Such a distinction, however, must not dismiss the common (at least in Western society) metaphysical vision of the world which understands the acts of social subjects to be a revelation of their inner self. In reality, the impact of shame always exceeds that of the acts that may have caused it; the shameful act then becomes interchangeable with the essence (or image) of its author. Conversely, categories of stigmatized individuals such as gays and lesbians are conscious of their structural social fragility that renders them vulnerable to situations and interactions in which this insecurity can be activated and exploited. The shame experienced by homosexuals is then mutually reinforced by the stigma related to their social identity.
Shame: A Corporeal Emotion
Shame, as a typically corporeal emotion, is in fact a consequence of the contradictory hate found in all forms of racism, which involves people criticizing someone for his own nature (over which he has no control) so that he then blames himself for it while at the same time affirming that he himself is not responsible for it.
Homophobia as sexual racism has a sort of oxymoronic concept at its core: homosexuality as an immoral pathology whereby the homosexual is an incorrigible person to be corrected (confirmed by the reactionary response to
AIDS
as a shameful disease). We understand, as a consequence, that shame is weighed down by this paradoxical feeling of being at fault without having done anything, of feeling simply “out of place,” discredited by one’s own essence. This emotion, tragic in its signification, is that much more intense and cruel when, as is often the case, the awareness of betraying one’s shame to the outside is added to it.
When shame erupts, whether through an intentional or unintentional act by oneself or by others, it is expressed in tangible manifestations of vulnerability and powerlessness, such as blushing, sweating, and shaking. These manifestations represent an urgent and irrepressible wish to disappear from the social scene, to run away and hide; and in a certain way, to suppress oneself: if not, not to be anymore, than at least, not to be there anymore. In other words, shame takes the homophobic stigma at its word: since for this society, a “wrong” sexual orientation makes one’s entire being no longer pertinent, and hence that being looks for a way to revoke itself in a tragic attempt at regression. And since this being sticks to one’s skin, the body tries to achieve this regression (to make itself small; to be discreet) for the sake of the mind. Symptoms of shame express the failure of one’s being to achieve this regression. Everyone, at one time or another, can find themselves in this kind of situation that is so all-encompassing and so humiliating. But for many gays and lesbians, particularly those who do not live in large urban centers and their protective communities, this is real life. Before even being situational, gay shame is an existential shame.
Further, the shame experienced by gays and lesbians is something more specific than the humiliation incurred by other categories of those who are socially or economically dominated. It is not limited to the feeling of being irrelevant socially, or to representing a lack of taste or comfort in social and familial situations, but is also a painful recognition that even in one’s
mode of jouissance
, one is abnormal; that is, in a position linked to the forfeiture and absence of control whereby the subject is at his most vulnerable in his humanity (and if it is a man, in his virility). That said, it is precisely this mode of
jouissance
that is supposed to define, according to the dominating “regime of truth” (as defined by Michel Foucault), a person’s essence. Of course, this focus on
jouissance
has nothing that is “natural”: on the contrary, it is a political construction that exploits the historical development of modesty (there is no shame without modesty) in “civilized” societies, to drive back the practices and persons that do not fit the dominant definition of normality.
Shame is thus total and reductive at the same time. Homophobic attitudes reduce gay identity to an orientation that is solely sexual and makes the sexual, thought of in terms of tendencies and of drives that are always more or less associated with animal acts, the origin of all actions and thoughts of gays and lesbians. Their entire being, then, becomes identified as a sort of “perverse drive.” This is why homophobia does not only consider them as socially inadequate but also, and perhaps even, predominantly immodest. For heterosexist society, homosexuals are in a way “itinerant provocations”: by the very fact that their sexuality is irregular, homophobic attitudes reduce them to nothing but their sexuality, and in doing so multiplies the inappropriateness of the abnormality by the indecency of
exhibitionism
(imposed by the enquiring and hypocritical look of domineering and moralistic people). By being so reduced through this scrutiny, homosexuals find themselves dispossessed of their
privacy
, their intimacy existing only to be ridiculed and symbolically exhibited as a negative example. No matter what gays and lesbians do to “desexualize” their identity, sometimes to the extreme, the end result is always the same: their very presence is an affront to decency and “good manners,” subject to slurs, if not open
violence
.
In the context of someone who is “out of turn” with respect to the system of “normative” sexual development, while at the same time reduced to an animal and sexual drive, facing a society in which the “civilizating process” precisely tends to push the bodily sexual drives back into the sphere of intimacy and privacy (i.e. hidden), homosexual shame is then a privileged rapport with the feeling not only of being dirty, but also being dirty in public, that is, in an inappropriate and shocking situation. The homophobic world projects its own indecency and fascinated voyeurism onto this inverted being, who becomes the phantasmic spectacle of a dirty
jouissance
, and imposes on him the social humiliation of a symbolic nudity—nudity that is in reality both produced and evaded by the very look that undresses him, all the while accusing him of
scandal
. Shame is the result of gays’ and lesbians’ internalization of this dominant vision of themselves that reduces their being to a nude body which exhibits itself and its private organs, this body that possesses an animal drive, and a drive to dirtiness. It is the manifestation of a form of bodily allegiance to the idea that what is revealed about them (or threatened to be) returns them to something fundamental in the definition of their character, and that this “something” in his body or mind should or should have remained hidden. More radically, shame extorts the gay subject with the belief in the myth that there is really “something” to hide or reveal. Homophobia’s strength is to create, at the same time and in the same move, shame of this “thing” and the thing we should be ashamed of.
