
 
 An Early Frost. Dir. John Erman. 1985. 
 
 Easton, Richard. “Canonical Criminalizations: Homosexuality, Art History, 
 Surrealism, and Abjection.” differences 4.3 (Fall 1992): 133-75. 
 
 Edelman, Lee. “At Risk in the Sublime: The Politics of Gender and Theory.” 
 Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. 
 London: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 213-24. 
 
 -. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York 
 
 and London: Routledge, 1994. 
 
 -. “The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and AIDS.” South At¬ 
 lantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter 1989): 301-17. 
 
 Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land, and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958. 
 1958. 
 
 Ellis, John. “On Pornography.” Screen 21.1 (Spring 1980): 81-108. 
 
 Epps, Brad. “Sense and Sensibility: Eros, Pedagogy, and (In)discretion in Ana 
 Maria Moix, Esther Tusquets, and Carme Riera.” Paper presented at “Gen¬ 
 der, Sexuality, and the State: A Latino/Hispanic Context Conference.” U of 
 California-Berkeley, 1993. 
 
 Escoffier, Jeffrey. “Inside the Ivory Closet: The Challenges Facing Lesbian and 
 Gay Studies.” Out/Look (Fall 1990): 40-48. 
 
 Fisher, Andrea. Let Us Now Praise Famous Women. London: Pandora, 1987. 
 “The Fog of War.” Time 4 Feb. 1991:16. 
 
 Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. 1978. Trans. 
 
 Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 
 
 Frank, Robert. The Americans. New York: SCALO Publishers, 1959. 
 
 Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 
 1989): 3-18. 
 
 Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New 
 York: Routledge, 1989. 
 
 -, ed. Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. New York: Routledge, 
 
 1991. 
 
 “The Future of Gay America.” Newsweek 12 Mar. 1990: 20-27. 
 
 Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Man on the Dump vs the United Dames 
 of America; or What Does Mr. Lentricchia Want?” Critical Inquiry 14 (Win¬ 
 ter 1988): 386-406. 
 
 -, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. New York: W. W. 
 
 Norton, 1985. 
 
 Gilman, Sander. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Fe- 
 
Bibliography 183 
 
 male Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” 
 “Race,” Writing and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: U of 
 Chicago P, 1985. 223-61. 
 
 Greenberg, David E. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago 
 P, 1988. 
 
 Greenhlatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social 
 Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 
 
 “Grief Counseling for Colleagues of AIDS Victims.” Newsweek 7 Jan. 1991: 61. 
 
 Griffin, Susan. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature. 
 New York: Harper, 1982. 
 
 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Bodies and Pleasures in Queer Theory.” Who Can Speak? 
 Authority and Critical Identity. Ed. Judith Roof and Rohyn Wiegman. Ur- 
 hana: U of Illinois P, 1995. 221-30. 
 
 Grover, Jan Zita. “AIDS: Key-words.” October 43 (Winter 1987): 17-30. 
 
 Gunn, Thom. Collected Poems. New York: Noonday, 1994. 
 
 Habermas, Jurgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project.” The Anti-Aesthetic: 
 Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay, 1983. 3-15. 
 
 Haggerty, George, and Bonnie Zimmerman, eds. Professions of Desire: Gay and 
 Lesbian Studies in Literature. New York: MLA Publications, 1995. 
 
 Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determination of 
 Self in Immune System Discourse.” differences 1.1 (Winter 1989): 3-43. 
 
 Harper, Philip Brian. “Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the 
 Homophobic Impulse in Responses to the Death of Max Rohinson.” Writ¬ 
 ing AIDS: Gay Literature, Language, and Analysis. Ed. Timothy F. Murphy 
 and Suzanne Poirier. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.117-39. 
 
 Hay, Louise. The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach. Santa Monica, CA: 
 Hay House, 1988. 
 
 Hemphill, Essex, ed. Brother to Brother: New Writing by Black Gay Men. New 
 York: Alyson Publications, 1991. 
 
 Hertz, Neil. “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime.” The End 
 of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime. New York: Colum¬ 
 bia UP, 1985. 40-60. 
 
 Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana: U of Il¬ 
 linois P, 1978. 
 
 Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. 1977. Trans. Catherine Porter with 
 Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 
 
 Ischar, Doug. “Household Misappropriations.” Visual Studies Workshop Ex¬ 
 hibit, Rochester, New York, Spring 1989. 
 
