Heteronormativity, Homonormalization, and the Subaltern Queer Subject Sebastián Granda Henao1
Abstract:
Norms are a constitutive part of the social world and political imaginaries. Without norms and rules of behavior, politics would be nonsensical, a nowhere. But then, what about norms and normativity over the individual, sexual and gendered bodies? What place is left for sexual identities, affective orientations, and diverse existences themselves when social norms dictate over non-normatively gendered people? Moreover, how about marginals from the acceptable abnormals, namely queer subaltern subjects? In this paper I intend to, first, draw a short review on what feminist and queer theory has to say about social norms regarding sex and gender – precisely on the matters of heteronormativity and homonormativity, so I can explore the trouble that such norms may produce. Second, I point out to the larger trouble that third world queers, as subaltern subjects –acknowledging queer itself is a subaltern category- may experience in their non-conformity to the double categories of being, on the one hand, gender abnormals, and on the other, by not fully compelling to the dominant Western modern, capitalist life experience. Finally, I conclude by putting in relation the discussion of gender in International Relations and the problem of heteronormativity and homonormalization of subaltern queer subjects. Key Words: Homonormativity, Queer Theory, Subaltern Subject.
Heteronormatividade, Homonormalização, e o Sujeito Subalterno Queer Sebastián Granda Henao2 Resumo:
As normas são constituintes do mundo social e dos seus imaginários politicos. Sem normas a política não faria sentido. No entanto, o que acontece com as normas e as normatividades que imperam sobre corpos, individuais, genderizados? Qual seria o lugar das identidades sexuais, das orientações afetivas e das existências diversas quando há normas sociais para as pessoas não normalizadas no seu gênero? Além do mais, o que acontece com aqueles às margens desse sistema de normas, sobre os sujeitos queer subalternos? Neste artigo, primeiro, ofereço uma revisão sobre o que as teorias feministas, as teorias queer e as teorias do gênero e a sexualidade têm a dizer no que tange aos assuntos da heteronormatividade e homonormatividade, a fim de poder explorar os problemas que essas normas podem produzir. Em segundo lugar, aponto os problemas que os queer no terceiro mundo, como sujeitos subalternos, podem experimentar, de um lado, ser anormais de gênero, e do outro, ser incompletos no pertencimento à uma experiência de vida dentro da hegemonia do capitalismo, da modernidade e do ocidente. Finalmente, concluo colocando a discusão sobre gênero e sexualidade nas Relações Internacionas em relação ao problema da heteronormatividade e a homonormalização dos sujeitos queer (e) subalternos. Palavras Chave: Homonormatividade, Teoria Queer, Sujeito Subalterno.
1 PhD Candidate in International Relations. IRI/PUC-Rio. Contact
Norms are a constitutive part of the social world and political imaginaries. Without norms and rules of behavior modern politics –and arguably all politics- would be nonsensical, a nowhere. But then, what about norms and normativity over the individual, sexual and gendered bodies? What place is left for sexual identities, affective orientations, and diverse existences themselves when social norms dictate over non-normatively gendered people? Moreover, how about marginals from the acceptable abnormals, namely queer subaltern subjects? In that way, one can argue that norms provide constraints for individuals to conduct themselves in social life, or otherwise be excluded and marginalized; and yet, there is a multiplicity of obscured personal experiences, neglecting the possibility of divergence to the average, or well of exploring the self in the social world. In terms of the international life, those exclusions delineate the conditions of possibility of the very existence of some individuals, their strange belonging to a national unity, the participation in any political community, or wonder –as Weber (2015; 2014) does- what about the queerness of International Relations as a field of inquiry? The queer challenges traditional political imaginaries, and so does for international politics’ stable and disciplinary categories. In this paper I intend to, first, draw a short review on what feminist and queer theory has to say about social norms regarding sex and gender –precisely on the matters of heteronormativity and homonormativity, yet trying not to confuse gender and sexuality as the same, but as parts of a whole affective experience; so I can explore the trouble that such norms may produce. Second, I point out to the larger trouble that third world queers, as subaltern subjects –acknowledging queer itself is a subaltern category- may experience in their non-conformity to the double categories of being, on the one hand, gender abnormals, and on the other, by not fully compelling to the dominant Western modern, capitalist life experience. Finally, I conclude by putting in relation the discussion of gender in International Relations and the problem of heteronormativity and homonormalization of subaltern queer subjects. As a disclaimer, in forehand, I acknowledge the very complex intersections that race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and class possess as social categories. Nevertheless, it seems too difficult, if not impossible, for me to apprehend such a large discussion as a whole in a short scholarly effort. For the sake of the parsimony of this essay, I will rather approach only the problems that compulsory attributed sexual(ized) norms may cause on the live experiences of subaltern subjects, intersections will appear for discussion only tangentially, and their possible implications for international politics as social phenomena in face of late modernity. It would seem throughout the text that I advocate for a normative unnormalization of sexual and gender relations; although, as I write in the first line of the text, I consider that a social world without norms –of any kind- is a utopian no-place.
