Reification
The strategy of the photographic “negative” is one of the responses to the inherent paradox of the relationship between advertising and homosexuality, most notably since the early 1990s. This paradox holds to the advertising discourse. In fact, for advertising agencies, it is a schematic way of attracting the greatest number of potential consumers and, consequently, not to offend any. In this manner, the publicity work can be deconstructed by way of an economic logic (target the largest possible number of consumers) and a
rhetorical
logic (develop a message that reaches the greatest number of those targeted). The latter requires the construction of a politically correct discourse that is at the same time based on the
doxa,
or popular opinion. As such, homosexuality is doubly troubling: on one hand, the gay and lesbian community has emerged as a social group with a large purchasing power that cannot be ignored; on the other, advertising agencies may fear that communication aimed at this group will harm their product’s image, a fear which is nothing more than a reflection of the ongoing homophobia that continues to affect the general social discourse. Unless one adopts a “niche” strategy, that is to say choosing to directly market to a specific social group (in this case, gays and lesbians) without worrying about the masses, the problem becomes one of how “to speak of it without speaking of it.”
Regardless, in the new era, homosexuality and homosexuals become objects that sell, whether it is explicit or implicit, the latter consisting of using certain attributes of homosexuality without identifying them as such. The proposed response to the paradox presented above is, in this case, the “double discourse.” The subject’s reification is, in this way, more radical: homosexuality and some of its alleged attributes of sensuality and sexuality are exploited to present a more nefarious image of a product. Those that opt for this strategy of “radical differentiation” offer a series of clichés that risk insulting and even endangering the gay and lesbian community.
This strategy of the “double discourse” moves the localization of homophobia, which appears not to be in the statement itself but in the minds of those creating the ads. The apparent
tolerance
of homosexuality, which seemed to be a trend in advertising throughout the 90s, can barely hide the queasiness, the phobia even, of advertisers on the question of homosexuality. Admittedly, gay culture is fashionable, and advertisers, always on the lookout for the latest craze, are constantly testing the waters. As a result, numerous commercials and print ads—for Dim (a lingerie and underwear company), Coca-Cola, Minute Maid, and Club Med—use the esthetic codes of the gay community, the festive and trendy connotations of the
gay attitude
. But if asked to confirm this, advertisers would deny it, finding numerous ways to justify their esthetic choices without ever having to admit to the theme of homosexuality.
As for the strategy of “radical differentiation,” it is used by a number of fashion labels that appropriate the image of homosexuality to sell their products. This appropriation is one argument among others in the glamour rhetoric developed by these companies. It was initiated in the late 1980s by Calvin Klein, who wanted to sex up the image of his company. This tendency reached an apex in 2000 with the trend of “porno chic,” whereby companies appropriated the same-sex imagery of gay porn. (Notably, Christian Dior focused many of its advertisements during this time on images of female couples in erotic positions.) Here, homosexuals were employed under the prism of “hypersexuality,” a cliché that purports to explore the nefarious nooks and crannies of sexuality, such as pornography, prostitution, or pederasty. For example, one Calvin Klein campaign suggested a casting session for a porno film: young-adult men are questioned on camera by a man whose face we never see; the tone of his voice, as well as the suggestive nature of his questions, suggests that the (older) interviewer has a sexual interest in the (much younger) models.
But it is lesbians, largely absent from advertising and publicity over the years, who are most commonly represented in advertising’s fantasy of homosexual “hyper-sexuality.” In these representations, the lesbian is the devastatingly beautiful and sensuous woman not unlike the one who populates heterosexual pornographic imagery. Thus, lesbians presented in this way persist in feeding the old male fantasy about female homosexuality: it is no more than an erotic crutch for chauvinistic sexuality. Such same-sex representations do not subvert the heterosexist vision of the world; in fact, they affirm it.
In all, publicity and advertising are riddled with a rampant homophobia which more often than not mirrors the homophobia of our times.
—Samira Ouardi
Chasin, Alexandra.
Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market
. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000.
Commercial Closet Association.
http://www.commercialcloset.org
[US website compiling a large number of advertisements with a gay or homophobic theme] (accessed March 14, 2008).
