Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (14 page)

So, should progressives stop using analogies? Will they only be effective for conservatives? One of the reasons that analogy is so effective for conserva- tives while it so often fails to accomplish its intended effects in progressive politics is the structure of analogy itself. Christina Crosby (1994) has explored the structuring effects of analogy. Because analogy is a form of metaphor, analogy accomplishes its work through the transfer of properties from one set of terms to another. To describe this movement, Crosby draws on the theory of Ch. Perelman who points out that with metaphors “it is essential, for anal- ogy to fulfill its argumentative role, that the first [term] be less known, in some respect, than the second . . . which must structure the analogy. We will call the [term] which is the object of the discourse the
thème
and the second, thanks to its effecting the [metaphoric] transfer [of meaning], the
phore
of the analogy” (Perelman 4, quoted in Crosby 24). So, in Grillo and Wildman’s ex- ample, sexism is the
thème
and racism is the
phore
, and in the 1993 March on Washington, heterosexism and gay and lesbian rights is the
thème
and racism and civil rights for African Americans is the
phoros
. The legal recognition of racism as a clear wrong that should be remedied through civil rights has ob- viously had a large effect on progressive political discourse. In this sense racism is more well known than sexism or heterosexism. Civil rights protec- tions against gender discrimination were included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act because opponents of the bill thought that it would be impossible to stop

protections against race-based discrimination but that the inclusion of gender might kill the bill (and, of course, protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were not included at all). Thus movements at- tempting to demonstrate to U.S. society that sexism or heterosexism is wrong and should be legally prohibited have in their use of analogies depended upon the development of a particular consensus about racism.

Racism has provided the ground for these analogies, and this means that likening sexism and heterosexism to racism communicates differently than likening racism to sexism and heterosexism. This is not to say that the analo- gy cannot be used in the other directions—that racism is like heterosexism, for example—but what is communicated by this reversal will be different, be- cause heteosexism will provide the ground of knowledge. It is quite clear that in the legal arena to liken racism to heterosexism will have different effects, because heterosexism has no legal standing; the analogy would be obviously ineffective. The two analogies also have different meanings in interpersonal settings like those described by Grillo and Wildman. In some ways it might be effective in a multicultural setting to say that racism is like heterosexism, as an attempt to enable white gays and lesbians to think about racism. But, as Grillo and Wildman report, its effectiveness is limited precisely because white gays and lesbians can understand racism only insofar as it is like heterosexism. The ground of the analogy—in this case heterosexism—provides the mean- ing of the analogy and also sets the limits of this meaning.

Crosby concludes that: “The equivalence created in analogy, then, re- quires that the
thème
have value
relative to
the
phore
.” In other words, the first term is dependent on the second. The two terms are not simply equivalent and they cannot necessarily be interchanged. In fact, the ground of the anal- ogy must be kept stable in order to shift our understanding of the thème. It is because we supposedly know and understand racism and know how to act to prohibit it that our knowledge of sexism can shift. If sexism is like racism, then what was once accepted as an appropriate set of social relations—in which women could, for example, be denied jobs simply because they were women—becomes legally prohibited discrimination. The use of analogy by the organizers of the 1993 March on Washington was intended to accomplish a similar shift. If heterosexism is like racism, then discrimination against gays and lesbians is no longer an acceptable form of social relation. But in each of these shifts, the ground of the analogy—racism—must remain stable when, in fact, the predominant understanding of racism in the U.S. and the social consensus that it is wrong is actually very weak. Progressives argue that sexu- al orientation should be a protected category, like race, but it is hardly as if legal prohibition has effectively protected people of color from racism in U.S.

society. This sense, that the thème of an analogy depends on the ground, is part of what can undercut the feelings of empathy among groups that Grillo and Wildman had hoped to produce. Those who fought for civil rights pro- tections can feel used when their struggles are invoked as the stable ground of analogy without recognition of either the difficulties of those struggles or the continuing fragility of civil rights protections when it comes to race. Thus, it should not surprise us that, for example, in the very same political discourses that invoke and depend on analogy to the domination of African Americans, gay and lesbian politics reiterates this very domination. Advocates of gay and lesbian rights—even as they invoke the analogy—can ignore, marginalize, and exploit the struggles of African Americans, thus reenacting the racism of mainstream American political life.

To return to the topic at hand, we can now see why the claim that queers are like Jews is so effective specifically in conservative politics, i.e., politics that are simultaneously homophobic and antisemitic. Because the thème must have value relative to the phoros, then the question of the domination of queers depends upon the maintenance of the domination of Jews as well. The analogy effectively marks both as appropriately dominated and makes that domination interdependent. Because the interdependence is not simply in- terchangeable, however, to claim that queers are like Jews in a progressive nar- rative is to maintain this dependence on the domination of Jews. So, the claim that queers are subject to domination in the United States in the same way that antisemitism operates, is dependent on maintaining the specific value of the phoros—i.e., the domination of Jews—and the progressive claims of queers (insofar as they are based on this analogy) are also based on the con- tinuation of antisemitism.

The internal structure of analogy, then, makes it particularly effective as a tool to iterate dominations across categories and much less effective in at- tempts to avoid such (re)iterations. In fact, this argument shows how various dominations are linked within discursive structures and how these linkages re- inforce specific domination. Resistance that is dependent on these very same structures is thus unlikely to be effective.

