Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

Eribon Didier Eribon, Lucey Michael Lucey

Description

A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a pathbreaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves.Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors-including Wilde, Gide, and Proust-who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself. Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 07 juillet 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780822385493
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

S E R I E S

Edited by Michèle Aina Barale,

Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon,

and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

Didier Eribon

translated by Michael Lucey

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 0 4

∫2004 duke university press All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan. Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

duke university press gratefully acknowledges the support of the gill foundation, which provided funds toward the translation and distribution of this book.

ouvrage publié avec le concours du ministère français chargé de la culture—centre national du livre. this work was published with the help of the french ministry of culture—centre national du livre.

English translation∫2004 Duke University Press. Réflexions sur la question gayby Didier Eribon ∫Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999.

For Marie Ymonet

To know how to get free is not so hard;

what is arduous is to know how to be free.

andré gide, The Immoralist

Contents

Prefacexi Acknowledgmentsxxiii Abbreviationsxxv Introduction: The Language of the Tribe1

part1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

A World of Insult

13

The Shock of Insult15 The Flight to the City18 Friendship as a Way of Life24 Sexuality and Professions29 Family and ‘‘Melancholy’’35 The City and Conservative Discourse41 To Tell or Not to Tell46 Heterosexual Interpellation56 The Subjected ‘‘Soul’’64 Caricature and Collective Insult70 Inversions79 On Sodomy88 Subjectivity and Private Life97 Existence Precedes Essence107 Unrealizable Identity113 Perturbations124 The Individual and the Group130