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Faggot = Loser Copyrighted Material. For use only by icpoffice. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.pep-web.org). Studies in Gender and Sexuality 2(1):3–28, 2001 Faggot = Loser Ken Corbett, Ph.D. This essay investigates the projectile force and projective work of the designation faggot by examining a clinical moment during which a child patient called me a “faggot.” Particular attention is paid to the defensive function that “faggot” played in this boy’s effort to disavow smallness and losing. I use his specific dilemma to consider the more general boyhood quest to be big and winning. Focusing on the ways in which boys defend against the anxiety generated by the big–small divide, I argue for the clinical engagement of these defenses, including aggressive protest, bravado, and phallic narcissistic preoccupation. I propose engaging boys in the difficult process of thirdness as a psychic venue that offers a context of growth within which to cathect boys’ anxiety and aggression. Such cathexis stands in contrast to the manner in which boys’ narcissistic preoccupations and aggression are simultaneously prized and neglected through the “boys will be boys” approach to masculinity. Boys’ aggression, which so often conceals their anxiety about losing, is neither adequately contained nor engaged. They are left to adopt a brittle bravado and to relate through control and domination. One routine form of bravado and domination is the contemptuous use of the word faggot. I conclude with some speculative thoughts about how the anxiety of loss that is initially managed through the diffuse projection of “faggot” might develop into a more specific form of hatred: homophobia. Ken Corbett, Ph. D. is Coeditor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He is a member of the New York University Psychoanalytic Society of the Postdoctoral Program. 3 © 2001 The Analytic Press Copyrighted Material. For use only by icpoffice. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.pep-web.org). 4 Ken Corbett here I grew up, it was faggot this, faggot that, faggot any- “Wwhere, faggot everywhere” (Wolf, 1999). The failures and the losses that “faggot” pronounces are multiple: losing hold of one’s proper gender; failing to perform one’s fitting sexuality; failing to be the right race (either majority or minority); failing to display the proper amount of intelligence (either too much or too little); failing to be the proper age (either too young or too old); failing to present popular or idealized social codes, including markers of class and class distinction; failing by virtue of physical injury or loss; failing to embody physical strength; failing to be the appropriate physical size or to exemplify acknowledged beauty; failing to win; failing because of seemingly random slippages or losses.1 The ubiquity of the word faggot speaks to the reach of its discrediting capacity. “Faggot” has become the all-purpose put down. You can be a faggot because you are homosexual. You can be a faggot because you drop your keys. “Faggot” can be a momentary appellation; it can mark how one is perceived as failing at normative expectations (based on hierarchies of excellence and value) at play in any given moment. In Oliver Stone’s 1999 film Any Given Sunday, a third-string quarterback is called into a football game. He vomits as he steps onto the field. Customarily, quarterbacks are expected to create anxiety, not give evidence of feeling it. The coach of the opposing team yells across the field to his competitor, “Hey, Joe, where’d you get the faggot?” “Faggot” can also be a more lasting designation for those who are perceived to consistently fail normative expectations. 1 The ironic use of the word faggot serves to redouble its (already) multiple uses. “Faggot” can be turned on its head and used as the precise opposite of the uses indicated here. For example, “faggot” can be directed at the winner of a competition. “Faggot” also has been rebelliously reappropriated by those for whom the term was intended. They then repeatedly and defiantly invoke its linkage with failure, indictment, and scorn. It can be employed with either defiance or affectionate good humor to celebrate the very losses and failures that are supposed to provoke shame and disgrace. While duly noting these ironic turns, and the manner in which a scorned group may ironically appropriate the very name that is used to humiliate them, I focus within this essay on the nonironic uses of “faggot.” Copyrighted Material. For use only by icpoffice. