You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In what seemed to me the most thoughtful and original essay in this volume, Bradd Epps cautions against would-be queer readings of Juan Goytisolo that exalt the author's “subversive” — because (homo) sexually unapologetic — virtues. Invoking, in the name of the parodie and the “fragmentary,” what one admiring critic terms Goytisolo's “sodomyth” neglects the possibility that “by representing the sodomite as dangerous, deadly and destructive, as subversive, [the sodomyth] may serve to legitimate, yet again, an apparatus of control and punishment. Indeed, so mythified, subversion may itself actually shore up the dominant order” (205). Even if the fragmenting power of the “sodomyth” can be allowed, writes Epps, “fragmentation as a general concept, strategy, and value should be critically interrogated. Fragmentation can only be completely “positive,” politically, ethically, and aesthetically speaking, when it becomes coherent and unambiguous, when it ceases to be fragmentation” (207). Subversion and fragmentation, as one might infer from this, only make good on their promise of emancipation if they envision and guide us toward some new system, some other, albeit radically different whole. And this, in turn, poses a real difficulty for (at least some) gay, lesbian or “queer” theories, since, in Epps' words, “there has never been a queer nation. There has never been a sovereign space for, dare I say it, queer ideology” (209). Here, without endorsing Marxism per se, but in evident and perspicacious distrust of Goytisolo's “radical” anti-communism, Epps is at pains to note the “tensions between communism and homosexuality.” These, while real enough, are insufficient reason to ignore the “ties between them” (210).
Were the implications of these observations to be more fully worked out, they would at the very least make one think more skeptically about the sorts of claims made in many of the contributions to this volume of essays. For if, as editors McKee Irwin and Molloy write