TURNING BACK

Adolescence, Narrative, and Queer Theory

Angus Gordon
Turning back to adolescence is a seemingly mandatory gesture in any narrative
of gay or lesbian identity. In its classic form, the coming-out narrative, this
return typically involves a retrospective exegesis, from the perspective of the
out adult gay or lesbian subject, in which virtually every aspect of his or her
adolescent life can be understood in terms of its relation to the eventual realiza-
tion of homosexual identitya realization that is both epistemological and nar-
ratological.
Judith Butler has recently suggested that a somewhat different form of self-
reexivity is fundamental to the internalization of disciplinary power during the
process of subject formation. According to Butler, the process by which a subordi-
nating power takes up residence in the psyche of the subject (who becomes con-
stituted as a subject only by virtue of that process) is relentlessly marked by a g-
ure of turning back, a turning back upon oneself or even a turning on oneself.
1
This turning back, which endures in the form of a constitutive conscience, guilt
or shame, is thus a precondition for the subjects very existence.
2
I want to suggest that the two forms of turning back are typically conated
in gay and lesbian accounts of adolescence: the temporal return to adolescence
often becomes a pretext for the staging of guilt or shame by the adult homosexual
subject. In Becoming a Man, for example, Paul Monette describes his reaction to
the queer-baiting of another student during his high school days: I never even
gave a thought to the evil of what Vinnie had done, how sick with confused desire,
the carnal thrill of degradation. The only reality lesson in it for me was not to be
recognizably Other.
3
Certainly, not every coming-out story attains the rhetorical
ardor of Monettes, but the gesture of subjecting adolescence to the judgment of
hindsight is so ubiquitous in this genre as to be an imperative. Of course, this
judgment does not have to take the form of outright self-condemnation; a verdict of
GLQ 5:1
pp. 124
Copyright 1999 by Duke University Press
mitigation, or even exoneration, still amounts to the exercise of a judicial preroga-
tive. Such reections tend to combine self-agellation and self-justication (as in
the Monette passage), and both gestures presuppose a mandate for the retrospec-
tive appraisal of the closeted adolescent by the out adult.
Another aspect of this passage makes it exemplary for my purposes in dis-
cussing the relationship between queer adulthood and queer adolescence. To the
extent that the remembered scene is one of interpellation, Monette himself is nei-
ther the interpellating agent nor the interpellated subject, except insofar as he ret-
rospectively recognizes himself as the latter. The scene does bring about a cer-
tain effect in the adolescent Monette, but it is an effect of disidentication, a kind
of infelicity that may in fact exemplify the logic of schoolyard homophobia more
clearly than any straightforward recognition on the part of the proper interpel-
lated subject.
In recent queer theory the coming-out narrative and the emancipatory
metaphorics it embodies have of course been subjected to a searching critique,
which in general has refuted the implied claim that the act of coming out can con-
stitute a singular, redemptive emancipation:
Conventionally, one comes out of the closet . . . so we are out of the closet,
but into what? what new unbounded spatiality? the room, the den, the
attic, the basement, the house, the bar, the university, some new enclosure
whose door, like Kafkas door, produces the expectation of a fresh air and a
light of illumination that never arrives? Curiously, it is the gure of the
closet that produces this expectation, and which guarantees its dissatisfac-
tion. For being out always depends to some extent on being in; it gains
its meaning only within that polarity. Hence, being out must produce the
closet again and again in order to maintain itself as out. In this sense,
outness can only produce a new opacity; and the closet produces the
promise of a disclosure that can, by denition, never come.
4
Less frequently remarked on in this critique is the status that the coming-out nar-
rative, with its Manichaean logic of closetedness and outness, assigns to the
period of life before the subject comes out. Just as being out of the closet always
depends to some extent on being in, so being in always depends on being out, in
that closetedness can be represented only from the retrospective position of out-
ness: one must be out of the closet to recognize it as the space from which one has
emerged. This necessary retrospectivity has important implications for the repre-
sentation of closeted adolescence (which, in the classic coming-out narrative, is
2 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
equivalent to adolescence tout court), since it consigns adolescence to a particular
stage within an overarching narrative, namely, a problematic or compromised
middle stage whose signicance becomes apparent only from the perspective of
the narratives denouement.
I want to argue that the retrospective narrativization of adolescence is, if
anything, more tenacious as a grounding postulate of gay and lesbian identity than
the coming-out storys claims of emancipation (which are, after all, refuted daily
by the lived experience of out gays and lesbians). To this end, I want to examine
the work of two of the most celebrated queer theoristsJudith Butler and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwickto demonstrate that the position of adolescence as both com-
promised and narrativizable proves inescapable even in these authors indis-
putably sophisticated accounts of sexual ontology and epistemology. In particular,
I wish to explore how Butlers implicit understanding of identity as temporally
constituted, and constituted as temporal, relates to the constituted temporality of
adolescence. I want to argue that her embrace of queer as a catachrestic, iterative
citation produces a stable original homophobic interpellation during adoles-
cence from which this citation derivesan effect in itself catachrestic. Finally, I
want to discuss the implications of Sedgwicks invocation of gay and lesbian ado-
lescent suicide as an inaugurating motive for gay and lesbian studies.
I should point out that in this essay the term adolescence is not intended to
refer to any ontological or transhistorical reality. Rather, it refers to a discursive
eld that in the twentieth century has been the dominant mode of knowledge of a
certain cohort of subjects, loosely dened by age. One of this elds most striking
features is its deployment of temporality, which I call narrativistic because it is
analogous to the discourse of ctional narrative in at least two respects. First, it
understands its object by means of what Peter Brooks calls the anticipation of ret-
rospection.
5
That is, the meaning of adolescence is always understood to become
apparent only in hindsight; it is structured throughout by a foreshadowed denoue-
ment, which is the subjects arrival at adulthood. Second, however, this denoue-
ment must never occur too soon; the narrative must be allowed to run its course,
resulting in an array of what Roland Barthes refers to as dilatory strategies:
detours, digressions, red herrings, and the like.
6
These strategies are particularly
important in the treatment of same-sex desire or experience during adolescence;
the discourse of adolescence typically recuperates them as detours (even, at times,
as necessary detours) on the path to an eventual heterosexual consummation.
Moreover, the production of adolescence as a narrativistic eld of knowledge both
informs and complicates the gay and lesbian account of adolescence, which, as I
have already pointed out, is itself irreducibly narrativistic.
