Caligari, Madness, Sexuality and Foucault

The other night I saw the classic 1920 German silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, at some friends’ place. I’d seen it once before many years ago, I think on SBS and probably on quite a small TV. My friends have got quite an elaborate TV/DVD/music set up in their living room with one of those quite large screens and so this time I saw the film in a lot more detail than before. It is really quite superb, not least for its sets which are quite surreal, astonishing in the way they distort angles and warp ‘reality’ (I wonder if H P Lovecraft might have been influenced by the visuals in this film for some of his stories, especially for his ‘Dreams in the Witch House’ in which the notion of distorted angles and weird perspective in room dimensions are key to his portrait of menace). Unsurprisingly, questions of what is real and what is illusion and fantasy are key to the film. That same sort of interplay of fantasy and reality was at play in a modern film, The Black Swan, I saw when down the Gold Coast. That film plays with fantasy and reality in such a way that towards the end the viewer has no idea of what is (meant to be) real and what not. Is the main character mad, has she been taken over from the depths, the Black Swan?

Curiously in both films, sexuality is interwoven with madness to signal that we are beyond the realm of the ‘normal’. There are several moments of queer slippage in Caligari, most explicitly in the final scenes when the Somnambulist character is presented as a kind of distractedly demented dandy. Likewise in Black Swan, at first, there’s more than a hint of (hetero)sexual desire in the interaction between the dancer, Nina, and the ballet director and I thought that maybe we were being given a narrative of young woman’s repressed creativity being released through eros and heterosexual eros too. But then suddenly as the boundaries between reality and fantasy really begin to blur there is a full-on lesbian eruption, much more graphic than any heterosexual scenes in the film. From that point on the story is swept away as the boundary between fantasy and reality collapses like the shattered mirror of Nina’s dressing room.

These links between madness and queer sexuality were even more striking for me as I’ve recently finished reading Lynne Huffer’s book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. I think Huffer’s book is probably the most important publication in queer theory and sexuality studies for a long time, at least in English- there has been interesting work in French not least by Didier Eribon who I was reading and writing about back in 2009. Eribon’s book made me want to go back and read Foucault’s Introduction to the History of Sexuality again. I’d read it, at least in part, back in my undergrad days in the early 90s. At that time it didn’t have much context for me and I found a range of other authors that influenced me more. At the same time, here in Brisbane those years following decriminalisation and the first anti-discrimination law were a heady time for LGBT folks, especially folks like me who were active in community stuff and politics. At UQ too, these were the first years of a queer space, the Rona Room, the existence of which was really changing the dynamics of queer life on campus. Probably, a much more important influence for me back then was Homocult and the activism around ACT UP and Queer Nation. What most appealed to me was the stance of not regarding heterosexuality as the default – as one slogan went ‘heterosexuality is not normal, it’s just common’ - and that led to a reading perspective of looking for queer possibilities in anything, destabilising the heteronorm and opening a space for the queer and homosexual. That perspective still largely describes my scholarly framework on sexuality. I don’t accept heterosexuality and its norms as the default or as something to aspire to. That’s one of my concerns with the push to same sex marriage (and something I saw earlier in the last couple of days, ‘gay family values’). It seems to me that one of the dynamics of homosexual/queer sub-cultures is imitation, pushing the boundaries of likeness. After Gay Liberation came the age of the Clone, at least for gay men. I hated it and, luckily, in Australia it remained very much a Sydney thing. And way back in the 18^th century we find the molly houses of old England and their curious practices of parodic imitation of the heterosexual world of marriage and family. In our day, though, the imitation is more serious lacking any parodic element at all (the parody is more at the expense of the imitation as in the anti-marriage quip of a queer friend of mine ‘Gay marriage? Makes as much sense as a male tampon’). Are we reproducing the heteronorm as our own standard for homosexual life?

Returning to Foucault and Huffer’s book, to be honest I’ve not read a lot of his work. I own a copy of the second volume of his History of Sexuality. I’ve not finished it because like Huffer, I found it boring, not least because of its focus on elite males in ancient Greco-Roman society. Foucault didn’t inform my work on Sodom and Gomorrah much at all, although after reading Huffer I can see how I might have been able to deploy him quite productively but I don’t regret not doing so. More important for me back then was the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She helped me to refine my reading position and lens and she’s still an important intellectual influence for me. Oddly, I don’t recall Foucault as a dominant motif in her work no matter how important he was for her theoretically. But periodically I’ve been rubbed up against Foucault by the way his Introduction to the History of Sexuality was being deployed in, to my way of thinking, quite uncritical ways. The crudest rendering of this Foucault deployment is the notion that homosexuality was invented as a category by sexologists and psychologists back in 1870 (or for some even later). This marked a new beginning and the creation of the homosexual identity as opposed to a time before when we can only speak of acts, certainly not identities let alone communities. As I heard one person say, citing Foucault, at a public forum about four years ago, there is no continuity with that time before the ‘invention’ of the homosexual and our modern LGBT worlds.

