Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

  • Auteur: Eribon, Didier; Lucey, Michael; Barale, Michèle Aina; Goldberg, Jonathan; Moon, Michael; Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
  • Éditeur: Duke University Press
  • Collection: Series Q
  • ISBN: 9780822332862
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822385493
  • Lieu de publication:  Durham , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 2004
  • Mois : Juillet
  • Pages: 474
  • DDC: 306.76/62
  • Langue: Anglais
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 André 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.

  • Contents
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction: The Language of the Tribe
  • PART 1 A World of Insult
    • 1 The Shock of Insult
    • 2 The Flight to the City
    • 3 Friendship as a Way of Life
    • 4 Sexuality and Professions
    • 5 Family and "Melancholy"
    • 6 The City and Conservative Discourse
    • 7 To Tell or Not to Tell
    • 8 Heterosexual Interpellation
    • 9 The Subjected "Soul"
    • 10 Caricature and Collective Insult
    • 11 Inversions
    • 12 On Sodomy
    • 13 Subjectivity and Private Life
    • 14 Existence Precedes Essence
    • 15 Unrealizable Identity
    • 16 Perturbations
    • 17 The Individual and the Group
  • PART 2 Specters of Wilde
    • 1 How "Arrogant Pederasts" Come into Being
    • 2 An Unspeakable Vice
    • 3 A Nation of Artists
    • 4 Philosopher and Lover
    • 5 Moral Contamination
    • 6 The Truth of Masks
    • 7 The Greeks against the Psychiatrists
    • 8 The Democracy of Comrades
    • 9 Margot-la-boulangère and the Baronne-aux-épingles
    • 10 From Momentary Pleasures to Social Reform
    • 11 The Will to Disturb
    • 12 The "Preoccupation with Homosexuality"
  • PART 3 Michel Foucault’s Heterotopias
    • 1 Much More Beauty
    • 2 From Night to the Light of Day
    • 3 The Impulse to Escape
    • 4 Homosexuality and Unreason
    • 5 The Birth of Perversion
    • 6 The Third Sex
    • 7 Producing Subjects
    • 8 Philosophy in the Closet
    • 9 When Two Guys Hold Hands
    • 10 Resistance and Counterdiscourse
    • 11 Becoming Gay
    • 12 Among Men
    • 13 Making Differences
  • Addendum: Hannah Arendt and "Defamed Groups"
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index

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