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 3
At the beginning of Epistemology of the Closet Sedgwick makes an observation that
has become almost axiomatic in gay and lesbian studies. Notwithstanding the tor-
tuousness of the debate about the origins of the modern concept of sexuality, she
writes, it seems indisputable that from the beginning of the twentieth century
every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a
female gender, was . . . considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a
hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications, however con-
fusing, for even the least sexual aspects of personal existence.
7
If identity can
be thought of in terms of an analogy with the grammatical sentencean analogy
that the reliance of notions of identity on the grammatical category of the subject
implicitly invitesthen Sedgwicks comment can be paraphrased as follows: In
the twentieth century sexuality has been added to the set of predicates compul-
sorily attached to subjects in Western discourse. These predicates, which also
include sex and gender, are not mandatorily arrogated to an already existing
subject; they are compulsory in the sense that they constitute the very conditions
of the subjects coherence and intelligibility. Without them, the subject would
dangle. There is, strictly speaking, no subject prior to its predication; the latter
is the means by which a subject becomes thinkable.
What is less frequently remarked, not least because it may appear to con-
tradict what I have just said, is that the subject is not conventionally thought to
have assumed all of these predicates at the same time. Specically, the intelligi-
bility of the subject is in part constituted as the effect of a diachronic interval
between the assumption of sex and gender, on the one hand, and that of sexual ori-
entation, on the other.
By sex and gender, on the one hand, I do not mean that sex and gender
are identical or simultaneous. Rather, I am referring to their positions in Western
discourse, in which they are classically understood as temporally proximate to the
extent that they are nearly (although not quite) simultaneous. For the culturally
mandated indissolubility of biological sex and cultural gender to function
discursively as an axiomatic pairing, whereby sex and gender exist in a necessary
relation of mutual entailment, the two must be thought of as temporally, as well as
logically, inseparable. The subjects symbolic gender is represented in discourse
as an immediate and necessary consequence of its putatively presymbolic chromo-
somal sex.
Butler has inuentially argued that the production of gender as an effect of
biological sex is generated by a constitutive metalepsis, whereby the gendering of
subjects discursively produces the morphological binarism that is then installed as
its material cause.
8
But to what extent does the discursive construction of sex as
4 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
logically antecedent to gender also entail a temporal anteriority? Are discursive
constructions of logical sequence and temporal sequence necessarily linked? I
contend that they are to the extent that identity is conceived of temporally. That is,
the deployment of narrativistic modes of thinking around identity inevitably
involves a conation of logical sequence and temporal sequence, since, as Barthes
argues, such a conation is a property of narrative itself: Everything suggests . . .
that the mainspring of narrative is precisely the confusion of consecution and con-
sequence, what comes after being read in narrative as what is caused by; in which
case narrative would be a systematic application of the logical fallacy denounced
by Scholasticism in the formula post hoc, ergo propter hoca good motto for Des-
tiny, of which narrative all things considered is no more than the language.
9
But the systematic application of the fallacious mapping of synchronic or
logical consequence onto diachronic consecution can take place in a number of
ways. The subject-forming effects of sex and gender are best served if their tempo-
ral disjunction is understood to approachwithout ever attainingsimultaneity.
That is, the interval between the discovery of a body as sexed and its founding
interpellation as a gendered subject Its a boy/girl!is as nearly impercepti-
ble as the interval between the neuter pronominal subject and the gendered pred-
icate within this interpellatory speech act. Further, this near imperceptibility is an
effect not of any ontological proximity between sex and gender but of the impera-
tive to represent such proximity as ontological.
However and here I come to the second component, the on the other
hand, of my founding claimthe predicate of sexual orientation is not applied to
the subject as soon as he or she has been assigned a sex and a gender. Although it
will invariably be understood in retrospect to have been immanent in the subject
all along, it is constituted in the rst place as an attribute that will not become
fully manifest until after an interval corresponding to the cultural categories of
infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Sexual orientation, as a predicate, is suscep-
tible to a constitutive delay.
However, this delay is neither more nor less constitutive than its retrospec-
tively assigned immanence. Rather, these two attributes together enable a narra-
tivistic construction of sexual orientation with respect to preadult subjects,
whereby the necessary futurity of sexual identity is strategically compromised by
its simultaneous inevitability. Thus, while Butler rightly contends that the initia-
tory performative, Its a girl! anticipates the eventual arrival of the sanction, I
pronounce you man and wife, the effect of a temporal delay between the two per-
formatives, as registered by phrases like eventual arrival, is rhetorically equal in
importance to the anticipation of the second by the rst.
10
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 5
What is the effect of this constitutive delay on the construction of adoles-
cent subjectivity, given that modern subjectivity is intelligible only within the
predicative ensemble of sex, gender, and sexual orientation? As I have remarked,
these two aspects of subjectivity may at rst appear to be mutually contradictory,
or at least jointly to render adolescent subjectivity unintelligible. I contend that
adolescent subjectivity is intelligible but that its intelligibility is grounded in a
narrativistic mode of knowledge. Moreover, adolescence is fundamentally struc-
tured along the axis of sexual orientation, in spite of the latters delayed predication
with respect to the adolescent subject.
It is important that adolescence not be understood in terms of some
prelapsarian anteriority to identity. The theoretical tendency to treat adolescence
as the utopian site of a free-oating liminal exploration of myriad nonbinding
identications and desires must be resisted, for at least two reasons.
11
The rst is
methodological: this tendency implicitly relies on a presentist phenomenology
that treats adolescent experience as something empirically available in its own
right. But since discourses of adolescence gure sexual orientation diachroni-
callyas an immanent futurity, that which the subject will acquirethe present
of adolescence is ubiquitously structured by an adumbrated future. Just as the
generically constrained denouement of ctional narrative structures the reading of
its dilatory middle, the perpetually foreshadowed xity of adult sexual identity
informs the purported liminality of adolescent sexuality at every point of its dis-
cursive articulation.
The second, more important reason for resisting utopian theoretical
approaches is that they mask the extent to which heterosexuality is privileged in
the discursive construction of adolescence. However much adolescence may
appear to be the site of a free-oating play of desire, there is a radical dissymme-
try between the assimilation of same-sex and opposite-sex desires by discourses
of adolescence. Except in a very limited generic eldthat of the coming-out
narrativeheterosexuality is installed in advance as the default sexual orienta-
tion, the standard denouement. There is thus a categorical distinction within dis-
courses of adolescence between the two terms of the standard binary axis of sex-
ual orientation, heterosexuality and homosexuality.
