I am very pleased to be able to respond to the comments that my essay 'Language & Gender/Sexuality' has elicited. I apologize for not responding earlier - I have been overseas for the last two weeks and (happily) far away from any computers or other electronic devices.

My essay was read by two commentators, Penny Eckert and Beth Povinelli. I am grateful to them both for taking the time to read the paper and articulate a response. I find it difficult to respond in detail to Beth's comments, since the papers she refers to have not been published. Lacking these, the meaning of sentences like "desire`is the relation of disavowal to any and every actual conventionally figurated world (genre, voicing)" remains obscure. Furthermore, Beth's brusque dismissal of my criticism of linguistics as lacking an understanding of the unconscious appears to rest on an unfortunately selective reading of my paper. In the paper, I note explicitly that "throughout the history of modern linguistics, the unconscious has played a significant role; indeed, I think it could be easily argued that the unconscious is the very resource of all linguistic analysis". I go on to say, however, that this unconscious "is seen entirely in terms of cognition, of knowing. It is more accurately thought of as a 'non-conscious'". While it is true that Lacan read Saussure, and that without Saussure's linguistic theory there would be no Lacanian account of desire or the unconscious, this is worlds away from saying that linguistics provides us with the tools we need to do insightful analyses of concrete instances of desire embedded within social relations. If Beth seriously wants to argue that linguistics has long had a well-developed understanding of the (psychoanalytic) unconscious, of how desire is conveyed, and of how language constitutes sexuality, then I anxiously await her documentation of this. Because I suspect I am not the only one who has somehow managed to miss all the attention to repression, desire, and sex in Whorf, Jakobson, and Sapir.

My response will focus on Penny Eckert's characteristically generous and attentive reading of my essay. The thing I like most about Penny's comments is that she grounds her concerns in actual data (and what data!), and she provides us with a number of examples with which we can try to think through some of these issues. I regret that I was unable to be more concrete in my paper. This lack of actual data analysis is undoubtedly what contributed to Penny's feeling of "being led up to a precipice and then told to do something [look around? explore? jump?] at it". I should explain that the reason for the rather rarified tone of my essay was that after having reviewed so much work on language and sexuality (all of it based on empirical examples of 'gayspeak', etc.), I had to try to figure out why I found most of it so unsatisfying. To do that, I felt like I needed to try to get AWAY FROM specific empirical examples and INTO the underlying assumptions that seemed to guide the collection and analysis of those data. What Penny's comments encourage us to do is never to lose sight of why we are interested in these issues in the first place; namely our own desire to explain why and how people use language the way they do.

I am happy to see that Penny agrees with much of what I write in my essay. She agrees that work on language and sexuality needs to move away from identity categories, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes that have been made in the study of language and gender (indeed, this move has been an important theme in her own work). She also agrees with my reminders that language is iterable, and hence, not fully explicable with reference to intention, and not inherently tied to any particular social group, even if that group happens to be the source of particular linguistic forms.

Where Penny disagrees with me is in my call to move our enquiry away from 'sexuality' towards 'desire'. Although I do not read her as necessarily objecting to such a move, she is worried about some of the implications of what such a move might mean. In particular, she seems worried that my essay never problematizes "desire itself". She also claims that "[a] focus on real and feigned desire still works on an assumption first of all that sexuality is about desire, and second, that the object of desire itself is unproblematic".

Let me begin to address this criticism by summarizing the three arguments I made for rethinking our enquiries into "language & sexuality" as, rather, investigations into "language & desire". The three arguments are:

1. A focus on language and desire shifts the ground of enquiry from identity categories to culturally grounded semiotic practices. This move constitutes what Butler (190:144) would call a shift from an epistemological account to one that locates the problematic within practices of signification. It gets us, in other words, decisively away from the temptation to ground linguistic practices in particular identity categories, and it opens up our analysis to exploring (rather than denying or lamenting) the ways that linguistic practices are inherently available to anyone to use for a wide variety of purposes, and to a wide variety of social effects.