Sex, Gender, Norms and Troubles:
As Foucault (1978a) introduces, normalization (and normatization as its corresponding disciplinary mechanism) has become a form of exercising power over bodies, controlling individuals, obscuring divergence and containing resistance and opposition to a political project in the era of disciplinary power; this through statistic studies and the definition of a median normal of the biopolitical organism. That is the case of a power that is imposed from outside, an arbitrary external input to living – individual or social- bodies for the sake of a lively society. Norms, either tacit or explicit, work as institutions in a juridico-political order; they provide prohibitions and aspirations for individuals if they want to belong to the social group. Yet further discussions on the production of norms and their compliance are necessary. On this aspect one has to take into account that individuals constitute society and are limited by socially constructed boundaries on behavior; norms can change as long as a determined society itself manifest change. In a world of norms and rules, the “normal” and the “abnormal” work in a symbiotic and co-constitutive relation, since both are void concepts, only inteligible in context. Therefore, any category of sexuality –i.e. heterosexuality, homosexuality, transexuality...- are produced through the production of norms over bodies. Sex and gender are but cases of those aspirations to lead a normal(ized) life, one has to behave accordingly to a compulsory discipline of normal nuclear monogamist heterosexual family, with two family heads, with no interchangeable masculine and feminine roles, each according to their birth sex. Anything beyond such a straight-forward definition is odd and should not be reproduced –if not combated or limited. In the normal world there is no space for singlehood, mono-parental families, same-sex arrangements, and even less for transsexual/transgender people, and even lesser for colored ones. Out for such superficial definition only lies the abnormal, the weird queers that co-constitute the normal form the outside, and which is symmetrically, externally constituted by the non-compliance to that core. In his first volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault (1978a) tries to trace back the modern norms of sexuality to Victorian patterns of behavior, along with the repression and silence of delegitimized sexualities and the creation of places of tolerance, such as the brothel and the mental hospital. There was an authorization to certain kinds of behavior, mostly of privative character, and it came in companion with the booming of capitalist and bourgeois reforms to state power and its upcoming order. As a bio-political technology, sex repression became an instrument for the separation of public and private spheres. Accordingly, Warner and Berlant (1998) argue that sex is a matter “mediated by publics”; it is not only about what happens in intimacy, a proper sexual act, but also it is about what people think of and do themselves in relation to other people. Problematically, they find, there is a form of ‘national heterosexuality’ that conditions the belonging and determines the places where certain kinds of peoples may be able to socialize. In their words: “National heterosexuality is the mechanism by which a core national culture can be imagined as a sanitized space of sentimental feeling and immaculate behavior, a space of pure citizenship. A familial model of society displaces the recognition of structural racism and other systemic inequalities” (pp. 549). Again, sex is used as a discourse of attributing roles and functions for individuals in society, regardless of what are their affections and desires. Yet, they specify that there is not such a thing as ‘heterosexuality', in the sense of a monolithic, uniform culture; rather there is a hegemonic ideology of heterosexual culture that normatively links intimacy to "institutions of social reproduction, accumulation, and transfer of capital, and self-development […thus] blocking the building of non-normative or explicit public sexual cultures” (pp. 553). Such sense of rightness and superiority, embedded in the idea of a heterosexual culture, leads to the accepted violence against those divergent from the sexually normal. It is a project about the correctness of the other, based on the separation of a public participatory sphere –under certain conditions- and a privatized realm of obscured practices ‘no-body should care about' and yet there is an insistence for regulating personal lives. Yet, as Foucault considers, and against such liberal claim upon the separation of public and private spheres of live, there is an inescapable regulation of individuals in their most personal aspect. Against Warner and Berlant, one can argue that their advocacy for free spaces of homosocialization, where being gay would be accepted and treated as regular citizens, is no further than an accommodation strategy towards the advent of a ‘new