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.pep-web.org). Faggot = Loser 5 Following the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a New York Times reporter interviewed a group of eight students. At one point in the interview, the students talked about how the gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were taunted by others: Meg: They’d call them freaks, weirdos, faggots. It was just stupid name calling, acting like little children. It’s like my cousins come home, they’re only two and three, and they come home and start calling me names, calling each other names like butt-head and all these things. They [Harris and Klebold] probably couldn’t handle it. Devon: People called them fags. People thought they were gay. And that’s not right. I mean, even if they were—and which, they’re not—it’s not right to say that. Dustin: When they call them fag, I think it’s a slang term for, like, loser. I don’t think they really meant that. They were like nerds [New York Times, 1999, p. A27]. This group of students point out how “faggot” has become unhinged from its customary meaning–a derogatory term for homosexual. Harris and Klebold, as these students understood them, were not homosexuals; they were alienated losers. Their alienation was perceived, at least in part, as a consequence of their manifest rejection of popular codes/ideals and the manner in which they repeatedly failed to adopt cultural standards of distinction and value. Harris and Klebold’s difference was persistently viewed as evidence of what they never had/lacked/ lost. Whether momentary or lasting, whether diffuse or specifically linked with homosexuality, faggot = loser. Faggot expels the anxiety of loss; the loss is projected into another and thereby kept from consciousness. Faggot operates as a projectile. Faggot is something to be caught, absorbed, or def lected. One of the Columbine students articulated the projectile force of faggot when he said, “I can see how these guys [Harris and Klebold] could have easily caught a lot of, not always physical abuse, but just verbal” (New York Times, 1999, p. A27). In this essay I examine a clinical moment during which a child patient called me a faggot. I situate this clinical moment within Copyrighted Material. For use only by icpoffice. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.pep-web.org). 6 Ken Corbett the broader frame of my work with this boy and his family. Central to this boy’s treatment was his experience of himself as small and losing, not big and winning. Particular attention is given to the defensive function that “faggot” played in relation to this boy’s effort to disavow smallness/losing as he sought the agency of bigness/winning. I use his specific dilemma and the manner in which it was refracted in his particular family in order to consider the more general boyhood quest to be big and winning, not small and losing. I use the terms small and losing as virtually equivalent. Concrete thinking would lead us to treat them as distinct; my work with young boys, however, has led me to consider these states as symbolically linked, indeed conflated within the psychic reality of boyhood. My work with young boys also leads me to posit the wish and effort to be a big winner, not a small loser as a central boyhood trope. Many boys and men respond to the threat of smallness/losing with bravado and aggressive protest, which is often embodied through a kind of phallic intrusion/illusion: an insistent, illusory display of bigness and agency that is coupled with an equally unrestrained contempt for smallness and lack. In the spirit of “boys will be boys,” bravado, aggressive protest, and illusory phallic narcissism have become defining, normative attributes of masculinity. I argue for the active clinical engagement of boys’ phallic narcissistic preoccupation and the anxiety and splitting that shadow this preoccupation. I argue also for the active cathexis of the muscular aggression (both the dogged mental muscularity of narcissism and the persistent physical pitch and push of childhood) that often propels such preoccupation and anxiety. Following Fonagy and Target (1996a, b), I propose engaging boys in the difficult process of thirdness as a psychic venue that offers a context of growth within which to actively cathect their anxiety and aggression. I am using “thirdness” here to capture the lively three-way connection that binds a child and the parental couple, and the manner in which that triangular bond allows all three members to simultaneously be participants and observers (Fonagy and Target, 1996a, b). I pay particular heed to the combustion and cathexis that arises through this unique process of attachment and observation. Such active engagement Copyrighted Material. For use only by icpoffice. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.pep-web.org). Faggot = Loser 7 and cathexis stands in contrast to the manner in which boys’ narcissistic preoccupations and aggression are simultaneously prized and neglected through the “boys will be boys” approach to masculinity. Consequent to this cultural trope, boys’ aggression, which so often conceals their anxiety about losing, is neither adequately contained nor engaged.
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