Moreover, this distinction operates quite differently from the one more com-
monly elaborated in adult sexual taxonomies. For example, whereas the nineteenth-
century construction of homosexuality was informed largely by the project of
isolating a containable subpopulation of adult homosexuals who could then be
constituted as subjects of scientic knowledge, such taxonomic imperatives have
generally not been pursued with respect to adolescent populations. The generic
6 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
logic of adolescence entails an imperative to inscribe same-sex desires, acts, and
identications as detours or snares in an overarching heterosexual narrative
rather than as indices of an immanent homosexual orientation.
One of the most interesting insights in Butlers genealogical critique of the cate-
gories of sex, gender, and sexuality is the extent to which logical, or synchronic,
accounts of cause and effect rely on temporal, or diachronic, accounts of anterior-
ity and posteriority for legitimization and naturalization. Implicit in Butlers theo-
rization of identity is the assumption that the logically prior and the temporally
prior are neither identical nor ontologically inseparable but, rather, that their
inseparability is a corollary of their discursive production. Thus genealogy inves-
tigates the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity cat-
egories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multi-
ple and diffuse points of origin (GT, viiiix).
One implication of this theoretical attention to the rhetorical links
between the temporal and the logical is that the proper object of a genealogical
critique ought to be not merely how certain categories come to be designated as
causes of others but also how certain categories come to be designated as coming
before others. The two designations should not be treated as if they were the same
thing; rather, their discursive relation should be treated as a thing to be eluci-
dated. Positing a logical cause as also temporally anterior may in fact be a neces-
sary move within the constraints of Western philosophical discourse on the ques-
tion of identity; certainly, Butler is not above making such a move herself, albeit
deconstructively, as when she disputes the ontological primacy of the incest taboo
by arguing for a prior taboo on homosexuality (GT, 63). But the discursive
articulation of temporality does not consist merely of the binaristic assignment of
two categories to an abstract before and after; temporalization works differently
for different categories.
A useful starting point for examining the temporality of identity in Butlers
work is her repeated insistence that identity depends on a grammar through which
it can be produced and expressed. Temporality is inscribed in this grammar in two
ways. First, Butler follows Nietzsche in asserting that the presumed naturalness of
grammar itself induces false ontologies by dissimulating the contingency of sub-
ject and predicate and installing them as reections of a prior ontological real-
ity: a temporal effect with respect to language tout court (GT, 20). But in addition
to the metaleptic reversal between language and its presumed referent, the gram-
mar of subject and predicate produces an effect of temporality internal to lan-
guage: not only is language as a whole constituted as coming after that which it in
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 7
fact produces, but the subject within language is constituted as preceding its pred-
icate. In the latter sense, what Butler calls the seductions of grammar (B, 6) make
it difcult to imagine the human subject in any other light than that of the gram-
matical subject that seems already to exist unproblematically and self-sufciently
in advance of predication. This form of seduction is not one to which only those of
an essentialist persuasion are susceptible; it applies equally, if not a fortiori, to
those who subscribe to the various forms of constructionism:
If gender is a construction, must there be an I or a we who enacts or
performs that construction? How can there be an activity, a constructing,
without presupposing an agent who precedes and performs that activity?
How would we account for the motivation and direction of construction
without such a subject? As a rejoinder, I would suggest that it takes a cer-
tain suspicion toward grammar to reconceive the matter in a different light.
For if gender is constructed, it is not necessarily constructed by an I or a
we who stands before that construction in any spatial or temporal sense
of before. (B, 7)
This particular temporalizing effect, then, is so internal to grammar that it
persists even in accounts in which the constituted temporality of language tout
court is acknowledged. Indeed, Butler argues that it emerges as a constitutive
double bind in any account of subject formation: The grammar of the subject
emerges only as a consequence of the process [of subjection] we are trying to
describe. Because we are, as it were, trapped within the grammatical time of the
subject (e.g., we are trying to describe, we are trapped), it is almost impossible
to ask after the genealogy of its construction without presupposing that construc-
tion in asking the question (PL, 117).
If this kind of metalepsis, whereby the subject is installed prior to the
predicates of which it is an effect, is a constitutive property of grammatical struc-
ture as such, then it would seem to follow that it will also be a constitutive prop-
erty of any system understood by analogy to grammatical structure, for example,
identity. In particular, I contend that the understanding of adolescence as a site at
which the sentence of identity is as yet incomplete is inevitably structured by
the invocation of a subject that is, strictly speaking, still to be fully predicated.
If such a subject is in the most rigorous sense an ontological impossibility, it
remains nevertheless an irresistible heuristic necessity.
But this is not the only point to be made about deploying linguistic cate-
gories to understand identity. When Butler, for example, denies the ontological
8 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
existence of a subject that stands before its predicate in any spatial or tempo-
ral sense of before, she invokes the capacity of certain grammatical compara-
tives to refer either to spatial relations or to temporal ones. I contend that this
ambivalence is not merely a characteristic of a circumscribed group of words
(among which one would include not only before but also behind, as well as the
pair anterior and posterior) but a manifestation of a trope within language itself, in
which the spatial written sequence and the temporal spoken sequence constitute a
mutually indispensable linear homology.
12
The spatial order of words on a page
inevitably evokes the temporal order of words spoken. Of course, following Der-
rida, we must insist that the converse also holds.
13
Moreover, if signifying systems are truly linear, their linearity must
involve not only the basic attribute of ordered sequence but also a supplementary
and consequent element of distantiation. In a spatial linear sequence there might
be quite different relations of distance between pairs of terms having an identical
sequential relation. For example, if one selects three arbitrary, nonequidistant
points A, B, and C in sequential order on a line, then the relations between pairs
A-B and B-C will be identical in terms of sequence but nonidentical in terms of
distance.
14
By analogy, there is also an innite capacity for differences in dis-
tance in a temporal sequence: temporality is not reducible to a simple before-
after binary. Might, then, a Butlerian suspicion toward grammar involve an
interrogation not only of languages ctive sequentiality but also of the various
ways in which distantiation is inscribed and managed as a function of this
sequentiality in discourses of identity?
I will attempt to work through such a suspicion by turning to what Butler
calls the heterosexual matrix (GT, 151 n. 6), the set of linked predicates by
which intelligible subjects are produced in contemporary Western discourse.
Since my concern is the temporal category of adolescence, my emphasis here is on
the ways in which the heterosexual matrix produces temporal, rather than spatial,
effects of distantiation, but it should be borne in mind that the two frames of ref-
erence coexist in a constant ux of tropological exchange, so that the temporal can
never be isolated entirely from the spatial.
