Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial
explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now
addresses homosexuality in America. Hardly a day goes by without
the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with
AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to
authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes,
gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay
columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications,
political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that
straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America.
Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent,
but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be
identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical,
political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust,
within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the
paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the
dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled
out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder
presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable
suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared
into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been
socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk
self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had
wanted to contest. In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on
Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and
on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and
Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire
by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His
spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights
as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the
world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The
gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather
cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse
lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality
itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.
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