 Jameson, Fredric. “Pleasure: A Political Issue.” The Ideologies of Theory: Es¬ 
 says 1971-1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Min¬ 
 nesota P, 1988. 61-74. 
 
 Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. 1975. Boston: Beacon, 1986. 
 
184 Bibliography 
 
 Joselit, David. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Poses.” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Per¬ 
 fect Moment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary 
 Art, 1991. 19-21. 
 
 Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. “True Confessions: A Discourse on Images of 
 Black Male Sexuality.” Ten.8 22 (1986): 4-8. 
 
 Kaplan, Cora. “Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist 
 Feminist Criticism.” Making A Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. 
 Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn. London: Methuen, 1985.146-76. 
 
 Kaplan, E. Ann. “Pornography and/as Representation.” enclitic 17/18 9.1-2 
 (1987): 8-19. 
 
 Kardon, Janet. “The Perfect Moment.” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Mo¬ 
 ment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991. 
 9-13. 
 
 -. “Robert Mapplethorpe Interview.” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Mo¬ 
 ment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991. 
 23-29. 
 
 Kibbey, Ann. The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of 
 Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge 
 UP, 1986. 
 
 Kimball, Roger. “‘Heterosexuality’ and Other Literary Matters.” Wall Street 
 journal 31 Dec. 1992: A6. 
 
 Kinsella, James. Covering the Plague: aids and the American Media. New 
 Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 
 
 Kozol, Wendy. “Madonnas of the Fields: Photography, Gender, and 1930s Farm 
 Relief.” Genders 2 (Summer 1988): 1-23. 
 
 Kushner, Tony. Angels in America, Part 1: Millennium Approaches. New York: 
 Theatre Communications Group, 1993. 
 
 Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. 1973. Ed. 
 Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. 
 
 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantel Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: To¬ 
 wards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. 
 
 Larson, Kay. “Robert Mapplethorpe.” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Mo¬ 
 ment. Ed. Janet Kardon. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1991. 
 15-17. 
 
 Lentricchia, Frank. “Patriarchy Against Itself—The Young Manhood of Wallace 
 Stevens.” Critical Inquiry 13.4 (Summer 1987): 742-86. 
 
 Leo, John. “The Familialism of ‘Man’ in American Television Melodrama.” 
 South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter 1989): 31-52. 
 
 Lesbian and Gay Studies Newsletter. Winter 1989. 
 
 Levinson, Marjorie. “The New Historicism: Back to the Future.” Rethinking 
 Historicism: Cultural Reading in Romantic History. Ed. Marjorie Levinson, 
 Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann, and Paul Hamilton. Oxford and New 
 York: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 18-63. 
 
Bibliography 185 
 
 -. Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays. Cambridge and New 
 
 York: Cambridge UP, 1986. 
 
 Litvak, Joseph. “Teaching and Melancholia.” Paper presented at the Modern 
 Language Association Conference. New York, 1993. 
 
 Longtime Companion. Dir. Norman Rene. Samuel Goldwyn, 1990. 
 
 Looking for Langston. Dir. Isaac Julien. Frameline, 1989. 
 
 Lowell, Robert. Life Studies and For the Union Dead. New York: Farrar, Straus, 
 and Giroux, 1964. 
 
 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. “Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz.’” Trans. 
 Georges Van Den Abbeele. Working Paper No. 2, Fall 1986. Milwaukee: 
 Genter for Twentieth Century Studies, 1986. 16—27. 
 
 -. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff 
 
 Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. 
 MacLeish, Archibald. Conquistador. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. 
 Mapplethorpe, Robert. Black Book. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. 
 
 Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, 
 Adrienne Rich. Ghapel Hill: U of North Garolina P, 1984. 
 
 Mathy, Jean-Phillipe. “Out of History: French Readings of Postmodern Amer¬ 
 ica.” American Literary History 2.2 (Summer 1990): 267-98. 
 
 Matthiessen, Francis Otto. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the 
 Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford UP, 1941. 
 
 -. Rat and the Devil: Journal Letters ofF. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney. 
 
 Ed. Louis Hyde. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1978. 
 
 Mercer, Kobena. “Imaging the Black Men’s Sex.” Photography—Politics, Two. 
 Ed. Patricia Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Watney. London: Gamedia, 
 
 1987. n. pag. 
 
 Michaels, Walter Benn, and Donald E. Pease, eds. The American Renaissance 
 Reconsidered. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985. 
 