normal’. Those spaces could be read as spaces of resistance and gathering among equals in their struggle for recognition; but also, as they segregate themselves from the totality of society, they represent a ghetto- in the sense of a clos(t)ed realm that separates us from the normal, where we can be free as far as we remain unseen and do not alter established social order. One might acknowledge, however, that the idea of such queer spaces is mediated by its public accessibility, and do not inherently mean an open public acceptance and incorporation of the queers and the ‘queer life’ to the wholeness of society. Again, co-constitution and symbiotism are necessary conditions for such access to happen. Drawing, for instance, on Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993) and the idea that “sex not only functions as a norm in society, but is part of a regulatory process that produces the bodies it governs […] bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. Indeed, it is the instabilities, the possibilities for rematerialization, opened up by this process that mark one domain in which the force of the regulatory law can be turned against itself to spawn rearticulations that call into question the hegemonic force of that very regulatory law.” (pp 1-2), One could argue that sex will always be a difficult matter for normativity. Sex is part of one’s own personal experience, it is the materiality that allows us to communicate with others our experiences of affection –whether through sexual intercourse or through assignation of biological characteristics to a set culturally constructed functions. Yet, it is also the materialization over which regulations apply. Therefore, the sexualized body is a site of struggle between the external and the internal, the self and the others, the public and the private. The body troubles the very distinction between those categoric dichotonomies, since bodies incorporate both terms in each pair at the same time. Nevertheless, it is sex as a performance – concisely, gender- that enables our imaginations of our own assigned roles in society –accepting the norm, negotiating with it, resisting and invoking new rules for our own bodies, or any other-. One could either accept or resist gender normativity; still, it is through gender that one can substitute a social norm for one’s norm. Gender, as Butler (2004) explicates, does not exist prior to a regulation, the gendered body emerges as it is subject to a regulatory system, in short: “Gender is the apparatus by which the production and normalization of masculine and feminine take place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal, psychic, and performative that gender assumes” (pp. 42). To think and talk about gender itself is to talk about the norm that surrounds our sexual/social behavior and the settings upon which our bodies are culturally personified. Gender, thus, can be either liberating, as a form of assuming one's body and self-assigning one's performance in the social world, as well as oppressive, since the limit of self-awareness/imposition over such performance is pretty hard to identify. Homonormativity, on the other hand, could be just as perverse as heteronormativity. It is a problem to dictate that an individual, or a group of individuals, can possibly be incorporated into larger society as long as they compel to a set of unspoken rules. Even when it is uplifting to have recognized rights for same-sex marriage and constitute forms of kinship, it is hazardous since, as Lisa Duggan (2002) states, homonormativity “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions — such as marriage, and its call for monogamy and reproduction — but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (pp. 179). Having a new norm for homo-queer culture disaggregates any possibility of identification and a common struggle against regulations over sex and bodies, it becomes the acceptance of a singular style of being ‘alternate', while some others –queers of color, trans, BDSM performance, etc.- are still pushed to the margins. This process of homonormalization dictates that is able to aspire to full citizenship as long as one is a white person, out of the closet, in a monogamy relationship, possibly looking forward to having children (yet, for some conservative sides it is morally problematic); and most importantly, such a subject becomes citizen in the terms of its wealth production and a banal consumerism. Moreover, the trouble with homonormalization and the embracement of bourgeois values and norms of straight (in the sense of what is correct) conduct, is that as Warner (1999) says, it undermines the principles of feminist and queer movements against patriarchy and normal desire. It is a simplistic liberationist policy that does not take into account the other exclusions that conforming with an agenda of (just) civil rights for gays and lesbians obscures the intersections that there exist with other social issues; intersections present in the materiality of those who are