Abstract
Given the resurgence of scientific studies on the etiology of homosexuality in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, this article considers the effects these studies had on contemporaneous queer filmmakers. By using the subject of criminality as a way to talk about homosexual causality, queer films of the 1990s illustrate that contemporary scientific studies on homosexuality were historically and politically situated in relation to cultural anxieties about other forms of deviance. This article focuses on films that dissect the hetero-normative tendency to amalgamate forms of deviance in order to distinguish between the diseased and the healthy. Such products of New Queer Cinema highlight this amalgamation of criminality and homosexuality in order to challenge demands by the LGBT community of the 1980s and 1990s for “more positive images” in film. This article argues that queer filmmakers have manipulated the image of the queer criminal to usurp the medical tendency to biologize and pathologize the notion of queer transgression. In such a way, queer films that enthusiastically dramatize the queer outlaw perpetuate myths about homosexuality in order to dissect and discredit them.
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Endnotes
1 See, for example, William A. Henry III, “Born Gay?” Time (26 July 1993): 36–9.
2 As Patton argues, “AIDS has provided a sophisticated screen for constituting and reconstituting identities, and a deadly opportunity to link specific institutional practices with both gay assertions of self-knowledge and new-right assertions that homosexuality is an object of scientific knowledge.” Importantly, if race had once served as a quasi-genetic metaphor for visualizing and policing difference, HIV, as a form of genetic interference, now provides the vessel for essentializing differences. In an interview with the editor of the right-ish periodical New Dimensions, right-wing AIDS expert Gene Antonio explains why HIV antibodies don’t stop the virus. The interviewer is confused and believes that people who get HIV are, due to drug use or homosexual practices, intrinsically weak. Antonio explains that ‘even if you had a healthy immune system and you got a transfusion of AIDS-infected blood, you’re dead.’ They continue:
ANTONIO: …Once you’re infected with the virus, you’re always infected. The virus incorporates itself into the very genetic material of cells, so that all subsequent progeny cells are going to be infected.
ND: It’s actually altering your genetic identity.
ANTONIO: Exactly. That’s a very good way of putting. You are now a permanent, genetically stamped AIDS-carrier (154–5).
3 LeVay acknowledged in the Science article that this variable made his findings less conclusive.
4 For opposing essentialist and constructivist arguments about homosexuality, see (respectively) Stephen O. Murray’s Homosexualities (London: U of Chicago P, 2000) and David Halperin’s 100 Years of Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 1990).
5 See also Murphy’s latest book on this topic, Ethics, Sexual Orientation, and Choices about Children (2012).
6 Murphy adds, “On the one hand, these reports have evoked durable worry that discovery of any biological components of sexual orientation will be used prejudicially against gay men and lesbians in programs of discrimination and diminishment. On the other hand, Simon LeVay, for one, believes that this research works to advance the moral and social prospects of gay people. LeVay says that biological research shows that being gay is a natural behavior and, therefore, something that one can accept in oneself and other people. This kind of enthusiasm about the meaning of biological sexual orientation research is shared by some gay legal advocates who see important implications in the domain of the law, for example, in civil rights that depend on fundamental interests or immutable characteristics,” (165). He continues to describe this “schizophrenic social reception” and the competing attitudes to etiology studies by stating, “A bifurcated reception of sexual orientation research is not new to this era. Lillian Faderman has pointed out that biomedical research on gay people in the early part of this century divided opinion in the emerging U.S. lesbian community. Some lesbians of that era embraced that research with enthusiasm, finding in it an explanation for their erotic interests and a locus for themselves in nature. They were at least favorably enough disposed to the science to participate as subjects in research. It was also a gay man who set in motion Evelyn Hooker’s psychological study of gay men. At the very least, sexological research had the effect of publicizing the widespread existence of men and women with homoerotic interests, which was to the advantage of gay people looking to learn more about themselves,” (165).
7 See LeVay’s Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (1996), especially the introduction (5–7) and Chapter 13, “Science Fiction-Science Future?” in which he states that one’s “concerns about future abuses of scientific findings are certainly warranted,” (225).
8 Sinfield’s work was largely influenced by historian Dennis Altman’s book The Homosexualization of America and the Americanization of the Homosexual (1982) and the writings of queer theorist Sedgwick, both of which propose that gays have intentionally envisaged a minority model because they have followed the precedent set by the Black Civil Rights movement, which offered the dominant paradigm for political activism.