Butler describes the heterosexual matrix as a complicated, tripartite met-
aleptic structure:
The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of
discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between feminine and mascu-
line, where these are understood as expressive attributes of male and
female. The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 9
intelligible requires that certain kinds of identities cannot existthat
is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the
practices of desire do not follow from either sex or gender. Follow in
this context is a political relation of entailment instituted by the cultural
laws that establish and regulate the shape and meaning of sexuality. (GT, 17)
I would add that follow designates not only a political relation of entailment but
also this relations temporal guration: gender follows from sex not only in the
sense that it is made necessary by sex but also in the sense that it comes after
sex. This point is not incidental: the nexus between entailment and temporal
sequence gives both the discursive construction of bodily sex and materiality as
prediscursive and the juridical construction of the subject as prejuridical
their rhetorical force, the questioning and unknotting of which animates the major-
ity of Butlers published work, particularly Gender Trouble.
But if the heterosexual matrix produces sex, gender, and heterosexuality
as a logical and temporal sequence through which the subject is rendered intelli-
gible, how is the sequences temporality managed with respect to its individual
terms, given my contention that temporality involves not just sequentiality but
also distantiation? I have suggested that what Butler describes as discursively
and performatively instituted modes of temporality (GT, 29) function differently
with respect to sex and gender, on the one hand, and to these two terms and sex-
uality, on the other. For if sex and gender are constituted in the same mode of
temporality in which sex is installed as prior to gender but also proximate to it
in which gender not only follows from but follows immediately from sexthen
the mode of temporality in which sexuality (which in the heterosexual matrix
amounts to heterosexuality) is installed as the consequence of sex and gender is
somewhat different.
Specically, what is different in the management of this second stage of
the heterosexual matrixs temporal sequence is the strategy of delay, by which
heterosexuality is put into place still as a necessary and implicit predicate of
subjectivity but one that will be fully manifest only after a certain interval.
15
With
respect to a subjectivity gured as taking place within that interval that is, the
subjectivity attached to childhood and especially to adolescenceheterosexual-
ity will be constantly invoked, but its realization will be constantly delayed. In
other words, the heterosexual matrix is narrativized with respect to adolescent
subjectivity. Its operation can be compared to that of the enigma that constitutes
the dynamic motivation of the classic hermeneutic ctional narrative, accord-
ing to Barthes, who in turn compares it to the unnished, as-yet-unpredicated
10 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
sentence: In short, based on the articulation of question and answer, the
hermeneutic narrative is constructed according to our image of the sentence: an
organism probably innite in its expansions, but reducible to a diadic unity of
subject and predicate. To narrate (in the classic fashion) is to raise the question
as if it were a subject which one delays predicating; and when the predicate
(truth) arrives, the sentence, the narrative, are over, the world is adjectivized
(after we had feared it would not be).
16
Using adolescence as its narrative template, the heterosexual matrix simi-
larly produces an anxiety the more conclusively to assuage it. The anxiety that the
adolescent subject might not be appropriately adjectivized, might not come to
inhabit the heterosexuality that will function as both effect and guarantee of his or
her sex and gender, is an effect not of an ontological intermediacy in adolescence
but of the narrativization of adolescence within which this intermediacy is pro-
duced and managed. The result of this narrativization is a construction of adoles-
cence that gures it as interjuridical and interdiscursive in relation to a law
and a discourse within which it is produced as delay, gap, or interval.
It is crucial that for Butler, the heterosexual matrix is a metaleptic struc-
ture that inverts relations of cause and effect and that therefore, in some sense,
inverts temporal relations as well. Although heterosexuality is gured as the even-
tual outcome of sex and gender as what comes after them, their necessary (but
delayed) consummationthis temporality dissimulates the extent to which sex
and gender are made necessary in the rst place by a regulatory heterosexuality
(GT, 17). Thus, although heterosexuality is submitted to a grammar of delay, it is
in some sense already there as that which makes such a grammar possible. If
this argument seems to subvert the logic of the adolescent narrative, I would
insist, on the contrary, that the doubling of heterosexuality as, in different regis-
ters, origin and conclusion is a constitutive and enabling ambivalence within that
narratives disciplinary framework.
If there is a theoretical move through which the adolescent narrative might
be subverted (and I have reason to question whether subverted is even the
appropriate term), perhaps it is not so much a recognition of this narratives dis-
cursively constituted temporality as an interrogation of the relationship between
adolescence and performativity. For this is another sense in which the grammar of
identity is a temporal grammar: to the extent that identities are produced through
performative repetition, they are produced over time and therefore, once again,
produced as temporal: Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or
locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenu-
ously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repeti-
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 11
tion of acts. . . . This formulation moves the conception of gender off the ground of
a substantial model of identity to one that requires a conception of gender as a
constituted social temporality (GT, 14041).
An understanding of the performativity of gender and, by implication, of
sexualitythus complicates my claims about the temporalization of identity
predicates. Clearly, if such predicates, and the subject who comes to be seen as
their origin, are installed as such by performative repetition, then it is not only the
discursivity of these categories that must be dissimulated by a temporalizing logic
but also the iterative performativity by which such discursivity is instantiated in
the subject. Not only must sex, gender, and sexuality have the appearance of being
assumed in a certain sequential order and at certain distances from each other,
but each of them must be seen to be assumed once and for all in a singular,
epiphanic (that is, nonperformative) moment of autogenesis.
Against this ctive singularity Butler posits queer as a destabilizing and
hyberbolic performative. Indeed, it is in the self-conscious evocation of its own
iterative status that, for Butler, queer nds its potential for destabilization: Para-
doxically, but also with great promise, the subject who is queered into public dis-
course through homophobic interpellations of various kinds takes up or cites that
very term as the discursive basis for an opposition. This kind of citation will
emerge as theatrical to the extent that it mimes and renders hyperbolic the discur-
sive convention that it also reverses (B, 232). Importantly, queer is not invoked
here as some utopian alternative to identity or even as some unproblematically
inclusive version of identity. Rather, it is offered as a term through which to inter-
rogate the metaphysical and temporal origins that Western discourse produces on
behalf of identity.
To say so is not to venture an opinion on whether such interrogations are an
efcacious means of subversion. For one thing, I agree with Sedgwick that the
compulsion to arbitrate such matters that many post-Butlerian scholars seem to
experience induces a depressing critical paralysis in which the outcome is gen-
erally the same: kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic.
17
But in addition, I fear that
a peremptory embrace of queer as a necessarily subversive citation in the pres-
ent unduly simplies the ways in which it operates in the past.