at the margins of the queer marginal, e.g. transsexual/gender people, queers of color, third world queers. In all, those who are far from having a central position in the capitalist modern world system. Finally, taking stock from Bersani (1987), one can point out to the misogyny embedded in both heterosexual and homosexual normativity and regulations. Positive and negative stereotypes about gays, lesbians and other queers and trans, and about women –specially prostitutes-, recall stigmas upon how people live and how are they supposed to live; the normative systems predicated upon sexuality and gender evidence a generalized hysteria against us, first as sick, ill people, then as problematic for society as they are divergent from the normal and may harm children and the future of the humankind. The perception of being penetrated as an abdication of power only reinforces a superiority of heterosexual men; a superiority seen as they become the ones able to decide for the lives of others, the ones supposed to be correctly representing society as a whole. Yet, there is necessary to discuss the power of being penetrated, and the standpoint of passive and active subjects, intercourse happens in the interrelation of one and others; receiving another into one’s body may not necessarily be an act of abdication and submission, it could also mean a submission of the active one by being engulfed by the passive subject. There are at least four perspectives on this: the one that the active subject has upon itself, the one of the active upon the passive, the perspective of the passive about itself and what the passive partner thinks of the active partner. Penetration is not what defines sexuality per se, often it is not even a requirement for intercourse, some people even dislike it for the sake of their own pleasure, or its symbolism. Penetration is also a flexible device, it ought not to be thought as a fixed feature of partners, it is rather a performative role one could assume or apply to another. Reasonably, Bersani’s claim of the dislikeness of sex could be interpreted as a critical perspective on the powerlessness of being penetrated through the standpoint of the passive partner on the instant of sex. As Bersani (1987) notes, it is not about AIDS/HIV, it is not about promiscuity and the repression of affections; it is about people not dealing with their differences, but hiding and repressing them. It is necessary to acknowledge the fads of heterosexuality and homosexuality –and problematize the reifications hidden behind ‘parodies’ or ‘ironies’-, in their late modern tolerant forms, they only contribute to a disciplinary power that regulates living bodies. This is a call for rethinking and reimagining the power of sex, the sites of sexuality beyond familial bonds and the violent utilitarianism of sexual behavior norms for society.
Subaltern Queers: Troubling the Nationalist Normativity(ies)
Besides the problematic link between sexual orientation and normativity, one can add to the homonormalizing process a political attachment to state and national imaginaries of citizenship; one that mirrors, even more, the heterosexual paradigms of the good life and correct belonging to the political corpus. The advocacy for gay rights is pronounced vis-a-vis the State as a legitimate political organization around the nation, and in that sense, coping with sexual and gender norms guarantees one the compelling with one’s national imaginary community. One could extract such problematization from Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America goes to Washington City (1997) –in which she questions the conservatism of privatizing sexual life and rights to complete citizenship, and the definition of a homogeneous national culture in the US, in terms of the exclusion of class, race, sex and gender contradictions from the public spheres. Also, from Jasbir Puar’s concept of Homonationalism (2007; 2013); as a “facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality” (PUAR, 2013: 337) That is, beyond obvious discourses of gay racism and the constitution of an ideal of tolerable gay citizen that is able to claim belonging, citizenship, and may eventually give his/her life away in the name of the nation. As one challenges the vision of a universal patriarchy, that as Butler states, fails “to account for the workings of gender oppression in the concrete cultural contexts in which it exists […as] efforts to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western notions of oppression” (1989: 6), and essentializes the ‘barbarism’ of non-West. And instead, by placing the idea of a relation between the construction of an ideal national citizen and disciplines of sexuality and gender, it would be of more benefit for queer subaltern subjects, in order to first acknowledge the connections between such forms of power, and the localized experiences of those who do not fit in the normality of their bodies and affections. Also, as Puar (2007) points out, the heteronormative nation no longer