 Miller, D. A. “Cage aux Folles: Sensation and Gender in Wilkie Collins’s The 
 Woman in White." The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society 
 in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laquer. 
 Berkeley: U of Galifornia P, 1987. 107-36. 
 
 -. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of Galifornia P, 1988. 
 
 Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Ballantine Books, 1969. 
 
 Mohr, Richard. Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies. Boston: Beacon, 
 1992. 
 
 Monette, Paul. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. New York: Harcourt Brace 
 Jovanovich, 1992. 
 
 -. Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 
 
 1988. 
 
 Moon, Michael, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Divinity: A Dossier: A Perfor¬ 
 mance Piece: A Little-Understood Emotion.” Discourse 13.1 (Fall-Winter 
 1990-91): 12-39. 
 
186 Bibliography 
 
 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Signet, 1987. 
 
 -. Sula. New York: Bantam, 1973. 
 
 Nussbaum, Martha. “A Classical Case for Gay Studies.” New Republic 13 and 
 20 July 1992: 26-35. 
 
 “On the Fence.” Time 14 Jan. 1991:12. 
 
 Other Countries: Black Gay Men Writing Collective. Acquired Visions: Seeing 
 Ourselves Through AIDS. Performance. The Underground. Syracuse, NY. 
 9 Feb. 1990. 
 
 Outweek: The Lesbian and Gay News Magazine. 27 Feb. 1991. 
 
 Paris Is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Academy Entertainment, 1991. 
 Parting Glances. Dir. Bill Sherwood. Rondo Pictures, 1985. 
 
 Patrick, Robert. “Letter.” Out/Look 1.4 (Winter 1989): 6. 
 
 Patton, Cindy. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge, 1990. 
 
 Perloff, Marjorie. “Canon and Loaded Gun: Feminist Poetics and the Avant- 
 Garde.” Stanford Literature ReviewA.l (Spring 1987): 23—46. 
 
 Phillips, Sandra S. “A Body of Work (on Johns Coplans).” Exhibit at the Art 
 Institute of Chicago, April 1989. 
 
 Pink Flamingoes. Dir. John Waters. Dreamland Productions, 1972. 
 
 Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. 
 
 -. The Golossus and Other Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1957. 
 
 Poison. Dir. Todd Haynes. Bronze Eye Productions, 1991. 
 
 Pokorny, Sydney. “The Root of My Obsession with Sandra and Madonna Is 
 Unbridled Lust.” Gay Community News 17.4 (30 July-5 Aug. 1989): 10. 
 Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. 2 vols. New York: Oxford 
 UP, 1986-88. 
 
 Renza, Louis. “A White Heron’’ and the Question of Minor Literature. Madison: 
 U of Wisconsin P, 1984. 
 
 Rich, Adrienne. “Rape.” Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. New York: 
 W. W. Norton, 1973. 44-45. 
 
 Riggs, Marlon. “Unleash the Queen.” Black Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. 
 Seattle: Bay, 1993. 99-105. 
 
 Roman, David. “Teaching Differences: Theory and Practice in a Lesbian and 
 Gay Studies Seminar.” Professions of Desire. Ed. George Haggerty and 
 Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: mla Publications, 1995.113-23. 
 
 Roof, Judith. A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory. New York: 
 Columbia UP, 1991. 
 
 “Saddam’s Endgame.” Newsweek 7 Jan. 1991:14-26. 
 
 “Saddam’s Slaughter.” Newsweek 15 Apr. 1991: 22. 
 
 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Gather and 
 Others.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter 1989): 53-72. 
 
 -. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: 
 
 Columbia UP, 1985. 
 
 -. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. 
 
Bibliography 187 
 
 -. “White Glasses.” Yale Journal of Criticism 5 (1992): 193-208. 
 
 Sekula, Allan. “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning.” Thinking Pho¬ 
 tography. Ed. Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1982. 84-109. 
 
 Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epi¬ 
 demic. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. 
 
 The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Orion Pictures, 1991. 
 
 Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The New Feminist Crit¬ 
 icism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985.168-85. 
 
 Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 
 1988. 
 
 Stein, Gertrude. How Writing Is Written. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. Los Angeles: 
 Black Sparrow, 1974. 
 
 Stevens, Wallace. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” The Collected Poems. 
 
 New York: Random House, 1954. 380-408. 
 