To which, of course, I say rubbish, and to which I also say you clearly haven’t understood Foucault if you think that was his argument. When I was reading Eribon, I was struck by the thought that maybe people hadn’t quite gotten Foucault. While he critiqued Foucault’s History of Sexuality, from memory especially its lack of sufficient historical depth, in relation to the ‘invention’ of the homosexual, Eribon also highlighted how important Foucault’s History of Madness was in giving more depth to his arguments in the Introduction to Sexuality. Eribon seemed to suggest that Foucault might have profited much more by drawing on his earlier work. After all, he asked, how was it that sexuality, homosexuality, should be the subject or object of discussion and study/treatment by psychologists and therapists. So I went back and re-read Foucault’s Introduction. I hadn’t gotten far before I realised that Foucault’s project here was not ‘history’ and certainly not homosexuality as such but much more about the discursive structures of social power. And when I re-read it, I was struck by the realisation that the famous passage about the homosexual being invented in 1870 was not about same sex love and eros as such, the people who lived it, their identities and communities. Foucault was not interested in identities and certainly not interested in aetiologies. I was struck by the thought that this was more a wry observation on the, one could say, vainglories of powerbrokers. In the late 19^th century in the field of sexuality these were the therapists, the sexologists, who were above, outside of the realm of the deviant erotic just as a biologist of the day was above, outside the realm from which specimens were collected and returned to the halls of knowledge in the metropole for classification and study, or white male anthropologists might be above, outside the communities of ‘savages’ they were studying. (And no wonder then that the term homosexual was resisted for so long by queer folks of the past as a term that was being imposed on them and not cognisant with their own experience). I couldn’t also help but think that somehow Foucault’s wry observation had been mis-taken by so many people in the areas of queer theory and sexuality. It always seemed to be cited as grim fact rather than grim joke. Queer theorists spectacularly misread, and thus failed to get, Foucault’s wit.

I had planned to write more about Eribon and my new understandings of Foucault but last year my adventures with depression got in the way, although I think it’s quite appropriate that I re-read Foucault when I was myself off spinning in my own trajectory of soaring madness and collapse. Maybe it helps to read Foucault when you’re mad. So when the chance came to read and review Huffer’s book eventually I had to go for it and was most surprised that I could get it, that nobody else had put their hand up for it at all. The book itself is rich, very rich and rewards reading and re-reading. It is an excellent introduction to Foucault’s thought, his overall project, not just Sexuality or Madness. There is a key central thesis to the book, to wit, queer theorists who restrict their reading of Foucault to his History of Sexuality, even if supplemented by Discipline and Punish, are severely limited in their understanding of Foucault. Huffer goes as far as saying that you can’t really grasp History of Sexuality without also reading History of Madness, that the two complement each other, with Sexuality standing almost in continuity with Madness. She argues that Sexuality should even (only?) be read through the lens of Madness to be understandable. The problem was, though, that for those who don’t read French, an English translation of the whole text wasn’t published until 2006 (translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa). The 1965 translation, Madness and Civilisation, was a much truncated edition which omitted important content from the original work.

In tandem with her thesis, Huffer also provides a critique of queer theory especially as practiced in the United States. In particular she critiques the ‘straight’ reading by queer theorists of that famous passage in Introduction, a passage she describes as clearly ironic especially when read in the French. She provides both the French and her own translation with the standard English translation to highlight the ironic aspects in Foucault’s words. She goes further and says US queer theorists have seriously misread it by reading it as a statement of origins or aetiology of homosexual identity. It’s nothing of the sort, she declares, indeed Foucault ‘refuses to posit an origin of anything’ (75), a fact most clear from reading Madness. She goes further saying that to ‘read the date 1870 as other than ironic is to buy into the psychological, psychiatric, and medical authority Foucault goes to great pains to dismantle’ (75). In other words, queer theorists mangled Foucault in the press of US identity politics and obsessions. I was struck by Huffer’s repeated observation that in Madness, Foucault describes (and laments?) the suppression of a homosexual lyricism in Europe during the Age of Reason , a suppression that happens alongside the Great Confinement, the rise of the asylum for imprisoning the ‘mad’ and the ‘deviant’. (And hence, says Eribon, sexuality and its manifold variations becomes the field for doctors, psychologists, therapists, and not historians, ethicists, philosophers, or theologians and biblical scholars either for that matter.)

Huffer also reminds us that first and foremost, Foucault is a philosopher, or better anti-philosopher. He wrote Madness, amongst other things, as a critique of Descartes, of the Cartesian separation of the mind/self and the body, in which madness is explicitly excluded from the Cartesian cogito; but more than just Descartes Madness was also of the Enlightenment and its heirs. However Foucault writes philosophy with the use of the archive so his work is history-like. Foucault is the heir of Nietzsche and seeks to abolish the subject so constructed by Descartes and developed by Hegel and the Enlightenment and later too by Freud and psychoanalysis. In all these projects of the internal metaphysical self both madness and sexuality have been deployed in its construction, to demarcate its boundaries and essence. As the heir to Nietzsche, Foucault rejects such essentalism of the self, as Huffer puts it there is no inside to this outside, it is a false demarcation. In this context, it’s no surprise that the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick began exploring Buddhism towards the end of her life. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta, no-self (as opposed to the Hindu/Vedanta concept of Atman/Self) bears a certain resemblance to the Foucault-Nietzschian position. My understanding of Nietzsche is that he stood for an unmediated immediacy to life which again bears a resemblance to the Buddhist aim of living free of all attachment including to the illusory ‘self’.

But this brings me to my main critique of Huffner’s book. Queer theorists might have misread Foucault’s wit and worse uncritically elevated him to canonical authority, ‘gospel’, but queer theory remains a heterogenous and fluid project. Foucault might have authority but he is jumbled with all manner of other intellectual streams. As Huffner points out queer theory even tries to couple Freud with Foucault (Huffner strongly critiques Judith Butler’s Psychic Life as one example of this coupling), which is like coupling matter and anti-matter. Foucault stands opposed to Freud; Freud’s gift, psychoanalysis, ‘endlessly performs and augments the Cartesian coup of the seventeenth century’ (160). But Huffner wants to make queer theory a more specifically, completely?, a Foucauldian project. She is herself ‘in love’ with Foucault so I can understand her zeal; she has ‘met’ this Foucault ‘in the archives’ and realised his breadth and depth in contrast to the cardboard cut-out of the standard queer theoretical perspective. I can understand her ‘love’ especially given both the splits between much of queer theory and much of feminist theory (which she explores early in her book) in part based on that old misreading of Foucault and the fact that queer theory nowadays is, in my opinion, really kind of moribund and disconnected, having no real ethical grounding or political eros to use Huffner’s term. But I would like to keep the heterogeneity and fluidity of queer theory, which might in future be further fed by a specifically Foucaultian project, overlapping but neither separate nor totalising.

For those of us who don’t want to work on a specifically Foucauldian project, Foucault might yet be a model. I like the way he works from, with the archives. The philosopher writing history against philosophy, philosophy from the archives, Foucauld blurs categories. What I appreciated about queer theory has been that blurring, the lack of rigidity, the almost bower bird approach to thinking and the commitment not to accept the heteronorm as given. But it has also remained caught in an identitarian morass (and perhaps that helps serves interests of late capitalist society anyway). I’ve not been all that interested in identities but rather the way people have lived their same-sex love and desires, how they have dealt with the rejection, also those cultures and discourses of insult and denigration that reinforce the heteronorm. I’m interested in the way those discourses work and I look for ways to change all that, to maintain a critique that opens up different possibilities. I suspect the identitarian thing may be a displaced aetiology. One thing’s for sure I’m not interested in origins or causes, or gay genes. They don’t broaden our horizons or humanise us, let alone change our world.

My critique then is not really of the book as such. In fact, looking through my copy of Mad for Foucault I see that I have underlined on just about every page, reinforced with exclamation marks and asterisks as well as occasional comments. It’s a book well worth reading by anyone doing any sort of sexuality studies, especially if they’re doing so under the umbrella of queer theory. Likewise for those doing feminist and gender studies. I recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in Foucault in any way at all. After reading Huffner there’s only one more thing to do and that’s read History of Madness, the full version, itself. I’m looking forward to it, not least to catch a glimpse of that disappearing suppressed homosexual lyric for which he mourned.

Foucault and the Virgin Mary

I noticed the other day, over at Mark Goodacre's blog, that he had a post up about a coming BBC Christmas production called Nativity. It's a dramatised retelling of the events around Jesus' birth and seems to be based on the merging of the canonical Infancy gospels in Matthew and Luke. Mark's quoted some of the press release promoting Nativity and I was very struck by this bit

Over four half-hour episodes the drama will tell the traditional tale known to millions from a very human perspective. With Mary and Joseph's enduring love story at the centre this familiar story is given a contemporary twist, as the drama follows Joseph and Mary from their initial courtship – Joseph desperate to win the heart of Mary – to his emotional turmoil at her unexpected pregnancy.

Now maybe I missed something but I had no idea that Mary and Joseph had an "enduring" love story to begin with, let alone that he had been "desperate" to win her heart. This is a BBC production, too. The Beeb has a pretty strong reputation for quality and I'm sure this will be a quality production. Mark Goodacre himself is excited at the prospect and it also gets a good rap at Bible Films Blog. But I am still puzzled by the "enduring love story." Is that what is meant by giving the story a "contemporary twist"? Or is that how the story is understood anyway with the contemporary twist coming from some other feature?

I raise these questions because if we turn to the sources and even to subsequent tradition, an enduring love story is not what's found at all. The story or stories, nevertheless are quite fascinating, powerful even and I think it would be great to see a production based on them rather than the modern love story treatment.

And so right now I want to look at the five most ancient sources we have for the Nativity and the relationship between Joseph and Mary. These sources are Matthew's infancy narrative, Luke's infancy narrative, Ode 19 of the Odes of Solomon, the Ascension of Isaiah and the Proto-Evangelion of James. What they'll show is that ancient Christians had a very different understanding of the relationship between Mary and Joseph, such that they would probably be extremely puzzled by portraying the two in the context of a romantic love melodrama. But I should note by way of preamble that Joseph barely gets a mention in the other two canonical gospels, he's not an active character, he's not in the picture at all. He's really only referred to in passing as the father of Jesus. He completely disappears in one passage in Mark when Jesus is referred to as son of Mary. On the strength of such absence, the understandable tradition developed that Joseph had died when Jesus was young, certainly long before he began his public life.