9 See Jennifer Terry 1997 and Terry 1999.
10 Referencing the very long history of this very kind of scrutiny, Murphy also writes, “History is replete with all sorts of unfounded scientific projects and claims regarding matters of race, gender, intelligence, and sex. Science has been prejudicially applied, that is, to categories central to how people make judgments about personal and social worth. Prejudice and calumny are always looking for support from the sciences, and whole cultures have gambled on social experiments grounded in scientific reports having every appearance of truth,” (11).
11 See, for example, Udo Schuklenk et al., “The Ethics of Genetic Research on Sexual Orientation” (1997) and Edward Stein, “Choosing the Sexual Orientation of Children” (1998). See also by Edward Stein: Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy (1992) and The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (1999).
12 For Tolins’s motivations for writing the play, see his “A Playwright’s Insight And Warning” (1993).
13 Davis also makes the claim in this essay that disability studies, as it is understood, might be the best way with which to understand other forms of first and second wave identity politics. His argument is that racial studies, sexuality studies, gender studies, criminality studies, and so forth, have all invoked and been used under the rubric of medical and corporeal isolation and fragmentation. To that end, disability theory, entering its brand-new second wave of identity politics, as Davis asked us to be mindful of in this piece, might actually be the ultimate umbrella with which to include, not just those who are physically disabled—and not just those who have been subjected to a clinical gaze—but more specifically, queers themselves. Davis writes, “I am arguing that disability can be seen as the postmodern subject position for several reasons. But the one I want to focus on now is that these other discourses of race, gender, and sexuality began in the mid-nineteenth century, and they did so because that is when the scientific study as humans began. The key connecting point for all of these studies was the development of eugenics. Eugenics saw the possible improvement of the race as being accomplished by diminishing problematic peoples and their problematic behaviors—these peoples were clearly delineated under the rubrics of feeble-mindedness and degeneration as women, people of color, homosexuals, the working classes, and so on. All these were considered to be categories of disability, although we do not think of them as connected in this way today. Indeed, one could argue that categories of oppression were given scientific license through these medicalized, scientificized discourses, and that, in many cases, the specific categories were established through these studies” (304).
14 For more on the veiled link of violence and homoeroticism in Hollywood pictures, see Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1987).
15 This potential threat to the hetero-normative discourse of the criminally and biologically constructed homosexual also finds its counterpart within gay discourse, most largely, in those queer activists and gay men who stress the culpability and responsibility of sexually active gay men in the era of AIDS to practice sex safely. As critics such as David Halperin, Michael Warner, Simon Watney among others have articulated, the concern, worry, and fear over the potential for unprotected gay sex at times levels against the gay person a literally deadly implication for the direction of his sexual desire. AIDS activist Larry Kramer, famously being perhaps one of the most vocal lambasters of his fellow queers, writes in his recent The Tragedy of Today’s Gays: “Make whatever excuses you can to carry on living in your state of denial but this is the fact of the matter. I wish we could understand and take some responsibility for the fact that for some 30 years those fucking without condoms have been murdering each other with great facility and that down deep inside of us we knew what we were doing. Don’t tell me you have never had sex without thinking down deep that there was more involved in what you were doing than just maintaining a hard-on” (Kramer 2005, 55).
16 For example, in From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law, Martha C. Nussbaum writes: “Projective disgust is shaped by social norms, as societies teach their members to identify alleged contaminants in their midst. All societies, it appears, identified at least some humans as disgusting. Very likely this is a stratagem adopted to cordon off the dominant group more securely from its own feared animality: if those quasi humans stand between me and the world of disgusting animality, then I am that much further from being moral/decaying/smelly/oozy myself. Projective disgust rarely has any reliable connection with genuine danger. It feeds on fantasy, and engineers subordination” (Nussbaum 2010, 16). Nussbaum’s use of the terms “smelly” and “oozy” provide a further exemplification of the ways in which gay desire, gay visibility, and gay rights fluidly make themselves known in the conceptions of many audiences. That her focus is on the law only exacerbates the way in which the threat of criminality and juridical danger speaks to and is made more apparent through epidemiological rationales associated with homosexual desire, etiological or otherwise.
17 Ultimately, it is Genet’s criminal deviance that marks him as an ideal inspiration for Haynes, in much the same way that such figures have for other queer cinaestes. Derek Jarman, for example, in producing his book version of Edward II, includes the following phrase in three lines: “CONSENTING GAY SEX/IS NOT A CRIME/CRIME” (Jarman 1993, 130). While Jarman suggests that some forms of gay desire are not crimes, he is nevertheless unabashedly attached to the very criminality that is wedded to questions of sexuality. Hence his repetition of the word “crime.”