excludes homosexual subjects. It instead uses the status of good citizen, a mainstream recognition based on what she calls the triad of homonationalism: sexual exceptionalism –i.e “we in the West accept sexual diversity”-; regulatory queerness – that is, as long as queers behave accordingly to their private spaces…-. and the ascendancy of whiteness –based on the white rich enlightened models produced by mass media, such as in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The Ellen Degeneres Show- to prove that those Orientalized terrorist want to attack us for our liberal politics. Queers, thus become figures of life and productivity, against the perversity of the other’s (Muslim) sexuality. For Puar, the whole project of homonationalism represents but another form of sexualized racism into the constitution of citizenship from the difference of the other, the outsider, the barbarian. Conversely, there are some people(s) who do not conform to the western enlightened ideal of a nation and a nationality, and the ideal subject that may be part of it. Even those who de iure belong to a political community organized around a national state, often find it difficult to fully attain a sense of belonging, as they do not properly fit on socially constructed categories of sexuality and gender. Think, for instance, in the case of transsexuals and transgender who decide to change their names in face of the state, and have a great deal of trouble with the recognition of their assumed gender identities, regardless of their bodily features. Or a gay man in Iran who, in order to be able to have sex with other men, has to perform a sex-transition surgery and acquire a female performance, or face death. Or perhaps the orthodox old man who preferred to jump outside the window to be caught in a police raid in the gay sauna he used to frequent. This is all to say that sexuality and gender should not be understood as a monolith, they signify different realms of experience: i.e. a normatively gendered person with a queer sexuality; a non-normatively gendered person with a straight sexuality. They sometimes complement each other, sometimes they do not come into agreement, but in purely ideal terms one does not mean the other inherently. Not going very far, I remember of overhearing a conversation between two black (gay?) males in a bar in Rio, in which one intended to explain to the other the meanings of LGBT categories such as: ‘active’, ‘passive’, ‘versatile’, ‘bissexual’, ‘heterocurious’, ‘transsexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘transvestite’, ‘assumed’, ‘twink, ‘daddy’, ‘bear’… For me, a mere scholar overhearing, they got them all wrong. Then, it snapped me; they were trying to understand a world for them afar. The sexual and gender experience they lived did not require a theoretical understanding that may be transparent and clear for some of us, just as a straight person might not wonder what kind of heterosexual he or she is. Those were politically, discursively and culturally imported categories with void meaning for them. Their own experience as (gay?3) men who have sex with other men had nothing to do with those categories, and perhaps their interpretation of their sexuality and gender performances is less troubled than those of the activist who has to label oneself for every part of its existence and experience. Still, a danger of obscuring of the publicized experience of others, and ‘outside the closet’ experience, is at stake. One has to question the limit up to which they are protecting themselves from the unacceptance of their circles of belongingness, their kin, and their own mirror, and up to what point they are reinforcing a system of sexual and gender norms that represses and oppresses differently lived experiences. For these people (the irani man, the orthodox old man, the black men in the bar) and others, the nationalist shared imaginaries about lively experiences of homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the social norms that surround them are but pure theory. They are not represented by them, and as in Spivak (1983)’s mute subaltern, there is nothing they can say about it, and even fewer are the possibilities to take action against such system. It is just not how they feel part of the nation, if they ever feel. As Lorde (1979) says “racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable”, and I take her words about Third World Women of Color to mean that we assume that those who are at the margins from the sex/gender boundary have nothing to say about their affective and desire experience. Again, are they protecting themselves? Are they claiming for an emotional non-rationalized experience? Are they reinforcing the system? All in all, is that unawareness of categorization, the fear of being publically
