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54 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP hypostatization of the picaresque heterosexual narrative journey from foreplay to procreation—a journey that reenacts and is reenacted in the normative developmental model wherein the perverse play of the infantile body slowly but surely contracts over time into one unitary procreative thrust. The texts from the years surrounding the addition of this master narrative statement to the Three Essays witness a refiguring of both narcissism and sexual inversion within Freud’s writings, a series of changes that subordinates both to the teleology of procreative heterosexuality. In an addition to the footnote on inversion from 1915, Freud tells us that “it has been found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious,” and further adds that thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature. (1905:10 n. 1) Yet the “equal abnormality” of both homosexuality and heterosexuality is, again, skewed within the text; for Freud does not further address the “problem” of heterosexuality, but instead explains the misprisions that lead to homosexuality: In inverted types, a predominance of archaic constitutions and primitive psychical mechanisms is regularly to be found. Their most essential characteristics seem to be a coming into operation of narcissistic objectchoice and a retention of the erotic significance of the anal zone. (1905:10 n. 1) This is a statement which characterizes inversion as a pre-civilized impulse, a nonanaclitic choice, and a manifestation of an early phase of infantile sexuality. 12 Through implication, heterosexuality becomes civilized, anaclitic, and mature. We might think here of Freud’s famous letter to an anonymous American mother with a homosexual son, wherein he tells her: “homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of the sexual development” (1935:419). 13 As with Freud’s problematizing of heterosexuality in the 1915 note, the liberal sentiments here appear laudable. However, the statement also privileges the narrative of heterosexual development, assigning homosexuality to the status of an “arrest,” an inability to tell the story in its entirety. As these theorizations draw homosexuality into the content of the psychodynamics of the subject, they also implicitly skew the representation in such a way as to privilege heterosexual object-choice. In the process, inversion becomes not a separate dynamic of
NARCISSUS IN THE WILDE 55 cathexis with its own authority, but a misplaying of the singularly authorized heterosexual cathexis. Not surprisingly, narcissism follows a similar course within Freud’s refinement of his theory. Initially, Freud accepted the term from the earlier work of Ellis and Rank, and Ellis’s own critique of Freud provides an excellent ground against which to view Freud’s reconstruction of narcissism. As Ellis states: For me Narcissism was the extreme form of auto-eroticism, which, it must be remembered, was a term devised to cover all the spontaneous manifestations of the sexual impulse in the absence of a definite outer object to evoke them, erotic dreams in sleep being the type of auto-erotic activity. Auto-eroticism while thus not properly a perversion…might become so deliberately pursued at the expense of the normal objects of sexual attraction. The psycho-analysts in adopting the term “auto-eroticism” have given it a different meaning which I regret, as being both illegitimate and inconvenient. For the psycho-analyst “autoeroticism” generally means sexual activity directed toward the self as its object. That is illegitimate, for the ordinary rule is that a word compounded with “auto” (like automobile or autonomous) means not toward itself but by itself. It is inconvenient because if we divert the term “auto-eroticism” to this use we have no term left to cover the objectless spontaneous sexual manifestations for which the term was devised. (1900:3:362–363) That to which Ellis objects—though these precise terms might escape him—is the increasing territorialization of the narcissistic cathexis by the anaclitic framework that dominates the Freudian model. 14 What Ellis perceives is an increasing effort to erase anything that disrupts the hegemony of the anaclitic subject/object divide. While Freud is not responsible for initiating this strategy—we have already seen it in the earliest theories of the term—his primary engagements of the concept succinctly summarize the problem Ellis pinpoints. In both the Three Essays and his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” Freud seems to posit a difference and an authority to narcissism and inversion, claiming that homosexuals “have taken as their model not the mother but their own selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object and their type of object-choice may be termed narcissistic” (1914: 69). Already, as I have suggested, Ellis’s objection is verified, for narcissism is figured not as “auto-erotism”—a process of and by the self—but as a mode of anaclitic cathexis to the self. Moreover, Freud’s 1914 expansion of the concept adds a new twist: “we say that the human being has originally two sexual objects: himself and the woman who tends him, and thereby we postulate a primary narcissism in everyone, which may in the long run manifest itself as dominating his object-choice” (1914:69). The difference of narcissistic cathexis
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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First published 1994 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of plates vi List of
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11 Richard Halverson as Lady Enid a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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2 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
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Page 30 and 31: 1 PERFORMING “AKIMBO” Queer pri
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Page 56 and 57: Plate 3 Prince Rupert, from a broad
Page 58 and 59: Plate 5 Actor Robert Wilks, from Co
Page 60 and 61: Plate 7 Antinous and Dancing Master
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104 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY p
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108 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY o
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110 REVAMPING THE GAY SENSIBILITY J
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112 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION pieces th
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114 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION practitio
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116 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION This meta
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118 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION specifica
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120 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION great tra
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122 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION In her pr
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124 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Dynes emp
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126 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION Case, Sue
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Plate 9 Claire Moed as Sir Oliver S
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Plate 11 Richard Halverson as Lady
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Plate 14 Liberace in long cape with
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Plate 16 Liberace was Count Dracula
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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA
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The key value, however, among these
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eternal youthfulness; and the way h
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7 TAKING OUT THE TRASH Camp and the
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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 15
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homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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