Leigh, Daniel, Bhat Subodh, and Daniel Wardlow. “The Effects of Homosexual Imagery in Advertising on Attitudes Towards the Ad,”
Journal of Homosexuality
31, nos. 1-2 (1996).
Maingueneau, Dominique.
Analyser les textes de communication
. Paris: Dunod, 1998.
Kates, Steven.
Twenty Million Customers: Understanding Gay Men’s Consumer Behaviour
. New York: Haworth Press, 1998.
Lukenbill, Grant.
Untold Millions: Positioning Your Business for the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Revolution
. New York: Harper Business, 1995.
Minot, Françoise.
Quand l’image se fait publicitaire. Approche théorique, méthode et pratique
. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001.
Mitteaux, Valérie. “Les Marques
gay friendly
mais toujours honteuses,”
Culture Pub
, no. 2 (2001).
Yarts. “Les Gays à la niche.”
http://www.yarts.fr
(site now discontinued).
—Art; Comic Books; Caricature; Cinema; Family; Heterosexism; Media; Rhetoric.
RADCLYFFE HALL, Marguerite
When
The Well of Loneliness
was published in
England
in 1928, poet and writer Radclyffe Hall (born Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall in 1880) was already famous not only for her work
(Adam’s Breed
had received many literary awards) but also for her lifestyle. While her first lover was an amateur singer named Mabel Batten (whose nickname was “Ladye”), who died in 1915, the great passion of her life was for sculptor Una Troubridge, who was married to Admiral Ernest Troubridge at the time they met. An emblem of the New Woman, the feminist ideal that emerged in the late nineteenth century, “John” (as she preferred to be known, except as an author) commonly wore men’s clothing and short hair beginning around 1920, whereas Troubridge had a more feminine demeanor. Both readily frequented chic lesbian circles, such as Natalie Barney’s literary salon in Paris, or Edy Craig’s more remote circle in Rye, England. In 1920, Hall was accused by Sir George Fox-Pitt of immorality for breaking up Admiral Troubridge’s marriage; she successfully sued him for slander. If the couple appeared scandalous in the eyes of the public as a result, both women nonetheless held decidedly conservative political opinions. A convert to Catholicism, Radclyffe Hall’s ideals were very close to that of
Fascism
in the 1930s, and she chose to set up residence in Florence in Fascist
Italy
with Una.
In her first works, such as
The Unlit Lamp
(1924), Radclyffe Hall broached the subject of lesbianism in a veiled manner. She then, however, considered the notion of writing a book on what was known as “
inversion
,” which would reveal the suffering endured by lesbians to the public. Written between June 1926 and April 1928,
The Well of Loneliness
, a melodramatic novel that was greatly influenced by the work of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, retraces the painful destiny of Stephen Gordon, a young, mannish lesbian—the very example of the “congenital homosexual”—whose life was marked by “difference,” solitude, and exclusion.
Published on July 27, 1928 by Jonathan Cape, the book initially received a lukewarm response. But three weeks later on August 19, the
Sunday Express
published on its front page an inflammatory article by its editor James Douglas entitled “A Book That Should Be Banned,” in which he stated: “I would prefer to give a healthy lad or lass a vial of prussic acid [cyanide] rather than this book. The poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.” A photograph of the writer, in one of her most masculine poses, accompanied the article, as if to provide further evidence against the author. Very quickly, the controversy over the book took on a national scale. The ground was fertile: since the end of World War I, there was a common belief that female homosexuality was on the rise. A growing amount of
literature
echoed the positions that were widespread in public opinion: that there were increasing numbers of female bachelors, evidence of a
contagion
rooted, in part, in the feminist movement. The image of the “flapper,” the free-spirited, independent girl who took charge and lived life to the full, was sometimes associated with the lesbian. In 1921, a bill seeking to criminalize lesbianism was passed by the House of Commons, but subsequently rejected by the House of Lords, which ironically argued that it was necessary to preserve the innocence of women who knew nothing of such practices, and whose curiosity could have been aroused by the passage of the law. Within this context, the controversy over Radclyffe Hall’s novel provided an opportunity to make an example.