3 Along the text the reader may find question marks in parentheses“(?)”. By this I intendt to mark my hesitations on the use of the names for categories I put throughout the text, yet I appeal to those in lack of a better term to express my thoughts. abnormal, the fear of threat against their existence for their non-compliance could be understood as ‘the masters tools’, but they could be, reversely, interpreted as context- based experiences of how to live in an adverse world, blurring the diving line of normal/abnormal. Yet, another problem is based on the use of all these French and North American theories and theorists to understand a matter of subalternity. As Martínez (2008), Irwin (2000), Bergman and Smith (1995) point out, it is problematic to assume that all queer gendered experiences are cross-cultural; instead, these latin-americanist authors propose that such appropriations of terms as ‘active’, ‘passive’, ‘queer’, be redefined and absorbed by questioning the binarisms and categorizations, and how they apply to the hybridity of Latin American societies, for instance. Take, for example, Eve Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990), in which she questions the taken-for-granted binarisms upon which social regulations on sexuality and gender are supposed to develop. For her, those oppositions are too simplistic and incoherent, since one explains the other but none has a true meaning to draw upon. Alternatively, having the closet as the repressive experience of the 20th century, and all the similar mirrors that one could grasp to inquire how gender is conditioned to our sense of belonging, a deconstruction in the terms of the connections between knowledge and sexuality. I am talking about lively experiences that ought to be expressed and heard before intending to understand and politically engage against a supposed system of oppressions and repressions, and before one declares the liberation of bodies and their social performative enactments. In the examples given above, the closeted experience of them give us a glimpse of their own awareness of what their sexuality mean, how it is lived, how they fit in their context, and how they play their gender roles with others by sharing and hiding. I surely defend that not being able to express one’s sexuality and gender performativity in public is problematic, to say the least, but I am trying to be empathetic with those who prefer to remain silent, as long as they do not interfere with an antinormative project. In that sense, a story of tolerance to a specific kind of homosexuality, of cisgender public conformist performance, that follows the neoliberal path of citizenship, recognition as pair and active participation in public matters is leading to yet other types of exclusion, of cultural appropriation and forms of violence against those deviant subjects, away from liberal bourgeois modern normative society. Still, following and distancing from Wiegman and Wilson (2015)’s claim for queer antinormativity, how would society (be) organize(d) otherwise? Is gender normativity necessary? Is deconstruction necessary? To what extent? In whose name –who is really speaking and for whom?
Normalization of Subaltern Queers as a problem for IR:
This is the story of Franco Kaodimuo. A teen Nigerian boy who had to flee his country for reasons of danger against life, who reached Sweden in look for protection, and sees it denied for not being able to demonstrate to be gay enough4. He was sold as a slave with the promise to play in Indian football league, when he returned to Nigeria, and not fully coming to terms with he being a gay man until he was 16, one of his neighbors alerted others about his homosexual behavior and engagement in man- to-man sex. Consequently, he and his partner suffered physical aggression in his own house, leading to his partner death. He hid on the streets until he got the financial aid to leave the country. Swedish refugee authorities are pushing him out for not being able to prove to be gay, talk about his sexual experiences or demonstrating his feelings in front of the board of refugee status. Whether his story is true, a hoax, or an untrue justification for his asylum request, is not up to me for evaluating. I prefer to use this story as an example of how queers become a subject to genderized norms in the late modern international politics. Franco's case shows us in clear light the latent effects of compulsory heterosexuality/homonormativity, the repression of the different forms of sexuality and gender, and socially constructed moralities. Those, altogether, banish the conditions of possibility for the existence of a singular subject, beyond the contextual, content norms in different locations, and under distinct regimes of sexual discipline. Whether he intends it or not, Franco will always fail to come into agreement with the norms of sex that constitute the vision of a Nigerian citizen (me being simplistic about it). At the same time, he cannot comprehend the sexual exceptionalism (homonationalism) of Sweden, which in its defense of queers and human rights as an universal claim, places a set of stereotypes over queer subjects and misguides the experience of this individual subject over his body and his affection.