 Sullivan, Andrew. “Gay Life, Gay Death.” New Republic 17 Dec. 1990:19-25. 
 Tagg, John. “The Currency of the Photography.” Thinking Photography. Ed. 
 
 Victor Burgin. London: Macmillan, 1982.110-41. 
 
 Taylor, John. “Are You Politically Correct?” New York 21 Jan. 1991: 32-40. 
 
 “A Tempest in the Test Tube.” Newsweek 18 Mar. 1991: 48. 
 
 Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. 1977. Trans. Stephen Conway. 2 vols. Min¬ 
 neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987-89. 
 
 Tongues Untied. Dir. Marlon Riggs. Frameline, 1989. 
 
 Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: 
 Aldine, 1969. 
 
 Untermeyer, Louis, ed. The Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. New York: 
 Simon and Schuster, 1949. 
 
 Warner, Michael. “From Queer to Eternity: An Army of Theorists Cannot Fail.” 
 Village Voice Supplement June 1992:18-19. 
 
 -. “Walden’s Erotic Economy.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, 
 
 and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: 
 Routledge, 1991.157-74. 
 
 Watney, Simon. “Lesbian and Gay Studies in the Age of AIDS.” NYQ 22 Mar. 
 1992: 42. 
 
 -. “Missionary Positions: AIDS, ‘Africa,’ and Race.” differences 1.1 (Winter 
 
 1989): 83-101. 
 
 -. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. Minneapolis: U of 
 
 Minnesota P, 1987. 
 
 Weber, Bruce. O Rio de Janeiro. New York: Knopf, 1986. 
 
 Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern 
 Sexualities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. 
 
 “When the Doctor Gets Infected.” Time 14 Jan. 1991: 57. 
 
 Wiegman, Robyn. “Negotiating the Masculine.” Diss. U of Washington, 1988. 
 Will, George. “Literary Politics.” Newsweek 22 Apr. 1991: 72. 
 
188 Bibliography 
 
 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. 1931. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago: 
 U of Chicago P, 1980. 
 
 Wolf, Larry. “Letter.” Out/Look 1.4 (Winter 1989): 5. 
 
 Wyschogrod, Edith. Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass 
 Death. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985. 
 
 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Expanding the Categories of Race and Sexuality in 
 Lesbian and Gay Studies.” Professions of Desire. Ed. George Haggerty and 
 Bonnie Zimmerman. New York: MLA Publications, 1995.125-35. 
 
 Yingling, Thomas E. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, 
 New Anatomies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 
 
 Yudice, George. “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival.” Universal Abandon? 
 The Politics of Postmodernism. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Min¬ 
 nesota P, 1988. 214-36. 
 
Index 
 
 Abraham, Julie, 120-21 
 Abstinence, 20 
 
 Academia: as profession, 57-58 
 ACT UP, 46, 55 n.7,128 
 Activism, 21, 43,101,127-28; aca¬ 
 demic, 108-12,116-17 
 Adorno, Theodor, 145-46 
 African Americans: men, 65-75 
 Afrocentrism, 32, 36 n.6 
 Agency, 117 
 
 AIDS: and academic knowledge, 106- 
 7; and confession, 106—7; and in¬ 
 terdisciplinarity, 129; and justice, 
 101-2; and pedagogy, 105-7,129; 
 and seronegativity, 130 
 AIDS memorial quilt, 53-54 
 Althusser, Louis, 150 
 America: as idea, 42-44, 45 
 An Early Frost, 26-28 
 Arac, Jonathan, 109 
 
 Asante, Molefi Kete, 36 n.6 
 Ashberry, John, 145 
 Authority: in cultural criticism, 84-86 
 Autobiography: and the confessional 
 poets, 151 
 AZT, 10 
 
 Bakhtin, M. M., 149-50 
 Barthes, Roland, 64-65, 69, 76 n.7, 
 77-78 n.l4,144 
 Bataille, Georges, 177 
 Baudrillard, Jean, 19,42-43 
 Beaches, 10-11 
 Bedou, Arthur, 77-78 n.l4 
 Benfry, Christopher, 29-30 
 Benjamin, Walter, 47-48, 50, 54 
 Bennett, Tony, 148 
 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 149 
 Bergalis, Kimberley, 18-21, 26, 35 
 n.l 
 
190 Index 
 
 Berlant, Lauren, 28 
 Bersani, Leo, 64,163—64 
 Black feminist criticism, 85-87, 88- 
 89 n.3 
 