2. A focus on desire would compel us to explicitly define what we mean by desire. Please note: Far from NOT problematizing desire (as Penny claims), my point here is that by forcing ourselves to be explicit about what theory/theories of desire we rely on to understand motivation and action, we will continually be moved to run up against problems in our accounts. Therefore, we will continually be compelled to revise those accounts and construct better ones. Thus, far from enshrining 'desire' as the New Irreducible, the Absolute Bedrock of All Things, a critical focus on desire allows us to regard it with a suspicious, jaundiced eye - in a way not unlike Foucault's focus on sexuality allowed him to see it as a social construction whose organization and workings could be charted. Remember, this point arises from my frustration with the fact that key terms, like 'gay', 'lesbian', 'sexuality', etc. are usually not defined in the literature that investigates language and sexuality. While ambiguity and fuzziness do have a place in our investigations, remaining equivocal about key concepts risks lulling us into a false and theoretically disastrous sense that the objects of our enquiry ('gay men', 'transsexuals') have an ontological coherence and social homogeneity that they simply and demonstrably do not have. And if anyone has a problem with the term 'desire', then choose something else! - like 'motivation' or 'interest', for example. I like 'desire' because I think it both encompasses and exceeds 'sexuality' (see below); because I think it is a social product (constituted in a dialogical relationship between subjects, who are themselves constituted through discourse); and because I think that there are a number of quite supple theoretical apparatuses at our disposal that might be of use to linguists who want to say something interesting about language and sexuality. I worry that concepts like 'interest' are too freighted with utilitarianist baggage to be of much use. But the main point is this: if students of language are going to have anything of interest to say about sexuality, a minimal requirement is some theory of what we think sexuality is. We also need to be explicit about what we think intimate talk, for example, or 'sexy voice', or homophobic conversation, DOES. What is its 'faire', as Michèle Le Doeuff would say, what is its work? What are people who engage in such talk doing? Furthermore, as an anthropologist, I am interested in speculating about why people do the things they do. And this is where desire (or some related concept) must, it seems to me, enter the picture. This leads me to my next point, which is:

3. A focus on desire would allow expanded scope to explore the role that fantasy, repression and unconscious motivations play in linguistic interactions. Once again, I think Judith Butler sums up the problem nicely when she writes (in "The Psychic Life of Power" 1997: 144-145):

"It is not enough to say that gender is performed or that the meaning of gender can be derived from its performance`Clearly there are workings of gender that do not "show" in what is performed as gender, and to reduce the psychic workings of gender to the literal performance of gender would be a mistake. Psychoanalysis insists that the opacity of the unconscious sets limits to the exteriorization of the psyche. It also argues - rightly, I think - that what is exteriorized or performed can only be understood by reference to what is barred from performance, what cannot or will not be performed".

[We can safely substitute 'sexuality' where Butler's writes 'gender' throughout this passage]

Really what I am suggesting here is that linguistics needs to develop theories and techniques for analyzing not only what is said, but also how that saying is in many senses dependent on what remains unsaid, or unsayable. In the essay, I suggest that we can turn to psychoanalysis for clues about how this might be done. But psychoanalysis is not the only place we might look. We might also turn to deconstructionist theory, for example. Or we might look to literary theory (exemplified by work such as Eve Sedgwick's, or by my personal favorite - Toni Morrison's 1992 book "Playing in the Dark") for analytical methods that examine how the unspoken haunts and structures the spoken. Metapragmatic theory, as Beth Povinelli suggests in her commentary, might also be helpful. We should look very closely, too, at some recent sociolinguistic work, such as Joanna Channell's (1997) insightful analysis of how lovers' talk is constituted in part by breaking linguistic taboos that apply in public life, or Deborah Cameron's (1997) important article about how the specter of homosexuality impels groups of heterosexual men to structure their talk in very particular ways (ways that, ironically, resemble stereotypically "women's language"). All of these perspectives move us beyond the words, and compel us to explore the constitutive 'outside' of discourse in terms that do not reduce that 'outside' to only being a matter of knowledge and cognition.

 

With those reminders and small elaborations in place, let me now turn to Penny's main concern about my call to dump sexuality and to focus, instead, on desire. Referring to my comments on how desire relies on structures of iterability for its expression, she worries that "[a] focus on real and feigned desire still works on an assumption first of all that sexuality is about desire, and second, that the object of desire itself is unproblematic".

Let me try to show how Penny's own example actually makes my point, rather than contests it. Let's take that first assumption ("sexuality is about desire") first, and illustrate it with Penny's example about Angela losing her virginity. Penny argues that Angela's sexual debut has to be understood as part of her strategy to claim peer recognition as a Chicana. In other words, the sexual act is comprehensible and meaningful only in relation to a set of social relations that are not immediately apparent from the act itself. The act is a concrete instance of "the heterosexual social order becom[ing] embedded in the peer social order" (a wonderful phrase). So far, so good - that line of reasoning will raise no objection from me.

Problems arise, however, when Penny suddenly asserts categorically that "Angela's sexual activity is not about sex". This I do not understand. We might all agree that Angela's sexual activity is not ONLY be about sex (when is sex ever just about sex?). But to elide the specifically sexual dimension of Angela's sexual debut and claim that "[i]t's about being Chicana", seems to me to be just as wrongheaded as it would be to reduce the debut to being exclusively about sex (and, hence, miss all the other dimension to which Penny importantly draws our attention). Furthermore, I couldn't agree more with Penny that it seems that "the object of Angela's desire is not the boy or sexual pleasure, but the girls' recognition and legitimation in the Chicano community". But whereas Penny seems to see this point as somehow refuting my call for a focus on desire, I see it, on the contrary, as CONFIRMING the power of an analysis that takes desire, not sexuality, as its starting point. Isn't the advantage of a focus on desire precisely that it opens our analysis to an exploration of the ways in which desire is ALWAYS about more than specific sexual acts?

The problem, I think, is that there seems to be a confusion here between 'sexuality' and 'desire'. Penny gets out her Webster's to define sexuality, but unfortunately she doesn't go to the D's and look up desire. When I do that in my Macquarie Dictionary, I find the following: (1) to wish or long for; crave; want. (2) to express a wish to obtain; ask for; request. (3) a longing or craving. (4) an expressed wish; request. (5) something desired. (6) sexual appetite; lust.

The thing to note here is that 'sexual appetite' and 'lust' are modalities of desire, but not its equivalent, its limit, or its sum total. Once we appreciate this, we can begin to develop ways of both seeing how different desires (e.g. the desire to be recognized as Chicana, to desire to achieve that goal through losing one's virginity, the enjoyment at feeling someone's hand around one's waist) are both (analytically) separable AND inextricably linked together in mutually marked and mutually sustaining forms. The point is precisely NOT to argue that desire = sex. If I had wanted to argue that, and if they were the same thing, what would be the point of substituting the one for the other? My argument is the opposite: to explore the ways in which the iterable codes through which desire is expressed and recognized extend beyond specific sexual identities and have social consequences not limited to, and beyond, the sexual.

Penny's second objection to my focus on desire is that "the object of desire itself is unproblematic". I am uncertain as to where Penny sees me making this claim in my essay. As I hope is clear from what I have written above, I think that the object of desire is ALWAYS problematic, partly in the sense just outlined, i.e. that desire necessarily has many layers, directions, and modalities, but also in the Lacanian sense that an utterance (what he calls a 'demand') is necessarily split into the spoken and the unspoken; the thing demanded and the relationship that is being sought through the verbalization of the demand. Since the unspoken part of the demand (the complete and permanent recognition and love of the other) can never be fully satisfied, we are condemned to seek it (repeat it) again and again.

I hope these comments have clarified some of the concerns that Penny raises in response to my paper. My conclusion is that once we get past the block of seeing 'desire' as equivalent to 'sexuality', she and I are pretty much on the same track. Like her, I am concerned with understanding "how we use language to accomplish sexual ends, how we talk about sexuality, how we index sexuality when we talk about other things, how we use language in and around sexual activity, how we use language to organize ourselves socially around sexuality, and how we use language to organize sexually around sociability". And like Penny, I think the continued fetishization of identity categories is these kinds of enquiries is a colossal waste of time. If my efforts at outlining a new line of flight in the study of language and sexuality help anyone to move away from identity categories, sort out some of the dissatisfaction they may have been feeling with recent work on language and sexuality, and gain new insight into linguistic interaction, then my essay will have made a small contribution.