Nonetheless, I do not advocate eschewing analogy entirely. Even in build- ing this argument I have depended on analogies, demonstrating some of the effects of saying that queers are like Jews, by considering what we know about other analogies. In the rest of this essay I will argue for a form of analogy that can recognize the complexity of relation named by it. The mechanism by which metaphoric transfers occur are not simple, because they depend on a fundamental category error. Analogizing queers to Jews violates the categories that might otherwise separate them. This category error is potentially a space

of constraint—it can focus our understanding of heterosexism by constrain- ing our knowledge of antisemitism—but it is also a space of possibility pro- vided that the analogy is used to destabilize the
phore
as well as the
thème
. If, when analogizing heterosexism to racism, we were to destabilize racism even as we changed perceptions of heterosexism, the effects would be quite differ- ent from those that depend on a stable concept of (and, thus, themselves often enact) racism. Similarly, in my analysis above, I have tried to destabilize our understanding of the ground of my own analogy, by shifting our understand- ing of the heterosexism-racism relation. In other words, I have not simply said queers are like Jews just as heterosexism is like racism. I have not left the heterosexism-racism relation intact as a stable ground for the queer-Jew rela- tion. This destabilization of the ground of the metaphor resists both the racist implications of the heterosexism-racism analogy
and
it changes what we think we know about the queer-Jew relation. It demands that we rethink the queer- Jewish relation in a complex manner. It shows that we don’t yet know what it might mean to say, “Queers are like Jews, aren’t they?”

The first question we must ask is: who are the “queers,” and who are the “Jews” that they are like? One way to simultaneously shift both thème and phoros is to play out the relational context of the two terms. Providing con- text broadens the setting of the analogy, so that we can see the breadth, com- plexities, and ambiguities of the relations between the terms. Contextualiza- tion can also allow us to broaden the reach of the analogy beyond the two terms
queer
and
Jew
. In doing so, we can resist some of the limits set by the invocation of the terms alone, thus allowing the ground of the analogy itself to shift. This is the power of what Michel Foucault has called “genealogical” work, and it enables us to ask not just who are the queers and who are the Jews but also how did they come to be so. Are they fully separable? And, how might we bring them together in a manner that both recognizes and resists the limits of each?

I begin my contextualizing genealogies, somewhat paradoxically, by nar- rowing the reach of the term
queer
in order to consider its specific implication in a genealogy of
homosexuality.
I take up this initial specifying strategy so that by the end of this essay I will be better able to realize the potential of
queer
as it might extend beyond
homosexual.
If we hope eventually to destabilize the connections between contemporary invocations of
queer
and the politics of sexuality, and of
homosexuality
in particular, we must first address the homo-

sexual genealogy of queers. David M. Halperin (1995), for example, speaks of “the ability of ‘queer’ to define (homo)sexual identity oppositionally and rela- tionally but not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity, but as a posi- tionality, not as a thing, but as a resistance to the norm” (66). Halperin uses the parenthetical “(homo)sexual identity” to show a relation to queer possi- bility without making the two terms coextensive. This attention to a homo- sexual genealogy of contemporary queers is particularly important because the queer-Jewish relation is historically grounded in and continues to work out of an attribution of complicity between the two specifically in antihomosexual and antisemitic discourses. One way to establish a more positive force to the analogy—one in which the queer-Jewish relation to difference is in play—is to recognize, and then resist, the constitution of their relation within a nega- tive discourse.

As with analogy itself, negative discourse presents us with both constraints and possibilities. For example, Foucault (1980) tells us in
The History of Sex- uality,
volume 1 that medicalized discourse about homosexuality in the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries, while largely “negative” toward homo- sexuality was also part of the constitutive technology for both homosexuality and heterosexuality. John D’Emilio (1983), in the now classic “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” takes a more Marxian view, arguing that medical theories “were an ideological response to a new way of organizing one’s personal life. The popularization of the medical model, in turn, affected the consciousness of the women and men who experienced homosexual desire, so that they came to define themselves through their erotic life” (105).

Both histories raise (although admittedly to a different extent) the ques- tion of the constitutive power of negative discourses in relation to the exis- tence and/or consciousness of those named through the negative.
9
D’Emilio goes on to say, in enumerating the various mechanisms of repression in the postwar period that led specifically to modern “gay identity”: “Although gay community was a precondition for a mass movement, the oppression of les- bians and gay men was the force that propelled the movement into exis- tence. . . . The danger involved in being gay rose even as the possibilities of being gay were enhanced. Gay liberation was a response to this contradiction” (107–8). In D’Emilio’s Marxian terms contradictions within capitalism si- multaneously opened the space for the construction of gay identity, for the possibility of organizing one’s life around erotic activity, and necessitated in- stitutional attempts to repress the possibility of such life organization. Gay liberation as a social movement works to make of this contradiction an open- ing to possibility, to turn its determination into overdeterminations in favor of the possibility of gay life.

What are the complexities of working to form social movement in this space? Not only did the contradiction of antihomosexual discourse form a space in which gay identity could be elaborated, but Foucault would encour- age us to think of the ways in which the discourse of antihomosexuality con- tributed to the content of this new space for gay identity. The space of possi- bility is not a content-free zone; we do not enter it and fashion new possibilities in any way we like. Moreover, by failing to take into account the ways in which negative discourses form the content of homosexual or gay pos- sibility we fail to take into account certain constitutive assumptions that can thereby operate with more power than they might otherwise.

Thus the various mechanisms that D’Emilio names as sites of gay repres- sion become important for thinking through gay possibility in the contem- porary historical moment as we continue to work with the effects of the post- war construction of gay identity. If the contemporary invocation of
queer
at once depends upon but hopes to shift this gay identity, then we must think through the genealogy of both
gay
and
queer.
In describing the discourses that formed gay identity, D’Emilio names what have become since the time of his writing the usual suspects: