In the light of Butler’s work, it is interesting that Teresa’s homophobic feelings towards her son have been accentuated at a time when she is experiencing intense feelings of neglect by her mother and fury towards her. Butler’s emphasis on the melancholia derived from the inability to mourn the lost object of homosexual love might be relevant here. The homosexuality of her son might, unconsciously, remind Teresa of the homosexual love that was prohibited for her, in her early attachment to her mother. Through her fantasy of sexually touching her son she finds herself in a melancholic identification with her mother as neglectful and abusive enabling Teresa to disavow the loss. She berates herself for her son’s homosexuality instead of berating her mother for the unlived possibility of her homosexual attachment to her.
In Foucauldian terms the prohibition against homosexual attachments in Teresa’s case is partly constituted by her parents’ Catholic discourses of homosexuality as sinful (albeit not made explicit to Teresa). In her account of the subject’s subjection to the heterosexual norm Butler does not specify different forms of prohibition, such as those theorized by Foucault. However she does explicitly challenge those notions of ‘the symbolic’ (I think that she is alluding to Lacan here ((See, for example, Lacan’s claim that ‘It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the
function of the law’ (Lacan, 1966: 67)))) which fail to take into account the multiplicity of ways in which power operates, namely through the reiteration of norms, through demands, and as ‘formative, productive, malleable, multiple, proliferative, and conflictual’ (Butler 1997: 99).
I think that Teresa is at some level grieving the possibility or acknowledgement of lesbian attachments. She has been in a very strong and intimate, non-sexual relationship with a woman for many years and she has always preferred friendships with women to those with men. However, I think that there is a further feature of her homophobia which is crucial, namely her terror of the ‘unknown’, the chasm opened up for her by differences. This is crystallized in her terrified exclamation, ‘Whatever next?’ at seeing the photograph of her son dressed in drag. This has been a somewhat recurrent, albeit not explicit position, which permeates her narrative. In Butler’s terms the ‘unknown’ for Teresa might represent a disavowal of what she wished she could have known, namely homosexual love. However, I think this interpretation does not go far enough.
Homophobia and the Other
Teresa’s mother’s anxiety and self-absorbed preoccupation with numerous phobias has been a source of terrifying insecurity for her. As a child she was also, always, on the alert for the possible death of her father owing to a chronic illness that he had. Teresa feels that neither parent (although she particularly blames her mother) was ever able to protect her from abusive, or potentially abusive, experiences with men when she was young, or support her when she was terrified. That which is ‘unknown’, unexpected, or ambiguous gives rise to intense anxiety. In her curiosity about what was underneath Christ’s loin cloth she both feared and desired knowledge. It was fearful, not only because of her (religious) guilt at being interested in Christ’s genitalia, but because whatever she might come to know is never complete and might be even more terrifying. The radical otherness of the Other constantly threatens her.
Levinas, a Jewish post-phenomenologist who was born in 1906 in Lithuania and lived and worked in Paris until his death in 1995, is centrally concerned in his theorizing with our relation to the Other. It is for this reason that his work has been of interest to those in cultural studies, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies. His work constitutes a major challenge to the prioritizing of the Same over the Other which permeates Western thought.
According to Levinas, ‘The Other is what I am not. The Other is this, not because of the Other’s character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the Other’s very alterity’ (Levinas 1947: 83). The ‘Other’ is not another ‘myself’ but is alterity itself. The Other is encountered in the irreducibility of the ‘face-to-face’ relationship. In his account of the face-to-face encounter, Levinas emphasizes that, ‘[The] face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse’ (Levinas 1961: 66). This speech is unpredictable and touches us from beyond ourselves. The Other can never be possessed or completely understood; it escapes my power. Furthermore, subjectivity does not pre-exist the relation with others, it is constituted through its openness to the Other. Our awareness of the mortality of the face of the Other demands of us a responsibility to them which does not rely on reciprocity, it is an openness to beyond being. This is an ethical position which does not rely on universal principles; justice for Levinas is rooted in proximity, in responsibility towards one another.
For Levinas, what is intrinsic to sexual intimacy is the search for the mysterious. The caress ‘does not know what it seeks’ (Levinas 1947: 89). He challenges the idea that the relationship with the other is of fusion. Nor is it one of knowing and possessing. Intimacy is a relation to the unknown of the future.
Luigi’s homosexuality, for Teresa, symbolizes the Other and it also, as a phobic object, stands in the place of the unknownness of the other. The unconscious references to her fears of the unknown are an important feature of her homophobia. It is not only that she recognizes some of ‘herself’, her prohibited homosexual desire, as an interpretation based on Butler’s theorizing might conclude. What is absolutely intolerable to her also is the radical otherness of Luigi, as a man and as gay. Luigi is also now middle-class (Teresa is working-class) but this difference is not so threatening: his achievements in his studies and work are culturally sanctioned and symbolize her success as a mother. She feels a part of his achievement. His homosexuality, however, symbolizes for her his absolute alterity. Into the absence of what she can know and possess she pours her fantasies. They frighten her, they seem to distance her from him, but they simultaneously bind her son to her. His uniqueness and his alterity, however, resist her power to possess him and to absorb him into the Same and she has murderous thoughts. As Levinas says, ‘I can only wish to kill an existent which is absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyses the very power of power’ (Levinas 1961:198).
Conclusion
The theorizing of Foucault, Butler, and Levinas all offer an important contribution to a consideration of what might constitute homophobia or homophobias. As my presentation of Teresa’s work in psychotherapy highlights, her conscious and unconscious experiences of homophobia or homophobias are shaped by a number of interweaving discourses through which she has ‘lived’ her sexuality from childhood on. Teresa’s associations to Luigi’s homosexuality shift in relation to other unconscious concerns which emerge for her at different moments. Enfolded into Teresa’s homophobia is also a profound fear of the Other as Levinas conceptualizes it. The forms of Teresa’s homophobia are unique to her but my reflections on how they are embedded within her particular socio-historical context might indicate possible directions for interpretations of what is inscribed in the various collective manifestations of homophobia.
References
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