So I'll start with Matthew. The infancy narrative comprises the first two chapters of this gospel. More than two thirds of chapter 1 is a genealogy of Jesus (1-17); the remaining 7 verses trace the relationship between Joseph and Mary and Mary's pregnancy. There's no sense of a deep romantic love here. Instead we are told that Joseph was a righteous man and on learning of Mary's pregnancy, decided to dismiss her quietly and not expose her to public disgrace. Perhaps Joseph feels kindly to Mary, but 'desperate' or ardent? - not really. He is only prevented from dismissing Mary by the appearance of an angel, who tells him just what sort of child Mary is carrying. Joseph relents and does not send her away. Chapter 2 relates the coming of the Magi, the flight into Egypt and the massacre of the children of Bethlehem. Here Joseph comes into his own, helping Mary and her child escape to Egypt. Without Joseph, their lives would be in the greatest peril. And yet, never at any time do Joseph and Mary converse. And then, once we quit the infancy narrative, Joseph disappears entirely. He gets mentioned a couple of times; in the parallel to the Mark passage cited above, he's referred to as the carpenter and not by name, while Mary is herself named. So what we have of Joseph in Matthew is an absence, following his appearance in the first two chapters, where the only person he interacts and converses with at all is an angel. There's nothing in Matthew about any enduring, let alone ardent, love.

In contrast, Mary is the main figure in Luke's infancy narrative, chapters 1 and 2 of the Gospel. Mary speaks and interacts with people and an angel too. The first chapter deals with the conception and birth of John the Baptist and the Annunciation, Mary's conception of Jesus and her visit to her cousin Elizabeth who is pregnant with John the Baptist; we are told that Mary is betrothed to Joseph but he makes no other appearance in chapter 1. His debut comes in chapter 2 but only as background figure: he and Mary go to Bethlehem to be registered in the census; he is present when the shepherds come, as bidden by the angels, to give homage to the Christ child; he accompanies Mary to the Temple for the Presentation scene. But at no time do he and Mary converse. In the Temple Simeon and Anna prophesy over Jesus and Simeon addresses Mary directly but Joseph remains a shadowy figure in the background. It's only in the final part of chapter 2, when Jesus is found in the Temple at age 12 after being lost by his parents, that Mary, when addressing Jesus, actually acknowledges Joseph's existence, by saying that she and his father had been searching for him anxiously. Jesus' response, invoking his heavenly Father, effectively contradicts any paternal claims that Joseph has. After that, Joseph as a character disappears in Luke's gospel. He gets a mention, unsurprisingly, in the genealogy of Jesus in chapter 3, and elsewhere Jesus gets referred to as son of Joseph, including in the Lucan parallel to the passages in Matthew and Mark referred to above. But again there is nothing to indicate any strong attachment between Mary and Joseph, he's a background figure at best and in chapter 1 Mary acts and speaks on her own initiative, apparently beholden to no one.

I'll break from narrative to poetry and turn to Ode 19 of the Odes of Solomon. You can read Charlesworth's translation of the Odes here. He dates the Odes to the 1st century, although others have opted for 2nd or even 3rd century. They've been called the first Christian hymn book and they have strong resonances both with the Johannine New Testament literature and with Qumran texts as well. Ode 19 gives a short but quite striking account of the Incarnation and Nativity not least for its gender bending imagery.

1. A cup of milk was offered to me, and I drank it in the sweetness of the Lord's kindness.

2. The Son is the cup, and the Father is He who was milked; and the Holy Spirit is She who milked Him;

3. Because His breasts were full, and it was undesirable that His milk should be ineffectually released.

4. The Holy Spirit opened Her bosom, and mixed the milk of the two breasts of the Father.

5. Then She gave the mixture to the generation without their knowing, and those who have received it are in the perfection of the right hand.

6. The womb of the Virgin took it, and she received conception and gave birth.

7. So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies.

8. And she labored and bore the Son but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose.

9. And she did not require a midwife, because He caused her to give life.

10. She brought forth like a strong man with desire, and she bore according to the manifestation, and she acquired according to the Great Power.

11. And she loved with redemption, and guarded with kindness, and declared with grandeur.

Hallelujah

I've quoted it in full because it's short and because I like it. Now assuming "the Virgin" refers to Mary (and I'm quite happy to allow for an ambiguity here, that the poem describes an event happening in the heavenly as much as the terrestrial realms), it seems that here the Lucan portrait has been brought to its logical conclusion. Mary is front and centre and she is an independent figure, a powerful figure in her own right. She has no need of a man, let alone a husband. If anything she might be reminiscent of the Woman of the Apocalypse (Revelation 12) who is herself a heavenly figure (the Hebrew goddess?) who was assimilated to Mary quite early in Christian tradition, too.

Returning to narrative accounts, our next stop is the Ascension of Isaiah. This text has been dated from the first to second centuries of the Christian era. It only survives in full in Ethiopian manuscripts but fragments also survive in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Slavonic. It's a composite text (Charles' translation of the full text can be read here). Chapters 1-5 relate Isaiah's persecution and martyrdom at the hands of King Manasseh. The second half relates Isaiah's vision in which he ascends through the Seven Heavens to meet Christ and Enoch and where he sees the future incarnation and nativity of Christ. Much of the Vision is reminiscent of the Enoch literature including the nativity of Christ in chapter 11 which I will now quote (from Knibb's translation chapters 6-11 available here):

1. And after this I looked, and the angel who spoke to me and led me said to me, "Understand, Isaiah son of Amoz, because for this purpose I was sent from the Lord."

