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88 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
have to be grasped in connection with domination and legitimation” (31). In fact,
he defines power and domination as the ability to establish and produce codes of
signification. He further stipulates that
Domination depends on the mobilization of two distinguishable types of
resource. Allocative resources refer to capabilities—or, more accurately, to
forms of transformative capacity—generat ing command over objects,
goods or material phenomena. Authoritative resources refer to types of
transformative capacity over persons or actors. …The transformational
character of resources is logically equivalent to, as well as inherently
bound up with the instanciation of, that of codes and normative sanctions.
(33)
While Wilde could control authoritative resources in his personal writings by
ordering the actions of fictional characters, or even during sexual exchanges
which were based upon (as I have discussed earlier and at length) the exercise of
gender and class privilege over the objectified body of the Other, he was not able
to command the allocative resources within the larger contexts in which
dominant culture exercised its control over the construction of everyday social
values and meanings. His writings and his sexual acts simply did not construct
themselves as a dominant discourse with the power to initiate a new code of
signification.
In order to establish a homosexual social identity initiated by a new code,
Wilde needed to submit himself as a potential surface of inscription to a power
far greater than his own control over text and genitalia. It was the trials that were
able to accomplish the transfiguration of the sodomite into the homosexual
because they were the first events to meet all the needed conditions: a signifier,
provided by Wilde himself, composed of a code (Wilde’s gesturary) and an
agent (Wilde’s social identity); a signified, mandatorily originating in dominant
discourse, comprised of a narrative (the homosexual-as-type provided by the
juridical activation of the dormant semiosis within sexology); a definite setting
of interaction in which to contain the sign (by normatively defining Wilde’s
signifying as the “expected” mode of conduct for the new identity); and—most
importantly—a means of reproduction (a cultural installment of the sign through
the mass spectacle of publicity).
AN EVER-OPEN BOOK
Naming Wilde as the first Homosexual is not to say that before him there were
no other individuals who had somehow become conscious of their difference,
conscious of the interface between their behavior and the homosexual type
represented in the literature. Why did his trials, then, create such a rupture in
social consciousness? The answer can be stated in one word: publicity. 6 Besides
the interplay of sexology and jurisprudence within a definite interactional