Fetishism, perversion and the Gay Identity :: Socialization Sociology Essays

Fetishism, perversion and the Gay personal identityThe contemporary Euro-American idea of identity as coherent, seamless, bounded and whole is indeed an illusion. On the contrary, the self carries many internal contradictions and nuances as a reflection of the many roles that a person plays in various social circles. Identity is parti eithery post-social and socially constructed though rituals and disciplinary acts. In turn Delany challenges the fantasy of a Gay Identity, an entity of being that could be defined as referential. The point to the notion of Gay Identity is that, in terms of a transcendent reality concerned with internality per se (a universal similarity, a shared necessary condition, a defining aspect, a generalizable and inescapable essence common to all men and women called gay), I believe Gay Identity has no more existence than a single, essential, transcendental sexual difference (Delany 1991131). The meaning of Gay Identity does not carry over across all time, sharing itself in a congruent way to each gay community to encompass an irreducible gayness. In fact, the very notion of the existence of any gay properties characterizing the Gay Identity is seriously questioned and refuted, as is the concept of a universal, timeless sexual difference (Delany 1991). According to Sedgwick, even the language used to identify the gay identity queer is non-referential. Queer describes the gay identity in as many uncharacteristic ways that fail to lap certain individual homosexual experiences as it does in describing characteristic ways that overlap other homosexual experiences. Queerness is not always translatable just as being queer means different things to different gays. Queer seems to hinge often more radically and explicitly on a persons undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation (Sedgwick 19939). Sedgwick contends that there always exists a performative aspect of the self in all the roles that peop le play, including the queer role. Thus queer is not outside of the performance. This description of performance as identity suggests that the retrospective act of interpreting performance constructs personhood. During moments of pagan misunderstanding and differences that cause personal stress and strains in individual access to self-representation of identity, a social actor has the ability to alter identity. By experimenting with who they are finished sexual performance, people shape their sexual identities (Sedgwick 1993). Building critically upon Delany, I call into question the accuracy of perversion belonging in marginal spaces. I specifically seek to analyze fetishism as a kind of perversion.