 Blanchot, Maurice, 173,176,177 
 Bourdieu, Pierre, 116 
 Bowers v. Hardwick, 99 
 Bubley, Esther, 71-72 
 Burgin, Victor, 69 
 Bush, George, 22, 33 
 Butler, Judith, 25, 34, 51-52, 93,103 
 n.l, 112,114,126 
 
 Cancer, 23 
 
 Canonicity, 109,120-21,123,126- 
 27,137-46; and gender, 138-42 
 Capitalism: postmodern, 42 
 Case, Sue-Ellen, 121 
 Caserio, Robert L., 98-100 
 Gather, Willa, 34, 98 
 Cavell, Stanley, 174 
 Cheney, L}rnne, 31 
 Citizenship, 28,42 
 Clifford, James, 108 
 Clum, John, 98 
 Cohen, Ed, 25 
 Collins, Marjory, 72 
 Commodification, 71; the gay market, 
 140 
 
 Commodity culture, 29 
 Community, 170,174—78 
 Coplans, Johns, 77 n.l3 
 Crane, Hart, 33,159-67 
 Creech, James, 163 
 Crimp, Douglas, 39,105 
 Culture and Value, 23 
 
 D’Emilio, John, 120,123,124,128 
 De Lauretis, Teresa, 163-64 
 Deconstruction, 101 
 Deleuze, Gilles, 16 
 Derrida, Jacques, 15,173,176 
 Desire, 15 
 
 Dickinson, Emily, 150 
 Disciplinarity, 109,126 
 Displacing Homophobia, 95, 97-102 
 Divine, 113 
 
 Dollimore, Jonathan, 51 
 Duberman, Martin, 130 n.4,131 n.ll 
 Dunne, Dominick, 60-61 
 
 Eagleton, Terry, 148-49 
 Easton, Richard, 130 n.3 
 Edelman, Lee, 53,100-2,104 n.6 
 The Elephant Man, 16 
 Eliot, T. S., 150 
 Embodiment, 107 
 Epps, Brad, 130 n.2 
 Escoffier, Jeff, 130 n.2 
 Experience, 22, 48-50, 53-54, 58 
 
 Feminism, 32; and lesbian studies, 
 111 
 
 Feminist theory, 103 n.l 
 Fetishism, 112,116-17 
 Finland, Tom of, 62 
 Fisher, Andrea, 71—72 
 The Fly, 16 
 
 Foucault, Michel, 96, 97,110,115- 
 17 
 
 Frank, Robert, 73-74 
 Fuss, Diana, 49,112 
 
 Gay and Lesbian Studies, 29, 93-102, 
 109-14,117,119-30; category of 
 race. 111, 121-22; elision ofthe 
 lesbian. 111, 120-21; and the hu¬ 
 manities, 130 n.3; and literary crit¬ 
 icism, 99,101-2,104 n.6 
 Gilbert, Sandra, and Gubar, Susan, 
 139,142 
 
 Ginsburg, Allen, 140 
 Grade, Rickson, 71 
 Greenberg, David, 95-97 
 Greenblatt, Stephen, 119 
 Grover, Jan Zita, 39, 46 
 Guattari, Felix, 16 
 Gunn, Thom, 158,164—67 
 
 Habermas, Jurgen, 17-18 
 Halperin, David, 123,131 n.7,131 
 n.8 
 
 Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text 
 (Yingling), 2, 6, 58,158-67 
 
Index 191 
 
 Hay, Louise, 50—52 
 Helms, Jesse, 16, 60, 64 
 Hemphill, Essex, 23 
 Hertz, Neil, 37 
 Heterosexuality, 33 
 HIV, 2, 3, 9,10,19, 20-21, 22, 37; test¬ 
 ing, 104 n.7 
 
 Homophobia, 96-98,114; and the 
 academy, 123; and racism, 99-100, 
 103 n.4 
 
 Homosexuality, 15, 22, 29, 30, 32, 33, 
 59-60, 95-102; and poetry, 158- 
 67; and repression, 109-10 
 Hughes, Langston, 23 
 Hurston, Zora Neale, 87, 88 
 
 Identity, 15,16, 28, 38-39, 50-54, 
 84-85,114; politics, 25, 49,112- 
 13,116-17,126 
 Ideology critique, 2 
 Interferon, 9-10 
 Irigaray, Luce, 97 
 Ischar, Doug, 63-64 
 