18 The flashbacks representing the youthful exchanges between Broom and Bolton take as their aesthetic inspiration the work of another French artist—a pair, to be exact. If Genet is the narrative motivation, then the photographer/graphic-artist couple of Pierre et Gilles are its visual touchstone (Ardenne 2007).
19 Ellis, in his study The Criminal, also isolates three particular types of criminals that he believes inform homosexual identity: the political criminal, the criminal by passion, and the insane criminal (1–3). For Haynes, it seems the political criminal, the criminal by passion, and the insane criminal are all one in the same, bearing in mind the fusion of homosocial order, homosexual desire, and queer counterculture.
20 Genet’s philosophy that homoeroticism necessitates stigmatization underscores the vignette. Gay film historian Richard Dyer has noted that queer and gay filmmakers usually invoke the memory of Genet as a way of highlighting the “sexual celebration of masculine violence” (Dyer 1977, 89). Rainer Werner Fasbinder’s Querelle, for example, forgoes a faithful adaptation of Genet’s work of the same name, and opts for an evocation of erotic atmosphere. Dyer has also commented that Genet often functions as a concept rather than as an actual filmmaker and author to whose body of work one can allude: “There is Genet… and there is Genet” (Dyer 1990, 47).
21 Michael Moon, in A Small Boy and Others, has referred to the “perverse” and “horrific” qualities of Anger’s films with some admiration as follows: “Anger’s precocity was the first very notable fact of his own career; the story of its beginning reads like one of the tales of always-premature, ‘perverse’ initiation I have been considering. Left on his own one weekend by his parents when he was 17, Anger, no doubt fulfilling the many suburban parents’ worst nightmare about their offspring, made a film starring himself about a 17-year-old boy who is ‘picked up’ by a gang of sailors and raped and disemboweled by them. That the atmosphere of the film is lyrical and witty rather than horrific suggests that Jean Genet might have had little to teach this boy-filmmaker about ‘perverse’ desires and their representation” (Moon 1998, 30). Moon’s fusion of Genet with Anger provides an aesthetic trajectory that finds its latest manifestation in Haynes’s body of work, which echoes Genet and Anger.
22 Roland Wymer, in his study of the films of Derek Jarman, noticed this exact fusion of homosexual desire and menacing criminal physicality in a range of other twentieth-century male homosexual artists, including Pier Paolo Pasolini, Yukio Mishima, Francis Bacon, and Robert Mapplethorpe. For him it is “an intriguing psychological phenomenon but it is surely, at least in part, ‘historical’ in that it involved an internalization of social disapproval (the degree of which is historically variable), leaving a residue of guilt which no amount of iconoclastic aggression can entirely eradicate. It is in this sense that as one of the script’s scene headings declares in large capitals, ‘LAWS MAKE NATURE’” (Wymer 2005, 153). For Wymer, the embracing of the criminal culpability of homosexual artists suggests at once a manifestation of their own personal self-criticism, but on the other hand reveals an empowering reappropriation of that kind of guilt.
23 There is a spanking scene in Haynes’s Superstar (1986), as well as a detailed rumination on the subject of spanking in his short film Dottie Gets Spanked (1993). In the latter film, a young boy idolizes a female television sitcom star, whose husband spanks her in one episode. In turn, the boy develops fantasies about spanking.
24 Early criminologist Cesare Lombroso provides an historical and juridical backdrop for these theories and feelings that make themselves known in “Hero.” He writes in his famous text Criminal Man, “Nearly every type of mental abnormality contributes in some way to criminality and, as a statistician such as François Magendie observes, in fact determines the particular kind of crime that is committed. Thus those suffering from epilepsy, alcoholism, and pellagra tend to impromptu murder and motiveless suicide” (Lombroso 2006, 84). Lombroso’s recognition that there is a constellation of criminal tendencies and a mental abnormality that occasions, or at least reveals, those ideas finds its manifestation not just in the subjects of his work in the first part of the twentieth century, but also in queer politics and queer cinema more recently. Lombroso is, of course, famous for making the claim, too, that “senile and palsied criminals often exhibit sexual tendencies inappropriate for their age, including homosexuality” (84). If criminality is fused with sexual desire in the wake of AIDS and etiology studies and queer cinema, it is not unique in that regard. Like the painful reunion of homosexual clinical identity as contagious, so the juridical estimation of homosexual subjects seems to have wrapped the twentieth century in its own forms of painful reunion.