4 See: All Out plea on: https://go.allout.org/en/a/stop-francosdeportation/ ; and in Gay Star News (Jan 18th, 2017): http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/teen-franco-kaodimuo-risk-deportation- sweden/#gs.12Bql2U This singular case exhibits a glimpse of the transnationalized homoexceptional project, since the reason beyond the plead protection for this singular subject is against the barbarism that many queer subjects suffer in places like Nigeria, where there are laws prohibiting homosexual behavior, death penalties for sodomy, criminalization of social movements that raise LGBTIQ flags, among others. This kind of sexual exceptionalism, along with a claim for liberalism, is the exact justification in Weber (2015)’s characterization of the homosexual as either a perverse creature to whom states must secure from, or normal human being states must protect and embrace. It is also what Puar (2007; 2013) calls into attention in her concept of homonationalism; the enactment of a certain type of queer that may be defended for the sake of Western civilizational project. This subject is at crossroads himself with his identity as a queer subaltern, one who does not fit into the modern enlightened cosmopolitan citizen, nor into the national ideal of good citizen society has built for him. This subject has to defend his existence amidst state politics, homophobic and xenophobic moralities, transnational advocacy networks with their own agendas, amongst other kinds of modern enlightened institutions, which want him to fit somewhere, regardless of what identity he accepts or leaves behind (to be protected in Sweden he has to embrace a specific model of gay man, to be safe in Nigeria he has to adapt to the model of a compulsory heteronational Nigerian). This discussion, for instance, is taken further in Wendy Brown’s States of Injury (1995), in which she problematizes the relations of freedom and power, the latter being understood more in Foucaultian terms of subjugation, domination and subject formation. The state becomes a place in where subjects who feel injured try to codify their norms and disciplinary actions towards a discriminatory behavior against those/that that injures them. Those codifications are placed in the name of a teleologically framed emancipatory freedom from structural oppressions, so that individuals cannot cope in their own self-dictated free will (?). It is the (neo)liberal Theory of State, one in which individual values prevail in order to acquire an evolutionary development, personal protection from harm and freedom of (consumer) choice. Counterintuitively, that is the version of freedom that Franco claims and finds neglected by both states and those post-individualists libertarians who appeal for his protection and the provision of his rights to live and be. Yet, freedom of choice appears contained to a certain set of possible choices, within the boundaries of late modern capitalism. Once again, Lorde (1979)’s claim that “racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable”, comes to gain salience when the set of choices that a person faces do not fit in the imaginary of the libertarian cosmopolitan, yet nationalist, homosexual. For a subaltern queer such as Franco, the idea of being as gay as Swedish authorities expect of him makes no sense. He is just as gay (?) as he may be, regardless of any state consideration of how to be or become straight or queer. All in all, national and international images of politics are both parts of the same modern enlightened project; as such, they are constituted of norms and regulations, materialized over human bodies and working as cultural constructs that rule subjects and society. They distinguish the regular from the deviant, the acceptable and the perverse, the referent object and the threat. As Weber (2014; 2015) recalls, the homosexual is a realm of sovereignty, of order vs. anarchy in the most traditional sense of the foundational dichotomy of the discipline. The queer subaltern is, thus, one of the latest spaces of ungoverned, exceptional forms of materiality that modernity has not yet reached, and that places trouble in the discipline and political world. Nevertheless, and problematically, categories as ‘queer’ or ‘subaltern’ are themselves constructed in face of modernity, through the lack of their compliance to the regular norm. Queer subalterns only exist in lack of a better form of incorporation to the sovereign order. It is again a matter of co-constitution: queer subalterns depend, as a category, of their non-incorporation to forms of normative sexuality in modernity; still, modern sexual subjects depend, as another category, of the existence of an other from which it may be positively distinct. The body of Franco and many others who cannot fit in the definitions of either heterosexual nor homosexual in the Western imaginary –or any. The queer subaltern subject finds difficulties into understanding what are those categories he/she needs so urgently to identify and fit. Such subject is targeted by hetero/homo norms, this subject is compelled to resist the disciplinary powers on sexuality and gender, or be incorporated into the system of regulations. The sexualized and gendered body becomes then a target of both nationalistic projects of citizenship, differentiation from the outsiders and homogenization with the insiders. It is a target for the inter/transnational project of humanity and the liberal mode of living and accepting an ever decreasing difference, for the sake of a contradictory cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, as projects of modernity.
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