 James, Henry, 34 
 Jameson, Fredric, 95 
 Jehlen, Myra, 149 
 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 34 
 Johnson, Magic, 18-21, 35 n.l 
 Joselit, David, 67-68, 70 
 Julien, Isaac, 23 
 
 Kafka, Franz, 16 
 Kaplan, Cora, 139-40 
 Kaposi’s sarcoma, 2, 9 
 Kardon, Janet, 69 
 Kimball, Roger, 123 
 Kushner, Tony, 118-19,128 
 
 Lacan, Jacques, 16 
 Laclau, Ernesto, 106,150 
 Language; as problematic, 144-45 
 Larson, Kay, 66-67 
 Lentricchia, Frank, 142 
 Leo, John, 98-99 
 
 Lesbians: and AIDS activism, 39-40 
 Levinson, Marjorie, 148,153 
 
 Liminality, 125-26 
 Literary canon, 30-35 
 Literary history, 138 
 Litvak, Joseph, 125-26,131 n.9,131 
 n.lO 
 
 Longtime Companion, 16,18, 26-27 
 Lowell, Robert, 141,148,151-54 
 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 45,101-2 
 
 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 59-61, 64- 
 75,82-86, 103n.2,lll 
 Marcuse, Herbert, 64 
 Martin, Wendy, 140-41 
 Mathy, Jean-Phillipe, 43-44 
 Media, 55 n.9,105-6; critique of, 46- 
 50 
 
 Mercer, Kobena, 67, 69—70, 72-73, 
 111 
 
 Michaels, Walter Benn, 149 
 Modernity, 17-18,173-74 
 Mohr, Richard, 131 n.8 
 Monette, Paul, 44, 79, 85 
 Moon, Michael, 29 
 Mouffe, Chantel, 106 
 Multiculturalism, 30-32 
 
 Narrative theory, 99 
 Nation-state, 41-43,45-46 
 NEA,60-61 
 NEH,60 
 
 Niedecker, Lorrine, 139,143 
 
 Parting Glances, 16, 26 
 Patriarchy, 61-63 
 Patton, Cindy, 18,46,105,128 
 Pease, Donald, 149 
 Perloff, Marjorie, 139 
 “phallus,” 62-63 
 Pink Flamingoes, 113 
 Plath, Sylvia, 141,148,151,152, 
 154-57 
 
 Poetry, 137-46; the confessional po¬ 
 ets, 151-52; the lyric, 150; and the 
 political, 147-50 
 Pokorny, Sydney, 76 n.5 
 Pornography, 60-65; and feminism, 
 76 n.5; as opposed to erotic, 70 
 
192 Index 
 
 Positive images, 113 
 Postmodernism, 45,115-16 
 Proust, Marcel, 98 
 Psychoanalysis: and psychiatry, 151 
 Psychology, 33-34 
 PLWA (Person Living With AIDS), 4, 
 18, 26, 49-50; subjectivity of, 22 
 
 Queer, 114 
 Queer Nation, 22 
 
 Race and sexuality, 111-12 
 Racism: in Mapplethorpe, 66-67 
 Rafsky, Robert, 118-19 
 Reagan, Ronald, 42-44 
 Renza, Louis, 34 
 Reproduction, 32—33 
 Rich, Adrienne, 140,147 
 Riggs, Marlon, 111, 122-23 
 Romanticism, 147-48 
 Roof, Judith, 24 
 
 Safe sex, 20 
 Schulman, Sarah, 38 
 Science, 44 
 
 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 26, 29, 33, 
 98,132 n.l2 
 Sekula, Allan, 68, 74 
 Self, 3 
 
 Serrano, Andreas, 75 n.2 
 Shifts, Randy, 41, 45 
 Silence = death, 100,128 
 
 Silence of the Lambs, 113-15 
 Social constructionism, 96 
 Sontag, Susan, 38, 49 
 Stein, Gertrude, 139 
 Stevens, Wallace, 137-38,142 
 Subjectivity, 49-52,139-40; and po¬ 
 etry, 148-57 
 Sullivan, 132 n.l3 
 