25 The subject of homosexuality in Hitchcock is one that has been studied by numerous scholars—in particular William Rothman, D.A. Miller, and Robert J. Corber. Corber’s In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America and his more recent Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema offer thorough analyses on the suspicious intersections of homosexuality, espionage, and deviance in Hitchcock’s work, suggesting a problematic relationship between the auteur and his queer subjects. William Rothman, in his book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, suggests that Hitchcock’s relationship homosexuality is “complex.” For Rothman, the presence of homosexual subtext has often less to do with the actual sexual encounters or desires that are happening between individuals, saphophillic or otherwise, but rather with the potential for menacing, for threat, or for suspicion attached to ulterior motives. What Hitchcock frequently referred to as the MacGuffin in his plots, or the red herring, or the misleading moment, we might also consider ironically within his films to be the homosexual subtext. Strangers on a Train, Rope, The Lodger, Marnie, The Birds, and of course Norman Bates in Pyscho—Hitchcock’s canon is full of countless examples of covert and semi-overt moments of homosexual desire. Rothman, pontificating on this fact, states, for example, “I believe that there is no major figure in a Hitchcock film who takes himself to be a homosexual. There are men bound together in mutual denial of the love of women. But if the relationship has a sexual dimension (and surely it does, in Hitchcock’s understanding), these men are not cognizant of their desire. They view themselves not as desiring one another, but as joined in denying all love. That there is no redemptive homosexual love in Hitchcock’s films surely reflects a form of censorship, but not one that can be undone by such naïve expedients as reading ‘homosexual’ for ‘half–caste’” (82–4). Swoon seems to be precisely the kind of film that bears witness to this Hitchcockian tendency, but it also recognizes that this is not limited to Hitchcock himself. Swoon essentially fills the gaps in the cinematic canons, Hitchcockian and otherwise.
26 The historical court record of the Leopold and Loeb trial ironically bears witness to some of these tensions that we see in Kalin’s film. For example, the judge presiding in this case is quoted in the seminal account of the Leopold and Loeb case, titled The Crime of the Century, as saying, “Judge Caverly banged his gavel.” “Gentlemen, go and sit down, you newspaperman. Take your seats. This should not be published!” (Higdon 1975, 15). Indeed, many of the historical narratives of the Leopold and Loeb trial, like the court record itself, reveal the need to censor or (in contrast) to exaggerate focus on the more titillating facts related to the case. Kalin’s Swoon has been argued to be a film that highlights, underscores or foregrounds homosexual and homosocial valences to the Leopold and Loeb trial. But a more fair assessment might be to say that the film foregrounds what is already foregrounded; underscores what has already been underscored.
27 Of the many incarnations the Leopold and Loeb story has taken in print, in stories, on television, in the cinema, and on the stage, the most recent manifestation has been a musical by Stephen Dolginoff, entitled Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story. Not unlike Swoon, the musical takes great pleasure in its fascination and concentration on the romantic and romanticized relationship between the criminals Leopold and Loeb. As preface to his own musical, Dolginoff writes, “Thrill Me: the Leopold and Loeb Story is a dramatic musical about a relationship, not about a murder. The murder is part of the plot of course, but it is not the dramatic focus. The dynamics of the relationship and its twists, turns, manipulations, shifts of power and alternate surprise conclusion creates its true drama and most compelling aspects of the show” (2006, 5).
28 Maureen McKernan, in her best-selling book The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb from 1924, similarly finds—as did newspaperman recounting the trial—that if the tension in the relationship between Leopold and Loeb was the purpose of the trial, it was the tension and relationships between and across the opinions of the alienists that proved to be some of the most fascinating moments of the trial itself. She writes, “The real contest was between the two sets of alienists. For that reason only their testimony is a real and lasting interest. The State’s alienists, who had examined the boys a very short time after the crime, contended that the boys were normal and not mentally diseased… The alienists for the defense, on the other hand, contended that the boys were diseased mentally. The trial became a contest in psychology and for days the air was thick with terms—‘split personalities,’ ‘fantasies,’ ‘subconscious influence,’ ‘basal metabolism’—which the alienists and neurologists of the two sides of the case hurled back and forth before the judge. Only the testimony of these two conflicting groups of alienists is therefore being given in this volume” (1924, 167). McKernan provides just those details and at great length for her readership in 1924, when the trial itself was but a recent memory.