As in much gay and lesbian discourse, there is a slippage here between
historical and individual narrative temporalities, so that the past and the present
are predicated with respect to both a periodized gay and lesbian history (pre- and
post-Stonewall or, perhaps now, pre- and post-queer) and a bifurcated individual
life story (closetedness and outness). When Butler refers to a subject who is
queered into public discourse through homophobic interpellations and who then
12 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
takes up or cites that very term as the discursive basis for an opposition, she pro-
poses a clear temporal disjunction between the subject of the homophobic inter-
pellation, who might be thought of either as a collective, historical homosexual
subject or as an individual, adolescent homosexual subject, and the subject of the
oppositional citation, who can be intelligibly thought of only as occupying a tem-
poral subsequence to the former.
While attention to the temporality of queer is indispensable, there is a dan-
ger that the rst homophobic interpellation will be taken for granted as the secure,
abject origin of the undoubtedly more glamorous subsequent citation.
18
That is,
adolescenceor the historical past might be installed as the necessarily stable
site of homophobic interpellation against which the contemporary subversive
reworking of queer arrays itself.
One objection to such a formulation is that queer does not necessarily func-
tion as a homophobic interpellation even in adolescence, if interpellation is under-
stood as a direct rhetorical appeal to (one who is thereby constituted as) a certain
kind of subject. Indeed, Butler seems to envisage such an appeal when she
describes how queer functions as a performative speech act: The term queer has
operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the
subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming inter-
pellation (B, 226). Whatever the purpose of the term queer, however, its effects
have emphatically not been conned to the shaming of the subject it names; as
countless adolescent narratives (including Monettes) attest, the subject who is
shamed may not be the one who is named queer. Indeed, the performative (or per-
haps, following Sedgwick, I should say the periperformative)
19
efcacy of queer
is in no way contingent on a felicitous nomination (the person who is called queer
does not have to be successfully interpellated as such); rather, it operates as the
rallying cry of an exemplary and spectacular form of punishment, a residual trace
of the ancien rgime within the modern disciplinary economy of assujettissement.
20
In this sense queer is already structured by a functional catachresis in its adoles-
cent usage: it operates not so much through a noise-free interpellatory dyad as
through a eld of disidentication in which the illocutionary failure of interpella-
tion is, if anything, precisely its point.
21
In other words, when one invokes the term queer as a secondary, citational
practice, one does not necessarily invoke a term through which one was previously
interpellated. Indeed, the self-reexive judgment that structures the relation of the
adult subject to his or her adolescent counterpart in coming-out narratives may be
predicated to a large extent on the failure of the proto-queer adolescent to respond
adequately to the interpellating address. The position of bystander at someone
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 13
elses martyrdom is, at the very least, a less heroic position on which to base a
practice of subversive reclamation.
Lest I be taken to accuse Butler in general of some vulgar Althusserianism
in her use of the concept of interpellation, I should point out that her own work on
interpellationin particular, The Psychic Life of Poweris rigorously aware of
exactly the kinds of problems I have outlined above. For example, Butler fully
acknowledges the danger of embracing the Althusserian interpellatory scene as
an ontological truth:
The theory of interpellation appears to stage a social scene in which a
subject is hailed, the subject turns around, and the subject then accepts
the terms by which he or she is hailed. This is, no doubt, a scene both
punitive and reduced, for the call is made by an ofcer of the Law, and
this ofcer is cast as singular and speaking. Clearly we might object that
the call arrives severally and in implicit and unspoken ways, that the
scene is never quite as dyadic as Althusser claims, but these objections
have been rehearsed, and interpellation as a doctrine continues to sur-
vive its critique. If we accept that the scene is exemplary and allegorical,
then it never needs to happen for its effectivity to be presumed. (PL, 106)
In her eagerness to regard the secondary use of queer as a citation of a primary
nomination, however, Butler seems to assert that the original scene of interpella-
tion has in some sense occurred. Even if she does not even if the original homo-
phobic interpellation is to be regarded as a necessary ctionthis ctionality
does not mitigate the effect of this construction on the understanding of adoles-
cence that it informs and is informed by.
In particular, the idea that the derivative use of queer is based on a found-
ing homophobic interpellation may be understood to require a narrativization of
adolescence as the exemplary site of that interpellation and thus to produce an
imperative to understand closeted adolescence as the bad-queer or abject coun-
terpart to the good-queer subjectivity of uncloseted adulthood. When this
imperative is combined with my contention that adult gay or lesbian subjectivity is
structured to some extent by the shame of a failure to respond to a homophobic
interpellation during adolescence, the attempt to represent queer adolescence is
placed in a double bind. Either one was interpellated as queer during adoles-
cence, in which case adolescence becomes a site of abjection, or one was not inter-
pellated as queer during adolescence, in which case adolescence becomes a site
of shame.
14 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
Is it possible to construct a representation of queer adolescence that avoids this
double bind? To suggest a tentative answer to this question, I turn to the work of
Sedgwick, who has repeatedly insisted that adolescence has a claim on gay and
lesbian studies. She has gone so far as to say, I think everyone who does gay and
lesbian studies is haunted by the suicides of adolescents (T, 1). I want to treat
this statement with, if anything, excessive seriousness, as a speech act that exerts
several kinds of discursive force. To do so, I will examine it in terms of the three
categories that J. L. Austin uses to denote the different capacities that may
coexist in a single speech act: the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the
perlocutionary.
22
The locutionary corresponds to the capacity within language that is asso-
ciated in toto with the constative speech act: it is a function that is referential, that
says something about something else, and that can be submitted to a criterion of
truth or falsity. Thus, the above-quoted statement from Sedgwick is a locutionary
act to the extent that it says something true or false about the people who do gay
and lesbian studies or, more accurately, about Sedgwicks estimation of them.
Arguably, the locutionary force of Sedgwicks assertion is what would arouse the
least immediate interest in gay and lesbian studies; it seems to me that most of us
would not respond with any great urgency to the question of whether in any con-
stative sense, literal or metaphorical, we actually are haunted by the suicides of
adolescents. This is not to say that the statement is trivial or uninteresting, but its
force would seem to reside in other capacities than the locutionary.
Next, the illocutionary is the performance of an act in saying something
as opposed to performance of an act of saying something.
23
It corresponds to the
function that contemporary theories of gender and sexuality have so jubilantly
appropriated from speech-act theory: the performative. Considered as an illocu-
tionary act, Sedgwicks I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is
haunted by the suicides of adolescents suddenly acquires a much more pressing
linguistic force, since it constitutes gay and lesbian studies as a eld haunted by
the suicides of adolescents. As an illocutionary act, rather than a claim or an
assertion, Sedgwicks statement virtually inaugurates a relation of obligation
between gay and lesbian studies and gay and lesbian adolescents; at least it
sutures a relation already adumbrated in a range of theoretical writing, not least
Sedgwicks own.
Finally, a speech act with perlocutionary force is one that mobilizes a
dimension of language roughly equivalent to the rhetorical in its classical
usage: the ability of a speech act to bring about an effect that is not coterminous
with the speech act itself. Since perlocutionary force becomes legible only when
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 15
a speech act is considered in its context, Sedgwicks statement can best be appre-
ciated in this respect as the opening sentence of an essay called Queer and
Now, originally published in a collection subtitled Messages from American Uni-
versities, that deals in large part with the debates around political correctness
that (one hears) have so stultied academic life in the United States.
24
In this
context, the invocation of suicide functions as a rejoinder to anti-intellectual
forces for whom, according to Sedgwick, the at inadmissability of openly queer
articulation is one of the self-evident things most readily available for rhetor-
ical deployment (T, 18). In contrast to the canonical problematics of Western civ-
ilization and the human condition, or even the (conceded) weight of the African
American history of slavery, inter alia, the desire to pose questions about sexual-
ity in an intellectual setting can all too readily be stamped an improperly trivial-
izing and frivolous endeavor. The deployment of a set of statistics indicating a
silent history of suicide by gay and lesbian adolescents, particularly marshaled
under the designation A Motive as it is by Sedgwick, functions rhetorically to
instill such a desire with the manifest gravitas that it perhaps needs to ght for its
academic survival.
It is not that such a deployment succeeds in any tangible sense, or at
least in any sense measurable by the standard criterion of the perlocutionary; if it
did make anything happen, change anyones mind, or cause anyone to act differ-
ently, the effect would be quite in excess of any sane expectation, Sedgwicks own
certainly included. Indeed, Sedgwick elsewhere has been the rst to point out that
the discursive history of the report, sponsored and later repudiated by the U.S.
government, from which the relevant statistics about gay and lesbian adolescent
suicide are taken is a history not merely of rhetorical inefcacy as such but of
obdurate unwillingness on the part of its interlocutors even to engage with the
report on the rhetorical terms on which it was offered.
25
The written response of the
secretary of the sponsoring government department to the views [sic] expressed
in the paper is, Sedgwick points out, calculated not to refute it on a veridical level
but to impugn its very existence (T, 154). In this sense, the perlocutionary force
of the statement I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted by
the suicides of adolescents is to be found not in any observable, immediate
kinetic inuence but in the intangible accumulation of rhetorical effects that
comes about through the stubborn reiteration of speech acts that, on their own,
seem forlornly evanescent.
But what does it mean for Sedgwick to press adolescent suicide into these
various kinds of discursive labor? Does it not raise an epistemological (let alone
an ethical) problem to invoke suicide, especially adolescent suicide, as an object
16 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
with claims on a certain constituency? Here is the opening paragraph of Queer
and Now in full: I think everyone who does gay and lesbian studies is haunted
by the suicides of adolescents. To us, the hard statistics come easily: that queer
teenagers are two to three times likelier to attempt suicide, and to accomplish it,
than others; that up to 30 percent of teen suicides are likely to be gay or lesbian;
that a third of lesbian and gay teenagers say they have attempted suicide; that
minority queer adolescents are at even more extreme risk (T, 1). Whenever I read
this passage, I am troubled by more than the horric facts that it describes. How
is it, I cannot help wondering, that queer teenagers, lesbian and gay teenagers,
and minority queer adolescents have become objects of statistical knowledge,
when adolescent sexuality has been narrativistically constituted precisely as the
site of an inability to make such denitive taxonomic designations? Can it possi-
bly be through suicide that they have become knowable? This question is in some
ways even more troubling, since it is at least plausible to understand suicide
as (among other things) a radical refusal of interpellation, a catastrophic short-
circuiting of the process by which subjects of scientic and juridical knowledge
become constituted as suchalthough it is necessarily also a failed refusal,
since the suicidal body succeeds only in becoming the site of a proliferation of
knowledges.
I am certainly not arguing against Sedgwicks using this material, nor am I
suggesting that gay and lesbian adolescent suicide should be referred to only
under erasure, in quotation marks, as a tactical ction, or by means of any
other rubric of poststructuralist equivocation. Indeed, the epistemological opacity
of these data in no way diminishes, and if anything intensies, the urgency of
invoking them. But although it is in one sense indisputable that the hard statis-
tics come easily to those in gay and lesbian studies, it is worth asking what kind
of relation such a disciplinary formation imagines itself having with the con-
stituency by which it is haunteda question that nally returns us to the locu-
tionary force of Sedgwicks assertion.
Perhaps the relation that we might most obviously be thought to have to
gay and lesbian adolescent suicides is based on identity: They could have been
us or, more dramatically, We could have been like themthe notion that
there but for the grace of some queer deity go all of us.
26
At rst glance this is
what Sedgwick seems to mean when she refers to queer identity as that of the
survivor (T, 3), a term that evokes both postcolonial and post-Holocaust tropes
of ethnic identity. But an uncritical assimilation of this kind of relation would be
problematic; its overwhelming tendency would be to stabilize adolescence as the
temporal site of mourning, of abjection, as that which we have left behind. I sug-
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 17
gest instead that to be haunted by something is not necessarily to claim a close-
tting identity with it. Rather, haunting suggests a past both traumatic and
incomplete, a relation between past and present that troubles the closure of nar-
rative temporalization. Both Butler and Sedgwick deploy the Freudian under-
standing of melancholia to describe such relations in other contexts, and I want to
invoke it again here, not out of any particular sympathy for the psychoanalytic
project itself but out of an interest in how this term blurs the boundaries between
desire and identication (B, 99) and thus disturbs the effortless autobiographical
presupposition of an untroubled correspondence between past and present.
27
Understanding the haunting of gay and lesbian studies by the suicides of adoles-
cents as a melancholic relation may be one way of rendering adolescence as an
inescapable topos within the discipline without simultaneously reifying it as an
abjected temporal past.
