Queer Citizens: the Structural Similarity between thepost-Revolutionary Citizen and the Figure of the Homosexual Público
Timar, Eszter (2009)
Abstract
The dissertation focuses on several conceptual presuppositions of modern Revolutionary citizenship arguing that a multifaceted, fundamental link connects the figure of the citizen and the figure of the (male) homosexual.
It traces this connection around notions of democratic transparency and the public sphere through a series of readings of mainly18th and 19th century texts from philosophy and literature in the light of theories of revolutionary citizenship and fraternity, queer theory, deconstructive philosophy, and social histories of the public sphere and masculinity.
First, relying mainly on Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert, Derrida's work on citationality, and texts by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler, I demonstrate a structural similarity between the modern figure of the homosexual and the figure of the actor by tracing a thread of the modern political discourse of antitheatricality to J.L. Austin's concept of performativity, and the way queer theory apprehends dominant cultural tropes of homosexuality.
Combining Hannah Arendt's philosophy of the revolution and Paul de Man's work on performative subjectivity, the second chapter traces the link between the actor and the citizen to the positing, performative force of the revolutionary declaration of the rights of man and citizen suggesting that these are metaphorical figures of the terms of the crucial tension between authenticity and inauthenticity instantiated by this performativity positing "man and citizen."
Next, I look at the concept of the homosexual closet and the post-Revolutionary public sphere. Reading Benjamin Constant's Adolphe and drawing on Luc Boltanski's and Susan Maslan's analyses of modes of theatricality and spectatorship structuring this public sphere, I argue that Adolphe's closet-like conflict coincides with these two modes and suggests that modern masculinity is shaped significantly in this superimposition.
Finally, I offer a reading of Hungarian novelist G. Thurzó's Days and Nights (1944), a closeted novel that, through making explicit its closeting intention, resists any readerly classification of gay, straight, in or out. Relying on Derrida's work on fraternity in Politics of Friendship, I argue that the novel effectuates this interpretive chaos by reconfiguring the aporetic terms of fraternity thus highlighting the tacit but powerful political dimension of the closet.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...1
CHAPTER 1 ACTING WEIRD: HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE FIGURE OF THE ACTOR...17 1. Austin's sea-change...28 2. Derrida: acting and the force of rupture...36 3. Rousseau and the actor: "...this forgetting of the man"...42 4. Counterfeit acts...51 Conclusion...63 CHAPTER 2 ACTING WEIRD 2: REVOLUTIONARY PERFORMATIVITY AND INAUTHENTICITY...66 1. Democratic performativity...72 2. Subjectivity, effacement, and the Jacobin imaginary...88 Conclusion...98 CHAPTER 3 THE CASE OF ADOLPHE: THE PUBLIC SPHERE, MASCULINITY, AND THE HOMOSEXUAL CLOSET...104 1. Adolphe: dissent, masculinity, and the closet...107 2. Habermas, Kant, Rousseau: public theatricality...126 3. Variations of spectatorship...129 Conclusion...140 CHAPTER 4 COMING OUT BY STAYING IN: THE CLOSET AND THE DISCOURSE OF FRATERNITY...143 1. The politics of friendship: "The brother is never a fact."...148 2. Coming out by staying in...156 Conclusion...177 CONCLUSION...180 BIBLIOGRAPHY...188
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