29 John Theodore, in his recent text Evil Summer: Babe Leopold, Dickie Loeb, and the Kidnap-Murder of Bobby Franks, provides for the most recent readers interested in the Leopold and Loeb history a more detailed than ever description of the bonds between the two boys based on desire, petty crime, and fantasy. It seems that Swoon renders in cinema what authors have rendered in print for generations and still continue to do so.
30 It is interesting to note that among the non-Leopold-and-Loeb phrenological diagrams used by Kalin are those of Gregg Bordowitz, queer filmmaker of the short Fast Trip, Long Drop; Frank Ripploh, director of the German, gay film Taxi zum Klo (1980); and Todd Haynes, the director of films such as Superstar, Poison, and Safe. Within Swoon, then, even New Queer Cinema itself is subject to the diagnostic tendencies of the clinical gaze.
31 For a more detailed study of the history of phrenology, see Roger Cooter’s The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1984).
32 Although the field of craniology was originally developed (around 1800 by Franz Joseph Gall) to locate an “organ of the mind,” within a few decades it had been developed by Johann Gaspar Spurzheim and others into a more complex field, called phrenology. While craniologists were concerned solely with brain localization theories, phrenologists were also interested in the application of their science to social causes. In time, phrenology would be adopted by various groups claiming that it could enhance the fields of mental health (see Andrew Combe’s Observations on Mental Derangement, 1831); penal reform (see George Combe’s Remarks on the Principles of Criminal Legislation and the Practice of Prison Discipline, 1854); personality studies (see Joseph Simms’s Physiognomy Illustrated, or, Nature’s Revelations of Character, 1872); criminology (see Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Mind According to Classification, 1911) and racial hygiene (for examples that incorporate homosexuality, see R. Plant’s The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (1986)).
33 The focus on media sensationalism and the marginalization of gay and seropositive persons unites not just the work of queer cineastes like Tom Kalin and John Greyson, but so, too, does their cinematic background and their clinical message. Monica Pearl, in her assessment of New Queer Cinema and its relationship to AIDS political strategy, writes, “AIDS and AIDS activism coincided with new video technology… Two key new queer film makers, Tom Kalin and John Greyson, started out making activist videos. Kalin was an early member of ACT UP and the activist arts group Grand Fury, and in 1988 produced the video they are lost divisional together, the video ‘heavily inflected by an ACT UP vocabulary’” (Pearl 2004, 26). Indeed, the vocabulary of Swoon, like Zero Patience and other films inspired by ACT UP politics and videographic tendencies, speaks to an urgency and an attitude that is at once queerly aesthetic.
34 This imaginative dramatization of the death of Loeb comes from George Murray’s The Madhouse on Madison Street, a sensational history of the early years of the Chicago Herald Examiner (1965).
35 The prejudicial nature of the accounting of certain infamous criminal trials, in particular the Leopold and Loeb case, persists even today. In a review of the recent musical Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story, John Steele Gordon, writing for The New York Times, recounted the biographical details of how Richard Loeb was killed in prison: “Twelve years after his conviction, as manipulative and narcissistic as ever, he was murdered in Statesville Prison Illinois after he propositioned the wrong fellow inmate for sex. Nathan Leopold, a model prisoner, was paroled in 1958, after 34 years. His remorse for the grotesque act that ended one life and ruined his own seemed genuine” (2008, E6). Such judgmental surveys of the biographies and reformabilities of Leopold and Loeb remain as prejudicial today as they did during their trial, in their lifetimes, and in Swoon.