 Tagg, John, 77 n.l2 
 Theweleit, Klaus, 29, 93 
 Turner, Victor, 124-25 
 
 University, 124,126 
 
 Van Gennep, Arnold, 125 
 Van Der Zee, James, 77-78 n.l4 
 
 Warner, Michael, 27,123 
 Watney, Simon, 18, 22, 39, 46-47, 
 105-6,129 
 
 Weber, Bruce, 70-71, 77 n.ll 
 Weston, Edward, 76-77 n.lO 
 Will, George, 31,32-33 
 Williams, Tennessee, 98 
 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 17, 23-25, 29 
 Wordsworth, 148,152-53 
 Work, 4-5,57-58 
 Wyschogrod, Edith, 52-53 
 
 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 121-22, 
 127 
 
Contributors 
 
 Michael Awkward is Professor of English and Afro-American and African 
 Studies at the University of Michigan. His most recent hook is Negotiating 
 Difference, published hy University of Chicago Press. 
 
 Robert L. Caserio directs graduate studies in English at Temple University. His 
 most recent essays are “Queer Passion, Queer Citizenship” in Modern Fiction 
 Studies (Spring 1997) and “Casement, Joyce and Pound” in Queer Joyce (Uni¬ 
 versity of Michigan Press). He has just completed The English Novel 1900- 
 1950 (forthcoming from Twayne Macmillan) and is at work on Citizen Queer: 
 Anglo-American Fiction and Democratic Dogmas in the Twentieth Century. 
 
 Stephen Melville, a former member of the English department faculty at Syr¬ 
 acuse University, is currently Associate Professor of Art History at Ohio State 
 University. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself {Minnesota) and Seams: 
 Art as a Philosophical Context (Gordon & Breach), and co-editor of Vision and 
 Textuality with Bill Readings (Macmillan). 
 
 David Roman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern 
 California. His book. Acts of Intervention: Gay Men, U.S. Theatre, AIDS is forth- 
 
194 Contributors 
 
 coming from Indiana University Press. He serves on the editorial board of GLQ: 
 A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. 
 
 Robyn Wiegman, a former member of the English department at Syracuse 
 University, now directs the Women’s Studies Program at the University of 
 California-Irvine. She has published American Anatomies: Theorizing Race 
 and Gender (Duke, 1995) and coedited two volumes. Who Can Speak? Author¬ 
 ity and Critical Identity and Feminism Beside Itself. 
 
 Thomas E. Yingling was Associate Professor of English and Director of Gradu¬ 
 ate Studies at Syracuse University at the time of his death in 1992. Author of 
 Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (University of Chicago 1990), he received 
 his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. 
 
Acknowledgment of Copyrights 
 
 “Wittgenstein’s Tumor: AIDS and the National Body,” Textual 
 Practice 8.1 (Spring 1994): 97-113. Used with the permis¬ 
 sion of Routledge Press. 
 
 “AIDS in America: Postmodern Governance, Identity, and Ex¬ 
 perience,” Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. 
 Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991): 291-310. Used 
 with the permission of Routledge Press. 
 
 “How the Eye is Caste: Robert Mapplethorpe and the Limits 
 of Controversy,” Discourse 12.2 (Spring-Summer 1990): 3- 
 28. 
 
 “Sexual Preference/Cultural Reference: The Predicament of 
 Gay Culture Studies,” excerpted from American Literary His¬ 
 tory 3 A (Spring 1991): 184-96. Used with the permission of 
 Oxford University Press. 
 
 “Fetishism, Identity, Politics,” originally appeared in Who 
 Can Speak? Identity and Critical Authority, ed. Judith Roof 
 and Rohyn Wiegman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 
 1995): 155-64. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of 
 the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the 
 University of Illinois Press. 
 
 “Speaking with the Dead,” originally appeared in Who Can 
 Speak? Identity and Critical Authority, ed. Judith Roof and 
 Robyn Wiegman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995): 
 165-79. Copyright 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Uni¬ 
 versity of Illinois. Used with the permission of the Univer¬ 
 sity of Illinois Press. 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 Yingling, Thomas E. 
 
 AIDS and the national body / 
 
 edited with an introduction by Robyn Wiegman. 
 
 p. cm. — (Series Q) 
 
 Includes bibliographical references and index. 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-1977-2 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8223-1973-X (pbk.: 
 alk. paper) 
 
 1. AIDS (Disease)—Social aspects—United States. 
 
 I. Wiegman, Robyn. 11. Series. 
 
 RA644.A25Y56 1997 362.1'969792'00973- 
 
 dc21 96-40282 CIP