Gays & Lesbians Between Shame & Pride
Through reductions, rejections, and threatening mechanisms, and their conscious and unconscious anticipations, shame directs gays and lesbians to become invisible by hiding themselves. Not in the sense of privileged invisibility reserved for dominant forces of the universe, whose identities are a given, and who do not have to tell of themselves or admit themselves (never “Mommy, I am heterosexual”); this invisibility is that of the “good soldier,” the one who sticks so much to the landscape that he ends up part of the social furniture. The invisibility stigma that gays incur is altogether different: it is the invisibility of oppressed, inhibited, inexpressible, unthinkable identities. The one who would prefer that none of that existed and had never existed. This way, if pride makes even more sense for gays and lesbians than for blacks (from whom they borrow the concept historically), it is that their invisibilization by shame has been one of the main means by which symbolic domination has been exerted upon them. The construction of gay identity, either personally or collectively, works precisely to resist this mechanism. Gay pride aims to regain gay identity by subverting the stigma of homosexuality, as much private as public, and by disarming its critics by reclaiming the identity originally assigned to it by homophobic society (the word “queer” is a good example). Pride is thus first and foremost a political strategy, and those who see it as simply misplaced narcissism demonstrate a refusal to face the facts and mechanisms of oppression. A mobilized gay and lesbian community serves not only as a means to political mobilization but also, more on a daily level, as protective shelter that allows gays to reconstruct their identities away from the domineering hierarchy whose beliefs, when internalized, produce shame and self-hatred.
Some, such as François Delor, however, insist on certain perverse effects of the pressure to feel pride, which can in turn be shameful; for gays and lesbians who cannot be proud, a shame arises from the fact of being ashamed. But how can one give shame its dignity back and not reduce it to a strictly negative side of identity without putting oneself on the side of oppressors by defending a reactionary discourse? If we really are children of shame, is there a way to remove ourselves from this matrix without at the same time being blinded by the slighting of our shameful origins? To help solve this dilemma and bring about a new perspective on gay shame, one should take note of the paradox at its heart: on one hand, it is another insidious form of the heterosexist order, with all its laws and hierarchies; on the other, it is a founding experience of gay and lesbian subjectivity, if not positive, then at least productive.
If it is shame that constitutes us, it is also shame that connects us: entering shame is at the same time acknowledging what we are, who we are, and to whom we are joined through the common experience of the homophobic social order. The just valorization of pride must not lead one to forget one’s whole emotional life lived in shame or in the voids of oppression, of the perverse eroticization of its instruments and agents (which could be a way to disarm opponents and initiate a process toward pride, as Genet said) for the social and political awakening that this shame and the marginality that it imposes helps to produce and nourish. Just as pride always bears the mark of its shameful genealogy (“One is always a little ashamed of being proud of being gay,” writes Guy Hocquenghem), shame, when fully assumed, when one ceases to be ashamed of being ashamed, contains a form of paradoxical pride which, explains Eribon, could constitute the starting point for self-reinvention toward something like our freedom.
—Sébastien Chauvin
Bourdieu, Pierre.
Méditations pascaliennes
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1997.
Delor, François.
Homosexualité, ordre symbolique, injure et discrimination: Impasses et destins des expériences érotiques minoritaires dans l’espace social et politique
. Brussels: Labor, 2003.
Douglas, Mary.
De la souillure
. Paris: La Découverte, 1992.
Elias, Norbert.
La Civilisation des moeurs
. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1973.
Eribon, Didier.
Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet
. Paris: Fayard, 2001.
Goffman, Erving.
Stigmates
. Paris: Minuit, 1963. [Published in the US as
Stigma
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963.]
Hocquenghem, Guy.
Le Désir homosexuel
[1972]. Paris: Fayard, 2000. [Published in the US as
Homosexual Desire
. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1993.]
Katz, Jack.
How Emotions Work
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999.
Kaufman, Gershen, and Raphaël Lev.
Coming out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives
. New York: Main Street Books, 1997.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve.
Epistemology of the Closet
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990.
Warner, Michael.
The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
. Boston: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000.
—Abnormal; Closet, the; Exhibitionism; Heterophobia; Heterosexism; Privacy; Rhetoric; Suicide.
Shepardhepard, Matthew
Unfortunately, the tragic death of Matthew Shepard (1976-98) was, on the surface, nothing extraordinary. Homophobic murders are common in the United States (and in many other countries such as Mexico and Brazil, for instance), and numbers provided by the FBI seem to suggest that such murders are on the increase (even though this worrisome trend may partially be explained by the fact that figures are collected in a more systematic way and, moreover, victims and/or families are less ready than before to keep silent).
But what would have otherwise been just another news item became instead a major media event. It aroused reactions of sadness and compassion all over the country, and even internationally; at the same time, homophobic discourse became more violent and hateful, with certain groups claiming that Shepard would perish in the flames of Hell, as would any homosexual person. It became a political event as well: beyond LGBT organizations, many citizens felt personally connected to the case. President Bill Clinton himself said he was deeply shocked by this terrible act of violence, and the debate over homophobic hate crimes was discussed on a national level: specifically, should homophobic crimes be included in the category of hate crimes, and be subsequently condemned in the same way as racist and anti-Semitic crimes? Finally, it was a moral event, in which self-reflection led to a wake-up call of sorts; perhaps for the first time, the whole country was confronted with the idea that the real scandal was not homosexuality, but rather homophobia itself. In that sense, the murder of Matthew Shepard brought about a sort of symbolic rupture in America.
On Tuesday, October 6, 1998, twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard, a political science student at the University of Wyoming, was at the Fireside bar in Laramie. Two young men approached him claiming to be gay and suggested that he come with them in their car. Together, they drove outside the city limits to a remote rural area where both men violently attacked him, bound him to a gate, tortured him, cut his face, crushed his head, and left him for dead. Eighteen hours later, a cyclist came across Shepard’s bound and brutalized body, at first mistaking him for a scarecrow.