36 News-clippings recounting Richard Loeb’s murder in prison feature headlines that include: “Prison Crimes Reach a Climax in Loeb’s Slaying,” “Series of Violent Acts and Escapes Told,” “Fellow Conflict Slays Slayer of Frank’s Boy,” “‘Loeb Dead Is Better off Than Leopold’ Darrow’s Comment.” These headlines attest to the legacy of Leopold and Loeb’s crime, revealing the sensational bend and sensationalistic desire on the part of readers and writers invested in this crime of the century. Accordingly, Hal Hidgon’s book, The Crime of the Century, takes great joy in describing the almost poetic justice of Loeb’s demise at the hands of James Day. He writes, “James Day worked in the business office of the administration building along with about 60 other men. They left for lunch at noon. They made certain he was last in line to enter the mess hall. As he passed the school washroom, he ducked inside. They later told prison authorities he suddenly was seized with the necessity to go to the toilet. In his 1960 True Detective article, they said Loeb had asked to meet him at the shower at noon and claimed that he had to wait shivering outside in the cold until Loeb appeared to unlock the door. But judging from other accounts, the door to the washroom of was on a corridor rather than leading to the outdoors. Despite varying stories as to how they got there and why they got there, the fact is that around noontime on January 28, 1936, James E. Day and Richard A. Loeb were alone together in the shower for an unspecified amount of time with the door locked from the inside… A short time afterward the door opened again. Richard Loeb staggered through it into the corridor naked and covered with blood. He collapsed into the arms of the first inmate he saw. Captain Austin Humphrey of the penitentiary guards rushed to the scene in time to see Day emerging from the washroom clad only in a pair of trousers. ‘Ever since I’ve been here, Loeb’s been trying to bother me,’ he mumbled to the officer. He handed Humphrey a straight razor” (294). The length to which Higdon takes such relish in describing the circumstances surrounding Loeb’s death is in contrast to the simple sentence he provides one-page later, in his account about the fate of Loeb’s body: “Loeb had between 56 and 58 razor wounds on his body,” Ibid: 295.
37 Indeed, the film’s focus on the indeterminacy of how to adequately label individuals finds its bedfellows in other New Queer Cinema works, like Greyson’s Zero Patience, Haynes’s Poison, and Gregg Araki’s The Living End. In each of these films, the horrific and the intimidating are coupled with the fascination about what could be construed as potentially campy—or at least the vacuum of camp in certain narratives. For a more detailed discussion on the presence of camp in Gregg Araki’s The Living End and in Tom Kalin’s Swoon, see Davis 2004.
38 The difficulty in trying to determine the valor or awfulness of Leopold and Loeb is expressed by Leopold himself in recounting the death of his one-time friend and criminal partner. In his autobiography, Life Plus 99 Years, Leopold writes (rather movingly) about Loeb’s death, “We cover him at last with a sheet, but after a moment I folded the sheet back from his face and sat down on a stool by the table where he lay. I wanted a long last look at him. For, strange as it may sound, he had been my best pal. In one sense, he was also the greatest enemy I have ever had. For my friendship with him had cost me my life. It was he who had originated the idea of committing the crime, he that planned it, he who largely carried it out. It was he that insisted on doing what we eventually did. But that doesn’t, in my eyes, at least, alter the truth of the first statement. Every human being, I suppose, is an infinitely complex mixture. In some it doesn’t show so much; outwardly, at least, they manage to maintain a certain degree of consistency. Whether their inner thoughts and feelings are equally consistent is an open question. But it wasn’t that way with Dick: he was, during all the periods of his life when I knew him, a living contradiction. As I sat now by his cooling, bleeding corpse, the strangeness of that contradiction, that basic, fundamental ambivalence of his character, was borne in on me” (1958, 295–6).
39 As Richard Meyer has suggested in commenting on Foucault’s concept of the “reverse discourse” (which is made literally manifest at this moment in Swoon), “the regulation of homosexuality has provoked unanticipated responses and counter representations, unforeseen pictures of difference and self-conscious stagings of deviance” (10).
40 T. Hugh Crawford, in his article, “Visual Knowledge in Medicine and Popular Culture,” has provided wise comments on the legacies of Foucault’s notion of the clinical gaze in connection to Laura Mulvey’s theories on scopophilia, or the pleasure in viewing. He writes, “What has come from Foucault’s work and the discussion surrounding Mulvey’s essay is a sharp understanding of the complex social relations involved in seeing and being seen. Nevertheless, it is important to avoid a naïve or reductive reading of either Foucault or Mulvey. Neither describe a simple, one-way power relation where those who occupy the position of the observer completely control and dominate those who were observed. Looking at can include looking back” (1998, 31). Lisa Diedrich has also written recently on a similar kind of stratagem about certain films, by writing that “according to Foucault, ‘the speaking,’ which combines a pure gaze with pure language, and which is ‘the servant of things and the master of truth’ has a special place in the history of cinema;” she argues that these “film[s] show something about witnessing, not just in relation to the subjectivity of the person who witnesses, but in terms of what a kind of seeing brings into being historically” (2010, 158).
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Wahlert, L. The Burden of Poofs: Criminal Pathology, Clinical Scrutiny, and Homosexual Etiology in Queer Cinema. J Med Humanit 34, 149–175 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9221-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9221-0