Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Exhibiting the expulsion of transgression 33
negation of what is other to it, thus leading to the exclusion of ‘the
other’ to the periphery of society, to outside the border, whereby it
only exists as the measure to what hegemonic society is not. This
exclusion of ‘the other’, Mirzoeff 76 claims, is integral to maintaining
the ‘Them’ in that ‘in a world marked by hybridity and diversity, the
absolute evil of the Other is perhaps the only means by which the
integrity of the same can be sustained’. This distinction of those who
constitute the inside/outside binary of the gender-border is used to
distinguish between normality and deviance and is constituted by the
homosexual on the outside. Fuss describes this border-binary as
follows: 77
Those inhabiting, the inside ... can only comprehend the outside through
incorporation of a negative image. This process of negative interiorisation
involves turning homosexuality inside out, exposing not the
homosexual’s abjected insides but the homosexual as the abject, as the
contaminated and expurgated insides of the heterosexual subject.
Furthermore, Cohen as embodying both hybridity and otherness, is
excluded from hegemonic society and his very humanness is doubted,
which Butler explains is demonstrated: 78
... in ... examples of abjected beings who do not appear properly
gendered; it is their very humanness that comes into question. Indeed,
the construction of gender operates through exclusionary means, such
that the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but
through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly
speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation.
Lugo 79 furthers the idea of border crossing to incorporate his findings
that ‘most border crossings are constituted by “inspection stations”
which inspect, monitor, and survey what goes in and out in the name
of class, race, and nation’. In this respect, the conceptual terrain of
Patriotic drag is a social boundary between the hegemonic white
masculinity of the neo-Nazi supporters and the hybrid, transgressive
masculinity of Steven Cohen. This is confirmed by Erikson 80 who sees
that normality and deviance meet at the same border, and during this
meeting ‘the line between them is drawn’. Cohen thus attempts in
Patriotic drag to negotiate the border and meeting between
heterosexuality and homosexuality, by, as mentioned earlier,
inserting himself as a gay spectacle into the centre of heterosexual
consumption and refusing his position outside the border of
heterosexual society. But, conversely, Erikson 81 also argues for the
76
N Mirzoeff ‘Introduction. The multiple viewpoints: diasporic visual culture’ in N
Mirzoeff (ed) Diaspora and visual culture. Representing Africans and Jews (2000)
15.
77
In Reid-Pharr (n 36 above).
78 Esposito (n 64 above) 234.
79 Esposito (n 64 above) 355.
80
J Dollimore Sexual dissidence. Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (1991) 220.
81 Dollimore (n 80 above) 220.