Dave's Book Blog: "Sexual Dissidence" by Jonathan Dollimore

This is a wide-ranging study of sexual dissidence, particularly in regard to homosexuality; the study's principal focus is literature but encompasses inter alia St Augustine the Great and Sigmund Freud.

It is not really for the general reader. I was attracted because I had previously read Dollimore's Death which is a brilliantly written and eye-opening book; I struggled with Sexual Dissidence. For example, in the first chapter Dollimore talks about essentialism; I had to look this up. It is the idea that a particular property of something is intrinsic to it. It is of great importance to this book. In terms of homosexuality it is the argument that homosexuality is intrinsic to the identity of a gay person; this is what Andre Gide felt, one of Dollimore's key authors, and it is a common trope that when a homosexual 'comes out' they are discovering a deep identity. But prior to the mid-1850s, homosexuality was regarded as a behaviour, rather than an identity:

“By the time of Wilde, homosexuality could be regarded as rooted in a person’s identity and as pathologically pervading all aspects of his being.” (C 4);
“The word ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1869 ... the nearest concepts to it in early modern English were probably sodomy and buggery ... the sodomite was someone who performed a certain kind of act; no specific identity was attributed to, or assumed by, the sodomite” (C 16)
“The idea of a God-given nature and destiny had the corollary that nothing so essentially predetermined could or should ever change.” (C 19)
In the Lady Chatterley trial Lawrence “was defended on the grounds that he had to transgress moral respectability in order to be moral at a deeper, more authentic level dictated by personal conscience.” (C 20)

I can understand why some people prefer an essentialist theory of sexuality but essentialism is more problematic when applied to gender. Many feminists are anti-essentialist and claim that maleness and femaleness are social constructs. These are important philosophical considerations and I was a bit embarrassed not to have known about essentialism ... except that I had but having been trained as a scientist I regard the essentialist/ social constructionist debate as what we call nature/ nurture or genes vs environment.

Nevertheless, the key point here is that I had to look this up to help me understand what seems to be pivotal to Dollimore's argument. There were other parts of the book later on that were equally obscure to me and that I did not bother to look up. So I may have misunderstood what he was saying.

It starts brilliantly, describing an encounter between Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, in which Wilde acted as pander, organising a young flute boy for Gide's sexual pleasure, an incident which changed Gide's life and made him acknowledge his homosexuality (although that is an essentialist interpretation). This encounter with Wilde informs Gide’s The Immoralist. Dollimore's point is that although Gide adopted an essentialist position in regard to his homosexuality, Wilde was fundamentally in favour of an anti-essentialist and transgressive aesthetic. I never really understood the transgressive bit. I think the idea is that transgression provokes a reaction and that this is a force for change:

“Inversion is only a stage in a process of resistance whose effects can never be guaranteed and perhaps not even predicted. (In)subordinate inversions, if at all successful, provoke reaction.” (C 4)
“One of the many reasons why people were terrified by Wilde was because of a perceived connection between his aesthetic transgression and his sexual transgression.” (C 4)

But the way that Dollimore contrasted Wilde and Gide made it appear that he was suggesting that a transgressive approach was the opposite to essentialism, whereas it seems to me that essentialism/social constructionism and conformism (?) /transgression are different dimensions.

Sometimes I felt that Dollimore (in common with many other social scientists) has a tendency to make unevidenced sweeping generalisations:

“It would be difficult to overestimate the importance in modern Western culture of transgression in the name of an essential self which is the origin and arbiter of the true, the real (and/or natural), and the moral, categories which correspond to the three main domains of knowledge in Western culture: the epistemological, the ontological, and the ethical.” (C 3)
“Western metaphysics can be represented in terms of three interrelated tenets: teleological development, essence, and universal, the last two being the source of essential and absolute truth respectively.” (C 8)

My favourite bits, I think, were where he hammered home the idea that 'perversion' is a form of 'diversion' or deviation from the 'straight' path; Western ethics then becomes full of contrasts between straight/good and crooked/bad:

“The pervert deviates from ‘the straight and narrow’ or the ‘straight and true’.” (C 8)
Evil, for Augustine, is a turning away from God “not because the thing to which it turns is bad, but because the turning is itself perverse.” (C 9)
Othello described as ‘the extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (1.1.135): “‘extravagant’ condenses deviation, diversion and vagrancy ...OED gives as its first entry, ‘A going out of the usual path, digression. Also, the position or fact of erring from (a prescribed path)’.” (C 10)
Othello says, of Desdemona ‘Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on, / And turn again.’ (4.1.244-5) (C 10)
“One way the metaphysic survives in a modern mutation is in the description of the homosexual as ‘bent’ and the heterosexual as ‘straight’” (C 11, fn)
“A now obsolete sense of ‘diversity’ gives, as one of its meanings, ‘perversity’. Perversity once involved diversity.” (C 13)

Some memorable moments:

“In 1946 Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; six years later, the year after his death, his entire works were entered in the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.” (C 1)
“The mythology of the two main kinds of the pre-sexological pervert, the religious heretic and the wayward woman (Satan and Eve respectively), take us to the heart of some awesome contradictions within Christianity, whereby the original pervert is neither Satan nor Eve, but God himself.” (C 2)
“It is not enough for me to say that it is natural; I maintain that it is good.” (C 3; Quoting Gide in his Journal)
“Modernism ... is (or was) still preoccupied with the experience of alienation.” (C 4)
“It is a familiar political move: the benighted past as a scapegoat.” (78)
“We have become used to thinking of sexuality as an anarchic and hence potentially subversive energy which conservatives want to control, radicals want to liberate.” (C 6)
“Subversion, and even more transgression, necessarily presuppose the law, but they do not thereby necessarily ratify the law.” (C 6)
“Containment theory often presupposes ... a criterion of success too total.” (C 6)
“To recognize that meanings are historically grounded and partly or largely (but never entirely) controlled by powerful interests [page break] is also, usually, to show them incapable of easy alteration.” (C 6)
“There is rarely a ruling bloc which controls meaning uncontested. As well as being contested by other classes or groups, it will typically also be contested from within.” (C 6)
“The suspicious thing about the concepts of subversion and resistance ... is that they tend always to turn up where we want to find them, and never where we do not - i.e. in relation to ourselves.” (C 6)
“The power of domination is also the power to fashion, apparently rationally but usually violently, the more ‘truthful’ narrative.” (C 6)
“For [St] Augustine, sexual arousal - literally the ‘involuntary’ movement of erection - epitomized fallen human nature out of control with itself.” (C 8)
“Evil is not a force or entity in its own right; evil should be understood as privation, a lack of good.” (C 9)
“God, for Augustine, was motiveless in his creation of the world (to attribute motive to God is to compromise his omnipotence.” (C 9)
“Contradiction ... arises for any monotheistic religion which asserts that God is both perfectly good and unlimited in his power.” (C 9)
“Evil cannot be allowed to be a ‘positive reality’ ... because this would readmit dualism.” (C 9)
“Evil is as lack of good as lameness is the lack of ability to walk properly.” (C 9)
“In older religions the devil and things related to him (e.g. the underground) were the source of life and fertility as well as death and destruction.” (C 9)