Stewart 7

 

Although I remain not entirely sure why Hacking calls the place occupied by the garçon de café and the homosexual the "autonomous" side of the making-up-people spectrum, I assume that he is referring to the fact that multiple personality is not a "lifestyle." Hacking says, "I suggest that the quickest way to see the contrast between making up homosexuals and making up multiple personalities is to try to imagine split-personality bars."14 This is hard to imagine because MPD is not associated with a set of ritualized practices within concrete social relations, whereas the way to properly exist as queer is precisely to engage in a particular set of practices.

What has gay liberation been about? Significantly, it has been about creating opportunities for homosexuality to be something that is publicly expressed and acknowledged, and therefore allowed into the everyday practices and institutions that define our broad social context. The institutions of marriage, family, parenthood: gay liberation (along with other liberations) has contributed to the struggle going on right now over what these are and who they can legitimately bind. If homosexuality is to be inscribed into institutions like marriage, family, and parenthood, the practices that define them will have to change. These institutions will have to change so that their practising allows the integration of same-sex couples to make sense, to be meaningful, in other words, to be socially recognized and recognizable. The point is that being admitted into those practices is precisely the strategy for legitimizing and normalizing being gay. Being in a position to disrupt and challenge the normalized, naturalized practices like marriage, family, and parenthood is to demand the same meaningfulness, the same social significance, and thus the same status of those who are already defined in and through those institutions, as they exist now. The "gay bar" as an exclusive site for the expression of gayness demonstrates the establishment of a kind of sexuality as something that is played out and practised in public space (however subversive this turns out to be). In short, homosexuals seek to live out the practices and rituals that reify an identity in a way that just engaging in sexual encounters will utterly fail to do. After all, heterosexuality is understood in the least as sexual encounters between people of opposite sex: heterosexuality is set up and practised through an incredibly diverse, rich set of social rituals and general intersubjective relations. The "gay bar" is simply a (successful?) attempt to get a foot in the door of such established, significant social practices. I can mark myself as straight or queer by the way I dress, the social sites I frequent, the vernacular I take up, the kind of gaze I solicit, etc. The point is that to some important extent, the way I appear and the kind of gaze I solicit are what it is to exist as straight or queer. Who I am sleeping with is not my lived out, practised socially recognizable identity.

14 Ibid., 233.

 


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