Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (Sexual Cultures Series)

209 Pages·1999·0.8 MB·English

by  Phillip Harper

Private Affairs
SEXUAL CULTURES: New Directions from the Center for
Lesbian and Gay Studies
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs
Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
Private Affairs

Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
PHILLIP BRIAN HARPER
a

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

Copyright © 1999 by Phillip Brian Harper

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harper, Phillip Brian.

Private affairs : critical ventures in the culture of social

relations / Phillip Brian Harper.

p. cm. — (Sexual cultures : new directions from the

Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8147-3593-2 (cloth : acid-free paper)

ISBN 0-8147-3594-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

1. Privacy, Right of. 2. Interpersonal relations and culture.

3. Privacy. 4. Minorities—Civil rights. I. Title. II. Series.

JC596 .H37 1999

323.44'8—dc21 99-6005

CIP
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Thom, in eager anticipation

Contents

Preface ix

1 Private Affairs
Race, Sex, Property, and Persons 1

2 “The Subversive Edge”

Paris Is Burning, Social Critique, and the Limits of

Subjective Agency 33

3 Playing in the Dark
Privacy, Public Sex, and the Erotics of the Cinema Venue 60

4 Gay Male Identities, Personal Privacy, and Relations of
Public Exchange
Notes on Directions for Queer Critique 89

5 “Take Me Home”
Location, Identity, Transnational Exchange 125

Afterword 155

Bibliography 159

Index 169

About the Author 189

vii

Preface

On the night of Monday, August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton de-
livered a televised address to the nation during which he admitted
that, contrary to what he had asserted over the preceding seven
months, he did have a relationship with Monica Lewinsky—presum­
ably during the period in the mid 1990s when she was a twenty-one-
year-old unpaid White House intern—and that that relationship was
“not appropriate.”1 Rather than belaboring—or even elaborating—
this point in his remarks, however, the president instead used the
speech as an occasion to denounce the investigation into his activi­
ties then being conducted by independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr,
and, in particular, to assert as rightfully ineligible for investigative
scrutiny the “private life” to which a sitting president, no less than
the rest of the citizenry, is fundamentally entitled.
Indeed, having been invoked a total of seven times in an address
that clocked in at well under five minutes, privacy would seem to con­
stitute not only the chief focus of the president’s remarks in the par­
ticular instance but also the primary conceptual and discursive cate­
gory through which what is essential to the life of the nation is dif­
ferentiated from that which has no bearing upon it. Clinton himself
recurred to precisely this distinction when he urged that we “get on
with our national life” as opposed to “the pursuit of personal de­
struction and the prying into private lives” with which the Starr in­
vestigation had “distracted” the country’s attention. But of course, if
it were possible for personal behavior to be rendered functionally ir­
relevant to national interest by virtue merely of presidential decree,
then we would not have seen the number of military personnel
ix