Following the negative reaction of the press, her publisher Jonathan Cape immediately sent a copy of the book to British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks in order to get his opinion on the novel’s obscene character. On August 21, Joynson-Hicks, reputed for his Puritanism and intransigence, ordered an immediate stop to publication. The following day, the book was removed from sale, but Cape took it upon himself to pursue publication by way of France, through Pegasus Press. Upon their arrival in England, the Parisian copies of the book were seized by customs. The publisher was charged with obscenity and went to trial on November 9, 1928 in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in order to determine whether the books were to be destroyed or not.
Since the beginning of the
scandal
, a number of intellectuals had mobilized in order to defend the book. E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf had thought to publish a letter of protest, but the plan was in part sabotaged by Radclyffe Hall herself, who insisted that the book’s artistic merit be underlined, a point on which many authors displayed a profound wariness. During the trial, despite numerous withdrawals, forty well-known personalities, a good number of them bior homosexual, declared themselves willing to defend the work. It was not to be. After the first witness, writer Desmond Macarthy, had refuted the book’s obscene character, Judge Biron, who had already revealed his hostility, rejected all subsequent witnesses. The defense’s efforts to demonstrate the novel’s scientific and profoundly moral character met with little success. On November 16, Biron declared that the book, which in his opinion referred to “unnatural acts of the most horrid and disgusting obscenity,” was to be destroyed. On November 22, a letter of protest appeared in the
Manchester Guardian
signed by forty-five intellectuals, but to no avail. On December 14, the attorney general, Thomas Inskip, confirmed the decision on appeal.
The Well of Loneliness
had a profound impact on many lesbians who found, in Stephen Gordon, both a symbol and a model. Banned in England until 1949, the book continued to be available in the United States, where it became a bestseller. In France, a play inspired by the novel, published by Gallimard, was presented in Paris, albeit without the author’s consent. Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, profoundly upset by the scandal, chose to leave England in 1929. The rampant condemnation of the novel had marked the apex of
lesbophobia
in pre-World War II England: behind the accusation of obscenity, there was the personal criticism of a woman whose appearance and lifestyle transgressed the hierarchies linked to gender and threatened patriarchal society. However, in the same year that
The Well of Loneliness
was published, Virginia Woolf published
Orlando,
a tribute to her close friend Vita Sackville-West, and Compton MacKenzie published
Extraordinary Women,
a satire about the aristocratic lesbian community, both without issue.
—Florence Tamagne
Baker, Michael.
Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall
. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985.
Cline, Sally.
Radclyffe Hall: A Woman called John
. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998.
Dickson, Lovat.
Radclyffe Hall at the Well of Loneliness
. London: Collins, 1975.
Souhami, Diana.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall
. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.
—Censorship; Contagion; England; Lesbophobia; Literature; Media; Scandal; Wilde, Oscar.
RHETORIC
In the past, homophobic rhetoric was rather simple. Certainly, it had access to a rich vocabulary: sodomite, uranist, fag, queer, poof, lesbo, butch, carpet muncher, dyke, et cetera, but it had a rather rudimentary syntax, reduced to a few
insults
(“Damned queer!”), curses (“May their blood fall upon them!”), and maxims (“All lesbians need is a good fuck”). It never went beyond the limitations of the sentence, for a sentence was all that was needed. Homophobic statements were made, and people agreed with them. Obviously, the simplicity of these statements took nothing away from their strength and efficiency; quite the contrary, in fact. Simply, there was no need to say anything more.
Now, over the past century, and notably in recent years, homophobes have felt the need to improve their rhetoric. Not that it is necessarily more violent or virulent than before, but it is clear that it is now more sophisticated than it once was: its syntax has been fleshed out, its concepts have become more refined. Mostly, it has become more self-conscious, which reveals its new reality in rhetorical space. Until now, homophobic rhetoric was considered not mere opinion but rather the truth, shared by all. In recent years, however, this rhetoric is now challenged on a regular basis, which has caused a certain uneasiness in homophobic discourse, but rather than recede, it has begun to mutate. Specifically, homophobes have modified their linguistic tools in order to continue to justify their presupposed ideology, and to remodel their social image in order to fight their political enemies. Without sacrificing its pathos, fantasy, or emotion, it is now more rational and argumentative. Homophobic rhetoric now has new clothes.