ABSTRACT
Criminals come in handy. —Michel Foucault, “Prison Talk”
If the treatment of male homosexuality as delinquency and disease is a product of the same legal and medical apparatus that “castrates” women (by regarding them as always already castrated)—and I will be arguing throughout this essay that it is-then the gay male intellectual has a fundamentally different stake in feminism than his heterosexual “counterpart.” How can he articulate that difference without setting himself up as the “exemplary” male feminist? To do so would not only be to appeal to a marginal-and marginalizing-(homo)sexual identity, rather than to investigate the construction of that identity; it would also be to posit a Genet-ic link between feminist and gay politics, rather than confronting the obstacles which stand in the way of such an alliance. Writing about Derrida writing about Genet, Gayatri Spivak observes that, in rewriting Freud by suggesting that the male homosexual may not be caught up in castration anxiety, Derrida is also suggesting “that the ‘feminization’ of philosophizing for the male deconstructor might find its most adequate legend in male homosexuality defined as criminality, and that it cannot speak for the woman.” For Spivak, this admission indicates the limits of deconstruction as a feminist practice; as she points out, in the end Derrida opts, not for homosexuality, but for fetishism: Glas, she writes, “is the classic case of fetishism, a uniquely shaped object (his bicolumnar book) that will allow the subject both to be and not to be a man-to have the phallus and yet accede to dissemination.”1 The gay male critic must also point out that, in Derrida’s de-Oedipalized homosexuality, Genet remains outside the Law. Is this not, then, a reconstruction of the “legend” of the homosexual outlaw?