2 And I saw a woman of the family of David the prophet whose name (was) Mary, and she (was) a virgin and was betrothed to a man whose name (was) Joseph, a carpenter, and he also (was) of the seed and family of the righteous David of Bethlehem in Judah.

3 And he came into his lot. And when she was betrothed, she was found to be pregnant, and Joseph the carpenter wished to divorce her.

4 But the angel of the Spirit appeared in this world, and after this Joseph did not divorce Mary; but he did not reveal this matter to anyone.

5 And he did not approach Mary, but kept her as a holy virgin, although she was pregnant.

6 And he did not live with her for two months.

7 And after two months of days, while Joseph was in his house, and Mary his wife, but both alone,

8 it came about, when they were alone, that Mary then looked with her eyes and saw a small infant, and she was astounded.

9 And after her astonishment had worn off, her womb was found as (it was) at first, before she had conceived.

10 And when her husband, Joseph, said to her, "What has made you astounded?" his eyes were opened, and he saw the infant and praised the Lord, because the Lord had come in his lot.

11 And a voice came to them, "Do not tell this vision to anyone."

12 But the story about the infant was spread abroad in Bethlehem.

13 Some said, "The virgin Mary has given birth before she has been married two months."

14 But many said, "She did not give birth; the midwife did not go up (to her), and we did not hear (any) cries of pain." And they were all blinded concerning him; they all knew about him, but they did not know from where he was.

15 And they took him and went to Nazareth in Galilee

The account resembles somewhat Matthew's infancy narrative and many scholars argue that it is derived from it. Enrico Norelli has argued that it is independent of the account in Matthew. If anything, I'm reminded of the nativity of Melchizedek in 2 Enoch, particularly in the manner of Jesus' birth. But I guess my main point here is that the author is not interested in any love between Joseph and Mary. In fact compared to the parallel scene in 2 Enoch, Joseph appears relatively nonchalant about being cuckolded by heaven, perhaps because it is very early days in the relationship, whereas in 2 Enoch the couple who have a heavenly child foisted upon them have been married for many (childless) years.

Finally I turn to the Protoevangelium of James also known as the Gospel of James i.e. James of Jerusalem known as the brother of the Lord. You can read this 2nd century text in full here and here. This Gospel is pretty much an infancy gospel only. It relates the conception and nativity not only of Jesus but also of his mother, Mary. It's not generally known in the Western Church and it was never included in any New Testament collection. Nevertheless it gives a considerable amount of 'back story' to the canonical gospels and their infancy narratives, such that it is almost a fifth Gospel. It's from this gospel that we get the names of Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna. It's from this gospel too that we get the idea that Joseph was a lot older than Mary and had children, one of whom being James, from a previous marriage. That way Mary's perpetual virginity is preserved and Gospel references to Jesus' brothers and sisters resolved. Unfortunately, the Western Church, in about the 4th or 5th centuries decided to make Joseph a perpetual virgin too, so the gospel was quietly discarded, even though much of its story entered into the Western tradition. While the East acclaims Mary's perpetual virginity it saw no reason for Joseph to be caught up in the gestalt of perpetual virginity. The East accepted the idea that Joseph had been married before and that James and the other brothers and sisters of Jesus were the product of that marriage. The Protoevangelium wasn't incorporated into the Eastern New Testament but the Eastern Churches hold it in very high esteem, counting it as coming from James and counting it as a key and inspired text of Tradition.

As I said the Protoevangelium relates the nativity of both Mary and Jesus. Mary's conception is miraculous, almost implicitly non-sexual. When she is born she is counted as a special, child of promise and her parents pledge her to the Temple. She's taken there at age two (there's a charming image of the two year old Mary dancing in the Holy of Holies) and she stays living there until she is twelve. At twelve she's on the verge of puberty and menstruation. The priests are concerned that she might breach the menstrual taboos and defile the Temple. So the priests summon a gathering of widowers so that the Lord will determine which of them will take Mary into his care and protection. After a miracle of the staves in which a dove emerges from Joseph's staff and perches itself on his head, Mary is placed in Joseph's custody to which he strongly protests due to his great age and her youth. In the end he relents but then leaves her in his home and goes away building houses. Mary is then summoned back to the Temple along with several other virgins and put to work on making the Temple veil. It's at this time that the archangel comes to her and announces that she will conceive. This she does and then sets off to visit her cousin Elizabeth who of course is pregnant with John the Baptist. While she stays with Elizabeth, Mary's belly starts to swell with her pregnancy and she gets frightened and returns to her home. Joseph then returns from his travels and finds her pregnant for which he berates her. Joseph resolves to divorce her quietly but then an angel comes to him to explain what has happened. Joseph relents and decides to protect Mary.

In the meantime the priests have discovered Mary's pregnancy. Joseph is accused of having violated Mary. Both deny the charge and both are subjected to trial by ordeal which they both pass. They are then allowed to go free and Mary returns with Joseph to his house. The narrative then relates the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, the coming of the Magi, the slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem, the flight of Elizabeth and her baby and the murder of her husband, Zechariah, by Herod's men in the Temple sanctuary for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of his child.

Pretty gripping stuff! But again what I want to highlight is the relationship between Joseph and Mary. It is most definitely not a love match! Mary is in her early teens while Joseph is an old man. It's not clear that they are even married. Mary is addressed and behaves too as if she is Joseph's ward, not his wife. In contrast, there is much more concern and affection among Mary's parents in the text than there is between Joseph and Mary. Why is Joseph under suspicion of having violated her? Although Mary is living in Joseph's house and is in his care, it seems the text does not understand them to be married in any way. I guess what I then want to point out that early Christians were not actually interested in the relationship between Mary and Joseph. What was more important to them as Mary's integrity, her virginity, her autonomy. As Virgin and Mother, Mary encapsulates a suite of ancient motifs, not least the virgin and living soil of Eden, and, of course the ancient great goddesses; Mary is the new Eve and the new Sarah, the Mother of the New Covenant. She represents the end of the old ways, the start of a new way of being, one in which women are no longer subject to the rule of their husbands. We forget that early Christianity had a vision of world without marriage (Matthew 22:23 ff) and many Christians tried to live that vision literally, the majority through celibacy, and a minority by a form of sexual communism. The Acts of Thecla (sadly she was dropped by Rome from the Western calendar of saints in the early 1970s) gives another radical celibate vision of female autonomy.

Early Christians were not interested in any love between Joseph and Mary. Firstly because most marriages weren't contracted for love anyway. They were family arrangements, much as they still are in many parts of the world today. Love might grow during marriage, such that if a woman survived her childbearing years she might hope to have the respect and affection of her husband. Failing that, then, the honour due her as a matron. Hence not only is Mary a Virgin, but she is preserved the pains of (and the mortal threats from) childbirth.

By the high medieval period, Mary has become the Queen of Heaven, enthroned on the ceilings and walls of churches she presides over the mysteries of her Son. If she is represented with anyone it is usually him, but sometimes with her mother (Da Vinci played with that pairing rather delightfully in this image of Mary and Anne with the infant Jesus), and sometimes in the company of other virgins. But rarely, rarely with her husband. Marriage is part of this world which is due to pass way. She is Queen in the world to come, a world in which there is no marriage at all.

Consequently, early Christians would regard this production of the Nativity with puzzlement. A love story between Joseph and Mary would not make sense to them. Likewise with their descendants a thousand years later. For them Mary was the great Queen of Heaven, the Virgin Mother. If she is portrayed with Joseph, it is because he, too, in the West is now counted in the company of virgins. Joseph the ever-virgin makes an oddly queer character in the radical celibate imaginary. The ardent heterosexual lover of the BBC's Nativity is alien indeed to that exotic flower.

The BBC's Nativity signifies that there's been a discursive shift over the last few centuries, hence my nod to Foucault in the title of this post. For medieval and ancient Christians, the notion that Mary and Joseph would be in love, in some kind of romance, would seem bizarre; as it still would to many Eastern Christians, for whom Joseph was an old man and Mary a young teenager, barely into puberty. But for us in the West, it seems, especially the Anglisphere it appears to be unthinkable that they wouldn't be. That this is so is, I think, the result of a process that began in the late medieval period and was accelerated in the Reformation. Mary is kicked off her heavenly throne and made subject to her husband. To the more 'liberal' minded Protestant it's only natural that Mary had all those children after Jesus, because it's only natural, it's what marriage is all about. The Holy Family get to model the ideal bourgeois Protestant family and Mary is reduced to a shadow of herself. The discursive shift that Foucault identifies as taking place in the 19th century is really only a rationalist appropriation of the older Protestant discourse, reconfigured in a secular frame, appropriate to a modern 'progressive' and reasonable society in which religion becomes an individualised and privatised activity, its public and linking functions taken over by the liberal, capitalist and secular state.

The same process happens in the Catholic world too. Following the Catholic Reform around Trent, Mary gets diminished and located more and more within the family, the Holy Family. It's more difficult, of course; there's the whole weight of Marian tradition plus the celibacy of Joseph. This family is not like any bourgeois family out there in the real world. There's a real danger that this family of celibates can flip out of the heteronormative into some very queer spaces. And it's not as if the diminution of Mary happens without a fight, either. Marian apparitions, generally always to women and (mainly girl-) children, become more public and dramatic, Lourdes and Fatima, the most striking of all. Nevertheless, by the post-Vatican 2 period, the Reform push has triumphed and Mary ends up pretty much removed from her throne, kicked out to the kitchen to take her place, the ever-virgin wife, subject to the ever-virgin husband. All this happened with the rise of feminism, too, and sadly many feminists saw Mary as too hopelessly entangled in the webs of patriarchy to be bothered with her.

And yet seen through a feminist lens the Mary of Luke's gospel does not fit that that holy patriarchal family at all. She speaks and acts in her own right without need of any man. Ode 19 might also seem shocking to many (it certainly causes discomfort to conservative evangelicals). A text like the Protoevangelium of James is completely alien to modern sensibilities.

It sounds like Nativity is taking its cue from Matthew - Joseph is front and centre, not Mary. Presumably a toned down version of Luke's account will flesh it out somewhat but it will be framed within the broader context of the modern nuclear family and Western ideologies of marriage and marital love. I doubt we will see any sign of the perpetually virgin Mary, let alone a perpetually virgin Joseph, and from what I can make out Mary and Joseph will be age peers too, no June December romance here. No, it will likely be the Joseph and Mary of the Western bourgeois imaginary even if the central event, a miraculous pregnancy actively agreed to by the woman, would serve to challenge it. Will this Mary say "Fiat! so let it happen, I accept" and will she argue justifying her decision and challenge Joseph and his patriarchal expectations?

Unfortunately the Mary of the Protoevangelium doesn't challenge Joseph either but pleads ignorance of what happened instead. Perhaps she does so to enable the heavenly angelic intervention, a feature of Matthew, Ascension of Isaiah and the Protoevengelium itself. Does angelic intervention maintain patriarchal decorum? Nevertheless, because it is so alien I would like to see a Nativity made using the Protoevangelium to flesh it out, especially if it joins with Luke to put Mary front and centre, not Joseph, and to celebrate her "Fiat!". That would make a Nativity suitably alien to modern sensitivities, a shocking and disturbing story and not one that has been tamed.

The Power of Insult and the Politics of Sexuality

"The insult lets me know that I am not like others, not normal. I am queer: strange, bizarre, sick, abnormal."

I have been reading a truly riveting book Insult and the Making of the Gay Self by Didier Eribon. I haven't finished it yet but so far it's one of those rare books which almost seems to be telling my life. Eribon is a prominent French gay theorist and social commentator whi has also written two biographies of Michel Foucault. In this book he critiques, Foucault's proposition that the modern homosexual identity was a creation of late 19th century medical/psychiatric discourse. Interestingly, Eribon will highlight the way this argument by Foucault contradicts aspects of Foucault's earlier work. But I have yet to read Eribon's critique of Foucault because Foucault is very much the focus of the third section of the book but I'm still in the second section, "Spectres of Wilde". In this section Eribon explores the work of Wilde, Gide, Proust and others and locates it within earlier patterns of homosexual discourse, especially, for Wilde, the work of Pater and Symonds. Ulrichs is also quite important for the Continent, but Eribon also introduces the work of earlier figures in 19th century and 18th century Europe as well.

I was also fascinated to read Eribon's account of the impact of the emerging visible lesbian and gay (sub)cultures in contemporary France in the 1990s (the timeframe of the writing of this book). We in Australia and other Anglosphere countries are used to the multi-cultural pluralist nation state. In comtrast, for France and much of Europe, they work on a universalist model nation state. In other words, the nation/state provides all the main points of identity and community in which all the citizens share to build a commonality. This includes marriage too. In France the only legitimate form of marriage is that performed by the State. You can supplement it with a religious marriage, but a religious marriage on its own does not suffice. In the 1990s the emerging lesbain gay communities were denounced in French media (from both right and left) as a threat to this universal national model. Queer folks represented a particularity which disrupted the universal aspirations of the French state, la patrie. Oddly what Eribon describes seems to anticipate recent cultural panics in France about Muslim identity as a threat to the national ideal and the resulting moves to suppress expression of that particularity i.e. wearing of religious/Muslim dress, such as the headscarf and other symbols, especially in such prime spaces of the universalist state as schools and other educational institutions.

But it is the first section, in which Eribon describes insult and gay socialisation, what he terms the practices of "subjection and subjectivication", which are typified by the language of insult. Reading his analysis was like a kind of revelation for me. He was describing social facts that I knew all too well. He points out that the language of insult, of derogation of homosexuality, of the abjection of same sex love pre-exists each and everyone of us. The language helps to create the social space of marginalisation to which we are consigned by our sexuality. It's important to note here that he is not interested in an etiology of homosexuality. The futile and arid debates constructionism vs essentialism are quite irrelevant to Eribon's analysis.

Instead he makes his starting point te fact that there is a sexual hierarchy in our society and quite an ancient one too which place the homosexual, same sex love and passion and attachment, below those attachments of heterosexual household, procreation and biological family. 'Below' is probably too weak a term the homo-erotic is abjected, scorned, vilified. And for the greater majority of us who are queer we will first learn of our difference through the discourses of insult vilification scorn and abjection. Thus is homophobia internalised in both queer and straight. The mechanisms of the closet are pretty much inbuilt into this discursive process. Not every insult that we hear will be directed at us personally, we will overhear or be made spectators to such discourses of vilification and we will learn the strategies of hiding, of deflecting the sharp barb of insult, the arts of passing, the relief that once more I escaped being made a spectacle under the sharp spotlight of insult. But even if we do escape, such discourse of insult and vilification still serve to define, to explain our already perceived difference, to name it for ourselves even if (at first) we hide it, pretend that we are like the norm even though we know in our hearts that we are not. We are one of those. And Eribon points out that so often for so many of us that knowledge of who we are is compounded by the sense that we are such a rare breed, we might even be the only one of our type in the world (forget the myopic vista of the only one in the village). Eribon describes repeated accounts of queer folks who in their youth, really beleived that they were alone in the world, the only one in the world. And this would certainly be the case for people of my generation who grew up in times when public discussion of homsexuality was minimal and same sex love was rarely if ever portrayed in film or other media.

One thing I knew from very early on was my strong sense of difference. I knew there was somethng different about me. I didn't know what. I'm not certain at what age, maybe 5, definitely 6. Already at age 6 and 7, I was being targeted at school and I was starting to gravitate towards other kids who were in some sense different, such as the newly arriving Italians. I had another friend who was somewhat effeminate and who I would meet up with again as an adult, like me he was gay. He died beginning of 1985 from AIDS. Another boy in convent school was very asthmatic. His family eventually left our neighbourhood and moved out to Kedron. I remember he told me about the boys school he would be going to there. I have a memory of asking my parents if I could go to that school. The local convent school was only a primary school and so I would have to leave at high school anyway. And this particular boys school inlcuded the upper three or four years of primary school. It was at that time evolving out of a local parish school . Now how much my entreaties to let me go to that school influenced my parents. But I wanted to follow my friend, I did get to that school but tragically my friend didn't. And so I started there on my own. As was my way I befriended the odd ones out. But this was an all male/boy environment and the outsiders there were targets of serious brutality. My final two year of primary school were a horror story of hatred and violence, both verbal and physical.

I didn't intend to write about that aspect though and I'm surprised at how the autobiography of violence disrupted my flow. Maybe it didn't disrupt. It was somewhere around that time that my parent's got a Jerusalem Bible. In those days, bibles weren't a normal part of a Catholic home. Lives of the saints, perhaps, missals definitely. But I certainly remember at maybe age 12 or 13, checking out those bits in Leviticus. How I knew where to look, I can't remember now. We wouldn't have been taught that in school. But we had a dictionary and I also remember looking up words such as pervert and sodomite, maybe even homosexual. Many years later reading Well of Loneliness I could immediately identify with Stephen Gordon exploring her father's large library to find out more about herself, about what she was. For me though it wasn't my father's library ( a small book case in the lounge room ) but the public library that was the place of my researches (furtive of course). How did I find the words? I can only assume the words were available in the language of vilification and insult to which I had been subjected

But my earliest memory not so much of insult but of being made aware that I had crossed a line was in grade 1 or 2. I was friends with a boy then, Gary I think his name was, and I have the distinct memory of sitting or maybe standing beside him as he was sitting eating lunch in the school yard. I was playing with his hair, running my hands through it, twisting it around my fingers. I remember being called on that, perhaps by one of the nuns, or maybe by one of the boys, or maybe even by Gary himself. It's so vague. But I remember the sense of shame associated with it. I don't think Gary and stayed friends after that either. He certainly doesn't figure in later memories. That might have been the year. too, an older boy tried to hang me by the neck from the bag racks after school - a vague memory of a, thankfully, rare occasion of physical violence I expereinced in the convent school.

I've wandered far away from Insult, my memory seems to have become somewhat Proustian this weekend, all manner of things surfacing. There's a marvellous chapter in this book on gay melancholy, which Eribon describes as mourning for things that are lost or maybe disavowed through the project/discovery of one's different sexuality. As far back as I can remember I've had a strong sense of melancholy. I've always liked autumn for the melancholy nature of the light. And I've always had a thing for places after hours. In my school days, I got a strange nostalgic/melancholic thrill of being around the school buildings late in the evening when just about everyone else had gone. All that was left were the traces, the ghostly echoes of the days bustling. This after hours apreciation has continued into my adult life. I would enjoy working back on overtime (in the days when I had a regular job) on my own into the night because again the workplace become a place of traces and ghosts framed with a sense of yearning for something. Did they want me to set them alive again? And I spent so much of the PhD at University of Qld in the after hours especailly in the later years. Writing the dissertation woke up a lot of old ghosts as it was but they would find plenty of company in the corridors of the Forgan Smith Bldg

Melancholy, the project of mourning, it's been a regular companion. There is all the mourning for the possibilities that could not be. The mourning for the inevitable separations of space and person. The mourning for the grief that you know you will bring to others, in particular parents. I have a friend whose grandfather thinks that the penalties laid down in Leviticus should be law of the land i.e. us queers, including his grandson, should be stoned to death. How much sorrow does that represent?

Eribon points out that the project of queer emancipation, of lesbian and gay liberation, of acceptance and affirmation will always be incomplete. The sexual hierarchy still remains, albeit moderated through law reform and so forth over the last few years. But we can never be sure that we will get there, wherever there is, because we will always be on the margins. The closet remains exerting its power. I have met people in recent months who are still living lives mostly in the closet. And all of us have to decide every day just how out we will be on that day. I wish we could get rid of the silly notion that once you come out that's it. That's not true. We will keep coming out all the way to our graves. And it is the mechanisms of insult and caricature that keep it so.

Thus is not a review of Eribon's book. I'm certainly not doing it justice. Rather as with most of the stuff of blogs it is reflections and responses. But I strongly recommend this book. It tells much of my life. How many other lives does it tell? Plenty, I reckon. Plus his analysis of Proust and Ulrichs is definitely worth it. And I haven't finished it yet. And now I have more paid work for a few weeks I might even lash out and add it to my library.