What makes melancholia different from the more straightforward mourning
in the Freudian account is that the loss that inaugurates the former is disavowed
and, because it can never be relinquished through grieving, becomes constitutive
of the subject. Thus, for example, Butler provocatively argues that within the het-
erosexual matrix gender is founded on the melancholic disavowal of a homosexual
attachment: If the assumption of femininity and the assumption of masculinity
proceed through the accomplishment of an always tenuous heterosexuality, we
might understand the force of this accomplishment as mandating the abandon-
ment of homosexual attachments or, perhaps more trenchantly, preempting the pos-
sibility of homosexual attachment, a foreclosure of possibility which produces a
domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss
(PL, 135). Butler has also suggested, however, that melancholia may be constitu-
tive of gay identity, in which case it involves an effort to disavow a constitutive
relationship to heterosexuality (PL, 148). If the relationship between gay and les-
bian studies and adolescence is to be understood as a melancholic relationship,
then this melancholia necessarily takes the latter form: a certain disavowed
attachment, the loss of which it is not possible to grieve within the constraints of a
gay or lesbian identity.
Butler argues that melancholia becomes constitutive of the subject in the
form of guilt, or self-beratement, the policing that the subject performs on
itself (PL, 140). It is interesting to speculate whether the self-policing evident in
gay and lesbian culture is related to the disavowal of a constitutive relationship to
heterosexuality. Is it possible, for example, for the verdict of internalized homo-
phobia that frequently attends such frowned-on practices as an expression of
unhappiness about being gay, a description of oneself as straight acting, or an
18 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
erotic attachment to heterosexual men on the part of gay men or to heterosexual
women on the part of gay women to be founded on such a disavowal?
If it is tentatively conceded that gay and lesbian self-policing is in part a
function of melancholia, then we may expect such melancholia to play a particu-
larly crucial role in the retrospective construction of adolescence. This is because,
as I have been arguing, one concern of the construction of adolescence in gay and
lesbian narratives is to engage in retrospective self-policing, to secure the closeted
past as a site of, precisely, the internalized homophobia, the refusal of interpella-
tion, that has been overcome in the uncloseted present. An adult gay or lesbian
subject can be exonerated retrospectively from such a charge only by evoking an
adolescence in which he or she was interpellated as queer and was persecuted as
a result. To reiterate what I have claimed earlier, the representation of gay or les-
bian adolescence is structured by a double bind: either one refused interpellation
as queer, which has rendered adolescence a site of shame, or one accepted inter-
pellation as queer and its consequences, which has rendered adolescence a site of
abjection. Hence, perhaps, the ubiquitous invocation of an unhappy childhood in
gay and lesbian narratives. As Elspeth Probyn points out, for a gay or lesbian
adult to assert that his or her childhood or adolescence was happy would in itself
almost sufce to arouse suspicion.
28
If the classic coming-out narrative tends to be structured by the rst clause
of this double bind, then, I would argue, queer theorys appropriation of adoles-
cence as a site of homophobic interpellation risks being structured by the second
clause. That is to say, an uncritical embrace of queer adolescence as the abject
site of an interpellation that queer adulthood subsequently cites and reverses risks
constituting adolescence, almost pietistically, as the territory of an inevitable mar-
tyrdom, the reward for which is postponed until adulthood, when the possibility of
queer identication offers its own kind of resurrection. If this sounds hyperbolic, is
it not the case that a reductively identicatory relationship between practitioners
of gay and lesbian studies and victims of adolescent suicide may inaugurate such
a pietistic relationship between queer adolescence and queer adulthood to an
almost literal degree? Victims of suicide might become emblems of the martyrdom
that we, whether through good fortune or insufciency of courage, managed to
escape.
How can this double bind be understood as an effect of melancholia
remembering that if there is a specically gay form of melancholia, it consists of
the perpetual disavowal of a disallowed, and therefore ungrievable, loss? I do not
want to speculate precisely what the object of this loss might be in every case, but
I do want to suggest that in narratives of adolescence melancholia might take the
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 19
form of a disavowal of the loss of the closet itself. After all, there is arguably no
desire more stringently disallowed within gay and lesbian culture than the desire
to return to the closet a desire impossible to realize, of course, but no less force-
fully disallowed for all that. In this sense, the double bind of shame and abjection
that structures gay and lesbian accounts of adolescence may involve a rhetorical
foreclosure of the desire to return to a time before ones queer identity was made
irrevocable by the act of coming out. An acknowledgment of the melancholic
nature of such accounts may be a useful corrective to the temptation to reduce
adolescence to a stable site of either shame or abjection in gay and lesbian narra-
tive, since it will constitute the relation between adulthood and adolescence as one
not only of identication but also of a disavowed and troubling desire.
Moreover, any narrative relation between gay adulthood and gay adoles-
cence will be not only melancholic but also, necessarily, catachrestic. Sedgwick
hints at this when she speculates that an attentiveness to the problematic of ado-
lescence is a motivating factor in essentialist gay history:
The ability of anyone in the culture to support and honor gay kids may
depend on an ability to name them as such, notwithstanding that many gay
adults may never have been gay kids and some gay kids may not turn into
gay adults. It seems plausible that a lot of the emotional energy behind
essentialist historical work has to do not even in the rst place with
reclaiming the place and eros of Homeric heroes, Renaissance painters,
and medieval gay monks, so much as with the far less permissible, vastly
more necessary project of recognizing and validating the creativity and
heroism of the effeminate boy or tommish girl of the fties (or sixties or
seventies or eighties) whose sense of constituting precisely a gap in the
discursive fabric of the given has not been done justice, so far, by con-
structivist work. (E, 4243)
Sedgwick here invokes a kind of naming that is necessarily a misnaming but that
nevertheless must take place: this is the very denition of catachresis.
To conclude, it may be useful to return to the term queer, one of whose
dening features is, according to Sedgwick, its referential mobility: Anyones use
of queer about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone
else (T, 9). If one implication of this fact is the terms availability for catachrestic
deployment, how does this availability relate to that other feature of queer, its
insistent evocation of a certain kind of past experience, about which Sedgwick is
as insistent as Butler? If part of the force of queer is that it embraces, instead of
20 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
repudiating, what have for many of us been formative childhood experiences of dif-
ference and stigmatization (T, 157 n. 8), this function should not be thought of as
a therapeutic citation of a secure, knowable past or of a relation of simple identity
with a past self.
Instead, the kind of relation to the past that queer inaugurates may be sim-
ilar to the one that Sedgwick nds in Henry Jamess Art of the Novel:
The James of the Prefaces revels in the same startling metaphor that ani-
mates the present-day literature of the inner child: the metaphor that
presents ones relation to ones own past as a relationship, intersubjective as
it is intergenerational. And, it might be added, almost by denition homo-
erotic. . . . One neednt be invested (as pop psychology is) in a normalizing,
hygienic teleology of healing this relationship, in a mawkishly essentialist
overvaluation of the childs access to narrative authority at the expense
of that of the adult, or in a totalizing ambition to get the two selves per-
manently merged into one, in order to nd that this guration opens out a
rich landscape of relational positionalitiesperhaps especially around
issues of shame. (QP, 8)
When we cite the term queer with reference to the present, we necessarily invoke
a certain past as well (to be queer and now is to summon what was queer and
then). This relation necessarily also involves the negotiation of a past self; how
could it not? But this past self need not be the object of a secure, foreclosing iden-
tication with the present self; indeed, it may just as easily be an object of desire
as of identication. As such, it is not knowable and narrativizable in any univocal
autobiographical sense, including that of being founded on a homophobic inter-
pellation or on experiences of difference and stigmatization, if such things are
understood to be predicated on an epistemologically available subject. Least of all
should shame be understood as the experience that might suture that subject in
place. On the contrary, what Sedgwick calls the contagiousness of shame (QP,
14) renders it an irreducibly catachrestic affect: the subject who is shamed will
never be identical to the subject who is named, nor will either be identical to the
subject who later cites the scene of shaming.
Notes
1. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 1997), 3. Hereafter cited as PL.
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 21
2. Butler is aware, not only in The Psychic Life of Power but in all of her work, of the log-
ical and grammatical difculty of insisting that a subject performs an action of which it
is itself, strictly speaking, an effect. I address some of the ramications of this paradox
for discussing adolescent subjectivity below.
3. Paul Monette, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1992), 3536.
4. Judith Butler, Imitation and Gender Insubordination, in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theo-
ries, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 16.
5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 23.
6. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1975), 7576.
7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 2. Hereafter cited as E.
8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 7. Hereafter cited as GT.
9. Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, in A Barthes
Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Cape, 1982), 266.
10. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1993), 232. Hereafter cited as B.
11. For an example of such a utopian treatment of adolescence see William Simon, Post-
modern Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1996), 5998.
12. Ferdinand de Saussure goes so far as to make the linear nature of the signier a
principle equal in importance to the more celebrated arbitrary nature of the sign
(Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade
Baskin, rev. ed. [London: Owen, 1974], 70, 67).
13. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 626.
14. This aspect of linearity is self-evident, but it is rarely deployed or even noticed in the
humanities in discussions of the linear nature of space and/or time, which is why I
draw attention to it so emphatically here.
15. One contemporary theoretical embodiment of the temporal disjunction between the
assumption of gender and sexuality is to be found in the revisionist psychoanalytic
concept of Core Gender Identity, as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: This
work [recent clinical psychology] posits the very early consolidation of something
called Core Gender Identityones basal sense of being male or femaleas a sepa-
rate stage prior to, even conceivably independent of, any crystallization of sexual fan-
tasy or sexual object choice. . . . sexual object-choice [sic] . . . is unbundled from this
Core Gender Identity through a reasonably space-making series of two-phase narrative
moves (How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay, in Tendencies [London: Routledge, 1994],
158. Hereafter cited as T).
16. Barthes, S/Z, 76.
22 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Queer Performativity: Henry Jamess The Art of the Novel,
GLQ 1 (1993): 15. Hereafter cited as QP.
18. This kind of gesture may be overdetermined by the tendency of theory tout court to
regard the past as something to correct or overcome, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and
Adam Frank point out: The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is
unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past
(maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the
application of two or three discrediting questions (Shame in the Cybernetic Fold:
Reading Silvan Tomkins, in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995],
23).
19. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has recentlyand tantalizinglyintroduced the term
periperformative to describe a neighborhood of language around or touching the per-
formative (Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Introduction: Performativity
and Performance, in Performativity and Performance [New York: Routledge, 1995],
18 n. 14). If I understand their meaning, the functioning of queer in adolescence might
well be better apprehended under this new rubric than under that of performativity
proper.
20. This is, of course, an allusion to the distinction made by Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon,
1977), 716.
21. Moreover, the catachrestic nature of queer and other terms of homophobic abuse fre-
quently renders their iterative citation quite different from an act of simple reclama-
tion. For example, Christopher Craft explains how his experience as a university stu-
dent demonstrated the boomerang trajectory of the brutal little noun faggot:
sometime in 1971 or 1972 I hurled the epithet maliciously into the night air, sometime
in 1976 or 1977 it returned from behind to catch me unaware. I became in that
moment the unwitting object of my own previous denunciation (Another Kind of Love:
Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 18501920 [Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994], xvii).
22. J. L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962),
94107. Austin introduces his three categories as renements of his earlier terms,
constative and performative, which, strictly speaking, refer to types of rather than to
attributes of speech acts. The renement is necessary, in Austins view, because the
same speech act may have different kinds of force, depending on its context, and most
speech acts exert them simultaneously.
23. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 99.
24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Queer and Now, in Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages
from American Universities, ed. Mark Edmundson (New York: Penguin, 1993),
23766.
25. See U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Report of the Secretarys Task
ADOLESCENCE, NARRATIVE, AND QUEER THEORY 23
Force on Youth Suicide, 4 vols. (Rockville, Md.: U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, 1989).
26. I use an uncharacteristic rst-person plural to refer to the discipline of gay and lesbian
studies not because of any reied sense of solidarity but because no other pronoun
seems to answer to the task: neither they, which would appear to distance me arti-
cially from a set of provocations to which I ought to be equally susceptible, nor it,
which would occlude what in this context is the crucial fact that gay and lesbian stud-
ies refers to a collection of people as much as to an abstract disciplinary formation.
27. See Butler, Freud and the Melancholia of Gender (GT, 5765); Butler, Phantas-
matic Identication and the Assumption of Sex (B, 93119); Butler, Melancholy
Gender/Refused Identication (PL, 13250); and Sedgwick, Queer Performativity.
For an autobiographical fragment that embodies such an epistemological disturbance
see Sedgwick, A Poem Is Being Written (T, 177214). It is important to dissociate
this kind of gurative usage of the notion of melancholia from normative psychoana-
lytic accounts, which, as Michael du Plessis points out, have routinely ascribed melan-
cholia to gay men and lesbians as a pathological condition. Thus du Plessis urges that
any maneuver that would attribute melancholia to gay men, or to lesbians, bisexuals,
and transgender persons, as an essential trait must absolutely be resisted (Mothers
Boys: Maternity, Male Homosexuality, and Melancholia, Discourse 16 [1993]: 158),
a plea with which I utterly concur while nevertheless regarding the concept as an irre-
sistible heuristic metaphor.
28. Elspeth Probyn, Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia, GLQ 2
(1995): 443.
24 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES